There comes a time when these stories have to come out. That period where I think about them and think about them, tossing and turning in bed on sleepless nights, and have to throw them up to regain some peace. Some stories take longer to come out, almost none of them I can write immediately: they all have their time. They decide, and it has taken Fatima longer than usual, but it’s time to tell her story.
Fatima is not called Fatima, although almost, but I will not be the key for them to find her. There, in Mozambique, I hope he remains safe; growing up as a 14-year-old girl who will never forget her past, but who can hopefully aspire to a better future, to rebuild her history.
There are many stories that hurt and others that go deep (too much sensitivity, psychology says) and Fatima’s has been one of the most complicated. But I always end up coming out, and if to get Fatima out of the hole we found her in, I have to go down another hole for a while, I’d do it again, any day.
Fatima must be 16 years old now. She was 14 when I met her in La Palma, a small municipality in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province. A piece of paradise lost, the kind that is corrupted by war and the religions of the blood gods, created by the followers who please them every day. Cabo Delgado is the only Muslim-majority province in Christian Mozambique, and it sparked an uprising and the many horrors that surrounded it.
Fátima was 13 years old when violence came to her village: when her family had to take refuge in the jungle to escape the rebels and their mass beheadings. When I went, every day we passed a path where you saw fresh elephant dung, but never the elephants. People told me that they were deeply affected by witnessing the killings and now avoid meeting humans at all costs, “those wild creatures who kill each other, even though some are just defenseless babies”.
Fatima cannot remember how many days she hid in the “bush” in the grain, trying to escape, eating mangoes and wild roots, until her perpetrators found her family. I don’t know for sure what happened to his mother, I only know that she was taken and he never saw her again, but he heard her screams for a long time, until he didn’t hear them anymore. Her father’s throat was cut in front of her, and her brother, her brother, was part of the rebels and was the perpetrator.
She ran away for days and was “rescued” by a Mozambican army soldier, who married her for a year and abandoned her to her fate when she did not conceive during that time. Trying to return to her hometown, she found her brother, her only living relative, who decided that, not being a virgin, she was no longer useful as a wife and could bring benefits in another way. He locked him in the ruins of a destroyed school, in a dark pit with no water, no way to clean himself, no food. Literally keeping her on bread and water, only when the men he brought in to rape her were satisfied and he realized it wasn’t in his best interest to let her die.
A disease that eats your flesh
I had never seen tungiasis: worms that eat the living flesh of someone living in appalling sanitary conditions. Larvae crawling through his fingernails, the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, his head, taking advantage of the wounds formed by the stretched skin left by the edema of extreme malnutrition, that thin skin on a body full of water that’s where it shouldn’t be because your blood doesn’t have the protein to hold it.
Very thin and bloated to the extreme, Fatima did not speak, interact or answer questions from the local health officials she worked with. It wasn’t until many days later, now washed and shaved, receiving treatment and eating, that she slowly began to tell us her story.
And when the war began to leave her hospitalized when she could have finished her recovery at home, the kind neighbor decided to take a risk and alert us to her case. That supportive woman who didn’t leave him alone in the hospital even when she had her own young children to take care of. Meanwhile, the MSF team mediated with other organizations to host him in the county capital – La Palma, as a high security risk area, no one wanted to come for him – where a permanent home could be found for him. .Fatima. A space so that he can reintegrate, after a lot of mental and physical health work, into this wild society.
It took many emails and many phone calls for someone to agree to take her away, for the district hospital to accept her as a patient, for an organization that could give her protection to take her case. But here’s how these battles play out: praying for the satellite Internet signal to cooperate, calls going through the phone, finding a space where the satellite phone works, and trying to understand each other among co-workers who speak different languages, between Portuguese my terrible.and the half-baked English of the native Portuguese.
Light appears in a smile
I visited Fatima for so long in the hospital to make sure she had money to eat that I could see her transformation; From that silent and badly hurt little person to a girl able to smile again in just a few weeks, I saw a resilience that will never cease to amaze me. That of girls and boys above all.
When I remember her, her fleeting smile and the few words we managed to exchange in her dialect, I don’t think of Fatima’s brother or the “clients”. I think of the friendly smile of the neighbor who changed a life forever, the one who decided that the horror had to end and took care of Fatima like a daughter, even against her husband’s wishes. Because this world is full of terrible people capable of doing the unspeakable, but also of wonderful people who find within themselves the power to change things.
I often think about Fatima. I try to imagine her as a girl again, with shelter and food, but above all safe from her nightmare. The anxiety that I now try to put out of my mind so that neither Fatima nor I continue to dream about it. Telling his story, so that it is not forgotten, thinking that by telling the horror it will somehow stop it from happening again.