You always think that you’re going through the toughest times in life until you listen to others tell their story.
She is called Katerina.
It’s unbelievable, but she has spent 42 years in lockdown.
She has been living in this house ever since then and she has never stepped out until today.
They no longer managed to cut her nails for years now, since they became hard.
Besides that, she has never showered for 42 years now.
She lost all her teeth.
She hardly eats and cannot move at all.
They wondered what happened to her, since they have never managed to take her to the hospital at all.
This is, go deliver her younger sister.
She has been taking care of her for all these years since they lost almost everyone in their family, and she is the one who decided to take responsibility and take care of her dying elder sister.
I want to turn that to cabbage.
Katerina says that she was born in 1962, which means that right now she is 59 years old.
She has spent most of these years in terrible pain, to the extent that she wished to die at some point, but she didn’t.
Well, all of this started years ago.
They were very young children who could hardly manage to live on their own, since they were still living with their parents, who took care of them each and every day, which means that they also went to school.
She says that it was in 1979..
She was 17 years old and one day she started feeling a lot of mysterious body pain.
She could not tell what it was, but she kept on thinking that it was something that was going to end anytime soon.
But she was wrong.
The pain in her body became serious.
They tried treating her with local herbal medicine, which they did for a very long time, but it totally failed.
And instead of the situation becoming better, it kept becoming worse one day after another, and they did not know what to do anymore.
Within no time she could not move at all, and what they did was to put her inside the house and keep her lying on the bed because she could not go to school anymore.
And they put her on the bed with hope that maybe one day she will wake up and walk, but this never happened.
She lived in this house for days, weeks, months and years.
Well, in the beginning they could at least come and bathe her, cut her hair, her nails, but with time this started becoming impossible, because the pain on her body became extremely too much and she screamed whenever anybody touched her.
There came a time when they all left her inside the house and rent for their lives.
It was in 1994 when the genocide against the Tutsi happened.
Katelina looked at them and told them to leave her inside and run and save their lives because she was already dying.
She always screamed when she had someone outside the house.
When they came to check who it was, she always asked for food because she was hungry since she rarely got what to eat, and surprisingly she managed to survive for the four months while her family was away.
When godeliva came back, she was shocked to find her elder sister still alive.
She then started taking care of her, but still she was lying on the bed that she was laid on in 1979, which was 15 years ago, and this was unbelievable.
From then, they always wanted to take her out of the house, but Katarina totally refused and denied anyone from touching her because of the pain that she always felt when anyone tried to touch or even move her a little bit, and this is one of the reasons why she kept being inside.
They always used to cut her nails, hair and bathe her.
Sometimes it happened for a few years, but later the nails got extremely hard because she was not bathing anymore and they couldn’t cut them in any way, which means that bathing had also become a problem.
It was a terrible experience when she had her periods in bed, she could not move at all and they made everything that she was sleeping on very dirty and smell badly until the blood always dried up on her body, and this happened every time when she was in her periods.
Because of lying on the bed for a very long time, her hair became long and dirty.
A lot of insects, like bed bugs, were always inside her hair, which disturbed her a lot.
