Download Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen: An Ordinary Family's Extraordinary Tale of Love, Loss, and Survival in Congo AudioBook Free
International human protection under the law activist Lisa Shannon spent many afternoons at the kitchen stand having tea with her friend Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her child years in Congo. Thelin would conjure vivid images of lush bloom gardens, fish how big is small children, and of children operating barefoot through her family's espresso plantation, gorging themselves on fruits from the robust and abundant mango trees. She urged Shannon to visit her family in Dungu to obtain a taste of real Congo, peaceful Congo, a location so not the same as the conflict-ravaged lands Shannon knew from her work as an activist. But then the nightly calls from Congo initiated: hasty, static-filled accounts from Francisca's mom of gunmen from Joseph Kony's Lord's Amount of resistance Army, which got infested Dungu and began launching attacks. Nighttime after nighttime for each year, "Mama Koko" sent the devastating reports of Francisca's cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors, who had been killed, abducted, used up alive on Christmas Day. Within an unlikely journey, Shannon and Thelin made a decision to travel from Portland, Oregon, to Dungu to witness firsthand the devastation unfolding at Kony's hands. Masquerading as Francisca's American sister-in-law, Shannon tucked herself into Mama Koko's uncooked concrete living room and listened to the reports of Mama Koko and her spouse, Papa Alexander, as well as those from a large number of other friends and neighbors - "Mama Koko's War Tribunal" - who lined up outside the house and waited for hours, eager to offer their testimony. In Mama Koko and the Hundred or so Gunmen, Shannon weaves mutually the family's tragic reports of LRA encounters with stories from the family's record: Mama Koko's early life as a gap-toothed beauty plotting to escape her inevitable destiny of wife and motherhood; Papa Alexander's empire of wives he committed because they cooked and cleansed and made good espresso.
