War Don-Don

I always knew I was raised privileged. My parents had good jobs, I always had what I needed, and had it in abundance. I knew I was lucky. Even compared to a lot of my friends. And in some broad way, I think I knew I was lucky to be an American.

But not really.

Not like I do now. We began today by watching a documentary about the war, and the indictment of war criminals of the RUF (Rebel United Force). This sobering experience had us all wide-eyed and really made us see how remarkable this country was that we had come to.

A massively complicated war, I’ll try to explain it as simply and well as I can. There are still pieces that I’m unclear about:

Pre-1990, a 1-party, corrupt government ran Sierra Leone. After a poor investment bankrupted the country, the value of the Leone plummeted overnight and the people were thrust into a state of abject poverty. The Rebel United Force (RUF) comprised of a group of Sierra Leoneans who wanted to overthrow the government because they weren’t taking care of the country. The initial intent of the RUF was good and they were necessary to change the way the government was run.

Over the course of the war however, criminals, both from Sierra Leone and other countries who wanted control of the diamonds and wanted to help build their own country’s economy, infiltrated the RUF. This was where the violence escalated, and this is the only part of the war that most people know about. Eventually, with help, the Sierra Leone Armed Forces forced the RUF to lay their weapons down, but the war had devastated the country. The war ended in 2002.

Those are the facts of the war, the textbook definition that a historian would tell you. The stories that the Salone people tell are the real stories. The heart-breaking, gut-wrenching ones. We learned all these stories and facts, realizing simultaneously that the Training Staff, all of our LCFs (Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitators) had lived through this war. Some had lived through it as children and some as adults. I can’t imagine which one was more terrifying.

We’ve been joking and laughing with them for two weeks now. They’ve been teaching us how to be safe here, and how to speak Krio and they have become our friends. We dance together, they trounce us in football and we taught them how to play Frisbee.

I don’t think any of us realized the reality of their lives outside our training compound. That the happy people we hang out with every day were a product of the Salone that we Volunteers all fell in love with. They were separate- there was the Sierra Leone that claimed too many lives and changed too many stories, and then there was our Sierra Leone. The one that had nonstop music and dancing and people that care about one another and love to laugh. The reality hit that these worlds weren’t two separate things, and this war wasn’t textbook to our LCFs. This was a part of their story.

The way that Sierra Leoneans talk about the war amazes me. They all have a story. They all have lost someone. They speak of them in almost a detached way, as if it’s simply a fact rather than anything devastating. It reminds me of the way that some survivors of the Holocaust talk, with a factual tone and unconnected eyes.

They want so badly for the war to just be over. They want to forgive the people that devastated them, they want to rebuild their country and they just want to be happy again. The Salone nationalism is beautiful, and they are so proud of their country. They’re proud enough to take any help that is offered to them, and why they welcome the Peace Corps with such open arms. They want more for their kids and their country.

Our students will be students who were born in the bush. That’s just a fact. Children of war, whose parents had to fight for them. The fact they’re in school means their parents beat the odds and made sure that the war didn’t define their children’s lives. They persevered to make sure their kids had more- an education that the war robbed so many people of.

In the quiet wake that followed all of these realizations, amid my feelings of horror and pity for this country, I felt something else- a seed of shame, deep in my stomach.

My focus has definitely not been where it should be lately. I’ve been doing a little too much chatting, far too much flirting and not enough of focusing, focusing on why I really came here. My American, over-extroverted, social self took over and I’d been focused on the same things that I was in America. My biggest concern for placement was how close I was going to be to another Salone 4 volunteer, nothing really about the students I would be teaching.

This morning picked me up and shook me, basically slapped me in the face. The fact that I’m in this country and can make a difference is the most important claim I can make about my life so far. I need to remain focused. I owe that to my students. I owe that to this country that I already feel ownership of and have a fierce pride in.

I owe it to myself to be a person who cares about what’s really important.