On Monday morning, the two young women anchoring Francis C. Hammond Middle School's daily televised news show chirpily announced an upcoming roller skating party, a talent show and a book club event.
Then one of the anchors, a bright-eyed Sierra Leonian immigrant named Damba Koroma, gave a nervous giggle and showed her fellow students, watching from classrooms throughout the Alexandria school, a video of herself that explained why she doesn't have a left hand.
"In August of 1998, war came to my village and ended my peaceful and normal life," said Damba, 13, who in the video was wearing a tank top that bared her arms. She explained that rebels set homes on fire and then attacked the villagers, killing those they accused of collaborating with the government and raping women and young girls.
They gathered the villagers under a tree and selected Damba, then 5, to make an example of. The rebel leader pushed her to the ground. "I could not hold the fear in me," she said. "I was cold and terrified. He landed his machete on my left arm. I felt a sharp pain running through my entire body. I was overwhelmed, and my whole body was shaking."
Dressed now as an anchor in a purple striped T-shirt, white skirt and pearls, Damba stared down as the video ran. At times her right hand, with its impeccably polished pink fingernails, reached unconsciously to cradle the stump of her left forearm.
"When my mother asked if she could pick me up and tie my bleeding arm, the same rebel who had cut off my arm ordered her to lay by me, and he cut off my mother's left arm." After several days, the two made it to a hospital. The video showed a photo of them, smiling on a bed together, left arms swathed in identical bandages.
After the broadcast, Damba's fellow anchor, Tamika Jones, 14, asked her schoolmates to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. Tamika was supposed to smile when she announced it. But she just couldn't.
Behind the cameras, in the darkened broadcasting room, students sniffled.
"I was about to cry," said Farishta Boura, 15, adding that she had never known why Damba was missing a hand. "I never asked her. It would be kind of mean, you know; it would be rude."
Tens of thousands killed, mutilated
Tens of thousands of people in Sierra Leone died or were mutilated during a decade-long war that began in 1990 as rebels fought to control the country's diamond mines. After living in refugee camps for several years, Damba was among a group of children brought to the United States to be fitted for prosthetics in 2002. She was taken in a few months later by a Sierra Leonian family in Alexandria that plans to adopt her.
Students at Hammond are used to seeing Damba -- a girl who sings alto in the choir, who acts in school plays, who aces her courses. Most of them are at an age where any blemish, any fashion mistake, can cause paroxysms of horror. But not many asked why Damba looked the way she did. Some thought she simply had been born that way.
Her peers have not always been so accepting. When she arrived in Alexandria at age 10 and enrolled at Ramsay Elementary School, some teased her. "They would call me a pirate or ask if I was one," she said. "Some of them would laugh at me and make me cry."
Her guardian, Amina Jah, contacted the school, and the teasers were made to apologize. Since then Damba has gotten good at sticking up for herself and answering questions with a disarming forthrightness.
"I'd like them to know . . . that what happened to me is not my fault; it's just something that I had nothing to do with," she explained, adding that showing the video felt good. "I'm kind of excited because it's kind of like a great feeling to let the whole world know what you've been through."
Damba said she hopes the video will go beyond the halls of Hammond Middle School -- she has drafted a letter to Oprah Winfrey that she plans to send along with the video.
Her teachers say her personality overshadows her disability. "She has this gift of making you feel good," said Elaine Brand, a school librarian who helped her make the video. "I don't know if it's what she went through or it's genetic -- she's just a child with an intuitive spirit. . . . There are other children hiding all kinds of things in this school, and she is what she is, and she makes you want to be what you are."
Facing challenges
Still, she faces challenges. In a rock-climbing course in PE class she was reduced to tears because she thought she couldn't do it, until her teacher told her she could, and with the help of her friends she scaled the wall. "I was surprised that I could do it," she said.
She surprises her new family, too. When she insisted on buying a pair of shoes with a complicated set of ribbons, Jah was skeptical, but Damba quickly went into her room and tied them herself.
The nightmares Damba had when she first arrived have gone away. So has her fear of going outside the small brick and clapboard house she shares with her "auntie" and "uncle" and their two young daughters. When people would stare at her stump in public, Jah grabbed it and kissed it.
"She likes that," Jah said, "and people stop looking at us."
Damba still badly misses her mother, who is back in the village farming with her other three children and a niece. The two talk every couple of months, whenever her mother makes it into the town where there is a telephone. Damba wants to visit her in Guinea, which they can both travel to, but the high cost means it won't happen for a while. In the meantime, her guardians send money and clothes to her mother when they can.
After the broadcast, when she walked into her language arts class, several students gathered to ask questions.
"Why didn't you run?" said Priestly Williams, 14.
"I couldn't run," Damba said.
"Did you feel it?" he asked.
"Mm-hmm."
"How big was the knife?"
Damba reached her arms out wide. "It's really sharp, and it's like this long and curved."
In social studies, her classmates talked about her broadcast.
"I know when she said 'machete,' everybody shut up," said Hermes Hernandez, 13.
"Do you realize that your standing here, it's a miracle?" said Kyle Stevenson, 12. "Do you realize that?"
Yes, Damba said. She did.