KAGA-BANDORO, Central African Republic (AP) – It’s been more two years since Therese Waima fled for her life with her five children after Muslim rebels shot her husband to death. While adjusted to a new normal inside a sprawling camp home to thousands of others, she still dreams of going home.
Yet even as she cast a ballot this past week in Central African Republic’s historic presidential runoff vote, she knows it is still too dangerous to return to her village, where she wants to resume selling peanuts and manioc to support her family.
“I hope to leave one day, but we can’t right now so long as there is still insecurity,” she says as she washes laundry in a plastic bucket outside the thatched hut where her family stays with thousands of other Christians in the town of Kaga-Bandoro.
Sunday’s election, even with its problems, marked a rare success in a country where more leaders have come to power through coups than through elections since independence from France in 1960. Though there was no major violence, many here in this town 330 kilometers (200 miles) north of the capital, Bangui, know the guns haven’t disappeared altogether.
“We ask the new president to make disarmament his first priority,” said Fidel Magonda, 48, as he collected cornmeal and split peas at a food distribution organized by the U.N. World Food Program and its local partners this week.