Total Impact House

These are the questions that were presented to the girls:

1. Tell us about your first experience with death. Who died? When? What did you know about death before the event and what did you come to learn about death after the event?

2. Spend a few minutes looking in a mirror. Stare at your reflection and then write about what you see. Describe yourself in detail. Try to imagine you are looking at a stranger. What assumptions would you make from this person’s appearance?

3. Write about an illuminating moment in your life, a time when you learned an important lesson or gained an important insight. Try to describe it exactly as it happened.

4. Write about your family members—living or dead, close or not close. Who do/did you most enjoy being with and why and who do/did you least enjoy being with and why?

Robinah, Pauline, and Blake, have the girls each pick at least one question to answer. They are certainly welcome to do more if they wish. Help them if they need it, like showing them how to explore and communicate the details and such, but don’t assist their actual answers too much. I want them to be wholly their own.
Thanks!
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This response is from one of our girls in the Total Impact House. (I will be sharing more of them with you once they are translated.)

Age:16

1. My first experience about death was in 2005 when my mother, who had gone to the garden to harvest sim-sim, was attacked to death by the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony. I was only 11 years old and when the news about my mother’s death was broken to me, I became suicidal and wanted to fall in a nearby river to drown so that I would die and follow my mother. This thought came to my mind because my mother was my only hope in life after I lost my father at the age of 7.

b – Before my mother’s death, I thought of death as a long sleep somebody would have, and that they would wake up after some time. I learned after mom’s death that death is not simply a deep sleep, and that when somebody dies, they go forever disappear.

2. What I saw in a mirror: I have black hair, am brown in color, small bodied, and beautiful

b – the assumption I make from a stranger’s appearance is: totally different from mine by all looks in the head and body. To me, a stranger is bigger than me in body.

3. An illuminating moment in my life was in 2003 when I was abducted by the rebels of the LRA, and lived in captivity for 2 years. While in captivity I was tortured in lots of ways, and am traumatized by participating in torturing other especially those who attempted to escape. I once was forced with other girls to horribly bite a girl that tried to escape, as punishment. I was shot in an ambush and I have a bullet in my leg. I learned one would be killed because Joseph Kony predicted it, but I would escape and indeed I escaped.

b – I learned that God has a hand / plan in everything in one’s life, where good or bad. When I returned from captivity, I was blessed to be supported by 2 organizations because I was affected by the war.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 2:01 pm by Kristen Hendricks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.