Chapter Thirteen

The memories we make with our family is everything.—Candace Cameron Bure

The next day, Caitlin was given permission to spend the whole day with Tejan and to record his story. After breakfast, they sat in chairs on the mission grounds, or walked about dodging rain showers. Caitlin had already written down much of Tejan’s life’s story from talking to her uncle. Father Ambrose told her that his earliest memories of Tejan and his family’s life was in Kono, the hometown of his mother.

“Do you know what a farmer’s life is like in Sierra Leonne, Caitlin?”

“No, I do not.”

“It is not an easy life. Every January his father brushed new swampland. With a stone-sharpened machete, Tejan and his father cleared as much of the grass and brush as they could and marked the boundaries of the plots with split poles. A leaf stuck on the top of the stick indicated that the ground had been spoken for. A sorcerer, whom they call a looking gron man, instructed his father to offer a yaasi, a sacrifice of rice flour and yams, and to hang a bell on a strip of white satin to placate a bush devil the sorcerer felt was fond of the location.

“In the spring they felled trees. After the first rain, the termites appeared. His father said this was a good omen, a sign that the crops would not be late. After the land had been thoroughly brushed, they burned it. In May, the family sowed the rice seed, along with corn, okra, small beans, cotton, benne, and cucumber seeds. While his mother weeded, his father wove twigs and saplings into a fence around the fields to keep the muskrat-size cane rats from devouring the young rice shoots. He showed Tejan how to make a noose-snare and place it in a hole or two in the fence deliberately left open. This way, some of the rats would indeed be with the rice as they wished, but as part of the meal. As the rice grew, Tejan was assigned the task of driving any marauding birds away from the crops. At harvest, the rice was stored in their rice barn.

“He spent the first ten years of his life in this yearly cycle at Kono, until his father, fearing for their safety, moved the family to Kamalu, an isolated town in the Northern District.

“At Kamalu his father gave up farming and became a skillful trader, and he prospered almost immediately. After trading for several months with our Catholic mission, Tejan’s family converted to Catholicism. I warned the father that I sensed changes coming in Africa, so to better equip Tejan for the future, he should enroll Tejan in the mission school to receive an education that would help him become a trader like himself. Tejan did well, especially in French and when school was not in session, his father took Tejan on trips deep into Guinea, the land of his birth, and even into Liberia where he learned to negotiate with city officials and the crafty Lebanese traders.

“I could tell that Tejan loved the mission school, but the happiness he felt was not meant to last. It was in those days that Papa’s armies came into their district, killed his parents, and took him as their slave.”

Caitlin read her notes to Tejan, and when she looked at the boy, choked and only with difficulty kept herself from weeping. “Do you remember these things, Tejan?”

“Some of these things. Some memories come to me in my dreams. It is good that Father Ambrose can remember these things.”

She set down her notebook and turned on the cassette recorder. “Tejan, I want you to tell me what it was like in the rebel army.” She turned on her cassette recorder.

He held up his fist. “The first lesson I learned as a soldier was that the RUF commanders ruled with this.”

When Tejan finished talking, they sat in a sad silence, listening to the rhythm of the rain that had started again. It was now time for supper. She led him by the hand to the barracks, and after the meal, ordered Tejan and the other boys to bed, and then shut herself in her room and raged and cried and cursed the men who had done these things to the young boys in her care. She cursed them as devils though she knew neither names nor face the devils wore.

Between the recording of Tejan’s stories and those of her uncle, she was able to write out Tejan’s story as a boy soldier.

The RUF did indeed rule with an iron fist. Every act and thought was under their leaders’ control and every order carried out immediately and without thought. If a soldier disobeyed or even hesitated, he was punished brutally. The boys were told that there was no escape, no quitting the glorious ranks of the RUF. Deserters would be found—no matter where they fled. And when found, they would be killed, or worse.

One of Tejan’s friends was beaten to death by a RUF commander as an example of what would happen to any soldier who did not obey orders. Two others were killed in a skirmish with Kamajors. One deserted. The commander sent two older soldiers to search for him. They found him just before he crossed the border into Guinea and they left his body in the bush.

Those boys had been Tejan’s friends. They had played together in the mission, and at school studied and dreamed together—dreamed of attending the university in Freetown, of owning farms, houses, and wives, of starting businesses. Yet, the RUF’s training and brainwashing had been so effective that Tejan shed no tears at their deaths. He said he wept for no one. His tear ducts were as dry and as withered as his heart. He knew his parents had been killed, but he never thought about them. He no longer thought of anything but the drops of blood on a machete and the daily fire of cocaine the officers injected into his blood.

At first, he was just a mule for the RUF in the mountains—the Sula Kangari, the Loma, and the Tingi Hills. He with other boys were sent to work the diamond mines, work that required them to stand in water, filling basket after basket of gravel in search of the precious little stones. The guards searched the boys every day to make sure they did not steal.

When the leaders were sure Tejan could be trusted, he was made a guard for the groups sent to Liberia. They took in diamonds; they returned with weapons. Eventually, Tejan was made a soldier and trained to kill. He hid from government troops in the dense mangroves of the coast, tormented by mosquitoes and snakes. He marched across the dry savannas of the north, his skin stung by the tsetse fly, and helped destroy village after village. He fought the Kamajors in the bush, the leopard men who clothed themselves in animal skins and hunted the rebels. He often slept in trees at night for fear of lions and leopards.

He marched, stole, burned, and killed. And this life had lasted four years. When he first came to the mission, he said he did not know what the future would bring, and some nights, he said he did not care.