After her cousin finished his story about violence in the north, Sister Elizabeth added her own piece. Fortunately, this one did not involve death, although there have been sisters murdered--or as Sr. Elizabeth so accurately notes--martyred by Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).
Sister Elizabeth was a young sister living in a local convent when a group of Kony's LRA broke into the house. The soldiers asked the sisters if they would rather the soldiers shoot them or beat them. Since the rebels had shot and killed a priest in the neighborhood just a week previous, they said they would rather be beat.
As the soldiers were beating them with their guns, the sisters ran out of the house and climbed the fence. Some ran between the soldiers' legs and out the door. Once they climbed the fence, they went to the house of another community at a bit of a distance. They ended up staying there for over a year since it wasn't safe to go back to their house.
The rebels used their house as a base for their operations in the area. When the sisters returned, they found that the soldiers had burned furniture, doors and anything else they could lay their hands on as fuel for cooking. The house was totally destroyed.
Many sisters who have been in the north have experiences of trauma, torture and violence. It affects communities and their lives together. Still, it does not stop them from reaching out to others in the area who have also suffered.
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