Making friends in Freetown was easy. Perched on one of the many hills in Freetown, near the US embassy, sat IMATT—the International Military Advisory and Training Team—a compound of mostly British soldiers who were deployed to Sierra Leone to train the fledgling Sierra Leonean army. On the weekends, they drove around Freetown in their 4x4s with the windows rolled down, Bon Jovi blasting from their radios, wearing wifebeaters and sporting cute buzz cuts. Most had come back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was a vacation for them, and they paraded their freedom.
I started dating one of the British soldiers—Sam, a six-foot-five human G.I. Joe.
On weekends, with surfboards strapped to the top of the car, coolers filled with beer and soda, a bunch of us sped through the bumpy back roads to the beach where we’d camp for the night. For supplies, we had military equipment—sleeping bags, netting, tents, and fluorescent glow sticks, which we’d hang from the branches of trees, and would light up our campsite all night. On our way to the beach one afternoon, we passed a man fixing the holes in the road. He used a shovel to dig up the rocks and then smoothed the craters with his hands. He toiled in the thick jungle air. Sam stopped the car.
“Hey, can you grab a soda from the cooler?”
I handed him a can of Sprite.
Sam rolled down the window and offered it to the man who put down his shovel and took the can. Sam shook his dusty and calloused hand and said, “Here you go, buddy. Thanks for the work.” The old man smiled and nodded. I think he was hoping for money.
Sam rolled up the window and sped off. He took out a small bottle of antibacterial gel and wiped some on his hands. “Hearts and minds, Jess. Hearts and minds.”
We continued the drive and passed a bridge that looked over a river where people always gathered to bathe. Men swam wearing only underwear; children went naked, splashing and jumping off rocks. The women, whether they were cleaning themselves or their clothes and dishes, usually went topless. The IMATT boys called it “Titty Bridge.”
They frequented the nightclubs in town. Most were teeming with prostitutes. Usually the boys took multiple women home at once, their Land Cruisers brimming with eager, scantily dressed women. Others stayed at the bar drinking and dancing. Dancing inevitably led to one guy taking off his shirt. Then another would take off his shirt. Before you knew it, all of the big white guys were shirtless, dancing, flexing their pecs, and drinking vodka straight from the bottle. Then one of them would up the ante and pull down his pants. Another would follow. And you’d look up and there’d be a group of boys—some in boxers, some with just cowboy hats on—swinging their cocks around to the beat and shouting, “Jim’s got the biggest schlong I’ve ever seen!”
I had never met people like this at home. No one I knew joined the Army. Yet, as wild and rowdy as they were, I could relate—they were like fraternity boys you’d see on spring break. Amidst everything else I was doing in Sierra Leone, meeting people like the IMATT boys reminded me of part of what I loved about this work: the preposterous range of people who you not only meet, but who you end up going surfing and spear fishing with on weekends.
We spent lots of time talking about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wanted to know what it had been like for them. It was hard to believe that these young, silly boys were the same people carrying out air raids while wearing night goggles, jumping out of helicopters with AK-47s, fighting Al Qaeda and searching for Osama bin Laden. One soldier, Mike, tall and quiet, drunkenly told me about a night in Afghanistan that still clearly shook him. He had a slightly overgrown buzz cut and one of his front teeth tilted back, pressing behind the others.
“It was dark, and there was a guy who was speeding toward base camp. There were lots of signs along the way to slow down, checkpoints, warning shots fired, the whole thing, but the guy just kept coming. He was driving really fast. It was a quick decision, and I didn’t know what else to do. We fired at the car and killed the driver.”
“Why didn’t you shoot at the tires? Why did you have to kill him?” I asked.
“That is stuff you only see in movies, Jess. Do you know how hard it is to hit a moving tire? It just doesn’t work like that.”
“Who was the guy?”
He sighed. “It turned out he was coming to fix our air conditioner,” he said, turning away. “I was the one who hired him to come to fix the damn thing.”
Three years later, I learned that Mike was killed by an IED in Afghanistan. I read it online and saw his picture next to the article. He was the first person I knew who died in the war.
Sierra Leone was the first place where the professional and personal lives genuinely merged. The isolation, restriction of movement, and loneliness that I was incapable of handling in Darfur vanished here. Not being at the height of a disaster also slowed the pace of life. My research was fascinating and I enjoyed being part of a larger project and mission, especially when the study could contribute to something as significant as Taylor’s indictment.
I loved my life so much in Sierra Leone that I invited Dad to come visit me. Before he arrived, I found the sole cardiologist in Sierra Leone, Dr. Kamara. He was an older man, his face flat and his skin dotted with deep pockmarks. He wore thick glasses that made it difficult to look him in the eyes because you never really knew where they were focused. I located his office in the largest hospital in Freetown and told him I would introduce him to my father, a cardiologist from the United States.
“Oh, this is excellent,” he said. “Can he bring things over?”
“Sure,” I said, expecting him to want drugs or medicines he could not get here. But what Dr. Kamara wanted most were EKG papers. He shuffled me into the room where patients were examined and their heart rates monitored. I remembered my childhood visits with Dad at the hospital, where spools of skinny, shiny white paper printing heart rates would pile on the floor. Dad would rip them off, review them carefully, and hand me the long sheets. I spent hours drawing mountain landscapes with the zigzag heart readings. Dr. Kamara was using something that looked more like toilet paper to get the printouts. He pulled up one of the crumbling papers and looked at me. “I can’t do much with these,” he said.
Dad arrived with a large suitcase full of medicine and equipment but he wasn’t able to get EKG papers that fit with Dr. Kamara’s outdated machine. I could tell he was excited about his contribution. He reached into the bag, saying, “I brought as many antihypertensives as I could fit into this suitcase.” But his spirits deflated when Dr. Kamara took us to the pharmacy where he handed over the supplies. “This will barely treat five people for a year,” Dad said in dismay. He sighed. “These people need far more than just medications. They need access to basic health care. There aren’t echocardiogram machines or other ways to even diagnose heart disease. There are no preventative measures.”
Dr. Kamara shook his head. “I know.”
Dr. Kamara boasted about the new ICU and made us put on clean gowns over our clothes and scrub our hands before entering. At first, Dad was impressed by these Western standards of sanitation. Yet once we were inside, he saw the mildew-lined curtains, the bugs swirling around the lightbulbs, the dust settled on the beds and floor.
We met another Sierra Leonean doctor at a more rural Catholic medical facility in Bo, about an hour outside Freetown. Dad had a chance to visit with the head physician there, a European-trained doctor. The hospital was cleaner and more modern and than the one in Freetown but beset by the same problems of access to modern treatments. The doctor who Dad visited with took him on a tour and was aware of the shortcoming in treatment modalities in Sierra Leone. Here again Dad saw patients with advanced forms of neurologic and rhematologic diseases. There were stroke victims and those with arthritis. Physical therapy was not readily available. We met a young woman who had a treatable malignancy and yet was doomed to an early death because there were no chemotherapeutic agents available to her. I could see the sadness in Dad’s eyes as we left. He gave the doctor his card and they s
poke about contacting each other. As we left the hospital, a girl was carried in by her mother, who shouted something to him in Krio. “This one,” he said, sighing. “She just drank lighter fluid. You can see her lips puckering.”
We thanked the doctor for his time and let him get back to his work.
FOR TWO OF THE DAYS Dad stayed with me my apartment didn’t have water. Although this had become regular practice for me, for Dad it was new. He handled it jovially, putting a baseball hat over his dirty hair before we went to town. Dad may have been worried about his own safety and mine before he left, but any anxieties quickly disappeared. “The people here are so friendly!” he kept remarking, as we strolled through town, stopping to talk to the butchers and fish sellers. We bought some vegetables from women who liked Dad and his smiley nature so much that they padded our bag with extras. “That never happens to me!” I told him. He was flattered.
Dad had brought I NY shirts and gave them to some of my Sierra Leonean colleagues, who all showed up to work the next day wearing them. By the end of my father’s visit, I could tell he felt at ease with my decision to work in Sierra Leone, and knew now that it wasn’t the kind of place where you had to worry about making it out alive. It was the kind of place you could have a life, and I did.
What I hadn’t yet realized, however, was that having a life wasn’t the same as making one.
During the first few months I was in Sierra Leone, the Taylor case had been moving along at a slow crawl. The prosecution was trying to track down someone who could testify about the use of children as soldiers during the war. They needed two types of witnesses for each of Taylor’s eleven crimes: one to verify that the crime took place, and the other to link Taylor to that particular crime. Finding the latter type was difficult, as many people were too intimidated to testify. Taylor had done a good job of maintaining plausible deniability. As he said in the courthouse that first day, he couldn’t be held responsible for the atrocities that happened in another country.
Anna, a tall, lean, and hysterically funny British lawyer on Taylor’s prosecution team, was exhausted. She often worked late into the night and could be found at the office most weekends. We were friends, and one evening she managed to get out and meet me and a few other expats for a drink at the local bar. The place was like any bar you’d find at home, with a pool table and foosball table, but it had only one kind of beer on tap and played the same gnawing soundtrack of Kylie Minogue and Shakira. The walls were painted with local proverbs: “Ehn pus no de, arata tak chaj” (When the cat isn’t there, the rats take charge); “News no have fit but it de wak” (Rumors don’t have feet, but they walk).
Anna mentioned that they were having trouble finding a witness who could speak to the number of children who participated in the conflict. They had children who could testify, just as they had other victims—amputees, rape victims, people who had watched their relatives be murdered—but they needed more evidence and research to establish that child abduction was a widespread, systematic activity.
We all knew that files at the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs (known locally as the Ministry of Social Welfare) recorded the histories of children who were demobilized. These were the forms that social workers filled out when a child entered an ICC. Social workers transcribed details about the children’s whereabouts, their activities during the war, where they came from and how old they were when they were captured. They needed someone to weed through the thousands of files that sat in boxes in the Ministry and find out what information was stored in them. It seemed like a natural extension of my work, and Anna wanted to hire me to get more data. Working on the Taylor case and contributing to his conviction, even in a marginal way, was about the most exciting opportunity I could imagine. Anna said I might even have to take the stand.
The defense was going to have questions, she said, regarding the validity of these forms. Most of the children didn’t have birth certificates, and many of them lied to enter the program. It was my job to find as much information as possible to verify that the abduction of children during this conflict was a widespread occurrence, and that these kids were legitimate.
“Oh, and Jess,” Anna said, after describing what my job would be, “what’s Article 14 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child?”
“I don’t know!” I said, laughing. I thought she was kidding.
Anna was serious. “What’s Article 15?”
I didn’t know that, either.
“You’re supposed to be an expert. The defense is already going to be suspicious because you’re so young. Memorize the CRC.”
Having seen the Special Court in action and befriended a number of the lawyers who worked there, I knew the brutal tactics they used on witnesses who took the stand. I once saw a retired man outside the courtroom after a particularly vicious cross-examination, during which the lawyers attacked his career, personal life, and expertise. He paced outside the courtroom, patting his forehead with a handkerchief and devouring cigarette after cigarette. I was scared.
SO I RETURNED TO THE field, revisiting the children and social workers I had just met, this time with more questions. The communities knew me and welcomed me with gifts—one time it was live chickens, handed to me by their feet, bound together with string. Another community offered me a cow’s head. It came in a cardboard box stuffed with old newspaper, like a delicate Christmas ornament. The head smelled like sardines, and the box was soggy at the bottom. But the community was excited by their offering, so I smiled and accepted the package.
“My children like the brains the best,” my driver told me on our way back to town.
“It’s yours,” I said, passing him the box. “I hope they’ll enjoy this one’s brains.”
Besides collecting assorted animal parts, I still had to find a way to prove that the ages recorded on the forms were legitimate. The forms showed that more than two thousand of the children had been fifteen or under at the time they were abducted. But without birth certificates or any sort of written record of their ages, how could we be sure? Any ambiguities in our report would permit the prosecution to assert that the people whose stories were recorded in the files were, in fact, adults at the time of recruitment.
I interviewed social workers who had received children and asked the same questions that I anticipated being posed by the defense. In Kailahun, a district in the East, I sat down with Fatima, a social worker who now dealt with child protection issues—cases of abuse or neglect, labor violations, the trafficking of children as domestic workers—for the local Ministry of Social Welfare. We met at her office, which was a small room with some papers scattered on a large desk. No computer, no electricity. It was no wonder that so little got done in these places, which lacked even the most basic resources. Fatima barely had enough credit on her phone to schedule our appointment.
The efforts Sierra Leoneans made in the face of these obstacles and the victories they managed to achieve impressed me time and again. I sat down in the plastic chair across from her and we began to talk. A solid, motherly woman with a stern voice, Fatima had been in charge of the reunification process after the war for this province and she explained the system to me: “When a child entered an ICC, he received services depending on his age. We didn’t know how long this child would be with us and we needed to provide age-appropriate activities, maybe schooling. Usually he didn’t know how old he was. We asked them to try to remember what grade he was in when he was abducted. What major milestones of the country he could remember. Like who was the paramount chief at the time you were born? How old were you when this city council building was built? We asked whether he had younger siblings and how many. Did he care for these siblings before they were abducted?”
They took note of physical signs as well. “We looked at their teeth,” Fatima said. “Did they have molars? Did they have their front teeth in?” She pointed to her incisors and grinned widely, so I could see her back teeth. “You listen to their voice. You can
tell if they’ve been through puberty yet. For boys we measured the size of their calves, looked to see if they had an Adam’s apple or underarm hair. For girls we looked if they had breasts.” It may not have been the most scientific approach, but it was the best they could do, and it sounded pretty reasonable. “You can tell a ripe corn by its looks,” she said. The mean age of the twenty-three hundred children entered on the Ministry forms—each one filled out by someone like Fatima, who’d carefully estimated the child’s age as nearly as possible—was still only eleven years old. Eleven was four years away from fifteen, the court’s designated cutoff age. So even if the approximations were off by a year or two in either direction, it wouldn’t make a difference. These were children.
The defense was also likely to question the validity of the children’s stories. When these centers opened, suddenly demobilized children were everywhere. “If I see my friend demobilized and getting access to education, I will want to come and lie and say I was demobilized, too. Some were opportunists—those who wanted something to put in their stomachs,” Brima, a neatly put together male social worker who worked in the northern town of Kono, told me. The ICCs didn’t have a lot of resources. They couldn’t afford to accept children who weren’t eligible. “So,” Brima continued, “all you have to do is ask a lot of questions. He will get confused. The story won’t add up.”
The social workers who questioned these children survived the conflict themselves. “I know exactly when that town was attacked, because it was my village! Now this boy comes and tells me it was last year? No, no. He was not a soldier,” Brima recalled. “He may have gotten some information from a friend, but if you go a little further and ask what kind of conflict took place, he won’t know,” Brima went on, leaning his head back as he recounted the stories. “Also, if they say they used an AK-47, then they were given training. So we’d ask—how do you use it? Can you draw one for me? What is a magazine? How many cartridges will go in a package? If a child has fired a gun for three years, he will have a mark on his finger.” He pointed to his index finger. “If he has been using a big gun, he will have a mark on his shoulder.” He patted his right shoulder.
Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid Page 22
