Starting from here

When she is asked what she wants most, 21-year-old Mariatu Sankoh smiles shyly.

"An education," she says, sitting in her Brighton apartment.

She never got past third grade. That's when war broke out in her native Sierra Leone. When it was over a decade later, more than 50,000 people were dead, and some, including Mariatu, felt like they were.

When she was 13, rebels took her from her village. Three of her friends said they were too tired to walk, so the rebels shot them.

Mariatu says sometimes she wishes the rebels shot her, too. Instead, they raped and brutalized her. They left her for dead. She says the only blessing was that she didn't get pregnant and become a "bush wife."

But the damage to her genital area was catastrophic and beyond the skills of African doctors.

Dr. Shannee Stepakoff, a physician for the United Nations, found her and knew Mariatu had to come here. A pair of doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Warren "Buzz" Becker, a gynecologist, and Kevin Loughlin, a urologist, agreed to do the complex surgeries for free.

Ray Tye, the liquor magnate and philanthropist, agreed to pay for most everything else.

Tye normally uses his medical foundation to help children, but reasoned that Mariatu qualified because she had lost her childhood to war.

At 4 feet 7 inches, Mariatu looks like the schoolgirl she never was. While it is not why she came to Boston, there is a special poignancy, or irony, in her being healed here, because the man who ruined her life and her country was educated not far away. The rebels who brutalized her were unleashed by Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia who spent 10 formative years in Boston, graduating from Bentley College in 1977.

In 1985, Taylor escaped from the Plymouth County jail, where he was being held for embezzlement in Liberia. Using the education and sophistication he acquired here, Taylor sneaked back to Africa and became one of that continent's most ruthless warmongers. His rebels recruited children as soldiers and hacked off the limbs of others. Today, he sits in The Hague, on trial for war crimes.

Mariatu Sankoh, one of his victims, blinks in disbelief when she hears of his life in Boston. She had no idea Charles Taylor was an educated man, much less educated here. How could a place that produced the people who have helped her also produce a monster like him?

"I don't know how this can be so," she said, shaking her head.

She arrived in March, to cold that made her cry. Her roommate and compatriot, Neneh Barrie, took her to the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge to see Ishmael Beah, who wrote a memoir about being a boy soldier in Sierra Leone.

Mariatu had never been on a train or a trolley and kept her eyes closed on the Green Line. Beah's eyes went wide with delight when he heard Mariatu speak their native Creole.

But mostly she stays inside, steeling herself for her third and final surgery next month. When she woke after her first surgery, Ray Tye was at her bedside, holding her hand. She had never met him, or seen a picture of him, but, drowsy and disoriented, she knew exactly who he was. She felt like crying, but thought it would embarrass him, so she just smiled and Ray Tye patted her hand.

She is grateful for everything people have done for her, but also embarrassed.

"I am most embarrassed because I have no education," she says. "Everyone I meet in America is educated."

Neneh Barrie, 28, who escaped from Sierra Leone during the worst fighting, won a scholarship to Fairleigh Dickinson University, and will soon head off to New Jersey for freshman orientation. Her cousin, Isha, will look after Mariatu.

Mariatu Sankoh will go home in the next few months.

That means she has time to scope things out.

"Where," she asks, folding her arms, "is this Bentley College?"

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.