They Thought She Was Dead

Mary, Rwanda

TRIGGER WARNING! sexual assault, abuse

Mary remembers vividly when she fled her home in Rwanda. It was June 2008, and she was certain that if she stayed, she too would become another name lost to the hate that had once plagued her country years before and had not quite yet disappeared.

Her parents had already been killed. She does not know where her siblings are to this day. Whether they are alive or dead, she cannot say. By the time she fled, she felt she was the only person she knew left in the world.

She was only fifteen the first time she was raped. It happened in Rwanda. She speaks about it quietly, carefully, as though the memory still sits close to the surface. The assault left her with severe infections. “I had to be operated on,” she says. “When I went to the doctor, I resembled a corpse.”

The infections had become so serious that doctors had to operate on her stomach. Even now, years later, she remembers the weakness in her body, the feeling of her health slipping away from her so young.

But fleeing Rwanda did not bring safety with it.

When she arrived in Uganda, she says she was caught by a group of people and raped again. She says she does not know who did what to her. She only remembers the violence, the confusion, and how sick she became afterwards. Her body began to deteriorate again. She developed severe infections and says there was a terrible smell coming from her body because of what had been done to her.

At some point during those days, she was abandoned in the woods on a hill near Jinja. Her hands and legs had been tied to a tree and she was left there alone during the rainy season. She remembers lying there terrified, unable to move properly, afraid of snakes, animals, or dying before anyone found her. Her eyes were swollen. Her body was weak. She could barely speak.

Then she heard voices in the distance.

She remembers hearing people hesitate to approach her. From where they stood, they thought she was dead. She heard them call for the police, saying there was a corpse tied to a tree. She wanted to answer them, to tell them she was still alive, but her body could not respond.

The police eventually took her to hospital. They also helped find clothes for her. She remained in hospital for days recovering from the infections and injuries. It was there that she found out she had HIV.

Since then, she says, she has felt sick every day. Some days her body is too weak. Some days the memories return before morning fully arrives. Survival became something she had to wake up and choose daily.

Still, over time, she began trying to rebuild a life for herself. She learned how to weave baskets. She learned how to make soap. Making things with her hands became one of the few ways she could imagine a future again, however small.

At the clinic where she went to collect her medicine, she began meeting women whose stories sounded painfully familiar. Refugee women. Women trying to survive. Women carrying heavy burdens trapped in their hearts and minds. 

So she started a group with them. She taught them how to weave baskets and make soap so they too could try to earn something small for themselves.

But even that is difficult. Selling is difficult. The KCCA is always out there taking away their things, scattering the little they have worked for. Some days they spend hours under the sun trying to sell, only to return home with almost nothing.

Still, Mary continues.

After Rwanda, after the hospital beds, after the tree in the woods near Jinja, she is still here. Trying to survive. Trying to make something with her hands. Trying, with all the hope she can gather, to keep living. She says that as long as God gives her life, she believes she has a duty to keep striving, not only for herself, but for others like her too.