Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Amadu Sidibey, a refugee from Sierra Leone, was afraid to be photographed. He shows a photo of his father, Ibrahim, who was killed.

December 1, 2003

THE NEEDIEST CASES

Escapee From a Nightmare That Loved Ones May Still Endure

By ANNA BAHNEY

n his right wrist, Amadu Sidibey wears a bracelet of entwined gold-silver-and-copper-colored metals. His mother gave it to him when he was 9 years old and living on his family's banana and poultry farm in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Mr. Sidibey, 27, explains the bracelet's power: "If something bad is coming toward you, like a nightmare or something, it will go all black." He says he has seen it turn black, too, though the bracelet's current shine suggests his sleep is peaceful.

Sometimes it is, and he can get a few hours' rest.

But often there is no sleep, tranquil or otherwise. There are only the nightmares that lurk in his memory. He is kept awake by images of atrocities, the sight of family members being killed during his country's civil war, which forced him to flee to the United States in 2001 in search of asylum.

Mr. Sidibey managed to escape from Sierra Leone with one photograph of his father, Ibrahim, and another of his family and neighbors, who are clad in formal attire in front of their homes. He also has a pink-and-green 500-leone note, which he carries in his wallet. "My father gave it to me to go buy one bag of corn," Mr. Sidibey says. "The next day it happened."

It was about 2 a.m. on a summer night in 1996 when members of the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group, stormed Mr. Sidibey's village. He says he and his family ducked under their beds.

A rebel came after his sister Asata. "She was eight months pregnant," Mr. Sidibey recalls. "She came out, they raped her and then killed her. Her husband, they forced him to come out and they killed him. They hit my back. I was lying on the ground. I tried to come help him, but I couldn't reach him."

While his mother and brother, who is younger, fled (their whereabouts remain unknown), Mr. Sidibey and his father were put on a truck and taken from their home. At another village, his father was taken before a crowd.

When his father refused to express loyalty to the rebels, his ears were cut off. Then they shot him. Before he died, Mr. Sidibey remembers, "my father looked at me three times."

Mr. Sidibey was then forced into the rebels' work crew, he says. The abused members of this group had their hands restrained; they were tied together like a chain gang and taken to other villages.

During one raid by the rebels, government soldiers from Sierra Leone and neighboring Guinea approached. The truck carrying the captives, including Mr. Sidibey, made a sharp turn to evade the armies and people fell out of the back. Many captives were injured, he says, but they were also free to run as much as their restraints would allow.

"An old man was running behind me," Mr. Sidibey says. "He grabbed me and said, `Don't leave me.' " Then a bullet hit the man. "If it hadn't hit him, it would have hit me."

But Mr. Sidibey did not escape the gunfire altogether. A bullet grazed his shoulder. Another lodged in his calf, and he lay on the ground until soldiers picked him up and questioned him. Convinced that he was a rebel with useful information, he says, they used their own form of force, beating him and breaking his thumb.

Mr. Sidibey went to a refugee camp in Guinea. He found work on a farm in Burkina Faso for six months. His employer could not pay him, but arranged for him to travel to the United States.

After landing at Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 9, 2001, unable to speak English and not knowing anyone, he says he took the subway to Times Square, where he slept on the street, overwhelmed, "in front of the big T.V." Still on the street two days later, he awoke to people screaming and running as they reacted to airplanes flying into the World Trade Center.

Since 2001, Mr. Sidibey has tried to adjust to his radically new circumstances. He has been granted asylum; he has learned English and taken a job.

He also found a network of support at the Immigrant and Refugee Services department of the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of seven charities that participate in The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. There, an employment trainer, Anthony Palamara, has become a strong ally.

"I started a new life here," Mr. Sidibey says. "I have to say thank you to Anthony because he's the one who helped me." Mr. Palamara assisted Mr. Sidibey in résumé preparation, cover-letter writing, interviewing and communication skills and financial planning.

The program also provided Mr. Sidibey with cultural orientation, including information on documentation, health care, taxes and public services.

Employed at a hardware store on the Upper East Side, working 40 hours a week at $7 an hour, Mr. Sidibey will soon be moving into an apartment of his own. Since 2001 he has slept, rent free, in the living room of a family of other refugees in the Bronx. Catholic Charities obtained $600 of Neediest Cases money for his security deposit and first month's rent, keeping him from falling behind financially.

He is also trying to save money to resolve one of the unknowns that still keeps him up at night. He does not know where his mother and brother are.

But Mr. Sidibey says he is determined to find out.

"What I have to do now is go to Guinea and go to the refugee camps to find out if they survived or not," he says.

"Maybe she is there and she is saying, `Maybe my son is already dead.' I don't know."