68-year-old LRA mutilation victim swims against the tide

Monitor Correspondent
GULU

Hellen Lanyom’s homestead in Owoo Village in Bungatira Sub-county is dotted with lush green vegetation of trees and food crops such as maize and cassava. It ironically gives the impression that all is at peace. But it is not the case.

It is here that the 68-year-old Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) mutilation victim, who has for the past 21 years witnessed countless psychological and physical torture, resides.

Lanyom poses a giant physique and dark complexion. She is charming and welcoming. However, it is her swollen lips that grab your attention on meeting her. The lamp-like growth on her lips has covered her chin and stretched the skin on her face.

How it all began
Ms Lanyom’s upper and lower lips were cut off in an incident when the rebels of the LRA attacked her home on October 4, 1990 in Pawel Angany, Patiko Sub-county in Gulu District. “They gathered all of us and asked me where my two brothers (one a local council chairman and the other a soldier) were. When I told them that I did not know, they said that they will teach me a lesson for what they termed as stubbornness,” she recalls.

She only blurry remembers the moment a young rebel brandished a machete ready to cut her lips and only regained consciousness the next morning on a hospital bed at St Mary’s Lacor hospital in Gulu town where her wounds were stitched.

Ms Lanyom was just 31 then and nostalgically remembers her once glorious looks. “I was very beautiful and the incident still makes me sad,” she said, before staring blankly at the mango tree .

To her horror, her husband was killed by the LRA on his way to Patiko from Gulu Town, just a few weeks after she was mutilated. After the incident, she was offered a place in Bungatira Sub-county about 5kms from Gulu Town by a man she identified only as Oneka, where she now resides.

No land
However, she is facing challenges as the owner of the land is asking that she leaves the place. But this comes amidst years of endurance that saw her lead peace talk efforts as part of the government delegation. Despite the pain of meeting her former tormentors, she did not bulge down. It is her courage that won her accolades from most people.

“Her years of grief could have easily settled into deep furrows across her brow. But when I look at her, I can see she is free, she has forgiven. She does not show much bitterness or self-pity. Being free is a difficult thing to fake,” says an Australian journalist Sara Sally in her book Go Go mama that profiles the lives of such 12 African women.

Last year, Living Hope, a Watoto Church project took her on and 20 other mutilated women for reconstructive surgery at Corsu Rehabilitation hospital in Kisubi, Entebe. A medical report seen by the Saturday Monitor indicates that she was admitted for 11 days for upper lip loss, and buccal sulcus reconstruction on March 2, 2011.

She again went back from March 28th to May, 2, 2011 for free anterolateral thigh flap.
However, unlike the other women, Ms Lanyom’s condition has worsened with a large swelling on her mouth and she struggles to live with it due to the severe pain it has caused to her.

Her mouth started emitting pus also in the process. As a result of this, her ability to perform any tasks is reducing by the day. She can neither carry 20 litres of water nor collect firewood.

“If I carry water, it feels like a big stone on my head,” she said. The operations director of Living Hope, Ms Christine Lutara. acknowledges that there is a risk associated with surgeries said Ms Lanyom will be taken for further corrective surgery abroad.
Despite the challenge, Ms Lanyom is currently hiring a small plot of land where she has planted beans, sweet potatoes and maize. Her worry is that she may be forced out of the place anytime.