Marketplace Features

"Touching Down in Sierra Leone..." Reporter Amy Costello's "Reporter's Notebook," Sierra Leone

" My adventure in Sierra Leone begins before I even touch down. After arriving at Lungi airport, I’m told I’ll have to take a helicopter to get into the capital, Freetown. I walk out on to the tarmac, and see a bright yellow Russian-made chopper in front of me. I can’t tell how old it is, but I’m not convinced that it would pass muster with the Federal Aviation Administration back home. With few other choices in sight, I climb aboard.

After 15 minutes, we touch down at the Freetown Heliport. As we wait for our luggage, a man begins to yell. He is wearing impossibly large sneakers and a goofy grin. His huge eyeglasses are missing a lens. Despite the sweltering afternoon heat, the raging man’s got a knit cap on his head and a puffed-up life jacket strapped tightly around his chest. He perspires as he continues to shout. A woman selling soda turns off her boombox, which causes more people to begin staring at the man.

Turns out, this is the heliport’s own clown! He comes here each afternoon to entertain waiting passengers and he’s actually yelling instructions about the safety devices aboard the helicopter.

This warm, comical reception that greets arriving visitors to Sierra Leone is misleading. The country is just emerging from a ten-year civil war and smiles are few. As I get caught up in the clown’s performance, watching his crazy antics, I have no idea that I’ll hardly hear anyone laugh again during my stay in Freetown.

Reminders of the war are all over the city. Some of the scars are impossible to miss. Imposing buildings have been blown to pieces. Today, their charred remains are colossal-size skeletons still haunting the streets. And the wounded, living legacies of the conflict are walking the streets of Freetown.

During the war, soldiers engaged in a bloody campaign to cut off the limbs of civilians; many of the victims died from their wounds but thousands survive. Every now and then you see men with no hands or a woman in a wheelchair without legs. During a visit to a camp for war wounded, I met a woman who was missing part of her shoulder; she explained that rebels attempted to hack off her arm without success. I would discover that child soldiers were frequently the perpetrators of these vicious attacks.

During my visit to Sierra Leone, I listened intently and often with horror, as men, and women; girls and boys; soldiers and civilians, recounted their horrific experiences in war. It was the most emotionally difficult reporting I’ve done during my two years covering stories around Africa. How do you respond when a mother describes the night she watched rebels murder her two children with knives? What is the follow-up question after she describes how soldiers then put her infant in a pestle and ordered her to beat the baby with a mortar? At those moments, I felt the only appropriate response was to be silent for a while, allowing us both to absorb the horror of what she described.

I enlarged some of my photographs of the child soldiers and put them in frames. I walk by those pictures every day as I go about my mundane household tasks. As the weeks pass, I find I’m constantly drawn back to their eyes. At first, they seem so vacant and lifeless. But sometimes as I stand there, looking at these children, abducted during a war that raged through the 1990s, their eyes no longer look vacant at all. The stares of these children, I’ve come to realize, are downright penetrating, accusatory even. You were late, they’re saying to me. Several years too late and our story has already been written. "