A family's fear

My neighbors were terrified last week, when Nightie, their 2 or 3 year old girl so named because she was born at night, went missing one afternoon. Her mother and brothers were running around the area in states approaching hysteria to varying degrees, calling her name and asking everyone if they’d seen her. They feared that she had been abducted; her mother was in tears, running up and down the road looking for her.

Any hint of abduction is horrifying, especially in light of several things I’ve heard about recently. The boys have told me about some “bad men,” who are often down near the river and will attack and kill anyone they find alone. From descriptions of invisibility, I’ve deduced that they’re talking about evil spirits, which are a pervasive fear here, especially since people placing curses on other people is commonplace. But more concrete and more hideous is the fear of witchdoctors and child sacrifice. I wouldn’t have imagined that ritual sacrifice is something I would encounter, but it’s been much in the news here, especially several months ago. A prominent businessman in Kampala was found to have sacrificed a child as part of a ceremony to protect a building that he was constructing, and the body was buried in the foundation. It’s hard to imagine that level of brutality, and the story brought much needed attention to inhuman practices that no one really wants to think about. In a place where witchdoctors perform child sacrifice, and a place where children run about alone all the time, I can only imagine the fear felt by families when a child can’t be found.

Equally heartbreaking is the belief that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. This leads to countless rapes of young girls - there is currently a 6 year old rape victim on the pediatric ward - with the very real risk of becoming infected with HIV added to the horrendous psychological, emotional, and physical damage that is done. Hearing the story of this girl had effects of both paralyzing me with sorrow and absolutely infuriating me with rage. It’s another horrible, sickening reminder of how broken this world can be.

All these horrors swirled through my mind as I thought about beautiful little Nightie being abducted. Fortunately, none of them came true. They soon found her down in one of the family gardens, near the river, but with a disturbing story of being grabbed by a man and taken there. I still can’t tell how much of that story is from what she communicated and how much comes from the fears of her family; it seems likely to me that she wandered off to the garden and couldn’t find her way back, but who am I to say?

It is believed that, for ritual sacrifice, witchdoctors can’t use children whose bodies have been cut in any way, so I wasn’t surprised when Nightie and her siblings, my friends Gloria, Charity, Gonja, and Afisa, showed up at my door with their ears pierced and pieces of string pulled through the holes. They seemed to think that having a needle stuck through their earlobes was great fun (they even denied that it ever hurt at all), and have since been trying to convince me to let their grandmother pierce my ear. I have declined thus far, and while these adorable kids can make me give in to just about anything, I’m feeling resolute on this matter. As is so often the case, the children around me provided me with an interesting view of culture and life here. There are always new things to think about and wrestle with, sometimes amusing and sometimes sobering, sometimes beautiful and sometimes heinous. How do I respond to these terrors? To the world where they seem to occur with such frequency? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I think that struggling with them is a start.