Telling the World About Sierra Leone

It’s easy for Margaret Mortimore to find herself flashing back a decade to her days in the West African republic of Sierra Leone.

First there are the pictures in her Montrose apartment and her office at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, where she works as a clinical instructor and physical therapist. And then there is the dubious news coming from a country that, even before its civil war, was at the bottom of U.N. rankings in literacy, infant mortality and life expectancy.

In the photos, Mortimore is flanked by a dozen polio victims, ages 5 to 15, who represent the focus of her three years in Kambia, a town in northwest Sierra Leone. Starting in 1989, as a lay mission helper of the L.A. Catholic Archdiocese, she trained others to do rehabilitation work with polio patients.

“Patients would literally come crawling to our clinic, twisted like pretzels,” said Mortimore, who has a master’s degree in physical therapy from USC. “After surgery, physical therapy and a fitting with braces or crutches, they returned home, often to a village stunned at the sight of them walking upright.”

Such youngsters had been battling more than immobility.

“Children with polio were thought to be possessed by the devil,” she said. “When they came to our clinic, it was usually as a last resort, after they had tried everything else, including treatment by the local medicine man.”

After Mortimore returned to Los Angeles, rebel groups intensified their attacks against the government. By early 1998, near the time Sierra Leone was achieving notoriety as home of the slaves in the film “Amistad,” the country was also making modern terrorist history as child-soldiers were introduced into its civil war.

Rebels reportedly kidnapped as many as 6,000 children, some only 4 or 5, then forced them to loot, burn villages, kill and mutilate. Often drugged and working in packs, they would chop off the hands or arms of adults and other children.

“The rebels knew what they were doing,” Mortimore said. “It is a terribly poor country where life revolves around your ability to use your hands.”

Hundreds of the child-soldiers not killed by their rebel captors or a populace seeking retribution have fled into the bush, leaving a once-peaceful country traumatized.

A tenuous cease-fire was negotiated in May by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, President Clinton’s special envoy, but almost half of the country’s 4.5 million people are reported displaced within its borders or refugees in nearby Guinea.

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“They are forgotten people in a forgotten country on a forgotten continent,” Mortimore said.

Mortimore tries to keep up with the Sierra Leone news, listening to BBC Radio (the country is a former British colony), checking several Web sites and keeping in touch with fellow missionaries. She knows the clinic, church and her home in Kambia are all destroyed.

Now on a new mission, Mortimore wants the rest of the world to know about Sierra Leone. She has talked to groups ranging from elementary school students to colleagues at Childrens Hospital, and written to President Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Mortimore was heartened when Jackson returned and chastised the news media for highlighting the civil war in Yugoslavia over the carnage in Africa.

Should conditions in Sierra Leone improve, will she return? Mortimore is undecided.

“Part of me wants to go back and help,” Mortimore said. “But part of me is afraid of what I will find, and who I won’t find.”

If she does go back, she knows she will learn that some of the patients pictured with her are dead or missing.

But she is equally positive that hundreds more will still need her skills.

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