By Kai Mansa-Musa
Sentho Koroma was born in Moyamba District in 2005 where her mother was being fostered by an old lady who was helping her with bread and board after she (mother) had been abandoned by the man who had impregnated her two months before with Sentho and her Twin Brother Alusine.
“The old lady fed my mother for nine months, while my mother in turn laundered for her before we were born,” she said. Her brother Alusine died. According to Sentho as a way of sustaining her life the old lady taught her mother how to make charcoal out of wood and her mother in turn helped her in the charcoal business.
She told Premier News that her foster mother, Tidankay Turay went to buy charcoal in Moyamba and asked her mother and the old lady to allow her to raise her up in Freetown so that she could enroll her in school. According to Sentho, when Tidankay brought her to Freetown in the year 2012, at age 7, she was not enrolled in School instead she gave her the task of selling cold water and soft drinks. She used to carry drinks from Old Road at the back of Worldwide where she lived to Sani Abacha Street everyday to sell. She said this was what she did from 2012 to 2013.
She said that everyday when she carried the drinks in the Coleman there was a certain man by the name of T-Boy who saw that the load she carried was too heavy for a seven-year-old, and he agreed to carry the drink for her every morning to the location where she sold them at Sani Abacha Street. Sentho said that it was the same man who asked her whether she was interested in going to shoool, and after she answered yes, T-Boy pleaded with her foster mother Tidankay Turay to allow him to enroll her in school and she consented. “After which I started attending school. T-Boy paid my school fees,” she said.
She started in nursery in 2014 and very soon she had a double promotion to class four and in 2016 she took the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). All this while, she was selling water and drinks after school. She said that her foster mother did not give her money for food in school, but this was not much of a problem because a certain lady by the name of Marie used to give her bread everyday as she used to help the ladies daughter Hassanatou in classwork.
According to her. she did most of the chores at home, cleaning, laundering and cooking but her foster mother dished the food after she finishes cooking and only gave her pot-crust (Crawoh) to eat. She eventually sat to the National Primary School Examination (NPSE) and started secondary school. Soon, she had another double promotion, and she was in Senior Secondary 2, but she has not sat to the West Africa Senior School Examination (WASSCE) which if every thing had worked out she would have done in 2019. While in Senior Secondary School she was only surviving from moneys which classmates gave to her for helping them during exams. “They used to give me Le 5,000 for every paper in the exam that I helped them on. So, if we do three papers a day, I would keep Le 3,000 and used the rest for food. This was how I survived,” she said.
Since then T-Boy who used to pay her fees has travelled abroad and she has lost contact with him. She said that she went to his address and asked about him but she was told that they could not have his contact number overseas. She currently has no one to pay her fees, so she has since dropped out of school.
Her foster mother after an argument burnt her clothes and her Progress Reports and tole her that she dislikes her because she is smarter than her three biological daughters. Hassanatou, the girl Sentho used to help in her classwork in Primary School has sat to the WASSCE and is now in College. According to Sentho, she bumped into her one day. She added that after Hassanatou asked why she had not been able to go to college, she responded that she does not have any sponsors. She said Hasssanatou looked at her pitifully and gave her Le 100,000. In addition to dropping out of school, Sentho had since been asked out of her foster parents’ house. She is now homeless. Sleeping rough in the streets of Freetown. Premier News met her shabbily dressed and huddling on the side of a nearby fence which offered her shade from the rays of the afternoon sun in Brookfields and she agreed to speak to Premier News after much insistence. This is her story. She now moves about during the day and sleeps wherever she is at nightfall that offers her refuge from the downpour at the front porch of houses along the streets and in the frontage of shops as nightfall.