KimElliott.net

Last year I spent a couple of weeks with ex-child soldiers from Uganda. These monologues are based on the snippets of conversation we shared, formal interviews and my own impressions.

I               Gloria

I met this Journalist today, this woman. She told me I was the strongest female she had ever met.

Me.

She has met a lot of important people. People in Government, people who make decisions.

She said that even though I was half her age, I had seen the world and lived through terror. I had made it out the other side.

I didn’t know what to say. There are sixty other children on the bus, and back home in Uganda, there are thousands of us, too many to count.

How can I be the strongest? I’m a fourteen year old girl.

We have been in England telling our stories to Journalists for two weeks. It is cold here; I always keep my coat on.

The other girls tease me for being so skinny. I can’t help it. I’m not good with food.

Sometimes it is so cold, I shake. The Journalists think it is fear. It’s not. I don’t know what fear looks like to me now.

Sometimes I cry. You tell the same story eight, nine times a day, but it’s still your story, it’s still your pain. This is what they want to know:

How old were you when you were taken?

Did you know what the rebels would do to you?

Did you have a choice?

Were you beaten?

Were you raped?

How many times?

How many men?

Did you cry out?

Did you try to get away?

I tell them all of it, all of it and more.

The Journalist kissed me goodbye.  She asked the same questions as the others, but she was the only one to cry when she heard my story.

I think maybe she was crying for her own pain, for her own personal terror.

Just before we said goodbye, she told me about this English Queen, long ago. The Queen said, I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too.

That’s you, the Journalist said. You are that Queen. 

I knew then, that she was right.

Some of us are trapped in fragile bodies and our blood will spill and our bones will be broken.

Our hearts will remain strong. My heart will remain strong.