My name is Santos Kallon and I am a beneficiary of the Digital Hope project.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8BwIrSR5Dks

During post-conflict Sierra Leone, I taught myself wood carving in order to survive and a means of expressing the savagery of the war.

 At a relatively young age during my teenage years, I was faced with a sad reality and this is my true story.
I have grown to become a remarkable young man now, and in spite of my odds and disability caused by the civil war in Sierra Leone, I have decided to set myself up with a woodcarving business in Sierra Leone.
I have produced art forms in wood carving that tells the story of my amputation, and also the beauty I nature and my country despite the war that shackled it.

Whilst now provided with digital ICT tools to share my personal stories to the rest of the
world, I have found a new voice through the Digital Hope project of B- Gifted which has constantly become a powerful media mouth piece that continues to inspire me with hope as well as hopefully help to shed more light on the many efforts at rebuilding and healing lives during the aftermath of conflict.

I have contributed to the National Vision Arts contest organized by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) my creative sculpture arts and wood carving which depicts my National vision for a 'peaceful, proud, but humble, under one flag for Sierra Leone.'
 Born into a large family of peasant farmers in Sierra Leone’s Northern Province, I am a respectful, usually a shy, softly-spoken young man in my early 20s now.
More than half of my young life has been spent in the midst of one of the last century’s most brutal civil wars, which shuddered to a halt in 2002.

When I was in my teens, I had my right hand sadistically amputated by dissident soldiers who appeared in my isolated jungle village. At gunpoint, they hacked off my hand and the hand of my younger cousin with a rusty machete before locking us up inside a thatched hut. There they set fire to it and left us to burn as their newest victims,  while they moved on to the next village to cause more mayhem.
 It was 1998.
At this time amputations were one of the brutal trademarks of the Sierra Leonean war. Whilst the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), was responsible for the majority of atrocities, amputations were practiced by all warring factions. This, along with the abduction of children to jungle bases where they were brutalized, forcibly drugged
and trained to maim and kill, is one of the horrors that put Sierra Leone on the international map on a sad chapter in history.

During 1996, the RUF infamously launched “Operation Stop Elections” where amputation became the most terrorizing deterrent against civil society, casting votes in multiparty elections. The democratically-elected government was soon ousted by a force known as the Armed Forced Revolutionary Council (AFRC) in a military coup. These dissident soldiers formed an alliance with the RUF. When the AFRC was in turn forcibly removed from office by a force of Nigerian-led
“peacekeepers” from the Economic Community of West African States, many former government soldiers went bush and joined the rebels.

I fell victim to these rebel soldiers who became known as 'sobels’. These ‘sobels’ may have wanted to punish my community for its tacit support of forces loyal to the country’s democratically-elected government. In a community that struggles to survive by subsistence agriculture, the act of cutting off one’s limbs is tantamount to cutting off the future livelihood of a peasant farmerand his family.


Miraculously Escaped! miraculous discovery

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h-0eYMdQDAQ

 Miraculously, I escaped from the burning hut and, like many thousands of other civilian casualties of the conflict, I ended up as a  refugee in Freetown, the nation’s capital. Here I sought shelter in the Freetown Amputee Camp. Yet my handicap led me to discover a  talent previously unknown to me.
  Outside the Freetown Amputee Camp, I noticed carving stone miniatures, left-handed, by nuns from the Cluny Sisters Catholic Mission. They helped me to learn further by organizing an apprenticeship with a local woodcarver. Through money earned selling my sculptures to foreign nationals and while working with other amputees in the garden of the Sisters’ mission, I gradually earned enough to commission local blacksmiths to forge tools for him.
 I was also able to rent a shed of corrugated iron, which I now use as a workshop.
 Thanks to the Digital Hope project of B-Gifted supported by ITU, I now have the technology tools to share my story as one of countless others in a country where untold thousands of civilians suffered the brunt of one of the previous century’s most devastating civil conflicts.
 This war crippled our small West African nation and such a poor country that so much natural wealth that has been made poor by negative actions.
 I continue to hone my craft and make a living in the trying conditions of my camp in Makeni and my city Freetown.

The innovative technology center created by B-Gifted foundation has afforded my colleagues and the tools and reawakened talents previously unknown to us. Now my plans are to sell my wood carving products online as well as used the technology and communication skills to network with others and find solutions for problems affecting me and my community. Through B-Gifted, I have found a unique voice and engaged in entrepreneurship, through a micro-credit program brought by one of b-Gifted associate Dalila Paulo from Lisbon, Portugal, (a therapeutic training). She was invited to our camp by the efforts of B- Gifted to co-host a very relevant workshop entitled "Support to Survivors of Amputation. "