A respected midwife, doctor and herbalist, Adios refers to herself as the grandmother of the movement. Although she never had any children of her own, today she raises five orphans in her home on the edge of Gulu town. She refers to the many children born in the LRA as her grandchildren; their mothers, her own daughters. “I delivered nearly all of the babies born to these women and I never lost one!” Adios remembers the origins of the war crisply; she was there when Kony emerged as a spiritual leader amongst the scattered remnants of the Holy Spirit Mobile Front. By the time she was forced to join the rebels in August 1987, she had already known Kony as a distant relative whom she had bicycled to see after hearing of his miraculous powers. Her stories about Kony often centre on the abundant miracles he continued to perform over the years to follow. She was adamant that I take down certain details well, so that the “truth comes out,” about the spirits, remarking that: “Kony's spirit said that we would come back as books that were going to be written.” Each time we met, she asked me to record more of the details she had forgotten previously. “Each of us could write a bible on their own of what happened,” Adios reflected. “The stories could last through night and spill over to the next day.”

During the first phase of the war (1987–1992) – as she served the controllers and trained to be an herbalist and midwife – Adios was constantly harassed to enter into a marriage. She was threatened with rape; maligned and accused of betrayal; beaten repeatedly; and on four occasions, condemned to, but escaped, the sentence of death for her refusal. When she finally accepted to enter into a marriage, it was to end this harassment. Yet she married a man so perverted and repulsive, Adios attempted suicide. When this failed, she attempted to end his life.