She convinced her family to move to an amputee camp, where they stayed for a year. Mariama had food in her belly, but the infection from her wounds racked her body with constant fevers and nearly unbearable pain.
One day a prosthetician from Staten Island, Matthew Merones, read about the amputees’ plight and decided to bring six children to the United States to fit them with prostheses. Mariama was chosen, and on September 21, 2000, she arrived in Washington DC.
Alone in a new country, weighing less than eighty pounds and speaking Krio, her native language, Mariama told her story—through a translator—to the U.S. Congress. A flurry of political discussions involving the United States’ role in Sierra Leone ensued, but Mariana’s lasting vision of Washington was the snow.
When she landed in New York, she was so sick with osteomyelitis—a bone infection—that she was sent to the hospital the next morning. She was scared and in pain, and with no translator, lost in the world of doctors and nurses. Mariama endured operations on her limbs as doctors tried to cut some of the infection out. The doctors were not able to expunge all of the infection, and with nothing but heavy antibiotics, Mariama was in danger of eventually dying.
For the next year, Mariama lived in an apartment in Staten Island with the other children who were being fitted for prostheses. Their story spread, the media responded, and after they were on CNN, which the Rebel army was known to watch in Sierra Leone, it became clear that the children would be in danger if they returned home. Politicians and community leaders successfully sought political asylum for the children, who were supported through donations until adoptive families could be found.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as tragedy struck New York City, a magical coincidence struck Mariama’s life.
Chad Everett, an actor best known for his role as Dr. Joe Gannon in the 1970s television drama Medical Center, was crossing the Verrazano Bridge for a fundraiser for Gift of Life Inc., a Rotary-supported organization that provides open-heart surgery on children from developing countries.
