No sooner had we entered the bush than it started
raining. Being young, Angwec couldn’t help but cry for our mother amidst
confusion. My efforts to silence her seemed futile although I managed to
convince her to stay low and crawl towards home. As we crawled on our bellies
like amateur snails, we hoped to find our mother and siblings but alas! What I
saw will never leave me for as long as I live. The strange men were actually
LRA rebels who had dropped in to loot and kill. From a distance I could see
hundreds of people divided into three groups. One group comprised of men and
young energetic boys, the second was full of toddlers and the elderly,
basically the weak and feeble, and the third group was of the women and girls.
Sadly my mother and big sister Apio were part of this group while Ojok my two
year old brother was in group two. Sadly the gathering was just a stone throw
away from home. At this point, it was getting darker, Angwec`s teeth were
chattering because of the cold and she was getting hungry but we could not
afford to move a muscle.
What transpired after was literally a nightmare. There
was this man who had certain darkness in his eyes. You could tell he was the
boss from the way he commanded the rebels. He made some kind of signal and the
men started firing gunshots at group two. I wasn’t able to see if Ojok was hit
but somehow I knew I would never see him again. I felt a huge lump slide up my
throat. I couldn’t breathe. I felt so helpless, my baby brother needed me, but
there was totally nothing I could do to help. The survivors were hacked to
death. As to add insult to injury, the rebels gathered the pieces of the
children, placed them in a huge pot and boiled them. The other villagers buried
their heads in their palms in fear but mostly in sorrow. It was too painful to
watch. On seeing this, Angwec fainted. My mother and Apio were not any lucky.
The rebels took turns in raping the women and girls. They were raped repeatedly
until some died and other became unconscious. That was when it all hit me. It
wasn’t a bad dream nor was it a bad joke. It was actually happening to my
people.
I sat quietly sobbing near Angwec, who was unaware of
what was happening around her for what seemed like hours. By around 10pm, it
was still raining and i could still hear sounds of gunshots and cries in a far
distance. Just when i was about to give up hope of getting out of this alive, i
saw a human structure move toward us. At first i thought it was one of them, i
tried to wake up Angwec but in vain. Amidst saying my last hail Marys is when i
realised it was actually Gita the village drunk. We called him gita because of
the way he pretended to be playing an imaginary Guitar every time he got drunk.
How he managed to evade the rebels is beyond me. He had seen us from the
distance and had come to help. The three of us stayed well hidden until around
midnight when we realised the rebels had matched out of our village with all
our food and relatives. What was left of
our once vibrant and colourful camp was now nothing but the stench of death and
burning huts.
Today all the dead victims lie in a massive grave as a
result of failure to identify their mutilated and burned bodies by relatives. A
monument has been built to remember what befell the people of Barlonyo on that
fateful day but mostly as a reminder to the military that Kony, the leader of
the Lords Resistance Army still walks freely.
Narrated by Abonyo Caroline
