The catastrophe came like an invisible predator in the night.

He was asleep. It was during the hottest season of the year, and he could still remember that he was lying naked on his reed mat. He had thrown off the blanket, his body was wet with sweat, and his dreams were uneasy from the stifling heat.

Suddenly the world exploded. A sharp white light yanked him awake; someone screamed – maybe it was one of his siblings, maybe his mother. In the desperate chaos that erupted he was trampled underfoot. He still didn't understand what was happening and he couldn't find his trousers. He was flung naked into the catastrophe, and at last he realised that it was bandits who had come sneaking up in the dark; they had come to burn and pillage and kill. The attack kept on into the dawn, but the huts burned with such a powerful glare that no one noticed the sun coming up. Suddenly it was simply there. By then the village had been burned to the ground and many people had been killed – slashed by machetes, stabbed by sharpened steel pipes or smashed by wooden clubs.

Afterwards it was so quiet. Nelio still couldn't find his trousers, and he was squatting behind a basket where his mother had stored the corn they had harvested several weeks before. The scorched stench of the burned huts was overpowering; it was a smell he would never forget. That's the way the world smelled when it came to an end in smoke and fire and chaos. That was the stench that came when people were hurled out of their dreams to meet death. It arrived with the ragged bandits, drunk on tontonto, drugged with soruma. It was very quiet. The bandits had herded together those still alive – maybe half of the villagers, men, women and children – in the open area in the middle of the huts where they would dance and drum whenever they had celebrations.

Nelio fell silent, as if the words had become too difficult for him. Then he looked at me and continued his story.