Sierra Leone on the Mend

Story by Geoff Oliver Bugbee and Sherri Nelson
Photography by Geoff Oliver Bugbee

View a photo slideshow of this story

Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war, fought mostly over the country’s rich natural mineral resources, plunged the small West African country into destitution.

Isata Kanu, 35, with her 3-year-old Mariatu Conteh, tends the crops of a gardening collective in western Sierra Leone. Kanu lost her mother, sister and husband in the war.

Although the country is best known for its diamonds, many Sierra Leoneans will tell you that the most valuable resource they lost in the war was their livestock. In April 2008, Heifer International opened a country office in Freetown. Together with the people of Sierra Leone, Heifer is working to develop livestock and agriculture projects, helping the country heal from its crises and build self-sustaining communities.

Western Rural District, Sierra Leone—Under a blistering sun, Isata Kanu tends to the crops growing in a women’s gardening collective, her young daughter, Mariatu, on her back. Sierra Leone’s civil war was especially cruel to Kanu: Her husband was abducted, her mother and sister killed. Her livestock was slaughtered and eaten, her home and garden destroyed.

“Before the war,” she begins, “my husband and I had goats, but then the rebels came, ate all the livestock and ravaged everything that we had in the village. That is when my husband was taken. I cannot say whether he was killed or not, but it has been eight years since he disappeared without a trace,” she says. “I lost my man while I was pregnant with my child.”

After her house was burned to the ground, Kanu could not afford to rebuild it; she and her six children have lived with friends ever since. For four years, she has depended on the meager harvests from a communal plot, which she farms with a women’s cooperative called Women’s Empowerment for Self-Development Association (WESDA) at Crossing Village. It is hardly enough, she says, but it has to do.

“This garden is all that we have, and with the little that we take from it, we feed our family.”

Widows make up the majority of participants in WESDA at Crossing Village, a grassroots organization that helps struggling women earn income and feed their families. The association’s coordinator, Fatmata Bah, says the war left many women with no way to rebuild their homes or make a living.

“As women, we are really struggling because since the war ended many of us are without husbands, and we have to cope with our children alone,” Bah says. “Our houses have been destroyed, and we are without means and cannot rebuild them. There is also the problem of not having men to help us build the structures. So, for these women who share this history, we decided to come together and engage ourselves collectively in agriculture so that we can provide nourishment for our children.”

Bah says she hopes that by working together, the widows and other women in the community can find a way to become self-sufficient.

“Everything that we grow and produce comes from our own work, our own resources. We are planting potatoes. We are planting okra. We are planting lots of other things like maize. The proceeds we gain from this goes to pay for the school fees for our children, feeding them, and all the rest. Amongst us, we pool all the resources.”

Sierra Leone on the Mend

The Need for Livestock Projects
Sierra Leone ranks last on the 2007/2008 United Nations Human Development Index, a composite measure of three dimensions of human development: living a long and healthy life, being educated and having a decent standard of living. Francis Sankoh, the acting director general with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security, says the country is transitioning from emergency phases of food relief to development work. He encourages nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to help establish sustainable agriculture systems. Most Sierra Leoneans engage in subsistence farming, and agriculture accounts for 45 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Heifer Sierra Leone will soon implement one of its pilot livestock and agriculture projects in the Western Rural District with the Crossing Village gardening collective. The location is close to Heifer’s office in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, which will make project visits and training easier to manage.

Marie Kabba, 52, a widow and member of the Kamuyu group in Port Loko, surveys a row of Chinese beans that climb trellised bamboo.

Travel can be difficult and sometimes impossible, as much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed in the war, and the long rainy season often leaves roads impassable. But because the Western Rural District is so close to Freetown, project participants will find a close-by, ready market for their goods.

During the war, thousands of people migrated to Freetown in hopes of finding work and a safe place to live, but the search was often futile. Some returned home after the war, but many ended up settling in camps just outside the capital city—culminating in large pockets of poverty. Rashid Sesay, Heifer Sierra Leone’s country director, says the organization’s assistance is desperately needed here because of the high unemployment and lack of nonprofit aid groups working in the area.

Director General Sankoh agrees. “Heifer International has a place in this country. It has a role. Because of all of the local and international nongovernmental organizations, Heifer is the only one that specializes in livestock—and that is an area that has very high potential that has not been fully explored in the past. Livestock are kept throughout the country. We now need a specialized agency to capitalize on this vacuum.”

Sankoh says he hopes Heifer Sierra Leone will provide farmers with animals and training in basic veterinary care, proper feeding and husbandry. “Cattle are kept throughout the north and northeastern part of the country. Sheep and goats are kept throughout the country. Poultry are kept throughout the country. But something needs to be done to improve, to increase returns on the rearing of those animals,” he says.

Sierra Leone on the Mend

Rebuilding Lives
The Southern Agro-Industrial Development Association Center (SAIDAC) teaches farmers throughout Sierra Leone the skills needed to go beyond subsistence farming and begin small businesses. Franklin Anthony, the program’s head coordinator, says animal programs are the fastest way for small farmers to make a living. Anthony worked with Heifer before the war in a livestock program administered through the Methodist Church of Sierra Leone. The work stopped because of the war. Anthony said he believes Heifer will fill a great void in the country’s nonprofit landscape by providing livestock and training.

School enrollment, particularly for girls, is increasing in Sierra Leone thanks to social service and food programs to assist the poor, according to the Sierra Leone Development Report 2007/2008.

“The food situation in Sierra Leone has been dire. During the war, the first people who were attacked were those with chickens or other animals. People were moving with just a bundle of clothing and no food to eat. Malnutrition was rampant,” he says. “If someone put up a fight for their land or their property, they risked being killed. When people are desperate, nobody is safe.”

Anthony says he thinks Sierra Leoneans are ready to move past the war and rebuild their lives. “People are smarter now. They want to settle and they see the need to build on what they have. They want to take responsibility for their lives and their own development. Not only that, as a result of this war, people are more tolerant. They are willing to change now. The animosity from the war and the political factions has reduced immensely. There’s a lot of hope. People are ready to accept one another based on the shared difficulties of their horrific past.”

Isata Kanu, the widowed mother of six, is certainly ready to rebuild her life. She’s eager to receive training and prepare to receive her Heifer animals. “If I am given the opportunity to have crops and raise some livestock of my own, I think I will be able to gain some income and will be able to improve my household nutrition,” she says. “I will also be able to pay for my children’s school fees. Maybe with these extra crops and some milk to sell, I will get some shoes to wear because as you can see, I don’t wear any now.”

Sierra Leone on the Mend

Port Loko District
Traffic slows to a bumper-to-bumper crawl along Spur Road in Freetown, the gateway that winds over a steep ridge at Regent village and heads into the Northern Province of Sierra Leone. About 40 miles north of Freetown, the highway hits the saddle of a steep mountain pass known as Okra Hill, just before the town of Masiaka. The passageway is the only way to reach the north, and the sheer altitude slows many vehicles. During the height of the war, it was here at this ominous stretch of road that a notorious renegade militia called the West Side Boys took hostages and committed horrific crimes: robbery, rape and carjackings. Today, the road shows no trace of its treacherous past.

The road leads to Port Loko Township, the location of another future Heifer project. Here, a cadre of women walk along a pathway leading to their collective garden plot of sweet potatoes, ginger, chilies and rice. A row of lush green Chinese beans climb trellised bamboo poles lined up beside a long slab of slotted concrete that used to function as a latrine for hundreds of internally displaced people.

These women farmers are members of Kamuyu Women’s Development Organization. Kamuyu means perseverance in Temne, one of the native languages in Sierra Leone (English is the official language). The organization works with 33 communities, and its members learn trade and vocational skills such as soap making, sewing, dressmaking and typing. This group existed before the civil war, but once the war began, operations were interrupted after several of the girls were kidnapped. Seven were returned, but one girl was killed.

“There were over 900 people in the camp here. Most of them dispersed after the war and returned back to their own villages, but a few of them stayed,” says Kadiatu Koroma, a group leader and member of the Kamuyu Women’s Development Organization.

What used to be a refugee camp is now a vibrant parcel of arable land. On the hillside next to a field of young maize, Mariama Fatorma, 48,

Warra Kargbo, 15, Ramatu Kargbo's granddaughter, prepares cassava sauce near her grandmother's patch of Chinese yams, pumpkins and corn. The family likely will become a Heifer beneficiary as part of the Port Loko project.

rubs her hands together as she talks about her painful past. “I had three children during that time [the civil war], and they all died. My father perished along with my uncle and aunt,” she says. “All of my children died from a sickness in 1996. They had fever, and there was very little food. No medical care was available around here at that time. My father was killed by gunshots in 1993.”

Fatorma’s traumatic personal experiences are not uncommon among the Kamuyu collective. Many of the women express deep gratitude to the leader of the Kamuyu organization, Patricia Sankoi. A former teacher and supervisor of schools, Sankoi now focuses her efforts on development work, especially women’s issues.

“I was in different places during the war but I made it here by foot, to Port Loko,” Fatorma says. “And when the war was over, I asked Kamuyu and Madame Patricia to take me in like her child. It is very nice to live here now. During the war, I was struggling with my family. I was suffering.”

Fatorma isn’t the only person whose life has changed because of Sankoi’s work. She is a staunch advocate for the women in Port Loko and throughout Sierra Leone, and hundreds have benefited from her efforts. “We are committed to gender balance, so that women work with the blessing of their husbands,” Sankoi says. “The men may join us, but women are the only ones allowed to have the leadership roles.”

Sankoi says all the communities she works with now concentrate on agriculture. “Because of this food crisis, one thing we are heavily doing now is farming, putting a premium on producing what we can eat. They need to concentrate on feeding their families— it is most important right now.”

Rashid Sesay looks forward to Heifer Sierra Leone’s future partnership with the group that Sankoi leads.

“The Kamuyu Women’s Development Organization is one of those vibrant women’s groups that has been working for quite some time now,” Sesay explains. “Some of them have lost their husbands during the war, so this group is a way of coming together to help one another. They decided to form this organization. And Heifer, as an organization that seeks to improve livelihood conditions in this district, we decided to see what they were doing and see how best to come in to assist them.”

Sankoi says she’s optimistic about the group’s success so far, and she believes that Heifer will be the handup to self-reliance these dedicated women need.

“If Heifer can put the mechanism in place, it will be successful because we have seen in other areas, when goats or sheep or any other animal are supplied to the community, things change.”

“It will take some time,” she cautions. “The waiting will be hard. Some will see others with animals and will be impatient for theirs. Change is very slow. But we have seen poverty decline in the recent years since the war—even more than what we were expecting.”

See additional photos and learn more about the Western Rural District, Port Loko District and Tongo Fields, a diamond-mining community, at www.heifer.org/worldark , where you can find out how you can help.

Photojournalist Geoff Oliver Bugbee has focused on global health, basic human needs and social-justice issues for 14 years. In 2007, he photographed stories in more than 15 countries including Syria, Egypt, Kosovo, Rwanda and Tanzania. Learn more about Geoff’s work at www.geoffbugbee.com.