Surrey North Delta Leader
November 13, 2008 1:00 PM
Updated: November 14, 2008 9:49 AM
The strength to forgive
By Sheila Reynolds
Mariatu Kamara had what she describes as the best childhood anyone could ask for.
She lived in a small West African village of about 200 people where daily life consisted of farming, fetching water from the river and cooking. She did not attend school, but it was the only life she knew and the little girl was immeasurably happy.
At 12, however, she started sensing change. The adults in her village were growing uneasy.
Kamara had heard talk of rebel forces, but didn’t know what they were. And she saw people from other villages moving into her village, but did not understand why.
“On some nights, we would hear sounds of gunshots in the distance. The sounds grew louder every day.”
Her village eventually moved, and she and her people spent much time hiding in the bushes.
Kamara knew little about war. Experience became her worst teacher.
Civil war had been a reality in Sierra Leone since 1991, when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) began vying for control over the poverty-stricken country’s diamond industry.
The RUF terrorized villages, demonstrating their brutality by torturing, mutilating or killing civilians, and often recruiting young boys to fight on their behalf.
On the night Kamara’s life changed forever, she saw groups of men and boys – some younger than her – with machetes and guns. While the young girl recognized a machete, she hadn’t seen a gun before that night.
“Nothing could prepare me for what would follow that fateful day,” the 22-year-old told a gymnasium of rapt teens and teachers at Fraser Valley Christian High School on Wednesday afternoon.
She saw fellow-villagers forced into houses and burned to death. She saw a pregnant woman have her belly ripped open, her baby killed moments before she suffered the same fate.
Kamara and her three cousins were captured.
“Some boys forced me down and cut off my hands.
“I wish it was a dream from which I would wake up. But 10 years later, I’m still wishing. Ten years later, I still don’t have my hands.”
She fell unconscious and wandered into the bush the next day looking for help.
“I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, but my will was strong.”
Kamara is currently promoting her book, The Bite of the Mango, co-written by journalist Susan McClelland. The book’s title makes reference to a man she met the night after she lost her hands, who offered her the fruit by holding it to her mouth. But her abiding spirit prevailed and she insisted upon taking the mango, holding it by herself with her cloth-wrapped stumps.
Kamara now lives in Canada and attends college in Toronto. While her talk at Fraser Valley Christian was brief, her book details her life’s journey – including a pregnancy that resulted from a rape, the subsequent death of the baby, her years living in a refugee camp and her eventual move to Canada.
Kamara was recently named as a UNICEF Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict and is scheduled for an upcoming North American speaking tour.
She has forgiven her attackers. They were from her country and also suffered, she says. In fact, the introduction in her book is by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone who wrote his own book, A Long Way Home.
Her story is just one among many, Kamara says, one she’s told over and over and over again
.
But, she admits, it’s a story she has yet to understand.