Sierra Leone: Battered But Not Down. SJ Dodgson. MJoTA 2015, v9n1 p0106
In 1999, after years of brutal murders in Liberia and the border towns of Sierra Leone, the rebels arrived in Freetown and started murdering. Two victims were a princess, the mother of Zainab Wai-Lansana, and her teenage son. I heard the story from two survivors, from another son and from a daughter of another family living in the same area.
A missile had struck a building, and wounded and killed some people. Fatmata Rosalind went out to tend to the wounded and dying, and her son ran after her. Then a second missile landed, killing Fatmata immediately, and mortally wounding her son. Another son, Joseph, scooped up his brother and an old man and took them to a hospital. His brother was crying because their mother was dead, and then he died too. The old man lived.
The deaths of Zainab's family follow the arc of tragedy that has been visiting Sierra Leone. Her grandmother in childbirth, her mother and brother in the vicious civil war that lasted from 1990 until 2002, sand in August 2014, her uncle because of ebola.
Uncle Morri is shown below in the red house, where his sister was born and his mother died in childbirth. He had a severe asthma attack, and he was not given hospital treatment and medicines. Because the hospital personnel were swamped with diagnosing, treating and quaranting patients with ebola.
