Clutching my father’s hand, I stared at the rebel soldiers pointing machine guns at us.
One looked at me with piercing eyes.
‘You! Come here,’ he said.
The civil war had raged in Sierra Leone in West Africa for eight years.
With a wonderful protective father, Yayah, a businessman, I’d lived a happy and privileged life with my eight siblings.
I’d heard horrifying stories of the brutal Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels using women as sex slaves and human shields in other areas of the country.
In 1998, when the rebels drew closer to Freetown, where we lived, my father
