By Chris Harvey Published: 11:48AM GMT 04 March 2010
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Hannah shares a room with twelve alternative members of her family, but not her father, who sleeps at his brother"s residence Photo: LEONIE PURCHAS 
Musu in progress with her step-siblings. Eating is community in the encampment of 300 people Photo: LEONIE PURCHAS 
The schoolhouse, a three-mile transport from the girl"s home village, is a windowless former food assist placement construction Photo: LEONIE PURCHAS 
Hannah with her family in the encampment of Gola Photo: LEONIE PURCHAS 
Lessons are conducted outward to shun the intolerable feverishness of the classroom Photo: LEONIE PURCHAS 
Musu and Hannah in their propagandize unvaried Photo: LEONIE PURCHAS Its an additional beautifully balmy day in Kanga village, Sierra Leone. Jan is the center of the dry deteriorate in pleasant west Africa, and everywhere the ripened offspring is ripe. The immature kids of the internal school, in dual lines of distinguished blue uniforms, are singing, "Were marching for the school, hooray. Afterwards, they lift out their benches and place them underneath the shade of a mango tree for the afternoons lessons. Eight-year-olds Hannah and her crony Musu are sitting close to the blackboard, that rests opposite the trunk. Musu says she wants to be a helper when she grows up; Hannah thinks she would similar to to be a teacher.
Hannah is already something of an preacher for the joys of school. Every weekday, in her home encampment of Gola, she gets up at 5.30 to brush and, if theres food, to assistance hope for the sunrise dish prior to environment off on the transport to Kanga. This sunrise she brought a six-year-old kid from Gola to propagandize for the initial time. She talked to his parents, asked their accede and walked with him along the 3 miles of dry highway that links the dual villages.
Lansana Cont� Guinea in risk of fight as military-civilian deadlock continues following manoeuvre Profile: Charles Taylor, warlord and ex-president of Liberia on hearing for fight crimes Government spending on abroad assist creates Britain safer and some-more moneyed Can the Church keep tillage England alive?Hannahs mental condition of being a teacher, though, is a prolonged approach off. As couple of as 9 per cent of girls in tillage areas of Sierra Leone go on to delegate school. Primary preparation is free, but fee fees are charged for delegate propagandize pupils, who contingency additionally have upheld the inhabitant examination.
School fees of up to �12.50 a tenure are not affordable for majority families. More than half the race in Sierra Leone live on less than �1 a day. Education is mostly interrupted by miss of money, vigour to minister to family income, conceiving physically or kid marriage, that in all involves a "bride cost paid by the groom.
The propagandize construction is an old petrify storehouse, built in 1999 to discharge food assist during the polite fight that convulsed the nation from 1991-2002. There are no windows the customarily light comes in by the doorway and multiform large holes in the masonry. Four happy classes, some-more than 80 immature kids in total, elderly from five to 12, lay behind to behind confronting 4 apart blackboards.
After school, Hannah gain home to Gola, whilst Musu, whose residence is customarily over the way, is sent to collect up kindling from the brush that surrounds the village. Trails lead in to the brush past unfeeling gardens, tomatoes and gourds. Deeper in, prior to the trees give approach to cassava farms, Musu and her cousins are creation prolonged piles of palm branches in a small clearing.
"Betty, a nya mbogbei? Musu calls out ("Betty, wheres my machete?). School lessons are taught in English, but Musu is vocalization in her initial language, Mende. The prolonged cutlass, it turns out, is being carefully thought about by a toddler in the centre of the piles. Musu retrieves it and expertly hacks off a small palm fronds, afterwards cuts a frame of weave from a traveller and ties the bundle.
"Help me tie mine, one of her companions says.
"Amaa needs to sense to tie her own, Musu complains to her father, Borbor, 35, who is nearby.
Musu tries to collect up her large bundle, but the weave breaks, to her frustration. "Make the raise smaller, her father says.
She discards a small branches, ties it again, afterwards rises it, a small shakily, on to her head and, utilizing one palm to solid herself, carries it behind along the route to the village. It looks heavy.
Kanga is 200 miles and 7 hours expostulate from the collateral and pier city of Freetown, along red-dirt roads that lead in to a landscape dominated by palm-oil plantations. Samuel L Williams, 75, remembers the area around the encampment as thickly forested when he was a boy. "There were elephants, antelopes, buffalo, he tells me. Were there leopards? "Too many! he says. "They used to come and take the goats, take the dogs.
Men and women from this area might once additionally have been taken to supply the worker trade, that magisterial itself on the people of west Africa from the 16th to the 19th century. Sierra Leone was the epicentre, and the traffic one after another prolonged after the initial boat full of liberated slaves landed in 1787, to face disease and attacks from internal tribes. The evocatively declared Free Town in the destiny determined itself, but Britain shortly changed to have it a colony, fluctuating the learn in to the wider reaches of the nation at the finish of the 19th century.
Independence arrived in 1961, followed by years of struggling democracy prior to a settlement of coups, crime and the key of a one-party state marked down the nation and the people, if not the leaders, to ruin. War came in 1991 when a small radicalised armed forces (the Revolutionary United Front) crossed in to Sierra Leone from Liberia and began a debate of confinement as they changed west, triggering domestic fracture, the impasse of unfamiliar mercenaries and a onslaught for the countrys remunerative solid resources.
The dispute deteriorated in to ever some-more bewildering and infamous forms. The rebels abducted children, fed them tough drug and sent them out to means mayhem with AK-47s. There were rapes, burnings, and, in an picture that repelled the world, as most as 4,000 civilians had limbs amputated. Tens of thousands were killed, dual million replaced from their homes. "This locale was most burnt by the rebels, Joe Sandi, 55, the arch of Hannahs village, says.
"When they initial came, they speedy people to stay around but as time went on they began to kill people. They took a small of the immature kids to their territory headquarters. We went there and managed to speak them in to handing behind the immature children, but the alternative immature people had to go. Only one returned after the war.
The villagers became so aroused that they fled in to the brush about 100 of them, stealing in small groups for about fifteen months, a settlement steady in Kanga. "We ate whatever we could find, Sandi says. "It was formidable for us to come in to the open. When the fight accomplished there was zero left, all of the stock had been eaten and we had to reconstruct most of the houses and begin the lives again.
The fight strictly accomplished in 2002, the year after Hannah and Musu were born. Since afterwards there has been peace, relations fortitude and a lapse to approved elections (the antithesis celebration won energy in 2007, a monument in African politics). Foreign collateral has additionally started to return. The nation is abounding in titanium, iron and changed metals as well as diamonds. Tourism has been slower to recover. Sierra Leone is sanctified with pleasing beaches and islands, as well as small superfluous areas of rainforest, but the customary reply to entrance here is, "Is it safe? In contrariety to most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, however, the Foreign Office offers no warnings opposite transport to Sierra Leone. Only 5,000 tourists visited last year, but the direction is upward.
The villages of the interior, though, sojourn trapped in poverty. We are here with the tellurian service and growth organisation World Vision, a Christian gift set up in the US in 1950, right afar active in roughly 100 countries. It is the customarily non-governmental organization handling in this area. Gola and Kanga are dual of 72 villages in the Tegloma Area Development Programme set up in 2006 and covering dual large chiefdoms in Bonthe district in the southwest of the country. Hannah and Musu are dual of 650 immature kids here sponsored by particular donors, profitable �18 a month. The immature kids do not embrace the income directly. It goes towards broader growth aims inside of their communities health and preparation are the evident priorities. One in 3 immature kids in this area does not have it to five years old. The gift supports projects such as the governments immunisation programme by profitable for motor fuel so that the programme reaches all the villages in the area and the growth of protected sources of celebration water. School assemblage is a condition of a childs being sponsored.
There is no physical phenomenon in possibly Kanga or Gola, no using water, no lavatories. People go in the bush, formulating intensity decay in the food supply. Water is drawn from a petrify well, but it is frequency lonesome and the cosmetic oil can that is used to pull the H2O is left at the bottom where the villagers walk. The risk of infection is high.
World Vision has been rehabilitating existent wells and restoring propagandize buildings. It additionally pays a small teachers salaries and sponsors others to take area guidance preparation 90 per cent of teachers in the area are unqualified; in Kanga, dual out of four. There are plans to set up a new propagandize in Kanga, finish with teachers quarters, latrines and a new well. Funds have customarily been procured for health work, such as the placement of insecticide-treated butterfly nets to strengthen opposite malaria.
Health has a anniversary dimension here. A draft posted on the wall of the Kanga health clinic, built 3 years ago and portion five villages, shows about 500 cases of malaria in 2009. Seventy per cent of them fell in the soppy months from May to October, with 80 new cases in August, the tallness of the butterfly tact season. Musu was severely ill with malaria last year, but recovered. Another of her propagandize friends wasnt so lucky. "About 40 per cent of those who get malaria die, Gertrude Satta Coker, the helper who runs the health clinic, says.
The sanatorium offers free butterfly nets, granted by World Vision, for profound women and immature kids underneath five, but still has a approach to go to remonstrate the locals to have use of the services. Most treatments are not free, and people are used to removing medicines from drug pedlars, who sell cheap, mostly fake, pills. Babies are traditionally delivered at home with the assist of a normal bieing innate partner (TBA) from the village. "We inspire the TBAs to broach at the clinic, Satta Coker says. The delivering fee, though, is 10,000 leones (about �1.70). "Some people dont have the money. A lot still give bieing innate at home.
If complications occur in a home birth, the bieing innate partner will hit the locale chief. He or she might be means to prepare to have the mom carried to hospital. There are no cars in Gola or Kanga. Before Christmas, a lady who grown complications whilst giving bieing innate to triplets was carried by hammock to the provincial health centre in Mattru, a small five hours transport away. She bled to death. Only one of her babies, all innate alive, has survived.
At 2.1 per cent, Sierra Leone has the top motherly mankind rate in the world. Musu lost her mom 4 years ago, when she died during labour, and is right afar looked after by her father, his new wife, Ami Nalloh, 50, and Amis mom Hannah, 67. Musu says she misses the approach her mom used to braid her hair.
Other health risks movement from the use of womanlike circumcision piece of the arising sermon of the sly Bundu societies. When we visited Hannah and her relatives Joe, 28, and Umu, 23, in Gola, a organisation of girls had customarily returned to the encampment from the bush, after being taken afar by the women leaders of the society, the sowei.
The girls are woken in the dim to the receptive to advice of protocol songs and dancing. One of the sowei wears a hand-carved black wooden facade representing the Bundu spirit. The alternative sowei are masked so that the initiates do not know that part of has achieved the "cutting, afterwards they are taken in spin and the clitoris is private with a knife, customarily unsterilised and used again on the subsequent girl. The protocol is finish prior to the object rises.
Efforts have been done locally to teach women about the dangers of the use infection, extreme bleeding, unpleasant scarring and to remonstrate relatives that daughters should not be instituted prior to the age of 18, and contingency give their consent. But in a small villages, such as Gola, the arising is achieved on really immature girls, underneath the age of 10.
Are there any girls in the encampment who dont go by the Bundu ritual, I ask Umu. "No, she says. "We all do it and we similar to it. It gives us a place in the community, we are reputable by others.
Will Hannah go by it? "Of course, yes, Umu says. "She will go in Dec or January. Hannah, who is sticking on to her mothers neck, adds her own criticism in Mende. The interpreter translated: "Hannah says she cant do it.
When we arrived, she had been pulsation rice in a large bowl. Most villagers here rely on keep farming. A few, similar to Musus father, Borbor, have their own rice or cassava fields, palm oil camp or banana farm, but most, similar to Hannahs parents, have to work for those that do, reception a suit of the crops they plant to await themselves. The dry deteriorate is a time of relations plenty, but May to Oct can be one of small subsistence. "We are stuff oneself right afar on the cassava we planted months ago, Umu says, "but by the time it is the stormy deteriorate all is finished.
Umu and Joe have 3 immature kids to support: Hannah, five-year-old Jerone and four-month-old Fatmata. Another daughter died last year after building suspected malaria. With Hannah and Jerone at school, Umu takes Fatmata with her
to work. "I put her somewhere to rest whilst Im working. Its really formidable work. In a day I will plant about thirty heaps. (A store is a dug-out pile of earth, that can be planted with multiform cassava plants.) Planters might be authorised to take the furnish from anything up to a third of the heaps they plant, and are means to sell anything they dont eat themselves. "We might embrace 50,000 to 100,000 leones [�8-16] a year from what we are means to sell, but we rely on the superfluous cassava to feed ourselves, Umu says.
Some gain are indispensable for garments and to buy food to see them by the rains. Joe says it costs customarily about 40,000 leones (�6.50) to dress the total family, but a pouch of rice large sufficient to feed a family for a month can cost 140,000 leones (more than �20). The family will have to buy most not as big amounts.
There is small awaiting of earning sufficient to buy a home. Hannah shares a stand in bed with her mother, hermit and sister in a dormitory-style room in a residence owned by a part of of Joes family. The room sleeps a serve 9 family members, from Hannahs parents mother to her masculine cousins. Joe sleeps at his brothers home. Houses built with mud-bricks, done locally, can cost upwards of �2,000.
Extra income can be warranted from assisting with the palm oil harvest. Joe says he can have maybe �35-40 a year from this. When the rains come, Umu will consequence really small amounts from creation and offered soup done from baking soft drink and palm oil. "Sometimes we dont eat, Hannah says. "Im not happy when theres no food at home.
She and Musu seemed really happy that day underneath the mango tree. But secret forces in their lives lost family members, poverty, miss of food, disease and informative expectations were crowding in firmly around them. Sponsorship, though, is creation a difference. Hannahs mother, Umu, similar to most who were of propagandize age during the polite war, had no preparation and tied together at 15. She thinks it "very excellent that Hannah is right afar going to school. Musus father, Borbor, says his daughter can move some-more income to the family by practice maybe as a helper than as a bride. Education and improved health caring might yield new routes in to the destiny for Hannah and Musa and most others.
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