JOURNEY TO CHILDREN OF BWOLA DANCES. AMAYA

on lorries. Dad was told they were taken to the south and southwestern part of Uganda where the soldiers came from, and some as far as a country called Rwanda.

      The villagers got together and tried as they always do, to help each other rebuild their lives. However, dad decided it was too dangerous to stay, because there were still a lot of NRA soldiers roaming about, so we moved to Gulu. We told the soldiers on the way back that mum needed urgent hospital treatment because she had a terrible disease. This helped us not to be troubled.” Olum paused again to wipe his face with his shirt.

      “We lived in Gulu for about six months, but life was very difficult because there was no work. Mum recovered, but the doctors said her injuries meant that she could not have any more children. It was very painful for my parents with the loss of my sisters. Nevertheless, dad decided it was better to go back to the village where there was food. We could rebuild our huts. Over that year some of our neighbours returned. It was a hard struggle for everyone because most of the young men had either been killed or had fled. Only children and the elderly were left. Slowly over two years, until I was 8years old, we rebuilt our lives and life in the village started to grow again as new babies joined us and the younger children grew. We could run around again and play games and go hunting in the forest and climb mango trees or swim in the streams.” Olum paused again, taking a deep breath and swallowed hard the painful lump in his throat as he proceeded with this tragic tale.

      “ Then one weekend in the afternoon, I was having fun, playing with my cousins in the compound. Dad was away on an errand. Suddenly all these children and older ones, teenagers, all carrying guns appeared out of the nearby forest and attacked our village.

      The Army refused to come to our rescue in spite of a mobile call by two people. There was a massacre of the elderly, married women, babies and children under six years of age.” Olum paused again, and his face showed a painful grimace and he was about to start crying aloud but, his dad again reached out to him and gently placed his hand on his shoulder. After a loud sniff, and deep sigh, Olum wiped his face and swallowed hard to tell the worst of his story that has tormented him since.

      “I had to kill my mother if I wanted to live. Mum asked me to go ahead and kill her, rather than she seeing me being cut to pieces in front of her. The LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) gave me a choice with a machete or a gun either to hack her to death or to shoot her. I decided to shoot her in the head. I had never ever touched a gun before but they taught me there and then, and the first thing I did was to kill my best friend” Olum burst out crying and shaking as he collapsed into his father’s arms who wrapped them as he struggled to control his emotions.

      Dr Jakobo Olok, stopped the tape and made some notes while patiently waiting for Olum to recollect himself. After about five minutes of comforting and gentle encouragement from his dad, Olum continued,

      “I saw some of the other children, whose parents used to beat them a lot with sticks, especially when their dads were drunk. The children became the most dangerous with guns and machetes. They did not even stop to think that they were hurting their parents. To them it was like revenge, and they did the worst things to their parents, making them really suffer before dying. That really scared me, because I really loved my parents and would never, ever think of doing such a thing to them.” Olum paused, shaking his head, still in disbelief.

      “These kids said some terrible, abusive and disrespectful things to their parents. Things that would never be accepted in our culture. But they could do it with a gun in their hands. It was like a children’s revolution against adults. “We have REAL POWER!” they would shout at their parents and other adults. They would laugh at their parents or adults who were kneeling or lying down begging for mercy, before either hacking them to death or shooting them.

      Over the following two-year period, the LRA trained us in the bush how to use weapons such as the automatic rifle, AK47; rocket propelled grenades, laying landmines, defensive positions and attacking tactics like ambushes. We also carried out lots of raids into villages. I have no idea how many men, women and children we killed either by machete or with the gun. You follow orders because you were soldiers. If you disobeyed, you were shot on the spot or your victims was forced to hack you to death or they would deliberately leave you severely wounded so that you died a slow anguishing death.

      You no longer had fear as you saw adults, who once towered over you as a child making you feel scared; suddenly with a gun in your hands, there they were, on their knees or even lying down before you like little children. They were the ones now begging you to have mercy on them. You could let out your anger at their weakness in not protecting the children from the wicked men who have destroyed children’s lives. At the beginning, I wept quietly for having killed my own dear mother. Her bloodied face returning in my dreams to trouble me. She was pleading with me to kill her rather than seeing me killed. My love for her self-sacrifice made me angry and bitter at the weakness in the ability of the men in the villages to join together to defend those of us who are the weak ones.” Olum paused and stared blankly at the floor, like a lost soul in some eternal helplessness. Dr Olok was about to interrupt his vacant look when Olum continued, his countenance now hardened and his voice steady.

      “As I grew older, I became more of a warrior and less afraid from victories over the NRM. They were cowards fleeing many times, leaving their weapons when the fighting got hot. Sometimes, we heard over their abandoned radios, the commanders giving false reports that they were completely out-numbered by an ambush of ten times their actual numbers consisting of a well-trained army. We laughed at the reports knowing that we were just a handful of kids who gave the appearance of a large number of LRA by using bush war attack tactics.

      The LRA knew well that the NRM soldiers were not really interested in fighting them. Many of them used the excuse of the war to raid the local villages, rape men, women and children. They stole all the livestock and food granaries, including harvesting crops from the fields they could find. They emptied all the granaries into sacks. They even forced the villagers to harvest the sweet potatoes, cassava, yams, and bananas, loading them on to trucks, which carried them back to their own homeland and the big cities to make them fortunes. So it made it easy for the LRA to defeat them, why die for a cause you don’t really believe in? We were fighting for our Acholiland against these evil foreigners.

      If only the NRM were really committed to peace and were caring, then the LRA would have lost easily, and I would not have lost my mother and my village would not have been destroyed.” Olum stopped.

      Dr Jakobo Olok stopped the tape and pointing to a large table with two boxes of coloured pencils and A3-sized white sheets said,

      “I want you to do some drawings for me. Drawings of the pictures you see in your dreams that trouble you. Also, any other pictures that constantly repeat in your mind. When you finish, we can discuss what you have drawn and then you can leave. I will arrange for another appointment. Also before you go, I will give you some medicine to help you sleep at night without the bad dreams.”