By Kai Mansa-Musa
Lilian Cole, 21, is a garbage collector and a mother of two children. She told Premier News that he resisted the pressure of his peer to slide into a life of prostitution by opting to do refuse collection to take care of herself and her two kids – Charley Kamara, aged 3 who is in nursery 2; and Alimatu Kamara aged 5, is in class 2. The kids stay with their aunt, whom she visits to give money for their schooling, maintenance and care after the day’s work, while she sleeps in an abandoned broken vehicle.
She does her refuse collection work together with, Ismael Kamara, the man by whom she had her two kids. She says she does not like the job she does, but has the courage to go about it passionately because it is the way she now has to give her two kids the love and care of a mother which she never had as a child.
“When I was growing up it was my grandmother that took care of me. She told me that when my mother gave birth to me, minutes after she took a ‘kula’ on the pretext that she was going to urinate, but she fled,” said Lilian.
She said that since her mother fled from her at birth, except for the stories her grandmother had told her about her mother, the first time she got to know her was when she was 14 years, adding that she has never been told who her father is.
“When I asked her about where she had been, she warned me to never again ask her that question. She also informed me that she was going to take me home where she had been living with a man in Mayainkinneh, but cautioned me that I was to tell the man with whom she stayed that I was her niece, not her daughter,” She said.
Lilian Cole added that when the man of the house eventually asked her about how she is related to her mother she answered exactly in the manner her mother had instructed, adding that when she enquired from her mother why she was instructing her to deny that she was her child, her mother’s response was that her man knew that she had had two other children, Chernoh and Bailor with another man, and that she did not want him to know that she had a third and eldest Child.
Lilian stopped school at age 16 because her grandmother who was paying her fees was then too old to fend for her.
At this point in her life, she lived at Portee in the East of Freetown. Having dropped out of school after taking the Basic Education Certificate Examination (B.E.C.E.) she started training as a hairdresser, and after a while, a friend by the name of Racheal convinced her to come and live with her at New England Ville in the West of Freetown, with the promise that she would help her secure job as a hairdresser.
“What I observed after living with her for a while was that she was going out to work as a prostitute at night. When she suggested that I should start doing the same, I refused. She kicked me out of her place saying that she would not take care of me from the money she gets from her prostitution while I refuse to do the same,” Lilian said.
She added that her friend does the job of a prostitute, and it is to the knowledge and support of her boyfriend who accompanies her to the spots at which she hangs out to solicit for client who are willing to pay for sex. She added that her friend’s boyfriend fixes nails at one of the busy streets in the West of Freetown, through which they make extra money.
Lilian Cole said that she then became homeless and started moving around in the streets of Freetown, and he got to a place called Gaza at Kolleh Town, near Congo Town in Freetown where garbage is dumped. This place attracts under privileged people scavenging a living out of plastic, metal and other form of recyclables which they sell to scrap collectors.
She said that this was where she met the father of her kids, who took her under his winds and suggested for her join him in Garbage and Scrap Collection at age 17. She has now been in this business for the past six years, and now has a daughter and a son with Ismael Kamara, her co-worker.
Lilian suffers from Asthma and she said that she moves around with her inhaler, but at times through exhaustion when she pulls the Garbage truck to climb hilly areas and steep inclines to collect garbage, she suffers acute breathing problem which necessitates her to be given artificial respiratory treatment like mouth to mouth respiration or pumping her chest for her to catch her breath. She said that although the work she does is very tedious, she prefers it to being a prostitute which would have belittled her dignity and exposed her to sexually transmitted diseases.