A Thousand Sisters (21 page)

AT DAYLIGHT,
we don't waste any time. Fitina, along with a few others, escorts us to the boat without ceremony. We wave goodbye and I dash into the cabin in search of the rolls and peanuts I left on board last night. I'm hoping to quell my acid stomach and edgy bad mood induced by no sleep, no morning caffeine infusion, and no food. I find my plastic snack bag. Empty. The crew, who slept on board last night, devoured every bit of bread, every remaining peanut.

My empty stomach proves an asset. On the ride back across Lake Tanganyika, there are no raging storm clouds. It doesn't even rain, but the wind is strong, splashing water over us, and waves swell dangerously close to the lip of the boat. Agitated by all the talk of sinking boats, I cling to the railing as if we are about to sink, calling on every in-flight, bad-turbulence ritual I've developed over the years. Measuring my breaths, muttering prayers, I run through a series of complex rationalizations, closing my eyes to imagine how much worse I would feel if I was being tossed around like this on an airplane. It's not the best fear-control strategy since it leads me to recall the rationalization I always use on planes: It may feel scary in the air, but I am much more likely to die in a car crash or on a sinking boat.

Rescued!
I think as we approach the port and I spot a UN vehicle waiting for us. Haggard, I climb into the SUV, and I've never before felt so soothed by that new car smell.

At the UN guesthouse, I walk down the hallway with wet hair, my feet bare on the smooth cement. I'm wearing clean clothes after my head-to-toe scrub down, but I'm still reeling from the adrenaline hangover.

I hear Kelly's voice drifting from her room, muffled laughter. Her cell phone is still in range, so she's called her husband to tell him about our night. The door to her room opens, she walks out into the living room, and catches me tuning in. I must wear something like a craving expression because she motions to her phone, offering for me to use it next.

When she gets off the line, she offers again. “You're welcome to borrow my phone if you want to call. . . .”

Call who?

If you feel like taking stock of your life, ask yourself this basic question: If you were stranded in a thunderstorm for the night, on a remote African peninsula, with a militia, and just made it home safely, who would you call? Not to double-check the minutia in your life insurance policy, but just to say hi? Mom is not a possibility, given the inevitable public hysterics that would follow. Perhaps pulled by the ambiguity that stretches months or years past the last time you share a bed or say “I love you,” I think of Ted. I think of his hand on the back of my neck and I consider calling him. But I'm certain his tone will tell me I shouldn't have, and that isn't something I can deal with today.

Nonchalance is the easiest response. I play it off like I've officially earned my bad-ass credentials, like I'm check-in-with-no-one independent. “I'll just wait until I get back to Bukavu.”

I return to my little blue and white room with its wooden wardrobe, pull the mosquito net around me, and lie down, still spinning from last night and fruitlessly attempting to sleep.

ASENDE, A SISTER I met the other day, has been on my mind since our meeting, when she spoke of surviving a massacre. Her story involves a higher body count than any other I've heard firsthand. We track down her mud hut in a quiet neighborhood and wait for her to return from work in the fields. She approaches; her austere eyes and modest manner give her a simple, nunlike presence. She carries a straw basket filled with rusty farming tools. Surprised to find us waiting on her doorstep, she invites us into her spotless mud row-home. It's furnished with a couple of wooden benches, a calendar on the wall, a pile of plastic tubs and pots in the corner, and a curtain marking the passage to another room.

I begin the conversation by asking about the slaughter.

“Around five hundred of us escaped from the fighting and hid in the bush,” she begins. “The FDD militia found us and began killing people. They shot me three times before I fell down. They went around killing wounded persons with knives and taking everything they found on the dead bodies. I was wounded, but they couldn't tell I was alive. Finally, they left. When I opened my eyes, I saw a person wearing white, who secured me. It was then that I realized I was alone among the corpses.”

“What was your life like before the war?” I ask.

“My husband abandoned me for other wives, so I was alone to care for my children,” she says. “During the war, we escaped to a place where I met my mother, who had three children left in her charge by my younger sister, who was a prostitute.”

Up until now she has maintained a plain, direct affect. While Maurice translates what she says next, Asende wipes her eyes with her skirt. She is crying. What could be worse than the massacre she just described?

“My mother became ill and went to Bukavu to be treated. She died.”

I'm surprised. She is reduced to tears not because her husband left, not because she was shot or buried alive among hundreds of bodies. Her mother's death, from illness, makes her cry. Why? It raises such a basic question about the human breaking point. Studying her, I wonder if losing her mom marked the end of all support, beyond which she was utterly alone.

“So I took care of those three children.”

“What is it like for you raising orphans in addition to your own children?” I ask.

“I consider those children as my own,” she says matter-of-factly.

“What do you hope for in the future?”

“It is very difficult to have any thought about the future. I am living, but I have a bad life. About the future, I don't have any hope.”

No party spin or testimony here.

Trying to nudge her towards the positive, I ask, “What gives you happiness in your life?”

“When I am angry or sad, I feel ill. So I try to consider life normal.”

We are all silent for a moment. I sit here and look at my new friend. There is something this woman has—a simple open manner, a quiet dignity—that I have yet to find for myself.

“I wish you could see what I see when I look at you,” I say. “I see one of the most beautiful souls I've ever met.”

Her face lights up with a toothy smile.

 

THE NEXT MORNING, Kelly and I watch Mai Mai cut trees for firewood. They hack down branches and drag them along the dusty Baraka back road where we are stalled, waiting, passing the time as many do. We complain. Hortense is running late again. We were both packed and ready to go at eight o'clock sharp, as instructed. Hortense has left us in the car for close to an hour while she takes care of one last piece of business before we hit the road on the eight-hour return trip to Bukavu. Kelly leaves tomorrow and she's stressed about getting ready for an early boat to Goma, where she will catch a flight back to Kinshasa.

Hortense finally emerges. Smiling as always, she announces her triumph. “A participant's baby is sick. We have secured treatment!”

I sink with embarrassment at the ugly
muzungu
routine. While we've been sitting in the car griping, Hortense was saving a baby's life.

I stop complaining.

Kelly mutters, “Just hope we make it.” Hortense doesn't catch it, or at least pretends she doesn't.

We hit the road, cruising up the long, flat stretch of road running next to Lake Tanganyika, and I'm cramped in the back of the SUV between Hortense and Maurice. As always, they are cheery.

The car slows and stops on a muddy patch. A UN jeep is tipped sideways, entrenched in road mud, blocking traffic. The road is quickly backing up with vehicles from every imaginable NGO operating in Congo: War Child, UNHCR, Caritas, The Red Cross, Save the Children, and more. Hortense laughs. “Forget Run for Congo Women! You need to Run for Congo Roads!”

We are stalled for a long time as crowds of men try to rig the car to a truck while dodging the deep pools that fill the road. Kelly is wound up. If she misses the border, she misses the boat, and if she misses the boat, she misses the plane . . . and no one wants to be stuck in Congo. I get that. Anyone would be tense about missing the boat. I want to make it back quickly too. It's just that we are tagging along on Hortense's business trip. She's not getting paid extra to have us along. She owes us what, exactly? I shrug off Kelly's complaints.

Finally the road clears. We continue on to Uvira, where Hortense rushes off to take care of more business. Meanwhile, we grab a lunch of french fries and Coke at a dive with plastic tables, laminated tablecloths, and a caged monkey for entertainment. Kelly continues griping about how Hortense is wasting time. I try to comfort her with a worst-case-scenario analysis. “Even if we get back late, even if the border does close and we were stuck in Rwanda for the night, you'll still make your boat in the morning.”

Kelly protests. “I don't know what time the seamstress's shop closes. I need to pick up my dress.”

Is that what the grumbling is about? Welcome to my limit, Miss Kumbaya.
I lean across the plastic table and snap, “A dress? We're late because Hortense was saving a child's life.”

Kelly's face turns pulsing, patchy red (and mine might be looking that way too). “I don't understand how you're all of a sudden so high and mighty,” she says. “You've been complaining too.”

She's right. But people change. I had my epiphany
hours
ago.

I'm sure an international border is open twenty-four hours and to prove my point, I turn to Maurice and ask, “Does the border ever close?”

Maurice stares at the tablecloth. He doesn't seem to appreciate being dragged into the middle of a
muzungu
girl-fight. He answers, “Six o'clock sharp.”

Whoops. I'm wrong and embarrassed for the unfair lashing. It's 2:15 PM and we are four hours from the border. If we gun it, there is a slight chance we could make it. We abandon our lunch, find Hortense, and hit the road.

Kelly and I don't say much for the rest of the ride.

DESPITE THE NAME
“Orchid Safari Club,” I've never seen anyone here actually wearing safari gear. So someone must have sent out the wrong dress code memo to a group that has shown up on the terrace decked out in deep-bush khakis. I noticed them peripherally last night at dinner, when I was dropped off here just after six o'clock, having narrowly made it over the border before closing time. I saw them, but at the time I was backed into an extended debate with a white man who was raised in an African colony and is now a maintenance guy for the Red Cross. He took a little too much pleasure in lecturing about women like me who clearly know nothing about the conflict, yet have the gall to fundraise and mobilize.

Tonight I'm exhausted and want to be alone. I arrive on the terrace in the early evening, before the hordes descend, and stake out my spot in the far corner. It's buzzing with mosquitoes, but there is a soft breeze off the lake. I order chips and tea, the watered-down kind that tastes like it's been run through a hotel room coffeemaker. I plug in my earphones and power up my laptop, as much in an effort to avoid tiresome conversation like last night's as to appease my roaming desire to tell someone about my run-in with the Mai Mai, even if that someone is only a blank Word document.

But apparently I'm going to have a new lounge companion, as one of the would-be Dian Fosseys interrupts me and asks permission to take over a neighboring lounge chair. It's one of those moments when life knocks on your door in the form of an annoying stranger and you just want to say, “Will you please go away? Can't you see I'm trying to brood in loneliness here?”

In a disengaged fashion, I remove my earphones. “I'm sorry, what?”

“Mind if I join you?”

I don't answer, but I motion approvingly to the seat, plug my earphones back in, and crank the volume, thinking,
As long as you don't talk.

The terrace fills quickly with NGO people just off work. The next cluster of chairs is packed beyond capacity. What a collection of people lands here on the shores of Lake Kivu! There must be a common thread connecting us, an emotional through-line explaining how we would all find this, of all places on Earth, the best place to spend our time and money.

A man with choppy, cropped silver hair walks across the terrace. He might be in his early fifties, perhaps a creative professional; clearly he's one of the safari-goers given his ill-informed outfit. But he carries himself with the smooth stride of the ultraconfident. The head-to-toe khaki can't contain his movie star cool. His is not the ho-hum handsome of Ken-doll stock models. His bold features give him a larger-than-life aura. Do I recognize him? There's something familiar about him.