Sierra Leone's amputees: A refugee in Chicago

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Victor Saidu puts a ball in the basket

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BY MATT RUSLING, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

After a decade long war, many of Sierra Leone's war wounded still slog through life, depending on handouts for survival. These two companion stories contrast the life of one amputee who has made it to the U.S. with the lives of his counterparts - disabled people who are left struggling for survival in his native Sierra Leone. 

On a basketball court in Rogers Park on the North side of Chicago, Victor Saidu, 32, looks up and takes a shot. Whoosh! Nothing but net. On any court in urban America, that would not elicit even a yawn - except that Saidu is shooting with two stubs where his hands used to be.

Saidu is a victim of the civil war in Sierra Leone, which was known for its particular brand of barbarity, perpetrated by the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group that used amputation as a means to terrorize the public. The conflict, which ended in 2002, displaced two million people, or one third of the population.

At age 20, Saidu was captured by RUF rebels, who lopped off both his hands with a machete before sending him off with a note hung around his neck bearing a warning to any potential opposition. His ear was also cut off that day by a child soldier about twelve years old, he said.

That was just the start of his troubles. Four years later, Saidu joined the swell of refugees scrambling to leave the city as the RUF descended on Freetown, raping and killing randomly. The civilian death toll was more than six thousand.

"The entire nation was moving out, even the government," he said, recalling the day he left Freetown amid thunderous explosions and crack of machine gun fire. The smell of smoke permeated the air, he said.

"I was crying when I left," he said. "I was leaving everything, I was leaving my home. You cannot take nothing with you. You are going to a different land but you don't know where you are going," he said.

The walk to Guinea, Sierra Leone's northern neighbor in western Africa, took two weeks, he said. He slept in bushes by the roadside and wondered every day how he, his wife and two children aged four and six would eat. Once he made it to Guinea, he was incarcerated for two weeks by Guinean authorities seeking payment, he said. When he arrived at the Sierra Leone embassy, he was told to go home.

But in a serendipitous twist, Saidu's escape from Freetown marked the start of his journey to the United States, where he would live a life eons apart from the hopelessness that awaits so many amputees in his home county (See companion story).

Following his refusal to be placed in a refugee camp in Guinea that was constantly under attack, he was placed in a shelter. His application for placement in Australia was rejected, he suspects, because immigration authorities considered his disability an economic drain.

"It wasn't easy," he said of the refugee placement process that took two years to unfold. With Sierra Leoneans coming in droves, helping refugees immigrate to the West was the least of authorities' concerns, Saidu recalled.

But Saidu kept pushing. "You have to know you're right," he said. "You have to be stubborn."

Finally, he was able to convince a UN protection officer to help place him in the United States.

He arrived in Chicago in March 2000. "It was great and wonderful," he recalled. "They treated me with respect and dignity."

Work for refugees in the U.S.

Saidu's refugee status entitled him to a range of government services, such as physical rehabilitation and two prosthetics to replace his missing hands. The government also sent him to an employment agency, which trained him in janitorial work, box shelving, computers and interpersonal skills, such as how to navigate through a job interview in a foreign culture. He was also sent to a driving school for the physically challenged.

In addition to a full-time job filing documents at U.S. Customs from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m, he works evenings stacking chairs, clearing dishes and setting up tables at a coffee shop.

"I'm working round the clock...working to support my family," he said.

Still, hard work beats no work at all, he said. "I can't imagine if I were back home," he said. "I couldn't beg because I would feel like a child. I want to provide for my family myself."

Indeed, Wendy Batson, spokeswoman for Handicapped International, a non-government organization, said that amputees in Sierra Leone have difficulty finding any employment at all.

"If I was back home I'm not gonna live like this," he said of his two-story row home on a tree-lined residential street, a palace compared to the dirt-paved streets of Freetown that are home to so many amputees making a living by begging.

Alie Kabba, executive director and president of the Sierra Leone Community Association of Chicagoland, an organization that helps refugees settle into Chicago's estimated 1000-member Sierra Leonean community, said refugees are still trickling in after five years of peace. Like Saidu, many in this small but tight-knit Chicago community have been through the war.

"Many adults have witnessed atrocities," Kabba said."We have had people in the community whose hands were chopped off and they were already disabled."

For these refugees, "job placement is a major problem," he said.

The approved ceiling for refugee arrivals in the U.S. stands at 20,000, according to the African Refugee Network. But actual arrivals from Africa totaled only 18,182 in 2006, the last available figure.

While Sierra Leonean refugees have made their home in a number of countries, the United States, Gambia, the UK, the Netherlands, Guinea, Nigeria and France comprise their main destinations, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The US accepted 6,745 Sierra Leonean refugees in 2005, according to the latest statistics from UNHCR.

War disabled in Sierra Leone

War in the West African country has produced 20,000 disabled, who occupy the bottom rung of the economic ladder, according to Handicapped International. With many begging by day and sleeping on Freetown's market tables by night, Handicapped International said their life span could be lower than the country's average of 41 years. Seventy percent of Sierra Leone's population is living below the poverty line and only 35 percent are literate, according to the CIA Factbook.

"There are just a lot of people being idle," said Emmanuel Allie, a teacher at Chicago's Homewood-Flossmoor high school and native Sierra Leonean who returns there every summer.

War disabled are bedeviled by psychological problems as a result of their trauma and many prefer not to return to their home villages, the site of their victimization, said Victor Gegebe, project officer in the psychological unit of Handicapped International's Freetown office. Many are also marginalized by their communities, which have backward attitudes toward the handicapped, equating their trauma with witchcraft and evil spirits.

Back in his living room, Saidu holds a can of soda to his chest with his stump and pushes it up to his mouth to take a sip. "My dream was not for them to pay me money but to make my life better."

Saidu looks over a collection of photos of amputees that I brought from a recent trip to Sierra Leone. "It's not enough," he said of what Sierra Leone's government does for amputees there, his big smile fading.

One picture depicts a women, hand lost in the war, who makes a living by begging. Her 10-year-old daughter has to be taken out of school occasionally due to lack of school fees, she said.

Looking up from this disturbing image, Saidu said, "If the kid grows up with no education, no proper care, (she will) end up with frustration."

He and others of his generation know all too well the potential explosiveness of youth, as the war in Sierra Leone was infamous for its use of thousands of child soldiers, some as young as ten.

"When you look at (Sierra Leone's) economic indicators, it's not far-fetched to say the war could happen again," said Emmanuel Allie, pointing to the rampant unemployment and aimless youth that made the war possible.

Indeed, one only need take a drive down Kissy Street, one of Freetown's main drags, on any weeknight. The place is teeming with thousands of aimless youth cooking, sleeping and pan handling. Even at 1 am it looks like a major sporting event just let out.

Chicago's Sierra Leone community

Sitting on the passenger's side while Saidu drives us through North Chicago, the sun is shining on a clear summer day as we listen to Bob Marley on the stereo.

His uncle, Abdul Sankoh, sitting in the back, said he was worried about his nephew when he first came to the U.S. "First time (seeing his injuries) I cry every time, but now he can do everything," he said. Sankoh was lucky - he immigrated to France before the start of the war and then made his way to the U.S.

Saidu's stumps hug the wheel as he hangs a left. "In six years, no accidents," he said. He occasionally gets quizzical looks from other drivers when stopping at a red light, but that doesn't faze him, he said.

Touhy

Saidu has helped other members in Chicago's Sierra Leonean community. "He doesn't want people to keep on suffering the same thing," said Sankoh.

We stop at the home of some friends, other Sierra Leoneans whom he's helped financially. With kids hanging all over him, he laughs and jokes.

Most have also come as refugees. "I have let them come live with me for a little while until I find them a job that could enable them to support themselves," he said.

He has also given advice on finding jobs, getting government medical and housing assistance and food stamps.

Saidu said he harbors no revenge fantasies toward those who victimized him, a sentiment expressed by amputees on the streets of Freetown.

"I am disappointed in them," he said, but does not hate them or even seek their punishment. What he does ask is that the perpetrators back in Sierra Leone try to assist war victims.

"I'm a God-fearing person," he said, contending that his loss of limbs was divinely orchestrated. "He (God) knows why he did that."

He focuses instead on what he described as a rich family and community life in Chicago. "God has replaced my hands with something else," he said. "Chicago is now like Sierra Leone to me. It's my home."

[This story was originally published in January 2008 for Immigration Here & There, a project for the Medill School of Journalism. Be sure to check out "Sierra Leone's amputees: Those left to beg."]