The United Methodist Committee on Relief has been working alongside other churches in the war-torn country of Liberia, western Africa, to help former child soldiers capture back their lost childhoods, reports the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church.

More than 250,000 people have lost their lives in the country’s 14-year-long civil war with another 500,000 left displaced. More than 300,000 Liberians have since fled to neighbouring countries.

“I have never seen a place like Liberia that has been so destroyed by warring factions,” said Marcos Melaku, head of mission in Liberia for UMCOR.

|QUOTE|Fifteen-year-old Philip Karhan, who was beaten and kidnapped from his home, is just one of more than 15,000 teenagers who lost their childhoods when they were forced to become child soldiers by warlords such as Charles Taylor.

“I fought for two years,” he said. “I was forced to fight. The people here fighting, catching people go to fight. I was beaten and forced – taken from my family.”

Karhan has living for the past year in an interim care centre in Virginia, Liberia, run by the Catholic Church.

“We are in the phase of reconstruction, rehabilitation and attending to emergency situations,” said Melaku.

UMCOR has been working with the child victims through its training centre for ex-combatants called the Apprenticeship Skills Training and Accelerated Learning Programme in Monrovia. The 8-month programme provides the former soldiers with vocational skills and literacy training.

Counsellors are essential to the transition process, said Sheku Sillh, who manages the training programme: “United Methodist counsellors meet and talk with them – tell them the need for peace, the need to make themselves self-sufficient.”

|TOP|Carpentry, tailoring, masonry and auto repair are just some of the skills being taught to the young former soldiers, with Sillh saying that some 946 have just completed the programme and received their training certificates that will help them to find employment or start their own businesses.

“People coming back to reconstruct their lives are coming back with nothing, sometimes with just the clothes they have on,” Melaku says. "We have to help these people to restart life, to own something which they would protect as individuals, as social groups, as communities.”

One of the many difficulties facing UMCOR in its work with the former child soldiers is convincing the community to accept them. UMCOR has assisted potential employers with resources in exchange for them accepting the former soldiers.

“We had to convince them that in the interest of the country, in interest of peace, they needed to accept these guys,” said Sillh. “More than 50 per cent of the centres we first contacted refused. After some time, they saw the need to accept and train these guys.”

But the hardest challenge is that faced by David Sheikh Konneh, executive director of Don Bosco homes, Karhan’s interim centre in Monrovia. Konneh works to convince the families to take back their children.

“We have to trace families, and the families are not always ready to accept the child,” he said. “When we are working with the community, we tell them this child who was 9 years old, a little boy in second grade when you last saw him, is not the same child. He has done a lot of things and had a lot of bad experiences.”

Konneh added: “Street children were especially vulnerable and very easy to recruit. At that time there was no school, no food. Commanders took advantage because of the conditions.

“Some of the girls went as wives of commanders or were forcibly taken as wives and sex slaves,” he said.

Today 14-year-old Karhan enjoys his life at the Don Bosco home, where he takes part in Bible study, is learning to read and enjoying raising pet pigeons outside his room.

"I miss my parents. I want to go back to see my parents," Karhan says. Unfortunately, he cannot go home yet because Cote d'Ivoire is now engaged in a war.

"I am happy I am not fighting anymore," Karhan says. "I pray for God to give me long life and make me a good man in the future. War is a bad thing, war is no good. War destroys people and destroys countries."