Kamakwie

Travelling with a medical team from World Hope Canada, journalist Kathleen Martin went to Sierra Leone in 2008, to write a book about child poverty and health care issues in the aftermath of the devastating civil war that tore Sierra Leone apart between 1991 and 2002. This exceptionally poignant book is the result of her visit to the village of Kamakwie, where she spent several weeks hearing the stories of children and adults and documenting their lives.

Anecdotal stories with buoyant full-page colour photographs give readers not only a sense of the enormous economic issues that face this community — which, Martin neatly notes, is just one tiny village affected by the tragedy of the civil war — but also of the wonderfully vibrant community’s resilience and desire to move on from the wounds of the past. What works best is Martin’s ability to give her readers a sense of her own personal journey and understanding of both the huge challenges facing a village like Kamakwie and the small gestures that make an inordinate difference, especially in the lives of the children. Martin isn’t shy about showing her own shortcomings, and this makes the book intimate in the best possible way. Her clearly articulated aim is to give readers an entree into Kamakwie and leave them with her own sense of the wonderful people of the village — especially the memorable children. Her book is the story of Marie, Brimah, Binty, Abu and Isotu, among so many others, rather than faceless survivors of the civil war.

But while this is a thoughtful and insightful book, this reader did wonder if teen readers find it engaging. It’s certainly a powerful book that asks difficult questions of Western nations — why didn’t we step in? Why did we not intervene when we could have? What can we do for the people of villages like Kamakwie? Martin has given us a passionate, compelling and challenging portrait of a world that most of us only know of through the media; hopefully teens will be moved to read it.