Saturday, November 29th

In the morning I drove over to the Cathedral area of Makeni which is on the other side of the town from where our Xaverian Community Center is. At 10:00am I had an appointment with a young Canadian journalist who is here for some months, teaching at the Fatima Institute in the Communications Department as well as doing some free lance work. We chatted for a while about the challenge of reintegration of combatants and ordinary civilians as well as the challenge of linking Government with ordinary people and the lack of trust that hinders attempts to bridge these two realities. He found the perspectives helpful in understanding some of the barriers to a holistic reintegration of society post war. The challenges are many - challenges from the past as well as present.

I had been invited to lunch by one of the local priests, Fr. Daniel Samura. Daniel had been with me in Kabala 30 years ago as a young aspirant to the priesthood and he spent the first long vacation with Fr. Aniello Salicone and myself in that parish. It was great to be together after 30 years and to share the stories of those years. On my way back to the Center, I stopped in another parish to visit with Fr. Gabriel Koroma, one of the older local priests, having been ordained in 1980. Again, it was a warm and wonderful reunion, talking over fresh pineapple (which one only finds in Sierra Leone) about the stories of those years of war and woe.

At 4:00pm I met with representatives of the Diocesan Justice and Peace and Human Rights Commission. This initiative of Bishop Biguzzi and Fr. Joe Turay has the support of Caritas Italiana and is composed of a 5 person team that gathers information, monitors situations, and offers advocacy to those victimized by injustice in any way it can. There is a legal department to this commission outreach called Access to Justice which offers professional legal services to those in need. I spoke of Access the other day when I visited the Bikers Association, one of their service outreach constituencies. With their representatives, Mr. Paul Massaquoi and Albert, we reviewed some of the major issues that they are working on and I offered them some of my thoughts from the visit so far. There are some core issues that need to be addressed to avoid future conflicts in Sierra Leone.

On my way to the Sisters of Cluny for supper, I stopped at the home of Bishop Biguzzi. I had not had the chance to visit his home which had been destroyed and rebuilt after the war. He was glad to see me there, and we had a chance to have an in-depth conversation about some of my experiences for about an hour.

At long last I was able to met the Sisters of Cluny for supper. Their community has been in Sierra Leone since the time of their foundress, Sr Anne Marie Jahoway, who herself worked in Sierra Leone. Sr. Mary Sweeney, the manager of the Girls RC School as well as the School for the Hearing Impaired has been a friend of mine since my days in the Education Office. We opened the hearing impaired school together in the early 1980s. There is a Togolese Sister as well as two Sisters from India that are in the Makeni community now. Together, we enjoyed an evening of stories and laughter and friendship. I admire their willingness to continue to serve as they do in this challenging environment.