Alpha Mansaray was 6 years old when child soldiers attacked his village in Sierra Leone.
“All of a sudden trucks came in and child soldiers just started shooting at everyone,” he said. “They were younger than 12, as long as you could carry a gun (you could be a soldier).”
The day the children attacked set in motion a series of events that will culminate on Saturday as he graduates with two bachelor’s degrees from the College of William and Mary.
Mansaray will receive degrees in Kinesiology and a self-designed major called Public Health and Community Studies.
Now 22 years old, Mansaray hopes to become a doctor and earn his master’s in public health so he can return to Sierra Leone to help reform the medical system.
On Monday, he reflected on the circumstances that brought him from hiding from rebels to setting out on a medical career he hopes will bring him back to his homeland.
When Mansaray describes what he was like as a six-year-old fleeing violence and walking across his war-torn country, he is merciless in his self-assessment.
“I was being very bratty the whole time. I cried a lot,” he said. “I didn’t want to walk anymore.”
Mansaray ended up being reunited with his family in the days after his village was attacked. His grandmother led six children on a two-week journey across the country to the county’s capital, Freetown, pleading and negotiating with rebels along the way.
“If she got stopped by someone, she would say, ‘Their mothers and fathers have been killed, and I’m the only one here with them. Please don’t take them,'” Mansaray said.
Mansaray’s mother and father were not dead, though. His mother was in Richmond, having won a visa to the U.S. His father had fled rather than being killed or forced into service by the rebels, and it would be more than a year before he was reunited with his family.
Mansaray spent time in a refugee camp in neighboring Guinea before moving to The Gambia. After five years, he and his older brother and sister were able to move to America to be with their mom.
He arrived in Maryland at the age of 12 and was immediately skeptical of the woman hugging him and the landscape outside the car window.
“When (my mom) hugged me, I told my sister, ‘Who is this person?'” he said. “Then we were driving on the highway and it was just trees and trees. In my mind, America was New York City. Why are there so many trees? Where are the buildings? Where are the skyscrapers?”
Mansaray said for years he never thought about the violence of his early childhood. But when he visited Sierra Leone as a high school sophomore and saw men whose arms had been chopped off and spent time with the grandmother and cousins who had saved his life, he began to struggle with survivor’s guilt.
“I came back to America and was asking, ‘Why did I survive? Why me?’ I felt very guilty,” he said.
He said the guilt fueled his desire to achieve in America. He began raising funds and donations for medical equipment for Sierra Leone. And he said while many of his classmates at Varina High School in Henrico were content to graduate high school, he set his sights on higher education.
Mansaray’s mother, Aminata Fornah, 48, said she remembers Mansaray’s change after visiting Sierra Leone. She said she would encourage him to view his past as a motivation to help people.
“I used to tell them: ‘Don’t forget where you come from,'” Fornah said. “We came from war, and fortunately we were able to come here.”
Her words rubbed off on Mansaray.
“It is my job to acknowledge I am here because of luck and I need to help these people out,” he said. “That’s why I want to go to medical school.”
One of Mansaray’s contributions to the William and Mary community was a pre-Thanksgiving banquet for the school’s custodians and cafeteria workers he began in 2014. Darice Xue, 22, worked with Mansaray on the event.
“Alpha always seems very interested in what other people think and empathizing with them and where they come from,” Xue said. “Because of (his childhood) experiences he learned not to take things too seriously, if something goes wrong or doesn’t work out (he) doesn’t get too emotionally attached.”
While his classmates describe him as empathetic, Mansaray isn’t so sure. He said when he first got to William and Mary, he had a hard time relating to the emotional pain of his classmates.
“I felt like the things people would complain about I just could not identify with,” he said. “I would listen to these people who had all these problems and all these things, and I would think, ‘What? That’s a problem?'”
He said it took a couple years, but he has learned to listen to classmates without comparing their struggles to hiding from rebels in Sierra Leone. And he encourages his peers to take their frustration and use them.
“My view was, ‘Channel your depression to something productive,'” he said.
McKinnon can be reached by phone at 757-345-2341.
