When the Rebels arrived at Mariama’s home, they demanded food from her family. They refused to hand over the mush they’d made for dinner, so the Rebels lit the house on fire and took the six children to a nearby house for mental patients, where they lined them up from youngest to oldest. They asked the children whether they wanted a long-sleeve cut or a short-sleeve cut. Mariama was fifth in line, watching the ax rise and fall.
When it was her turn, the Rebels chopped off her left hand, but didn’t finish the job. Her hand was hanging by the flesh, so heavy and uncomfortable that Mariama later had her aunt cut through the dangling skin with a piece of broken glass.
The Rebels tried to whack her right hand, but the pick ax must have been getting dull. They left a gash—which is now a one-inch scar—above the wrist, but the hand was saved.
When the Rebels were done cutting, they raped her.
“Now I realize God can’t control everything,” says Mariama. “He can’t control the Rebels. I can’t blame Him. He didn’t do it.”
Mariama passed out on the ground for twenty minutes. “I got up like God was inside me,” she says. “I was crying and my blood was drying and all of the flies were going to my hand.”
She found her family hiding in an unfinished hut in the bush, where they stayed for two days listening to the Rebels burning, cutting, and killing. Mariama had no medicine during that time. When she finally went to a clinic, her hand was washed and bandaged. But still there was no medicine, and eventually Mariama had to leave because the Rebels invaded the clinic and threatened to kill everyone unless they evacuated.
“I walked maybe twenty miles, seeing dead people,” says Mariama. “I was by myself.”
At a checkpoint, Mariama found soldiers from the West African peacekeeping mission ECOMOG. The soldiers drove her to a hospital in Freetown, where her wounds were cleaned and medicated, but after a month in the hospital, her hand was not healed and she had to go back home.
