Adenah Bayoh and her cousin put their aging grandmother in a wheelbarrow and walked through a thick, hot jungle to escape approaching rebels in an African civil war. The terrified 8-year-old girl had no idea what lay ahead, and how it would make her a success.
War in Liberia would kill a quarter-million people between 1989 and 2003. Warlords raped and mutilated thousands of women. They recruited or kidnapped children into their armies. Bayoh and her cousin walked all night and deep into the next day to reach a government-sponsored refugee camp in Sierra Leone.
Even then, she saw a business opportunity—and once her grandmother was safe, she headed back.
“When you have a bunch of people that are refugees in one area, there’s a lot of commerce happening because there are a lot of things they don’t have that they need,” Bayoh told Zenger. “My cousin and I decided to make some money. We started walking back through the jungle, back to Liberia, and getting vegetables and things the refugees would buy. We would put the goods on our heads and walk and walk, back through the forest. We did this two or three times a week.
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