When AllAfrica opened its bureau in Liberia in September and launched its continent-wide HealthAfrica.org project, which will be headquartered in Monrovia, we needed someone reliable to anchor the office – and we needed that person fast. One of the people recommended to us was a young man named Boakai Fofana, who had endured the war years by moving around the country, eventually ending up in a refugee camp across the border. Upon his return, he resumed his studies by winning a scholarship and graduating at the head of his department from United Methodist University. He had taught himself Internet skills, visiting cybercafés, and he had volunteered at United Nations radio, where he hosts a weekly youth program. He talked about how he got to where he is now.
Immediately before joining AllAfrica, I was an intern at a local bank called the Liberian Bank for Development and Investment. Prior to that, I was a student. I graduated. I do this radio program for young people, for the United Nations Mission's youth program service. In my community, I serve as youth chairman and basically help out the community.
I intend to continue at UN radio because I quite frankly love it. I like to interview all kinds of people. We talk to policy makers on a lot of things, ranging from health to politics to business and sometimes, like last week, we talked to the deputy minster of education about education, the educational programs they are instituting. So I love it. It's a weekly show called 'One Voice'. It is done at Unmil headquarters on Tuesdays at 2 pm for 45 minutes.
I am the main presenter. There is… another boy who also presents with me. Occasionally there is another young student, a… twelfth grade girl - she comes often. We are supervised by one of the employees on the radio.
At university I studied management. I did an economics minor. My emphasis was in human resource management. My goal – I intend to help out my country.
I grew up in Monrovia. I was born November 6, 1977, here. My mother is Victoria Mark. My father is James Fofana. My mother is a Christian. My father is a Muslim. They separated and both remarried. Since then, I grew up with my father, mainly, in a home of extended families. My father and his brother lived together at the time, both of whom had children. We kind of grew up calling my cousins my brothers and sisters. As time went by we became too grown up to be in the same home, so the family had to separate. Currently my uncle is in the States, along with his wife and his older son, and I am responsible for the care of five other little children. I am practically the head of the home – not to fend for them in terms of feeding all the time - he sends money back home. But I am responsible for the security; making sure they are home on time; sometimes settling disputes.
I am approaching 30, and I haven't had a very good job. This is my first paid employment. In my refugee life, I served as a teacher and then subsequently became vice-principal. At some point in 2005 I served as sales-manager for a little organization that does printing, but I thought it would hamper my schooling. I went to school on a scholarship, and I needed to support my grade points.
I left the country twice. First in 1990 - that was when the war started in '89-1990. We had to leave and went up country to my father's home town. The rebel chiefs came one morning, [to the town, which had] three or four hundred persons. I am sure that town could not support that number [of internally displaced persons.] At the time, 1990, I was just thirteen years old, so I wasn't sure about the number.
There was a lot of shooting, a lot of dead bodies. A massacre actually went on there. It was NPFL rebels. Charles Taylor was the head of it. There had been rumors that they were coming, so we were getting ready to leave, and then we heard loud shooting. They were already on us. People ran to the bushes. I and a group of older women ran into a house. There was a lot of shooting. Then we heard some noise calling people to go into a palava hut. Some other persons were fooled into believing that they didn't come to kill them, that they came to talk to them. They came out. There were a large number of persons there. They immediately started shooting again, killing everybody there.
Mysteriously, a kind of rain fell. I think some think they got an answer to a prayer saying...some mysterious power, is what they thought. I feel it was natural. [But the rebels] ran out of town. So they did not have a chance to go around door-to-door asking for people. So we left from there by foot to Guinea.
It was very terrifying. We left from the house and then walked along the river. We walked a day and a half. We walked an entire day and the next morning up until the evening hour. We were just feeding on whatever we could lay our hands on at the time. There were a lot of small children. There was a large group actually. A lot of older people. Most of them were women, in fact. I found my self in a town called Guéckédou, along the Guinean border.
It was like a refugee camp, because later on the UNHCR came and we started surviving on rations for two years. Then Ecomog, as we used to call them, came. That was the West African troops, not the United Nations at the time. So we came back. That was in 1990. We were there until '92, when we came back.
We started our schooling again, but by the time I graduated from high school in 1998, I had to leave again - this time after Taylor's election to the presidency. My uncle felt that there wasn't much security at the time… he probably foresaw that there might be trouble. So he told us to go be in Conakry this time, with a little more comfort than… in 1990. That is when I did some teaching. I taught English in the junior and elementary sections [of a French school], and English grammar to Liberians living as refugees. It was kind of makeshift… we talked to [the] proprietor of a French school to let us use his building in the afternoons, and he agreed. Surprisingly, we had a large influx of students coming in. We registered them up until the ninth grade and the following year we extended it to the 12th grade.
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I liked teaching. I taught English for elementary students in the French school this time, the Guinean school – basic English, the number system. I liked the interaction with the students - both refugees and Guinean students.
There is an educational foundation sponsored by the Methodist Church. So when I came back from exile I went to the foundation to inquire where I could continue my scholarship. Fortunately, I was told I could, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to school. It is very expensive. I spent three and a half years, because I actually started classes in February of 2004 and I graduated this year, the 16th of July.
