Searching for Sister

SEARCHING FOR SISTER
By
Paul Platte


According to Open Doors USA, every month . . .
255 Christians are killed.
104 Christians are abducted.
180 Christian women are raped, sexually harassed, or forced into marriage.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
-- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ninety percent of this book is truth.

Chapter 1
Kenya-Somalia Border 1999
The Ngolo boy threw Mirembe to the red dirt and jumped on the girl, straddling her chest with his knees. He pulled a pistol from his belt.
The dark girl’s eyes popped open wide as brown saucers.
“Susan!” Mirembe yelled for her sister.
The pistol struck her, and she felt her jaw jerk to the right side of her face. She tasted warm blood fill her mouth. She felt her shirt rip open.
Mirembe cried out, “I don't want to die!”
The pistol struck again. Blood dribbled out of her mouth down her cheek. Mirembe’s mind retreated from the violence into a black hole filled with stars.
She vaguely felt her body being dragged through the rough undergrowth and scrub grass and dug her fingernails into the red African clay.
She was jerked over and Ngolo smashed her face into East African dust.
Mirembe felt her pants jerked down to her ankles. Long, thin arms and legs quivered like those of a squashed spider as she tried to wiggle out from under Ngolo. She heard a “thud” in the back of her head followed by a white hot explosion of pain that burned through her skull.
She felt her underpants ripped and tugged off.
Mirembe closed her eyes and fled back to the dark place.
There was a pause. All her body hurt. Her head. Her private parts. Her legs. Her arms. Her mouth. She bit down on her hand and felt a hole in the front of her teeth.
A violent jerk shoved her legs apart.
“Why is my body jerking back and forth?” She screamed, until dirt filled her mouth.
She opened her eyes, and her face moved back and forth next to something white and small in the dirt next to her. Is that a tooth?
She tried to raise her head. The darkness and stars returned followed by the sound and ache of a punch on the right side of her head.
Again her body was penetrated and pushed. Back and forth for a forever moment. Long enough for Mirembe to think of her mother at home in her traditional dress and head wrap, sitting serenely on her woven mat, watching. In and out. In and out of the black space with the stars.
Her stomach wretched, and she vomited; half the puke ran out into the dirt, and half stayed in her mouth. Tears formed in her eyes.
Now the boy grabbed the thin ankles and dragged her backwards, the clay-packed pebbles scratching her face. “Ngolo, where are you dragging me?” she tried to ask through blood and vomit, but her mouth was filling with dirt. Another sudden sharp pain snapped through her body and then a loud crack in her ribs as if someone kicked her.
The boy let out a grunting sound as if he had been stabbed, and for a moment he froze. She hoped this evil moment was ending.
Then he dragged her body further and her face passed a pool of white cream in the dirt.
She heard another female scream. Is that Susan screaming? “Sister,” Mirembe mumbled through her bloody mouth. Her tongue felt a hole in her front teeth. The dragging continued.
Her ankles dropped to the ground. Mirembe did not dare move any part of her body. She heard a cork pop out of a bottle. It was the bottle of skat that Ngolo carried in his pocket. I should have left him when I first saw that drinking.

A fly landed on her nose and walked up the trail of blood into her mouth. Mirembe heard other men talking, some in her native language Laala. The others, maybe, spoke the Arabic of her Moslem friends.
Someone grabbed Mirembe’s arm and rolled her body over onto her back. She felt a breeze on her chest.
Someone pushed her knees to her chest. She felt pressure in her private parts, then a jack-hammering like when father drives in a fence post on the farm. “Help!” she screamed. Someone slapped her across the mouth, her jagged teeth shredding her already swollen lips.
Mirembe saw a large pile of rubble lying around the ground, food tins, tires, some burnt bottles, lots of empty bottles, guns, and . . . her pants? Her arms were gripped tightly, stretched out away from her like the crucified Christ statue over the alter at church. “Please help me!” Mirembe mumbled until a boot stomped on her throat. She felt her ankles grabbed and her legs jerked wide and high.
She opened her mouth to scream, but the boot crushed her throat. Her mouth was as open as it could be, her jaws locking in anguish. But now she could not breath, as if she were under water like the wet between her legs.
She woke up in the night lying on the forest floor. Her head pulsated pain with every beat of her hurt. Reaching her trembling hand up to her skull, Mirembe felt a crack and dried blood. Between her legs, she felt wetness and lifted her finger to her nose to smell blood. It was cold, and Mirembe remembered she was naked. The worst pain was in the back of her right leg. She rolled slowly over on her stomach. Pain seared through her ribs, privates, leg, mouth, skull. For some reason she was afraid to cry out. Loud voices yelled and laughed to her left. So Mirembe dragged herself to the right. Through the forest. Through the pain.