Blood Diamonds (36 page)

More than ever, the time-warp sensation was overpowering. Only, instead of feeling as though I'd been transported back to when I was here last, at the end of the war, I felt as if I'd gone even further and was visiting the country at the
beginning
of the war. Sierra Leone of 1991 must have been a lot like Sierra Leone of 2011. It has all the ingredients: a weak central government riven with corruption, greed-blinded chiefs in the provinces selling out their own people for cash, resource industries run with no transparency or accountability, and a citizenry yet again disenfranchised and starting to feel its resentment rise. The country I visited in 2011 seems exactly like the country described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “Endemic greed, corruption and nepotism . . . deprived the nation of
its dignity and reduced most people to a state of poverty.” All that's lacking is a warlord to spark the flames, and West Africa has never been short of those.

I felt the need to measure my impression against a knowledgeable third party, afraid that having been away for so long was giving me a jaundiced view of things. Was I expecting too much in too little time? I called Michael Owen, the U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, who assured me that I was seeing things accurately. In fact, he had trouble settling on which of Sierra Leone's problems poses the most significant threat to its future. He was particularly concerned about youth unemployment in combination with the conditions in Kono and Kailahaun Districts. In fact, Kailahaun is arguably worse than Kono; Owen said there are no doctors in the district, none of the roads have been paved since the end of the war, and the economy is “moribund.”

“The conditions there are indeed terrible,” he said. “They have not improved much since the end of the war. The infrastructure is bad, the schools are bad, health care is bad, doctors are not there, doctors don't show up, teachers don't show up, they have a lot of unemployed youth. . . . The situation in both districts is really very, very bad, and I don't see frankly much sign of improvement in the near term.”

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 prospects 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.