by Chelsea, Michele, Danielle, and Morgan
 

Sierra Leone is a country in West Africa that is having a very bad war.  Children from villages are being kidnapped by rebels and being forced to help the rebels by fighting, cooking, caring for them and sometimes even going against their own villages.  Some of these children manage to escape.  The children who manage to escape go to camps where they get cared for, receive food, shelter, and emotional help.  After a while, the people who run the camps feel they need to return the children to their own villages. Some of the villages don't want these children back because of the crimes they have committed.  We learned a lot about this from Wendy Smith who works with the International Rescue Committee. The IRC is working in several locations in Sierra Leone to help these children return to their villages.

There are so many other horrible things that are happening in this country.  Many people in the US do not know of this because there is so little media on it. 

We made a poster for our bake sale and exhibit on Thursday, June 8, 2000, with some recent articles in the New York Times and Time Magazine on Sierra Leone to help people at Dalton learn more.

America has paid a lot of attention to other countries and has forgotten about Sierra Leone.  This is what America doesn't know.