Good advice. However, I’ve found a cause that’s not only worthy of donations but which also seems to my experienced eye like a safe investment. I’m often asked what can be done to help the people in war-torn or impoverished regions I report on. Here’s a situation where a little can go a long way, and serve to give hope to some of Sierra Leone’s most hopeless. Here’s the back-story:

I was in Freetown with my friend Mike Seamans, a freelance photographer, to evaluate how well (or not so well) Sierra Leone has emerged from its brutal RUF civil war, which ended in 2002. The full details will be published next year when Basic Books re-releases Blood Diamonds for its 10^th anniversary, with new chapters based on this summer’s research.

But I’m not giving too much away to say that the level of poverty and misery is no less breathtaking than it was during my last visit in 2001, just as the war was ending. One of the most dramatic examples we witnessed was a new phenomenon in Sierra Leonean mining—colonies of long-displaced refugees, including very young children, who struggle to survive by mining gravel.

This is just as grueling as it sounds. Men with shovels remove soil to expose large granite boulders, some the size of small cars. They heat the boulders with wood fires or burning tires to make them easier to split into chunks with chisels and sledgehammers. Once the rubble is small enough to lug downhill, the women and children take over. Older kids use mallets and small sledgehammers to crush the rock into pebbles, while very small children use ball-peen hammers. During our visit, a 3-year-old used a ball-peen hammerhead on a stick to smash rocks held in place by her tiny foot, which was clad only in a flip-flop. When buyers come from construction companies or cement manufacturers, as often as twice a week or as infrequently as twice a month, the gravel is measured into a pan the size of a large skillet and sold for 1,300 leones per pan-full. That’s about 30 U.S. cents, to be split by everyone along the chain. An industrious rock crusher can fill about 10 pans per week, but whether anyone buys that much is out of their control.

In a country rich in precious stones, it was a stark reminder of how desperate a place Sierra Leone still is that children must crush common stones in order to survive day to day.

Luckily, this story has glimmers of hope. Foday Mansaray, a former cell phone salesman, has made it his life’s mission to rescue children from the quarries and enroll them in a school he founded, the Borbor Pain Charity School of Hope. Unlike most other schools, including those run by the government, there are no fees for attendance. Everything is offered to the children for free—books, report cards, education.

What this means is that Mansaray is constantly on the hustle for funds to keep the school open. During our visit, two of his four teachers were threatening rebellion over past-due wages amounting to about $150. There weren’t enough stools and benches for the approximately 250 children enrolled in classes. The facility itself can barely be called a “school” in the sense that most people imagine. It’s really nothing more than a pair of crude tents made of zinc sheeting for the roof, tarpaulin walls and bush sticks. The floor is dirt (or mud during the rainy season). Pencils, notebooks, chalk and every other trapping of a typical classroom is in critically short supply.

And when he’s not trying to raise money—by befriending visiting journalists or appealing to the goodwill of local businessmen—Mansaray walks the hills south of Freetown, following the tinny ping of hammers on stones. He always finds another child who’s prospects for a bright future are dim indeed without at least the rudimentary education his school offers.

Mike and I are still working on a big package of stories about these child laborers (we’ve got excellent photos and a radio-ready audio story in addition to the print story I’m writing), but until we find a home for it, I wanted to do what I could for Mansaray and his pupils by publishing details about how those who might be interested in helping financially can do so.

But before I get to those details, here are some of the reasons why I’m taking this unique step (I’ve never before advocated for direct help). In addition to the obvious desire to see very young children spared a hopeless life of dangerous hard labor for the opportunities afforded by education, both Mike and I were impressed with Mansaray and his commitment to the cause. That’s saying something, because, by the end of our trip, we were hard people to impress. Mansaray is the only person we met in three weeks who did not personally appeal to us for money, favors or a free meal. Others certainly did, including those we count as friends. It’s just expected that, during a meal or a meeting over drinks, that the foreigners would pick up the tab. It’s hard to begrudge, considering the level of poverty.

Not only did Mansaray not order food or ask for a Coke if we didn’t offer it to him (which can be a bigger deal than it sounds like), but he made clear that all he wanted out of us is what we do best—spread the word and make people aware of what he was doing. Moreover, every time we ran into him, he was inevitably in a rush, off to pick up lesson plans, or late to a meeting with potential funders. We never “coincidentally” met him at the same café with plenty of time on his hands to sit and do nothing, as was the case with many others.

On my last day in Freetown, I bumped into him coming out of a copy store where he’d spent the last of his money on report cards. He’d just finished studiously blacking out the line on the front where other headmasters would fill in the price to attend the school—he reminded me yet again that his school is free.

In providing the means for people to send money via Western Union, he produced receipts, some several years old, showing how he spent money that had been donated in the past, from places as varied as Virginia and Holland. The amounts were never huge: $25-$100 seemed to be the average donation, but as I mentioned, a little goes a long way if it’s in the right hands. And I wouldn’t be wasting time or space if I wasn’t convinced that those hands belong to Foday Mansaray.

Those interested can send money via Western Union to: the Borbor Pain Charity School Of Hope or Foday Mansaray at 40 Main Peninsular Road, Adonkia/Angola, Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. Mansaray’s cell phone number is :00 232 76 69 89 79. Email wire details and test question to Mansaray at borborpaincharity@yahoo.com.

(Borbor Pain Charity School of Hope can also be found on Facebook.)

The top photo of children working in the quarry is mine; the photo of me in the school was taken by Mike Seamans.