Free The Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara Page B

were dogs, and people of all sizes and skin tones, speaking an array of Sierra Leone dialects. The smell of garbage, dirty bodies, and cooking food was sickening.
    Our new home was a big tent divided into eight rooms by canvas doors. It housed about five families, and each amputee was assigned one room. I shared mine with Abibatu and Fatmata, who had been living in Freetown with a distant relative. We looked right across at Adamsay’s room, where Marie and Alie were also going to sleep. All of the families shared a fire pit outside to cook food. The supplies we got from the camp were bulgur, cornmeal, cornstarch, palm oil, and beans—that was about it.
    There was little for anyone in Freetown at the time, let alone us injured kids. Due to the war, farmers could not bring their produce into the city to sell. Meat, cassava, beans, and fresh water were increasingly difficult to find. That responsibility soon fell to the kids. We became the breadwinners in our families through begging.
    There was a central place in the camp where everybody would congregate to hear news of the war. We learned there that rebels had crept many times into the camp at night and stolen the scant food that was available. “Be careful,” a woman who shared our tent warned us. “Don’t travel around the camp alone at night, and sleep with lots of people beside you. If you have a knife or a gun, keep it handy.”
    I knew that no one in my family had a weapon.
    A few people at the camp had tried to grow a garden, we heard, but the rebels had dug it up. There were rumors that the rebels had even invaded the medical supplies storage room and taken all the bandages, pills, medical equipment, and IVs. The rebels sent letters, according to some of the people at the camp, threatening to return. No one was sure if the rumors were true, but it scared us all to hear of the rebels’ words. One day someone at the camp read aloud a letter supposedly written by a rebel.
    We’re coming to get you. We’re coming back to finish you all off. The government isn’t helping us, but they’re helping you, taking care of you. So we are going to come back and chop off the hands of anyone who still has theirs, including the hands of the people looking after you. Why? Because you don’t deserve the help from the government, the money they are giving you, the clothes and food. But we do
.
    The letter chilled me to the bone, reigniting all my terrible memories. In fact, the words were a lie, because the government wasn’t helping us. There were more than 400 of us at the camp who didn’t have hands. At least four times that many people,mostly family members like Abibatu, Marie, and Alie, had moved there to look after the injured. The camp wasn’t really big enough for all of us—it was about the size of the soccer stadium in Freetown.
    Our relatives cooked for us and fed us. The camp received a shipment of flour once a month that was doled out to the first few hundred people in line. Our family had to show up early or we got nothing. The begging money my cousins and I collected paid for most of our food and clothes. On the days we didn’t earn much by begging, we ate nothing, or just a few spoonfuls of rice. We were starving.
    About a month after we moved to the camp, Abdul appeared one evening after dinner. Now that Mohamed and Ibrahim had Alie to help care for them, Abdul had settled back into his old life, running a small shop in Freetown. He said he wanted to tell the family something special and asked if we could gather the following night.
    Marie tried to prepare a nice dinner for Abdul. She collected the few leones we kids had saved from begging and went to the market to buy some fish. We all suspected we were about to have a celebration.
    After we had eaten our meal, Abdul told us the news. He was sitting beside Fatmata, and he stroked her hand as he spoke. “Fatmata and I are getting married!” he announced. Fatmata lowered her head shyly as Abdul kissed her