My parents sheltered me from many of the civil war images that surfaced on TV. I didn’t really understand war, because my parents did such a good job protecting me from it. I did understand the need to be safe. I did not understand why people would want to target us. Some days, I would eavesdrop on conversations among my parents and other adults. I would hear them talking about war that was either going on at the time or that was about to start. That’s how I knew if we were likely to flee soon. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of my father opening a closet that he kept locked at all times, and for a good reason—there were several guns in there. I didn’t understand why Dad owned guns; he was not a soldier, and I had never seen him shoot anything. I know now that he wanted to protect us from war, but at the time, I figured he was keeping them for an uncle in the military.
I had two uncles in the military, and they would often stop by the house with their friends to visit. I loved all of them dearly. They used to play with me and let me touch the stars adorning their uniforms. My favorite uncle was my mom’s younger brother Rumenge. My mother loved him deeply too. He was a tall, handsome man, like a movie star. He was kind and gentle; it was hard to picture him as a soldier. He was always playing and laughing with me. He brought me gifts whenever he visited—candy, money, clothes—and I cried when he had to leave. I never knew what his job was in the military. Just like my father, he never explained why he had a gun.
For all I knew, our life was normal. I was a happy kid.
To be sure, there were daily challenges. The electricity went off all the time, at random hours throughout the day and night. When it happened, you could hear the neighborhood erupt in one big, heavy groan. Then kids would go out in the streets and sell petrol to light oil lamps.
“Petroleeeee!” they would call in a singsongy voice from the streets. “Petrol here!”
“Kuya apa!” we would reply. “Come here!”
The back-and-forth chant would continue until the kids found the customer. If people weren’t interested in buying the petrol, the kids would sometimes snap at them, telling them to drink it: “Kunywa ayo!”
When the electricity came back on, you could hear the neighborhood cheer and clap.
My father was often away in those early years, working at different jobs to support the family, including a job in customs and immigration at the port. During this time, my uncle Rumenge became like a second father to me, visiting often. The doors of our home were always open to uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, visitors. There were at least three cousins staying with us at any given time. Privacy was not something that I knew. People came and went, all day long. No one bothered to knock on the door; they just wandered in.
The same went for traveling members of our tribe: Whenever they hiked down from the mountains and crossed the river to get to the city, our house was the first one they saw. They would often come and stay, to rest on their journey. It took about three days by foot to get from the mountains to the city. Our house was like a landmark: People knew to look for the big yellow house with the green roof. Mom would invite them in and lay out blankets for them to sleep on the living-room floor. They could stay as long as they liked.
Mom was like a saint, friendly to everyone in the neighborhood, including the homeless, the troubled, random drifters. Everyone knew her by name, even the most obscure outcasts—a lady with swollen feet and a cloud of flies around her, a strange drooling man with a lisp. They would show up at our front gate and my mom would give them food.
At Christmas and New Year’s, she kept the gate open so that anyone could come in and have a meal of rice, meat, and beans. My mom grew vegetables in a garden—cassava, corn, beans. On the holidays, scruffy children would meander into our home, along with homeless people.
A typical kid who did not yet understand the world, I would say things about our odd guests like, “Mom, that man smells.”
She would shush me. “It doesn’t matter if he smells. He’s still a person. A person is a person, no matter what,” she said. “You must do what you can to help people. What you do comes back around to you.”
It reminded me of the lyrics to a song I had heard in church while growing up: “Goodness returns to you. Wrongdoing also returns to you. Choose which one you want, because it will come back to you.” It always scared me. I thought: What if I’m not nice and nothing good happens to me?
I was just beginning to learn about the generosity of our tribe. Eventually I came to understand that there was a spirit of unity among my people, a deeply ingrained sense of helping those less fortunate than you because you could lose your own good fortune at any moment. My people knew that wealth could come and go. My family didn’t always have enough food for ourselves for dinner, but we would help anyone who asked. And sometimes, I would be sent to a neighbor’s house to ask for help.
“What did you make for dinner?” I would ask the neighbors. And they would send me home with food. We all looked out for one another.
On those nights when we didn’t have enough food for dinner, I don’t remember feeling upset about it. That’s simply the way life was, and I figured it was the same way for everybody. Mom would make a joke and we would laugh it off. She would say something silly or sarcastic, such as, “Tonight we can eat the word of God.” Then we would all entertain ourselves by playing cards in the living room. I never felt deprived.
My mother was such a strong, wise, multitasking force. She literally chopped down a tree once while watching Princesse, who was a baby at the time. She situated Princesse over to one side and made sure she chopped the tree so it would fall in the opposite direction. Mom never complained. To this day, I can never complain about anything in front of her. She will say, “Sandra, do you have to chop wood with a child on your back?”
And that pretty much says it all.
FOUR
I STARTED SCHOOL IN KINDERGARTEN, AND I loved it. I was the smart kid, a little nerd. I adored my school uniform and never wanted to take it off. Occasionally I fell asleep in it after school, curled up on the couch. One time when I did this, my brothers and sisters grabbed the opportunity to play a prank on me. I had napped for a few hours, waking up in the evening while it was still light outside. They told me it was the next morning and time to go to school.
“Get up!” they said. “You’ll be late for school!”
I hopped up and started getting ready. They were all sitting there, watching me, trying to hold in their laughter. My brother Chris was having an especially hard time keeping a straight face. It occurred to me that they were not getting ready for school themselves.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s so funny?”
Finally, Princesse said, “Okay, guys, enough.” She told me it was early in the evening, not early in the morning. Everyone let loose with their guffaws.
I went to a private school, the best in Uvira. We spoke mostly French and some Swahili, not the language of my people, Kinyamulenge. The different languages were never a problem for me: I had grown up speaking Swahili and knew it well. French came easily to me in school, and I became fluent. My dad would brag to guests that his daughter spoke the best French, and I was so proud. My parents deeply valued education. They had big dreams for their kids, and they knew it all started with school.
“One day, Sandra, you will become president of Congo,” Dad used to tell me.
It was important to my dad that both the girls and boys get a good education, which was very forward thinking of him in a community where the traditional role for girls was to marry and produce children. Most families spent all their time and money on the boys. But not my dad. If anything, he stressed the girls’ education more. Maybe because he was married to my mom, who was so smart and strong. He really admired her. My parents refused to conform to a lot of things.
For instance, when girls became teenagers in my community, they were often married off. They weren’t encouraged to prioritize their education. Sometimes, rival clans would actually try to steal a girl to
marry her to their son. A clan once attempted this with my sister Princesse. Boys from the rival clan came and tried to grab her from school, but my brothers fended them off.
It was part of an unfortunate culture, mainly in the villages, in which young men would kidnap a girl, rape her, and then marry her. The rape is committed so that the girl is too ashamed to go back home, or so that her family won’t ask for her back. Hundreds, if not thousands, of girls have been married this way. It is one of the reasons why I think my parents were so passionate about educating their girls, so that we could learn that no one can take away our worth.
Another way girls get married in the villages is if a father promises a bride to another father—then their kids grow up and get married. If a man in my family, even one of my brothers, were to promise another man that I would be his bride or his son’s bride, I would have to do it. I can’t imagine the day my brothers would do such a thing, thanks to my parents, who never gave the boys even the slightest hint that they had any power over the girls.
We were all equals. Even our haircuts were pretty much the same. In school, we had to wear our hair very short, per the rules. It was a sanitary precaution, so that kids wouldn’t catch lice from a kid who couldn’t bathe every day.
I was ambitious in class. I raised my hand to answer questions and volunteered to go to the chalkboard to solve math problems. But I was also shy with my teachers, afraid to ask them for permission to go to the bathroom. What if they said no? For some reason, the thought of that was intimidating. I kept my head down and studied. I cared deeply about school; I thought if I did the best among my siblings, my parents would love me the most. At home, they were heavily involved in our lessons. During final exams, if we started to fall asleep while studying at night, they would bring a bucket of cold water, put our feet in it, and say, “Keep going!”
Mom made us tea in the mornings, and I walked to school with my brother Alex, carrying a lunch bag and a backpack. The kids at my school all lived within walking distance. That was the only way for any of us to get to school: on our feet. Each morning before classes began, we all lined up in the courtyard by grade, then recited the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer. It was a sweet scene, a courtyard filled with students clad in white and blue.
I was always on time to school. If you arrived late, you could get a beating. The school had a director of discipline, and he would watch the front gate to see who showed up late. If you were tardy, you would often be told to kneel where you were. Then you would get hit with a stick or ruler—on either your palms or your butt. Sometimes kids could negotiate their punishment: The discipline director would say, “I’ll give you ten whacks,” and the kids would lobby for five whacks on a hand, five on the rear. Other times, kids who were caught late at the front gate would have to walk to class on their knees. Or they might have to work in the garden, pulling weeds.
You could also get a beating if you didn’t know an answer in class, or if you talked out of turn. Discipline was tough. Each class had a designated “chief of class,” a student who was in charge of keeping the class in order if the teacher left the room—basically, a spy. We were always nice to the chief of class.
The schools had limited resources, and there were few textbooks. We spent the days learning from our teachers. When I went home, my monkey, Kiki, would be waiting for me by the front gate, jumping up and down. He knew my footsteps and my schedule by heart. I could count on Kiki.
There was always a cloud looming over our school days—the possibility of war. I remember sitting in class and hearing bomb blasts in the distance as rival tribes fought. It was normal to see Congolese soldiers in the streets of Uvira with machine guns. One time, the sound of bombs from some rebellion came close, and the teachers locked us all in the school and told us to take cover under the tables where we did our work. I could feel the ground shaking. I wondered where my parents were, worrying whether they were safe. The school wouldn’t let kids leave until their parents came. I waited under the table in fear, until my brother Alex—my sweet little guardian—came and found me. The teachers decided to let us go, even though our parents hadn’t arrived yet. We ran through the streets for home. Halfway there, we found our older siblings, who had been out looking for us.
When it came to war, my parents could shelter us from only so much. I knew the sounds of war before I knew how to do a cartwheel. I became accustomed to those sounds. As a kid, I was never afraid of imaginary monsters at night: All the monsters I knew walked in daylight and carried big guns.
One year, when my parents learned from my uncles in the military that my tribe was under threat, we packed up and moved to Burundi. We stayed with a friend of the family named Joyeuse. There were lots of kids at the house, and I became best friends with Shiva, the youngest boy there. All the kids were kind to us, even though they had to share their beds. Shiva was my buddy, but he sounded funny: He spoke Kirundi, a language of Burundi, and I would often ask him to repeat things. Kirundi sounded like a lazy version of Kinyamulenge. Everyone took forever to finish their thoughts in Kirundi. Since I had grown up speaking mostly Swahili, one of the languages of Congo, I was impatient with this slow-sounding language of Burundi. I would interrupt as people were speaking because I couldn’t wait for them to finish.
Shiva took me under his wing, just like Alex used to do, and introduced me to some of the neighborhood kids, helping me feel more at home. I began going to school in a hideous uniform: khaki shirt, khaki shorts. I didn’t have any friends in my class—Shiva was a couple years ahead of me—and I wanted to get back home. We spoke French in class, but it sounded different from the French I was used to—again, slower. One small thing that brightened my life: Joyeuse bought me a festive little plastic bottle with cartoon characters all over it. I loved it. It had a blue strap so I could sling it over my shoulder, and I filled it with juice or tea and carried it everywhere. And Joyeuse introduced me to a delicious hazelnut-chocolate spread, much like Nutella, that we would slather on bread.
We ended up staying with the family in Burundi for about a year. That was the longest amount of time we were away, but there was rarely a time when our lives weren’t interrupted in some way by war. Other times, we had to flee to temporary refugee camps.
I was relieved to get home from Burundi and reconnect with my friends. I resumed my studies, and excelled. My favorite day of school was Proclamation Day. That’s the day when our teachers would invite parents to school and announce the rank of the students in each class—from top to bottom—out in the courtyard. It was like our version of a report card, I suppose, only much more public. We would all sit outside and await the results.
For some kids, this was stressful, waiting for their name to be called as the teachers went down the list. No one wanted to be last—it was a monumental embarrassment. For me, the day was fun, because I was confident and always knew I had done well. I consistently made the top three in my class. My dad always said that any of us kids who made the top three could ride home with him in his car. He had a little red Toyota that was so ancient, it was about to die, but I loved that car. It was rare to own a car. I always got to ride home in it from Proclamation Day.
One year, however, I missed a few weeks of school due to a bout of malaria. On Proclamation Day, my teacher called the first name on the list, then the second, then the third. My name was not among them. My heart pounded. A fourth name was called, and then a fifth. I did not hear my name. I started to cry. Two more names were rattled off. Again, not mine. I thought my chest would burst. Finally, I came in at number eight. I was heartbroken. I wanted to be a star. My parents tried to comfort me.
“Remember, you missed a lot of classes because you were sick,” Mom said, putting her arm around me, trying to console me.
Dad said I could ride in the car because he was proud that I had done well despite the malaria. I refused to ride in the car; I didn’t deserve it. My siblings tried to tell me that it was okay, that I was still brilliant. Alex even
offered to give up his seat for me.
Alex, who was a year ahead of me in school, had a Proclamation Day where he didn’t do so well either. In fact, he did so poorly, he had to repeat the fifth grade. That year, we went to fifth grade together. He was none too pleased about that, especially when I couldn’t resist teasing him. But he was such a sport. I knew he always had my back.
Around this time, I set my sights on becoming a television journalist. The reporters on TV dazzled me, and I wanted to be just like them. I would practice at home, putting on nightly news broadcasts for my family, speaking in French. I loved showing off to my dad especially, since he also spoke French very well. For my broadcasts, I interviewed my mom about what she cooked for dinner, questioned my dad about work, and did investigations about the origins of various household items. I could tell that my parents were proud of me.
At school, the Congolese kids were not always so supportive. They would tease me, mainly because my nose was thinner than theirs, making me look different. Sometimes they would say I wasn’t truly Congolese. Other times they would call me Rwandan. It was meant to be an insult, making me into a foreigner, but I didn’t know what it meant.
“I’m not Rwandan,” I would say. “I’ve never been to Rwanda. I was born here.”
I didn’t understand. I didn’t know anything about Rwanda, besides being able to point to it on a map. The kids who targeted me probably didn’t understand what they were accusing me of either. They were repeating what they heard from their parents. I would tell Alex when other kids taunted me, and he would get into fights with them. My parents told us to ignore slurs.
They were determined to raise us peacefully, even though we were growing up in a conflict zone. They taught us tolerance and forgiveness. I didn’t understand why the Congolese kids were mean to us. I wanted to say to them, “Don’t you have parents who teach you respect?” When I complained to my parents, they said not to take the jabs from the other kids to heart. They always helped me keep perspective.
How Dare the Sun Rise Page 3