Sierra Leone is both a place in Sofia Zetterlund’s past and a recurring source of distress in her present. Her experience there undermined her expectation that she could help children build safer lives: she came to see herself as a distant adult whom they had reason to distrust. Years later, memories of Sierra Leone connect that disappointment to Samuel Bai, a former child soldier whose war trauma Sofia had not known how to meet.

Setting and Personal Association

Sofia’s account defines Sierra Leone through her work with children and the limits of what she could accomplish there. She had imagined that she might help them find a better life, but never felt she had become close to them. Their blank expressions and wariness toward aid workers challenged the helpful role she had expected to occupy. Instead, she understood herself as an adult stranger who might have frightened the children more than she had helped them.

The children threw stones at her, a concrete sign of the distance between her intentions and their response. Sofia connected that hostility to a wider loss of trust in adults. The encounter left her feeling powerless: she could not turn her presence into the safety or confidence she had hoped to offer. Sierra Leone thus becomes, in her recollection, not a story of successful intervention but one of good intentions meeting children’s justified suspicion and the lasting effects of war.

The Return of Memory

The place returns in Sofia’s thoughts well after her work there has ended. On one occasion, she wakes at four in the morning, sweating, after dreaming about Sierra Leone for the third night in a row. Unable to settle back to sleep, she leaves Mikael sleeping beside her and goes to smoke in the kitchen, switching on the exhaust fan because he dislikes smoking indoors. The quiet domestic scene contrasts with the agitation that has brought her out of bed.

As she thinks about Sierra Leone, Sofia wonders whether refusing a job fact-checking a book had been a mistake. She recognizes that the work might have offered a more cautious way to approach her own experiences than confronting a former child soldier directly, as she had with Samuel Bai. That thought does not resolve her regret. It shows instead how the past has become entangled with a later professional encounter: the book’s subject and the work she declined might have allowed her to approach difficult material at a distance, whereas Samuel made it immediate.

Sofia’s memory of the children also returns as part of her judgment of her present life. She thinks that she failed with Samuel, and compares that failure with her earlier disappointment in Sierra Leone. The two experiences are not interchangeable, but her thoughts place them in a painful sequence: first, she could not reach the children she had hoped to help; later, she feels unable to help Samuel. Sierra Leone therefore functions as an earlier measure against which she interprets a new loss of confidence in herself.

War, Samuel Bai, and the Swedish Case

The connection between Sierra Leone and Samuel is established through his family history and his own exposure to war. His parents had fled the conflict there. Samuel showed signs of trauma and, at different times, received treatment at the centre for childhood psychiatry on Maria Prästgårdsgata and from the private therapist Sofia Zetterlund. These details place the professional relationship in a larger context: Samuel’s difficulties were not presented simply as misconduct, but alongside the consequences of war and displacement.

In the police investigation after Samuel’s death, the family’s history appears beside reports that he had run away and case notes describing drug use, theft, and violence. Jeanette Kihlberg notices that Sofia’s name has surfaced in more than one case, including Samuel’s and Karl Lundström’s. For the account of Sierra Leone, the significant point is that Sofia had treated Samuel before his death, while his past connected him to the country where she herself had felt unable to help children. Her work there and her later clinical encounter consequently converge around the difficult question of what help can accomplish when a child’s experience of violence has already shaped his trust in adults.

Recollection and Narrative Significance

Sierra Leone also supplies the frame through which Sofia remembers Samuel’s suffering. While speaking with Jeanette, she pictures Gao Lian attacking Samuel and recalls that Samuel was too badly hurt to defend himself effectively. Sofia understands that his loss of consciousness meant that he believed death was near. She also recalls that he had seen comparable violence in Sierra Leone and understood the situation as a pattern with an outcome he could not prevent. The memory links what happened to him in the present with what he had witnessed in his home country without making the two places the same scene.

The country’s significance is therefore personal and relational rather than a broad account of Sierra Leone itself. The evidence gives no general survey of the country; it gives Sofia’s limited, troubled experience and Samuel’s history as someone whose parents fled its war. Through those distinct connections, the place carries two kinds of failure: Sofia’s recognition that her presence did not earn the children’s trust, and her later sense that she has failed Samuel as well. Its repeated return in dreams, regret, and recollection makes Sierra Leone a continuing part of how she interprets her work and her limits.