“Every night a man approaches me and screams in my left ear,” the man* says with an unchanging expression. “I wake up covered in sweat and can’t fall back asleep.” His nightmares date back ten years to when he was kidnapped from his hometown, shortly after burying his brother who was killed in the war.
The scar on his cheek is a relic of the torture he endured in captivity. Poorly controlled health issues like diabetes forced him to seek help from the UN. He struggled to get medication, and at one point was in a coma for a week. He woke up tethered to a hospital bed by wrist restraints. “They told me I had been shouting and thrashing in my sleep.”