(The New York Times) — “The rebels came in one night at 2 a.m.; they started shooting and killing people,” said Michael Kallon, 55, a survivor of rebel raids in Liberia in 1986. “There were hordes of them, and I fled to Guinea.” After a stint working for the Pan-African Writers’ Association in Guinea in the late 1980s, Mr. Kallon, a member of the Kissi tribe originally from Sierra Leone, moved to New York in 1992, living briefly with his sister in Rego Park, Queens, before finding his own apartment in Harlem. He applied for political asylum in 1999 and received it in 2001. Last year he gained his American citizenship. But throughout the last decade, he has suffered from crippling back pain, which he said resulted from complications during surgery in 1998. Since then, he has struggled to make ends meet and was jobless until last year.
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