Case study - The story of Aimerance Chibalonza

My name is Aimerance Chibalonza and I am from a village near Walungu town in South Kivu. I was married when I was 16, to my husband Moushagalusa. I gave birth to my first child a year later. By the time I was 23, we had 7 children together.

Two months after the birth of our seventh child, 6 members of an armed militia came and attacked the village in the middle of the night. My husband gave them all the money he had but it was not enough. They took my children outside, threw my two month old baby onto the ground.

They dragged my husband out of the house and tied him to a tree. They dragged me and my father-in-law outside, stripped me naked and demanded that I have sex with him. When I refused they stabbed me on my stomach and my arms – you can still see the scars today. Eventually I had to give in. My husband asked to be killed so that he didn’t have to watch. The militia tortured him and cut his arms with a machete, but they left him alive so he had to watch.

Afterwards, they divided into two groups. One group took my husband, my father in law and my two eldest children, ‘thank you’ and ‘Je t’aime’, away from the village. They killed them all; they made my father in law step on a landmine. They decapitated my husband and put his head in a tree for the village to see.

The other group took me into the forest and enslaved me for a year. During this time they raped me repeatedly and beat me so badly that I still have stomach injuries to this day. They cooked food for me and the other captives using water mixed with urine. If anyone refused to eat, they would be hit with sticks covered in faeces, and if they still refused, they were killed with a machine gun. I was forced to dig mass graves for the people they killed.

Eventually I managed to escape and made my way to a hospital in Bukavu, where I was given medical treatment and clothes. Today I am living back in Izegea village. I have been given counselling by (SCIAF partners) CDJP but I still feel sad when I remember how my life was before the attack, how happy we were. Nowadays I am hungry, I feel sad because I can’t give my children the food that they need and I can’t send them to school.