Dionisia remembers an episode in 1987, right after resettling in Guarjila, when the dropping of a bomb harmed her children.
- Interviewee:
- Dionisia
Transcription
We experienced so many tragedies during the war. A bomb dropped by a plane hit us. It nearly killed us. Dead! One person’s intestines were hanging out, the others… one had a huge piece of shrapnel here, and I… God is great and powerful, so... they lived, they survived. No, I didn’t think they would live. I saw one person's intestines hanging out and the other was hit in the head with shrapnel, I said, that’s it for them. But thank God it wasn’t. He’s still around.
[Approximately what year was that?]
That was in ’87, yes, ’87. We had come back from Mesa Grande. We had gone to Mesa Grande and returned. We had just gotten back when the plane dropped a… it must have been the soldiers who dropped the grenade, but it… exploded, right, and the children were dying. One died right away, he fell dead immediately, and the other… my two children, they went to the hospital. They were in the hospital in Chalatenango for about three months. I went to visit them, yes. Thank God they survived. They got better. They’re still alive today, but they were damaged. One of them is crippled. Did you notice the other day? Yes, he is crippled. He lost these fingers. He lost them. But it doesn’t matter; he works like any healthy person. Yes that’s what happened…
[I have a question, where was it that the bomb was dropped? Where were you?]
In Guarjila, in my house. They had given us; since we had just come from Mesa Grande they gave us huts made of tarp. We were living in that tarp hut and that’s when they dropped the grenade, because if it had been a bomb the whole village would have been destroyed. But no, thank God they just dropped a grenade, but it did a lot… it totally destroyed my house. The children were thrown to the ground. They were covered with blood, they couldn’t see. One of the neighbor’s children was twelve, he died at once. They took him to Chalatenango but he was already dead…