John Ochola

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion, Summer-Fall, 2008

"A normal human being cannot do that"

John Ochola's face is the face of war in northern Uganda. When he was 23, rebels mutilated his nose, lips and ears and chopped off his hands. Today he lives in a simple hut with his wife, Grace, and their three young children, Alfred, Sunday and Samuel. Though life is hard, John is grateful to be alive and to have his family.

Around midnight on June 2, 2003, Lord's Resistance Army insurgents kicked in their door, tied John to a rope and carried him off, stopping periodically to kick and beat him. A fellow abductee from his village had falsely told the rebels that John was with the Ugandan military, but he repeatedly denied the charge. Later in the day, the Ugandan army attacked, which infuriated the LRA commanders who believed the soldiers were trying to rescue John. He heard them discussing whether they should give him a short sleeve or a long sleeve, but he didn't know what they meant.

After calling for a knife and axe, one of the rebel leaders ordered him to lift his face. As the young captive wept and screamed in pain, the commander cut off most of John's nose, sliced away his upper lip and severed both ears. With blood gushing everywhere, the rebels held John's hands, still tied behind him, to a small piece of log. His sadistic assailant then took an axe and lopped off his left hand at the wrist, giving him what the LRA calls a short sleeve. "As they started cutting my hand," Ochola says, "I pleaded with them to leave my right hand so I could make a living. But they refused, saying they wanted to make sure I could never again handle a gun." Mercilessly, the commander hacked away John's other hand. The only consolation was that he spared him the long sleeve--amputation at the elbow.

Left with two bleeding stumps, the young captive was released with three female abductees who were to deliver John and a letter to the nearest military detachment. The letter warned that John was an example of what would happen if the rebels encountered any other soldiers in the area. Grace Ochola remembers:

   Many of my friends came around and told me to leave John. They
   said, "He's ugly." My response was, "This man has been very
   handsome and he's still a human being, so stay away from me." What
   kept my heart on John was that he's a loving, very kind young man.
   That was what attracted me to him. This other thing, the
   mutilation, I see it as nothing. And I remember as I was being
   discouraged by my friends, I wrote him a few words. I said, "My
   dear John, I still love you, regardless of what has happened. What
   if it had been me? You would not leave me. Nor will I leave you."

But her parents did remove Grace from John's home because he wasn't able to finish paying her wedding dowry. When some Canadian friends kicked in enough money to pay the bride price, Grace was returned to her grateful husband. "After receiving this money," Grace says, "John sent a letter to my parents and then the debt was satisfied. The elders, after reading the letter, met with me and asked me repeatedly if I would really stay with a man who had been mutilated. I kept saying I love John."

John says that what got him through his ordeal was her unflagging support; the steadfast encouragement of his friend William Oketta, an Anglican priest; and his Christian faith: "My life has changed because now I can't do many of the things that I would otherwise be doing. For example, my friends work in construction but all I can do is use my bicycle to fetch water and sell it to the builders. I make some money in that simple way but I can't do the real work they're involved in." Grace digs sand for those same workers and, together, they get by. More remarkably, John has achieved a kind of inner peace:

   Before forgiving this man, I bad a lot of bitterness in my heart.
   It kept disturbing me so much. I was planning evil revenge all the
   time. I had wanted also to get the young man who had accused me and
   mutilate him also. But later, I let that go and now I feel like I
   have put the burden down.

   I took a lot of time meditating on why a fellow human being would
   do these things to me. And after a long time, I realized that it
   might not have been him directly--a normal human being cannot do
   that. Secondly, I found that nothing can undo what that man had
   done to me. I couldn't undo the mutilation, so I consoled myself by
   abandoning the whole idea of revenge, because it was really
   bothering me, for nothing. So I started moving forward. I abandoned
   revenge, anger and worry, because they don't help anything.

Meanwhile, he has moved forward in another way as well. "I want to be computer literate," he says, "maybe to be a secretary or working in an office to help others with computer services. That is my goal." In July 2007, using the stumps of his hands to painstakingly peck away at the keyboard, he opened an Internet account and went online for the first time ever, sending a message to a friend across the table at an Internet cafe.