Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  But things went wrong sometimes. When it was raining, it was easy to slip and fall in the mud, and then he’d have to stop to wash off his legs in a stream and to reassemble his lunch. Sometimes he’d stub a toe, and then have to walk slowly for a while—walking, as he pictured himself, like a chicken that had lost its other leg. And there were so many distractions—the crowing of cocks, the crying of babies in houses below in the valleys, a wildflower, birdsong, chimps—so much coming in at his eyes and ears and nose and asking for examination, that he could forget momentarily the object lessons against tardiness he’d witnessed at school the day before. So he didn’t always get to the top of the bald hilltop as early as he meant to.

  From that summit, he could see across the next valley to the schoolyard, and in the distance he could make out the miniature figures of schoolmates on the bare ground in front of the building, the field that served as their playground. From across the valley, he heard the ringing of the metal head of the hoe that served as the school bell. He saw his classmates already forming into lines at the classroom doors. Then he ran. Headlong down the hillside, legs brushing through knee-deep grass, across the muddy bottomland, and gingerly across the slippery logs spanning the stream, trying to make his feet prehensile, praying, “Please, God, don’t let me fall. Please, God, don’t let me be late.”

  But once across, he knew there was no hope. Small eucalyptus trees bordered the path up the last hill. He stopped and broke off a long thin branch and stripped away the leaves. He also broke off a twig and put it in his pocket, and walked slowly on. A couple of other boys were crouching among the brush and saplings beside the path. He wasn’t really tempted to join them. They’d have to hide there all day, because going home before the end of school would bring approximately the same penalty from their fathers as arriving at school late would bring from their teachers. Sometimes a student hoping to escape a punishment would duck into the latrine off to one side of the campus, but the teachers knew that trick. If they caught you hiding there, they’d sometimes make you stay in the reeking hut for the rest of the day.

  Entering his classroom, Deo offered the eucalyptus branch wordlessly to his teacher, who wordlessly accepted it for use later that day.

  In his memory, a couple of the teachers were French, one was Belgian, and the rest were Burundians. He and most of his classmates tried to make good impressions on their teachers. He sensed before he understood that the Burundian teachers tended to be cruelest because they were trying to impress the white ones. Maybe beatings were less common than he remembered. And yet in retrospect, it seemed as if a day never passed without someone being punished. No matter how hard he tried to be perfect, the rule seemed to be that everyone must be beaten.

  There were so many rules that you couldn’t help breaking one now and then. There was arriving late or arriving without your homework done—and arriving in either condition without a eucalyptus switch, the tool for your own punishment, got you a double whipping. The teachers would sneak around, trying to catch kids speaking Kirundi instead of French, a punishable offense. Forgetting to bring your lunch was bad, though not as grave as what one schoolmate did, in a hungry season when his family had run low on food. A teacher discovered that the boy had filled his package of banana leaves with cow dung instead of beans. “Eat it!” the teacher commanded. The child refused, he was suspended, and to get him reinstated his mother had to come and watch him be beaten with the eucalyptus in front of the whole school. From then on everyone called that boy Fumier, “Manure.” The name would have been the hardest thing to take, Deo thought, though he laughed at his schoolmate, too.

  Punishments were at least as varied as infractions. Whippings with the eucalyptus switch across your bare legs and sometimes your back. Hard pinches on the arms and cheeks. Teachers would lift you by the skin at your jawbones and give you a good shake or force you to kneel on the ground in front of the school and hold a rock above your head for an hour. If a rooster shat on your copybook while you were trying to do your homework by the light of your family’s cooking fire, you might end up the next day with your hands on your desk, your teacher beating your knuckles with his ruler. Biting down on a twig of eucalyptus helped you not to cry, but Deo hadn’t brought one the time this happened to him, and the more he cried, the harder the ruler struck. By the end of that day, his fingers were so swollen he couldn’t hold a pencil, let alone do his chores at home. He made the long walk toward Butanza, crying out silently, “What am I going to say to my dad?” But he was saved. He kept his hands behind his back and told his father he was sick, and was excused.

  He knew he had it easier than some other kids. Some kids had cruel fathers, whereas his was merely stern. And Deo’s father believed in education. His own schooling had ended after sixth grade, when he was obliged to go to work tending Lonjino’s cows. But Deo’s father had insisted that his own younger brother get educated. He’d fought with Lonjino and won; that younger brother, Deo’s favorite uncle, had made it through the national university and become an economist. As for Deo’s mother, her education had begun and ended with a year of catechism class. Sometimes Deo would come home from school, thinking, “I’m learning things my parents don’t know.” Sometimes he’d hand a textbook to his mother and ask her to read it, and she would hold it upside down. But she forgave him. She told him once, “If I can send my children to school, then no one is ever going to tell me that I didn’t go to school. If my child went, I am educated, because I have an educated child.”

  On most days Deo’s father let him stay at school for an extra half hour, so he could do his homework while there was still light. And Deo’s daily walk was manageable, whereas other kids had to come from mountains twice as far away. Those were the ones most in danger of the eucalyptus switch, the kids he was apt to see hiding on the way to school, caught between the fear of teachers and the fear of fathers.

  Many students dropped out. In Deo’s memory, many also died. One day he would come to the room and a classmate would be missing. For the next several days Deo would keep glancing at the empty seat. The school was attached to a church. There was a graveyard filled with wooden crosses just a short distance away. Through the grated windows of his classrooms he would hear the ululations from funeral processions, high-pitched, two-note sounds of grief played on fluttering tongues. The sound went right to his stomach, especially on windy days. People said the wind could carry the thing that had killed a person. He pictured this thing floating like a leaf on the wind, up from the graveyard and through the classroom’s open windows.

  Some other students were differently affected, like the brother of the most popular girl in the school. That boy sat in the classroom, studying, on the day of his sister’s funeral, as if he didn’t hear the cries of mourning that Deo was hearing all too well. How could you lose your sister and go to school during her funeral? That boy never cried when he got beaten, and there were some others like him. Their numbness had seemed strange to Deo, because numbness hadn’t overtaken him. Looking back, he thought he understood the condition and its consequences: “Some people wonder why so much anger in my country, and really there is something that is rooted, from the way you grow up in the beaten conditions.”

  His best friend, Clovis, died on the evening of a completely normal Sunday. They had spent it minding their families’ calves on a slope of the mountain Runda, their usual Sunday job, a good job for a pair of fourth graders. They took turns retrieving the calves that strayed near the edges of ravines. They spent the rest of the time playing cards and wrestling around on the ground. Near sunset, with no warning at all, Clovis began shivering and sweating and weeping, moaning, “I don’t feel good.”

  Deo wanted to run away. Maybe the thing on the wind had caught Clovis. Maybe it was going to catch him, too. Oh, God, would he be next? He began weeping with Clovis and calling frantically for help. For a long time, all he heard were his own echoing cries, and then at last his father’s voice called from an adjacent slope. Sever
al men came and carried Clovis away. After Deo and his father had put the cows safely in their pens, they went to Clovis’s house. Deo stood in the doorway of the hut. Inside, torches made of tightly wrapped dry grasses were set into the dirt floor. In the wavering light, Deo saw a neighbor he recognized attending to his friend; people called this man a doctor, but Deo’s father had said he was really just an herbalist. The man was forcing a green liquid into Clovis’s mouth. Clovis wasn’t moving. Perhaps he was already dead.

  Standing there in the doorway, watching the herbalist administer his potion, already suspecting that this medicine was worthless, Deo thought, “God, what is killing him? What can I do, what can I do?” Deo was an altar boy, in spite of his father’s banishment from the church. He asked God for a favor. “I wish I could have some magic to get my friend back to life.”

  For years afterward he would visit the graveyard by the school and remember the funeral—the women wailing, everyone weeping—and he would think of Clovis and of the prayer he had said in the doorway.

  The first time Deo came down with malaria—perhaps the cause of Clovis’s death, he’d later learn—he felt as if a layer of his skin had been stripped off, as if the breeze blowing on him were a thornbush. He was on his way to school when he collapsed. His fierce little grandmother found him and carried him home piggyback. His father was away, but the people carrying loads through the mountains formed a virtual telegraph service, which brought his father home in time to have Deo treated at the hospital in the provincial capital. His father knew malaria, its treatment and its cause. His grandmother, however, believed differently. She blamed a neighboring family. “That family, they hate my grandchildren,” Deo would hear her say in a low voice for years afterward. “They gave him poison.”

  Looking back, he saw this as a typical event in the annals of such allegations. His grandmother didn’t approve of the way his mother was raising her children. Deo’s mother must have exposed him to members of that neighboring family, who must be jealous of Deo’s family’s cows and must therefore have poisoned Deo. What was frightening and confusing to him then became dreadful in his memory. How, out of love for her grandchildren, his grandmother was bound to start a small feud on their hill. And surely the same sort of thing had been happening in other huts and houses in those mountains all during his childhood.

  Most of Deo’s classmates who didn’t die or drop out of the elementary school progressed from room to room down the length of the building and after six years headed off into the mountains to eke out a living raising crops or herding cows—if their families had some land or cows. Whether they finished school or dropped out, many left Butanza for the towns or the capital, where the usual choice was a menial job or, for Tutsis at least, service in the army.

  During the years when Deo was growing up, a succession of military dictators ruled Burundi. All belonged to a group called the Tutsi-Hima. Records from the era show that in all of Burundi there were only a few dozen secondary schools and one university, and that Tutsis occupied the majority of places in them. No doubt this favoritism gave Deo advantages that most schoolchildren didn’t share. It seems strange to think of Deo enjoying anything that could be called privilege, but in a small, crucial way that was the case.

  His family didn’t belong to the ruling group of Tutsis; they had no political connections. For a boy like him, the only ticket onward was good grades and a high mark on the nationwide exam administered to sixth graders. Only Deo and one classmate scored well enough to make the cut.

  He excelled in middle school, too, and was admitted to one of Burundi’s best high schools, situated two days’ walk from home. Deo boarded there. School became genteel. One wasn’t beaten, and one wore shoes. He ran barefoot, though, in races. He ran for fun as well, sometimes with friends and often alone in the surrounding hills. He was no sprinter, but he could run for hours. He liked to boast that his feet were so tough you couldn’t drive a nail into them. In a sense, he had been in endurance training ever since his first hikes with cows in the mountains. That kind of training continued when the school year ended and he and Antoine went back to carrying food and cowherding for the summer.

  At high school his world expanded, partly under the influence of a bishop named Bernard Bududira, a big figure in the region, the man in charge of all its Catholic schools. Deo felt he’d known Bududira for most of his life, ever since third grade, when the bishop had visited the school in Sangaza and Deo had been chosen to present him with a gift. At the high school, priests got to select their spiritual advisees. Naturally, Bududira got the first picks. He chose Deo and one other boy. He spoke to them about God, of course, but with an emphasis on what God asked human beings to do for themselves and what God would have bright young students do about poverty and injustice in Burundi.

  “There are many ways in which poverty finds its way into the bodies of the destitute.” This was a favorite saying of Bududira’s. He traveled widely through his territory, visiting many hills, and he would talk to Deo and the other boy about what he saw, especially about the almost universal need for clean water and medicine. He told them he was distressed at the great numbers of impoverished children who joined the army at twelve or thirteen, and told them about his campaign to build alternatives in the form of technical schools.

  At the end of eleventh grade—high school ended with thirteenth—Deo started his own project, an attempt to build a clinic in Sangaza that would serve the surrounding hills. He dreamed of inspiring other communities to do the same throughout Burundi—starting small but thinking big. He talked half a dozen classmates into joining him, and even got his father to let him spend the first weeks of summer vacation on the construction. He worked at trying to build the clinic for parts of three summers, right up until graduation. He didn’t manage to get a building erected, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. He told himself he would get back to a project like this one day.

  Deo received a very high grade on the national post-secondary school test and was offered a scholarship to a university in Belgium, to be trained there for the priesthood. No doubt Bududira had a hand in this, but Deo wanted to go to Burundi’s medical school instead. Bududira heartily approved.

  In 1988, during Deo’s senior year in high school, Bishop Bududira had written a bold public letter, urging the government to abandon its “deliberate refusal to talk about ethnic antagonism.” The subject, he wrote, had become “a taboo,” and meanwhile, Hutus were being systematically harassed. They were suffering “deliberate injustices in the distribution of positions of responsibility in favor of Tutsi elements.” (There was also blatant discrimination against Hutus in all aspects of education, even in the grading of the national tests.) Ethnic antagonism, the bishop warned, had become “extremely acute.” His pastoral letter was prophetic. That summer, a large Hutu rebellion erupted in the north. Tutsis were slaughtered indiscriminately, and the army retaliated with even greater brutality, killing perhaps as many as fifteen thousand Hutus.

  Deo happened to be at home on Runda when the massacres in the north began. Neighbors who he had long since learned were Hutus—whatever that actually meant—warned Deo’s family that the trouble might spread. He and his family spent a few days and nights in the woods, all except for Lonjino, who as usual kept a vigil over the compound. Nothing happened around Butanza, but in the aftermath Deo began asking questions and for once received some answers. He also did some reading. Later, he called this time “an awakening.”

  In school, he had learned a basic version of Burundian history. Even at the time some of the lessons had seemed weird, particularly when it came to colonization. The basic facts were clear: Germans had claimed the kingdoms of Burundi and Rwanda at the very end of the nineteenth century, and were replaced after World War I by the Belgians, who ran the countries from 1918 until the early 1960s. His teachers said that the Belgians had “tortured” Burundi. Nonetheless, students were taught songs extolling the greatness of Belgium, and the teachers would speak longi
ngly of going to Iburaya. And now those high school history lessons also seemed strikingly incomplete, all but devoid of explanations for the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi,” and of facts that Deo gradually ferreted out. He learned that Hutus made up about 85 percent of the country and Tutsis about 13 or 14 percent; that for decades Tutsi big shots had controlled both the army and the government; that there had been many bloody Hutu uprisings, followed by even bloodier army repressions. This pattern had turned into a bloodbath back in 1972, when Deo had been a baby. That was the year, Deo already knew, when his uncle the doctor had been killed. Now he learned that Hutu militiamen had dismembered his uncle and left him to die in his little car on the mountain Honga. His uncle had been just one victim of a gruesome Hutu rebellion, which the army had put down with gruesome efficiency. They had killed all the Hutu politicians and intellectuals they could, even schoolteachers and nurses, and many schoolchildren—at least 100,000 Hutus in all, and some said 200,000 or even 300,000; many other Hutus had fled to neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Tanzania.

  Why had he known almost nothing of this? Had he heard more than he’d allowed himself to remember? It was a frightening subject for everyone: for Tutsis who were outnumbered by Hutu neighbors, for Hutus who knew the army was never far away. And by the time Deo was born, the Tutsi-dominated government had decided its own purposes were best served by silence on the issue of ethnicity. Among other things, they had done away with the Belgian practice of putting “Hutu” or “Tutsi” on citizens’ identity cards.

  It was a shock for Deo to realize the depth of the divisions in his country, a shock to think how virulently people must have spat out the term “Tutsi” around cooking fires in some neighbors’ huts in Butanza during the years of his childhood. And yet, for all the suffering the division had apparently caused, he still felt puzzled as to what “Hutu” and “Tutsi” actually meant. Had the Hutus been the original, the true Burundians, and the Tutsis more recent conquerors from the region of the Nile? It was said that Tutsis kept cattle and Hutus farmed the land, but many people around Butanza, Hutu and Tutsi, did both. It was said that Tutsis were tall and slender with thin noses, whereas Hutus were short and chunky and broad-nosed, with hairlines that ran straight across their foreheads. But in Deo’s experience the stereotypes didn’t hold. He thought he knew of more exceptions than examples. He himself was close to being a hybrid, at least according to the standards laid down by some Belgian colonials, who had weighed and measured Burundians and Rwandans and come up with averages for features such as height—1.7586 meters for a Tutsi, 1.6780 for a Hutu. By those definitions, most of Deo’s brothers were too short to be Tutsis, and he was just barely tall enough. He was thin, but not as thin as many people around Butanza who were said to be Hutus, and his nose was neither narrow nor very broad.