‘We walked over corpses’: Mother reveals journey out of hell in northern Ethiopia during Tigray war
“When the enemy entered, we fled. Those who escaped, escaped; those who died, died. We walked over corpses. We were lucky to escape.”
Shushay and her six children were among the three million people displaced from their homes during the Tigray conflict between 2020-2022. Thousands of people were killed in the war that pitted local fighters against federal troops allied with fighters from other regions.
Three years later, she still remembers the “good life” they left behind in northern Ethiopia. She remembers the brothers and sisters who were unable to escape, her house with three rooms and a television, and the security of work and school for her children.
“Those who stayed behind were slaughtered and killed; we left them behind,” she reflected.
When the fighting spread to the Amhara and Afar regions, Shushay and her family fled on foot, sleeping in the bush without cover for “almost a month”.
During the military advance, she says, some people were “taken”. Others were “beaten and sent back”. “Those who were to be killed were killed.”
Shushay, now 40, and her children eventually settled at a camp for internally displaced persons, where they still live. She is today among tens of thousands of people living in the grounds of a school in Shire City.
“There is no work. I wake up in the morning, and there is no breakfast. They eat once a day. I stay and play with my children until that one meal. We need everything,” she says.
British charity ShelterBox and PAD were able to help Shushay and her family with blankets, a mosquito net, a kitchen set and a dignity kit with sanitary pads among other essentials.
Their work is ever more vital as cuts to international aid continue to hamper the plight of people building back their lives, even years after conflicts have ended.
Funding shortfalls have seen aid agencies globally cut emergency relief supplies by 70 per cent this year.
Ethiopia, still with its own crisis of internally displaced people, is now the second-largest refugee-hosting country in Africa, with many arriving due to conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan, and drought in Somalia.
Shushay says their hope for the future “is to return to our homeland”.
“We wonder if they will return us to the land where we can work and eat. We used to celebrate holidays like Christmas (Lidet) well. We’d make popcorn and coffee and spend the day. But here, we don’t know Christmas; we don’t know the holidays. We spend them in the mud.”
