Mariama Conteh-Elliott’s childhood faded before it began.
Prior to 1999, Mariama lived with one aunt, and then another, in the countryside of Sierra Leone. They ate what they could grow, and when nothing grew, they looked to the ocean for sustenance. By the time Mariama was fourteen—the age when her life changed forever—she had never been to school.
“School? No, just farming,” she says, responding to my naïve question. She breaks out laughing. “That’s it. That’s the future.”
During the nearly three hours we talked, Mariama must have laughed for thirty minutes. Hers is a heartbreaking story of epic proportion. It is the stuff of nightmares, of movies so wrenching that you have to close your eyes. But it is her courage, her strength, and her joy that has survived. Not her anger.
Mariama is now twenty-two, and in the five years since she was adopted by Deannie and Clayton Elliott of Ortonville, Michigan, she has gone from being illiterate to a standout college student. She has transformed from an ill, antibiotic-infused amputee to a healed and grateful soul.
As I spoke to Mariama, I could hardly bear to hear the details of the inhumane abuse she endured in Sierra Leone.
In 1999, the year when the diamond struggle permeated the lives and souls of Sierra Leoneans in the form of ruthless Rebel soldiers burning houses, raping women, cutting off limbs, and stealing young boys away from their families, Mariama was fourteen. She knew the Civil War was raging, but it was not until she visited a friend in the hospital that fear set in.
“One of my best friends—they chopped his hands and his ears,” says Mariama. “He was in the village and they came and gathered them together and started chopping. If you didn’t do what they said, you got shot. That was about a month before they came to me.”
It was January, and Mariama was ill from a pill she took to fight off bacteria. She had welts and sweats and couldn’t walk, so she went to Freetown, the capital city, to be treated. She was at her aunt’s house there one evening, listening to the radio, and cooking. The authorities were ordering people to stay in their houses and warned that the Rebels were headed to town with “all kinds of weapons.”
