Sierra Leone Adoptee Searches For Mother

“Usifu Bangura remembers walking up the hill with his mom to the adoption agency in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

A beautiful building stood tall inside a gate at the top of the steep climb, different in its splendor than much of the rest of the small, impoverished country.

His father, Ibrahim Bangura, had died in the civil war a year earlier, 2000.

His mother, Fatu Fhanko, learned of her husband’s death by seeing a photograph in the newspaper. He was just 4 at the time, but Usifu remembers the picture.

“I saw it in the newspaper. There was a photo of him dead. She knew things would be different after that,” Usifu said of his mom.

Soon after, Fatu learned she was pregnant with twins, and she gave birth to a boy and a girl. As a widow in a war-torn country, she knew she couldn’t give her children the best lives possible.

She begged a woman at the adoption agency to take Usifu and the twins, and All is One agreed. One day in the family’s home, a rusted metal shack with rotten wood as siding, Fatu told Usifu his life was going to be a little bit different.

“She had me on her shoulder, and she started crying. She told me everything was going to be OK, and you’re going to be in a better place now.

“You go, start a new life, with a new family, and everything is going to be better.”

The day they parted, his mom gave him a teddy bear, a drum, and a new T-shirt with blue and white stripes.

Then, the little boy waved goodbye to his mom, and he watched her cry as she walked down the hill.

“I didn’t want her to go,” he said.

At the top of the hill, the gates closed around the building, and closed on his old life.

As his mom had hoped, Usifu did start a new life, although it didn’t get better for a long time.

Now, 14 years later, the recent Hellgate High School graduate and crew member for Jackson Contractors plans to return to Sierra Leone to help the country he left behind.

He also wants to search for his mom.

He hopes she is still alive.

***

At the orphanage, the lady at the gate welcomed Usifu.

“You will be given an opportunity here. You will be given a bed. You will be given food.”

“Hopefully, we will give you a family that will take you in,” Usifu remembers her telling him.

Adoption wasn’t certain at all for Usifu, an older child whose age made him less appealing than his siblings and other younger children in the home.

Soon, a family from Idaho took in his brother and sister, 1-year-olds, and Usifu waited.

Finally, a family in Columbia Falls called for him.

Usifu, then 7 1/2, headed to the U.S., but it would be years until he found a home.

***

Culture shock hit Usifu hard in his new country.

In Columbia Falls, he was the only kid who was black, who looked different.

He spoke Swahili, not English.

He still wet the bed.

“I got very bad grades. I was considered a poor student because I was, quote unquote, lazy,” Usifu said.

He believes the wife of the couple who adopted him had good intentions, but the husband didn’t accept a child who wasn’t his blood. The couple had money, he said, but he believes they were overwhelmed by the severity of his needs.

At one point, the husband built a shed in the backyard, and Usifu lived in it for months, he said, maybe three, as many as six.

“I was almost a slave to them. They didn’t treat me right, as a kid should be treated,” Usifu said.

They could have sent him back to Sierra Leone, but friends of theirs who questioned the way Usifu was being raised took him in instead.

In 2006, the Flanigans adopted him, and with them, Usifu found his American family.

***

Sandi Crocker and Alan Flanigan welcomed Usifu into their home with open arms, and Usifu believes Alan saw him as the son he never had.

In one picture, he and the Flanigans’ daughter, Kaylee, sit on either side of Alan, the father with a wide grin.

“They took me in, took me in as their own,” Usifu said.

They swam in Montana lakes, rode bikes, went to Boy Scouts, played in water parks, “did kid stuff.”

“We had a cat. A couple cats, actually,” Usifu said.

The good new life with his family didn’t translate to his experience in school, though. In Columbia Falls, he was bullied for being different, and Usifu suffered through depression throughout middle school.

“That’s one of the major issues … the looks on their faces when they see an African kid. I kind of had to let it go,” Usifu said.

For a short time, the family lived in Castle Rock, Washington, and there he learned he needed to live in a place that was more diverse. Usifu broached the topic with his parents, now divorced, who agreed a more ethnically rich environment would benefit their son.

They believed he would do well in Missoula, and four years ago, Usifu enrolled at Hellgate High School and moved in with his adopted sister.

“It was a lot better place, a lot more people, feeling welcomed,” Usifu said.

***

Usifu flourished in high school. He found friends, a basketball coach who talked with him, a math teacher who told him how to walk through life, to stay focused on school, keep his head on straight, make good friends.

“I really liked the fact he actually cared about me and was willing to work with me,” Usifu said.

He made his first real friend, Austin, and they hung out in Bonner Park together, drove around town, and sometimes played basketball.

At Hellgate, Usifu started shedding his insecurities, and he stopped worrying about what other people thought. Slowly, he started being content with himself.

“I realized who I was going to become, or the person I am becoming,” Usifu said.

One day in class, he experienced a moment that would set his course in life. It was a history class, and the teacher talked about current events, with Ebola in Sierra Leone the topic.

“Everyone else is shrugging it off. You’re the kid who is sitting there thinking, I can’t do anything,” Usifu said.

He hoped no one in class saw him cry; he didn’t want to be teased.

On the other hand, Usifu figured he could do one thing.

***

In Sierra Leone, he remembered how his mother had strapped him to her back, placed a basket on her head, and walked many miles in search of clean drinking water, maybe in a spring or a river far away from the city.

Usifu remembered she would fill the basket, place it on her head again, and return home. Fatu would ration the resource, setting aside a portion for laundry, and most of it for the family to drink.

Many other mothers who lived in the city, with its polluted water, did the same.

“It came to me that everyone should have that opportunity to have good, clean water. I’m sitting here in Missoula looking at the river go by and people swimming and enjoying what they have at the moment.

“I’m in a place where I have good, clean water, very necessary for life, to life. People over there don’t have that opportunity,” he said.

In Montana, he learned about Lifestraws, a tool some people use when they go camping. A Lifestraw filters 99.9 percent of pathogens, and Usifu would like to take 200 of them, along with water bottles, to Sierra Leone next year. (See box for details.)

He’s saving up his money in order to stay in the country for a year, with a departure in May 2016, if possible. In those months, he wants to understand Sierra Leone, speak with the president about the state of the country, and help build houses.

“That’s why I have this job with Jackson. It gives me an opportunity to learn the skills to be able to do that,” Usifu said.

There, he also wants to discover a career he can pursue in the U.S. that will help him return to his homeland with even stronger skills. He’s considering enrolling in Montana State University for a degree in architecture.

He also wants to find his mom.

For graduation, his American mom gave him a photo album with pictures of his family life in Montana and ones from his early years in Sierra Leone, the photographs from Africa he didn’t even know existed.

One shows Usifu on his last day with his mom in Freetown. He’s holding up his blue and white T-shirt at the adoption agency, smiling for the camera.

His mom is smiling too, before she cried on her way down the hill, before he cried last week, thinking about his amazing journey, a gift from his mom.

“The only reason I want to look for her is to tell her thank you,” he said.

“She had to give me up in order to have a better life. That’s something no mother should ever have to do, giving up her own child.””

Missoula man from Sierra Leone plans return to help country, find mother [The Missoulian 9/26/15  by Keila Szpaller ]

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