Amina is being raped and that is, right now, the least of her concerns. It’s what her 5 year old boy is going to do about seeing his mum pinned to the ground by a uniformed man with wild eyes in the middle of a dirt road.

The man is strangely bobbing up and down with a big rifle still strapped to his back. Licking his mother’s cheeks with his tongue. Amina knows her son well enough to see in his eyes that he is angry. And he is about to do something with that anger. 

So Amina tries to look like she is not in pain, even though it feels like her pelvis is about to be pulverized. She even tries to smile at little George, but little George isn’t buying it. He doesn’t know exactly what the uniformed man is doing, but he does know that he doesn’t like it one bit.

Her rapist now grabs her head between his two hands and forces her to look at him. He mumbles something like: ‘Stay with me or I might as well be screwing a hole in a tree.’

Amina tries to wrestle her head free so she can keep tracking little George.

Then the man cries out in pain. Amina is even more horrified than when the man grabbed her and forced her to the ground.

Little George is beating the man right on the head with a thin metal rod. These days the roads are strewn full with all kinds of strange objects. So many refugees trudge along every day now.

The man is dazed, but starts reaching for the gun on his back. She screams: ‘Run, George, run! If you love me, run!’

George is preparing for another blow on the man’s head, but Amina manages to make eye contact and yells with an authority that surprises her: ‘Ruuuuuunnnnn!!!’

And so George runs. Amina’s never been more relieved in her life. Little George can be just as fast as grandpa’s rickety Italian Vespa from the sixties for ten minutes or so. And that’s without panic and terror propelling him onwards.

Blood is dripping from the man’s head, but not nearly enough to make him faint. He sits up on Amina’s hurting body and finally gets hold of his gun. As he’s about to aim Amina shoots up and kisses the man on the lips. She pulls him back down. She’s never seen a man covered in blood from a gash to the side of his head grin a greedy grin like that.

While the man is chasing his two seconds of triumphant victory over her, she lies there agonizing over two things.

How to convince little George never to tell a soul about what he saw.

If anyone from her village finds out she was raped, they will not count it as rape, they will count it as infidelity, even though her husband hasn’t touched her in two years and is womanizing abroad, God knows where.

The man reeks of the same cheap whiskey they sell in little plastic bags, not even in plastic bottles. Peddlers of the liquid that promises relief, but usually brings more pain.

The second agonizing thought is how to convince this drugged, bleeding, drunk soldier who right now barely knows which faction in this idiotic civil war he belongs to. Convince him of what?

Of not potentially burdening her with life long proof of her rape by coming inside her vagina.

She will try not to vomit when she finishes him with her mouth.

And after that she will have to go find little George hiding in the bushes and try not to scold him for trying to protect his mother.

How do you explain to a five year old that the most horrible thing you have ever seen happening right in front of your eyes is not actually the most horrible threat you are facing?

You don’t.

You grab his hand, stroke his face, hug him and tell him nothing that happened was his fault.

And above all you attack reality in the most savage way possible.

By smiling.