My Story

Revisiting journals and photos from my Peace Corps days between 1984 and 1987 inspired the composition and trajectory of Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone.

The complexity of the Peace Corps experience was always difficult to grasp, and the brutal conflict, which erupted in 1991, further confounded me. I struggled to reconcile my memories of the peaceful village of Tokpombu with the decade-plus horror that followed. This tragic turn of events set me on a course to look more critically at my experience.

The consequences of the conflict, often referred to as the “Blood Diamond War,” still reverberate. Families continue to reckon with their loss of loved ones, home, language, identity, education, and sacred traditions. More than eight million citizens, mostly farmers, are still coping with Ebola, environmental catastrophe, and the excruciating pain of loss. Most of Sierra Leone's glittering diamonds are sold worldwide for profits that few Sierra Leoneans ever see.

In 1988, I worked for the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., and then traveled to West Africa to support a farming cooperative in Ghana with Africare, Inc. While there, I had hoped to visit with my dear friends in Sierra Leone, but the government of Ghana mistakenly accused me of belonging to a subversive group, which led to my arrest, detention, and deportation.

For the next decade, devastating civil chaos persisted in Sierra Leone. While working and studying, I completed master's degrees in New York and North Carolina (Cross-Cultural Counseling Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Special Education at North Carolina Central University). I joined a small group to establish the Gullah Heritage Society, which connected America's Gullah community with its ancestors in Sierra Leone. In North Carolina, I spent a year apprenticing as an organic farmer under the auspices of a farm-stewardship association.

Wherever I lived, I taught school, counseled families and youth, and supported marginalized communities. Along the way, I met my husband and started a family. In 2004, I served as executive director of War Child USA. In 2022, I assumed directorship of Creating Friendships for Peace.  

Sierra Leone showed me the universality of our human needs: the hopes, fears, pain, and drama that we all experience. My ongoing work and study of violent conflict and forced migration have further shown me that forces beyond the control of ordinary citizens can propel any of us to unimaginable violence. I believe that resilience and survival is rooted in our willingness to hold the pain and history of one another.

We might take heed. The particulars of Sierra Leone’s tragedy flash a blinking red light in the shifting landscape of our modern world.

How will we exert our rights when we have them, and how will we keep our humanity if we don't?