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I put this on the closed forum on monday and thought maybe it would interest some of you others who arnt allowed in there...There have been further developments since monday but Im going to tease ya and only give them out if someone asks for them ;0)

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Monday 6.30pm

Feeling a little traumatized this afternoon so I thought I would share it with you all…

I’ve been working with the Remand School where kids awaiting sentence are in detention. There are some kids with pretty full on lives living in there but they are all pretty decent people as far as I’m concerned. The conditions that live in on the other hand are not decent at all. They don’t really have enough food and they never have medical attention (except in emergency situations). The guy who runs the school is seems OK, Mr Kamara, but has a nasty temper, but he is often the only staff member for 55 kids.

So I do drama workshops with these kids on a Monday afternoon and earlier today I heard that there had been an incident but I didn’t know what had gone down. I rocked up and the kids were telling me that some of the inmates had absconded, mentally I was cheering them on, so I decided to sit and wait for 15minutes and see if anyone rocked up to do the workshop cos there were 4 kids there. Then one of the staff came up and explained to Jah, who then explained to me what had happened when the kids absconded…

A whole bunch of the boys had made a hole in the roof of the dormitory and snuck out but Mr Kamara managed to catch 5 of them in the process. He then gave them a flogging and ‘unfortunately one of the boys died and another 2 were admitted to Conaught Hospital in a critical condition’. Mr Kamara has since gone to ground and I discovered that they have the death penalty in Sierra Leone so I doubt he will be appearing any time soon.

Now I cannot fathom how you can beat a kid to the point that you put them in intensive care let alone killing them. The whole thing made me feel sick to the stomach and I was fighting back the tears. The kids in Conaught aren’t likely to have a swift recovery, just knowing that stats of how many people actually make it out of hospital alive after minor surgery is scary let alone if they went in there in a critical condition in the first place.

The really crap thing is that there are still five or six kids living at the Remand School but there are no staff to look after them and the Department has ceased all activities pending investigation so when we arrived to do our workshop this afternoon we were politely asked to leave. So these kids are dealing with the fact that the guy who’s been looking after them for the past few months has just killed their friend and put their mates in hospital and there is no program to support them to deal with that, let alone replacement staff to look after them. I managed to get five minutes to talk to them and explained that if they wanted to talk to anyone they could come and find me at the Peacelinks office and to see if there was anything that I could do. They just explained that they didn’t want to stay there and could I help them find somewhere else to stay…. What the fuck do I do?
And then when I got back to the office and explained the situation the response was ‘yeah it’s a tragedy but that’s just another African story’….

Other messages for this discussion:

Gemma please go on .....

Ive had to read your posting afew times before I could respond.

Im shocked sad (I was in tears reading it) and hope that you have somehow been able to help the kids.

So please go on...

My thoughts are with you

Ive got one week left to got til I fly outta here so I spose I should let you know the latest on my human rights abuse story.

Ive spent the last couple weeks hanging out in the hospital with the kids that survived the 8 hours of torture at the ahdns of their supervisor. The story is phenominal and it gets more complex by the day. Everyone has there own points of veioew of what happend during the inmcident and in the subsequent 2 weeks and none of them match up. So ive decide not to belive anyone except the kids and even then I have to be aware of how well they know how to play me. For all my efforts I think that the only 2 achievable things that I might be able to get done in the next week is to try and get one of the kids broken wrist into a plaster and to get a doctor to treat the other kids internal bleeding (niether of which has been treated through out a 10 day staty in the hospital, jointly due the deptartment being slow to pay medical bills and the hospitals inability to give proper treatment.)
Its a situation which has blown me away and Im kinda glad to be walking away from, cos to fix something like this will take years, and this is just one problem in a whole country of problems.

Im probably not giving particularly useful info at the moment so Ill save it up til I get back to England and have a chance to put my brain back together and compose something a little more comprehensive...
Gemma

Hey Gemma,

I\'m not sure, but you may be back in england by now. How are you going? Am thinking of you. One of the hardest things about coming home is how totally unaware the Western world is of the real conditions in developing countries. I\'m sure you have some very supportive people around you, but i just wanted to say, reach out as much as you need to, don\'t try and deal with it all yourself. I\'ve been back almost 3 months now and there are still things I find suprising and hard to deal with.
Sending you lots of love, would love to catch up when you return.
melinda