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« on: January 30, 2007, 01:47:10 PM »
Sunday Guardian
Sunday 28th January , 2007
Horror lurks in the shadows
“It took me ten years to have a child and now I feel as if I have lost her,” the mother said. She had all but given up having children.
She would look on in sadness as other people loved theirs, praying and trying every kind of fertility treatment, even local herbs. Everything and anything. When she finally did get pregnant, she was ecstatic as was her husband. An emotional void in their lives was about to be filled with the birth of a child, a daughter, their firstborn. Then, one day, her daughter was kidnapped.
She now refuses to listen to music, the mother said as she related her daughter’s story, which is now hers as well as that of her husband and their son.
Price of not paying
Ransom negotiations were not going well and people had become frustrated. Hands tied behind her back, with duct tape plastered over her mouth and a pair of headphones over her ears, her daughter was raped by the three men who stood guard over her during captivity.
The music was so loud in her ears that it helped distract her from the pain of the assault. She screamed in her head because she couldn’t open her mouth.
She tried to concentrate on the music instead of focusing on the violation of her body but her powers of concentration were no match for the brutality.
The duct tape was yanked off and she was forced to submit herself to every form of sexual abuse by her three kidnappers. It was degrading and humiliating, but the worse was yet to come.
Her parents were trying to be tough with the kidnappers, refusing to pay a ransom on the advice of the police and a private negotiator her father had hired.
The kidnappers were playing for time, knowing that the family would come around.
The father was also playing for time, thinking that once they eventually realised that he was not going to pay up, their resolve would weaken and his precious daughter would be freed. She would pay the price for this principled stance.
As the negotiations intensified, she was allowed to speak to an uncle through an old school friend who the kidnappers had got her to contact in order to reach her relatives without the police being any the wiser.
Her uncle asked her if she was all right. More concerned about her family and how they were coping, she put up a brave front and said yes, her captors were treating her fine.
The following day, she was dragged out of the room she was in and into the kitchen of what seemed like a run-down dirty apartment. It was the first time she had left the room.
No headphones, this time. The men were cursing, saying her father “set dem up” and “took dem for (expletive) fools.”
“All yuh Indian feel all yuh too smart!” one man said.
Her father was supposed to have dropped off the money one day, but then, apparently, changed his mind.
The kidnappers were saying that they had another kidnapping job to do and were behind schedule and someone (the boss) was not too happy.
It sounded as if they were working with a list. They blamed her for all of this. She was supposed to cry and beg her parents to pay the damn ransom.
They blamed her for failing to convince the family to pay the ransom. They concluded that she was being treated too nicely. She too was “(expletive) dem up” because she playing brave and didn’t show enough pain. That was about to change.
She was spread-eagled on the floor, naked, belly down and sodomised by all three men. Taking turns, two of them stood on her hands while the third man raped her.
She could feel something running down her legs and thought it was semen. It was not. It was blood from her ruptured anus. This didn’t make any difference to her rapists. One man used a condom because as he told the other men, “all yuh always running hoe (whores).”
Please Daddy!
Battered and bruised, she thought of her father. He was indeed wealthy. Why did he not just pay the money? Did her mother not tell him to pay it?
Were the dreams about them talking to her and lovingly coaxing her to sleep each night during captivity not real?
She thought she was so close to her father that he could read her mind. He knew she was tough and always put up a brave front.
She remembered how he hugged her and took her for ice cream when her best friend chose someone else to speak at her birthday party and she pretended not to care.
The precious, unforgettable unspoken understanding between father and daughter. Did his money mean more to him?
That night, she cried and begged her uncle for her father to pay the ransom. It was paid the following day in full, at three different drop-off points.
Out of captivity, she wished she had never broken down and begged for her father to pay for the ransom. She found that facing her family was more difficult than the suffering and assault she had endured at the hands of her kidnappers.
She was bitter, angry, hurt and found herself disconnected from reality.
She kept asking herself if it was her brother who was kidnapped if her father would have paid the money without hesitation.
She lived inside herself, shell-like. She stayed in her room, spoke little, ate little.
One night, she woke up screaming. Her parents rushed into her room, she pointed at her father, telling him she hated him.
She accused him of making the kidnappers rape her. She went mad, running amok through the room, destroying and smashing everything in sight from photographs on the wall to the lamp.
She rummaged through drawers until she found a gold chain her father had given her on her 16th birthday, ripped it and pelted him with it.
She wanted nothing from him anymore she shouted, telling him to take back his (expletive) land. (Her father had given her some land.)
Living inside herself
Her mother held her and tried to hug her. She raised her hand to slap her mother, but was stopped by her brother. She struggled. The phone started ringing—neighbours wanted to know if everything was all right. Her mother chased father and son out of the room, cursing and telling them to “leave her alone with her child.”
In growing horror, her mother listened to her daughter’s story. She told her daughter that she had told the father to pay the ransom.
One of the kidnappers had spoken to her once at her sister’s home, he had told her that her daughter would not be harmed if the money was paid.
She said the kidnapper gave his word and that he said that the police were involved and should the family tell them what was going on, that would only make things worse because they (the police) were very greedy.
So she begged her husband to pay the money. The police had set up shop in the house and had advised the father to pay no ransom saying that the kidnappers might think he paid too easily, and ask for more. He must negotiate, the police advised. The father hired a special negotiator who had helped another family whose child was also kidnapped.
The mother said she didn’t trust the police and she spoke to her husband about this fear, but he did not listen to her. She tried telling her daughter that her father meant well. She would never forget the look her daughter gave her, it was like pointing stabbing into her eyes.
No point reminding her daughter now about all those years when her father was there for her, the times when, as a child, she’d ignore her mother so she could be with her father, and hug him while she fell asleep, sucking her thumb.
She had failed the child that God had blessed her with after ten long years of painful infertility. She had thought about pawning her jewelry and borrowing money from her sister to secretly pay the ransom without telling her husband and the police, but she had no way of contacting the kidnappers.
When they called, the kidnappers spoke to her husband and the negotiator. Her son sided with his father, telling her to leave the matter to the men.
She did.
Mother’s pain
She knows that her husband loves his daughter more than life itself, but her daughter’s pain was too great for her to think of anyone else’s.
With her daughter, she moved out of the house. She misses her son, but has explained to him that he must take care of his father while she looks after his sister.
Her husband has gone into a state of irreversible and permanent depression. He swallows pills and drinks himself to sleep every day. The man who fathered her two children is now an unrecognisable drunk.
One day, her son got into a fight at a nightclub and the protagonist told him, “Yuh sista get kidnap and doh worry, you next in (expletive) line.”
His father sent him abroad immediately.
The daughter, has chopped off the long, beautiful hair that her father so admired. She resists counselling, she no longer prays and hates the gospel music she once loved. She wants no Bible in her room and wants no priest to pray for her. She is now a vegetarian and lives a robotic existence devoid of rhyme, rhythm or reason.
The mother is slowly dying inside. She feels as if her insides are being ripped apart “with pliers,” she says.
Her family has been torn apart and destroyed by these kidnappers. A perfect marriage had come to naught. She saw her daughter eavesdropping once when she was speaking with her husband on the phone.
Her daughter had a frown on her face. She now speaks with her husband in secret. She has stopped him from calling her, as he often did when he was drunk, to ask about his “baby girl.”
In total isolation, the mother clings to the shadow that is left of her daughter, nursing the memories of happier times.
She came forward to tell her story because she had heard people arguing that families should not pay ransoms to get back their loved ones who have been kidnapped.
If she had her way, she said, she would have gladly given them a little extra.
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eh...but ah juss cyah keep meh lil mouth shut no more...when ah quarrellin in d stadium yuh does cyah hear much 
cause ah doh have ah big mouth so i hadda come here and post it...
listen to it wiht some beers in yuh head..u go relate better
, eh-eh. Yuh could 
from now to thy kingdom come, no way no how anybody could convince meh that song decent.