Sunday Read: First-Person Matthew Mackenzie on creating SIA

Full of Fire and Hope
A journey, cultural dislocation and a play
by Matthew Mackenzie (photos courtesy of Matthew Mackenzie)

In the fall of 2003 I flew from Alberta to West Africa, with a brief stopover in Toronto.  My plan was to go and research my play concerning the civil war that had recently torn the tiny country of Liberia apart.  Talked out of going directly to Liberia by my parents, I decided to go to Ghana, which was the most stable English speaking country in the region, where there was a significant Liberian refugee population.  Alarmed that I was travelling half way around the world without having done any kind of research, my Aunt Karen—who is a Librarian at the University of Toronto—hastily put me in touch with a Ghanaian student she knew, in the hopes that he would be able to offer some guidance.  As it just so happened, a member of the congregation the Ghanaian student belonged to back home, was the former Head Nurse of the Buduburam Camp—the largest Liberian refugee settlement in the world.