Life in Freetown

Sunday, August 10
I’m sitting in a giant brown chair in my living room listening to Ice Ice Baby blasting at full volume from the stereo in the corner, completely overshadowing the hum of the generator. I just finished an early dinner of rice and a tasty fish stew with my housemates, Emmanuel and Abraham. I’ve been sitting in this chair for the past hour or so beginning to transcribe an interview I conducted this morning with a former child soldier, my first such interview. We met near his house by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and then headed over to Victoria Park in the downtown area. Over a couple of sodas, he detailed his experiences first with the RUF rebel group, and then with the government forces.

Where I’m living
But now back to my living room. I am staying with a Sierra Leonean guy named Emmanuel, along with his best friend, Abraham, and foster daughter, Josephine. Emmanuel runs a local NGO called the Society for Democratic Initiatives (SDI), and has studied in the UK, Hungary, and South Africa. Josephine, a 17 year old half-French, half-Sierra Leonean girl, has been put in Emmanuel’s care. I’m not sure exactly what the full story is, but her mother died when she was young and her father lives in France. Emmanuel just moved in a few weeks ago, and every day the place gets nice and nicer. We’re still waiting on electricity and running water (I’m not hold my breath that either of these things will come soon), but we now have a television, stereo, freezer, fans, and even a coffee table. At night and on the weekends, my housemates like to turn on the generator and watch movie after movie.

The house is in an area called Bobadurie, and is about a ten minute walk from a main road. By this point, I have gotten to know a lot of the people who live in the area, so whenever I leave the house I hear shouts of “Rebecca! Rebecca!” coming from all directions. The trek to the house is a bit of a pain because the stretch of “road” before you come to the place is made up of two hills, the first of which is impassible by car. The problem with these hills is that they are steep enough to leave me drenched in sweat when I walk up during the hot or humid part of the day, but also become very slippery when the rain comes (which is at least once a day). Sometimes the bottoms of the hills even turn into mini rivers when the rain comes down hard. But the good part of the hills is the gorgeous view of the ocean and the town that we have from the veranda!

What I’ve been doing
I’ve basically spent my first two weeks settling in, getting to know Freetown, and making contacts. I knew that I was going to have to figure out how to focus my research more once I got here, and at first this proved to be quite a challenge. The war has been over here officially since 2002, and all of the reintegration programs for former child soldiers closed down long ago. Right now in Freetown, peace is prevailing. When I first arrived in Uganda two years ago, all I kept hearing from the people I met was that “Everyone has been traumatized by the war.” But in Freetown, people keep telling me how peaceful the people and the country are. In fact, if you came here without knowing anything about the history, the only hints you would find of the brutal 10 year civil war are the groups of amputees sometimes hanging out around town.

After many frustrating brainstorming sessions and crossed out pages in my notebook, I have finally gotten a handle on my plan for the year. I am going to document the reintegration experiences of former child soldiers in my project countries, trying to understand how they have been living since they went through demobilization. I have gotten permission from the Watson foundation to add Uganda to my list of destinations for the year in order to look at the consequences of reintegrating into Internally Displaced Persons camps in a context of ongoing war instead of into communities as part of a war-ending peace process. Also, I may try to add Rwanda to look at the reintegration of children who fought in the neighboring war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Here in Freetown, I am conducting interviews with former child soldiers who now live in the streets in an area called Lumley. I wasn’t sure how I could safely get access to these guys, but then my friends at the Lumley internet café came to the rescue. A number of these ex-combatants hang out around the café, and the manager has gotten to know them throughout the past few years. I was chatting with him a few days ago and explaining what I wanted to do, and he offered to help me out. So we met yesterday with Alieu, a former commander with the rebels, and Alieu has agreed to connect me with all of his friends. I interviewed four of them today, and am going to continue interviewing as many of them as possible throughout the next few weeks. I’ll post some of their experiences on the blog over the next week. Their stories are really horrifying and terrible. Many of these guys were forced with the threat of death to become rebels, and now they are left with no prospects for the future and no one to help them.