A Broadcast of War's Brutality

Her peers have not always been so accepting. When she arrived in Alexandria at age 10 and enrolled at Ramsay Elementary School, some teased her. "They would call me a pirate or ask if I was one," she said. "Some of them would laugh at me and make me cry."

Her guardian, Amina Jah, contacted the school, and the teasers were made to apologize. Since then Damba has gotten good at sticking up for herself and answering questions with a disarming forthrightness.

"I'd like them to know ..... that what happened to me is not my fault; it's just something that I had nothing to do with," she explained, adding that showing the video felt good. "I'm kind of excited because it's kind of like a great feeling to let the whole world know what you've been through."

"And also to know what happened in Sierra Leone...I think it has to do with the government or something like that, but I don't really know."

Damba said she hopes the video will go beyond the halls of Hammond Middle School  she has drafted a letter to Oprah Winfrey that she plans to send along with the video.

Her teachers say her personality overshadows her disability. "She has this gift of making you feel good," said Elaine Brand, a school librarian who helped her make the video. "I don't know if it's what she went through or it's genetic  she's just a child with an intuitive spirit. ..... There are other children hiding all kinds of things in this school, and she is what she is, and she makes you want to be what you are."

Still, she faces challenges. In a rock-climbing course in PE class she was reduced to tears because she thought she couldn't do it, until her teacher told her she could, and with the help of her friends she scaled the wall. "I was surprised that I could do it," she said.

She surprises her new family, too. When she insisted on buying a pair of shoes with a complicated set of ribbons, Jah was skeptical, but Damba quickly went into her room and tied them herself.

The nightmares Damba had when she first arrived have gone away. So has her fear of going outside the small brick and clapboard house she shares with her "auntie" and "uncle" and their two young daughters. When she came home from school crying about the teasing, her guardians called her a princess. When people would stare at her stump in public, Jah grabbed it and kissed it.

"She likes that," Jah said, "and people stop looking at us."

Damba still badly misses her mother, who is back in the village farming with her other three children and a niece. The two talk every couple of months, whenever her mother makes it into the town where there is a telephone. Damba wants to visit her in Guinea, which they can both travel to, but the high cost means it won't happen for a while. In the meantime, her guardians send money and clothes to her mother when they can.

After the broadcast, when she walked into her language arts class, several students gathered to ask questions.