Barbarity, hope coexist in Sierra Leone.

HALF A WORLD AWAY from his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, Marvin Olinsky picked up an alert African girl, maybe two years old. Her smile sparkled against the backdrop of the more reserved semicircle of a hundred or so men and women, young and old, who stood as willing displays of a barbarity hard to fathom. Each one had some limb cut off by machete. The little girl wasn't paying much attention to the fact that a rebel had slashed her right arm off a few inches below the shoulder. Perhaps it was the same rebel who shot the little girl's mother to death.

Spotting Olinsky's blue cap, she scooped it away and plopped it on her head, giggling triumphantly.

We all laughed, but not long. Laughing was the last thing we expected to do at the Murray Town Amputee Camp in Freetown, Sierra Leone. This camp was the last stop on a three-day journey to Sierra Leone, led by U.S. Representatives Tony Hall (D-Ohio) and Frank Wolf (RVa).

A grim, pregnant teen-age girl looked straight ahead at no one in particular. The fullness of the girl's midriff was accented by her two arm stubs. The rebels had raped her, then cut off her arms above the elbows. These victims, more than 10,000 by one count, symbolized what brought our small delegation to a country that had been home to me.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1962-64. I knew these people as kind, loving and industrious. I never imagined the nightmare that would eat the nation alive.

In early August, Olinsky, a Daytonian who uses his vacation days to teach practical technology, like building latrines, to the people in Sierra Leone, said he was going to Sierra Leone, that Hall and Wolf were going. He asked if I would want to go. I said yes.

On Dec. 5, our sprint began with a tour of refugee camps in Guinea near the border of Sierra Leone. Hundreds of thousands of terrorized Sierra Leoneans had fled north to this West African camp.

Down the camp road, a young man beckoned Hall to go inside his family's windowless, square mud hut. Two small rooms, each with space enough to fit one single bed, slept 26 people. Another man pulled me to see his family's quarters, a bare room with a straw bed and a torn piece of plastic for a sheet, nothing else.

As children held our hands, we were led here and there, soon separated among alleys. Sitting in a row beside the pole structure they had built no roof for yet, because they don't have the materials, a half-dozen colorfully dressed women wove beautiful blankets. They were producing these goods to create a women's center.

They were kept alive by sacks of bulgar wheat labeled "U.S.A." But hunger loomed. A November skirmish in Sierra Leone had sent thousands more refugees to Guinea. There wasn't enough food, and supplies would run out in January. Starvation could possibly cause unrest, which would make matters worse. Guinea itself, the host country, is dirt poor.

Inside Sierra Leone, on another day, girls sat holding their babies in the tiny Holy Mary Clinic. Some of the mothers were 13, maybe 14. Many had been among the 3,000 children swept up and kidnaped in a January 1999 attack. Girls over 12 had been used as sex slaves. The boys had been used as spies, soldiers, scavengers to do whatever needed to be done. Five hundred of those abducted girls had returned to the community served by the clinic. Now many were giving birth. They were lucky by comparison: Some girls bore their babies while on the run; some had their babies buried alive.

In the Peace Corps, I had seen children so malnourished their bellies were swollen. Yet, I hadn't seen a baby near death before. At the French-run Action Contre le Faim therapeutic center, mothers sat beside their babies on mats that barely cushioned the cement floors. Beside one teen-age mother was her bone-thin son lying on his back, eyes closed, arms outstretched. He looked like a cross. Hall seemed to be as struck by the boy as I had been. But whereas I had filed the scene in the numb holding room of my mind and then moved on, Hall knelt on one knee beside the child. Hall said nothing for a while. Then he touched the boy's hand fur maybe a minute and said some words to the mother. Then he rose slowly, respectfully. Silent.

On December 6, we entered the residential compound of president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. Tall, sturdy, and easy in his manner, Kabbah is a retired U.N. diplomat who had been elected president in 1996 and then overthrown by a junta in 1997. He was brought back in 1998 by Nigerian soldiers (from Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) who overthrew the junta. Kabbah is Sierra Leone's hope. He said he was ashamed at how corruption had crippled the country and outlined his anti-corruption strategy. He asked for help.

Hells dot the earth. But the landscape of this hell was once my home. If you could see face to face the darkness of human madness wrought on these people, your heart would ache into your sleep.

If you could see the courage with which the innocent people of this little country endure the nightmare wrought by countrymen who betrayed them, if you could see the determination with which Sierra Leoneans and others struggle to heal and restore, you could not help but measure your life against theirs.

NCEW member Hap Cawood served on the editorial page staff of the Dayton Daily News for nearly 33 years, the last 17 as editorial page editor. He retired Dec. 31, just after his trip to Sierra Leone.