African War Victim Inspires Others

Damba Koroma started her life in the West African country of Sierra Leone but now calls Washington, D.C., her home. Most of her fellow students and teachers never knew about the horrors she had experienced, until one day Damba decided to share her unforgettable story with them.

Today, Damba sees mostly the joy in her life. She lives like a lot of 13 year olds, going to school, acting in the class play and singing in the school choir.

But Damba also remembers the pain. "They laid me on the ground. They put my left hand on the root of a cotton tree. Then they chopped it off. They chopped off my hand," she tells The Early Show national correspondent Tracy Smith.

Damba was born in Sierra Leone in the midst of a brutal civil war over diamond mines. When she was just 5 years old, she became one of its casualties.

Rebels came to her village, and forcibly amputated her hand, just as they did to 20,000 others.

She remembers the pain, saying it felt "sharp."

The rebels took her mother's hand, too, but in the three days it took them to reach the hospital Damba's mom somehow managed to hold on to her daughter.

"I remember her carrying me, carrying me even though her hand was bleeding, too," she recalls.

As the wounds healed, survival itself became a daily challenge. "We had to, like, go out in the streets and beg for money or beg for food," Damba explains.

When an opportunity came to send Damba to the United States for treatment, the mother who had held on to Damba through the pain let her daughter go.

"Her mom did a great job. Even when her hand was cut off, she forgot about her pain and took care of her," says Amina Pombor, Damba's guardian.

Amina and Sahr Pombor took Damba in to their Washington, D.C., family a few years ago. Though she could barely speak English then, she's now a straight-A student, hosting Hammond Middle School's morning news program.

And the most remarkable story she reported this year?

Her own. After years of endless questions about her arm, Damba shared her life story with the entire school in her student documentary.

She admits sharing and showing her story made her a little nervous.

It was a school day no one will soon forget.

"You could have heard a pin drop. They were glued to the monitors watching what had happened to her and a few of the students actually started crying," recalls school librarian Elaine Brand.

School librarians helped Damba with the project.

Asked if she sees Damba as a normal kid, Brand tells Smith, "No. I think she's superior. A normal kid would have succumbed to this."

"I think that she's brave to share that story in front of everybody," one student says.

"Nobody is perfect, but she comes pretty close," another student tells Smith.

Damba plans to stay in the United States but hopes someday to be re-united with her mom — a dream that may take time to fulfill but to Damba Koroma, anything's possible.

"Keep dreaming. Always a miracle that will happen to you," she said in her school documentary.

This is a girl who thinks she can do anything. In fact, she tells Smith that next year she plans on joining the volleyball team.