|
|
A Special International Report
Prepared by
The Washington Times
Advertising Department - Published on September 30, 1999
[Home Page]
|
|||||
|
Sponsors (1) Federal Ministry of Finance
|
 |
A survivor finds sanctuary
Her mother had just returned home from the market. She and her brother were busily helping put away the groceries when a boy soldier stormed into the house. “He could not have been more than 14,” she said. “He had an AK47 assault rifle.”
When he opened fire Channelle, then 19, ran upstairs to her father’s study to hide. From behind a bookcase she heard another soldier searching the room. When he found no one, he and his counterparts left. It was six hours before she heard another person searching the house. This time though, it was the familiar voice of a man employed by her father. “When I heard his voice I had to make sure he was not one of them. When finally I came out, he looked as though he had seen a ghost and said ‘Channelle let’s go’. I wanted to turn and look at my mother’s body and he said ‘don’t, don’t, don’t’ and shoved me out the door.”
When they stepped out, they joined the throngs of people fleeing Channelle’s wealthy neighborhood in Monrovia. “We just started trekking into the bush,” she explained.
Her mother and brother would remain unburied, and it would be two years before she returned home. But her father would never have the opportunity to go back: Channelle learned when she was on the road that he had been shot in the street two days after she fled. Killed for being a wealthy man.
For four months Channelle walked, wearing only the clothes she had on her back that day. Moving along through villages, sleeping beneath trees, in school yards, in barns, “anywhere you feel safe and you get tired, you just lie down and start sleeping.” The main thing, she explained, was just to keep moving. “You don’t want to be caught in the shooting – to be alone – because as a woman you stand the risk of being raped or kidnapped, and turned into a slave. Then you do the washing, you do the cooking, and, of course, whatever the soldiers feel you should be doing for them.”
In the months that passed Channelle would see many bursts of fighting and many dead bodies strewn along her path. She would deliver a baby in the bush with no water, no bandages and no scissors, forced to cut its umbilical cord with her nails. For food, she survived on lizards, flowers, wild fruits and rice boiled in cement pans – whatever it took to survive.
“I have been a cook, a midwife, a sister, a mother to children when I didn’t even know whose they were. You do anything to keep your sanity. You have to make sure your brain is working all the time. You cannot afford to let go and allow the whole situation to overwhelm you.”
Though she began her trek with some 150 people, when she arrived at the Ivory Coast border they were less than 25. The others had been killed or died of exhaustion and starvation along the way. Others still had joined relatives in the villages they passed through or stopped to nurse dying loved ones who could no longer go on. The man who had taken her away that first day was killed by shrapnel from an explosion while she stood just yards away. “It’s a terrible situation when it is someone you know and the person thinks you can help and you cannot. There is a certain helplessness that is really painful. You want to help but you can’t. You have to help yourself.”
She returned to Liberia some two years later only to find her house. It was all but destroyed. “It was just a skeleton,” she explains, “The roof- there was nothing. Everything stolen and bombed with bullet holes in the walls.” She laughs when she remembers that the only thing left intact were the flower pots. “I remember a particular flower pot and we had a flower in there that would not grow. When I saw it blooming I could not help but smile and say ‘Oh, you finally decided to grow!’”
Searching for an opportunity to rebuild her life, Channelle turned to Nigeria. During the war she had had contact with Nigerian ECOMOG soldiers and found them to be professional and helpful. When she made friends with a girl who had been to Nigeria she learned more about the people and the country. “She said the people were very hospitable people, very laid back about strangers. And when I came it was true. People were very good to me.”
Today, Channelle shares a room with five other women in a hostel in Abuja and works to rehabilitate those same soldiers she once saw rape, maim, murder and torture her people. When asked if she finds it difficult to face the rebels and speak about their experiences, she said she does not blame them for what happened.
“I would recognize some of them from the war. Some were scared that maybe I would point them out as rebels, some were even a little aggressive as a self-defense strategy to intimidate me, so I would feel scared. You could see they were sorry. There is no option but to forgive. They did not go into the war because they wanted to rape, to carry arms. It was adults who initiated them into the atrocities they committed. They are not kids anymore. You cannot go on feeling bitter about something that has happened. By forgiving you are able even to help the person because now you can interact for the benefit of your society, for the society you live in, for the peace back home, for the future, for prosperity. You just have to let go and forgive – it is the only thing.”
Together with a group of Liberian expatriate women, she began Liberian Women for Reconstruction and Peace (LIWORP) International in 1996, a non-profit organization which helps Liberian refugees to deal with the wounds of war and learn skills that will help them to again become productive members of society.
Among LIWORP’s projects is the Repatriation Assistance Program. With support from the Nigerian government and private contributions, the organization will repatriate some 4,000 Liberian refugees by the middle of next year. They have already succeeded in teaching hundreds of women and former child soldiers such skills as soapmaking, carpentry and how to run small-scale enterprises.
Only recently, Channelle spoke with the Ministry of the Federal Capital Territory Abuja. They offered her organization a small plot to build a workshop and mini-factory to provide those who have been taught skills with the opportunity to put them to work. “The assistance we have received from the Nigerian government has been wonderful. The facilities are better than anywhere else in West Africa. They are helping us to be self-reliant so we won’t need to go bowl in hand.”
After almost a decade, Channelle’s nightmares have become less frequent. She has succeeded in finding her direction in Nigeria. And though one day she hopes to return to Liberia, she says she will always think of Nigeria as her second home.
|
|
Table of Contents (1) It's a new dawn over Nigeria |
|
Channelle Merchant remembers the day the civil war broke out in Liberia in 1989. She is calm and speaks with controlled emotion when she tells her story.