The End of Where We Begin: A Refugee Story - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rosalind Russell is a journalist and editor with two decades of international experience. She has worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and The Independent in East Africa, the Middle East and Asia, reporting on the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and Myanmar's Saffron Revolution. Her first book, Burma's Spring, was described byAsian Affairsas 'reportage at its best' and reached number one in the UK Kindle non-fiction bestseller list. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters and currently works for the Evening Standard.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

They made it to Ombachi with a couple of hours of daylight to spare. Hundreds of people had gathered in this one spot, under the trees by the primary school: old ladies with aching, swollen legs, hungry children, anxious men. They quickly got themselves organised: men went to gather firewood, some of the women fetched water, other started the fires. They would pool their resources – they would need to, to survive.

Lilian gently encouraged Harmony. She had relaxed a little, there was a woman who had handed out cups of millet porridge to the children, and Harmony had finished the water she had collected in the jerrycan, gasping after each mouthful. Some kids had gathered under the school entrance, some playing with sticks, some just sitting on the steps, too exhausted to do much. Harmony wandered over shyly and soon seemed to be chatting to another boy a little older than him, and they started drawing patterns in the dust. Lilian offered her saucepan and some rice to the woman tending the fire. She enquired about cars, hoping they could leave in the morning. It should only be an hour’s drive from here to Kaya on the border, it was just her and her son; how much would they charge?

The woman heard it before her. She flopped down suddenly like she had been deflated, her face was on the ground then her hands clawed at the dirt, as if she was trying to get herself into the earth. That was when Lilian heard the deadly whoosh of the artillery shells, she felt the air sucked from around her; a split second of silence and then a searing white light.

At first she thought she might be dead. She had been thrown across the ground, her eyes were burned shut. There was a vacuum of time, her head was empty, numb, perhaps her brain had been smashed out of her, there was no real thought. Time passed: it could have been a second, a minute, an hour. Lilian heard herself breathing. She dug her fingers in the dry earth and willed herself back to the present, to sit up, to move.

The volume turned up, louder and louder. She sat up, stood up, heard the screams, the wailing. She opened her eyes to the glare of fires burning the trees, the buildings, the cars. Madness whirled around her, people running, screaming. The air was thick with smoke. Harmony! Harmony! Lilian screamed, but couldn’t hear her own voice. She ran in circles around the fires, crouching to touch a blackened body, running more, weaving around the horror scene in frenzied madness. The living were already leaving, fearing another attack. Cars revved away with doors open, other survivors just ran, scattering in all directions into the scrub.

“Come! Come now!” a man shouted, pulling Lilian’s arm. “You must run!”

She went along, pulled by the stranger who tightly gripped her forearm. He had been right to tell her to run – as they stumbled along a path of dry leaves into the forest, another explosion nearly threw them to the ground. An unnatural glare lit up the dusk and the acrid smoke descended.

“No!” Lilian screamed. “No! Let me go! I need to go back! I need to find my son!”

She wrestled with the man, who kept hold of her arm as they both fell to the ground. Lilian struggled and kicked, trying to free herself. She lunged forward and tried to bite his shoulder, her mouth falling hard against bone.

“No!” she tried to scream. Her throat felt as sharp as razor blades; she could hear no sound. She tasted blood in her mouth. She lunged at the man again.

“Bitch! Stop it!” the man yelled. “Stop it!” His lip curled, he looked crazed. His shirt had been ripped off; his chest was heaving; his eye was bleeding. “You stupid bitch! We have to run, or we will die. Don’t you understand? I’m trying to save you!”

They walked for hours through the night, a caravan of strangers – women, men, children, babies – who had all fled the bombing. They kept going until they came to the shelter of a mango tree. They dropped to the ground. The smallest infants, already limp bundles carried in arms and on shoulders, were placed down carefully after one of the women quickly swept the dirt ground with her hands. The older children sank gratefully onto the warm earth and fell unconscious, their dry mouths open and slack. Lilian lay down on her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. She had covered the tattered remnants of her primrose yellow dress with a kitenge that someone had passed to her. The shreds of the dress underneath were useless, but that was the last thing that Harmony had seen his mother wearing. When he started to search for her, she thought, if he had to describe her to someone, he would remember the dress, so she would not take it off, not until she had found him again. Her son had been wearing his blue shorts and blue-and-red striped T-shirt. Was he wearing them now? Where was he? Was he trying to sleep too, lying down with a group of strangers?

She lay behind a little girl a few years older than Harmony, probably about nine. She didn’t know her; she didn’t know anyone in the group. There had been no time for talking, but the others seemed to understand that Lilian had not been travelling alone before the attack. They helped her take sips of water in the darkness when they got to the stream. Lying still now, Lilian listened to the sleeping girl’s murmurs; she watched her tiny ribcage gently rise and fall. She wanted to reach out and place her hand on the girl’s back. That’s what she did with Harmony, and they would both drift off to sleep together, breathing in unison.

But Lilian could not sleep on this night. She lay awake, with the glassy, open eyes of a doll. She turned her neck to watch the dawn sky turn to violet through the canopy of leaves. Was Harmony looking up at it too? She should never have let him go and play, she should have stayed with him, holding his hand. She deserved the agony she felt, the stabbing pains in her heart, the nausea rising in her windpipe. She would not eat until she found him. She would starve herself, but when she found him again she would cook him his posho and beans, then she would kill a chicken for him, and they would eat it together.

What should have been a two- or three-day walk to the Ugandan border turned into an epic journey of endurance that Lilian bore without complaint. If anything, the pain felt appropriate to her, she deserved it. She even wondered, when she was walking, whether the more she suffered the more likely she was to see Harmony again.        

The road to Kaya, the fastest route to Uganda, was unsafe. On the second day they had encountered a group of terrified retreating civilians, staggering up the road towards them. They had started off as nine, but they had been ambushed by rebel fighters who had robbed them, accused the three men in their group of being deserters, and slaughtered them on the spot with their machetes. They wouldn’t waste bullets on cowards, the rebels had said. The bodies were left on the side of the road to rot in the sun, then they gang-raped the women, including a twelve-year-old girl, forcing the two young boys to watch. When they had finished, they ordered the depleted group back up the road towards Yei, knowing that if government soldiers came upon them the routine would be repeated.

The six survivors joined Lilian’s weary band and, like her, became quiet, compliant followers, leaving all decision-making to the two men and one woman who had emerged as natural leaders. If the Kaya road was impassable, they would have to head west, through the bush to Congo, one of the men had said. He had been there before, when he was driving petrol tankers, but he hadn’t been on foot. He tried to laugh. This would...