The Sound of Bones

Mohamed Siad Barre was a brutal Somalian dictator who, in 1988, authorized the bombing of his own country to wipe out the Issaq tribe and quell opposition to his authoritarian rule. His soldiers killed between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians, causing the world’s largest refugee crisis. Air force raids destroyed 90 percent of Somalia’s second-largest city, Hargiesa, giving it the nickname “The Dresden of Africa.” Tribal members fleeing to neighboring Ethiopia were gunned down by fighter jets.

And thirty years after the Isaaq genocide, with a little help from a University of Oregon instructor and a popular television show, Winsome Lee, BS ’12 (philosophy), arrived in Somaliland to recover the bodies Barre’s troops left behind.

Lee was born in Hong Kong in 1989, growing up among tranquil islands, vibrant fishing villages, and bustling Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, a world away—literally and figuratively—from the fighting in Somalia.

She moved to America to study at Shoreline Community College in Washington. After an SCC supervisor told her the University of Oregon had a strong sense of community and was welcoming toward international students, she transferred to the UO to earn a philosophy degree. Like many young Ducks, Lee wasn’t sure what she wanted to do for a career: she was interested in human rights issues, cultures, and rituals, but didn’t know what path she wanted to take in life.

With more than 100 majors and minors at the UO to choose from, Lee explored her options. While she ultimately stuck with philosophy as her major, she added anthropology as a minor. That small change—along with an icebreaker question about an Emmy-nominated crime drama posed by instructor Felicia Madimenos, PhD ’11 (anthropology) in a Forensic Anthropology class—had huge repercussions for countless people worldwide.

“She asked us if we watched Bones at all,” Lee recalled. “Then she told us, ‘Those stories, those techniques, and all that science is true.’ Then I started to get really curious about that, and started looking into it, and the more I got to know or understand it, especially forensic anthropology, I found out that their values were really aligned with my own values.”
 

After graduating with honors from the College of Arts and Sciences, Lee earned a master’s degree in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and following an internship with the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner in Florida, joined the Odyssey Field School in Cyprus. Odyssey gave her more than just the chance to hone her skills excavating mass graves and repatriating exhumed remains—it’s also where she first heard about Kenyon International Emergency Services.

Established in 1906 when brothers Harold and Herbert Kenyon assisted with the recovery of passengers who died in a rail crash in England, Kenyon International Emergency Services has provided assistance in the aftermath of World War II, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, and more. The list of services Kenyon provides is considerable, and includes search and rescue, exhumation and repatriation, personal property recovery, and crisis communications training.

Kenyon hired Lee as the regional coordinator for Asia in 2017, the same year she published her first book, The Sound of Bones: Life of a Forensic Anthropologist. She returned to Hong Kong, wrote a second book, enrolled remotely in the master’s degree in forensic sciences program at the University of Leicester, and now travels on behalf of Kenyon whenever and wherever her skills are needed.

And “wherever her skills are needed” has led to a lot of stamps in her passport.

Lee’s very first assignment took her to London, where 72 people had died in the Grenfell Tower fire, the city’s deadliest tragedy since the Luftwaffe air raids during World War II. Lee was a member of the team that cleaned the personal effects that were recovered, and returned them to survivors and family members. Then came East Timor—she doubles as a forensic anthropology consultant for the National Police of Timor Leste—where she excavated, cataloged, and stored the unidentified remains of genocide victims; then collected DNA and set up a database to aid future identification of the bodies. After East Timor was Papua New Guinea, where she worked with Air Niugini to provide insurance companies medical updates about survivors of a plane crash.

In all, her first year as a professional forensic anthropologist saw her work on more than 300 cases.

In 2018, Kenyon sent Lee to the Republic of Somaliland to help repatriate the remains of Isaaq people killed in the war. Somaliland is a self-declared state in the northwestern region of Somalia; after Barre was removed from power in 1991, local authorities declared their independence from Somalia and named Hargiesa the capital city. Unrecognized by the United Nations, Somaliland has found it difficult to get international assistance with repatriating victims of the war, but Kenyon is one company that has offered it’s—and Lee’s—services.

“We started every day with some digging, basically getting our hands dirty digging in the mud trying to recover the bones, the dead bodies, the skeletons,” Lee said. “Then we had a better picture of the context of how many bodies were in a pit.”

Once the bones were removed from the pits, the pits were filled back in with dirt and the bones were taken back to the lab for testing. 

Lee says the deceased speak to her through their bones—skeletal remains can tell her as much about the life a person led while alive as they can about the way they died. In the lab, she listened to the Isaaq remains to hear what they had to tell her.
 

“We would establish a biological profile of the bones, giving an estimation of sex, age, stature, and sometimes ancestry,” said Lee. “Then we’ll try to see if we can find any markers that indicate if the individual has suffered from trauma or injuries during their life. Finally we’ll see if there are unique individualistic markers of that person. For example, someone may have a very wide gap between the two incisors, so that could be a signature that helps us find a family match so they can be reunited again.”

It is the last point that ultimately sums up why Lee does what she does. Days spent digging bodies out of dusty, deep pits and analyzing their remains on sterile metal tables is all worth it to know that she is providing closure to families and making a positive difference in a world that can often seem hopeless and cruel.

“There are moments where I feel very upset by humanity and what we do to each other,” Lee said. “It’s really ugly. But at the same time, with our work, when I’m working with my team and my colleagues, they show me how beautiful humanity is. The beauty of humanity is greater than the ugliness of it.

“Through our work, I hope that we can show we are one humanity all the time, and we should always care about each other without caring about their race, religion, or where they’re from. At the end of the day you’re just stripped down to a plain skeleton, so just live your life and enjoy each moment.”

- Damian Foley, UO communications

- Photos courtesy Winsome Lee