Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone

Where is Sierra Leone?  It is located in Africa, between Guinea and Liberia
How big is it?  It is 71, 740 sq. km.  What does that mean?  It means it is roughly the same size as South Carolina!
What's the population?  There are 5,743,725 people living in Sierra Leone.  In South Carolina there is 1,136,557 people, BIG difference in population.
What's the weather like?  Between  May and December the weather is very hot, humid, and rainy, but between December and April the weather is very dry.
How do you communicate there?  The common languages in Sierra Leone are English, Mende, Temne, and Krio.
Popular religious belief?  60% of the country is Muslim, 10% are Christian and the other 30% is mixed.
What's the government type?  Sierra Leone is currently a constitutional democracy.  The legal system is a mix of English common law and customary law
Men vs. Women-  Women typically are ranked lower, but they are referred to as Sierra Leone's backbone.  The men do the physical labor while the women do everything else, like:  planting, harvesting, nursing, cleaning, cooking, etc.  Women don't get educated as frequently as men do, but overall both genders suffer nowadays because everyone is living in poverty and everyone is suffering due to the decade long civil war...

Sierra Leone and the Civil War between 1991 and 2002

"Sierra Leone was meant to be the shining light of Africa; it had all that was needed to engineer economic and political prosperity. It was also the first country to have the first University in West Africa: the Fourah bay college. These Factors ought to have made Sierra Leone a living paradise; instead, it became a living hell. As history as shown before, war can diminish even the most mighty to nothing."

This war began in 1991 because of the "resource-curse" and because of Charles Taylor.  The resources in Sierra Leone are:  rainforests,  clean water, arable lands, and gemstones.  Diamonds and the unstable government provided the perfect opportunity for anarchy to arise. To fund the war they used the mining of the diamonds which were later referred to as the "blood diamonds"  Who was Charles Taylor?  He was at one point a Liberian President, but he was also a brutal civil war leader and is now facing trials in the international criminal court for instigation of murder, rape, and terrorism in Sierra Leone.

In the midst of this war, the rebels were known for murder, rape, mutilation, and recruitment of child soldiers.  By the end of this brutal civil war, the death toll was estimated at 50,000 people.  In the 2006 U.N. Human Development Index, Sierra Leone ranked second from the bottom.