05 24 07 I am Cato Mprende

(Roy's notes)  On the night of May 20th 2007 I went out in my sweeper and with me came Sara Jane, Melissa, Shifa, Seima and Sproingy. We passed a roadside amusement park and Sara took Melissa to see it, Shifa went back to Clifton and Seima and Sproingy stayed with me.  We were alone for several hours and Seima had told me that the two girls had gone joy-riding.  Indeed!  When they returned they had an entourage: over three hundred little children, all of whom had been killed in wars going on around the world.  I was standing in an open parking lot picking up trash when I sensed their arrival and looking up I saw with my second sight a swarm of ghostly human figures descending to the pavement.  Before me stood all of these little kids, eyes wide, looking up at me, silent.  It was overpowering and now, several days later, I've not fully recovered.  One of them, Caton Mprende, seemed more vocal and more expressive than some of the others.  After several talks with Sara he asked if he could tell his story.  How do you refuse that?  Last night he too wished to accompany us on a ride in the sweeper, and he watched and occasionally talked as we did.  Caton, who prefers to be called Cato, died at the age of six.  Although he is a few years older mentally, he is still a kid.  After a couple of hours of me working and all of us chatting, he sat between Sara and I and put his arms around me and rested his head on my chest.  This caught me totally off-guard.  Brought me to tears, to the point where I had to pull over.  "I have a home now," is all that he said.

(Sara's notes)  One of the things I like to do when I go with Roy is to take some of the others on a ride around the world, so to speak.  This started a couple of months back when we were able to get Roland to leave the house.  We were passing Newark International Airport that night and Roland was all wide-eyed, so I offered to take him on a tour.  I'm pretty familiar with the place because Roy used to sweep part of it some years back.  From Newark we went to new York City, then London, then the Seychelles......we came back several hours later!  Was a lot of fun.  When Melissa saw the amusement park I had the same idea; I was eleven when I died, and have had over six hundred years to grow up, but I'm still a little kid in some ways.  We sat on the roller-coaster, rode the ferris wheel and tilt-a-whirl and had a lot of fun.  When the park was closing Melissa asked, "Can we find another one?"  I offered to take her on a trip to some of the cool places I've found.  The first was a place in West Timor, it was a beautiful but abandoned Buddhist temple.  We found a little girl there, named Kilang.  She had been blown up when someone tossed a bomb into the marketplace in her town.  Without even thinking about it, we decided to take her with us; she had no-one and was alone but for her guide.  She was very frightened as well; we managed to convince her that we were not evil djinns but dead people like herself.  melissa had a large part in that.  From there we went to the island of Quemoy, off the coast of mainland China, where I am invisible playmate to a mortal girl named Lih Shih.  Again we found a small child's spirit.  This went on for several hours and it became a sort of mission; I know where many of the wars are being fought in the world, and every time we touched down we had a few more kids in tow.  One of them was in Waco Texas USA and was a victim of the American ATF when they murdered David Koresh's religious group there some years back.  On the way back I knew that this would take Roy totally by surprise so we circled above him until he was out of the sweeper in a large parking lot, then we touched down.  Blew him away completely!  One of the kids is Caton, writing for the first time.  He desired to tell his story to the world, has been waiting until his opportunity came today.  Hold on to your seats.  It is NOT pretty.

Hello.  I am the boy Cato Mprende.  I was of six years age when I was shot with bullets in the country Rwanda.  I had been at home with Grandmother, who has protected me for all of my life.  Soldiers came to our village.  They were boys not much older than myself, armed with guns and knives and some explosive things.  They had a need for more boys to fill their ranks and were going from home to home searching.  Dear Grandmother knew this and when they came into our home she denied that there were any boys in the house.  The lead soldier told her that he would kill her if she had lied, to which she replied that Allah would accept her.  They tore up all of our belongings and found me in a cloth bag and fired bullets into Grandmother.  The lead soldier told me that I was a man now and must defend my land and my leader, and that Grandmother was an enemy deserving of death.  I cried and was beaten to walk with them.  I was not fed or given water for two days and was told that I could have both if I learned the use of a gun.  This took long and I got to eat after some terrible times.  We marched and marched.  I thought, "There are no enemies."  Where we would go there was village after village, town after town where lived no-one.  Homes had been destroyed, in some of the places were the bodies of the dead stinking where they fell.  Birds and animals had eaten many of these.  After some time I gained some composure and began to think of my situation.  I found that if I co-operated I ate and had water, so I did that.  Every day we had to practice with guns.  We had to fight with our hands and with knives and clubs.

One day we were given bullets and told there was an enemy force ahead in a village.  We would be fighting for our land and our leader and should expect to die.  I however had secret thoughts otherwise, for I never forgot that Dear Grandmother had been killed by these soldiers so when the chance came I shot many of them with my own bullets, only to be killed by the others.  I ran and ran for many days because I was afraid of what might happen to me should they find me.  I thought nothing about Grandmother or anyone, just myself.  I was not even sure that I was dead.  But I was dead.
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