How a refugee turned mayor seeks to transcend politics of divisiveness
“You!” the rebel fighter pointed at Maddie Saab. “Come here!”
She and her fiancé, Wilmot Collins, knew it was dangerous to venture into the streets of Monrovia, the Liberian capital, in search of food.
But as the front lines of the civil war pushed further into the city, they had little choice. Their relatives’ home had been raided, and they were starving, eating toothpaste and licking mayonnaise laced with sugar off the palms of their hands for sustenance.
Now Ms. Saab stood in front of a man whose fellow comrades had killed and dismembered the president of Liberia just weeks before.
“You’re the president’s girlfriend,” she recalls the rebel saying to her. An AK-47 rested between his legs.
“No, sir,” Saab said, avoiding eye contact and motioning with her other hand to Mr. Collins to stay silent. “You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.” Finally, the rebel relented.
“You guys can go,” he said. “I’m tired of killing.”
They decided to leave the country two days later, on a Friday in October 1990. Collins’s mother handed them each $5 and said, “Go, and God be with you.” They headed to the port and waited in line for three days without food or water. On Sunday night a soldier tapped Saab: You, you’re going. Collins insisted on joining her on board, and the soldier finally relented in letting him leave, too.
They had no idea where the ship was headed.
Today, 28 years later, Collins spends his days with less-harrowing concerns. As the mayor of Helena, Mont. – one of few former refugees to become the chief executive of an American city – he finds his time taken up with replacing sewer pipes, debating outdoor smoking regulations, and ensuring that firetrucks can get through the
