Sugar Daddy

He said we were going to a Wesleyan school, but it looked to me like a back ally. After Ruth's story, I guess I should have been afraid—but Saidu had worked too hard to make sure I was getting out of here tomorrow to give me any concern.

The school was started by a woman named Frances who was well-educated, but more interested in giving girls in Sierra Leone an opportunity to survive than to give herself an opportunity to succeed. During the war, when Frances' baby was just eight months old, she had been forced to jump out of a second story window with her child in her arms as the building erupted into flames. The little boy got a concussion and she didn't know where her husband was, but she couldn't make a noise or the rebels would have found her. (You still see many burnt out buildings everywhere you go—most of them, like this one, inhabited again.) Against all odds, Frances escaped, her son lived, and she reunited with her husband. When the war ended they opened this school for girls, which teaches the typical math, english, and geography classes as well as marketable skills like sewing and soapmaking—all between the hours of 2-5 in the afternoon so the girls can keep their day jobs.

The students called Frances Momma, and I know she earned that title. This run-down little campus is the only safe place the girls have. Each one of those I interviewed today told me basically the same story: they had lived upcountry and had to run for safety after their parents were killed by rebels; it had been drilled into them that education was their only chance for a better life, and they were fighting for this opportunity—sometimes sneaking away from their "guardians" who enslaved them in the home or from their "sugar daddies" who provided for their physical needs, and always working to raise enough money for the minimal school fee.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" I asked them. Their answers were either owning their own businesses (i.e., selling their own products from stalls along the road) or becoming teachers to help others. All of them had goals, and I believe each of them will reach it. They have already overcome so much.

Frances and I talked about the girls for a bit after they had all gone back to class. "It's hard," she said, "when I know how they're making their money to come here."

I'm ashamed to admit that my first impulse was to accept the situation. Surely they would be forgiven for this kind of behavior. And what else could they do?

"But I'm not afraid to lecture them about this," Frances continued. "They think it is the only way, but it's not. God will provide a way," she says. "God will provide a way."