Athlone-based Angolan woman buries parents, decades after they ‘disappeared’ BEATRIZ BAILUNDO sits in her living room in Athlone, Co Westmeath, tears streaming slowly down her face. “I waited over 30 years for this,” she says, as she watches the video playing on her TV screen.
The videotape, which was filmed in June, shows three small coffins sitting side-by-side in a section of Huambo, southern Angola. Photographs of Beatriz’s parents – Reverend Oliver Bailundo and his wife Flora – rest on top of their respective coffins, which sit alongside the casket of Beatriz’s paternal grandmother. The clear blue sky and bright orange gravel contrast with the unforgiving sights and sounds of a community in mourning.
Beatriz and her only surviving sister cry for the losses that have shadowed them for over three decades. The video also shows the burial of Beatriz’s maternal grandmother at the local cemetery Her remains were found after the others.
It’s an extraordinary insight, transmitted into a living room in the midlands, of the incredible hardships inflicted on families in countries which have experienced civil war – hardships that last for decades.
Formally brought to an end in 2002, an estimated 500,000 people were killed in Angola’s 27-year-long war, Africa’s longest running conflict.
An act of conscience on the part of someone with information on the remains of her father resulted in 42-year-old Beatriz, a care assistant at an Athlone nursing home, travelling back to her native country earlier this summer to organise the burial and pay her respects.
It was only her second trip back since attaining refugee status in Ireland four years ago, and while she was there, information came to light about the whereabouts of her mother’s and grandmothers’ remains.
Angola erupted into civil war in the 1970s, during which a number of Beatriz’s family members – including her parents – ‘disappeared’. Shortly after the disappearance of her Anglican priest father, Beatriz, then aged just seven, was sent away from Huambo to live with her godparents, during which time a number of other relatives ‘disappeared’.
Today, the soft-spoken, popular woman, who is now an Irish citizen, lives near the centre of Athlone with her daughter, Olivia, who will start secondary school at the local Our Lady’s Bower later this month.
While the burials may have begun a process of healing for Beatriz, she is still coming to terms with recent events. “It is like we found them and then they had to leave again,” says Beatriz, as she cradles a mug of tea in her kitchen. “But at least I know where they are now.”
The full story of the deaths is still a mystery to her. Some people may have killed under the guise of a civil war, she observes. “I don’t really know what happened to them. This is the question I have asked all my life – what did my father do to deserve that? I know there are people that know why.”
What she does know, however, is that her parents were held in high esteem. “My godmother used to cry, and look at me and say ‘your mother was the nicest person on this earth,’” she recalls, adding that “people came from all over for the service”, and that she met childhood friends whose faces she didn’t recognise, but whose names she did.
“The song they sang [at the services] was the song I used to sing to my dad every Sunday morning at four, five years of age. They were my friends when I was small and they reminded me with their song, and supported me all the time I was there,” she says.
Beatriz now plans to visit the burial places with her daughter Olivia in the next few years, when the youngster will meet relatives – both close and distant – she has never known.
Meanwhile, Beatriz is full of praise for the local Athlone couple, Gerry and Sue Callaghan, who took care of her daughter when she was away and offered invaluable support. She first met the couple during her early days in Athlone when, having fled the latter stages of civil war in Angola, she was one of the first residents at the town’s asylum seeker centre.
“We are not friends anymore,” she says, “we are family. They are my daughter’s godparents. The family I never had I found here in Athlone.”
Life now goes on for Beatriz. She intends to go to college in September to re-train as a nurse, which was her profession in Angola, and begin a new chapter in her life story. Part of the reason she is sharing her story is to highlight the fact that sometimes people do endure incredible hardships in their home countries that, to an outsider, may appear unbelievable. Sometimes, as in Beatriz’s case, the unbelievable is the truth.
