Two (43) sma' t'ing that amuse me about Liberia

In Liberia, and maybe this happens elsewhere, most people who know how to write, will always write out a number in full, followed by the number itself in parentheses. For example, "He has twelve (12) children". Sometimes the number written in-full is outside the parenthesis, but less often. I see this in newspapers, in letters churches write to me asking to connect them with a ministry in the USA, in notes written to me telling me how great I am and can I sponser their four (4) children. I suppose they are just being thorough, but I think in most cases it is bizarre.
Sometimes, though, it creates substantial confusion, because the written-out number and the number in parentheses don't match. Sometimes the values are pretty close, so it doesn't matter, but other times, it's way off and you wonder, 'what the hell went wrong here?'
Yesterday, a story came out in The Inquirer, one of Liberia's better newspapers - (by 'better' I mean it is only slightly pathetic) with the first line as follows:

"Some close to 4,000 (Fifteen Thousands) former soldiers of the Armed Forces of Liberia have threatened to cause havoc during the Christmas celebration if the government of Liberia refused to live up to it commitment."

Now, I was curious, because surely if either 4,000, or 15,000 soldiers had 'stormed the ministry of finance' as this newspaper reported, that would be a major deal and something to worry about. So, I went to the best Liberian newspaper, The Daily Observer, to get the facts straight. Apparently, only 'hundreds' or soldiers actually stormed the ministry; they claimed to represent 14,000 of their colleagues.

This reminds me of another thing that amused me about Liberian writing. Often, usually in the church context, whenever a year was written down, the writer would include A.D. and sometimes, 'The year of our Lord'. Quality.