Blood Diamond

I finally saw Blood Diamond yesterday. What a powerful movie. To see the situation in Sierra Leone in the 1999 wars depicted on screen was something that moved me a lot. While I lived in The Gambia I lived with a Sierra Leonian family who had fled the war torn country many years before. Steven and Helen had left their homeland and been lucky enough to go abroad and study. I also lived a little while with Helen's brother Henry who had been in the city when Sierra Leone blew up - he made it out with only his life (I don't know if he lost family because he would only mention certain things about that time).

Henry was emotionally messed up, and you can understand it after the things he went through to flee on foot the country he had grown up in.

So seeing these scenarios recreated on film really impacted me. I'd heard real life stories, and seen the lives effected by the stuff I was watching in a movie. Ironically the main African actor looked a fair bit like Henry as well.

Also seeing the side of White Africans and British people using this terrible time to try and gain wealth really disgusted me. I think this also had more of an impact because I've witnessed first hand that sort of behaviour in The Gambia.

Child Soldiers, though none in The Gambia, have always been a real soft spot on my heart. To exploit the pure nature of a child and turn him into a killer seems to me to be the most terrible thing anyone could ever ever do.

Blood Diamond rekindled a passion I have for Africa - it disturbed me greatly, and left me in tears at the end when Samuel finds his son in a RUF camp, and the son doesn't even recognise his own father.

The movie does have a very Hollywood ending though, with the family totally reunited and living in the UK. It's a shame that for millions of others this was not the case.