Frazier’s visit was cut short, as was her work with Timap for Justice, the country’s largest paralegal network. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Rwanda, Frazier had been helping develop organizational assessment tools and training materials, and observing paralegal activities in Timap’s various offices around the country.

For a year, Frazier worked remotely for Timap as best as she could from the United States. She graduated a year later with a master’s degree in economics and international political and economic development (IPED), and worked as an adjunct professor with Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs.

In October of 2016, she came back on a yearlong Fulbright scholarship to continue her work with Timap.

“When I was here last time [during the Ebola outbreak], it struck me how much of the epidemic’s consequences weren’t just going to be health-related. There were going to be many more systematic problems related to socioeconomic recovery and access to civil justice issues,” she said.

Her fellowship involves exploring new ways that the legal system can handle civil justice cases, particularly those of a commercial nature. When the Ebola epidemic was in full swing, a great deal of economic activity arose from responding to it. Now that it’s ended, Frazier said the time is right to explore avenues for these cases to be resolved.

“Do we look for cases that involve debt, breach of contract, or land tenure?  Or is it about the total amount of money involved in the claim? What does it look like to handle commercial cases in a way that could alleviate pressure from the legal system through alternative routes? That’s what we’re in the process of looking at,” she said.

Frazier splits her time between Timap’s offices in Freetown, where she writes proposals and reports, and in towns three to six hours away from the capital, where she visits local Timap paralegals and judicial officials to measure the demand for commercial alternative resolution services. Although she is learning Krio, the official language of the country, she still relies on an interpreter who can help her reach speakers of Mende, Temne, or any of the other 17 tongues spoken in the provinces.

Sierra Leone has a formal legal system based on the British Colonial common law that features courts, correctional centers, and police stations. It’s a dualist system though, so local chiefdoms also have a say in some matters, she said.

“As you can imagine, navigating that can get complicated for an ordinary Sierra Leone resident,” said Frazier.

“On top of that, the formal legal system is much more limited in terms physical facilities. The customary legal system has a far wider reach, but it has a slightly different scope. A lot of times, legal aid and access to justice services like Timap are a bridge between those two.”

The work is challenging, and Frazier admits she occasionally feels overwhelmed. But she’s inspired by the camaraderie and resolve that was borne of the efforts of those who worked together to stop the epidemic, as well as her colleagues at Timap.

“It’s very much a transition stage here right now, which I always find to be a fascinating time in a country,” she said. “But it’s very difficult for a lot of people.”

But as he now knows firsthand, “Education can take you everywhere.”

On April 9, Williams, who was one of the youngest child soldiers rescued during Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war, addressed a group of undergraduate political science students shortly after they were inducted into Fordham’s chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society.

In his keynote address, “Conflict-Affected Youth: Education and Paths to Peace,” Williams offered his harrowing history as testament to the power of education.

One day, when he was about 7 years old, Williams returned home from a neighboring village to find that the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had attacked. Bodies lined the roadways, homes were ablaze, and Williams’ mother had vanished.

The rebels kidnapped the surviving children—Williams among them—and took them to the RUF base for war training.

“The first exposure I had to any education was the kind that no child should ever receive,” said Williams, who is now an advocate for education and the reintegration of ex-combatant youth. “Instead of books and papers, I was given a gun and taught how to run and hide with it.”

The RUF forced Williams and the other child soldiers to murder, torture, and commit sexual violence. Often, the children were drugged so that they would be more controllable. The drugs, Williams said, made him “mad” and “fearless.”

Williams escaped the RUF after six months, only to be captured by the Sierra Leone Army (SAL) and forced to fight for another three years. He was about 10 when a UNICEF representative found him and connected him with the charity Children Associated with War.

The battle wasn’t over, however. Rescued child soldiers underwent a process of “disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration” to help them rejoin society. But the years of psychological damage—compounded by the stigmatization they encountered in their former communities—left many former child soldiers unemployed, drug addicted, and homeless.

“We were just left—the lost children of Africa,” Williams said.

In the end, what saved him was his ardent desire for an education, Williams said. He attended school for the first time at an orphanage in an SOS Children’s Village and fell in love with learning. He felt such an urgency to catch up to his peers that he would trade his meager food rations for extra tutoring.

“I admired the other kids,” he said. “Sometimes when I saw them reading I thought it was magic.

“Despite all the obstacles, I was determined to be educated because I knew the power of education. It is the best legacy you can ever attain in this world. No one can take it from you.”

He urges his audiences to understand that although child soldiers have committed grave crimes, they were as much victims of war as they were perpetrators. Sadly, he said, this is a message the world struggles to understand. (Williams himself was almost barred from entering Canada for a conference because he was labeled a war criminal.)

“What you give young people is what they give back to the country,” Williams said. “If you give a child criminality, then you’ll find we have criminals running the country.”

The event was sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the Fordham College at Rose Hill Dean’s Office, and the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs.

No one in her right mind would drive around Freetown without wearing a seat belt for three very good reasons: Most of the locally-owned autos here are Frankencars, quite literally glued or bonded together from car parts hailing from the ends of the pre-air bag era auto world; many drivers are unlicensed and daring – this is especially true of motorbike okada riders (there is a frightfully apt saying, “no traffic for okadas”); and, it’s the law. That said, the Frankencars do get you to where you need to be, the okada associations provide valuable jobs for otherwise unemployed youth and, as for the law in Sierra Leone, it is truly in the eye of the beholder. The beholder, as it so happened in my case on Tuesday morning, is the Sierra Leone Police.

As my driver, John, and I headed across town in between interviews today with UN country team agencies, we approached a major roundabout linking a number of feeder roads. Traffic was heavy and a small group of police had lined one side of the road. As soon as they spotted me, they scrambled over and halted the car. One of the officers pointed at me, and said something along the lines of “I saw you without your seat belt on! You put it on just now when you saw us!” Instant deer-in-the-headlights moment for me! John uttered one word: the four-letter one beginning with “s” and ending with “t.” Then, the officer screamed at him, “And your seat belt is broken! You could both go to jail for this!” Before I could even get the words, “Are you kidding?” out of my mouth, they demanded our IDs. I showed them my passport but I wouldn’t let them take it. John wasn’t so lucky. They wrestled his ID out of his hand and that was it. Shakedown 101: We were theirs until they either got some money or decided to let us go.

There we stayed, for the next half hour. The officers quickly pulled John out of the car, berated him in Krio, and threatened him not to speak in English. They wanted to know why I was in Freetown and why I was out on the roads at that moment. I tried to convey (calmly, calmly) the work I was doing, who I was meeting with, and (big mistake) that we were both wearing our seat belts when they stopped us and had been since leaving the UN compound. At that point, one officer looked me squarely in the eye and asked if I was accusing her of lying because, for this, she would definitely take me to jail. I tried changing the subject. And so we continued, back and forth. The officers seemed OK with allowing things to escalate to a certain level, but stopped short of, say, directing me to get out of the car or hauling us both off to the station house. And then, just as quickly as it had begun, it ended. One officer said to me, “I am letting (John) go because of you. You should thank me for this.” And I did — in a restrained, but sincere, manner.

My next interview was with the World Bank country manager. I was very late. I offered apologies and mentioned that I had just had my first shakedown.

“How much did you give them?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said. “Superb,” he responded, without blinking an eye. “Now, let’s talk.”

I arrive at Freetown-Lungi International Airport at 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 19. IPED graduate and my former student, Jay Endaya, is due to meet me on the “Aberdeen side,” with the person who will likely be my part-time driver during my stay. The airport is very much what I expected — and it’s probably good that we landed in the dark because the photos I’ve seen of the airfield during daytime include abandoned aircraft wreckage.

Lungi Airport has to be the worst located airport on the entire planet. It sits on a peninsula and there are three ways to get into Freetown proper (and your hotel): car, ferry and taxi. The land route takes at least 4 hours. The ferry takes about an hour, but weather can complicate this and there is always the chance of too few life vests for too many passengers. The helicopter is expensive (relatively speaking) but fast (15 minutes). Each option has its risks, including the helicopter route; one crash in June 2007 killed all 22 people on board. So, you pick your poison and hope the travel gods are with you.

The neon sign telling us where we have landed read “F EETO N INTE NATIONAL A POR. ” The first thing to hit you when you leave the plane is the humidity. I’ve managed three summers in Richmond, Va., and have traveled a fair bit in tropical countries, but it’s not quite the same as the equatorial humidity here.

The second thing to hit you is the chaotic environment. Getting through customs was relatively straightforward, but it’s what’s on the other side that was a shocker. Dozens of porters (no clue if they are “official” or not) grab at your luggage, and beckon you to follow them here or there, either to the ferry or to the helicopter offices. They make a chalk mark on your luggage, which designates a temporary “ownership” and deters poaching by other porters. I took only two carry-ons for this trip, knowing this would be something I’d face. But Mohammed, the porter who eventually caught up with me, persisted and so I finally gave in and let him wheel my bag out to the helicopter office.

My helicopter ride was uneventful. The most unnerving thing about it was finding out that the Syrian pilot flying our Russian craft got his license in Nigeria. ‘Nuff said. We land. More chaos. My bag is nowhere to be seen and Mohammed is on the other side of the peninsula. Other passengers are similarly worried, and it takes about 30 minutes for them to “reappear.” By this time, Jay is in the parking lot with his colleague, Henry, and the driver, John. So we head to the hotel and. as I swat a few mosquitoes away from my ears and drift off to sleep, I realize I’ve finally arrived in Sierra Leone.