🌊 A Child Soldier’s Story

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We seek to hold a mirror to the world. To do so, Roca editor Max Frost traveled to Sierra Leone – a country synonymous with war, disease, and poverty – to understand how countries fail and what it means for their people. Each Sunday, he’s sending out an on-the-ground report. This is part 3. Parts 1 (Inside Trash City) and 2 (Inside the Secret Societies) are available at those links.

Makeni, Sierra Leone

Peter recalls being a child and hearing about a war in distant parts of Sierra Leone.

Then one day, it arrived in his village.

It was the mid-1990s and Peter should have been in elementary, maybe middle school, although in his village, people didn’t keep birthdays and rarely went to school. 

Civil war was spreading like wildfire: The government and rebels were fighting for control of the country and, most importantly, its diamond mines. Initially, people celebrated the rebels for launching an attack on a repressive and corrupt government. Then, the rebels reached their homes. 

“When the war reached our area, we ran away. But along the process, my aunt was very sick and we couldn’t help her…so we left her at the house and ran into the bush [the forest] with a lot of people,” Peter recalled. 

The refugees spent weeks living in the bush, hiding from the rebels. 

“But when we prepared food, it hurt my grandmother,” who couldn’t bear the thought of her daughter being stuck hungry in the village. So Peter volunteered to help: “‘Grandma, you know, I want to try this. Let me take food to Auntie Adam.”

“Our house was in the extreme corner of our community and I knew all the bush roads, so I would just come in, place food for my aunt…and then I’d sneak away,” Peter recalled. 

He did this once, then twice, then for a week. It became a daily routine – until late one night, when a rebel saw him.

“He saw me sneaking,” Peter recalled. “The language he used to me was, ‘Hold! If you move, I will shoot you.’ I shouted…I started crying.”

Peter – the little boy – said he was “petrified.”

“He came very close to me,” he remembered of the rebel soldier. “That was my first experience to see somebody point a gun at me and promise to kill me. I was like, ‘I was just doing this to help my auntie.’ I started crying and prayed,” Peter recalled.

“I was bold enough to explain to him and then he told me, ‘You’re very bold. But I won’t let you go to your grandma’...he took me away, and that’s how I started the journey.”

Peter, the child, was off to war.

Editor’s Note

We’ll keep this short: Thanks for reading today. If you missed parts 1 (Inside Trash City) or 2 (Inside the Secret Societies), they’re available at those links. We have a few more installments coming, followed by some domestic reporting. We think you’ll enjoy it all.

Also, here are our last 5 stories: 

• Our Interview with the Mastermind behind Trump’s Tariffs

• The “Fringe” New Leader of the NIH

• Did the US spend $8M to make mice trans? 

• Should Bridge Colby be confirmed? 

• Our investigation into whether Ukraine is a democracy

See you tomorrow.

–Max and Max