Comprehension: The Lost Princess

          In April 2004, Sarah Culberson got a call she’d spent nearly 30 years waiting for. “This is your father, Joseph Konia Kposowa. Please forgive me”, begged the caller. “I didn’t know how to find you”. Sarah then 28, had had no previous contact with her birth parents. Her adoptive parents Jim and Judy Culberson, had told her what little they knew. Her biological father had been an exchange student from Sierra Leone, attending Salem College in West Virginia. He dated a young white woman who worked at West Virginia University. When she became pregnant, they decided to give the baby up. The couple separated, and Sarah’s father returned to his homeland. Now he was urging his daughter to come visit. “As a member of a royal family”, he told her, “you could be a chief here someday.” At that moment, Sarah knew her life had changed forever. From now on, she would be inextricably connected to a small, war-ravaged village halfway across the globe.

          Sarah took a leadership training course and during one session the instructor asked, “Where are you holding back in your life? Tell the person sitting next to you.” Sarah turned to an old friend named Art. “I’m terrified of finding my biological father,” she confessed. Art assured her that the search could bring her peace and said he knew a private investigator who could locate her father for less than a hundred dollars.

          The detective after just three hours of sleuthing, turned up a Joseph Kposowa in Maryland. Sarah laboured over an introductory note and nervously sent it off. Soon afterwards, she got a phone call from a woman with a lilting accent. “Sarah? This is Evelyn, your auntie. I was there when you were born”. Sarah broke down in sobs. Once she’d composed herself, she learned that this Joseph was actually her uncle. He then got on the phone and asked, “Do you know you are a princess?”

          Sarah, he explained, belonged to a ruling family of the Mende tribe in Southern Sierra Leone, a nation of six million on Africa’s Atlantic coast. Her grandfather had ruled a chiefdom with 36,000 subjects based in the village of Bumpe. When the old man died, Sarah’s father could have nominated himself for the office, but he opted to keep his job as headmaster of the local high school. Another uncle was now chief.

           The information made Sarah’s head spin. But it wasn’t until her father called, two weeks later, that she began to comprehend its full significance.

(Reader’s Digest, November 2007, page 92)