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I want to go back to school. I haven't been back since this happened. How can I write? I can't do anything except eat and drink water from a cup. Sometimes I follow my father into the forest when he cuts wood to sell in the truck park. I used to wash my clothes and cook. But now I can't do those things. I play with my younger sisters, chasing them and wrestling. I still do that.
I have friends here. They don't make jokes about my arms. They feel very sorry for me. Most of my friends are in Freetown. I want to go back there and see my aunt--just to visit, not to stay. There's no one at her house to take care of me.
[Issatu's father is humble, polite and upset. "Any time she goes somewhere with us, I want to cry because they have destroyed her looks," he says. Issatu went to Handicap International's clinic in Freetown and got a leather strap to help her hold a spoon on the end of her right arm. She smiles as she shows it off. "Before, I used to eat by holding the spoon between my arms," she says.]
Abdul Sankoh, 27, was a teacher until last December, when fighting between government and rebel forces closed his school. Now he is jobless and lives at the Murray Town amputee center in Freetown. On the morning of April 30, after hiding from the fighting for three days in the bush without food, he and another man went back to their village to look for mangoes to take to their friends:
We got the mangoes and were on our way back to the bush when we met two rebels. They stopped us at gunpoint. They told us to drop the mangoes, and they tied us up.
They brought us back to the village where more rebels--I counted 36--were holding five others: two women, two children and an old man. All of the rebels were carrying AK-47s, and some had rocket-propelled grenades. They were mostly about 35 or 40, but some were in their 20s. They looked untidy, as if they had been in the bush for a long time.
They killed the five other people they were holding one by one. The people were shouting and crying. I was sitting a few yards away, tied up back to back with my friend. There were about seven soldiers doing the killing. The others were searching the houses. I thought they were going to kill me too.
When they had finished killing the other five, they started arguing. Some wanted to kill us, but others said we should carry rice for them. My friend was a farmer, and I told them I was too. I said that because at that time, the rebels were searching for teachers and police. Then someone came up and said he knew me, although I didn't know him. I thought he might save me, but he turned out to be the one who destroyed me. He said, "I know you. You're a teacher, and you have a friend who is a policeman." They asked me where he was, and when I said I didn't know, they told me they were going to kill me. One of them was instructed to kill me, but he refused. He said he had never killed anyone. They pulled the gun from his hands and started to flog him. Then one of them said he was going to amputate my arms. I begged him not to and offered to join their group, but he refused. He called for an ax.