We Need Witnesses: People Willing to Prove That Love Is Stronger Than Fear”.
I do not speak of witnesses as an idea. I speak of them because, at a crucial moment of my life, I was forced to become one myself. I learned early to distrust violence, not from books but from lived experience: from the harsh challenges of boyhood, and later from a civil war that turned neighbors into enemies and children into child soldiers. When I fled Sierra Leone for Guinea, I carried no certainty except this: that hatred, if left unchallenged, would finish what war had begun. Teaching displaced children often without pay, joining a campaign for the restoration of democracy, I learned that love is not sentiment. It is labor. What follows is not theory for me. It is the language I learned while helping children study literature, while building peace programs with no budget but faith, while guiding young people shattered by violence toward collaboration instead of revenge. Through a unique foresight, I chose to believe that healing was possible, that technology could be a bridge, an...
