Deliberate disbelief

I was bathing when the Kfir planes came so I hid under the water tank, and then I realized they were coming for us, so I went and lay down underneath a bush. With the first bomb I was wounded in the stomach, but I didn't realize this, it was like I had been burned by fire.

I got up and was walking away, and then other girls were calling to me, ‘Big sister, you're wounded, stop and lie down.' Blood was pouring down my body. The other girls wouldn't let me get up and walk anywhere, so we were all lying down together. If we had gotten up we would definitely have lost an arm or a leg because they just kept bombing us. When they came to carry me and go, that's only when I saw how much blood there was around me. Throughout the whole grounds, everyone was dying. They were all wounded but otherwise it looked like they were sleeping. They took us by pick-up truck to the hospital. I went from the Mullaitivu hospital to the Ponnambalam hospital in Puthukudiriyiruppu to the Tharmapuram hospital and then back to the Puthukudiyiruppu hospital. So my parents were going to each hospital looking for me. And other people were telling them I was dead. And then finally my older sister came searching and found me inside the operating room, where I had been left to sleep.

-Rajeswary Selvanesh, 19 years