“I thought I’d never see you again. Is it really you?”

Louis* weeps on inspecting the frail body of Antoine, his 16-year-old son, who has just been through four months of captivity at the hands of armed men. “My child. Thank God. It’s so good to see you. Thank God.”

Antoine’s abduction and Louis’ nightmare took place in May, in their village located north of Niangara.  “Around nine o’clock in the morning, armed men burst into our home,” says Louis. “They made us all get down on the ground. They took my clothes, my cases and my radio. Then they took two of my children, and led them away.”

Antoine continues: “They made us sit on the ground. They applied a magic oil to our foreheads, over our hearts and on our backs and feet. This oil makes you like them, and you no longer think about escaping and finding your family. It didn’t work for me because I wiped the oil straight off.

“They gave me work to do. I had to clean their clothes and do other jobs during the day. We weren’t allowed to talk. If we talked, they hit us. They hit us a lot,” recalls Antoine, showing the wounds resulting from whippings and beatings with a machete. “We only ate in the evenings. And we walked all day. Every day. I was barefoot.”

One evening, the kidnappers heard that enemy soldiers were approaching their positions. They told Antoine to climb a tree and see if he could spot them. “They were quite far away. I knew that I was near the road. I slid down the tree and started running. I walked all night and, at five in the morning, arrived here at the village. They were already far behind me.”

Antoine’s brothers, cousins and uncle join his father, around him. They look at the boy they had taken for dead. As a sign of celebration, Louis calls for him to be lifted into the air.

“I had become so thin. I thought of my child night and day,” he says, while hoping against hope that his second missing son will return to him too.

* Names have been changed to protect those involved.

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