Mutilated African war victims helped by Baltimore Catholic school

Fatu Koroma was only 7 years old when a band of rebels stormed her village in Sierra Leone, grabbed her and hacked off half her right arm with one cruel swipe of a machete.

After mutilating the defenseless girl, the rebels pointed to her amputated limb and mocked her.

“They told me to take my arm to the president,” Fatu, now 11, recalled. “The president was saying how important it was to vote. They’re bad people. They’re real bad people.”

But for every bad person there is in the world, there are many more good people, Fatu said.

She should know.

With the help of $3,000 in pennies collected by the students of Sts. James and John Elementary School in East Baltimore, Fatu was able to fly from her West African home to New York, where she and seven other maimed individuals from Sierra Leone received prosthetic limbs last September from Dr. Matthew Mirones, president of a prosthetics manufacturing company in New York.

Fatu and two other beneficiaries, Mohamed Conteh, 5, and Damba Koroma, 9, visited Sts. James and John Nov. 27 to thank the students for their generosity. The East Baltimore school is in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Maryland.

“We appreciate what you have done and we want you to know we love you,” said Damba, whose left arm was cut off during one of the rebel attacks. “May God bless you.”

During the visit, Mohamed was all smiles as the bashful little boy bounded through the aisles of students with the help of his artificial leg. Two years ago when rebels severed his limb below the knee, they had threatened to take his hand as well.

“I begged them not to,” whispered Mohamed during an interview with The Catholic Review, Baltimore’s archdiocesan newspaper. “They cut off my leg and left me alone.”

These days, Mohamed has dreams of becoming a doctor. Damba wants to be a minister, and Fatu wants to help the people of her homeland. All three now attend Our Lady Help of Christians School in New York.

Etta Toure, project coordinator for the nonprofit Friends of Sierra Leone, told the Sts. James and John students they have been an inspiration. “We prayed hard to get help from the U.S. and you were the first to give us money,” Toure said.

Friends of Sierra Leone estimates that 75,000 unarmed civilians have been killed and 20,000 mutilated during Sierra Leone’s 11-year-old civil war.

Daphne Sawyerr-Dunn of Friends of Sierra Leone, said the presence of British troops has helped bring an end to most violence in recent months. But there remains a struggle for control of the country’s diamonds, she said.

The penny project at Sts. James and John was started three years ago as a Lenten outreach by Mary Ellen Long, a teacher and former member of the Peace Corps. Last year, several students from the school attended a congressional committee hearing in Washington the civil war in Sierra Leone.

The school was awarded a $500 prize from the Maryland Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals in November in honor of its outreach to war victims. The award was added to the penny campaign.

“It’s helped our students see that there’s a bigger world than East Baltimore,” said LaUanah King-Cassell, principal of the 350-student school that serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grades. “It’s amazing. With pennies, they were able to help someone thousands of miles away.”

Email George Matysek at gmatysek@CatholicReview.org

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Editor’s Note: For more information on Friends of Sierra Leone, write to the organization at P.O. Box 15875, Washington, DC 20003-0875.

Copyright © 2001 Catholic Review Media

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