Acts of mercy: spirit of community in Africa - Column

Christian Century, June 1, 1994 by R. Drew Smith

The accounts of destruction and devastation are horrific. An estimated 500,000 killed and more than 1 million displaced in Rwanda within weeks of the April deaths of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. One hundred thousand killed in Burundi in the past five months and more than a million forced to flee to neighboring countries as a result of civil conflict. More than 150,000 killed in a five-year-old civil war in Liberia and as many as half of its 2.5 million citizens living as refugees. The suddenness with which a nation's political fate can alter has become one of the central perplexities of the 1990s. Although such change sometimes has been for the better, too often, lately, it has been for the worse.

Yet in the midst of political ruin, community still persists. A sense of the common struggle and common good - resident more often in the hearts of people than in the policies and practices of institutions - refuses to die.

Perhaps some personal, observations from a recent trip to Sierra Leone will illustrate. Sierra Leone, Liberia's immediate neighbor, has been swept into Liberia's conflict on two levels. The civil war in Liberia has sent tens of thousands of refugees pouring into Sierra Leone and has encouraged political chaos in that country, where rebels supported in part by one of Liberia's principal military factions have launched guerrilla actions along the border. Though the conflict has been relatively contained, it has displaced hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leonians. Roughly 280,000 have been forced into neighboring Guinea, tens of thousands have fled to Sierra Leone's capital city, Freetown, and more than 100,000 have sought refuge in (of all Places) Liberia.

Nevertheless, there is cause for optimism in grass-roots community building across ethnic, national and religious divisions - the very divisions that have contributed to the breakdown of many of these national structures. Because Western governments responded slowly to the deteriorating situation in the two countries, Africans were left to attend to the initial waves of refugees on their own. Sierra Leonians responded to these displaced populations with impressive levels of hospitality and assistance, mobilizing indigenous and internationally based social agencies, their family networks and church structures.

For instance, prior to the outbreak of war inside Sierra Leone, the 125,000 or so Liberian refugees who fled there mostly stayed in small Sierra Leonian villages and towns near the Liberian border. A vast number of these people were received into private homes by acquaintances and many more were housed by total strangers. Some were put up in churches and schools. Many were simply provided with land on which they could build shelters and grow their own food, aided by their host communities and by church groups and international relief organizations.

A Liberian family named Samba fled over the border into Sierra Leone in 1990 and encountered a seminary student named Joseph Abu, whom they had previously met when he had been studying in Liberia. Abu set about arranging lodging for Mrs. Samba and her five children with Catholic colleagues. When Mrs. Samba's husband, a graduate student in the U.S., brought her and the two youngest children to the U.S., Joseph found living arrangements for the other three - all teenagers. The two oldest girls were placed in a mission school and the oldest boy with a Catholic priest named Anselm Umoren.

Sierra Leonian rebels then overran the area where Umoren and the children were staying, prompting Umoren to flee with them to neighboring Guinea. After they returned to Sierra Leone and while Umoren was away on business the area suffered another massive rebel onslaught. The children were rescued from the fighting by Joseph's father, who took them to live with his family in Freetown. The children remained with them for months before eventually moving on to stay with another Catholic family in Makeni, Sierra Leone's second-largest city. Fortunately, after two years of separation from their parents, the Samba children received U.S. visas and were reunited with them in the States.

The writer of Acts reports that the early Christians "held all things in common." Like them, these West African Christians have a sense of common struggle, of common good and of common ownership of resources. The latter was demonstrated by the actions of a husband and wife team of Baptist ministers, Richard Howard, an African-American, and Alexine Howard, a Liberian, who were forced out of Liberia as the fighting broke out. They came to Sierra Leone in 1990 and received government clearance to establish a refugee facility near Freetown. Using $11,000 of their own money, they began operating a feeding program, an elementary school and vocational classes. With eventual assistance from the Red Cross, Planned Parenthood and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the camp served up to 4,000 Liberian refugees. The Howards operated their camp for more than a year, suspending operations only when a major UN camp finally opened in the area.