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Community Corner

Helping Sierra Leone Rise from the Ashes of Civil War

Culver City gallery owner Lisa Schultz recently spearheaded the donation of 10,000 pairs of crutches to the disabled in Sierra Leone in honor of World Peace Day—and she has more dreams on the way.

While Lisa Schultz’s office is currently nestled in the Culver City Art District, a little wooden placard over her door reads, “Greetings from Sierra Leone,” the African nation with which she has bonded over the past year. Her most recent act of love to the country is termed Operation Rise—a recent initiative to distribute 10,000 pairs of Invacare crutches to war amputees.

Schultz is busy these days—moving her gallery to a new location on Main Street, debuting the second annual on Oct. 22, continuing to spread her vision of peace worldwide, and trying to raise money for the crutches she recently distributed in Sierra Leone. Though the total price tag for the gift is $250,000, Schultz has fronted half of the funds herself, saying that: “if I ever stopped to think about whether or not we would raise the money, I would never do anything.”

“One of the critical problems in Sierra Leone is the lack of mobility for a lot of people due to amputations, as well as diseases like polio that are such a significant problem there,” Schultz said.  According to The Peace Project website, Sierra Leoneans make up more than 20 percent of the world’s amputees.

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While on the airplane on the way to Sierra Leone, Schultz met the country's director for UNICEF, Mahimbo Mdoe, who later suggested she distribute the crutches over a period of six months to a year.  Schultz considered his proposal “absurd.” UNICEF and the local NGO, Association of Cycle Social Services, nevertheless backed her World Peace Day efforts, which she said gave the campaign much-needed credibility.

After traveling for more than 24 hours on what she deemed an “interminable” series of flights for her latest trip overseas, Schultz touched down on the airport off the west coast of Sierra Leone and took a ferry into the capital city, Freetown.

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The two major shipments of crutches made it through a lengthy customs check before they were divided for transport to the distribution sites. Without a means to contact the truck drivers, two deliveries appeared to be lost. The last trucks finally reached the warehouses at 2 a.m. on World Peace Day on Sept. 21, taking nearly a day to travel 120 miles.

“It’s just complete chaos over there,” Schultz remembered.  “I began to understand why the head of UNICEF laughed when I said I wanted to distribute everything on one day.  There are no roads in some areas.  The lack of organization is unfathomable.”

Yet, she noted quizzically, “No one finds that unusual.”

Musa Mansaray, 22—one of the amputee soccer players who worked as a peacekeeper during the event—expressed a surge of emotion on World Peace Day. He helped distribute crutches at the site of the former Aberdeen Amputee Camp near the capital city, where he had been herded during the war as a refugee.

“It really was like a big healing process for him to see all this joy on the site that had held so much personal pain,” Schultz recalled. 

As for Schultz and Peace Project program director Heidi Huber, they are hoping that their passion for peace will spread throughout the community, looking ahead to future projects such as the Phoenix Program, which will teach Sierra Leonean adults to read and write—and to construct a community center near the Aberdeen Amputee Camp in Freetown by February 2012.

Said Huber: “The whole project, just the energy of it, was contagious,” Huber proclaimed.  “Our goal was to create a big energy shift in that country and I think we accomplished this.”

In her office, Schultz was surrounded by the powerful images—devoid of color and yet rich with action and emotion—that inspired her work.  Captured through the lens of Spanish photojournalist Pep Bonet, the five black-and-white photographs of the country’s amputee soccer team depict the players’ graceful movements and demonstrate their strength and resilience in the aftermath of the decade-long civil war.

“His work sparked a social movement that has gone on to change the lives of thousands of people in Sierra Leone, many of them the amputees, their children and their families that you see in these photos,” she indicated.

In a few months, she plans to return to bring home her adopted son, Tejan, a 10-year-old Sierra Leonean boy who has lost both of his parents. She explains her passion for peace this way: “That’s really what drives me is that feeling that we’ve got to get going.

“There’s no time to waste.”

Would you like to buy a pair of crutches in honor of Operation Rise? Click here to donate.

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