His mission is to help children, but Romeo Dallaire's return to Africa is also a chance to help himself as he copes with the recurring nightmare of Rwanda

By Allan Thompson. Toronto Star. Dec 15, 2001.  pg. K1 (National Report)

DARU, Sierra Leone – Romeo Dallaire has made the journey back to Africa to confront his demons, and finds solace in the eyes of a child.

His mission to Sierra Leone has brought him to this remote corner, to a camp for children left stranded by the country's 10- year civil war. Dust rises as little girls stomp their feet, dancing and clapping their welcome to the retired Canadian general.

Suddenly, Dallaire catches the eye of a small child. He winks at her and she winks back. Then he raises an eyebrow and she does the same. Moments later, as he moves through the crowd, the 55-year-old Dallaire feels a tiny hand slip into his.

The man who commanded the United Nations force in Rwanda and is still shattered by the world's failure to halt the genocide there squeezes the child's hand and holds it tight. He speaks later of the "quiet dignity" he saw in her eyes and of his mission to ensure that all such children are treated as individuals, with the right to a proper chance in life.

Still fighting a battle against post-traumatic stress disorder, Dallaire has thrown himself into a new role as an advocate for war- affected children. They have become "an embodiment in me that has taken on a life of its own," he says. "So I had to go look, see, smell and hear the story of war-affected children back in Africa."

As Canada's adviser on war-affected children, his week-long mission earlier this month is to visit some of the world's conflict zones and report back on the needs of children. It is his first visit to a conflict zone since Rwanda.

This journey is to a part of Africa pushed off the international radar screen by the war in Afghanistan, despite the crying need for renewed international attention at a time when this west African nation is desperately trying to cope with the aftermath of civil war.

It is a journey to a place where atrocities were committed by all sides, where thousands of children suffered unspeakable horrors- maimed, raped, abducted, dragged off to serve as child soldiers, sex slaves or labourers in diamond mines. They were targets, not just innocents caught in the crossfire.

It is also a journey into the heart of a soldier, a commander once beaten down by the ghosts of Rwanda, now struggling to climb out of the abyss, to find some comfort in an effort to wrench the world's attention back to the plight of children caught up in the wars waged by adults.

"I'm not sure if it's redemption I'm looking for, at least it hasn't come to me like that in a conscious way," he says. "Maybe it is part of my trying to move to a certain level of serenity with some of those remnants of the past."

On this journey, he will meet some of the 3,500 child combatants who have been released or who have escaped- such remarkable children as 15-year-old Peter Kofama, a former child soldier forcibly injected with cocaine through a wound in his temple to turn him into a killing machine, and Baindu Koroma, barely a teenager, who escaped from her rebel abductor after spending three years in the bush.

In emotional encounters in mud huts, in refugee camps and aid centres, these war-affected children speak almost with one voice of their desire to rebuild their lives and, most important, to get an education. But there are disturbing signals that their hopes are in vain. As one aid worker puts it: "Children will tell you, 'We survived the war, but can we survive the peace?'"

And that is precisely why Dallaire is here, on a fact-finding mission for International Co-operation Minister Maria Minna. But this mission is also a personal test of his ability to function back in the African milieu. Even at home, his senses are assaulted at every turn by reminders of Rwanda.

"Smell is a powerful influence," he says. "I've been stopped in my tracks in supermarkets because the smell of fresh fruit is so strong and just brought me back to the smell of rotten avocados being sold among the people being killed in the marketplaces in Kigali."

Even more powerful are the images of children. The sight of a toddler lost and crying in a shopping mall can transport him back to Rwanda. "Of all the types of dreams that have come back, many of them have been the sights of children, youths with machetes or under the influence of these drunken, barbaric militias, kids chopped up, kids in these refugee camps just crying and crying and crying, covered in dirt, hungry."

Those images will be ever-present throughout this journey.

It is Friday, Nov. 30, at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Dallaire emerges from the overnight flight from Montreal wearing a dark shirt and cardigan. With the time difference, he is still groggy from the pills he takes every night to help him sleep. Walking down the gangplank to Air France Flight 764, the connection to Conakry, Guinea, in West Africa, Dallaire stoops slightly to board the aircraft. "This is a test for me, returning to the continent. It gives me sort of a tingling feeling." He sleeps most of the way, bent over in his seat, still clutching a copy of The Atlantic Monthly magazine open to an article about political theorist Samuel Huntingdon. Hours later, the flight lands in Africa. It is 9:15 p.m. but still a humid 24C outside. The smell of charcoal from countless cooking fires hangs in the air. Dallaire spots a white military helicopter sitting on the airport tarmac. "What I could have done with some of those in Rwanda," he mutters. "Tabernac!"

The drive into Conakry from the airport brings back vivid memories of his first arrival in Africa in 1993, in Kampala, Uganda- the first stop on the way to establishing the ill-fated Rwandan mission. The streets of Conakry teem with people. Women at the side of the road sell peeled oranges and other fruits from large, round trays. Others lean over cooking fires only inches from the pavement where traffic whirls past. Crowds linger in ramshackle cafes in wooden shacks under tin roofs.

Later, Dallaire dines with his "team" in the hotel restaurant. He is joined on this mission by Phil Lancaster, a former army major who was his right-hand man during much of the Rwandan mission and who now works as a consultant in international development. The team also includes Jennifer Shapiro, a specialist in humanitarian relief from the Canadian International Development Agency. (Later, Philippe Beaulne, Canada's ambassador to Guinea and High Commissioner for Sierra Leone, joins the group).

At Customs, Dallaire had hesitated for some time over the landing card. Under "occupation," he couldn't decide whether to put down "retired general" or "consultant" and finally settled on the latter. Tonight, he's upbeat, pleased that landing back in Africa hasn't sent him into a tailspin.

At breakfast the next day, he wears an old "summer tan" officer's uniform that has been stripped of all military insignia. Above the breast pocket, you can still see the pinholes where military decorations were once worn. He drinks tea in the morning. "I stopped drinking coffee in Rwanda because they had the best tea in the world," he says. Then he opens a plastic pill container marked with the days of the week and dumps out a handful of brightly coloured pills- orange, pink, purple- that help him to cope with his illness. Post-traumatic stress disorder can be debilitating, causing flashbacks, fits of depression, physical disability and, sometimes, suicide. Dallaire takes his pills several times a day.

In the years since he commanded the U.N. mission, he has slipped into cycles of depression that have swept him back to the horrors of Rwanda, the images of bloated corpses, pleading children, the faces of peacekeepers he couldn't save. More than once, he has tried to take his own life.

"My health keeps getting better," he says at one point in the journey. "Last summer with my therapist, we moved from trying to continue to survive, to keep me from rubbing myself out, to finally reaching a level that I would be rebuilding." He tries to fill every waking moment with activity, so the nightmares can't creep in.

Dallaire has stopped in Guinea because there are no direct flights from Europe to Sierra Leone and because Guinea has played host to hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leonean refugees in the past decade. After travelling on a World Food Program flight from Conakry to a gravel airstrip outside the town of Kissidougou, Dallaire visits three refugee camps near the so-called Parrot's Beak area where Guinea juts into its two volatile neighbours, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The Kountaya, Telikoro and Boreah refugee camps are a mixture of makeshift shelters covered with blue or white plastic sheets issued by the U.N. and some more durable dwellings made of mud brick. At the Kountaya camp, Dallaire addresses several hundred refugees gathered under a tin roof in the community centre they have established. He introduces himself- as he will at every stop- as the former commander of the U.N. mission in Rwanda, a mission he describes as a failure.

"There is nothing more horrific in the eyes of my experience in Rwanda and other places than the use of children in war," he tells the refugees, who sit on wooden benches. Then he listens diplomatically for nearly an hour as they ask for better food, education for their children and the chance to return to their homes.

Outside, he is suddenly surrounded by an excited crowd of children, most of them young boys. "Where are you from? What's your name? Can I come to Canada?" they ask. At one point, Dallaire seems to be in his glory, his mouth wide with laughter. Moments later, his eyes show he has drifted off to another place.

"With all those kids pressed up against me, sometimes 10 or 15 of them holding my hand, I was suddenly back in a displaced children's camp in Rwanda where the kids could be jubilant one minute and angry the next," he says later. "I remember those kids all around me, shouting, then seeing out of the corner of my eye the body of a child- it looked like a 2-year-old- lying nearby in a ditch. I still have a problem being surrounded by a crowd of kids like that."

The next morning, a Monday, a U.N. helicopter takes us from Conakry to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Most passengers in the chopper wear headphones to protect against the thundering noise. Freetown is breathtaking from the air, a coastline of pristine white beaches, the city nestled in green hills that slope down to the ocean. It is hard to imagine that only months ago, this was the scene of pitched battles between Revolutionary United Front rebels and pro-government militias. The RUF still hold vast swaths of territory in eastern Sierra Leone.

Dallaire points out the window at the city and mouths the word "Nice," nodding his head approvingly.

The first day on the ground in Freetown is a whirl of meetings with officials from government and UNAMSIL, the United Nations peacekeeping mission. The U.N. force of 17,000 troops has extended its presence throughout most of the country to oversee the winding- down of hostilities. But in the lead-up to elections in May, Sierra Leone is still in a fragile state.

One of the poorest countries in the world, its 5 million people are served by just one mental health doctor and there is virtually no state-run health-care system. Against that backdrop, aid groups such as World Vision, Save the Children and CAUSE Canada work with UNICEF to help former child soldiers and other children victimized by the war.

The focus is on the immediate needs of children who have gone through official programs of disarmament and demobilization or who are trying to reunite with their families and communities.

Child soldiers have been released in batches in the wake of a series of ceasefire agreements between the rebels and the government, the latest in May. Sometimes it has been non- governmental groups that have gone into the bush to negotiate for the children's freedom.

Many of the children who are free face rejection because of their wartime activities. And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of child soldiers, porters and "bush wives" are still believed to be in the bush.

For the Freetown meeting, Dallaire wears the "uniform" for this mission- a business suit and brightly coloured tie covered with kids linking arms, produced by Save the Children.

The white van stops at the Freetown office of CAUSE Canada, a non- governmental organization that supports development projects in Sierra Leone and has provided logistical support for Dallaire's visit. He climbs out of the vehicle, carrying a black satchel handed out at last year's Winnipeg conference on war-affected children. He glances at the array of vendors set up at the busy intersection, but is suddenly transfixed. He stares at a man who wields a machete and smashes open coconuts piled in a wheelbarrow. Dallaire flinches at the sound of the machete crunching into the coconuts. He freezes on the spot. He stares straight ahead, blankly, remaining oblivious when the Canadian ambassador touches him gently on the arm and says "mon general." Dallaire turns and takes a few steps, walking into the path of a car, which honks its horn and slams to a halt.

After a minute or two, Dallaire blinks and wipes his eyes. He climbs the stairs to the CAUSE Canada office where, before long, he is sitting on the edge of a desk, eating fried chicken and telling war stories. When he returns to the van to head to the next stop, he describes his illness. It's like being at the centre of a stage, he says, watching the curtains as they are drawn shut.

"You just never know how much time you're going to have before the curtains close."

This journey actually began in Rwanda, in another corner of Africa, a postage stamp-sized country that barely registered on the map before an explosion of brutality that, in 100 days, took more than 800,000 lives while the world stood by.

Dallaire commanded the ill-equipped U.N. force of 2,500 that was reduced to 450 and left high and dry by the international community.

The orgy of killing was sparked by the April 6, 1994, death of president Juvenal Habyrimana. It was an orchestrated campaign by Hutu extremists to exterminate the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates willing to share power. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans who were slaughtered huddled in churches for sanctuary. Death squads lobbed in grenades. In their frenzy, killers severed the Achilles tendons on the heels of their victims, so they could return and finish the job later. Teachers killed students, neighbour slaughtered neighbour as local officials helped organize the killing.

Months before the genocide, Dallaire told his superiors at U.N. headquarters in New York that there was an informant who claimed Hutu extremists were plotting mass killing. But Dallaire was told that it was beyond his mandate to raid arms caches or intervene. Once the massacres began, his force was left virtually powerless to stop the killing and his cries for reinforcement and international intervention fell on deaf ears.

After he returned to Canada in mid-1994, there were telltale signs he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In late 1998, he took his first medical leave from his post as associate deputy minister of defence. He was eased back to work some months later as a special adviser to the chief of defence staff. But in April, 2000, he was forced to leave the Armed Forces for good, more than two years early, on medical grounds.

His new official role began in September, 2000, at the Winnipeg conference on war-affected children, when Minna asked him to be her special adviser on the subject and return to the field when possible. It has taken him more than a year to prepare.

Dallaire walks across the courtyard of the Cape Sierra Hotel in Freetown. The sidewalk is still overgrown with grass. The rooms are a bit shabby and musty, even though they cost $135 (U.S.) a night. On his way to catch a helicopter ride to eastern Sierra Leone- where rebels are using the areas they control as a last bargaining chip- Dallaire suddenly bends to pick up a white-and-yellow blossom that has fallen from a tree. "Beautiful, eh?" he says. "You know, I used to spend a lot of time admiring the birds and flowers in Rwanda. It was just such a beautiful country."

The helicopter thunders over dense jungle, pockmarked by diamond mines that have been gouged out by gangs. In the rebel heartland, Dallaire lands in Kailahun and is greeted by Brig. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the Pakistani general who commands his country's contingent in the U.N. peacekeeping force. He addresses Dallaire as "Sir."

Driving his own vehicle, Pasha gives Dallaire a quick tour of the area. The main street of Kailahun is lined by buildings riddled with bullet holes. A decrepit yet beautiful mosque dominates the town square, looking down on the local office of the RUF rebels.

A small crowd of people dancing and singing surges past the vehicle. About half of them are men, with rifles hanging from their backs.

The main stop today is a transit centre for children and ex- combatants operated by Save the Children with the support of UNICEF. The concrete building has no window panes; blue paint peels from the walls. Former child soldiers pepper Dallaire with questions. "We were good fighters, yes," boasts one boy, who sports a Mohawk hair cut.

Another comes face to face with Dallaire. "I still have a gun, in the bush. The commander told me not to give it up, but I want to. What should I do?" he asks. "That is a first-class question. You should go to the U.N. and turn over your weapon. I'm proud of you for even asking," Dallaire replies.

On the way to the next stop, Pasha still at the wheel, we come across the dancing crowd again, but this time it has grown larger and the men with guns block the path of the truck. The general inches forward and some of the revellers, guns slung over their shoulders and clearly drunk, fling themselves onto the hood or reach in through the window. Pasha makes reassuring noises and, gradually, the crowd parts and lets the vehicle pass.

Dallaire learns later there was a major rift in rebel ranks that day and the demonstrators in Kailahun were making a public show of their desire to disarm, in defiance of rebel leaders who want to win concessions from the government before relinquishing more territory.

Another helicopter flight over the jungle brings Dallaire to Daru, where the Pakistani battalion has its headquarters in British military barracks dating from colonial times. At a nearby interim care centre for separated and demobilizing children supported by UNICEF, hundreds live under plastic shelters. The dirt-floor structures have cots and basic cooking utensils.

A choir of little girls dressed in matching pink chants a welcome for Dallaire. After touring the camp, he meets with about 100 children, many of them under 10- too young to remember anything but war. Dallaire introduces himself as someone who "saw the destruction of so many children who were caught in the catastrophe of Rwanda," which is translated as "caught in this war business."

Some of the children speak in soft voices about their wants. One boy, dressed in a ragged blue T-shirt, complains there is no opportunity to go to school while living in the camp. Another boy complains there aren't enough books or learning materials to keep him busy.

"You are very courageous children. You have your whole lives ahead of you," Dallaire says. "The adults who created your problems should solve them. We must help you."

The Pakistani soldiers are anxious to get back to camp. They are fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and it is nearly sundown.

That night, a mess dinner is held in Dallaire's honour, a buffet of Pakistani food: steaming rice, chicken curry and vegetables. Soldiers, neatly shaved and in civilian dress for the occasion, smell of cologne and eat standing up. Disco music gives the event the aura of a school dance. In a brief speech, Dallaire salutes the Pakistanis for their peacekeeping endeavour.

"There was no finer mission in all of my career of 35 years than my mission in Rwanda. But we failed and 800,000 were massacred."

Mammie Kamara is 19 and lives in Koribundu, near Bo, in southern Sierra Leone. She attends a skills-training program supported by World Vision, where she learns to tie-dye textiles. "I was abducted at 14," she says, recounting incidents of mass rape in the bush. She became pregnant and had to deliver alone in the bush. She points to a protrusion below her belly button, an internal injury that stems from her pregnancy and has never been treated. Her son, Bokarie, is nearly 5. She wants to send him to school, but she has had problems reintegrating in her community. Family members initially rejected her. "They said I'm a rebel." And while she has finally regained contact with her family, they still won't accept her child, whose father was a rebel commander.

Another helicopter ride to Bo. This is an area dominated by the pro-government CDF militia, which also made widespread use of child soldiers and still has them in its ranks, although there has been little fighting since the May ceasefire.

On the road from Bo to Koribundu, we pass diamond mining operations. Men and boys dig in the muck, then screen the sludge in search of the precious gems that have fuelled the civil war. Abducted children who weren't forced to be soldiers or sex slaves became labourers in diamond mines.

At the Koribundu centre supported by World Vision, about 180 girls and young women learn weaving, tie-dying and sewing. Chickens run through the open-air centre, which smells of smoke and dye.

Baindu Koroma, 13, sits on a bench, crocheting. "I want to learn, but I don't have anyone to care for me," she says. She was abducted four years ago by an RUF commander, who kept her in the bush for three years. She won't talk about what he did to her in those years, when she was still a child. "I escaped by telling him I had to go pee, then just ran away," she says. What she wants most in life is 16,000 Leones (about $7), the entrance fee for one term at a local technical-studies school.

Later, in Bo, Dallaire sits down with local foster parents from the Good Shepherds Organization who have taken in war-affected children separated from their parents. By now, he is hopelessly behind schedule because of weather-related delays. A meeting with another relief organization has already been scrubbed. A local organizer with World Vision looks at his watch fretfully and reminds Dallaire that he will have to cut the questions short if he wants to catch his helicopter ride back to Freetown.

"Listen, it's not worth coming if you're going to do that," Dallaire snarls. "We can make arrangements for travel, so just work it out."

The foster parents describe how some of the children are still troubled by the time they spent in the bush and are hard to discipline. "There is some character that is in them that is difficult to take out," one man says. Another tells how a fostered child went for weeks without speaking. But one woman says the girls in her care "have begun to smile again, beginning to forgive themselves for what they allowed to happen to them."

On the helicopter flight back to Freetown, Dallaire pulls out a map of Sierra Leone and peers out the window to find rivers and other landmarks. You can't hear it for the roar of the helicopter engines, but he is whistling.

At the side of the bumpy road from Lakka to Freetown, a man pushes a wheelbarrow up a hill. It is loaded with bags of concrete. The man glistens with sweat and every muscle seems to be tensed. Inside the white van heading back to Freetown, Dallaire washes down a handful of pills with a swig of bottled water, fumbling with the pill case as the van tosses him back and forth on the rough road. Then he spots a large yellow grader doing road repairs. Asking the driver of the van to slow down, he waves and shouts out the window: "Hey, hey you, keep up the good work, eh?"

"We've got to encourage the troops you know," he says with a chuckle.

Dallaire is thriving on this trip. On a mission that goes far beyond ceremony, he throws himself into every meeting and pores over briefing notes. Yes, there are flashbacks to Rwanda- more than even he had expected. But he seems able to deal with episodes that not long ago would have left him out of commission for a day or longer, and he takes some comfort in that. At every turn, there are flashes of the sense of humour that friends recall from the old days, when he was known as a soldier who worked hard and partied hard. When he laughs, his mouth hangs open and his eyes wrinkle at the corners. He'll slap you on the back after he tells a joke.

The son of a Canadian World War II veteran and a Dutch war bride, Dallaire's working-class upbringing in east-end Montreal often rises to the surface. He is wary of big development agencies and their gleaming new, white Toyota Land Cruisers. He bristles at the gap here between rich and poor.

"Brand new air-conditioning units. Shiny Mercedes. I guess we're at the right place," he quips as he pulls into the compound of one major relief agency for a meeting. Later, he grumbles about the high concrete walls studded with shards of glass that enclose many compounds. "If I became president," he says, "I'd tear down every goddam wall."

Another key aspect of his personal experience- the struggle against post-traumatic stress- also comes up in virtually every meeting. He questions whether there is enough long-term care for children who have participated in or witnessed atrocities. He concedes that in the context of an impoverished African country, the best that most children can hope for is to be reunited with their families. But he wonders aloud if community support will be enough.

"These scars will pop up and God knows what the effects will be. There is a hell of a lot more hurt out there that could be exploding years from now," he says in one session with relief groups. "We could be fostering the next generation of rebels. If you've tasted blood, if you've killed, that doesn't just go away with tender loving care."

And every day there are reminders of Rwanda, not least the chance encounters with a steady stream of individuals who have some connection with the ill-fated mission.

After a formal meeting with the Kenyan general who commands the U.N. peacekeeping force, the two get to chatting and realize the Kenyan was commanding an observer mission in Liberia when Dallaire headed the U.N. mission in Rwanda. "I think now, if only you had the troops in Rwanda that I have now," the force commander tells Dallaire, who can only shake his head and mutter under his breath.

Later, he bumps into the son of the general from Ghana who was his trusted deputy commander in Rwanda. An American photojournalist who worked in Rwanda and is now with a human-rights group approaches him at an airport and shakes his hand.

One morning, Dallaire stands in the lobby of the cavernous Mammy Yoko Hotel in Freetown, which the U.N. has taken over as its headquarters. A Rwandan woman, a member of the U.N. staff, suddenly embraces him. She was spirited out of Rwanda during the genocide with Dallaire's help and, seeing him again for the first time, she is beside herself with emotion.

"You didn't fail. You didn't fail," she says, tears streaming down her face. "I'm alive because of you."

At the end of another long, bumpy road, Dallaire reaches the St. Michael's interim care centre, run by a remarkable Catholic nun named Sister Adriana. The centre can handle up to 150 children, mostly traumatized ex-combatants or bush wives who come to the centre while they await family reunification. Sister Adriana herself was abducted and tortured by rebels during the war. She says that whenever children shun those who have come in from the bush and accuse them of associating with the rebels, she tells them she's a bush sister, too.

"What happens here is the re-humanization of children- little by little they are brought back to their dimension," she says. Like others working in such relief efforts, the Sister says she sees very few girls. But she recounts the story of one who had a series of scars hacked on her inner thigh, like some kind of grotesque calendar kept by those who raped her. Most of the children who were with the rebels have had "RUF" carved on their chests or legs and some get surgery to try to remove the marks.

Peter Kofama is 15. He avoids eye contact and speaks almost in a whisper while he tells how he was abducted by rebels during a family holiday in the east of the country, near Makeni, in 1995. Before he was even a teenager, Kofama rose to the rank of platoon commander. "They cut us here, with a blade," he says, pointing to his temple, "then put in drugs and covered it with a bandage. They did this for seven days in a row and, after that, I needed it." He says children also smoked marijuana and took pills. "Because of my task, I was bound to kill, I had to do that to my enemies. My brother was killed, so I took revenge." He lowers his head again and rubs his hands on his knees. "But when I talk about these things, I start shedding tears." He describes an incident that comes back to him every night in his dreams. The boys had come upon a woman, a mystic. They opened the woman's satchel to steal her things. "She said she was putting a spell on us and that we would be troubled for the rest of our lives," he says. "Then we killed her. I still have that dream."

Kofama is among the ex-combatants who meet with Dallaire at a child rehabilitation project in Waterloo, outside Freetown, run by the local chapter of the International Federation of the Red Cross. The project seeks to de-traumatize children through skills- training and team-building. Dallaire sits with the children under a canopy erected to ward off the searing midday sun.

He turns the meeting into an impromptu focus group, asking the children mostly about how they are dealing with their feelings. Kofama stands up to describe his experience and admits he is still tempted to return to the bush. He says, at one point, he fell back into drug use after returning to his village.

Several of the girls are pregnant and one has a newborn in her arms. Another girl, dressed in jeans and wearing a hair net, says that sometimes, when the memories of her experience in the bush rush back, she can't continue.

"Do you express sadness? Do you cry? Do you share your experiences with others?" Dallaire asks the group. The children look confused. Some of them answer "No." When he asks if they have forgotten the past, they talk about the skills they are learning and how they are forming a team. He tells the children that he salutes their courage and strength. "Don't feel guilty," he says. "You are good people, all of you."

The journey nearly at a close, Dallaire heads for Hastings air force base to board the U.N. flight that will be the first leg of the long voyage home to Canada. On the way, Dallaire thinks out loud about the report he will submit to Minna, who is responsible for CIDA.

On a personal level, he leaves Africa with a sense of satisfaction that he was able to do his job and deal with the waves of memories from Rwanda. That he was able to make this journey at all is a milestone in a long voyage.

But he is concerned that the subject of war-affected children may not get the long-term attention it warrants and that some relief workers aren't equipped to deal with the permanent damage to some of these children. He is deeply troubled about what is happening with girls, those who are still in the bush and those who have problems returning to their families or face outright rejection if they have had children. And he tells how most of the kids he met are "screaming for education" in a country where half the schools were destroyed during the war and where rebuilding the education system falls in line behind other priorities, such as feeding the hungry and dealing with the lack of basic medical services.

"This is not the time to back away from Sierra Leone," he says.

Once again, Dallaire meets with a group of child soldiers who describe how they were forced to take drugs and threatened with death if they resisted orders. One boy says he feels overwhelming guilt for what he did, as if he were carrying a weight.