Mass Graves

LRA victims and uncompleted mass graves....
This morning a bunch of us headed out to the village of Obalanga to assist the local chairman in pick up the remains of LRA victims and bring them to a mass grave site. The mass graves already have almost three hundred bodies in them, but they have remained unfinished for quite a while. Some of the bodies have been left in fields or under trees for the past three to six years. The Lord’s Resistance Army rarely left a skull in full form, in order to make sure the person was dead, so we didn’t see any skulls on the first two bodies we gathered and placed in white sheet. A third body we watched a group of men dig for and everything was there – bones and clothing. It was a very thought provoking day for me.

The mass graves are soon to be completed. Many bodies are placed in one whole.
As we walked through the long grass I really thought about the young men who just a few years before were running through these fields - either running for their lives or joining rebel forces.

I collected the bones of the second body we found.

We tried to find as many bones as possible for each body.

" A full grown man in a small piece of cloth."