DaytonDailyNews.com

'Wrong place, wrong time' could have cost her life

By Russell Carollo
rcarollo@DaytonDailyNews.com

Cheering volunteers greeted 23-year-old Carla Casella Hodulik of Dayton as she walked off an airplane in the African country of Niger to begin her Peace Corps service in 1992.

"They're singing songs to welcome you, and they're all cheering you as you get off the plane," recalled Hodulik, an Alter High School graduate who worked at Mayflower Mortgage in Dayton before joining the Peace Corps. "So you're kind of overwhelmed by everything."

Fifteen months later, Hodulik lay alone bleeding in the African bush, begging the teenager who had just cut her with his machete to let her live.

"I was bleeding a lot, and I was worried about that," she recalled. "It (the wound) had severed the muscle in the left side of my neck, so I couldn't hold my head very well. So I fell to the ground."

The attack, one of several on volunteers in Niger, was like other assaults: Statistics don't accurately reflect the trauma to those involved.

Hodulik was one of three Niger volunteers assaulted in September 1993, and one of two cut in the attacks, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of the Peace Corps Assault Notification and Surveillance System database. Between August 1992 and December 1993, five volunteers in Niger — an average of one every three months — reported being cut during attacks, three of them receiving injuries described as severe.

Hodulik said her attacker, who was about 17, saw an opportunity when he spotted Hodulik and another volunteer in a market in Ziguida, about six miles from her village of Kouli Koira. He followed them down a trail, confronted them and demanded money. As Hodulik reached in her purse, he mistakenly thought she was reaching for a weapon and swung the machete in his right hand toward her.

Instinctively, she threw up her left arm to block the blow.

"It caught the back of my hand, but the blow was strong enough that it pushed my hand in towards my face," she said. "So it got the back of my hand and it also got me from probably my midcheek back to the middle of my head, about a 2-inch gash right through my left earlobe."

She credits an earring with keeping her earlobe attached to her ear.

After she was injured, the other volunteer ran for help, leaving Hodulik alone with her attacker.

"He basically went through my bag and grabbed my money. I'm begging him, ‘Please just take everything and leave.’ I was trying to reason with him."

When he ran away, Hodulik opened her Swiss army knife with her teeth and used it to cut cloth from her T-shirt, which she used to bandage a wound. She pulled off her underwear from beneath her dress to cover another wound.

As she lay in the 100- to 110-degree heat, she tried to figure out why she was in so much pain, unaware that the force of the blow from the machete had broken her jaw in two places.

"I lay there and tried to calm down. . . . I thought I could be dying," she said.

The other volunteer eventually arrived with help. She was taken by donkey cart to a Peace Corps truck, which carried her to a hospital.

Her attacker was found hiding under a tree not far from the road where she was robbed.

A few days later, she flew home to Dayton, where she spent the night at Kettering Medical Center before going to her parents' house.

The Peace Corps paid for everything, including two first-class tickets for her and a doctor, she said.

Hodulik later returned to Niger to finish her service.

Her attacker's mother felt so bad about what had happened that she made two clay pots, painted them and gave them to Hodulik.

"The boy's mother, when I came back, came to apologize," said Hodulik, who now lives near New York City. "I don't think I was a target. It just happened to be wrong place, wrong time."

[From the Dayton Daily News: 11.01.2003]