The United Methodist Committee on Relief has been working alongside other churches in the war-torn country of Liberia, western Africa, to help former child soldiers capture back their lost childhoods, reports the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church.
More than 250,000 people have lost their lives in the country’s 14-year-long civil war with another 500,000 left displaced. More than 300,000 Liberians have since fled to neighbouring countries.
“I have never seen a place like Liberia that has been so destroyed by warring factions,” said Marcos Melaku, head of mission in Liberia for UMCOR.
Fifteen-year-old Philip Karhan, who was beaten and kidnapped from his home, is just one of more than 15,000 teenagers who lost their childhoods when they were forced to become child soldiers by warlords such as Charles Taylor.We have to help these people to restart life, to own something which they would protect as individuals, as social groups, as communities.
Marcos Melaku, head of mission in Liberia for UMCOR
“I fought for two years,” he said. “I was forced to fight. The people here fighting, catching people go to fight. I was beaten and forced – taken from my family.”
Karhan has living for the past year in an interim care centre in Virginia, Liberia, run by the Catholic Church.
“We are in the phase of reconstruction, rehabilitation and attending to emergency situations,” said Melaku.
UMCOR has been working with the child victims through its training centre for ex-combatants called the Apprenticeship Skills Training and Accelerated Learning Programme in Monrovia. The 8-month programme provides the former soldiers with vocational skills and literacy training.
Counsellors are essential to the transition process, said Sheku Sillh, who manages the training programme: “United Methodist counsellors meet and talk with them – tell them the need for peace, the need to make themselves self-sufficient.”
