blood-diamond.jpgI recently watched Blood Diamond, twice in two weeks. That’s rare for me. The first time I watched it I watched with my aunt who mentioned that missionary friends of hers had to leave Sierra Leone because of the conflict portrayed in the movie. So here, in the words of Kenneth Wiebe, is a personal story and some observations about the movie:

Yvonne and I are from Chilliwack, BC. We’ve been missionaries of Christians in Action to Sierra Leone since 1977. We left the country in the middle of the war — in 1995 — on the last scheduled flight to leave the country. Since 1997 we’ve been living in London, England, and I make regular trips to Sierra Leone — two or more a year — to provide encouragement, oversight, training, and logistical support for our African team.

The Christians in Action work in Sierra Leone consists of a dozen established churches, five more developing churches, several village outreaches, and five primary schools.

We have watched Blood Diamond. It was pretty good… surprisingly so.

DiCaprio’s Krio, though used only sparingly, was far better than any of the other African actors’. And, fittingly, as he was portraying a South African, he spoke it with a South African accent. The presence of South Africans, though, seemed incongruous to me. There may be South Africans involved in Sierra Leone’s diamond trade, but I’ve never seen any. I would have expected to see Lebanese diamond dealers instead — there are thousands of them in the country.

There was some pretty grand looking country in the film, too, though Sierra Leone has much less of that. And, interestingly, despite much red soil all over the country, the diamond-rich soils are primarily a light ashy colour. I may be drawing attention primarily to periferal things, but those were the things that caught my attention.
The grander aspects of the story — corruption, brutality, and how those have been exacerbated by Sierra Leone’s diamond wealth — were done without glaring inconsistencies or factual error that I noticed. I have only marginally experienced some aspects of the terror, so I cannot comment adequately there, but my knowledge of the things that happened lead me to believe that the film in no way overplayed that aspect of the story.

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Michael Krahn (michael.krahn@gmail.com) is a husband, father, Pastor, writer, and recording artist who enjoys books, theology, technology and the Ottawa Senators.
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