“This laptop,” the instructor went on, “is designed for people with disabilities.” The mouse was shaped like a big ball, so that I could easily maneuver it with my arms.
I watched the icons for Word and Internet pop onto the screen. I moved the ball, and the instructor showed me how to hit the little arrow on the blue W. A blank page appeared on the screen.
It was hard at first to hit the keys. Even though the keyboard was big, it was not easy to master hitting one letter at a time. An hour later, when the instructor said our time was up, all I had on my screen was a mismatch of letters and numbers.
That evening, when the nieces were downstairs watching a movie, I sat on my mattress and played with my new computer. It took some experimenting, but I finally managed to spell out a complete sentence: My name is Mariatu Kamara. I live in Toronto, Canada, and like it here very much.
Once I became proficient on the laptop, the instructor taught me how to connect to the Internet. There was so much to explore, including websites that talked about the war in my country and chat groups where I could communicate with Sierra Leoneans living all over the world. I started sending emails, first to the nieces, but soon to friends I had met at school.
One day, Kadi gave me Bill and Shelley’s email address. “I haven’t heard from them in a long time,” she said, “but you might as well try.”
Hi Bill and Shelley, I wrote. You may remember me, it’s Mariatu Kamara. You helped bring me to Canada.
I didn’t hear back for about a month. When I did, their email made me very sad.
Richard, they told me, had been killed in a car accident.
Bill and Shelley also explained how they had come to know about me in the first place. They wrote that on a sunny Sunday afternoon, they were driving in the countryside. Shelley read aloud a newspaper article about the war in Sierra Leone. That article featured me. Afterwards, Richard had turned to Bill and asked him to do whatever he could to help me, including bringing me to Canada if he could.
Bill and Shelley also told me that Comfort hadn’t wanted me to stay in Canada. They said that they had been fighting with her from the moment we arrived. Comfort, according to the email, wanted to remain in Canada too, and had threatened to take me back to Sierra Leone if she didn’t get her way. That’s how, Bill and Shelley now revealed, I had ended up with Kadi and Abou. Bill and Shelley wanted me to stay in Canada and have a shot at life, which they felt I wouldn’t have in Freetown.
When I finished reading the email, I closed my laptop and thought about sweet Richard, who had walked in the hills with me, introducing me to chipmunks, squirrels, and even a deer with a fluffy white tail. He was responsible for bringing me to this country, and now he was dead. Bill and Shelley had written that Richard was in heaven, smiling down on me. Maybe he was with Abdul and Santigie. Maybe they were all smiling down on me. I hoped so.
And then I thought about Comfort. If what Bill and Shelley said was the truth, then she had lied to me.
“Hmmn … Whatever the truth is,” I thought as I went to sleep that night, “I’m here, in Canada, getting an education. Bill, Shelley, Richard, and Comfort all did a good thing.”
CHAPTER 21
It was late spring 2005, and I was seated in the library of G.L. Roberts Collegiate and Vocational Institute. I was hiding my shaking knees under a big round table, afraid to look up into the eyes of the journalists who were waiting to talk with me.
In a few minutes, in the auditorium down the hall, the famous Canadian rock band Sum 41 would take the stage, along with some lesser-known bands, in a benefit concert to benefit, well, me. The students at my high school, working with the students at G.L. Roberts, had organized the event.
Kadi, as always, was beside me.
“I’m scared,” I whispered to her as the first journalist approached.
“Don’t be,” Kadi whispered back. “You’ve talked to the media a thousand times before. You’re an old pro!”
I’d met with journalists many times, that was true. But I was more nervous this time than ever before, and for good reason. These would be the first interviews in which I answered the questions myself, in English, without a translator telling most of my story. My mind had run through all the possible answers I could give to the questions I thought would be coming. And not one of those answers felt right to me.
Every so often a student at my school had mentioned reading a newspaper article about me. I’d never read any of the articles myself, so I would just nod and thank them for their interest.
Then one of these students suggested to our World Issues teacher that we discuss the articles in class. The teacher checked it out with me, and I said yes.
As the teacher read the first article out loud, I wanted to melt in my seat.
After she read a second one, I wanted to run right out of the room.
When she had finished reading the articles, the teacher asked if I wanted to share anything else about my life experience with my fellow students.
A knot formed in my throat. “No,” I croaked.
The students clapped. The bell rang. Class was over.
I dashed out of the room, even though several of my friends were waiting to talk to me, and ran straight to the washroom, where I was sick to my stomach.
Some of my classmates had followed me. They thought I was upset because I was reliving the bad things that had happened to me. A girl pulled out her cell phone and was about to call one of the nieces when I managed to say, “I’m okay. I just want to be alone for a while.”
I was traumatized that day because I had learned for the first time that much of the information written in those articles was wrong. The most glaring mistake the journalists had made was stating that the rebels had raped me.
After my confession to Yabom in London, I never spoke of Salieu’s assault on me again. Like many people who experience violence, I wrongly believed I had brought it on myself. I would say to myself: “If only I’d left the house that day Salieu came! If only I’d agreed to be his wife, he wouldn’t have touched me until we were married!” I never wanted to utter Salieu’s name again, let alone have to think about him, so I had shut him out of my head.
That day in school, I realized that a big lie had formed because of my silence. And now I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to correct the mistake while I had the chance. Another part of me felt it would be easier to say nothing. I swallowed hard as a reporter from the Toronto Star sat down opposite me.
“Hello,” the woman began. “Are you excited about the concert?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“You must be pleased to know that your dream of prosthetic hands will soon be a reality?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, more hesitantly.
That was the other reason I didn’t want to talk to journalists: the benefit concert was to raise money to help buy me prosthetic hands, and I was still uncertain that I wanted them. The only people who knew of my concerns were Kadi and Abou, and they had encouraged me to give prosthetic hands another try.
Abou had explained that some prosthetic devices are attuned to your nerves and can move accordingly, meaning if I twitched a muscle as if to pick up a pen, the way I would if I had fingers, the prosthetic hand would sense this and pick up the pen. The prosthetic hands I’d received in England didn’t do that.
“Please don’t tell me they’re made out of metal,” I had moaned.
“No,” Abou had replied, laughing. “They look just like real hands.” He showed me a photograph of them on the Internet, and sure enough they did. But the hands cost nearly $30,000.
Kadi had asked my tutor whether I might do better at school if I learned to write my examinations along with the other students, using prosthetic hands. I was still mostly pulling in Cs, and Kadi felt I could do better. The tutor, who thought it was worth a try, told the principal how much money was needed, and the principal told the student council. The students had pulled together this event.
I w
as scared that if people knew the truth about my rape or my dislike of prosthetic hands, they would abandon me. I didn’t want to let them down, either. Everyone seemed so proud of me.
Just a few weeks earlier, I had completed reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for my grade 11 English class. I cried tears of joy when I put the book down. I was finally at the same level as my peers.
After I’d told my drama class about the theater troupe at the camp, my classmates wanted to know more about our performances. Our drama teacher didn’t like us chatting, but behind the curtains I’d whisper to my friends about HIV/AIDS and the part I’d played of a mourning village woman.
“I wish we could do a play about our lives,” one of the boys said.
“We could do plays about cutting and violent boyfriends and dieting,” said one girl.
“Instead, we have to put on this boring stuff that only adults want to watch,” another added. We all started to laugh.
“QUIET BACK THERE,” the teacher yelled.
Everyone seemed happy that I was part of their lives. But I worried that could change in an instant.
None of the journalists in the library that afternoon asked questions about the war or about Abdul. I was relieved at the time, though afterwards I wished I’d been able to tell everyone the truth.
Before the concert began, I had to go onstage to say a few words. I was really nervous about that too.
“Hello, everyone,” I said into the microphone. There was standing room only in the audience. “Thank you so much for doing this for me.”
Beside me stood some of the band members from Sum 41. I hadn’t done enough public speaking to risk making a joke. But I was thinking of one, something like “All you girls should come and meet these cute boys after.” The girls in the front row already had their eyes glued to the band members’ every move.
The concert was fun. I didn’t feel like dancing, so I stood off to the side and watched. In between playing songs, some of the band members spoke about the impact of war on children and called for world leaders to do more to end the conflicts. I hadn’t known until I came to Canada that there are wars all over the world, and that today children are the number one casualty. In many countries there are children like me, maimed by guns and knives.
As I was leaving the stage, a teacher I knew came up to me. “You should write a book,” she said. “I’d make sure every one of my students read it!”
I mulled over the teacher’s comment as we drove home that evening. She wasn’t the first one to suggest a book about my life. I couldn’t imagine many people would want to read such a book, even if I could figure out how to write it. At least, though, I fell asleep thinking, a book could dispel the myths that had built up around me.
On a warm April night in 2007, writing my book became a reality.
Kadi had announced a few days earlier that a journalist who’d interviewed me after I arrived in Canada wanted to do a follow-up story. Now the journalist, whose name was Susan, sat across from Kadi and me, asking questions about how I liked high school.
“Have you heard of Ishmael Beah?” Susan asked near the end of our conversation.
“No,” I replied.
Ishmael was a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, Susan said, and he had published a best-selling book about his experiences.
“Best-selling book!” I exclaimed. “People in the West want to read about Sierra Leone?”
Susan nodded. Ishmael was going to be in Toronto the following week, she told me. My story would run beside his in a national newspaper, the Globe and Mail.
As she was leaving, Susan turned to me. “Mariatu, would you like to meet Ishmael?”
I gulped. I thought of the boy soldiers who had cut off my hands. “I’m not sure,” I replied. “Can I think about it?”
Many, many times I had thought back to those boy soldiers. Kadi and Abou kept me pretty sheltered from Sierra Leone politics, but I had learned through the Internet that a special court had been set up in Freetown to investigate some of the soldiers, including the leaders who had ordered rape, murder, and the amputation of people’s hands.
What would I do if I was in that courtroom and had to testify? I asked myself. What would I do if I ever saw one of those boys who had hurt me?
At first I felt only anger. I wanted those four boys dead. I hoped the special court would order them killed.
But the anger made me feel sick, and over time I saw that taking a life was not the solution. They were kids, like me, who’d got caught up in something beyond their control. Maybe in the bush they’d thought of their parents and sisters, and felt alone and scared like I had.
There was nothing I could do, I realized, even if I wanted to. Even if those boys were right in front of me, I wouldn’t be able to hurt them, not with my words or with my body. They might spend some time in prison, but there was no way I could allow myself to make them suffer. Instead, I imagined those boys standing before me as I said to them: “I hope you’re very sorry for what you did to me. But I forgive you.”
Susan called over the weekend to make sure I had seen her stories in the newspaper. At about eight o’clock that Sunday night, as I was sitting alone in my bedroom, I punched in Susan’s telephone number on my cell phone. If I didn’t reach her, I vowed I’d take it as a sign not to go through with what I was about to ask.
Susan picked up.
“Hi, it’s me, Mariatu,” I said. “How was your weekend?”
“Good, and yours?”
“Fine. How are the girls?” She’d told me about her two young daughters.
“Good,” she replied. I could sense she knew that I was procrastinating. “Everything okay, Mariatu?” she asked.
“I want to meet Ishmael!” I blurted out the words before I knew what I had done.
“I think I can arrange that,” Susan said.
Three days later, I was standing in front of a big old church in downtown Toronto with Abou, Kadi, and Susan. Ishmael’s publicist had said we could have a private session with him before his speech and book signing.
When I saw Ishmael, I breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t look at all like any of the boys from Manarma. He had a broad face, a high forehead, and curly hair. I instantly felt I had found a friend, odd as that seemed with a former child soldier.
Abou opened the conversation with Ishmael by talking about Sierra Leonean food. “I miss those cassava leaves and hot peppers,” he joked as he bit into a coffee-shop sandwich.
Ishmael asked if I knew any Sierra Leoneans in New York City, where he lived. I did. Some of the kids from the refugee camp had moved there, and we discovered we had some friends in common. Next we talked about music. He likes rap, I prefer hip-hop.
“I want to write a book,” I said to Ishmael as his publicist signaled that it was time for his speech to begin.
“What do you want to call it?” he asked.
“Hmm … Maybe Never Give Up on Your Dreams. Is that a good title?”
“I think it’s an excellent title.” He smiled, then moved to give me a goodbye hug.
“Do you think anyone will want to read a book about me?” I asked.
“Yes,” came his reply. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 22
It’s February 2008, and I’m back in Sierra Leone with Susan, Kadi, a woman from UNICEF Canada, and Sorious Samura, the filmmaker who made Cry Freetown, a documentary chronicling the brutal January 1999 invasion of Freetown by the rebels. I got the book deal: Susan and I were working on my memoir, and we have returned to Sierra Leone to finish and fact-check the book.
It’s early in the morning on our second week in the country. Sierra Leone smelled just like I remembered: the air thick with aromas of open fires, spices, and the ocean, and bright, like a soft fluorescent light. I’m in Freetown. I crawled out of bed, opened the window, leaned out, and inhaled. Just as I was about to turn and wake up Kadi, my cell phone rang.
“Hello,” I said after digging it out of my purse.
It was Sorious Samura on the other end. “You’re going to meet the president tomorrow,” he said.
The phone was crackling, and I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly. “I don’t understand,” I replied. “What did you say?”
“Mariatu, I’ve arranged for you to meet the president tomorrow. The president of Sierra Leone.”
As Sorious went on to give me details of the meeting with President Ernest Bai Koroma, including how I should present myself to the leader of my native country, I thought back to the time, nearly nine years earlier, when I had first heard the word president.
“Mariatu, are you listening to me?” Sorious’s voice broke into my thoughts.
“Yes,” I said. “I have been listening. But I don’t see how I can meet the president.”
“All you have to do is tell him your story,” Sorious said gently. “Can you do that?”
“I will think about it,” I whispered after a long pause. “I will try to remember.”
After my conversation with Sorious, I didn’t feel like talking to anybody. I was too worried. What could I possibly say to the president? Why would he want to listen to me?
Susan and Kadi and I were going to Yonkro to visit my family. I had to get bathed and dressed or else we wouldn’t make it to the village until midday. Kadi had awakened at the sound of the phone, and as she stumbled to the bathroom, she asked me who it was.
“Sorious,” I replied. “He says we’re meeting the president tomorrow.”
“Good,” Kadi said as she shut the door to the washroom. “He went to school with my brother. It will be nice to see him again,” she called out nonchalantly. I then heard the sound of water running.
For a moment I laughed, thinking that everyone in Sierra Leone is either related to Kadi and Abou or knows them. But then my mind returned to the actual meeting with the president. Even the president being a friend of Kadi’s brother did little to soothe my nerves. I said barely a word all the way to Yonkro.
The Bite of the Mango Page 15