Imagine six months of dry, dusty climate, and thunder clouds are rolling toward your neighborhood in a cool, dark mist. Now pretend that you are the children of a West African village waiting under the tin roofs of your mud huts for the clouds to burst and bathe you in a downpour of thirst-quenching rain. Showering in the rain is so much nicer than standing in the trickle of murky water from the stream half a mile away that you have been using to wash yourself each evening after finishing your work on the farm. These rains, marking the beginning of the planting season, bring joy for the children and adults alike. Everyone takes the opportunity to sing and to dance while the rains pours down our bodies. We drink straight from the sky until our bellies are full and refreshed. The rain that falls into our buckets and our pots is stored in large clay bins for use later on. This is a memory from my childhood in Sierra Leone in West Africa. I am from the Mende tribe. I was born the seventh of nine children, and I am the only one to receive a formal education outside of the traditional Mende practices. I attended college at the University of Sierra Leone, studying history. I came to North Carolina in 1986 to join my fiancee, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in the town where I had gone to teach high school students. Most rural Sierra Leoneans assume that America is a place where a better life is in reach for everyone. My family - especially my mother, Mata Gbateh - did not think that way. They were not impressed by Western culture or its materials benefits. They preferred the practices and routines of life in the tropical rainforest, where generations of extended family had proceeded them on ancestral farmlands. My mother and my grandparents, well-respected community leaders, were concerned with continuing and strengthening Mende village life, a peaceful and nonviolent ways of life. They believed my willingness to marry and live abroad was the result of “too much book” and not enough farm work. My mother was proudest of the fact that all eight of my brother and sisters wanted to be farmers. They could feed their families and take care of the coffee and cocoa plantations that my father had put in as “life insurance” should the weather not cooperate to produce our subsistence-level rice crop. My father died when I was just two years old. According to my mother, he had hoped I would become a blacksmith.

In our remote village of Bunumbu, the elders often told stories about colonial times of their childhood. In those days, British missionaries established schools and churches in our region and co-opted our leaders to work in them. These Westerners exploited divisions among the Mende people in an effort to change the language, the traditions and the customs of out tribe, the very things the elders believed comprised the goodness of village life.

When these stories were told, my mother would often say: “If our people throw away what we know and take something new, we will have nothing. The English and the Sierra Leoneans who incorporate these new beliefs don’t have an understanding of the Mende people and how we know what we know. We belong to our past and to our future. It is our responsibility to protect the knowledge and the history of our people.” My mother was a respected herbalist who carried with her an extensive oral history of our people, our stories and songs, as well as, the herbal mixtures that healed otherwise deadly diseases.

Not surprisingly, her last words to me as I packed my few belongings onto the lorry for Freetown, the capital city, were: “Balema bila meheima.” Remember your food. “Balema bila meheima” was her way of reminding me that community is the food for every human life. She understood that a sense of community and belonging protects one from being lost in the world. She was worried that I would not find a place to belong in America. I was 24 at the time, and I had a lot more growing up to do.

Since my arrival in North Carolina 13 years ago, I have shared my memories of Sierra Leone with students in public school, community centers, summer camps, and other places where children gather. Working as a freelance artist and storyteller, I relate the customs and small adventures that life can present in a remote and seemingly poor rural setting. I tell how history has connected this part of America to the west coast of Africa. Slaves were exported from my country to the Carolinas and Georgia because of their expertise in rice agriculture. I hope my stories will instill among my students a curiosity about Africa, their own family histories, and about the culture many of them came from. I want to connect the values my mother taught me to the children in this country, and my own two children, Juju, 9, and Jebe, 3. Sharing my experience is the best way I have figured out to belong here while fulfilling my mother’s wish and my own conviction that remembering my food is a worthy way to make a living.

In 1991, civil war broke out in Sierra Leone, spilling over from the neighboring Liberia. Rebel armies rampaged across the eastern part of the country, seizing control of the mines and valuable natural resources. The village of Bunumbu was one of the hundreds that were destroyed by children and youths kidnapped by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), then forced to take drugs so they could commit otherwise unimaginable acts of terror on their families and communities. Twenty thousand innocent people are dead. Ten thousand more have had arms, legs, lips, and other body parts cut off or mutilated. In a country of just 5 million people, there are more than 1 million refugees.

Two months ago, a peace agreement was reached. The democratically elected president invited the rebel faction into a coalition government. Because this faction represents a rogue army that has terrorized the population, it seems unlikely the agreement will hold. My mother worried about what I might lose by emigrating. Those who stayed have lost almost everything. Their homes were burned to the ground, some with people inside. Their farms were abandoned. Those who escaped to refugee camps were completely traumatized by the time they arrived, sometimes after months of hiding in the bush before they could arrive safely. I am often sad that the Mende way of life that I celebrate in my work is now lost not just to me, because I left, but for those who stayed and experienced horror that is hard to wrap around my mind.

Before my mother died in 1995, she told my sister Howa to tell me that she dreamt it was time for her to go, she was tired. I knew that meant that, as an old woman, she didn’t want to begin reclaiming the work of a lifetime. Living day to day in a refugee camp with poor facilities, rampant disease, and limited supplies of food was not something my mother could ever imagine for herself or her family. She spent her last year living in Freetown, which remained outside the rebels’ grip in the western part of Sierra Leone. It was a place she went only because my sister told her that she would be able to talk to me on the telephone. Until then, my mother had never seen a telephone.

I will never forget the day when my phone rang in Durham and I heard my mother’s voice on the other end. She had stood in line six hours at the national telephone headquarters to call. “Howa has brought me out of hiding in the bush to this strange city. There is too much noise in the streets at night. I cannot sleep. I have spent the last four months eating only roots and berries. In the distance, I have seen rebel children high on drugs. They wear Nikes and shoot people who are not fighting for or against with machine guns. I do not want to know this life. This is not what my life is made of.”

When I went to Freetown five months later to say goodbye, Howa and I arranged for her to return to the Mende region, with the help of secret connections, through the bush. After I returned to North Carolina, I learned that she died peacefully in my brother’s arms not far from home, as was her wish. The following year, disease killed my brother Amara and his wife, leaving six children behind.

Last month, my sister Howa called me from Freetown. She alone of my seven surviving brothers and sisters and their families is not living in a refugee camp. So it is the two of us who are trying to shoulder the burden of caring for Amara’s children. Howa has been making the traditional tie-dye gara and selling it over the Internet. But with the airlines shut down, her business is limited. My family is not able to harvest the coffee and cocoa that my father once imagined as security for all of us. The life’s work of my parents and grandparents has been destroyed. My entire family is in dire straits.

The elders in my village used to say, “If trouble comes upon one’s household and becomes too big to handle, then one must ask for a neighbor in the community for help.” Remembering my promise to my mother to remember my food, I am asking for help. Of course, my family is just one of thousands who need humanitarian aid. But in the words of Grandma Nematu, my mother’s mother, “Kuwai ala kuwai mahun.” Literally, this means, “Of one has two shoes, the bottom one goes first.” In other words, we have to start somewhere.

Following this article a fund-raiser was held on Oct. 16 1999, which raised $1,600 for the Moiwai family in the Knema Refugee Camp in Sierra Leone.

*as printed in the Oct. 13, 1999 edition of The Independent Weekly, Durham, NC