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>> 55 2 Child Protection Deployed The Bo Interim Care Centre One Sunday morning in late March 2000, I took the government bus to Bo, the capital of Sierra Leone’s Southern Province, and found someone to give me directions to the interim care center (ICC) for former child soldiers. I knew the center was cosponsored by Christian Brothers (a local NGO) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC, an international NGO) and that it was located on the eastern edge of town. Late March is the very beginning of the rainy season, and big black clouds were threatening. The breeze was a welcome change from the heat of the previous months. When I arrived at the ICC, I was told the person in charge had gone to church and that I should come back in the afternoon . When I came back in the afternoon, he still was not around, but one of the caretakers, Grace, agreed that I could hang around and wait for him. I recognized a few of the children from another ICC, and even more recognized me (at this point I had already spent six months at another ICC near Freetown and had visited several others briefly). This reassured Grace, and we all played bingo for a while. Ibrahim, another of the caretakers, came along and joined the game. There was also draughts (known as checkers in the United States), snakes and ladders, ludo (something like parcheesi), tehtehbol 56 > 57 (“In a way we are all the children of God. Even to argue about religion is a sin.”) The children were standing in lines, trying to keep quiet, punching each other on the arms and laughing to themselves. Weekdays had a strict timetable at the ICC. The morning was taken up with school-like activities. Instead of teachers, they had “animators”1 and instead of Class I, Class II, Class III, and so on they had Group I, Group II, and Group III. As a former math teacher, I decided to sit in on Group I math lessons for a while. It was dismal. The woman leading the class copied an exercise incorrectly onto the board and then asked the children to perform a task that was made impossible by her copying error. (The math teacher in me could not stand it and I had to show her the mistake. She corrected it, but in doing so only further confused the children.) It seemed to me that the main lesson was how to sit still and keep exercise books, although the classes were more informal than regular school. Next I went to Group III. They were learning the Bible story of Joseph. The animator said, “You see the father and the son are crying. Why?” One of the boys responded, “Because they haven’t seen each other in a long time and they didn’t know if the other was alive or dead.” The animator said, “Some of you, the same thing will happen when you go back to your families, no? Remember when Mariama’s father came to take her? They both cried, not so?” After a while, the children were bored so he gave them some math problems to do. Lunchtime! As a special visitor I was called to eat away from everyone else. The children each got a colored plastic plate with “combat” (a combination of rice and bulgur) and some cassava leaf sauce. There was some grumbling from the children about the bulgur since they thought they should be given rice only, and some of the new boys refused to eat it. (Bulgur is aid food from the United States and not part of the normal Sierra Leonean diet). I said I liked the bulgur for a change and they just laughed, saying, “Well, they should keep it in America for the people who like it.” In the afternoon, there was a visitor from the Planned Parenthood Association of Sierra Leone (PPASL), a Sierra Leonean, to talk to the children about “well body business” or health. He started with family planning. “What is a family?” he asked. He wrote, “Father, Mother, Child” on the board in English but spoke only Krio. He said there are 58 > 59 In some ways this was a pretty good job for postwar Sierra Leone. Many of them had worked as teachers before the war, but the Ministry of Education had not paid teachers for a long time. Rugie came running to the adults, complaining that a new boy...

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