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| May 5, 2008 |
I will tell you about one encounter which occurred while I was traveling across the north west.
Id been driving for at least 3 days . No road to speak of- savvy driver/translator and a track probably made by elephants. We passed burned village after village. I lost count after awhile. It was numbing. I had heard that there were people living in the bushes, too terrified to return to their villages. I heard that if maybe we stopped the car, just anywhere, and if people saw that we were unarmed, no machine guns bolted to the car, they might come out. So we stopped. And we waited. After 15 or 20 minutes two people emerged, then 10, then 40 then 100, then perhaps 400 people came forward. Like specters they came, caked in dust, emaciated, wearing remnants of clothes or no clothes at all. We spoke with them for a while. They said it was not safe to return to their village. They told me they were eating roots and leaves. Even the children's teeth were rotting. They were drinking swamp water. They said "our children are dying". They had been living without any shelter or assistance for over a year.
Someone must have signaled because suddenly the whole group turned and ran; the pounding of bare feet on the hard clay ground, a shudder of leaves and they vanished.
We scanned the horizon and eventually saw another vehicle. As it turns out it was the HRW team-they too were crossing the north west of CAR but had started from a different place. As we exchanged information the people reappeared. They were laughing and shoving each other as if to say "ha-ha- silly us- it wasn't the murderers this time".
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