Peep Sierra Leone

I met Sia Komba at the gate of the Bank of Sierra Leone. Her emancipated conditions drew my attention.

She was wearing a red frock and looked gaunt .Her face was swollen. At her side was a big blue and white plastic bag, commonly called ‘Ghana must go’ which probably contained all her worldly possessions. I asked Sia for her name. She told me and said she was 19 but as you can see from her photo she looked more like an old woman than a teenager.

Sia is suffering from tuberculosis. The disease is curable –but the social stigma around it is not.

“I’ve been ill for 18 months she said.  She claimed, wiping tears from her eyes that she received eight months treatment at Connaught Hospital but never got better. Connaught rejected her and she was now living on the streets.

Sia said she’d been going to school in Kono (Ansarul).But in JSS 3 she met an older woman she called ‘Titty.

Titty was a prostitute and she tempted Sia into the life.

“It was alright at first and I made a lot of money” Sia explains. But Titty’s boy friend’, who seemed to be a pimp, began demanding more and more money from her.

They moved to Freetown. Sia began selling wares on Sani Abacha Street. But money was slow coming in. She drifted back into prostitution and got pregnant.  Her daughter is 3 and lives with a relative at Waterloo.

She eventually got sick and both Titty and her partner evicted her from the shack they were squatting in near Government wharf.  Sia began to sleep on the street.

‘I slept on market stalls, in unfinished houses and on street corners, She was sleeping at a shop at Kroo Town Road when a man attempted to rape her.   “He beat me mercilessly, ripping my knickers and my clothes.

She was saved by some security guards nearby who heard the screaming.

She says that she’s tried to get admission at Lakka Hospital but they say they have no bed for me.

Now she begs around the Bank of Sierra Leone, and Law Court. She says she knows she will die if things continue like this. It is sad that a young Sierra Leonean should pass away in this sorry state.