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Skilled staff members have been recruited from Cole's church in Sierra Leone. Many of them have relatives and friends who have died or been maimed at the hands of these children. Rehabilitation for these children, who have no family to return to, involves victimized families from the church taking them in. Cole himself has firsthand experience with what it means to forgive and be reconciled to these young killers. His grandfather, a village chief, was shot by an eight-year-old boy. Cole has witnessed the dismemberment of children and the rape and disembowelment of a pregnant woman at the hands of these young rebels. This, in part, is why Cole places an emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation as a primary focus of the Nehemiah Project.

"The aim of the project is to provide care and rehabilitation for these children, and the hope is that they will come to experience the love of God, who can bring about major change in their lives," says Avril McIntyre, LifeLine's U.K. coordinator. Sixty young men live at the school. Some have become Christians, been baptized, and given testimonies about how God has changed their lives.

"This is a very serious need in at least seven African nations," McIntyre says. "What do you do with all these orphaned and traumatized children? The Nehemiah Project has started to address the needs of this lost generation. The children in the school are among those who've really seen the most horrendous things. And these boy soldiers are outcasts in the community because of what's gone on."

Lynn Coles, a member of LifeLine Community Church, was one of a group who ran the London Marathon last April, raising over £7,000 [$11,000] for the project, and one of the first to visit the school from the London base. He went to Sierra Leone to help with the project in November 1998. "They are learning to farm the land by the school, and when I was there they were building a little piggery and learning trades. Several of the younger ones held my hand and said, 'I'll take you as my father,' which really brought a lump in my throat. They're still boys and inevitably still get a bit hot under the collar with each other from time to time, but I was seeing the older boys beginning to care about the younger ones and taking a responsibility toward them." Eight-year-old Musa enjoyed wearing a marathon medal Coles had won.

"This is one of the few projects that continued throughout the war," McIntyre says. "These boys have stuck with us. Even though they've been bribed by the rebels to go back, they've chosen not to."

For more information about the Nehemiah Project, visit LifeLine's Web site: www.lifelinenetwork.org.

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December 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 14