Our project manager invited a high ranking police official to the ship and I arranged some dental and minor surgical procedures for him. He was the head of the special investigation of some people involved in a coup attempt in 1997, and had the suspects in jail. The RUF broke them out, and subsequently a coalition was formed between the existing government and those that had freed. This officer became #1 on their hit list. His daughter was 2 months old at the time and they came looking for him at his house. As he hid under the bed, his wife went out with the baby in her arms and screamed that when the child was born he deserted the family, she had not seen him since and if they found him they should put a bullet in his head but not before they brought him back so she could tell him how much she despised him. They bought it and he then had to flee to "the bush" and eventually Guinea because if anyone saw him around the house, those looking for him would know his wife lied and would kill his whole family. Some of his co-investigator/friends were rounded up into a building and burned alive.  What this country has seen is unbelievable, in fact, the officer said when he thinks back on it all it seem like a dream.  I started out my "being on call" day with a page from the Duty Nurse about a crew member who had pulled a maggot out of his scrotum. This is Africa!!!  What's the diagnosis docs?. It was a Mango Fly larva (Google and read). The Bot Fly has a similar and even more interesting life cycle: It "captures" a mosquito or smaller fly, lays its eggs on the abdomen of the smaller insect and when that smaller insect lands on a warm mammalian body, the heat stimulates the eggs to hatch into larvae that painlessly bore into the host mammal, sometimes through the mosquito bite, sometimes through intact skin, and then go through several larval transformations before they burrow back out of the skin to escape and continue their life cycle to a full grown fly. Nifty!!! We are settling in, finally, and had a second, very calm screening in a safer venue with heavy police assistance to control the crowds. There is a feeling that during the Civil War a whole generation of child soldiers were ripped from their heavily parent/elder respecting, socially stable traditions and introduced to extreme levels of selfishness, disrespect, power and blatant cruelty. There were child soldiers that would bet a cigarette on the sex of the baby of a pregnant villager and then slit her open to see who won. People were burned alive. Cannibalism was not unheard of, and the chopping off of hands and feet were common, dare I say routine. The child soldiers of that war are now the twenty-something youth that roam the streets with an unemployment rate of 70%, and an literacy rate of 36%. If you make more than $1.25/day your are ABOVE the poverty level. Since the majority of those who broke through the gate at the first screening were males in this age group, coming through with clenched fists and raised hands, one wonders if they are some of those young kids who have never integrated back into society. Why did they surge through the gates? What were they doing there? What did they want? When the rebels were asked what they were fighting for during the civil war, they were usually unable to give an answer, and likely to kill you for asking.