What it’s like to be a princess

Sarah Culbertson sought out to find her birth parents and discovered she was born royalty.

By Sarah Culberson, daughter of Jim Culberson, Rotary Club of Morgantown North, West Virginia. As told to Melanie Dione

At age 28, I decided to hire a private detective. I had been adopted three days after my first birthday by an all-white family in West Virginia. I didn’t look like anybody in my community or anyone in my family. My dad, Jim, was a university professor and my mom, Judy, taught kids with learning differences. Even though my parents could not completely relate to what life was like for me, they were incredibly checked-in on the details of my well-being.

But I had all these questions. I wanted to find my birth father, but you never know what you're going to find. Maybe he wouldn't want to meet me. I was so afraid of being rejected.

In 2004 I called a private investigator, and three hours later I had all the information I needed. I wrote a letter, and four days later I got a phone call. When my birth father called me from Sierra Leone, the first thing he said to me was, "Please forgive me. I didn't know how to find you."

My uncle said, "Do you know who you are?" I said, "Sarah?" He said, "You are part of a royal family in Sierra Leone. You can be a chief someday. You are considered a princess in this country."

This created more questions: What does this mean? Am I supposed to be perfect now? Can I never say a bad word? The potential visibility did not appeal to me.

When I first went to Sierra Leone later that year, it was incredible. Hundreds of people welcomed me to my family’s village of Bumpe, singing and dancing. Speeches went on into the night. My birth father, Joseph, arranged a memorial service for my birth mother, Penny. They had met when he was a college student in the United States, and she had died from cancer when I was 10. I was overwhelmed by having answers about my origins and by the lush beauty of Sierra Leone.

I was afraid of the title of princess because I only associated it with people on some kind of pedestal. I just didn't know how to be with it. Then I started to think, wait a second, when I was a kid I was constantly looking for people who looked like me, and there weren't a lot. Africa has a rich history, but because of colonization we only learn it in fragments. This includes the concept of African royalty. The British only wanted there to be one, the Queen of England, so they tried to get rid of those titles.

So for me to deny this part of my history would be denying another little girl the narrative of where we come from, including kings and queens from this amazing continent. I realized this isn't just about me. This is about others. Then I was able to embrace it.

As the excitement died down I saw what had happened in Sierra Leone during its 11-year civil war. I was there two years after the war ended. The school my grandfather started had been burned down. I saw people with missing arms and legs. It was horrible.

I couldn't just go back to Los Angeles and teach dance class. I had grown up with this family that thinks about the world and how we live in it in a very different way. My dad works to alleviate hunger through Rotary. My mom's whole life was about service. That's how we were raised: to look at the world and leave it a better place. They taught me that if other people are suffering, we all are. This is empowerment work, not savior work.

I used this same approach when it came to helping my family in Sierra Leone. I haven’t walked in the shoes of someone who has had to hide for their life during a civil war, so I can never completely understand. But what I can do is listen, learn, and help rebuild. I could see no better way to honor the entirety of my family than by forming a nonprofit that’s now called Sierra Leone Rising.

We started out by rebuilding Bumpe High School and providing scholarships, especially for young girls, who often don't get an opportunity to go to school. Now we're trying to bring clean water to all of Sierra Leone. With the help of the Rotary Clubs of Morgantown North, West Virginia, and East Bremerton, Washington, and a grant from The Rotary Foundation, so far we have dug nine functioning wells and brought clean drinking water to 12,000 people. My dad and my father regularly work hand-in-hand. They worked together to rebuild Rotary in Sierra Leone, where activities had stopped because of the civil war.

We're also working to train coders and help people with banking. We're building a Roblox game so kids can learn about different countries in Africa, and an animation project to help kids learn about cultures around the world.

Being a princess is no joke. It's a commitment. It's a responsibility. This is not what I studied. I had no idea about how to run a nonprofit. But sometimes there's a bigger plan that we don't know and wonderful things that can show up on the other side.

This story originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Rotary magazine.