Kailahun.

A school, bombed. I knew that these things existed, I knew that I'd see them. I never thought the sight of a destroyed school, crumbled walls held together by a creaking tin roof would coexist with the image of laughing, smiling children. I should have felt a sense of calm pride for them – they seemed so happy, so smiley, so uplifted despite having experienced so much. I should have swelled with pride over the fact that humanity might just Make It After All.

Instead, I had a breakdown.

I was in a room with sixty children. Sixty black little bodies pushing one another to get closer to the white ladies, big smiles spreading, bambinos giggling. Their eyes were so *wide*. They laughed with so much excitement as they scattered around pushing rickety wooden benches together, the movements making awful dirty scraping sounds against the rocky mud floor. There was endless babbling amongst the kids as they got the room organized. Cliques of girls sat together and teenage boys guffawed, backwards baseball hats bobbing along with their laughs. Little tots not more than four years old crowded outside the "windows" (bomb-blasts) to see what was going on in the school, braided little heads peeking over the shards of broken stone wall. Together we had convened to discuss children's rights. Sounds pretty cute, eh?

I almost vomited.

There's that expression of "choking back tears" that we've all heard – and felt – a million times. This particular time was extremely intense. I was there to give a lecture on the Child Rights Bill so that these kids would know what their rights were. I had given a two-hour presentation that morning to the regional directors of Save the Children and discussed with them possible problems with its implantation at the district and regional levels. We had talked about the hierarchy of laws and I explained in detail how this bill would affect current national and customary laws. It was, as Charly would later say, a "brilliant" presentation. I had spent the day revamping my presentation so that I could present it to the socially-aware under-eighteen-year-olds of Kailahun, the poorest district of one of the least developed countries on the planet. I had drawn graphs and pictures to explain how legislation is passed, What Is A Constitution and What Does it Mean to Have Rights? And here I stood, staring at a school that had been bombed only a few years ago – a school that these kids had frequented prior to the blasts and still sat in every day – to talk to them about Rights. These are some of the children amongst thousands who had been abducted, drugged, armed and forced to serve as combatants. They had been raped and forced into slavery, bore the children of their rapists and were maintained as slaves after the war. They attacked civilians after being themselves tortured and drugged with cocaine. They were forced into a rebel movement whose slogan was "Operation No Living Thing." They were separated from their families and were the victims of merciless amputations and they themselves, under threat of death, murdered others.

And there I stood in my polka-dot dress with my flipchart and markers ready to explain to this group of smiling, laughing children why they won't have to go through that anymore.

You'd think that it'd be uplifting. You probably think that faced with a similar situation you would swell with pride at the chance to discuss something so positive. You would think that explaining to war-children that no Sierra Leonean child will ever be forced into combat again would be easy to voice. You probably imagine that you would stand straight and tall, launch a vibrant smile and speak with ease. Congratulations, kids! YOU'RE FREE!

I didn't, couldn't.

I choked. I hyperventilated. I panicked.

"I have to present HERE? This school has been *bombed*, Charly. Good God, are those bullet holes?"

My throat welled up with that horrible choking feeling and in my head I willed by body into dehydration just so that I would not fucking cry in front of these kids. I will not cry, I will not cry, I will not cry. I begged Charly to do her presentation first knowing that if my weak, emotional and affected little self stood in front of this group of children I would completely lose all semblance of composure. Charly herself breathed a sigh of relief – she had to get the kids organized for a conference on Sunday and they were not ready. She warned me that if she went first I might not have time to present to them. My hands flailed and my curls bobbed with eager gestures of "that's okay that's just fine no problem it's okay" because I could barely even speak. In the end, I didn't present anything.

And after many minutes of a panicked internal chant of get-your-shit-together-damnit, I finally did.