For Columbia Falls man, a return to Africa sparks a call to action

With beads of sweat shimmering on his dark skin under the African sun, Usifu Bangura’s lean 6-foot-3 frame towered over his mother. As he approached her, Bangura hastily pulled a wrinkled, 14-year-old photo of the two of them out of his pocket. Since they didn’t share a language, he tried to identify himself with the blurry remnant of his life in the village, but the expression on her face and outstretched arms revealed she already knew who he was.

Bangura embraced his mother for the first time in over a decade.

“We were just happy to be in each other’s company, just knowing that 14 years had finally come full circle,” Bangura said.

Bangura’s homecoming was a long time in the making. His father Ibrahim died in the Sierra Leone Civil War, leaving his mother, Fatu Fhanko, unable to support their four children. Three of the kids, including 3-year-old Bangura, were sent to an adoption center in the Sierra Leonean capital of Freetown in 2004.

Bangura spent the next four years in the center, before a couple from Columbia Falls adopted him in 2004 when he was 7. The couple believed they were incapable of having biological children.

But shortly after finalizing Bangura’s adoption, his new parents learned of an impending pregnancy. Bangura said they prioritized the needs of their biological child over his own.

Bangura arrived in Montana speaking only Swahili and with no knowledge of American culture. He didn’t understand why people took their shoes off inside. He didn’t know how to use the bathroom. As a result, Bangura’s adopted family moved him into a shed in the backyard and planned to send him back to Sierra Leone.

Bangura rationalizes his mistreatment by attributing their frustration to the trials of raising two children and their misunderstanding of his situation. He believes his adopted family didn’t think through just how hard acclimating a child to a new culture could be.

“The way that I was treated when I first got to the first family was absolutely unbelievable,” Bangura said. “I didn’t know it at the time. I couldn’t know any better.”

Another family in the community, the Flannigans, noticed the abuse and stepped in. They asked to adopt Bangura and keep him in Montana. Bangura’s original American family quickly accepted this offer.

Bangura thrived with the Flannigans. He picked up English quickly and easily skipped both first and second grade. Although Bangura did all right academically, he said his history and skin tone made him an outcast, and he was never capable of truly connecting with his classmates.

“I had a hard time forming relationships with other kids, because of coming from a different background,” Bangura said. “Nobody could really understand that.”

The Ebola crisis that struck Sierra Leone in 2014 prompted Bangura to reconnect with his biological family. He knew his father died fighting rebels, but he had no contact with the rest of his family since he left war-torn Kambia in 2001.

“Due to the blood diamond civil war and the Ebola epidemic, I didn’t know if my family was still alive,” Bangura said. “That was really just the hardest part.”

With the help of a family friend, Bangura tracked down his family and learned of their survival. He reached out to his older brother, named Ibrahim after his father, who had moved out of Mambolo and into a more developed Kambian city. Bangura told his brother he planned to visit his homeland. Though Ibrahim’s English was raw, it was sufficient to organize a return for 19-year-old Bangura in April 2016.

“I realized I’m here (in America), I made it, I’m safe and I’m an adult now,” Bangura said. “I can choose to go back if I want to.”

Bangura’s story gained national attention, and Al Jazeera America documented his reunion with his mother. Bangura said his return to Mambolo was bittersweet; while he was overjoyed to be reunited with his mother, the state of her village was upsetting.

“I just saw so many people walking miles and miles and miles just to get water, and it’d take hours to do so,” Bangura said.

The nearest water source was over two miles away, and the only way to transport it back to Mambolo was for the village’s women to carry it in large pots on their heads. Not only is this horribly inefficient, it also causes long-term health issues, including permanent neck and back disfigurement, according to Bangura. In addition, the villagers have no way to clean the water once it reaches Mambolo.

Before Bangura’s return, several organizations visited Mambolo and dug wells in an effort to provide easier access to water, but none of the villagers knew how to maintain them. Not only did the wells stop producing water, they also became a safety hazard for the village’s children.

The sight of his family struggling to find clean drinking water in a third-world country ravaged by disease and civil war sparked Bangura’s desire to give back to his village.

Bangura said most international aid coming to Sierra Leone focused on unsustainable, one-time resolutions to recurring issues. Bangura himself brought school supplies to the children of Mambolo when he visited, but recognized that, while the gift was helpful, the school would need to be restocked again in a few months.

“One of the initiatives I wanted to take was to provide a nonprofit organization to help the people of my village, as well as to help her (Bangura’s mother) and the communities she belongs to,” Bangura said.

Bangura founded The Bangura Project, an organization focused on bringing sustainable, lasting change to Sierra Leone by engaging with the citizens and prioritizing their needs. He wants the nonprofit to constantly interact and build relationships with the villagers of Kambia.

Rather than supplying what he believes Kambians need, Bangura asks how he can help. When he first returned to Mambolo, he distributed needs assessments to the villagers. Bangura received 60 responses, detailing the struggles of African village life. He believes direct communication with the village will separate his project from other organizations offering aid.

His first mission is to send water-purifying Hippo Rollers to Mambolo and other Kambian villages. A Hippo Roller is essentially a wheelbarrow with a 24-gallon barrel in place of the wheel. Each barrel can cut a Mambolo woman’s trek for water from over two hours to just 30 minutes. The barrels also contain filters that clean the water as villagers push it back to their homes.

In May, Bangura returned to Sierra Leone for six months, as he imports Hippo Rollers from South Africa and distributes them in Mambolo and surrounding villages. While he said this is only the first step for The Bangura Project, it will make an immediate positive impact on the lives of many Sierra Leoneans.

“That’s the most important part of this project,” Bangura said, “to give people an option.”

Learn more about the Bangura Project at http://www.banguraproject.org.