In the memoir of Evelyn Amony's life in and after her abduction by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the author tells a story she describes as “particularly painful,” one she has been unable to tell anyone, “not even [her] own mother.” It involves an evening some months after her abduction from her village and after she had moved a great distance in a military convoy transporting foodstuffs to a safe base. Along the way, Evelyn spills a cupful of sorghum and, when confronted by rebel commander Joseph Kony, she pleads with him, telling him that she could lead him to her home village, which was nearby. There, she tells Kony, her mother has at least four granaries full of sorghum that she would gladly give him to replace the small amount Evelyn had lost.

In response, Kony orders a boy of Evelyn's age to whip her as she lies face down. If she should move or cry out, Kony tells the boy, he should begin to whip her over again. At some point, Evelyn loses consciousness. She is left unattended overnight but in the morning, when Kony sees that Evelyn will survive, he consoles her, and gives her medicine to help her heal. In her account of this incident, Evelyn reflects on Kony's offer to help her as if she were once more there, reliving the moment: “First you want to kill me? And … now you want to give me medicine to live? I would rather die. Was I really beaten for the sorghum I spilled?” When Kony leaves she throws the medicine away.

The same boy who inflicted the beating on Evelyn is then ordered to carry her to a nursing station. The boy remains with Evelyn and watches as a nurse attends to her wounds, using warm water to loosen the threads of fabric that had become enmeshed in her flesh. The boy begins to cry. “Is this how people are really beaten?” he asks her, “For just sorghum?” The two begin to cry together.

It was, I would suggest, Kony's intention to sever Evelyn's affinity for her mother, to whom she looked as a source of continuing protection; to replace a sense of longing for home with fear.