Reflecting on Sierra Leone mission trip photos

According to the chronology in the back of A Long Way Gone, the RUF began attacking villages in eastern Sierra Leone in March 1991. My father-in-law, Fred Wright, went to Sierra Leone on his mission trip with Operation Classroom in November 1989. He said talk of a civil war was going on while he was there. The volunteers were very concerned for their safety. They later learned that some fighting occurred only a few weeks after they left.
 
I also noticed that Ishmael Beah attended secondary school in Bo, the city where Fred and his friends worked on repairing an elementary school. The volunteers visited many of the villages surrounding Bo. Fred can't remember all the names, but one of them may have been Beah's village. After all, Sierra Leone is smaller than the state of Indiana.

When I look at the children in Fred's photos, I realize many of them were orphans and/or soldiers for the RUF or the army within a few years of when the photos were taken.

It's likely some of the villages Fred visited were raided and burned. Some of the people he met were probably killed in the war.


What strikes me most, however, is how many things had to work out in the universe for me to be part of a class that is reading a memoir from a boy soldier in a war 6,000 miles from Indiana, which happens to be the one place in Africa that my father-in-law visited in his life. And the day he came to visit our class is almost exactly twenty years from that visit. 

It reminds me of what Beah said when he visited campus a month ago...we are connected in ways that we may not immediately recognize. A place, an event, a person who seems far removed from our experience may some day be a part of our lives. We may learn something today that will help when that day comes.