THE Dogo-Nahawa people are yet to recover from last Sunday's macabre assassination of their kinsmen. The pain of the gruesome attack is yet to leave them. The people are still seen in groups wearing very sorrowful looks. To them, the day of the attack will ever be etched in their memories, as will also the day the victims were given a mass burial. No single soul slept a day after the attack as they all kept night vigil.
For surviving relatives of the victims, the pain is especially hard to bear. And they are ever ready to empty their hearts to any one who cares to listen-and many care to listen. Agonised Joseph Gyang who lost his only son to the attackers: "Mass burial is not the best form of burial. You don't have access individually to the grave of the loved one you have lost. For example, you can go to the grave of your loved one if he is buried privately. But in a mass burial, you don't even know what side of the deep grave they bury your victim. This shows the end of your contact with your dead one. But if he is privately buried, you can still go there to weed some grass around his graveyard. You can still feel as if you are seeing him."
But one man's meat, they say, is another man's poison. Mrs. Hannatu Gyang who lost her husband in the attack, said she preferred mass burial to private burial. According to her, "in a mass burial, you cannot go to ponder over the grave again. That will keep you away from thinking about the person you lost because you only know that this is the spot my loved one was buried with other people. You don't need to go there. Gradually, the sorrow fades away from your mind. But a private burial will constantly remind you of the person you lost because you bury him alone in that grave. So, the memory lingers for long."
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