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THE NATION, SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 2012
Sad, bloody lives of Liberia's war orphans, child soldiers and other vulnerable kids T
HE sun still rises daily with a dark pall; in the world of Salimotu Jalon. The successive widow, divorcee and single mother of eight still rises to the same tragedies every day: her heart still pounds like a Konga drum; sometimes, it seizes. Tadiatu, her first daughter, is still jobless; the 20-year-old still deserts the house to return ravaged and scarcely remunerated every day. Five of her eight kids: Kadatu, 3, Kadatu (Jnr) 2, Marca, 6, Elizabeth, 4 and J-Girl, 4, have never been to school. Ishmael, 14, dropped out in Third Grade and Alphonso, 19, dropped out in fourth grade. There are a whole lot of things the Jalon kids will never know and do. They will never know of their mother’s heart condition, something she struggles to dismiss as “just a bad cough.” Jalon’s children will never see their fathers. The eight kids from three fathers are content just to know that two of their fathers were hacked to death in a brutal civil war while the third one suddenly disappeared into thin air. Save Tadiatu and Alphonso grew up through the bloodbath, the six others grow through a different kind of pain every hour. Although their persistent cry is of hunger, a visit to their abode in Paynesville, in the Red light district of Monrovia, Liberia, portended an unpardonable grotesqueness of sort. Far from a huddle of thrash, dried droppings and oxidized pans, J-girl slept peaceably on the cold floor. Few metres from where she snored, from a very bare room to be precise, a pitiful moan wafted chillingly across the house. Inside, J-Girl’s twin, Elizabeth, lay sprawled clutching at her ribs, her misery so clearly defined and accentuated by the maniacal pulse in her wrists, the pallor of her face and the anguish that her young heart struggled to make sense of. “She got pneumonia. She been having it for two weeks and I ain’t got (sic) money to take care of her,” revealed Jalon staring at her kid despondently from the doorway. The acceptance in her face intensified the tragic essence of her disclosure, like a dancing parody of fate on grace. “I pray she doesn’t die. She says she wants to eat but I ain’t got food to give her. The little she gets, she cannot eat. Now she too(sic) sick to eat,” lamented Jalon in a cadence that betrayed a truth past the pain declared. It restated facts that the 45-year-old would like to forget; like her hopelessness as a widow and single parent. It evoked memories of the bloody decade when the rampaging LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Development) army stormed Nimba County laying her first husband, childhood friend and parents to waste with the rest of Tapa Town. It stirred the blood within her veins as she reluctantly recalled the authoritative pellets, bloody bayonets, and smoking cartridges as they hurtled through the air from everywhere and nowhere, to hack down her second husband and other defenceless folks in gleaming mercilessness. With the feral nuance of a grieving lioness, one trying desperately to detach itself from the torment of an insatiable hunger spasm, Jalon bemoaned her loss in the heat of the protracted civil war and bloodbath perpetrated by government forces and rebel groups of the LURD army, Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) and other renegade militias. At the end, she lost 16 people, including three husbands, her aged parents and 12 siblings. “They come to our house very early in the morning. Me and ma were cooking. They drag papy (father) out and tell him to get naked. Then they shoot him in the dick (penis). They say he is government spy. He say he ain’t but they didn’t listen. They force my brother to sleep with ma. Then they kill them both. Then seven of them hit me in the face, hold me to
•The Jalon kids swarm on their mother, each seeking a pinch of a very late and unsatisfiable lunch
•The ‘vulnerable’ divide: Grace, an Ivorian refugee child receives a tearful consolation from her mother on arrival at the refugee camp in Bahn County. Olatunji OLOLADE, Assistant Editor the ground and begin to rape me. They say I be bitch traitor,” recollected Jalon. It’s a miracle that she survived. But if she had her way, Jalon would rather die. According to her, death would be preferable to waking up every morning to the familiar despair of kids she can neither feed nor send to school. “If I were dead now, I know God will take care of them. See, I am alive and I can do nothing. I get to do nothing. Don’t have money for food. Don’t have $10 for rent and my baby is so sick. I don’t want her to die. She too scared to die,” cried Jalon. “No she won’t ma. She won’t. Somebody will come help us,” said Alphonso, de facto man of the house. The 19-year-old does the little he can. “I am a bike rider, I am also a contractor and I wash cars but I don’t get enough to support my ma. I don’t have money for Lizzy (Elizabeth’s medical fees). She feeling pain. The children are hungry, I like to help but I got no job,” he lamented. The Jalons’ plight without doubt, offers a vivid portrayal of the fate of many families in post-civil war Liberia. It portrays the misery casting their touted epoch and dawn of hope in the shadows of a very gory and repugnant past. “It’s the children I fear for most. Most of them are growing up in an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust. Most parents can’t feed their children. They can’t clothe them and educate them, and as a result they dump them in orphanages around the country. The risk on the kids are quite enormous,” said Lucia BletahBrown, a teacher and aid worker. The orphan At least, Jalon’s kids have still got her; unlike Olleh. Olleh lives at the mercy of neighbours and any Good Samaritan kind enough to accord
•Girl-interrupted: Many Liberian orphans are forced into child labour to survive
her a passing glance. Rummaging through the pots and pans in her grandmother’s kitchen, the four-year-old cut a dramatic picture of desolation and neglect. Her cotton frock was a jumble of twists and loose threads. Now badly worn, it had faded from factory-green to reddish-black of the fireside. Fungal spores spread through her temple and across it, mottling her scalp, earlobes and cheeks with a pallid sheen. Driven by lust to satisfy her hunger pangs, Olleh tore her Grandma Beatrice’s kitchen apart, upsetting the grate and dirty utensils from a previous meal. It didn’t seem like she had had a decent meal in a long while though. “Last night, I gave her left over bread and vegetable rice because she been crying and her grandma had nothing to give her,” said Bimso Clark, her grandma’s landlord. Although Grandma Beatrice refused to talk, Clark narrated how the 67-year-old and her orphaned granddaughter ended up as her tenants. According to her, she took pity upon them and offered them one of her tiny rooms at $8 per month even though she collected $10 from her other tenants. “Me being playing Good Samaritan because me and Beatrice come a long way. We from the same county. We grow up together in Lofa County. But now she making me pay. She can’t even pay rent. She’s been owing me for seven months. That ain’t fair. Can’t throw her out…that poor orphan child (Olleh) been making me chill,” said Clark. As you read, Olleh’s fate depends upon Clark’s continued magnanimity or otherwise. Worst case scenario is: they could be thrown out on to the streets until her granny decides to do what everyone else does and dump her in the nearest orphanage. The refugee
But while Olleh enjoys the luxury of a magnanimous landlady, Mieba, 5, enjoys no such benefit. The orphan was snuck out of Sinfra, Côte d’Ivoire by neighbours after her mother died giving birth to her sister as they fled their war-torn nation few months ago. A fleeing Ivorian couple rescued her from the jaws of death after rebel militia fighting on a campaign against ousted Ivorian President, Laurent Gbagbo, slaughtered her mother while she nursed Mieba’s three-month old sister. “She would have been killed too. The poor girl slept through the decapitation of her mother and sister. They thought everyone in their house was dead until some fleeing neighbours, a newly-wed couple, found her choking on her own sobs behind what used to be her father’s barn. She was brought here covered in her mother’s blood,” revealed an aged refugee and grandma who simply described herself as Martha. Nobody knows the whereabouts of Mieba’s father till date. Consequently, Mieba faces an uncertain future alongside other orphaned kids at the UNHCR refugee camp for Ivorians in Bahn County. The world of the youngster hardly depicts that sacred innocence continuously touted as the essence of childhood. Liberia’s 14 years of war (1989 – 2003) no doubt had devastating effects on the social fabric of the nation. Mass displacements, killings and the recruitment of children and adults by warring parties destroyed the most basic social unit: the family. During the course of mass displacements, many children lost track of their parents or watched them killed before their very eyes. Child soldier One such victim was David a.k.a Detprofet (Death prophet). Now called Ishmael. The 15-