Free Tombstones and Banana Trees by Medad Birungi

it must have been for her to hear me tell the story of what really happened that day when I told her about getting bitten by ants. After I finished speaking she simply said that we wanted peace in this home and that I should never tell anyone else about it. She said, “It will be a huge scandal in this village. You will be ashamed, your sisters will be ashamed, your half brothers and sisters and stepmothers will use it against you.”
    I have spoken about the abuse a little more of late. I think that it is important to be honest about the pain we experience in life, especially when that pain goes on to affect us in later life. I can draw a line between what happened to me as a child and the way I treated women when I was a teenager, and years later when I was thinking about marriage and realized it was still troubling me. Although I was less uncomfortable with women than with men, I was still mistrustful of them.
    I was involved in a number of relationships that I thought might end up in marriage, but four of them failed, the last one ending just before the wedding. Even though we were both born-again Christians, I was still affected by the abuse from the past and the demons of rejection, abandonment, and my father’s curse of blowing away everything I touched, like so much ash.
    And when I finally did get married—to my beautiful Connie—the abuse came with me into the marriage. It started to affect us both, even from the time we were engaged. I had not talked about it with my sister, and I was starting to think about what happened. I developed this terrible fear about the wedding night, especially since Connie had told me it would be her first time and I knew how painful and dirty it was for me. I was so full of fear that I almost ended the engagement. But an aunt came to my home and called Connie to join us. Together we began to talk about it all and to deal with the issues. So we started our marriage with some confidence, gained largely by the fact that Connie accepted me despite my past. Yet for the first year and a half of our marriage I hated sex. Gradually that changed.
    It was not until I was thirty-seven that I confronted my sister about what had happened. She had buried it too and had forgotten about it. At first the conversation was impossible, but eventually we talked. We cried and we prayed and we put things right between us. We told the other sisters as well, and it was a key moment in the healing of our family, bridging the rift that had formed between my sister and me. It had divided the whole family, with everyone taking sides, even though nobody knew the real cause. But once forgiveness flowed, the root of bitterness was torn from the ground; the broken bonds between us were restored.
    It makes me wonder what life is like for girls who are raped, as they get older.
    I heard a story about a woman who had been raped when she was a child. On her wedding night her husband got out of the bathroom, and something changed for her. Instead of seeing her husband, she saw the rapist. She jumped out of bed, picked up an iron bar, and prepared to defend herself. She hit her husband twice on the head. He fell. Immediately she regained consciousness and picked up the phone to reception but could not talk. Reception came to the door but could not get an answer. The police were called. They arrested the girl and took the man to the hospital. She was silent for a week.
    I know this story because the police commander was a born-again Christian, and nobody knew what to do about the woman who would not talk but who had blood on her hands. The police commander called me and asked me to join them at the police station. I started praying and felt that I needed to rebuke whatever power it was that had taken her over. We prayed, and God performed a powerful work of healing within the young woman. She was able to talk and narrated the ordeal in tears. We told her husband in the hospital what happened, and because he