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" The first time I wore diamonds I was 16. They were a birthday present from my parents and my first taste of the delight that comes with wearing something special. I remember carefully putting the earrings on right away at the restaurant. As I walked home tucked under my father&amp;#039;s arm, I hoped each passerby would notice my new gift, which I imagined beamed like two little lighthouse strobes in the cold New England night. Standing on trash, rubble, and red dirt in the tepid West African afternoon this past spring, in a ghetto of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, I felt no such pride for diamonds or any kind of adornment. Between 1991 and 2002, the Sierra Leonean government and the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) engaged in a civil war, which claimed an estimated 50,000 lives and was propelled by the very culture of consumption and luxury we have come to worship. A group of homeless teenage boys\u2014ex-child soldiers clad in rap concert and Super Bowl T-shirts older than their years\u2014crowded around a transistor radio, and I looked away as one of them, his eyes heavy with drugs, fell and gashed his knee on a rock. Surveying the vivid human aftermath of this national tragedy, I felt shame for all the things I had been given and discarded in my life.  &amp;quot;The motivation for a jewelry purchase is emotional,&amp;quot; says Wade Watson, the founder of Ruff&amp;amp;amp;Cut, a new jewelry line that donates a percentage of its profits to charities in Sierra Leone, where the diamonds for the collection were mined. &amp;quot;If we can emotionally connect the consumer to the village where the stones came from in the same way that people connect to the idea behind an engagement ring, and if it piques interest in the DNA of the diamond and the culture of the diamond, we could not only succeed as a business but change the world, too.&amp;quot; In this spirit, Watson invited ELLE, Victoria&amp;#039;s Secret &amp;quot;Angel&amp;quot; and model Selita Ebanks, and photographer and artist Phyllis Galembo to see Sierra Leone\u2014a country as notorious for its diamond supply as for the civil war fueled by it\u2014and his efforts to create a socially responsible company there. Upon arriving in Freetown, the first thing one notices are the hand-painted billboards flanking the miles of unpaved roads that carve through the misty electric green mountains. They don&amp;#039;t advertise soda or cell phones but rather motiva-tional messages, some placed by relief organizations and others by the country&amp;#039;s recently elected president: Ernest Bai Koroma, a native son who ran on a platform of anticorruption with a pointed emphasis on reforming the country&amp;#039;s economy. &amp;quot;Promote development, kick corruption out of Sierra Leone&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Water is life, preserve it&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Our future is in your hands, keep it AIDS-free: abstain, be faithful, condom use&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Have you been sexually violated?&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Prevent malaria, protect your family by sleeping under an insecticide treated net every night.&amp;quot; These signs summarize the problems facing Sierra Leoneans, which include holding the last spot on the United Nations&amp;#039; Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, education, and adult literacy, among other things.   After the conclusion of the war in 2002, the United Nations led the implementation of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme\u2014a global initiative designed to stop the trade of diamonds from conflict zones, the profits of which had bought rebel weapons. Following suit, George W. Bush enacted the Clean Diamond Trade Act in 2003, which enabled the U.S. (the top consumer of diamonds in the world) to participate in the KPCS. Today, 74 countries follow the regulations set by the KPCS, accounting for 99.8 percent of the global production of rough diamonds. As a result, these countries are finally seeing royalties\u2014like Sierra Leone, which legally exported $125 million in diamonds in 2006, compared with almost none at the end of the 1990s. However, the problems now facing the country are how to get foreign investors to do business in Sierra Leone (most are deterred by the country&amp;#039;s reputation for corruption) and then to get more of that money back to the people, who are still picking up the pieces from a war that made life stand still for more than a decade. Watson\u2014a Pepperdine grad with a penchant for Jimi Hendrix, Spicoli-esque surfer shirts, and stacks of chain necklaces\u2014set his compass for Sierra Leone after 9/11, when he lost his brother-in-law, who worked as a trader for Sandler O&amp;#039;Neil, in the World Trade Center attacks. For the past two years, Watson has served as the executive vice president of the Sierra Leone\u2013based diamond mining outfit Target Resources, focusing on the company&amp;#039;s investor relations and social responsibility. &amp;quot;I thought, If we can separate ourselves by mining in a transparent, socially and environmentally responsible way, we can generate jobs and fair pay to a people and an economy that really needs it,&amp;quot; Watson says. So far, they&amp;#039;ve built four schools, several covered markets, roads, bridges, and drainage systems, all in the Kono region, the country&amp;#039;s diamond mining capital, where Target Resources&amp;#039; operations are also located. Presently, the mining company sells all of its stones to Laurelton Diamond, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tiffany &amp;amp;amp; Co., at which point the best are integrated into Tiffany&amp;#039;s diamond stock. &amp;quot;Before working with Target, we had never received stones from Sierra Leone,&amp;quot; says Jim Fernandez, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Tiffany &amp;amp;amp; Co., who has direct responsibility for the company&amp;#039;s diamond operations. &amp;quot;We were looking for the right kind of partner to do business with. We were most impressed by what they&amp;#039;ve given back to the community; it has surpassed our expectations. They were building schools before they were making any money of their own.&amp;quot; In addition to the partnership with Target Resources, the Tiffany &amp;amp;amp; Co. Foundation has invested in the country&amp;#039;s future, including launching an initiative with FESS (Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability) to cover mined-out holes\u2014water-filled craters dug by small-scale artisanal miners who pan through the watery gravel looking for, but rarely finding, diamonds\u2014in Kono. Once abandoned, these stagnant pools become dangerous breeding grounds for malaria, the No. 1 killer of children under the age of five in Sierra Leone. This year, Watson purchased a fraction of Target Resources stones to go toward the first collection of his new venture, Ruff&amp;amp;amp;Cut. Made of recycled silver and gold and both polished and unpolished diamonds, the Ruff&amp;amp;amp;Cut collection consists of designs created by Watson&amp;#039;s friends, including Robin Renzi of Me&amp;amp;amp;;Ro, Scottish designer Vivien Johnston of Fifi Bijoux, and, coming soon, Ebanks&amp;#039; own jewelry inspired by her visit. Each piece comes with a card revealing the name of a charity that will receive 5 percent of its retail cost.   One is St. George Orphanage, an NGO largely funded by Target Resources that rehabilitates and then attempts to reconnect the countless children displaced by the war with their families, relatives, or foster families. All the children at St. George have been rescued from the streets by the staff, who take daily trips at dusk to the Freetown areas where girl prostitutes and gangs of teenage boys can be found, a mission they allowed ELLE to experience firsthand. These volunteers know most of the children by name and each day talk to them about leaving life on the streets.  &amp;quot;The children have to decide on their own when they&amp;#039;re ready to come to St. George. And when they are, we bring them in,&amp;quot; said Eddie Dominic Koroma, an organization volunteer, as he walked me into a hilltop cemetery in town where a group that provocatively calls itself &amp;quot;From the Grave, Friends of the Dead&amp;quot; convenes. Many of the young boys were child soldiers who had been kidnapped from their homes and forced to fight for the RUF, notorious for amputating the limbs of innocent Sierra Leoneans and for the illicit trade of stones, captured in Edward Zwick&amp;#039;s 2006 film, Blood Diamond. These boys live in whatever kind of shelter they can find, in tight-knit groups that can be traced back to the battalions in which they fought during the war. In some cases, they also carry with them addictions to drugs like &amp;quot;brown brown&amp;quot; (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder) and sleeping pills, both of which were fed to them routinely by the RUF during the conflict. The clans have effectively replaced their families, who were either murdered by the RUF or can&amp;#039;t be located, as nearly one third of the population was internally displaced and/or fled as refugees to neighboring countries.  A searing example of this tragic dislocation surfaced on a visit to another orphanage near Freetown, where ELLE&amp;#039;s Sierra Leonean photo assistant was miraculously spotted by his nephew, with a tiny cry from a crowd of children playing with sardine cans: &amp;quot;Uncle Alpha!&amp;quot; Both the director of the orphanage and the boy believed his father was dead. Alpha knew otherwise and immediately placed a call on his cell phone to the father, whom he reached, passing it on to the nine-year-old. Watson is just one among dozens of young activists and businesspeople working to bring relief to the country&amp;#039;s deci-mated social system. Also benefiting from Ruff&amp;amp;amp;Cut&amp;#039;s profits is Shine on Sierra Leone (SoSL), a charity founded by 35-year-old Tiffany Persons, an L.A.-based former music video executive who initially traveled to Sierra Leone to film a documentary following a diamond&amp;#039;s journey from mine to final polishing in South Africa and India. Once there, she took an interest in an elementary school in Bongema, in Kono; today, her organization raises funds to build and maintain schools and pay for textbooks, clothes, and food for the children living in mining villages. &amp;quot;These people are just trying to survive,&amp;quot; Persons says. &amp;quot;Most of them have never even seen a diamond.&amp;quot; Persons is also a partner in Bambai Bling, a charity started by movie producers Filippo Bozotti and Rebecca Chaiklin, who created the 2007 VH1 document-ary Bling: A Planet Rock, which trailed hip-hop artists Paul Wall and RaeKwon of Wu-Tang Clan to Sierra Leone to discover the connection between blood diamonds and rap culture. Persons, though still working on her own film, will be the subject of an upcoming documentary series that follows her on her trips to Kono for SoSL, directed by actress Regina King (known for her parts in Boyz in the Hood and as Cuba Gooding Jr.&amp;#039;s wife in Jerry Maguire).   A few weeks after returning to New York City, I caught up with Ebanks. We reminisced about our visit to the Muddy Lotus School in Kono, one of the beneficiaries of SoSL funds. We were served warm Cokes and sliced pineapple while a customary welcoming ceremony was performed by the village children. Ebanks told me how the experience had stayed with her. &amp;quot;When Tiffany [Persons] was presented with one of the villager&amp;#039;s babies, whom they had named after her, born with 12 fingers and 12 toes, it really hit a soft spot,&amp;quot; she said. It prompted her to place calls to her friends rapper Eve and tennis star Serena Williams to share what she&amp;#039;d seen that day. Subsequently, the women have formed an organization of their own to benefit SoSL and other individuals and organizations in the country. Their first fundraiser took place in October in New York City, the proceeds from which went to build a small fetal clinic near Muddy Lotus, including medical supplies, doctors, nurses, and two vehicles to transport patients to and from the facility (cars, not to mention bikes and scooters, are hard to come by). This month, Ebanks has planned a return trip to Sierra Leone with Eve to visit the clinic. As for Ebanks&amp;#039; collection of jewels for Ruff&amp;amp;amp;Cut, they&amp;#039;re inspired by the spirit of Sierra Leoneans themselves. &amp;quot;I wanted to use unpolished and polished diamonds to represent the rocky path they&amp;#039;ve had to endure,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I also wanted these pieces to symbolize the hope of a bright future that these smiling people have to look forward to.&amp;quot; This put me in mind of my last image of Sierra Leone. I&amp;#039;d spent hours with Ebanks in the airport bar, well past midnight, among cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking global travelers. We waited for our plane to arrive in the midst of a downpour, marking the first day of the country&amp;#039;s devastating rainy season, which lasts seven months, halts all farming and mining, forces street children to live under makeshift plastic tarps, and floods most houses, with their leaky tin roofs. Through the claps of thunder and the billowing curtains alongside open windows (no air-conditioning here), Ebanks and I talked about our apartments, boys, and the comforts we&amp;#039;d left behind. As we finally walked to the portable stairs on the open runway in the balmy night, an airport worker with a crushingly beautiful smile said goodbye in the way common to all Sierra Leoneans I met\u2014with complete sincerity and kindness. All too quickly, I ducked into the cold, brightly lit plane, where a buttoned-up English flight attendant closed the hatch and warned us to cover our eyes and shut our mouths while she walked up and down the aisles spraying a thick cloud of disinfectant. And just like that, Sierra Leone was gone\u2014but not forgotten. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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