Marie-France rolls herself into a ball behind the jeep, from which I pushed her at the sound of the first gunshots. Our newspapers in London and Paris teamed us up, but we don’t get on.

At some point I see her grab the strap of her green camera bag and pull it over the sandy, dusty ground toward her. She lies on her side and holds up the camera to create some distance between herself and the horror she sees. She takes a photo of the bodies of Nelson and the Blue Helmets, with me crouching beside the child killer with one hand on his trembling shoulder.

I have the impression that I’ve seen this picture before, as if I’ve seen myself from the outside in the photo Marie-France is currently taking. Nelson’s cowrie necklace lying bloodied in the foreground, the child soldier and me in the background.

The heat flickers before my eyes, and the momentary déjà vu—a certainty that I have lived through these seconds before and know exactly how the photo is going to turn out—fades.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

He looks at me, quietly says, “Boy,” and averts his gaze again.

I crouch beside him as the shadows shift and Marie-France takes photographs. Otherwise, nothing moves in this street, as if we were the last living people in this corner of Africa. In the whole world even. Flies and goats, gutted vehicles, plastic bottles, rubbish, and nothing else.

Sometime later Boy tells me that his father used to call him Akol. His father is dead and so are his mother and younger sister, but his elder sister’s still alive. She cooks for the commanders. At night she’s allowed to sleep in the leaders’ huts while he curls up under a plastic sheet suspended from two dead tree trunks.

I ask him if he knows that UNICEF helps boys like him.

“But what happens to her?” he asks. “What happens to her?” He’s scared that the militias that trained him will sell his sister to Italy if he doesn’t fight.

I can’t do this any longer, I think. Over and over again I have tried to take realities like this home with me and to expose them to people who have only ever seen war on the television. They avert their eyes, as they always do when they’ve seen their fill of life’s atrocities.

I can see why.

I let Akol run away, and now have an unloaded rifle; Marie-France, whose heart seems to have partially turned to stone; and a two-hour trek back to the camp. Marie-France refuses to take off her heavy protective vest printed with the word “Press” and let me carry it, but she’s grateful when I shoulder her green camera bag.