How Dare the Sun Rise

by Sandra Uwiringiyimana

  Then one of our neighbors in the back of the van started shouting, “I’m not a soldier! I’m not a soldier!” I wondered why he was saying that. Perhaps he feared that we were under attack because the Congolese thought we were some kind of rebels, although we certainly didn’t look the part.

  We were completely exposed, with no way out. We must have sat there for almost an hour, waiting to die. We couldn’t jump out into the mob. But we couldn’t move the car without keys. It was the longest hour of my life. We so easily could have all been killed right there. But then, a miracle: an angel appeared. A young Congolese man wearing a striped polo shirt and sporting a cool haircut pushed his way through the crowd to the van. He looked like Will Smith when he starred in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

  “Why are you still here?” he asked us.

  “Our driver left with the keys,” Dad said. “We can’t move.”

  “You need to get out of here,” the man said. “Or you are going to die.”

  The man asked what our driver looked like, and my dad described him. Then the man left and, remarkably, returned ten minutes later, forcing his way through the mob again. He had the keys. He managed to wedge himself into the car. People didn’t try to fight him since he was Congolese.

  “I’m going to drive out of here as fast as possible,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

  This good-hearted stranger saved our lives. I will never forget him. There was nothing in it for him to help us—in fact, he could have been killed for doing so—but he sped toward the blockade of furniture, finding a weak spot on one side where there were just a few chairs piled on top of one another. He smashed through the chairs, crunching them beneath the wheels, and got us out of there. People were going crazy, running after the van. We were all crying and screaming. I heard gunfire and kept my head down.

  This mysterious man drove us to the Congolese border, which was jammed with crowds of people trying to get out of the country and head into Burundi. We piled out of the van. None of us had really processed the attack. We were too shaken up. Our suitcases inside the van had not been stolen, and we yanked them out. Dad thanked our driver, this mystical being. The young man drove off, and I hope and pray that he survived after saving our lives.

  I will never know. At the border, we climbed into a giant semitruck run by the refugee arm of the United Nations, the UNHCR. The truck was built to carry cargo, not people, and it was smelly and disgusting, packed full of bodies. It reeked like rotten food. We were jammed in there so tightly, we could barely move. Everyone was hot and sweaty, the kind of sweat that smells like fear. The back door of the truck was left open so we could breathe, but people had to hang on for their lives and be careful not to tumble out onto the road. We drove for about a half hour into Burundi, and then stopped at an empty field near a town called Gatumba. The sun was starting to set.

  That empty field was our home for the night.

  EIGHT

  THE FIRST NIGHT IN THE FIELD, WE ALL SLEPT outside on the ground, a bunch of displaced, frazzled families, uncertain of what was to come. There were hundreds of us. We had no tents or mattresses, and no food. My dad went out foraging and returned with a handful of snacks he bought from kids selling them by the side of the road—peanuts and mandazi, little round cakes. The field stretched along a highway that ran from Burundi to Congo, and cars whizzed by us as we lay in the dirt. The land smelled of fertilizer and livestock from a nearby farm. The ground was hard and damp, and mosquitoes feasted on us. The evening air was cooler than we were accustomed to, and officials from the UNHCR handed out itchy dark-gray blankets. Those blankets were so scratchy, I wondered if the person who designed them thought: How can I make the world’s worst blanket? No one slept much that night.

  The next morning, the UNHCR officials started building tents. They put some strong logs in the ground and stretched green tarps across the top. Our new homes. The tents were separated into “rooms,” with sheets of tarp serving as “walls,” but there was no privacy. There were women’s tents and men’s tents. We had nothing, no furniture, no mosquito nets, just thin mattresses placed flat on the ground. It took several days for officials to deliver food. In the meantime, Dad bought snacks from the kids by the roadside. My parents said the situation was temporary, and I think they really believed that. We had been displaced before. I thought we would just have to endure this incredibly uncomfortable camp for a little while.

  Life in a refugee camp is bizarre: There’s no school, nothing to do. No toys for kids, no dolls, no distractions. People sit there all day long. For the first week, I thought it was kind of exciting because some of my friends were there; their families had fled the city like us, grabbing rides however they could. Since my friends were now living within a few feet of me, we could hang out all day and eat dinner with my parents at night, kind of like an endless slumber party.

  My friends called my parents “Mama Sandra” and “Papa Sandra.” We didn’t use terms like “Mr.” and “Mrs.” In my culture, that would be considered impersonal and disrespectful. I loved eating meals with my friends every night. My best friends were there, two girls around my age named Justine and Ziraje, and a boy named Inge. We would hang out together during the day, looking for things to do, thinking up games to entertain ourselves. We played one game with a ball made of wadded-up plastic bags and rubber bands: One of us would stand in the middle of two others, and we would try to hit the person in the middle with the ball, sort of like dodgeball.

  Sometimes, young men from Burundi would come to the camp with bikes to see if anyone wanted to be taken anywhere, and my brother Alex managed to befriend some of them. This was a huge bonus, because they would let us play with their bikes. Alex taught me tricks on the bike, like how to let go of the handlebars while I rode.

  Weeks went by. I missed school terribly. But I continued to think that we would be going home.

  My siblings and I spent much of our time in line for water, standing with empty jugs to fill from a giant plastic tank in a blue tent. The water tank was huge, the size of a spacious living room. Trucks would come regularly and pump water into the tank. The line for water was always crowded, and sometimes the water would run out after we waited in line all day. We went there almost every day. I was so little that I would often get pushed to the back of the line. I was never successful in retrieving water from that tank. My older siblings were much better at it.

  For food, each family had a card to show the authorities to get their rations. Every few weeks, UN workers would deliver the rations of rice, beans, vegetable oil, sugar, salt, and a flour mixture called sosoma, made of soybeans, sorghum, and corn. The amount of food you got depended on the number of people in your family. There was no variation in our meals—no greens, no meat, no fish. The women cooked with clay stoves fueled by coal, and the camp always smelled of fire and smoke. People were provided with pots for cooking, but some women had brought their own. Many of my family’s things had been stolen on the drive to the camp, but we still had our photo albums, which my mom had grabbed on the way out of the house. I would often flip through them with my friends since we had so little to do.

  On the days the food was delivered, I got depressed. It was as if we had been reduced to beggars. Mom and Dad waited in line with their card for their designated food supply, and it was disheartening to see my parents so powerless. All of us kids in the camp could see that our parents were no longer in control. How could parents assure their kids that everything would be fine when we could see how vulnerable they were? They couldn’t hide it. We appreciated the food, but it was a demeaning and demoralizing experience.

  The camp had a handful of outhouses, separated for women and men. The toilet consisted of a hole in the ground, unsanitary and smelly. To bathe, we put water in a bucket and splashed ourselves with it, using soap we bought from local vendors via the kids on bikes. It was a far cry from our comfy house back in Uvira with indoor plumbing.

  Every day I dreamed of going home
. I couldn’t fully comprehend why we had been displaced, why people would resent us so much that they would drive us from our homes into this barren, desolate place.

  We tried our best to stay positive. At six o’clock in the morning every day, people would gather outside in the middle of the camp for prayers with the pastor. Sometimes I would go with Deborah and my mom; other times I would sleep in, waking to people singing and clapping—happy sounds. Every Sunday, people gathered for church in the courtyard. On the cool, crisp mornings, I would nestle with Mom, resting my head on her shoulder.

  At one point, some of us kids were taken to the Congolese embassy in the capital of Burundi to take final exams. Congo had national finals for sixth and twelfth grades. I was in sixth grade, and I went. We were offered food at the embassy, but I was too nervous to eat. The kids who did eat—including Princesse, who was in twelfth grade—got very sick, throwing up from food poisoning. The Congolese workers at the embassy had tampered with the food. Even the schoolkids were targets. I never got the results of my exam.

  We returned to the refugee camp and continued to sit there in the heat with nothing to do, day after day. And then came that fateful night, when the sound of gunfire approached while Deborah and I lay down to sleep. I never imagined it would be the last night I would see my little sister alive.

  NINE

  THE KILLERS WHO ATTACKED OUR CAMP WERE rebels from Burundi, and they did not want us there. We were outsiders again. On that night, I thought my life was over. My mother and sister had been gunned down. I had blacked out from fear, then tried to flee, only to find a gun pointed at my head. I don’t know why the gunman didn’t shoot me on the spot. Perhaps he didn’t want to waste a precious bullet on a little girl. I was just a girl, after all, so how could I possibly survive? I imagine this is what he was thinking.

  In that moment, with the gun to my head, people rushed all around us in a fiery blur—shooting, fleeing, screaming. It must have been just a second or two that I stood there, expecting to die, but it felt like an eternity. The man, the gun, and me, in my red shorts and khaki tank top, frozen in time. I closed my eyes. No way out. There was no time to think anyway. I suppose, in that instant, I felt more peace than panic. It was all beyond my control.

  Then, in a flash amid the chaos, somehow I got kicked to the ground. The gunman went chasing after someone else. Fate had given me another chance. I got up and fled. I stumbled, I fell, I ran. Around me people were burning, crying in pain, dying. Those who still had legs were scrambling in all directions, running for their lives. I tumbled into a ditch that served as a garbage dump for the camp. I waded through the trash and sludge, and kept moving forward. I had no idea where I was going. I just ran.

  I made it to the fields of a nearby farm. I could hear people talking in the dark. I went to hide behind a tree, but I was not alone. A woman was there, and I tensed up. I didn’t know if she was one of my people.

  “Where are your parents?” she asked me. She was one of us.

  “I think my mom is dead,” I said.

  She took me by the hand and we wandered through the bumpy fields in the dark, passing the haunted faces of survivors. I spotted an uncle, Ezekiel, and he said to me, “Why aren’t you with your mother?”

  “I think she died,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I saw her. She’s not dead.”

  “But I saw her die,” I said, confused. “She was shot.”

  “No, no,” he said. “She is alive.”

  I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t tell what was real. Ezekiel joined us and we searched for my mother, tapping women on the shoulder as they sat, hunched over, on the ground, or stood in stunned silence. I desperately wanted Mom to be alive. I prayed that Ezekiel was right. The thought of continuing my life without my mother was too much to bear. She was my strength, my inspiration. With her, I felt safe and loved. Who would take care of me if she died?

  “I’m not her,” each woman said, turning to look at me with vacant eyes.

  “I’m not her.”

  “I’m not her.”

  We kept tapping women on the shoulder. I thought Ezekiel must have been mistaken. Perhaps he had simply seen someone who looked like my mother. Why was he insisting that she was alive, taking me on this search and breaking my heart all over again?

  And then, like an image from a dream, Mom appeared before me. She was standing by herself, wrapped in a sheet, and very alone. She looked as if her world had ended. I had never seen my mom look like that, not even when my uncle Rumenge had died years earlier. I couldn’t believe it was her.

  “Is that you?” she asked me, studying my face, as if she couldn’t believe I was real either.

  We hugged each other hard, but I couldn’t trust my eyes, or my arms. Was it really her? I kept feeling her, touching her body, her hands, her arms, up and down, again and again. I hit her on the arm to make sure she was not an apparition.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  But she was not fine. I could see a gaping hole in her side from the gunfire. She was bleeding, shivering in pain. I held on to her, clinging to her gently but firmly at the same time.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked me.

  And then a realization swept through my body as if I had been torn apart by bullets myself: My mother was not with Deborah. My little sister had been clinging to my mom during the attack, never leaving her side. The last time I saw Deborah, she was holding tight to my mother’s side. And then there were the sparks of gunfire. I looked Mom in the eyes, searching, and she looked back. She knew what I was thinking. And I could see the truth in her eyes. I sobbed. I couldn’t imagine the world without Deborah in it, my beautiful little sister, my soulful young friend who thought I could do no wrong.

  Deborah died in the clothes she wore to bed that night, including my hand-me-down soccer jersey that she loved. The jersey had always been my favorite—a blue Brazil jersey, with the number 9 on the back. When it was mine, I made my mom wash it constantly so I could wear it as much as possible. It had become Deborah’s favorite too. Now she would never wear my clothes again. She would not grow up with me.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said, holding me close. “I’m so sorry.”

  She told me they were all gone—Deborah, my aunt, my two young cousins who had held Mom’s hands as they marched from the tent to their death, lured by the men who promised to help them. She thought I had been killed too. Mom had been left for dead in a pile of bleeding bodies. Deborah had been shot in the head, but she survived long enough to say the heartbreaking words to my mom, “Hold me.”

  My mother managed to hold Deborah on her chest as my little sister died, something a mother should never have to do. Mom, covered in blood, heard the attackers talk about torching the pile of bodies she lay in, and she managed to remove the bodies on top of her and quietly crawl away. She decided she would rather be shot dead trying to escape than be burned alive. But my brave and resilient mom did escape. She headed for the farm, following other people who were fleeing, and falling into the same garbage ditch that I did along the way.

  Mom did not know if my father or Alex had survived. She thought not. But she said she had seen Heritage and then lost sight of him.

  And so we set out to find Heritage together, weaving through the lost souls in the night. Exhausted and overwhelmed, we didn’t say much to each other. I tried to keep my thoughts focused on finding Heritage, not to think about Dad and Alex, since we knew nothing of their fate. I could not bear to think about what might have happened to them. Just hours ago, we had all been drifting off to sleep, and now our lives, our families, our people, were torn apart.

  As we scoured the farm, people were weeping for lost children, whimpering in pain, or sitting silently, staring at nothing. The air smelled of dewy grass, damp soil, sweat, and death. Dawn was coming soon. People who lived in cozy homes on the outskirts of the farm were waking up, turning on their lights, unaware of the bloody massacre that had taken
place across the fields that night, turning our camp into a fiery hell. At that point, there were no policemen, no officials, no one to help us, just my butchered tribe.

  I wondered if I would ever see my father and Alex again.

  TEN

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN AROUND FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning when we found Heritage. His arms were practically falling off his body from gunshot wounds, but he was acting like he was just fine. So stoic, so brave, my brother. He knew violence all too well.

  My mother and I embraced him, trying not to hurt him with our grip. I asked the question I was afraid to hear him answer: “Have you seen Dad and Alex?” They had been living in the same tent with Heritage. I braced myself for his reply.

  “Yes,” he said. “They are alive.”

  My heart flooded with relief. I would get to see them, hug them, again. Heritage had spotted them amid the chaos and confusion but had lost them. And so we set out once again, searching the ghostly faces.

  It was light out when we found them, the sun rising slowly in a pale-blue sky, casting a warm glow over the fields of sorrow and grief. I remember thinking: How dare the sun rise, as if it were any other day, after such a gruesome night.

  People all around us were weeping so loudly, it sounded like a choir. A chorus of tears.

  Oddly, Alex was wearing a sparkly red shirt designed for girls and a too-small pair of shorts for girls too.