Living with demons

Yesterday I was at the BeadforLife office interviewing some women with an audio recorder. I have written many biographies of these women, but the US office wants some recordings so people can hear their voices. Thanks to the cute little recorder that Eric donated and Anna brought, I can capture the soft, lilting cadence (and high ululations!) of these ladies.

But I’ve had some problems. I recorded one woman, Fatuma, a new beader, two weeks ago, only to discover that she is so soft spoken that the recorder (on voice activation setting) kept cutting out. She was eloquent – she was abducted when she was 13 years old by the rebels in the north, then released, then discovered she was pregnant. A British woman took her and her son to Kampala but abandoned her here. Then she married and had three more kids – one born with disfigured limbs. When she was pregnant again, her husband died. As is normal when this happens, his family took everything she had – except the kids. Fatuma had no money, no prospects, so she moved to a slum in Kampala. The source of water is runoff from beside the railroad tracks. There is illness, violence, stench - the stuff of poverty.

So yesterday I asked, with apologies, if Fatuma could tell me her story again, painful as it is. We talked about how people in the US can read about something and still not feel it, but when they hear it from the person herself, they begin to understand. And she was willing.

But this time the telling was different. We sat in a little spare room at the office, me in a wooden chair holding the little recorder, and Fatuma sitting tall in a wicker chair. Wearing a blue headcloth, she was extremely pretty -- very black as Ugandans go, startling white teeth, young (about 30) and strong-looking (that is her picture above). This time Fatuma skimmed over the part about being abducted and went on to talk about how she has bought a popcorn machine and moved out of the slum, thanks to BeadforLife. That was fine, but then I asked her to please tell about what happened to her. So she started, now in more detail.

It was precisely 10 in the morning, she said, almost whispering. She was in school and the students were starting to go for their morning break. Suddenly the teachers realized the school was surrounded by rebels. “They let the ones in P1, P2 and some of P3 go,” Fatuma said. “Everyone else had to go out the door in a line.” Some, like her, they took. Others had a different fate. If they tried to resist or to help someone else, they were killed. “And the way they were killed was not good,” Fatuma said, looking at me with eyes that truly were pleading. “They took pangas (machetes) …” Suddenly she stopped. Her hands just lay in her lap. She was no longer looking at me – her eyes were not seeing anything in the little room, they were just seeing something that has never been erased from her memory. We sat that way for awhile, she was breathing hard, then started gulping as she tried to talk. I turned off the recorder (I am no Mike Wallace!), and told her to stop. I put my arms around her, held her stiff hands in mine and she finally started crying. I tried to talk to her about her children, how they had a future, how she did too now, how it was time to look ahead and not back. How strong she had been, things like that. But what can you say, really?

She said she tells her children that such things can happen in life and you need to be prepared for them. And she told me she was lucky. She was released by the rebels and some soldiers found her along the road, first thinking she was a rebel too. When she convinced them she was not, they took her home. The luckiest thing: she did not get AIDS. And she raised the son she bore from this experience. He is now 16.

Later, a bunch of us from BeadforLife were having lunch. I told Fatuma’s story, and one of the young women on the staff said, “Did she commit atrocities?” I knew where this was going. Bill and I have both read “The Aboke Girls,” a book about abduction in the north. The girls who were taken were sometimes forced to kill each other and people they met accidentally. And when they returned (those that did) others were quick to condemn them. I said I didn’t know if Fatuma had done this, and what difference did it make anyway. “What would you do?” I asked this young woman. She didn’t answer, but I could see what she was thinking: she is a Buganda and Fatuma is Acholi – tribal differences run deep.

Later in the day I interviewed a young man whose parents were burned in a cult murder in 2003. He wants to be a nurse. And a woman who ran from the north when soldiers were cooking people in pots – I asked her if she saw them and she said, “Of course, it was right in the road.” She is raising five kids, and her two sisters.

These things are not distant history, they are alive in people’s minds and in their hearts -- and in today’s reality. Man’s inhumanity to man can take the shape of pangas and rebels, or of judgment and bias. Or of war close-up or in a far-off country full of people different from you.

I was sorry to have made Fatuma remember it all again. But her story is important for a thousand reasons. Hearing it in her voice, seeing it in her face ... it's something I will never forget. I wish I knew what to do about it.