A Man from Another Land: How Finding My Roots Changed My Life (17 page)

Twenty-five years later, the terror in the little girl’s frightened eyes reminded me of my mother’s. The angry man stood there,
looking deeply into my own eyes, filled with my teenage rage, as my mind’s eye was reliving the painful events from my youth.
But just like my stepfather, the angry man saw the steely resolve that said I meant business, and he completely morphed into
a gentle middle-aged man right before my eyes. He let go of the little girl’s arm, put his head down, slowly turned, and peacefully
walked away. The crowd followed him, hurling insults at him, as he walked down the street. Someone threw a rock at him.

Raymond shared what he found out: that the man was possibly the little girl’s uncle and was known to be abusive.

I was floored. “What?” I asked. “Does she live with him?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said as he got back in the Dodge Ram.

I climbed in on the passenger side. We drove alongside the little girl as she walked off down the road still tightly clutching
the band of her underwear where she had stuffed the money for safekeeping. Raymond asked her if she would be okay. She nodded,
smiled, and said, “
Tanki!
” which is Mende for “thank you.”

Apparently, the man had seen Adisa give her the American dollars and decided he was going to get the money. I turned toward
the backseat where Adisa was sitting. “What did I tell you back in the States? Huh? No media liability! Do not
do
or
say
anything that will bring more attention to us than what we already have. Didn’t I say that?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“Then what the fuck were you thinking? You could have gotten that little girl killed!” I shouted.

“I was just trying to help—”

I exploded, “Just do your fucking job, Adisa! Getting great sound is all I need you to worry about! That’s help enough, Okay?”

“I got it, man,” he said quietly.

“Good, now let’s get the hell out of here, I have a reception to get ready for.”

My words fell on deaf ears. Adisa Jones gave money to, hugged, kissed, and tossed in the air every single boy and girl he
encountered in Sierra Leone. He couldn’t help himself. He absolutely loved the people of Sierra Leone.

That night, the heat and humidity made it hard to smooth out the wrinkles in my suit. I was very nervous. Jackie had worked
very hard to put together a group of local businesspeople for the evening. She felt that it was important that Raymond and
I know them. Antonio came to my room to check on me. I was running a little late.

When we finally arrived at a neighboring hotel, night had fallen. The room was full of guests and fans. I noticed Antonio
walk in and then turn right around and walk back out. I kept pushing forward, making my way through the crowd, shaking as
many hands as possible before I sat down to eat. Breton walked up to me and whispered something in my ear. I jumped up and
ran to the parking lot just in time to catch Antonio jumping in the car. Breton had revealed Antonio’s secret and I now knew
the reason for his sudden retreat.

As I approached, he said, “Hey, man, I’m so proud of you tonight and so excited for ya I didn’t even notice I had the wrong
shoes on.” Antonio had put on one black shoe and one brown shoe. We fell out laughing. It was the first real, full-bodied
laugh I’d had since arriving in Sierra Leone. I felt the stress and anxiety of the last few days lift off my soul.

Back inside, Raymond and I met Mr. Kalu O. Kalu, a banker, and Mr. Kayode Adeniji of Hewlett-Packard. We all shook hands and
pledged to help return the country to its former greatness, to a time like when it was known as the Athens of West Africa
because of the quality and number of its universities.

O
n our third day in Sierra Leone, I hired two boats to take the team to the Bunce Island Slave Castle. I couldn’t wait to get
there. I finally had the opportunity to meet Professor Opala, who toured Bunce Island with us.

I felt a range of conflicting emotions—anger, hurt, disgust—but at the same time I was very proud about what I saw and heard
there. The anger stemmed from my own ignorance. I knew nothing about Bunce Island’s history and its connection to the development
of the Southern region of the United States. I listened as Professor Opala explained how Bunce Island was built by the British
exclusively to process West African slaves with rice-harvesting skills, destined for South Carolina and Georgia. Fifty thousand
slaves from Sierra Leone were processed at Bunce Island alone.

We learned of slaves who willed themselves to death while on the island and others, trying to escape, who were killed by sharks
in the deep waters surrounding the castle. I stood in the
center of a corral where three hundred slaves lived chained together with only a small trough of rice to eat placed between
them. I felt hurt by the humiliation they endured. I found myself feeling disgusted as I looked through a display window depicting
the castle where the slaveholders sat around sipping wine and spirits as they chose which slaves they wanted to buy or molest.

Somehow, after hearing all of the horrific statistics and facts, I still felt a sense of pride. Yes, the slave castle was
designed by the oppressor, but it was built by the oppressed. And it’s still, hundreds of years later, standing for the world
to see and understand the atrocities that took place there.

As I stood on Bunce Island I felt I was a living testament to the indomitable spirit of my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
I pledged $25,000 to help Joe Opala complete a CGI rendering of what the Slave Castle may have looked like before its deterioration.

While we were there, a local man approached our group and presented Dr. Panossian with a very sick boy. He had cysts on his
back brought on by tuberculosis. Dr. Panossian looked him over and decided to do field surgery to remove the cysts right there
on the island. He later told me, after the surgery, that he didn’t think the little boy would make it.

Daylight was fading fast. Our boats had no headlamps. I told Sonya to take one of the boats back to the mainland with the
group and that I would stay behind to assist Dr. Panossian. We finished the surgery and we got back into the remaining boat.
As soon as the sun fell beyond the horizon our boat stalled, the engine burning out as debris strangled its propellers. It
was too dark and dangerous for anyone to dive into the murky water and untangle it. We slowly limped back to the mainland
with one engine, our boat’s captain navigating by the stars.

*     *     *

I woke up the next morning feeling grumpy from not sleeping well. I was not very happy up to that point with Guy’s camera
work. But I chose him, knowing he was inexperienced, so I knew I would have to take the hit. I could see that he was a really
nice guy, but I quickly realized that he needed to be directed every step of the way as he would be if we were shooting a
movie on a set. That level of direction was impossible here. Sierra Leone was not a controlled environment, to say the least.
I couldn’t predict what would happen one minute to the next. I couldn’t “set up a shot” as I could on a movie set. So, I decided
to give him some direction. “Follow me,” I said to him.

Guy and I stepped out of the Hotel Barmoi compound and walked about two hundred yards away from where the rest of the team
was loading up the Land Rovers. “I want a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shot just like the famous one François Truffaut used
in his film
400 Blows,
” I said. I went on to carefully explain exactly what I wanted.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you want,” he said.

I looked at him and knew full well that he didn’t. And sure enough, he fucked up the one directed shot I gave him. From then
on, I just told him to keep the camera rolling and just point and shoot until I said, “Cut.”

The team piled into the 4x4s for another day of adventure. We drove in a single-file formation. I insisted that the drivers
keep a two- to three-second distance from bumper to bumper, something I picked up while in the military. In the military this
was a way to be sure we weren’t attacked by an unseen enemy. While I wasn’t expecting an attack per se, it made me feel safer.
I felt responsible for these people; I didn’t want anything to happen to them.

We stopped at a local store in downtown Freetown to purchase some bottled water. While some of the team were inside, I got
out and looked around to see what I could film. My photog
rapher, Michael, was fast on my heels, camera in hand. He was clicking away as I came upon some little boys gathering water
in a ditch from a dirty and broken underground water pipe. The image was just as disturbing to me as the boys’ reaction to
my approach. They eyed me nervously as I asked them what they were doing. As they answered quietly, their eyes darted back
and forth from me to Michael’s camera and then back to me.

I couldn’t process what I saw. How could it be that we had entered the twenty-first century and these children didn’t have
clean drinking water? Why were these children forced to live this way? There were a few Sierra Leoneans working with our crew.
When I asked them, they explained that this was their reality since the war started and ended. They told me that every year
the president said that things would get better in Sierra Leone, and every year things got worse.

I said to myself, “A change is gonna come, one day a change is gonna come.”

As we drove away from the scared little boys scavenging in the filthy ditch, I felt something popping in my chest. I clutched
the area with my hand and realized that it was my heart… pounding, breaking. Each and every hour of every day I woke up in
Sweet Salone it broke a little more. I remained silent and tried to stay poised as our caravan snaked up into the mountainous
area of Sierra Leone.

I began thinking about my own children and how blessed they were. I began thinking about my experience in Namibia with Craig
Matthews. I remembered how hard I watched him work, trying to make things better for the Himba people. I felt something wet
running down my face. At first I thought it was a drop of the light rain that had started to fall outside. It wasn’t. I was
crying. I remembered asking Craig how he could stand to be away from his family for so long. His answer rang in my mind’s
ear just as it had those many years ago. I heard him say,
“This, Isaiah, is my passion,” as if he were there saying it to me at that moment. I turned my face away from my driver, stared
out the window, and wiped away my tears.

We arrived at the Bo Hospital on May 27, 2006. I met with Dr. Andrew T. Muana, the physician in charge, and asked Dr. Panossian
to interview him. Built in the 1940s, the Bo Hospital was in extremely poor condition. It didn’t have clean running water,
electricity, sterile instruments, or gloves. The staff washed and reused the rubber gloves they had. Their operating room
didn’t have any modern instruments. The hospital had no oxygen tank or bottles anywhere on the site for emergencies. They
used tall “wooden crucifixes,” slats of scrap wood they nailed together, as their IV poles.

The children’s malnutrition ward looked like a makeshift refugee camp, and the ICU that housed patients suffering from AIDS
was a devastating sight. To say I was floored by what I saw would be an understatement. I walked the darkened corridors lined
with empty sockets yearning for lightbulbs, past moaning, dying patients lying on hardwood makeshift beds, standing next to
the six-foot-tall makeshift crucifix IV poles. It was as if their eyes were beseeching me, their gazes burning through me
asking, “Why has the world forgotten us?” “Why are we left unheard?” “Why are we being left here to rot and die without dignity?”

The hospital staff looked as forlorn and as helpless as their sick and dying patients. The nurses had the “thousand-yard stare,”
physically their bodies were there in the hospital, but their minds and spirits seemed to have departed. Desperation and hope
seemed to be waging a fight for the light, but desperation was winning. I felt so helpless; I didn’t know where to even begin
to help. I pulled out a copy of Jeffrey Sachs’s UN Millennium Project and left it for Dr. Muana. I didn’t know what else to
do.

I was so overwhelmed that finally I had to walk away from my camera crew. I found a dark and unused room, stepped inside,
and just cried. “God,” I asked, “why would you bring me here and not be able to do anything? God,
please,
tell me what to do!”

I walked out of the room and picked up a little boy who was lying there alone, suffering from malnutrition. He seemed so determined
to live. I felt empowered by his little spirit and immensely humbled by his will to live. As I walked out of the children’s
ward I heard myself pledging to the doctors and staff that I would help raise awareness of the plight of Sierra Leone and
do everything within my power to provide positive and timely improvements for their hospital. Even as I said the words, I
knew it would be (and it still is) a Herculean task, but somebody had to let the world know what was going on there.

As the day progressed I became increasingly more agitated. I couldn’t recall a time in my life when I ever felt more helpless.
What I was feeling was beyond culture shock now. I was feeling completely powerless.

During a meeting with the members of the BO Council, I felt my spirit shift from the despair I had been feeling earlier to
something different. In the middle of the meeting I felt compelled to say, “Before I’m inducted as an honorary chief tomorrow,
my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother says that she forgives you.”

The women in the council dropped their heads. The men sat there staring at me, speechless. Raymond’s brother, Alieu Manga,
jumped up and shouted, “There were extenuating circumstances, there were extenuating circumstances, there were extenuating
circumstances then! What would you have done?” he asked.

I heard myself say, “I would have died before I sold you away.”