Diasporic Connections | Freda KoomsonAbout five months ago, I decided to take a leap of faith a
Diasporic Connections | Freda Koomson
About five months ago, I decided to take a leap of faith and relocate to the sweet sweet land of liberty, Liberia, West Africa. This opportunity and experience has been years in the making for me, and if it wasn’t one excuse it was another. So, I decided to embark on this journey because for me, I’ve always been a Liberian far away from home.While I was born in Brooklyn, my heritage in the motherland has never been taken for granted in my upbringing. At the age of four, the civil war in Liberia had begun and though far away, I remember being young enough to be perplexed but old enough to be afraid of what was ensuing in our homeland. I remember visiting family friends and the kids being ceremoniously ushered into a cousin’s bedroom to play while the adults sat in awe watching the rawest video footage from back home. I recall vaguely trying to sneak in to the living room during what I now know was video of a president’s brutal torture. I remember tearful renderings of friends & family members who had somehow escaped, speaking of things in this wonderland I couldn’t imagine. These stories coupled with my mom’s recollection of King Burger “y’all think y’all the only one with Fast Food options?”, or shopping on Waterside before going to visit her mother in the “countryside”. I’ve even had dreams riddled with anecdotes of her time on LU campus in Monrovia, the “country girl” that made it to college in the city.
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