Two months ago, we were all in our village when armed men entered. They started to shoot and kill people and burn houses. I fled into the bush with my baby. The attackers ran past me to where my parents were. I could hear my parents screaming and crying. The next day, I went back and found them both dead. Many people were dead and their bodies burned. I ran back to the bush and fled towards Toulepleu. My other young son was with my parents when the attack happened and I haven’t found him since.

I stayed in the bush. We could not go to the village because we have no houses there. We slept under palm roofing and ate raw manioc. Some other people have gone to Liberia but they say there is nothing to eat there. One man came back recently and he says he will go back to call his family to join him here because there is not enough food there.

There are many people out there [in the bush]. And a lot of illness, with people who have stomach problems. We only come out of the bush to go to the clinic. We are too afraid to see dead bodies. Often I think a lot about what happened and my heart starts to pound.

After the election, we asked for help with the hope that we would be spared the violence between the two sides, because that has nothing to do with us. But in March fighters came and now there have been too many people killed.  

There were two types of fighters. There was the opposition army in conflict with the loyalist soldiers fighting for power. Then there were the people who were not soldiers, but local militias who had problems and conflict with landowners. This second group seized the moment to kill the landowners or to force them off the land.

On Monday 28 March I was at home, because I am old and retired. Armed people came and took me to the big road. They laid me down on it, doused me with gasoline and set me on fire. They took my right foot and wanted to totally burn it. Somebody grabbed me and took me out of the fire and put me on their back. My foot and my clothes were burnt. That person took me to the hospital on his moped the next day. Why did they pick on me and burn me? I’m innocent.

Then the rest of my family followed me here. There are 25 of us. It was time to go - our home was destroyed, burnt down. We don’t have anything left. The harvest has gone – everything has been ransacked.  I can’t go back. I don’t have any shelter there. I would have to live in the bush if I went back. I’m totally at the mercy of humanitarian organisations to look after me. Somebody should take care of us while we find a solution and rebuild our homes.

When you arrive in the village, there are so many people who have been displaced by the conflict. What are they going to eat? It’s a matter of urgency. You need to take care of these victims without any more delay so they’re not going to die.

I need to heal my foot. But when I get out of hospital where am I going to go and where am I going to put my family? I’m panicking just thinking about going back to my village. It’s such a shock. The panic still haunts me. I don’t want my identity to be divulged, because they are still here and they are armed to the hilt. I’m just asking for my security and my safety. I don’t really care who is the President, whether it is Paul or Joe, I just want to be in peace.

I’m not a politician I don’t know anything about politics. But from December, we were not living like before. We were scared.

Normally, we just live among ourselves. When somebody is not from your village, after two or three years, you treat him like your brother. We become friends and then we become brothers. We didn’t know that people still had an old grudge against us so that one day they would attack the village, to kill and massacre everybody, pillage, take all the goods from the houses. Those people to whom we have given forest plots in the village so that they could feed themselves, they came into the village and massacred us with machetes and 12 calibre guns.

People broke into our house armed with rifles, machetes and hoes. They took me outside and told me to sit down. I was really scared and thought, this is it, I’m dead. They shot me in the shoulder. I lied down, pretending to be dead. One of them struck my head with his foot and when he saw I was still breathing, he pointed his gun at the back of my head and told me to get up. But there were no bullets left in his rifle.. So, he took a machete and struck me on the throat. I was breathless and he struck me on my head. He wounded me badly. Then he took his machete and struck me again on the back of my head.  He thought I was dead. I lost so much blood that day.

In the next house we saw a little girl of five shot dead. Shot in the neck, she died instantly. They took a bucket of water to wash the little girl’s blood off themselves. Then they took our belongings, and took my wife, on the back of their motorbikes.

I couldn’t see anything, everything was black, I’d lost too much blood. I walked a bit, crossed the road into the bush. If I’m alive today, it’s thanks to a young villager who saw me lying down and bleeding in the bush. He helped bring me to a safer place deep in the bush. My wife came back later that day. Three days after that we made it here to Bangolo hospital. Without MSF, this hospital would be filled with dead bodies. There are people with bullet shots in the chest. When I first arrived, my arm stunk and it was almost rotten. Thanks to Martial, [MSF surgeon], he cleaned my arm nicely and now it’s getting a lot better.

There are loads of people I know who have been killed. How many are going to be left? It’s heartbreaking. When I’m told how many people have been killed in my village, I find it impossible to absorb and when I talk about it, it hurts. It goes straight to my heart and makes me cry.  I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to go back to the village. If we go back there I will see strange things and I will feel tormented. There will be places where they killed people. And when somebody has been killed somewhere, no matter how much rain falls down, the blood of that person stays where it is, as if you had just poured gasoline.

I know they have burnt my house down and they ransacked the whole thing and stole everything including my mattress, my id, all my clothes, rolled my t-shirts in the mud, stole my new clothes. To get back together with these people again will be hard. We live in doubt and in fear.

Up until three weeks ago, we were all still living in the bush. Many of the houses in my village were burned. Now that we are back, we live in the houses that are still abandoned. Everything was taken. Many people are sick. But the health centre nearby has not functioned since the events of 2002.

A few months ago, we left our village when Toulepleu was attacked in the morning. In the course of the evening afterwards, they started to attack all the villages. Some people fled to Liberia—and we have not heard from them since then. Others, like us, fled to the bush. Where I was in the bush, 26 people were living together. We soon ran out of rice and it became hard to find any manioc left in the fields to eat.

When we were in the bush, one old man was shot in the hand by armed men when out looking for food for us. He went weeks without care. The wound became infected and now that he’s gone to the hospital, he lost his hand.

People are still afraid to leave the bush because of what happened here. Even though the military goes into the bush to call us back, saying the war is over, we are afraid it is not really over.