My father was a kind man and he was very tall, he was maybe ten or eleven feet tall! Well, I don’t know how tall he was, I never asked him, “How tall are you, father?” But when we walked together, while going to the ocean or to town, and he held my hand I looked way up into the sky to see him. My mother says I am getting tall like my father. . . .
Nothing had ever happened in my village. It was a very quiet village. I don’t think that anyone had ever been killed there before. It was a Sunday night. I remember everything about that night. It was in the summer of 1992. It was 12:30 am. We were all awake. There were men with big guns who surrounded our house. They looked like they were in the army. My mother said that we were the minority tribe, and they were fighting against us and that is why they were there. Or maybe they had seen my father coming from his store in the town and thought that my father had a lot of money.
One of them had a chopped off arm, there was no hand below his elbow. He seemed to be the commander and he was the worst of them. He told everyone to come out of the house and to lie down on the ground. He said, “Where is the father of this house?” My little three-year-old-brother told them that my father was in the outhouse. Then the commander without a hand, without saying anything, shot him. Just like that, without thinking, he just shot him and he died. The soldiers went to the outhouse and kicked down the door. The outhouse was up on the rocks and there was no way he could have escaped from it. The commander with the chopped off arm told my father to come out, and when he did, the commander then told him to get on the ground. Nobody was moving. A few minutes later, the commander said to one of the soldiers, “Why are you looking at that man, kill him!” Then they shot my father. He died. My mother screamed, “Why did you kill him?” The soldiers asked the commander if they should shoot her. The commander didn’t care about anything and he said, “Look at her!” and then he shot her. The shot hit her leg. She was alive, but badly injured. . . .
One time, my friends at the refugee camp and I were talking, and they said they didn’t believe that I had killed a hyena. They were afraid of the hyenas. I told them to ask my mother if I had killed a hyena in my village. Then one morning, early, they took me over to the slaughter house where there were always hyenas lurking around. I told them to give me a club. I started running towards some hyenas, there were three or four together and then I dove on to the ground and grabbed the legs of one the hyenas, then I hit him in the kidneys, like my grandmother had told me to. That’s how I killed that hyena. Then I took a rope and I tied his legs together. My friends said, “This is amazing that you can kill hyenas like that!” Then they said, “Every Friday we will come here and you will kill a hyena.” But I said, “No.”
I was fourteen when I killed that hyena and I lived in the refugee camp in Kenya. Now I am seventeen and I live on Merrill Street in Portland, Maine. It is peaceful here, except sometimes in my dreams. Coming to America has meant going back, again and again in my mind, to these stories I am telling. My mother wants me to forget, but I cannot. I would like someday to go back to Kenya, perhaps go to the university there. And I would like to ask my girlfriend there to marry me.
But I’m done killing hyenas. At least I hope so. I’m almost as tall as my father now, and I’ve nothing left to prove.
