It was Saturday before I heard something had happened. Already for 72 hours dozens of baby faced teenage boys with bullets in their shoulders, and pregnant women with gunshot wounds to their knees had been bundled over the border by family members. Thousands more stood waiting in no man’s land by the time Al Jazeera reported on the shootings on Saturday morning.

At the time I wasn’t surprised—after all, things like this happen in Kyrgyzstan regularly now. The point about ethnic conflict was not really being reported until Monday morning. Even at that point the media said the violence was due to some gang activity, they didn’t mention men in Kyrgyzstan military uniforms were the ones setting Uzbeks on fire and pulling out their eyes.

By Monday, I was writing indignant emails to friends about how I had not one single message or phone call about the situation, and I work for the main aid organization in Uzbekistan! My boss sent an Uzbek colleague out to review the situation on Sunday and he returned Tuesday with sterile facts about the camps: 3,248 people in Jalalquduq, 4,200 people in Poktabod. My colleague didn’t mention anything about the rapes or the mutilations. He also didn’t mention anything about the toilets, shelters or meals at any of the 40-odd refugee camps being set up along the Kyrgyzstan border. My boss sent me out to investigate along with our health project manager, Adolat.

By then, late on Tuesday afternoon, I had some idea of what was going on. I knew the basic facts—37 camps, 80,000 refugees, mostly women and children—but I also had heard some of the rumors that were being reported, about the decapitations, shootings, and beatings of Uzbeks. I and my colleague drove the 5 hours out to the Fergana Valley and settled into our hotel in Margilan about 10pm. We had no idea what exactly we were doing, with whom we were supposed to meet, or what the implications of this trip (I am talking on a personal level) might have.

At 9:00 we reported to the Andijon airport where the main coordinating center had been set up. Adolat and I sat there for 3 hours waiting for someone to be identified by the government to accompany us to the camps. In the small “press center” where we were waiting, a DVD was being looped showing men and women being carried into the Andijon emergency hospital with gunshot wounds. The time stamp on the footage read June 10, 3:10am. Until this point, I thought the shooting had started on Friday rather than Thursday. Yes, the three press men sitting next to us confirmed, it started Thursday. The DVD lasted for an hour and showed at least 100 people dead and dying, and was accompanied by a small set of laminated, bound pages of pictures of corpses. These photos included men with gunshot wounds to the head, women severely beaten and the charred corpses of toddlers wrapped in blankets.

Our first stop was the emergency hospital where the injured were brought. We donned the requisite white coats (Adolat's actually an MD) and visited the wounded. Everything was white, clean, quiet and bleached. Young men stared languidly at the ceiling while doctors explained their treatments and the surgeons produced before and after x-rays to show to the American what action was taken. Thankfully, we were spared visits with the rape victims but were allowed access only to the ICU where the worst injuries were still recuperating. 170 people were brought to this hospital with gunshot wounds.