A Thousand Sisters

by Lisa Shannon

  Patrick looks at me and asks, “What are your plans?”

  My plans. Not our plans.

  Now I get it. I’m not in Congo with Kelly. Though she’s happy to occasionally piggyback on my outings that appeal to her, Kelly has no intention of making this a joint trip.

  I watch them pick at the deep-fried fish heads, the breaded eyeballs, as reality settles in: I’m in Congo alone.

  Though everyone who knows me would call me an “independent woman,” I wouldn’t choose a situation like this. I let go of trying to earn my bad-ass credentials years ago. At twenty-five, I drove ten hours across Oregon to go on a lone camping trip in a remote canyon on the Idaho border. When I got there, I pitched my tent, made myself a beautiful meal over an open fire, and watched the sun set over the canyon walls before I thought how much better it would all be if I were not alone. The thought gnawed at me through the evening until I decided, This sucks. Then, while I’m in my spot more than an hour from the nearest paved road, a van drove by. As I lay awake in my sleeping bag, I couldn’t stop thinking about the isolation of this place. If something went wrong, no one would question my absence for days. That night, I thought to myself, Point proven. At midnight, I packed up and drove home. Within a year, I was with Ted.

  It’s not that I can’t be independent; it just isn’t my preference to be alone. If I had the choice of going to dinner by myself or with a friend, I would choose the company. If we needed to prop shop at Target, I was always happier to go with Ted. The preference became a habit, full days of work-lunch-work-dinner-bed-work that rolled into years of zero space. Soon enough, friends were more likely to remark on our model partnership than my independence. Occasionally, with a quick slip of the tongue or one too many glasses of wine, we were introduced as Tisa and Led.

  I walk back across the Orchid grounds armed with only a flashlight. The paranoia is contagious. As I fumble for my key in the dark, a guy strolls by with a four-foot axe. I freeze, sizing him up. I’m upside down with no perspective. Should I be scared? Exhaustion wins. With resignation, I let it go. I hope he works for the hotel.

  I put all my equipment on the charger and go to bed.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, I am up again. I never adjusted the time on my computer or my cell phone and I’m unable to figure out the conversion, plus or minus daylight savings. I don’t feel like making journal notes, so I lie awake until close to dawn before drifting back to sleep.

  Shouting crowds, humming from a nearby street, wake me. Are those riots or a celebration? It’s impossible to distinguish, though I try to tune in. Newly elected President Kabila is in town. Must be a rally. I listen for a long time, as if listening closely enough could filter my first day through a sieve and give me the definitive answer I’m craving to the question, Is it safe here?

  People said that once I got to the hotel, I would make fast friends. Over a breakfast of fruit and toast with strawberry jam (exactly like my mom used to make), I sit between an officious French woman and the Congolese Army commander with his women. A few other guests are scattered around in groups. No one here talks to each other. Everyone must have a story, but they don’t seem interested in getting into it with others. I don’t feel like getting into it either. Instead, I watch the helicopter take off from a landing pad by the water. It belongs to a mining company headquartered here on Orchid’s grounds.

  I’ve made many calls for a guide and translator but they’ve all been dead ends. After breakfast, I meet Jean Paul, a UN staff member. He’s booked on UN business, but he brings his brother Maurice, a mild-mannered man in glasses who wears a spotless, pressed T-shirt tucked into ironed, belted jeans and polished shoes. Maurice teaches English in Rwanda and has a gentle aura; he is more soft-spoken and understated than his brother. His school is on break, so he’s available. They’ve also brought a driver. Serge is more of an un-tucked guy’s guy—stocky and bald, with an understated cool. He doesn’t speak English, or at least won’t admit to it. I hire them on the spot. Maurice and Serge will be with me every day of my journey in Congo, and along with Hortense, will be at my side to translate every story, every moment, every interaction I have in here with non-English speakers—and in this French and Swahili-speaking land, that’s almost everyone. They’ll work for US$10 per day. A steal.

  But first, I have to do an errand. I ride alone with Women for Women’s staff driver to Bukavu’s main drag; we pull over across the street from a cell phone shop. We both sit in the Range Rover, unmoving. I need phone minutes. One of us has to get out of the car.

  I haven’t seen a westerner on the street. One of us has to leave the bubble. If the driver goes, I’ll be left as the lone guardian of the Range Rover. If I go, I’m walking alone, exposed, across the street, without an escort, without security, out of compound bounds. I feel like I’ve been asked to strip and go grocery shopping naked. I motion to the driver, hoping my broad gestures will help overcome the language barrier. “You go or I go?”

  “You.” He can’t leave the car unattended.

  I finger the door handle, feeling like I did in middle school, when I stood on the high-dive for the first time. I stared down at the water as friends jeered, egging me on while I measured the social cost of retreat. I remember wondering if they would see my flaming cheeks, prickly with humiliation, if I slinked back down the ladder.

  Each moment that slips by fuels the awkwardness of the moment.

  What’s the big deal?

  I don’t move.

  Just get out of the car.

  I unlatch the door, step out on the road alone and dash across the street.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Souvenir

  I’M SO WRAPPED up in the sea of virgin-faced killers on my first morning at Bukavu’s child-soldier rehabilitation center, Bureau pour le Volontariat au Service de l’Enfance et de la Santé (BVES), I don’t notice Noella in the crowd. It’s a flurry of activity as half of the boys get ready to depart for home after their two-month stay here. Boys collect their parting gifts—a blanket, a soccer ball, and some tennis shoes—before heading for the vans that will drive them south to be reunited with their families.

  Noella’s shaved head blends in with the ninety boys’ faces in the group. Her skinny eleven-year-old frame swims in her oversize pajama bottoms. Perhaps that’s why I missed her; she doesn’t look like a girl. Or perhaps her history has made her expert in being invisible.

  She comes to my attention because of her younger brother, Luc. He is the youngest here, only nine years old. I notice him, in a man-size T-shirt that hangs to his knees, dodging in and out between the older boys as they pack up the vans. How could a kid that age be a former soldier?

  I ask the staff. He’s not. Luc and Noella were picked up on the road by aid workers who found them wandering, lost in the forest. They only speak Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. Despite their ever-changing story, in South Kivu that means one thing.

  It is not the first time the center has aided Interahamwe children. In fact, the influx of Hutu refugee children was the catalyst that started the center, in 1995, when an earlier program split into two projects, one for unaccompanied child refugees and the other for 650 former Interahamwe children.

  The center director, Murhabazi Namegabe, whom I met in Portland a year ago, is an intense man with a serious temperament that commands respect.

  I ask him, “What is it like bringing children together from rival militias?”

  “In Eastern Congo, children were raised with the idea that someone who is not of your tribe or ethnic group is an enemy,” he says. “There was conflict between Hutu and Tutsi children staying at the center.”

  Murahbazi explains that the center was home to children from the Mai Mai, a homegrown Congolese militia known for its use of witchcraft, as well as kids from Rally for Congolese Democracy, or RCD, militias backed by Rwanda. “The children from Mai Mai were dirty, and children from RCD were clean and tidy. The clean children considered the others witches because Mai Mai pra
ctice sorcery. When they were playing cards, if the Mai Mai won, immediately a fight began with, ‘They won because of witchcraft.’ If the RCD won, the fight began, ‘They had intelligence from Rwanda! They had modern technology!’

  “The key message is, You are children. There is no difference between you. You must live together, share together. We ask the children, ‘Is there someone who has chosen to be born in Rwanda, Burundi, or Congo?’

  “No one among the children raises a finger to say, ‘I chose to be born here.’

  “This causes a change in consciousness. After one week, they become friends.”

  THE VANS DRIVE AWAY, leaving the remaining boys to file back inside the compound. As the dust settles, their focus shifts to the only remaining source of entertainment: me.

  On long runs, I fueled myself for miles by contemplating this moment, rehearsing what I might say. As the boys crowd around asking questions, the moment has arrived. I step up onto the front steps, reach back into my mental file of talking points rehearsed on the trail, and launch into a speech about hope! And caring! And healing! And choices! And “You are not alone!”

  One boy yells from the back, “Blah! Blah! Blah!”

  They all laugh.

  Another one steps in, “White people always say they care, they want to help. But where is the help? They never do anything!”

  That went well. Nothing like teenage boys for a little straight talk. Let’s call it “open dialogue.”

  There’s an old stock photo trick that always worked with kids. It’s cheesy, but it’s worth a try. I ask, “Can I take your photo?”

  The boys crowd around, posing. I snap the shot and show them the viewfinder. “Shanella!” they cry—an apparent Swahili hybrid for Lisa Shannon. They are all shouting, “Take my photo!”

  Vanity. Works every time. After they are warmed up, I talk with a couple of boys privately.

  I SIT IN A PRIVATE classroom with Junior. He is seventeen, clean-cut, and seems like a good kid, one that in a different context might be found buried in a book or taking college prep classes.

  “Can you tell me about your family?”

  “Even though my family was very poor, I chose to live with them. It was by force I was taken. What the chief made us do was not good. Because I was to kill, to make sex and violence on wives and children. It upsets me now.”

  I’m surprised we’re getting straight down to it. “What was it like the day you went to join the Mai Mai?” I ask.

  “I was a pupil. That day, the Mai Mai came and asked us to join . . . there was no alternative. You must join or you will be killed. Once in the mountains . . . I became ill. Only after I recuperated, I became a Mai Mai. I knew how to write, so they made me the secretary of the group. What they made me do still upsets me. We are not welcome in our village because we made violence against the civil population.”

  “They made you attack your own village?”

  “I think the village population will understand it was not our will, but the will of the chief. Sometimes we avoided making violence in our own village. It is in other villages we made sexual violence against women. The real problem was sleep. We slept without anything, no blanket, just on the mountain. There was nothing to eat. Bad food. Bad sleep. No sanitation. We lived like savages. This led us to sexual violence against wives and to loot villages for food.”

  I find it remarkable he has brought up sexual violence, all on his own, several times, as though I am his confessor. “Did they force you to rape?”

  “This was a kind of revenge. Whenever we saw a girl or a wife, we had to attack her immediately. For me, it was a kind of safe defense, to reject the problems I had in the army, to forget.”

  “What do you hope for in the future?”

  “Even though I am poor, studies can change my situation. I hope I get my diploma, that I can be a VIP, a very important person.”

  PAI PAI IS CLEAN-SHAVEN, wearing a white tank top that shows off his muscles. He has the kind of toughness that comes from having nothing to prove. He’s seventeen and though he is mild mannered, I can’t imagine anyone giving him a hard time. Something about him radiates, “Don’t mess with me.”

  “I was in the government army. The salary was very little. Twenty-five dollars a month.”

  “How old were you when you joined the army?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Five years in the army.”

  “Yes, five years.”

  I’m not going to get too far with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers. I try to prompt him, “Why did you join the army when you were twelve?”

  “I was taken by Rwandan soldiers to the forest, to carry things of the soldiers. Once there, we were formed by RCD. Eventually, because of bad treatment, I changed to the government army. I hoped there would be a change, but the conditions were the same.

  “In my mind there are remnants of violence I have done to people. Now I would like to do something to erase those souvenirs, to forget things I did in the army.”

  “You had to do violence? Can you talk about that?”

  Pai Pai crunches up his face, ticking his tongue. “Ugh. The problem is that I killed a lot of people. But it was not my will. I was under orders of Rwandans; because of this, I had to kill my own brothers, and sometimes this makes me feel ill at ease.”

  “Can you tell me the story?”

  “I had a lot of cases. Once, at the village of the president, the Rwandese asked us to erase the village. We had to take people in their houses, lock the houses. We poured petrol on the houses and burned them. If you tried to escape from the house, you’d be shot immediately.”

  “How many people do you think you’ve killed?”

  “People I myself saw dying? Around three thousand.”

  That must be a translation error. I clarify, “Three thousand?”

  He emphasizes, “Three thousand that I saw myself. We had to take dead bodies, I had to put them in rivers or the lake.”

  “Did that include children?”

  “What?” He looks at me like, yeah, duh. “Children, babies. . . .”

  “What made you decide to leave the army after five years?”

  “It was only because of my age. They asked me to leave, but I was happy to. The souvenirs of what I did in the army are very bad. I do not think I will be able to study. I have a problem in the mind. I want to be an apprentice for manual work.

  “I feel sometimes in my mind I am very different from other children my age. Because now I continue to think about violence, what I have done. Maybe I will practice violence in the future. I can’t behave that way now, but I have to fight the images in my mind.”

  I WANT TO TALK with little Luc. While staff members round him up, I notice two girls. The littlest, around eight years old, wears a skirt. Noella, eleven, hangs close to the other girl, clinging to her like a life raft. I’ll talk to the three together.

  We climb a steep wooden staircase, accessible only through the director’s office, to a little room perched on top of the center. The girl’s room feels like a princess’s high tower, albeit a worn-down, African-war-zone version. I look out the window to the hills and fields of Rwanda.

  I squeeze in between Noella, Luc, and the other little girl, then show them photos of my family, postcards from New York City and the Oregon Coast. Our driver, Serge, speaks Kinyarwanda, so he translates. I show them a photo of myself running in the forest, which I use as a lead-in. “Does this forest look like the forest where you used to stay?”

  Luc says, “Yes, but I don’t know where . . .”

  Noella takes over. “We are only angry and upset about the absence of our mother. We would like to be back with her.”

  “What about your father?” I ask.

  “We love both parents.”

  “Do you want people in America to know something about you?” I say.

  Noella plays with her hands, while Luc laughs, “The white man can help us to eat well and when we know something about our parents we will s
ay ‘bye-bye’ to the white man and go home.”

  “Do you know anything about Interahamwe?”

  They whisper to each other, then Luc speaks up. “We don’t understand talk about Interahamwe. But whenever we passed, we saw men with hammers looking for precious metal, like diamonds.” Noella elbows him, gives him a hard stare. He continues, “They must be in the mountain because I hear people search for these metals . . .”

  The two whisper to each other, conferring. Serge points out, “They are discussing what to say and what to avoid saying.”

  I try to soften them up by saying, “Sometimes people tell little kids to not tell the truth, but it’s always better to tell a safe adult. You might feel better to tell the truth.”

  Noella furrows her brow. She’s one stressed little girl.

  The staff member jumps in. “Sometimes they say they came from Rwanda, they were arrested by police on the road. Sometimes they say they came from the mountain. Some days they say they came from the village. When we separate them, they change the subject. They were found in the forest, so their parents must have a link with Interahamwe. They are not allowed to talk about it.”

  Maurice adds, “If they say they are from the forest where they have parents who are Interahamwe, they will jeopardize their own lives. That’s why they emphasize they are from Rwanda. But we know Rwanda, we work there. They have something to hide. These children are specialists in secrets.” Another staff member says, “Those children come from the forest. They come with a message that must be translated to a member of their family, if the situation is quiet, to come here or something.”

  The littlest girl excuses herself to go to the bathroom.