Mariama was a displaced woman in her early thirties from Kailahun, Sierra Leone. I met her in the town of Kenema in eastern Sierra Leone in 1997, at a point during the eleven-year war when the whole world seemed to turn upside down. A military coup had displaced the president, and the rebels were invited to become part of a power sharing government. A civil militia who had become local heroes by aggressively taking back villages from rebels was suddenly outlawed, and was being asked to disband voluntarily. Drunk or stoned soldiers from the army would ply the streets to make a living by extortion or theft. Whereas most violence had before taken place along roadsides in the forest, or in small villages, now towns were the center of unrest. Kenema was experiencing gun battles between the militia and the army; dead bodies on the streets had become a fact of daily life.

Despite the tense milieu of our first meeting, Mariama on the surface seemed remarkably self-assured. A widow since just before the war started, she had lost her husband to cancer in 1989. She had become displaced when rebels attacked her town and burned down both her house and the school where she worked. She had made her way to the safety of Kenema and had here begged for a job with the Kenema Diocesan Development Office, funded through the Catholic Archbishops, and Catholic Relief Services. They were one of the better run local NGOs operating in the area; their workers were actually paid a livable wage, and (the war permitting) on time. Her life was on the surface somewhat enviable; unlike many displaced people who crowded into IDP camps, she was able to contribute to the household income of her uncle’s family and so shared a room with three others in a house in town. What made her unusual was that Mariama was one of the few women in town who had survived, and would talk about, attempted nighttime rape by a witch spirit.