Quotes & Sayings About Sierra Leone

We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food. — Ishmael Beah

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life. — Ishmael Beah

I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought. — Ishmael Beah

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity. — Graham Greene

However, I think, first of all, that what's happening in Sierra Leone is going to have the great influence on those governments who will be asked to provide forces to the Congo. Second, of course, the Security Council has no professional military advice organized in any way. — Alex Morrison

The life changing moment for me what the first time I went to a war zone and that was Sierra Leone. I took two weeks, eleven years ago and I went. I wasn't an Ambassador or anything I just asked to go and I was allowed to go. It was like someone smacked me in the face. — Angelina Jolie

By 1445 they had reached the mouth of the Senegal River; in 1458 they discovered and colonized the Cape Verde Islands; by 1462 they had reached Sierra Leone; and in 1473 the Portuguese mariner Lopo Goncalves crossed the equator. — Clark B. Hinckley

I want to go to Sierra Leone with something - whether it's some sort of contribution to healthcare, or to the entertainment industry. My cousin is a nurse; we are talking about opening a clinic. — Idris Elba

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life. — Aminatta Forna

There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control. — Edward Zwick

Sierra Leone and Liberia must remain vigilant, that if you think somebody is sick with Ebola, you must get help immediately. Otherwise there could be a resurgence of Ebola. So everybody must remain vigilant. — Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

Sometimes people ask me how difficult the astronaut program was, but being in Sierra Leone, being responsible for the health of more than 200 people, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at age 26 - that prepared me to take on a lot of different challenges. — Mae Jemison

The U.S. should support the Nigerian government to stay in Sierra Leone under the ECOMOG umbrella. The U.S. should also support other countries, including Ghana, in ECOMOG until stability is established. — Ed Royce

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them. — Ishmael Beah

In Sierra Leone last year there was just the two of us hanging out of a helicopter and, when we were in Bosnia, I drove an armoured vehicle, thousands of miles. — Kate Adie

I received so many hate letters when I breast-fed a starving baby in Africa. I was in Sierra Leone in 2009 and I was weaning my child at that time - she was not there with me. There was a hungry baby who was crying because his mother had no milk, and I thought, 'Why throw away my milk if I can give it to a baby who needs it?' — Salma Hayek

Today, the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse, with the exception of a few isolated pockets in Papua New Guinea, India, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Tanzania, Kenya, or Sierra Leone, where "witches" are still burned to death. A 2002 World Health Organization study, for example, reported that every year more than 500 elderly women in Tanzania alone are killed for being "witches." In Nigeria, children by the thousands are being rounded up and torched as "witches," and in response the Nigerian government arrested a self-styled bishop named Okon Williams, who it accused of killing 110 such children. — Michael Shermer

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter. — Ishmael Beah

Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone. — Ishmael Beah

I think they do have to get it right in Sierra Leone. There has to be something in there now to establish confidence, to stabilize the situation, and then to move to some sort of political negotiations. — Alex Morrison

I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world. — Ishmael Beah

As children in a small village in Sierra Leone, my friends and I dreamed of travelling the world like the missionaries who opened our village school. As a British subject, I dreamed of walking the streets of London. I imagined my self in the United States of America visiting the places where the cowboy movies were made. — Francis Mandewah

The Nigerians have been very instrumental in preserving stability in Sierra Leone. They have done this at considerable cost in dollars and Nigerian lives. The US should encourage Nigeria to stay in Sierra Leone. — Ed Royce

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living. — Ishmael Beah

Guinea has managed to go 42 days consecutively without any new Ebola infections. And that comes after neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia, the other two West African countries that were hardest hit by Ebola, have been through the same cycle of zero Ebola cases. — Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

I would hate to see operations in the Congo held hostage to Sierra Leone but I really think that's the way it's got to be. At one point we've got to decide to get it right and we've got to be professional. — Alex Morrison

Though it's thousands of miles away
Sierra Leone connect to what we go through today
Over here, its a drug trade, we die from drugs
Over there, they die from what we buy from drugs — Kanye West

There was something that was killing the people in the interior, in the forest area, of the country, and nobody quite knew what it was. That lasted a good three months before it was officially declared that it was Ebola virus. So it started off in Guinea and spread quite slowly, but then spread over the border into Sierra Leone and Liberia. — Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun. — Ishmael Beah

I've been wanting to make a movie about the war in Sierra Leone, specifically, for more than 15 years. — Cary Fukunaga

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences. — Romeo Dallaire

The global village is deteriorating at a rapid pace, and in the children of the world the result is rage. It is the rage I saw in the eyes of the teenage Interahamwe militiamen in Rwanda, it is the rage I sensed in the hearts of the children of Sierra Leone, it is the rage I felt in crowds of ordinary civilians in Rwanda, and it is the rage that resulted in September 11. Human beings who have no rights, no security, no future, no hope and no means to survive are a desperate group who will do desperate things to take what they believe they need and deserve. — Romeo Dallaire

I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project. — Tim Butcher

I guess what I'd like to say is that people in Sierra Leone are human beings, just like Americans. They want to send their kids to school; they want to live in peace; they want to have their basic rights of life just like everyone else. I think we all owe an obligation to support people who want to do that. — Ishmael Beah

Ebola, that little bastard of a bug, had popped up earlier in the summer in Sierra Leone in the worst outbreak in history. Was it possible that global warming had changed something important about the ecological balance in Africa and turned it into an optimal, continent-sized petri dish for breeding that virus? — Bobby Adair

Ebola has killed almost 12,000 people and at least 500 health workers. So it affected the entire population. And as you know, the World Health Organization was accused of not having declared an epidemic soon enough. And that's when we saw Ebola rampaging through Sierra Leone, Liberia and, to a lesser extent, Guinea. — Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

Over the years, the diamond industry has had a devastating impact in countries such as Sierra Leone, Angola and the Congo, where profits from the sale of diamonds have been used to fund brutal wars, with disastrous effects on local communities. — Sheherazade Goldsmith

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life. — Carolyn See