Blood Diamonds

by Greg Campbell

  Owen believed that President Koroma, while motivated and committed to change, was hampered by a lack of “human capital.” A large Sierra Leonean diaspora occurred during the war, when many educated people fled the country, particularly to the United States. While some are returning and bringing home their experiences in America in business and government, “there’s really very little [that government institutions] have in terms of people who can actually carry out programs,” Owen said. “The capacity constraints in all the ministries are really quite severe.”

  As an example, he points to Sierra Leone’s attempt to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global effort to improve governance over mining industries in resource-rich countries by instituting standards that all signatory countries must adhere to. Sierra Leone has fallen woefully behind schedule.

  “They’re having enormous difficulty pulling everything together to adhere to the requirements of the EITI, and they’ve been put on notice that time is running out,” he said. “That goes back to that lack of capacity. They just don’t have the sort of midlevel management in their government to put in the system they need to meet the requirements of EITI.”

  This deficit manifests itself in tangible ways, particularly in how the government manages, or fails to manage, extractive industries mining diamonds, gold, iron ore, and other valuable minerals—in other words, the lifeblood of Sierra Leone’s future. The government, according to Owen, has yet to control so much as one of its most important industries—diamonds—much less figure out how to maximize revenue from it.

  “From all I hear, there are still large segments of the diamond sector that are entirely unregulated and unpoliced,” he said. “There are areas in the Kono District that are off limits to everybody, and I’m not entirely clear what’s going on there. In spite of the fact that they’ve signed on to the Kimberley Process and made all these pledges, enforcement is still a major issue.”

  Owen ticked off a checklist of deficiencies as if reading the ingredients from a recipe for revolt, one that’s been followed before. Dire poverty, endemic corruption, paramount chiefs on the take from foreign investors (not just in diamonds but agribusiness as well), untreated post-traumatic stress disorder in former child soldiers, a pending health-care crisis if the government can’t find revenue to take over the free medical program once donor funding dries up.

  I tried to find something that we could agree was a positive sign. I asked Owen about forgiveness and reconciliation. Before my arrival, I’d expected to find hostility between former rebel soldiers and their victims. But it hardly ever came up. Jango was adamant that internecine violence was over. “We took care of that a long time ago,” he said. “It’s no problem now.”

  In the words of one man: “We may not ever be able to forget what happened, but we can forgive.”

  This was an amazing sentiment, repeated often. I wanted to believe that no matter how bad things got, there wouldn’t be a return to the sort of deadly violence that had brought me here in the first place. Owen, however, couldn’t offer any reassurance.

  “This unemployed youth thing, that’s a major problem, nationwide and here in Freetown particularly,” he said. “You have a lot of former child soldiers who’ve never really recovered from the trauma of war. Many of them never went to school and have very limited skills. They’re probably suffering from PTSD, and I think the presence of a large number of these young men is really a risk factor for the future.

  “I still do worry,” he continued after giving it some thought. “There’s a lot of anger underneath the surface in a lot of people. Under the wrong set of circumstances, that could come out again. Things seem calm on the surface, but I’m just a little concerned that there’s still some definite anger underneath.”

  I DID FIND MY glimmer of hope, but where I least expected it: on the side of a steep hill east of Freetown, surrounded by the poorest and most desperate people I’d met yet. They are child miners who crush rocks in order to afford enough food to go on living. They aren’t looking for diamonds—they are simply crushing rocks, big ones into little ones and then the little ones into gravel, with the hope of selling piles of them to construction companies for use in making concrete. There is an entire colony of these child laborers and their families, living as squatters on hills offering a clear view of Freetown’s white sand beaches and another road construction project that politicians showcase as evidence of progress.

  I found these hill dwellers completely by accident, after allowing myself to be hailed on the street outside the Solar Hotel by a passerby. “Are you a journalist?” he asked, in the same manner one would ask a person with a stethoscope if he is a doctor. He was pointing to the camera slung on my shoulder.

  He told an amazing story. He worked at a school near Lakka Beach that offered free education to children so poor that their only hope for survival was through backbreaking labor in ad hoc gravel quarries. He described little kids, some of them orphans, swinging hammers as if on a chain gang, perfectly hopeless until discovered by the headmaster, who searched the hills continuously for new pupils, like Jesus looking for lost lambs. Would I like to meet him and visit the school? Naturally, I said yes, even though I suspected he’d exaggerated the story to make me more interested.

  But I was wrong. The founder and headmaster is a man named Foday Mansaray, a fit man in his early forties. He was all business when he showed up at the Solar Hotel the next morning to meet Mike and me for breakfast. He brought along enough supporting material to apply for a World Bank loan—receipts, report cards, photos, even an audio file of a radio show that had been done on the children that aired in Holland.

  Throughout his presentation I kept expecting an appeal for funds, but it never came.

  “I just want you to tell the story,” he said. We piled into a taxi and headed toward the hills with Mansaray explaining that these rock quarry colonies were a result of the war, when rural families fled the provinces to the perceived safety of Freetown, usually with no skills, no education, and nothing more than what they could carry. But without the means to return home when the war was over, they were forced to innovate. They’d been crushing rocks for more than a decade, eking out the barest of existences. From the road, we could see tumbledown shanties and lean-tos built with zinc siding and bush sticks teetering on the hillsides. As we began our climb, the tinny sound of hammers on rocks pinged down to meet us.

  The life of a rock breaker is as hard as it sounds. There are no jackhammers or bulldozers; everything is done by hand. Men with shovels start by removing soil to expose large granite boulders, some the size of small cars. They burn wood or tires to heat the boulders and make them easier to split into chunks with chisels and sledgehammers. Once the rubble is small enough to lug downhill, the women and children take over. Older kids use mallets and small sledges to crush the rock into pebbles, while very small children use ball-peen hammers. On our way up the hill, we passed a three-year-old girl who used a rusty old hammerhead on a stick to smash rocks held in place by her tiny foot, which was clad only in a flip-flop. Mansaray had never seen her before.

  “You see,” he said, “I always find more children. Every time I find more.”

  Speaking gently to the toddler, he learned her name and those of her parents. She pointed in the direction of her home, and Mansaray told me he would come back tomorrow to speak with the parents, hoping they would agree to send the girl to his school and get her out of the quarry. Usually such conversations were straightforward. The parents may be uneducated and illiterate, but they were smart enough to know that there was no future for their children in what they were doing. But others were harder to convince because every swinging hammer meant more gravel they could sell. On a few occasions during our visit, Mansaray spotted students crushing rocks who should have been in school. Some tried to hide, knowing they were in for a scolding, but Mansaray had eyes like a hawk.

  Not only is gravel mining a hopeless existence with no p
rospects for improvement, but it’s also dangerous. Children often miss the rocks and hammer their toes and shins, and most miners have had gravel shards hit their eyes and cut their faces. Most of the schoolchildren have injuries. Mariatu Sesay, an eight-year-old girl, fell and broke her arm at the elbow a year ago. Although set by a doctor, the bone healed at an odd angle and is permanently deformed.

  As the rocks get smashed smaller and smaller, they’re moved closer to the road along a chain of crushing stations, until eventually the pea-sized gravel is piled in knee-high cones that can be spotted by passing construction trucks in need of material for concrete. When buyers come, as often as twice a week or as infrequently as twice a month, the gravel is measured into a pan the size of a large skillet and sold for 1,300 leones per panful. That’s about 30 U.S. cents, to be split by everyone along the chain. An industrious rock crusher can fill about ten pans per week, but whether anyone buys that much is out of his control. All along the road from Freetown, we saw many piles of gravel for sale.

  We also saw many new homes being constructed, some along the very paths the rock breakers used to bring the stones down the mountain. To Mansaray, they were monstrosities. He’d tried to convince some of the future homeowners—most of whom were wealthy businessmen, he said—to donate money to his school so that tiny children didn’t have to produce the raw material for their homes through the sort of hard labor usually reserved for prisoners, but he’d never had much success.

  Of course, Sierra Leone has laws prohibiting child labor, and the country’s Family Services Unit, which is charged with enforcing it, has an office less than two miles from the quarry. But it didn’t surprise me to learn from Mansaray that officers would investigate his complaints only if he paid a “fee” for their transportation to look into it. He quickly gave up on help from the government and decided simply to rescue the children himself.28 He keeps a copy of the child labor law in his pocket to read to skeptical parents.

  The school itself, situated across the road from the hills where the children live, is easy to overlook if you aren’t paying attention. It’s nothing more than two small tentlike structures made of tarpaulins stretched around a frame of tree limbs with a zinc panel on top. The floors are dirt.

  About 250 children are enrolled in the Borbor Pain Charity School of Hope, “Borbor Pain” meaning “suffering children.” On the day we visited, school was already out for the older children, and it was the last day of instruction for the seventy or so smaller kids who greeted us with rehearsed songs reserved for special visitors. Mansaray said the school takes a break from classes during the month of August, which is the rainiest month of the rainy season and usually proves too miserable for either teaching or learning. Mansaray needed the break himself so he could work full-time to solve an immediate funding crisis—two of his four teachers were threatening to quit because of overdue wages.

  While the children took turns reciting the alphabet, Mansaray recited a long list of needs. Not only was there no money to pay his teachers, who were owed the equivalent of about $150, but there was none for notebooks, pencils, report cards, or chalk. The school needed new desks and chairs; as it was, the children sat on driftwood benches and wrote at crudely constructed tables, and there weren’t enough of either for all the students. Eventually, he wanted to offer them lunch, but with all of the school’s more pressing needs, it just wasn’t in the cards yet. When he wasn’t looking for new children to bring down from the mountain in hope for a better future, he was in Freetown chasing money by dropping in on businesses, emailing practically everyone he’d ever met who could send $50 through Western Union, or not infrequently, simply appealing to strangers. In such a corrupt country, he tried to encourage trust by promising to share receipts with donors down to the penny, so that they would know where their money was spent. That meant extra time at painfully slow computers at Internet cafés, scanning documents and emailing them around the world, but he was determined to prove that there were still people in Sierra Leone who could be trusted to put donated money to the uses for which they were meant.

  In spite of the school’s needs, he emphasized repeatedly that the one group he wouldn’t harass for money in his effort to keep the school running were the students’ parents.

  “Everything is free for the children,” he said. “Everything.”

  Before the war, Mansaray lived in Freetown and held a variety of odd jobs, from ditch digger to cell phone salesman. When fighting began, he joined the cyclonic movement of refugees who fled from place to place hoping to find a safe haven from the RUF’s guns and blades. He survived a brief capture by RUF soldiers in Kono and eventually made his way back to Freetown. He was in the city during Operation No Living Thing, an attack so brutal that he decided it was time to flee the country. He spent years living in refugee camps in Guinea.

  Mansaray and his school form but one example of people in this small community who have stopped waiting for the government to improve their lives. Alfred George, who worked for 12 years with the Environmental Foundation for Africa but who is now unemployed, uses his experience with ecological issues to try to end the gravel mining. It may be hard to imagine community members caring about environmental degradation from clear-cutting trees when there’s no telling where the next meal will come from, but there are tangible reasons to address it. Digging boulders out of the hillsides has resulted in an infestation of snails on the flatlands; with their natural ecosystem disturbed, the snails’ eggs wash downhill during the rainy season. Snails destroy crops. In addition, to help prevent large-scale deforestation, George promotes what he calls an eco-stove; made of clay, it requires fewer pieces of coal or firewood to heat water than a typical campfire.

  And a woman named Abbey Kamara who lives next to the school does her part as well. She and her husband, Ibrahim, adopted a two-month-old baby boy when his mother, who was single and had no other known relatives, died of a throat infection while breaking stones across the road. His twin sister fell ill and died soon after. The couple already has three small children, but Ibrahim told me that there had never been any question that they would adopt the baby. Like Mansaray, he said God told him it was the right thing to do.

  After my visit to the school, I saw Mansaray frequently in Freetown, meeting him occasionally for coffee or lunch, but just as often by happenstance, as he was hustling to or from funding meetings or school suppliers. I saw him on my last day in town, as he was coming out of a copy center with a fresh batch of report cards for the new semester. He’d just finished studiously blacking out the line on the front where other headmasters would fill in the fee for attending school. As he did every time we met, Mansaray reminded me that Borbor Pain was free, and so its report cards didn’t need that line.

  Mansaray provided me with the thread of hope I had been looking for. In a country rich in precious stones, it’s inexcusable that children have to mine common ones in order to survive, but here was someone who had learned the lessons of the past and was trying hard not to repeat them, at least in the lives of some.

  “All this hardship that I went through with the war prompted me, and the word of God prompted me, to establish this kind of thing because I don’t want children to go in pain,” he said. “I think education is the key because the children are the future of Sierra Leone.

  “If you let these children go down astray, then the country is going down astray.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER of 2001, I was stranded in Kabala, in northern Sierra Leone, one of those inevitabilities that come with the territory when the UN is your chauffeur. To this day, I don’t know what the delay was, but for several hours I dozed fitfully in the ovenlike cargo bay of an Mi-8 helicopter, Flight 096, with three Ukrainian pilots and a Nepalese UN administrator. The Ukrainians stripped to their plaid boxers to battle the heat, which came in through the open passenger door and the open cargo doors under the tail boom with each hot breath of wind. The spectacle of three very pale, very flabby me
n wandering around a helicopter nearly naked was apparently the social and entertainment event of the year in Kabala, for there was soon a perimeter of gawkers ringing the sports field where we were parked. SLA soldiers kept them far from the chopper, though, and we killed time by giving one another vocabulary lessons in our native tongues.

  One of the copilots, a man named Sergei, only knew one set of English phrases, a memorized mantra that he recited haltingly and painfully before each flight: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard flight UN zero-nine-six flying from the Mammy Yoko to Mile 91, Magburaka and Kabala. Flight time to Mile 91, approximately 40 minutes. This Mi-8 aircraft is equipped with emergency exits here, here, and here and this is a nonsmoking flight. We hope you enjoy your flight.”

  We mostly taught one another crude terms and profanity and boasted about our home countries’ military might and the comparative beauty of each country’s female citizens, but it was an effective way to kill time. By coincidence, these men had flown me around Sierra Leone more often than any others and it’s not a stretch to say that we finally became friends while sitting there in Kabala that day, sweating nonstop and waiting for passengers who were apparently important enough to delay the flight. I wrote down their names when I left the chopper back at the Mammy Yoko Hotel and promised to send a postcard from Colorado.

  On November 7, 2001, an Mi-8, Flight 103, crashed within a minute of takeoff from the Mammy Yoko. It was bound for nearby Lungi Airport, but plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near the lighthouse marking the western edge of Man of War Bay. All seven people on board died, including all three of my Ukrainian friends. The other victims included another Ukrainian copilot, two Zambian soldiers, and a civilian from Bulgaria working with UNAMSIL.