In Limu Village, Gulu East Division, 21-year-old Josephine Ayo walks out of a rickety hut. With a poignant gaze, she sits on the bench to narrate her story.
After a brief prayer, she is overcome with emotion and grief. Tears roll down her cheeks.
Ayo, a single mother of one, lives with four siblings in a shabby slum in Gulu Town along with several other Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) war victims.
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She says her in laws and neighbours asked her husband to disown her because she was born in captivity.
“He changed his mind and chased me from his house and said because of my background. He dropped a plan of take me back to school and supporting my siblings. He claimed I had demonic spirits in me and could kill at any time,” Ayo narrates.
Ayo now works as food vendor on the streets of Gulu City. In 1993, Ayo’s mother, Regina Acayo was abducted from Lawiyadul Village, Angagura Sub-county in Pader District. She was 14 at the time.
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Acayo says she returned 11 years later in 2004 with two children—Ayo and her elder sister.
“Upon return, the welcome in the village was not encouraging. I later realised that my parents were killed by the rebels. My brothers and uncles asked me to take the children to their father where they belong before I could be embraced into the family,” Acayo told Daily Monitor in an interview.
She says she decided to return to Gulu Town.
“Right now I have five children, two from captivity, and three with two different men. One of the men said marrying me a former captive was a bad omen while the other hated my daughters because of their background,” she adds.
Acayo says she is not sure whether the father of her two older children returned from captivity or was killed.
“I traced the father of my two children in vain. I heard that he was killed in captivity after I returned. I also heard that he returned home. I failed to trace him because he told me a different name and a village that does not exist,” she says.
Acayo hopes to secure a piece of land so that she can build a home for her family. She is worried that her children will drop out of school because she cannot pay their tuition fees.
The LRA rebellion started in 1987 under the command of Joseph Kony. The war lasted close to two decades.
As Gulu emerges from the ruin of the war with a new skyline and sleek roads, this festering wound that left thousands dead, abducted, and hundreds of young girls defiled and raped and millions huddled inside squalid Internally Displaced People’s camps— is yet to heal. BY DAILY NATION