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This is Red Cross Radio. I’m Becky Webb and today we’re looking at a project that helps former child soldiers in Sierra Leone recover after years of violence.
During the ten-year civil war that raged throughout Sierra Leone, tens of thousands of children were forced to join fighting factions. The legacy of this systematic recruitment is a generation of young people who have both seen and committed unthinkable atrocities.
One young woman, who I’ll call Helen in order to protect her, has a story that is truly tragic. She’s 18 years old now, but when she was just 11 or 12 her parents were murdered and she was kidnapped and force-fed cocaine to desensitise her. She became a child soldier and then a young mother. When the war was over, she turned to commercial sex work because it was the only way she and her child could survive.
Helen is just one of the young people whose lives have been turned around because of the Red Cross’ child advocacy and rehabilitation, or CAR, programme in Sierra Leone.
There are four CAR centres across the country, which have helped more than 3,000 young people develop skills, like carpentry, that can help them get jobs. Helen now has a tailoring apprenticeship and is hoping to be able to support herself and her child soon.
Just as importantly, the CAR centres offer young people counselling to help them recover from the traumas they experienced.
I went to Sierra Leone and spoke with Nancy Bocari, project officer for the CAR centre in Kailahun.
Becky Webb: Can you tell me a little bit about what the project here does and who it helps.
Nancy Bocari: The project, child advocacy and rehabilitation, in short we call it CAR, caters for children who are greatly affected by the ten-year civil war in Sierra Leone. They are trained in various skills. We have six skills at the centre we are doing. We have tailoring, gara tie-dye and soap making, we have carpentry, we have BBC or brick block laying and concreting, we have cloth weaving and we have agriculture.
BW: And what kind of things have the children here been through, why do they need the support so much?
NB: They need the support so much because they were greatly traumatised by the war. Some of them, they were going to school but during the war they stopped. Their work won’t permit allow them to continue their school. They have to go into skills training in order to help them for self reliance, because they need not to be dependable on their parents. They are big enough and some of them have children. These children they got from the war, they have no father because the fathers of the children they are rebels and maybe they cannot accept them. So all their responsibilities rely on them, so they have to take care of all these.
If they don’t have any way of getting sources like they go into stealing or do bad things in order to make them live, commercial sex workers.
So in order to deprive them from that we have this centre. They go through skills training. At the end of the skills training, we give them certificates. We take them back into their communities.
Some of them had conflicts with their parents, with their communities, because of their ways, because of what they did during the war so at the centre we train them, we take them back into the community and we reintegrate them so that they will become useful in the community, the community will accept them.
Now, whilst they are at the centre since they are traumatised – they are war-affected children – we have this psychosocial support, we give them psychosocial support, what do we mean by psychosocial support? We counsel them. We help them come over their problems and guide them how to solve their problems. We counsel them so that they will know, they won’t lose their hopes, they can still be somebody tomorrow.
BW: And the centre today from what I see, it’s very busy and noisy and there’s lots going on. Is it always like this?
NB: Always like that! As you see, everyday they go through these trainings because we come in the mornings, we have a morning assembly after the assembly we do registration, after registration we go into basic education.
Basic education is another part of the programme because if you are doing skills, because some of these beneficiaries have never been to school and whatever you do you need to count; you need to do measurement; you need to learn instructions, read instructions. So we allow them to do basic, we teach them basic education, numeracy, literacy and some environmental studies so that they should know exactly what they are doing. Then after that, they go into skills. As you can see we have various skills, everybody goes into his or her various skills and it’s a kind of competition, everybody wants to learn something.
BW: To find out more about the British Red Cross’ work with civilians affected by armed conflict, go to redcross.org.uk/conflict. If you’d like to read Helen’s story, visit redcross.org.uk/Helen.
Thank you for listening to Red Cross Radio. If you have any comments or suggestions, please email us at podcasts@redcross.org.uk. | 
