The following story was submitted by an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) in Cameroon. For safety reasons, we are withholding her identity.
…Continued from Part 1
How we were Rescued
While in that house, there was still shooting going on outside, so we were all on the floor. We were there for over 30 minutes.
When the place became a little calm, it was every person for themselves. Everyone was trying to figure out how they were going to survive, so we all ran in different directions. The direction I took, we were 5 of us. I was so afraid.
In the process of running, we met up with other people who were running from different directions as well. So now we were a large number running in the forest. Where we hid ourselves, we didn’t know that the military people had also entered into the forest. Since people had run from their homes and into the forest with their belongings in an attempt to hide them, the military soldiers were now searching the forest.
So, we ran into the military there. They captured us from the spot that we were in and took us to one of their camps. It wasn’t easy there. We were not fed or given enough water. We were severely mistreated and many of the women were raped. When all the forces came together (the military soldiers and the Ambazonian forces), they began to shoot at each other.
During all of that commotion, we decided that we could not stay there. There were many people who are injured and killed, and their bodies are being taken to the mortuary or just left in the forest. So, we ran away, and the place where we were running to wasn’t a place that we knew. We were just running inside the forest. We couldn’t run along the main road because of safety concerns. The villages that we were heading to had already been raided, so it was all quiet.
Nobody was there. So, we got there and sat behind a certain house just looking around, afraid. We couldn’t risk the chance of being discovered.
While we were sitting there, a vehicle passed by. We thought it was a transport vehicle, but it wasn’t. Sometimes the military would use other vehicles to transport themselves, even a taxi or a private car. They would do this to disguise themselves. So, when that vehicle passed, another one came by. That one was a bus. It dropped somebody off – a woman who was from that Village. When she was dropped off, she had to go into the forest because her house had been burnt down.
Since the bus had dropped her off, we knew it was not the military operating the bus. We took that opportunity and as soon as she left the bus, we rushed onto the bus. The bus then transported us to Kumba (a city in the Southwest Region of Cameroon). When we got there, we were a little safer but still in danger. While in Kumba, even though some people ran away to seek refuge elsewhere, many people stayed behind. It was difficult but we just thanked God that we survived.
We did not stay there long because sometime later, we were ordered to leave. We had to go to a safer place.
