Interview: Isatu Kallon

Interview: Isatu Kallon

In this interview, Isatu Kallon, born in 1991, speaks about her experiences growing up in Kenema, Sierra Leone, her family, and what it was like growing up during the Rebel War. She begins by introducing her relationship to her grandmother, the woman who raised her most of the time as her mother worked to send Kallon and her two sisters to school. She moves on to speak about her large family; Kallon says she has more than seventy cousins. Kallon speaks about the horrors she witnessed growing up during the Rebel War in Sierra Leone and her eventual boat trip to Guinea to take refuge from the violence in Sierra Leone when she was about nine years old. She remembers coming to the United States for the first time, to New York City in April of 2013.

February 25, 2019

Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries

2019oh0142_irw0073

Nicole Strunk

Isatu Kallon

0024

Childhood trauma

Civil wars

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Rebel War, Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone, West Africa

Trauma

War crimes

Nicole Strunk