Meet Ramatu Bangura
Sierra Leone is still recovering from a well documented, decade long civil war which officially ended in January 2002.
Village Aid has been working in Sierra Leone for 15 years, supporting local community-based organisations (CBOs) to carry out appropriate and culturally relevant development projects.
Ramatu Bangura is now 47 years old (already above Sierra Leone’s national average life expectancy of 41). Like many women in West Africa Ramatu became a mother and housewife at a young age. She always desired to go to school but coming from a poor, rural family she was denied the opportunity, instead being married off after her father died.
Ramatu, like almost all Sierra Leoneans did'nt escape the war. Her husband and two of her three children died during the conflict and she found herself as a refugee, laying low in Freetown, the capital of the country.
It was only after this traumatic period of her life, towards the end of the conflict that Ramatu was able to once again think about herself and focus on her future.
At the turn of the millenium in mid 2000 she attended a literacy training workshop which was hosted by Village Aid’s partner SLYEO (Sierra Leone Youth Empowerment Project). This workshop taught Ramatu to read and write in native, relevant languages so that she was able to communicate effectively and find work. Using this training she became a voluntary workshop facilitator, responsible for taking the very same literacy training workshop into other rural villages.
Five years later, after much success with the REFLECT workshop in the Tonkolili district in 2005, Ramatu made the decision to become a teacher (no easy task in a country with such high unemployment rates). After a lot of hard work she prevailed and was hired at a local secondary school with a very rural catchment area.
This is where Village Aid, in May 2010 find her again, eleven years since our last encounter. Ramatu is doing what she always dreamed of and spending her remaining years educating, inspiring and equipping the next generation of Sierra Leoneans to fulfil their own dreams.