Liberia

I was about to write a review of this great movie, but Tami Hultman does a great job in letting you know what this movie is about. Check it out, I got this from New America Media.

‘Blood Diamond’ Entertains, Educates

allAfrica.com, Review, Tami Hultman, Posted: Dec 11, 2006

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the early days of Master Sergeant Samuel Doe's 1980 coup in Liberia, I was entering a hotel in Monrovia with my five-year-old son when soldiers lounging in the lobby started shouting and indiscriminately shooting. Flight seemed the wrong option, especially when one of the shooters challenged me, "Lady, wheh you goin' wi'dat bag?"

"Looking for you," I improvised. "My son wanted his picture taken with a brave soldier. Would that be you? My camera's in the bag. Do you want to see?" Within seconds, half a dozen menacing youth, brandishing assault rifles, were good-naturedly jostling to be in front of the lens, asking my "small boy" how he liked Liberia, would he like to stay with them, would he show their pictures to everybody in America.

That long-forgotten moment lurched into my mind during a pre-release screening of Edward Zwick's new film, Blood Diamond, starring Djimon Hounsou, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly. During a tense encounter with young rebels in Sierra Leone, U.S. journalist Maddy Bowen, played by Connelly, defuses the threat by taking their pictures.

When Caoily was 10 months old, she came down with rotavirus. If you have children, and you've been through this, then you know how awful this common infection is. Everything you put into your child--in my case, breastmilk and some solids--comes out in a very short time as a watery, noxious, seemingly neverending river of shit that overflows diapers. I would breastfeed her, and she would be shitting simultaneously, covering both of us in it as I tried to get fluids into her to keep her from dehydrating.
Our pediatrician hospitalized her after 12 hours. For three days, she stayed on a simple solution of electrolytes and fluid through an IV in her leg, the only vein the anesthesiologist (I had insisted on an anesthesiologist) could find to puncture.
She was one of the lucky ones.