Inn worker Agnes, haunted by her experiences in the Lord’s Resistance Army war in Uganda, has no memory of how she escaped Aba military camp, and she determines to find out – at any cost.
Image generated with OpenAIJanuary 2015 – Gulu
“I need to do this.” Agnes looked right at Sunday, as he searched her eyes, anticipating a possible change of mind. “You know I’ve talked about that feeling like I don’t know how I got us from that Kony camp called Aba, all the way to Purongo, and how it scares me when I have nightmares about our escape, as I feel like there is a big missing part that any night might come out of hiding and reveal to me something dreadful – maybe even accuse me of something dreadful. In the darkness, I’m on the edge of remembering and I’m terrified. Then I wake up or scream, but nothing’s there. I’ve told you and Molly how I’ve yearned to meet someone who came from Aba camp too that could tell me how we got home.” She folded her slender arms across her chest as she often did which made her look like she was holding herself together.
“I know you’ve said that, and we understand your need,” her former army-man boss said, exuding his characteristic compassion. “But we also know of Peter’s cruelty towards you and how determined you’ve been since you started here to never lay eyes on him again, and both of us just want to make sure your change of heart won’t lead to something bad for you.” Sunday remembered when even the mention of the name of Agnes’s bush husband made her sweat and want to hide. When they first employed her, she had flashbacks that caused her to disassociate right here at the inn, often in this very spot behind the reception counter. Molly had taken a short training in guiding people through traumatic flashbacks after she decided to leave Manchester and return to Gulu, her mother’s birthplace, when she read about the extreme circumstances here. She moved from the UK to help. Passionate, determined, and humble Agnes had captured her heart, and she’d stuck by Agnes through some awful moments. Molly and her husband had intentionally hired others who’d come out of the LRA war, but none was quite like Agnes.
Agnes understood how valuable this training was and had learned some techniques of her own to get her through her worst episodes. She’d enlisted her daughters in those processes. “Ask me my name, if I act weird,” she told them. “Walk me around the compound and ask me who lives where. Get me to talk about and touch real things.”
And, of course, she stepped up to help others when someone else lost their bearing and started spiraling into another reality. This was common in Gulu, so it was a skill people who’d lived through the war learned was useful. It was still a sensitive call to know when to offer help to another person who appeared to be lost in an emotional waking dream of sorts. Some people did not want help at that moment. Agnes was most easily trusted by women with her same life experience in captivity, and she tried to lift them up. International agencies sent experts to help people traumatized by the war, but their services touched so few of all who needed them.
Agnes trusted Molly and Sunday to best know when she needed help. But this week, she was adamant that she needed to invite Peter back to the inn, as she felt sure he alone could help her untangle this mystery she’d carried since she got home in 2005. He had come to Gulu at the invitation of foreigners from Germany who, like hundreds of others, were writing about “inside the LRA.” Was it a bizarre coincidence or proof of God’s hand in her life, that this man she had known intimately as the third man to whom she’d been given as a wife and learned to hate for how he’d behaved, had suddenly shown up in Agnes’s life – in a place she thought was safe from violence?
But since he was, in a way, delivered to her, she determined to have him help her resolve a mystery that haunted her and corroded her sense of self-assurance or independence. Her sense that she was whole.
Where had she been and what happened to her on her journey from captivity to an army barracks where a handful of military men were trying to receive and help hundreds of frightened and damaged young escapees from a place of violence halfway across Uganda? She had to know. She could remember and tell people about many of the atrocities she had witness or endured in the bush, but it undermined her credibility to admit she forgot how she got home. When she’d first built a hut for her and the little girls, she had awakened them in the night and quizzed them about what they remembered, but soon saw the futility in this. Plus, it frightened them. They’d begged her to stop.
“I told you that when I heard Peter come here last week so those German journalists could interview him, I listened so carefully to his voice, and, honestly Sunday, his meanness is gone. God gave me a gift in the bush. I can tell when a man is dangerous, and Peter always was that when we were both in the camps. But something has happened to him. Even when he told them about the war and his role in it, he was just different. I could tell he’s no longer a threat.”
Her clarity reassured her protective friend. He smiled, turning to look out the wide front doors of the modest inn, anticipating the arrival of this special guest. Peter Okello did not live in Gulu, since when the ceasefire was signed in 2006, he and a few thousand other soldiers with their families left the DRC or South Sudan, where Kony was last encamped, surrendered to the Ugandan national army that had clumsily pursued Kony and now offered to broker a peace, accepted a modest amnesty package, and came home. These were mostly young men who’d been abducted and turned into killers when they were children, along with an equal number of young women like Adong Agnes, who’d been kidnapped while teenagers and turned into porters, fighters, cooks, and the bearers of children of the Lord’s Resistance Army. But few were welcomed in Gulu. Especially rebel officers. They melted into Gulu-town or other villages, some soldiers even reuniting with wives they’d had in the bush. But the ones against whom war-time grievances were enduringly attached, disappeared. A dreaded killer, Peter Okello had saved his life by drifting to the capital in the south to make a life there.
When he’d called Agnes twice from Kampala, she’d made it clear she had only contempt and rage, mixed with fear, for him and would not see him, nor would she allow him near the daughters that she had dragged across the country on her flight away from him and to safety. Agnes had found a way to support them, and she was gradually taking steps to heal from the wounds of war. “Stay away!” she’d warned. “Or you’ll be sorry.”
Agnes stepped inside the larger of two offices behind the reception counter and waited. She did not pace nervously, nor wipe her sweaty palms on her skirt. In fact, she focused on the good things life had brought her, and on the striking contrast between what she cherished now and what had been her lot a decade ago. She envisioned her beautiful Beatrice, who was first in her class and was confidently applying for a scholarship to medical school, and her littler daughter, Grace, who still showed up at the end of a school day in her bright yellow uniform with ribbons in her hair, laughing with other children in their compound. She closed her eyes contemplating breakfasts in her solid cinder block house, where each child got posho and occasionally honey, which they gobbled with glee before scurrying off to school, leaving her safe, protected by her loyal neighbors.
Agnes was glad Sunday was out front when the Irish guests at the inn left their keys. They were ones that had asked too many questions of Agnes when she checked them in. It was not that Agnes didn’t want people who came here to learn about the devastation the war had wrought. During her fifteen years in the bush, she had yearned for someone outside of this place to take an interest in what was happening and come save them. So, she was glad that now they cared, but some people didn’t seem to understand how thoughtless it was to ask a person like Agnes if she had been in the war, even with Kony, and hear that she had, then ask questions like: Did you know young girls that were kidnapped and forced to marry rebels? Or: Did you ever have a baby in a forest that died in captivity? Bless Sunday for telling her, “Agnes, you can pick the questions you want to answer and turn the others over to me.”
Still, she felt obligated to tell everything, every time she was asked. She wanted to make sure that no one here ever told a tourist or an aid worker that the documentaries they’d seen of this place, or the newspapers they’d read, exaggerated what had gone on. It was her duty, Agnes believed, to testify to the truth of the worst stories and help people care.
She recognized Peter’s voice now before she saw him – a familiar, resonant voice from her past. The reminder made her shiver, like she often did when she encountered anyone she’d known in the bush. She wrapped her arms around herself again. It wasn’t too late to turn back. To call this off. Peter may be talking in a normal, polite sort of way, but maybe she was wrong. He could be deceiving them all. Was this too much? To deliberately bring back memories she usually tried to forget? To intentionally dig into the blur of pain that marked her past? A past that still attacked her in the present?
Agnes stood even taller, then braced herself to enter the smaller office behind the front counter. Sunday was beside her and Molly was seated at the desk across from Peter, who rose.
“How are you, Agnes?” Peter asked in a way that felt different from how everyone else asks that question. She heard concern and maybe even – regret? Despite her hesitations, she didn’t feel as upset as she’d imagined she might, seeing him there again, like nothing had ever happened.
“I’m here,” was all she could say, her arms now rigid at her sides.
“Agnes, take a seat.” Sunday offered her a chair.
Of course, she thought as she slowly lowered herself to the same chair she sat in during nearly every shift. But today it was unfamiliar. She felt awkward. Her flashing eyes fixed on Peter, she folded and unfolded her hands, pausing before she placed them on the desk, palms down.
It was a wonder either chose to speak. It was she who leaned in and began, driven by her mission. She reminded herself that it’s normal to have this urge to know what really happened. It was that urge that compelled her.
After a bit of small talk, Agnes was assured by Peter’s respectful tone. Abruptly, she remembered moments of calm that had once claimed Peter’s face when he slept. It was the way his brow had smoothed out, relieved of tension. How she had marveled that his meanness and desperation seemed to melt away in the light of dawn.
“Sunday,” Agnes said. “I think I will be okay now.”
“We’ll be right here at the counter,” he said, leaving the door ajar as he and Molly made their way out, grateful no more guests awaited.
“So, you work here all the time?” Peter inquired, brightly. “They say they are grateful to employ you.”
“It is a good place,” Agnes said. “Sunday and Molly are very kind. They are like my family. They own Harmony Inn.”
How was it, Agnes thought, that they could slip into conversation like this? Like Peter was just an old friend who’d simply been away for a while? Not the man who had forced sex on her, repeatedly, and beaten her anytime he pleased. Raised his voice and cursed and called her vile names.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I repair buses. I live with my son and his mother behind a roadside market in Kampala. I support them.” Then, he took a deep breath. “My son’s name is Sam.”
Agnes startled. She closed her eyes. She squeezed her hands into fists. She could hear her sons’ screams as Peter beat their little friend Sam to death in front of them after accusing the child of some tiny infraction of a rule. When she opened them again, Peter’s face was soft. His eyes, full of remorse. She understood. He was telling her how much he regretted his actions, and that his son’s name was a tribute to the young boy he had killed.
Agnes nodded.
“I have questions to ask you,” she said. “I have trouble remembering some parts of my captivity. Especially my escape.” She took a deep breath. “I hoped you might have some answers since you maybe had to follow the same route home when the ceasefire began.”
Now, Peter nodded. “Ask me anything.” He pulled himself closer into the desk.
They began by talking about what Agnes could remember, switching from English to the more intimate Acholi. “I escaped at the beginning of 2005,” she said. “But those days are very mixed up in my mind. I know it was way before the peace.”
“At that time, we were camped near Aba, inside the Impenetrable Forest,” Okello Peter said soberly. “How did you get from Garamba Forest all the way to Gulu?”
“That’s what I don’t fully know,” Agnes said, remembering her swollen feet, three-year-old Grace on her back, seven-year-old Beatrice tugging at her limp arm. Would he dare to say they were his daughters? Surely he wouldn’t dare make that claim, even though they were biologically his. Should she not say their names? If he claimed them, would she suddenly lose them now? After all these years that she’d kept them safe? Her hand shot up to cover her mouth, as though she feared he was about to take them, and she would have to call out for him to stop. She was abruptly anxious.
“Thank heaven you escaped with your daughters. They might not have made it out otherwise.” Peter’s voice conveyed more than his words. He was telling her that he was glad she had saved their daughters, and he was also telling her that he would not claim them as his own. That he would give her the credit for bearing them, keeping them alive, saving them, raising them, and mothering them. He must know something of how hard it was. She breathed deeply. Her heart swelled with gratitude, and she raised her eyes to meet his. She was surprised to find kindness there. The cruelty she had once seen was indeed gone from him, along with his own desperate fear. How afraid we all were, even the soldiers. They were young too. While others had pointed out this fact, it was not until now that she believed it.
Then, the memory of a moment of kindness Peter had shown her in the bush popped into her head. A few hours after Grace was born, he had come to see them. She wondered how he’d gotten past the older women since they usually shooed men away from any place a woman had given birth. She had been afraid he would be disappointed she hadn’t delivered a boy. Maybe he would even beat her when he saw a daughter in her arms. But he had not hurt them. Instead, he had brought Agnes an extra portion of rice to help her recover from labor. And he had brought an extra portion every day for three days, no small gesture in the camp at that time. Perhaps he’d even smiled at the tiny babe. Approved of her name.
Agnes shook her head a little to clear it, relying on the grounding exercise Molly had taught her. Slowly, she came back to the present, feeling her body in the plastic chair, her feet inside her shoes.
Together they opened up the large paper map that Molly had brought in earlier. “Uganda looks larger on this map than on a computer screen,” Agnes said, remembering all the times she’d used the inn’s computer to try to track her escape. “This map has more details, little roads. This one just feels more true to how far it felt to walk.”
“I imagine,” Peter grunted. Then he placed his finger on the map. “This is Aba Camp, just inside the DRC, across the Sudan border, in the direction of the Ugandan border. It is on the east side of the Garamba Forest, about 100 miles from a small city called Dungu on the other side of the forest. Kony picked this place on purpose. If we’d stayed in Uganda, the Americans might have come in and helped the Ugandan army crush Kony. He was safer over the border because the Congolese government would not allow Americans to fly over their country to make war.” He paused. “Everyone was fearful when we went west into the DRC, since we knew we were being taken farther from home – we knew we would be forgotten and that we would never get back to our families. But… we had no choice.”
Agnes remembered that desperation. Everyone felt it. A few expressed it. Her throat tightened now in memory. The way some mothers smothered their babies to save them from such a horrific life ahead. The way she’d risked everything to get her own daughters away from that place. Yes, that was the desperation behind her decision that then was the time she had to get out of there and flee east.
“Did you go north when you left Aba?” asked Peter. “Or did you head south toward the nearest Uganda border crossing – toward Arua?” She couldn’t say.
Together they traced Agnes’s way out of the forest, to where she would have had to choose north or south. How did she choose?
Quietly, he said, “If you went north you would have been starting to go back along the trail we had walked from Kitgum near Gulu, two years earlier. You might have sensed that heading north would take you back to places you knew before, near Gulu.”
“Yes.” Agnes remembered, with pinched pain. She closed her eyes as the images came in flashes. If she’d walked all across Uganda on a route not far from Gulu, she must have been seeking for it to return. But that walk took days and days.
Some of the fog lifted as fragments of little things she recalled began to surface – leaving the gumboots behind, hoping the LRA wouldn’t be able to track her. Emerging from the woods into open fields of grass where certain smells and birdsong reminded her of Gulu. Spotting the red dirt that looked like home. Picking that road. The sun. Finding water, being able to bathe her daughters.
“A truck… I remember a truck stopped to pick us up. A bunch of rowdy women were in the back, but they were generous and fed us fruit. They picked us up soon after we headed north,” she spoke in fragments, struggling to piece together her route. “We drove for a quite a while. Yes, for a really long time.”
Peter said. “Oh good. A truck. You must have gone north through Sudan then south to the Nile and crossed the Nile on the ferry – the ferry at Laropi. It takes you from the Sudan side to the Uganda side. Then there’s a real road.”
Agnes smiles. She can remember the ferry.
“You were so lucky that the trucker took you all the way from near Yei to Uganda because the only place to cross the Nile up there is at Laropi. People depended on that ferry going back and forth during the whole war. Sometimes it was stopped by different armed groups and lives were lost right on the riverbanks. Some people waited for days on both sides of the river. Desperate people tried fishing boats, but it was dangerous as the river is broad. The ferry let vehicles on and kept walking people waiting because they couldn’t pay. Trucks paid. I’m so glad you got across the Nile on that truck. Did it take you to Adjumani?
Agnes nodded. “Yes, Adjumani.”
“I’m so glad for you,” said Peter. “You were driven over 200 miles if you were dumped out in Adjumani. I’m happy it was a Ugandan city.”
“Yes, but no one was speaking Acholi there, even though it was in Uganda.” She doesn’t tell him how the locals shooed her away, calling her a Kony whore. Agnes studied the map as faint memories emerged.
“The smaller rivers might have led you to Gulu,” Peter said, showing how the waterways mostly ran south to north in what looked like valleys. He pointed out possible routes Agnes might have taken.
It’s as though the map was where she’d walked. She could see herself there. She described it softly. “No more big towns. Fewer people. More afraid. Avoiding villages. The sound of languages I’d never heard. Listening over and over hoping to hear Acholi – the language of home. Some tall hills. We just walked and walked and were still too far from home. Nothing familiar.” She leaned over the map. Even on the map nothing looked familiar.
But memories rose quickly now. They walked on a road, and she recalled how she hid every time a vehicle with men rolled towards them. She smiled, thinking of finding flip flops thrown to the side of the road, hoping they would fit each child. The infected blister on her foot. The constant cycle of hunger and thirst. Hiking up hills or outcrops of rock to get a better view as Beatrice guarded Grace.
Then, lying down in the road, sleeping, and hoping those little girls would stay at her side. The way she tried to hide tears when Beatrice asked how far they had to go. Beatrice, so strong. So young. Both girls, so loved.
“Peter, I was sick in the road,” she said abruptly. “Yes, illness overtook me.”
“But you didn’t stay there,” Peter whispered. “Go on…”
She remembered it well. She vomited. Was she dying? It was the day she lost consciousness. The first time. How did she get up? Where did they go? What next? The image shimmered, just out of reach. This moment had a beginning but never an end.
“Yes, there was a hut out away from a village. I remember the hut. And a woman who offered fresh fruit to Grace. We ate bananas until we all felt ill. The woman was kind. A very old woman. Her dark, deep eyes soft with concern. Hands open with a bowl of beans and posho. Then, the feeling of a full belly, a safe shelter, the feeling of deep rest.” Agnes smiled, remembering.
“Agnes, you must have desperately needed to sleep. What a blessing to find her far from other hostile places,” Peter whispered, watching her struggle to say what came next.
“A clean dress for me, one for Beatrice too. We ate again. Beatrice called the woman an angel. We rested for a day. Even two. That dear angel-woman wrapped my blistered feet, tending to the infection. Sitting on an upturned plastic bucket, she rocked Grace on her strong shoulder while Beatrice put her head in the old one’s lap.”
She wanted never to forget the scene.
“Then, this angel woman sent me on with clear directions to head south, to ask for Purongo first, then Gulu. A clear direction, though a long way still ahead.” Agnes took a deep breath. “We started walking, and we walked at least three hours before… a truck appeared on the road. It was filled with drunk Ugandan soldiers. They drove too fast so I could not hide us. They laughed as they passed us, heading toward where we had come from. Where we’d been sheltered and fed. With the angel-woman,” Agnes recalled. “How I believed they would be kind. That they were the ‘good’ kind of soldiers. I made us turn around and follow the truck, hoping they would turn around for us and drive us to Purongo. We walked as fast as we could back to where we’d been. But they were too far ahead. But then… we got there. They had gone. The hut was burning. We found… the angel-woman… the soldiers had slit her throat. And raped her.” Agnes’s body shook. “I vomited. Then… I’m not sure. That’s all I recall.”
The images blurred. Another truck, more soldiers. Different ones.
“I learned from Beatrice many years later that another truck came by and picked us up and took us toward Purongo. I don’t remember it, even now. What I recall next was waking in a stiff hospital bed, the gray/green ceiling, my daughters somewhere out of reach, but I was aware they were safe. I did not speak, only asking, Is this the way home? Over and over and over. Is this the way home?”
Suddenly Agnes stopped herself, coming back to the present. The four white walls. The door, open. At some point, Sunday and Molly had come in, hearing her words. They stood at the office door, listening with perfect love and silence. A balm.
“I think I know where you were,” Peter said. “I’m amazed you found your way.”
The image of the bloodied woman was now scalded in her mind. Agnes blinked, studying the map as Peter tapped the spot. “Maybe you were here,” he said tenderly.
“Now look here.” He moved his finger south. “These barracks here, Purongo Detach. They must have nursed you back to health.” He sighed. “The Ugandan army, along with the LRA, did bad things. Terrible things. Like those soldiers who killed that woman for no reason.” His voice was like a prayer. A prayer for the dead. “I am glad you got to the main road and could be picked up by some of the good men left in the army.”
She could remember more now. That large, low building with screens on the windows. How they were painted green. How there were few mosquitoes. The quiet. The beds around her, some filled with wounded men. But quiet men. The nurses who brought water, who helped her outside to squat and pee. How someone had wiped her face with a wet cloth, the comfort of that gesture. A nice man who took her pulse and smiled at her before leaving her bedside. The absence of the tension that she’d felt every day in Kony camps.
“I feel a little foolish,” Agnes said, returning to herself. “How long have we been talking? Hours, at least.” All these silly details with Okello Peter. Why did it matter to him? To her? To anyone, really? A familiar shame crept up. Agnes was not used to talking about herself in this way for so long.
Peter exhaled. “I understand your quest for answers.” He paused. “I think God helps us remember important things when we’re ready, so we can tell them out loud. Out loud they are easier to look at and examine. Like a photograph. We can know if they really happened to us or if we made them up. I know I did when I came out.” His face fell, heavy with sorrow. “We have to be sure that our stories are real, even when others don’t believe them. We say them out loud – we tell them to each other – because we can’t let others say we are lying.”
The room was small. Twice she shook her head and closed her eyes. Molly brought water and gave Agnes a dampened towel to blot her forehead. And her eyes. Agnes remembered the cool comfort such a gesture had brought her in the barracks.
“Agnes,” Peter said, “though your memory may feel fuzzy, it held on to where you’d marched from Kitgum to Garamba, which made you able to find your way from Garamba almost to Yei in Sudan, then to Adjumani, on to the towns along the Nile and to Purongo. You found your way home by memory.”
These words shifted her perspective. Suddenly, she felt proud. Rather than losing herself in her memories, she grew stronger because she had them. She wondered if she might tell her daughters about what they had achieved together. After all, it was their story too.
“Is there anything else?” asked Peter.
Agnes was afraid to ask, but she forced the words out: “Can you tell me what happened to my sons when I left? The sons I had with Samson when I was twelve? And fifteen? You didn’t acknowledge them, but surely you remember they were in the camps.”
What did she not ask: Was it selfish of me to leave them? Was I a bad mother because I saved myself and my girls by leaving Aba Camp without them? For the first time that day, tears streamed down Agnes’s cheeks. In the bush she had been told not to cry. Never. She had learned to cry silently, as it was a crime to sob out loud. Holding her body together again, she rocked herself back and forth in the plastic chair.
Peter’s forehead creased with compassion. “You want to know if you could have possibly taken your sons with you?”
Agnes nodded without looking up. She tried to wipe her nose and her face with the cloth Molly had handed to her, but she could not get her tears to stop.
“It would have been impossible,” Peter finally said, gently. “They were expected to be Kony’s next soldiers. Your sons were part of a group he kept in training, protected fiercely by him. When amnesty did come, he lost them, and they came home. But before that, up to the peace in 2006, it would have been impossible for anyone to free those boys. To do so would have been a death sentence, for your whole family. You did the right thing.”
Agnes let herself sob now with sorrow for what could not have been.
Peter rose to leave. They shook hands before departing. Peter shook Molly and Sunday’s hands too. Molly and Sunday would stand as witnesses to the truth of what Agnes could now tell.
If a guest asked if she had been in the LRA, she could now say with full honesty, “Yes, but I escaped. I found my way home with my two brave daughters. Myself and my girls.”
