Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (31 page)

When the Sierra Leonean conflict finally ended, 45,000 fighters were disarmed and demobilized by UN peacekeepers. Men put down their guns in fields and the
international community, along with the Sierra Leone National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (NCDDR), tried to facilitate their return to something like their normal lives. Aid organizations and the local government distributed starter money, provided transportation home, and helped people as they tried to find work.

For children, the process was different. Between 1998 and 2002, nearly seven thousand children who had been forcibly conscripted to join the war were demobilized. Many had been transported far from their homes and the NCDDR and the international agencies were attempting to reunify them with their families. These children were placed in Interim Care Centers (ICCs) until someone could track down their families and return them to their homes.

I came into my research project with a lot of questions. What was the reunification process like? What strategies were most effective? What were these children doing now, and how had they fared since returning home? Being free to formulate these questions on my own also meant traveling the country and making connections at my own discretion and pace. At times, the autonomy that came with being on a Fulbright could feel overwhelming. But eventually, I began to get my bearings, and found plenty of organizations that had worked with children after they were demobilized, and it turned out they were asking the very same questions I was. They were happy to collaborate and provided
transportation, accommodations, and the names and contact information of people I ought to meet along the way. With two assistants, one translator and one driver, a backpack filled with notepads, and the necessary toilet supplies for living in the bush for a few weeks, I went to the field to track down and interview former child soldiers, social workers, and reunification officers about the demobilization process.

On these trips I learned more than I had set out to. Children were an uncomplicated target for the rebel groups—they were easy to manipulate, their minds malleable and their bodies quick. They did as they were told, their innate obedience heightened by the drugs the rebels administered through injections or by cutting a child’s skin and rubbing the chemicals directly into the wound. In order to extinguish any family ties, rebels would force children to kill or rape their relatives. This was torture, and a kind of insurance policy: now, even if they wanted to escape, the children would have no home to return to. The rebels also branded children as a way to keep them close. If they ran away and were captured by another one of the factions, children with markings from the rebels would immediately be killed.

After a visit to a community where I met a few former child soldiers, one of the boys followed me to the car and asked if he could speak with me in private. We walked behind his school and he lifted up his shirt. Carved across his chest were the letters “RUF”: the Revolutionary United Front.

A medical agency came right after the war and performed plastic surgery on some of the boys to remove the scars. They’d missed this one.

“Can you help me get these letters off?” he asked, looking away, too embarrassed to even make eye contact. I didn’t know any agency that was doing these procedures anymore. But I told him that I would ask around.

“
Tankey
,” he said, as he pulled his shirt down and tucked it tightly into his pants. I was never able to find an agency to help him.

Many boys were taken deep into the bush where they were trained to shoot and fight. Older boys were forced to steal, kill, rape, and maim. The younger ones, too small to carry guns, were used by the militias as porters, cooks, messengers, and servants. Many were sent on spying missions to see what was available to loot in neighboring villages. Girls as young as seven were taken as bush wives. Some of the older ones became pregnant, and some of the younger ones bled to death after sex. Often, girls needed surgery to repair the damage to their bodies caused by rape and early pregnancy. Those who gave birth had their children labeled
rebel pikin
—rebel children—and were rejected back at home.

Meeting the children now, it was hard to believe the trials they endured. But as I learned from my first assignment in Darfur, children are usually the most resilient of all. For the most part, they were reintegrated
into their communities and seemed happy going to school and getting their lives back on track.

Occasionally, I was joined on my travels by Claudetta, my Sierra Leonean friend and colleague, who had worked with one of the agencies that helped demobilize children. “Jessica,
yu ma nehba taya
,” she’d say to me, which literally meant, “
You never tire
,” or, “
You are always on the go
,” because I’d wake up early to get on the road or keep working into the night. Claudetta was definitely bum cut, and flaunted her full figure with sexy tank tops in aquas and pinks and tight jeans. Her smile was sly and playful and when she laughed her head fell back, as did her bright, dangly earrings. We had a fun time on the road together, playing music and stopping for fruit or snacks at every stall we passed. Sometimes when I ate too much she’d jokingly pinch my stomach and exclaim, “Oh, Jessica,
yu don fat-o
!”—Jessica, you’ve gotten fat! On our long trips we’d talk about our lives, but mostly about boys. She had a boyfriend and couldn’t believe I was single. “
Yu noh geht man
?” (You don’t have a man?) “No, I don’t!” “
Yu noh mared
?” (You’re not married?) “No!” Then we’d go through the whole routine again.

Claudetta survived the rebel attack in Freetown in 2002 but her father was killed. Half of her family’s house had burned down and they still did not have enough money to repair it. Once, when we were in the process of interviewing a group of children, one
of them described marching into the capital, drugged up and leading the way. Claudetta’s face went gray. To her, this was the scariest part. “They don’t have a sense of right or wrong yet. They don’t yet understand what it means. It’s a game for them at that age. There is no hesitation for them to just shoot!”

FIELD RESEARCH PROVIDED A VIVID
counterpoint to desk work. Leaving the city, we’d drive deep into the countryside—rows of shell-colored buildings giving way to open fields and damp woodlands, the roar of traffic fading into the dense silence of the forest. Walls of trees, tangled and lush, surrounded us; in the distance, hills floated against the blue sky like pale, mossy stones in a pond.

But there were also plenty of times we’d drive at night down unlit streets, with only one of our headlights working. Trucks, cars, and motorcycles—none of which had headlights, either—flew by in the opposite direction. It was impossible to tell how close they were until the driver had just enough time to swerve away. Some trucks didn’t even have taillights, and I’d heard of motorcyclists fatally crashing right into the backs of them.

Other times, the rain fell so thick and so fast the sole working windshield wiper couldn’t keep up, and all I could see was wet, gray fog. And I would sit there, with my seat belt fastened, thinking:
If I can’t see anything, I can be pretty sure that the driver can’t, either
,
and this Land Cruiser doesn’t have an air bag, there is nothing but a piece of metal about as sturdy as a cookie sheet between me and the tree we almost just smashed into
. Sometimes I’d try to talk myself down, tell myself we wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t safe, but eventually I didn’t bother. These were the risks I had to take if I wanted to work in these places, and I did, so there was no point in dwelling on them. I just had to ride the fear through, until I didn’t notice it anymore. First, I stopped being pricked by dread each time I spotted a potential danger, then all the dangers—the collisions, the slippery roads—blurred together. They were just part of the landscape, like the trees along the road.

In most cases those research missions took us to former Interim Care Centers (ICCs), where demobilized children received assistance from local social workers while waiting to be reunified with their families. While in Bo, a city in southern Sierra Leone, I met a social worker named Francis. A tall, thin man, Francis was in his forties but looked twenty years younger. We sat on a wooden school bench outside a classroom as he recounted the children’s temperament when they first arrived at the ICCs. “They were so stubborn when they came. Troublesome. They picked fights. They stole,” he recalled, shaking his head. “Some of the older ones
who rose to certain levels wanted us to call them ‘Sir.’ These
pikin
, ugh! They were so aggressive.” He looked ahead as he remembered more. “They were boastful about their exploits. One boy, he came up to me and said, ‘Do you know how many arms I’ve cut off? Two boxes of arms and I will soon be a second lieutenant.’ They didn’t think they had even done anything wrong.”

Other children, he said, were sullen; many had trouble sleeping and kept to themselves. Francis and his colleagues didn’t do clinical interventions but used drama, song, sports, and drawing to help the children. “Through these things they can regain themselves,” Francis explained.

Some children were so young when they were taken from their villages they could no longer remember where they were from, or what their mothers looked like. Francis recalled a girl who “no longer understood her own language. She was only four when they took her.” As far back as they could remember there had only been war. “Some said they wanted to be reunified with their warlords. There was a strong attachment to commanders, thinking that he was a savior, a protector,” Francis said. It wasn’t easy for people like Francis to break these links. “Some of the children had risen from the junior ranks and the younger children continued to salute them in the ICCs.”

Family tracing programs began. Social workers took pictures of the kids, displaying hundreds of faces on large posters that were circulated across the country. Parents scoured the images for their children.
When one was found, social workers informed the appropriate ICC and a tape recording of the child’s voice was prepared for the parents. When—if—the parents confirmed that this was their child, the social workers scheduled a reunion.

Many of these reunions were joyous, but some were not. “Children themselves were scared about how they would be received when they went home.” And for good reason. “Sometimes when we took children back home, the community threw rocks at the car,” Musa, a social worker from Makeni, told me. “We were in serious danger. ‘That boy was one of them who led the RUF to our village and burned our homes! These children destroyed a nation’ the community would say.” Musa still worked with foster children, and I interviewed him in a café near the school where he was now employed. To our meeting, he wore a bright red collared shirt, which had been tucked in tightly enough to reveal the outline of his belly button.

Musa recalled the months he and other social workers spent preparing communities for these returns, explaining that everyone was a victim of the war, even the children. “It’s not a day’s work,” he said laughing. “Some people said they would not associate with these children. Others said they were bush people and not fit for the community. They didn’t want the kids to even sit down in their houses.” Musa and other social workers visited villages, spoke to local leaders, and developed radio programs that instructed people to “stop provoking these kids.”

IT
’
S NO WONDER THAT MANY
children tried to leave home as soon as they had returned. Even if families did accept the children, Musa explained, they couldn’t provide three meals a day, or the toys and regular educational opportunities that the children got at the ICCs. “We would reunify a child with his family or a foster family and think that everything was OK. A month later we would find out that the same child left that family and enrolled in a different ICC where he wouldn’t be recognized,” Musa recalled. And this time they were smart—they told lies about where they were from, delaying the process of getting “reunified” in order to extend their stays at the center for as long as possible.

The school Musa now worked at was one that had accepted former child soldiers when they were reintegrated. One of the ways the aid groups tried to persuade the children and the communities to accept each other was by covering the children’s school fees for five years. But even this was complicated. Some children had missed too many years of school to enroll in grades appropriate for their ages. They needed to catch up somehow, and a rapid education program that condensed six years of schooling into three was launched. But why should the children who participated in the war be rewarded, community members protested, when those who weren’t taken, who stayed home or fled alone, got nothing? The community called the support “blood books, blood materials.” To mitigate some of the resentment, the aid community provided school
supplies—desks, pens, pencils, bags—to all of the students at schools where children were reintegrated.