About Elizabeth SanFilippo

Elizabeth SanFilippo graduated from The University of Chicago in June 2008, with a Master's Degree in Humanities/Creative Writing. Her favorite female author is Laurie Lynn Drummond, who she admires because of the way she weaves crime stories with everyday female concerns.

When Elizabeth isn't drawing portraits or working as a freelance writer and editor, she is finishing her first novel, which is about the life of a heroic woman named Charlotte Corday.

Juanita's Story

Growing up, Juanita C. watched Sesame Street, knew popular nursery rhymes, took piano lessons, and attended her junior high prom. She also knew the difference between an AK47 and an RPG gun.

“A kid is not supposed to have that kind of inside knowledge,” Juanita says, now 25-years-old, about her childhood in war-torn Sierra Leone. “Growing up in a war zone makes you more aware.”

Civil war began in 1992 as a result of individuals angry at the corrupt government for the disparity between the rural poor and the wealthy.  Over the course of the next five years, there were five changes in president.

In 1997, the civil war grew worse, after Liberian rebels—also battling a civil war of their own—spilled into Sierra Leone’s south. According to Juanita, little by little these rebels made their way north, attacking villages as they moved closer to Juanita’s hometown and Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, with the goal of overtaking the Sierra Leonean government as well as control of Sierra Leone’s number one export, diamonds.

Juanita all too clearly remembers the Sunday morning the Liberian rebels arrived in Freetown. “We woke up to gunshots. It wasn’t very surprising because gunshots go off all the time.” But both Juanita and her mother felt there was something different about this coup.

“We’d had coups before but this one; what made it bad was the people of the city got tired of everything and they were just like ‘you know what, I refuse to go to work for a new government,’” Juanita explains. “So, pretty much, the civilian populace rebelled. This was what made it even worse. My dad was a medical government doctor and he was part of one of the civilian groups of doctors who refused to go to work because he was tired of [the corrupt governments].”

Rebels typically titled their offensives with names like “Operation Burn House.” This time, in May 1997 when the rebels reached Freetown, the offensive was called “Operation No Living.”

“Can you imagine?” Juanita exclaims. “That was their tactic! They were coming to the city and killing off everything in their way.”

Juanita grew quiet when discussing her experiences during the guerrilla fighting. “I saw everything,” she remembers.  “I saw people getting killed. We had curfews and if someone was caught outside the curfew, you would be shot because they would think you were a rebel.”

She will also never forget what she saw one day when she went to the market. “I saw somebody hacked in the back with a machete, and that was very gruesome for me.”

Some of her friends were captured as sex slaves. “They were 15, 16 years old,” Juanita says. “And these were well-to-do, regular girls like me and you.”

She also has friends whose arms were chopped off by the Liberian rebels. “What they say, when they get a hold of you, they ask your opinion, ‘What do you want? Short sleeves?’ they cut you off from here.” Juanita points to her upper arm. “‘Long sleeves?’ They chop it off from here.” She points to her wrist.

“I was lucky,” she says.

Another day seared into Juanita’s memory was the morning her mother woke her and said that her father had been nearly beaten to death.

Her family owned two homes, one in the capital where her father used to work and one at the nearby university where her mother taught. “Pretty much, [my father] was attacked for not going to work, and they were about to kill him,” Juanita explains. “But every time they attack someone, they loot the house also.”

When the rebels started looting their house in Freetown, according to Juanita, the guard watching her father felt left out for not getting a chance to take his share so he left Juanita’s father without supervision.

At that moment, Juanita says her father thought, “I’m not going to survive this if I stay here, so I might as well make a dash for it.”

“And it’s unbelievable,” Juanita recounts. “Every time I explain it, people can’t believe that he actually survived. We lived in a two-story house, and he was upstairs. And we had a back door that took a lot to even open it up. In that split second he ran, with everything he could to the back door. And he said, ‘I’m telling you, for once, that old back door actually opened in one go.’”

By the time the rebels started chasing him, he was already climbing over the back wall.

While Juanita says her father was lucky to survive, the family’s trials were not over. Her father was a Gambian national, which meant that he was citizen of Gambia and not of Sierra Leone. As such, he and his family were provided the opportunity to evacuate when all the other nationals, including British and French, did.

Unfortunately, her father’s injuries were too severe, and he was in no condition to be on a refugee ship. The family decided to stay in Sierra Leone until his health improved.

“It was a lowest point, because by then everybody had [been] evacuated,” Juanita recalls. “If you could get out, that was when you had to get out. It was a complete sense of destituteness, because we were now in it for the worst. We were running out of food… we had to start living off the land.”

When Juanita’s father recovered, he gathered money from around the house to pay for passage to Guinea, Sierra Leone’s neighbor to the north. The family took with them two nylon plastic bags, her father’s briefcase with important documents, and a bag of clothing and food. “That’s all we left Sierra Leone with,” Juanita says.

The family traveled by car through rebel territory, bribing rebels whenever they were stopped. After two days, Juanita’s family arrived in a border town and were then forced to walk for a nearly a day to Guinea, because cars were not allowed over the border. In Guinea, they were refugees for about a week until her father’s family paid for their airfare to Gambia, where they lived for the next three years.

When Juanita was 16, her mother was accepted by University of Kansas’s philosophy PhD program and the family moved to the U.S.

“We came in the middle of winter and snow was foreign to us,” Juanita admits. “I stopped dead in my tracks several times on the way to school because I was convinced someone was throwing stones at me. But it was hail falling.”

Then there was Juanita’s first 4th of July. “Me and my brother hid,” Juanita laughed. “We obviously equated that noise, the fireworks, with gunshots. We turned off all the lights, and closed the blinds.”

Juanita finished high school in Kansas, graduated from St. Lawrence University in New York, and moved to Chicago to work for an immigration law firm as a paralegal. “I understand the life of refugees and immigrants in general; I love interacting with cultures and people from all over the world,” Juanita says. She’s currently studying at John Marshall Law School in Chicago so that she can return to Sierra Leone and make a big impact. Her mother returned following the end of the war in 2003.

“We just had elections last year in which the opposition won the elections and there was a peaceful transition to power. There’s still a lot to be done in terms of rebuilding of ruined infrastructure. The war sent us back at least 20 years, but from all indications we’re rebuilding slowly but surely,” Juanita says hopefully.

While Juanita is excited about the progress Sierra Leone is making, she remains disappointed by the lack of attention the war received around the world. “It was a very bad timing for the war to happen,” Juanita explained. “[Operation No Living Thing happened] when you had the whole Kosovo thing going on, and the Rwanda thing had just happened, and so people were not really attuned to it because they were like, ‘oh, yet again, the Africans are killing themselves.’ The war wasn’t getting a lot of attention so we felt very left out. It barely made the news overseas, only the BBC was really covering it.”

Due to this lack of coverage, Juanita knows the importance of telling her story, even though she doesn’t like to talk much about her experiences. “During the war, as my friends and I hid, we used to tell each other that whoever makes it out should not forget to tell the world what it is that we witnessed.” As a result, Juanita shares her story with those who’ve asked, like coworker Renae Riley.

When Renae learned that Juanita was in Sierra Leone during the war, she was surprised. “In my ignorance, I immediately blurted out, ‘What was that like?’” Renae says. “To which she just laughed and asked me if I’d read, Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Solider.”

Renae was horrified after reading the book, which documents the story of Ishmael Beah, as a boy of 12, after he is abducted and forced to fight in the Sierra Leone war. “It was such a gruesome book,” Renae said. “I had to repeatedly put it down and walk away from it, and I couldn’t believe that this calm, optimistic, and gifted young woman I’d come to know had lived through these horrors and emerged seemingly untraumatized.”