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"This Is My Family"
As she wiped away her tears, Sarah stepped from the car and swayed to the music. The women in the group led her to a red-dirt plaza shaded by huge trees, where she was seated at a banquet table with her father, her uncle the chief and other dignitaries. The speeches and ceremonial dances lasted well past sunset.During her 17 days in Bumpe, Sarah bonded with Joseph's wife, Mary, as if they were old girlfriends. Sarah's half sister, Jeneba, then 20, and half brother, Hindo, 15, proved to be bright and thoughtful. Joseph, it turned out, possessed a talent for impressions and foreign accents. (British colonial to bartender: "Gin on ice? Ab-so-lewtly!") Relatives dropped by often, bearing live chickens because Sarah had said chicken and rice was her favorite dish. Only later did she learn that poultry was a rare delicacy, reserved for the most honored guests.
"I'd spent most of my life feeling like I needed to do something really great to be accepted," says Sarah. "When I got to this village, there was complete acceptance and love."
There was also great pain. Sarah met adults and children who'd lost limbs to the rebels. One of her aunts, who'd survived an attempted decapitation, was missing a chunk of her neck. Clean water and modern medicine were in short supply. Among Bumpe's 2,000 residents, no one but her father and uncle had access to electricity, and even they could afford to run their generators only on special occasions. Joseph's house was made of cinder blocks rather than mud bricks, but the mosquitoes made no distinction, and he and his son—like many of the villagers—suffered recurring bouts of malaria. During Sarah's two-and-a-half-week visit, three funerals were held.
At her father's school, 200 students were pursuing their studies in roofless classrooms, determined to improve their lives. "These people had been through hell," Sarah marvels, "and they were like, Okay, what's next? Let's get our education going."
Sarah returned home to Los Angeles wrestling with questions of responsibility (especially when distant kin called from Africa, asking for money). "She was trying to figure out her role in all this," says John Woehrle. How much time, energy and cash could a struggling actress and part-time dance instructor spare?
Woehrle agreed to help with the cause. He and Sarah established the nonprofit Kposowa Foundation to channel aid to Bumpe, and they set as their goal raising $200,000 to restore its high school. Sarah raised the first $850 with a carnival at the school where she taught dance. A concert of African and Appalachian music at West Virginia University brought in $16,000; her adoptive parents helped organize the WVU event and now work regularly with the foundation.
Last March, Sarah and Woehrle returned to Sierra Leone to set up an NGO enabling the villagers to run their own reconstruction projects. By then, the foundation had funneled $24,000 to Bumpe High School; the money went toward new roofs and windows, library books, and bright paint on the classroom walls. Today attendance has risen to 450. Dorms are being repaired, to be followed by improvements on the home economics building.
Sarah hopes the work will be mostly finished when she returns to Bumpe in December with her adoptive parents. "Sarah likes both of her fathers quite a bit," says Jim Culberson with a smile, "and she thinks we should meet."
Joseph Kposowa agrees. "I owe them a lot," he says of the Culbersons. "The way everything has worked out, it's a very big blessing."
No one feels more blessed than Sarah, who never expected she'd be a key supporter of an African village. "Sometimes I think, I don't know how to do this," she says. "But what I do know is that this is my family."
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