“What are you wearing?” I asked him. “Where did you get those clothes?”
He explained that he had been sleeping in the nude when the killers attacked his tent, and he took off running, naked.
“No time to get dressed!” he said. When he reached the farm fields, he said, a family from a nearby home brought him the clothes to cover his body.
My dad stood by his side, strong and tall. He had holes in the collar of his shirt from bullets. Even his belt strap had bullet holes, but no bullets had brought him down. I stared at the holes in his shirt collar, amazed. We all hugged again and again, holding one another tight. But the reunion felt strangely awkward too. We did not mention Deborah. I think everyone sensed that she was no longer with us, but no one could bear to say that she was gone. Dad looked like he was trying to hold himself together. Our lives would never be the same. Our Deborah was gone. Our dreams would forever be haunted by her memory. But for now, we had each other.
Alex was telling me a rush of stories. “A bullet just missed my eye!” he said.
He described how a woman had been cooking in his tent when the killers came. While trying to escape, she stepped into the pot of scalding-hot beans. Confused by the burning pain, she screamed, “I’ve been shot!” Alex called out to her, “No, you haven’t! Take your foot out of those beans!” Just one more insane image from our night of hell.
Officials from Burundi and the UN were finally arriving now. Buses were coming to bring people to the hospital. Mom refused to go to the hospital, despite the gunshot wound in her side. She said she would go later. For the time being, she wanted to stay with our family. And I’m sure she did not want to leave Deborah behind. We all stuck together, tired and broken.
I found my cousin Inge. He had survived, but he had lost his mother and two little brothers. I don’t know how he could handle losing so many family members in one night. I remember feeling that I wasn’t entitled to cry because others had lost even more than I had. I learned that my friend Ziraje had been killed. I would never see her face again. My friend Justine survived, and I saw her briefly, but we got separated and it would be the last time I ever saw her. Two of my closest childhood friends, gone from my life in a night.
Inge and I sat together with his brother Desire that morning beside a fence near a highway, looking out over the eerie scene. For a long time, we didn’t talk. We just stared in disbelief. Devastated people were scattered across the fields, our friends, neighbors, and relatives, facing unthinkable grief. Mothers were screaming and wailing at the thought of leaving their children’s bodies behind. I saw a baby with full-body burns. Children were wandering aimlessly, staring blankly, not yet old enough to grasp what had happened. Some had lost both of their parents. I had never seen people look so desperate. Mothers were lifeless. Their entire lives had been taken from them. None of us kids could understand what was going on.
I had a sense of shock and confusion, jumbled emotions. We had seen the horror, but we couldn’t understand it. We were so young, so confused, that Inge and I did what kids do: We teased Alex about the girls’ clothes he was wearing. “Nice outfit,” I said.
I asked my mom if Inge and Desire would live with us now since they had nowhere to go. But my family had nowhere to live either.
We all walked across the charred remains of the camp, wading through a sea of crumpled bodies and limbs. I could not comprehend that you could spend time with people one day and then pick up their body parts the next. We looked for the remains of Deborah, my cousins, and my aunt. We found Deborah near where our tent had been.
“That’s her skull,” Mom said.
It was the most horrifying scene imaginable. Somehow my mom found the strength to cradle my little sister’s burned skull in her arms. We saw the row of people who had been shot dead while running from the tent when the attack began. We found my cousin’s body, which had not been burned.
I didn’t understand death yet. I knew that older people died, and I knew that people could get sick and die, but not kids. I had never thought about how children could die, especially such a violent death. I thought someone would come and say it was all a dream. I wanted to wake up from this nightmare.
We saw officials stuffing people’s limbs into long white plastic body bags, just picking up different people’s limbs and throwing them into the bags. I stared; I didn’t cry. It was too much to absorb. You’re not supposed to see the limbs of your friends and relatives crammed into plastic bags, all tangled up together because no one knows who the limbs belong to.
At the time, we didn’t know who had come to kill us. We learned later that a brutal militia group from Burundi had carried out the attack: Forces Nationales de Libération, led by a man named Agathon Rwasa. The group claimed responsibility through a spokesman, Pasteur Habimana. Members of other militia groups were reportedly involved in the attack as well, including one called Interahamwe. Of the some 800 refugees in the camp, 166 were reportedly killed and 116 injured. The killers were not brought to justice.
But all we knew on that morning was that we had nowhere to go. We had no home. We had nothing, not even the suitcases we had brought with us to the refugee camp. We didn’t even have our family photos. Mom’s albums had gone up in flames with everything else in the tent.
It had been more than thirty hours since I had slept. I don’t recall the rest of the day, or the night. Everything became a blur. I remember seeing the body bags. I remember thinking: How will we stay alive?
And I remember a feeling of disbelief that Deborah had been taken from me. When you lose someone, you’re supposed to have time to say good-bye, time to cry, time to mourn. We never got to bury Deborah. I never saw her grave. I didn’t even get to see her face after she died. If only I had known that I would never see her again, I would have spent the years learning every curve on her face, studying those long eyelashes, memorizing the way her lips curled into a funny little twist when she was happy. I would have paid more attention. When I think of her infectious smile and those black curls and big dark eyes, I can’t help but wonder what my baby sister would look like now. She would be eighteen years old today if her life hadn’t been cut short. Beauty like that was never meant to last in this cruel world.
Sometimes I have a terrifying thought: What if I forget Deborah’s face? The years take me further and further from her. I meet people who never knew she existed. I feel as if the older I get, the more I am losing her. As a child, my future always had Deborah in it. The memories haunt me: One second I am there beside her, falling asleep, and the next, I am watching her die. I never got to say good-bye.
ELEVEN
I WOKE UP IN THE HOME OF A RELATIVE NEAR the capital of Burundi. I don’t remember how I got there. I was like a zombie. There were six kids in that family. We called their dad, Mutware, our uncle. His mom and my father’s mom are related. In our culture, they would be considered brothers. Some of my cousins there were around my age, and I could tell they didn’t know how to wrap their heads around what had happened to us. They had no idea how to play with me or how to cheer me up. The house was tiny, and my traumatized family had suddenly piled in there with nowhere else to go. Everyone seemed confused.
Heritage, Alex, and Mom had all checked into the hospital. Heritage was in critical condition with bullets in both arms. Alex had a bullet fragment in his eye. Mom had the devastating gunshot wound in her abdomen. It was remarkable that they were still alive. My sister Princesse—who had been away at the choir concert on the night of the attack—reunited with them in the hospital. I went to visit everyone there, and was horrified by what I saw. The hospital was vastly overcrowded. Some of the survivors were helping clean wounds and change dressings for others. There weren’t enough people on staff to handle the influx of broken bodies.
Heritage’s wounds to his arms were so ghastly, I couldn’t look at them. I tried to focus on his face.
Mom had a gash in her side. When I hugged her, she flinched. But she was worried about me,
not herself. She asked me, “Are you okay? Have you eaten?”
She tried hard to soothe me. But she still had that lost look in her eyes. She gave me some of her hospital food, but I had no appetite.
Back at the crowded house, everyone treated us like we were about to break. No one knew how to talk to us. It was hard for me to feel much of anything. And I didn’t want to feel anything anyway. The house was packed with people. The air was hot, suffocating. There was an outdoor toilet, which smelled atrocious with so many people using it.
We all shared mattresses. I had an impossible time sleeping. Darkness would descend and I would feel a blast of terror. Sometimes we heard gunfire in the distance, and my mind would go back to the camp and the gunshots that shook us from our beds. When I managed to sleep, I would wake up in the middle of the night, shaking uncontrollably. Shaking, shaking. I couldn’t make it stop. My family thought I was going to die. They would cry, and I would cry. They tried to reassure me that I was safe. But I never felt safe.
My shaking got so bad, the entire house would wake up. I would shake for hours every night, then pass out around four thirty in the morning. I couldn’t shed my terror of the dark. I dreaded going to bed. No one could snap me out of it.
This went on for weeks. I hated living like that, crippled by fear, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. There were days when I wished I had died in the camp. It simply hurt to be alive.
Our host family was so gracious; they tried really hard to help, caring for us generously when they had little room in their home. My family was kind of useless, too shell-shocked and upset to do anything. We could have gone to live in another refugee camp, but my parents said they would rather die than subject their kids to another camp.
Sadly, some members of our tribe had to go to another camp, because they had no other options. Imagine being sent to another camp after living through the hell of the first camp. I would not have survived in a new refugee camp. Every little noise would have terrorized me.
When Mom came home from the hospital, she was tiny. She had once been big and strong, confident and formidable. I didn’t know it was possible for someone to become so little. I could see her getting smaller and smaller by the day.
Mom cried all the time. Everyone did. We would be sitting around, in our usual zoned-out state, and someone would suddenly cry. No one would question the reason for the tears. It was just part of our new life. Sometimes people would visit the house, look at us, and simply cry. There was no real conversation with any visitors, just crying. People didn’t know how to be comforting. I remember women coming to the house to visit, to console us, and instead they would cry for hours at a time. Sometimes my mom would look at me and start to cry, and I wondered if it was because I had unknowingly done something—made a gesture or a facial expression—to remind her of Deborah. I worried that perhaps she resented me because I reminded her that her youngest child had died. I carried so much guilt.
There wasn’t much food in the house, but we didn’t want to eat it anyway.
The gloom continued for months. Finally, my dad said, “We need to get out of this country.”
He thought if we moved out of Burundi, the land of the massacre, my mom and I would feel safer. We had a little money from donations that Good Samaritans gave to us in the hospital. And so in 2005, my dad put us on a bus and we moved to Rwanda.
There, we all crammed into a tiny rental apartment—my parents, Heritage, Princesse, Alex, and me—with just a bedroom and a half. We had an outhouse. The apartment was dark, like a dungeon. We had no furniture. There was no running water. We lived on top of each other. The landlord drank too much and would yell at us about nothing. We had a little joke among ourselves that he was such a drunk, his child’s very first spoken word was “alcohol.”
Adele and Chris, who had been in the mountains with my grandparents during the attack, eventually joined us. They brought along some money, which my grandparents had earned from selling a cow. Adele and Chris were disoriented. They didn’t know whether they should talk to us about what happened in the massacre. And they were heartbroken at losing Deborah.
They had endured their own problems on their journey to reunite with us. First, they walked for three days from the mountains to Uvira, where the Congolese promptly poisoned them in a restaurant. After that, they went to stay with a friend of the family in Burundi so they could get medical care. Then they took a bus to our apartment in Rwanda. It had taken them three weeks to get to us.
Sometimes we went for days with no food or water. I understood for the first time how it felt to experience real poverty. To wash our clothes and clean the dishes, we would get water from a nearby pond. But the pond was polluted, so my mom needed to boil the water. For drinking water, sometimes Mom managed to get a jug of tap water from neighbors, or I would be dispatched to sit beneath a leaking pipe connected to another home. The pipe was at the bottom of a hill, and I would walk down there and huddle with other poor people from the neighborhood, collecting drips of water. There were a lot of desperate people waiting to get that water, including kids my age and mothers with babies. Arguments would erupt. It felt mortifying and also humbling to be among those people waiting for drips. I realized there were so many people struggling to survive. We were not the only ones.
My dad tried to find a job, but there was no work for an undocumented refugee in Rwanda. We were foreigners again. We didn’t sound Rwandan since we had never lived there—or even visited there—until now. Ironically, people back home in Congo had called us Rwandan, but here in Rwanda, people called us Congolese. We didn’t fit in anywhere. We were stateless.
At night, Mom and Dad slept in the bedroom, and the rest of us slept on mats and blankets on the floor in the main room. Over time, my shaking started to get better. I was far away from where the attack had happened, so that helped, and also I didn’t hear gunfire at night. My parents would ask us to pray. Dad kept a written list of things we should pray for—food, money, education, jobs. I remember thinking: God is not going to suddenly drop us some food and money.
But my parents never gave up. I had never thought much about religion or God, despite having grown up Christian. Eventually, seeing the unwavering faith of my parents, I began to open myself up to the idea of God’s help. I prayed with Mom, morning and night. Sometimes we all prayed together as a family. Dad would call us together and pick someone to lead us in prayer. He liked to pick the younger kids.
“God listens more closely to children,” Mom said.
I hoped she was right. Maybe there really is some sort of higher power that can help us, I thought. I prayed all the time, even when I was alone. My faith began to deepen. I began to see that certain things were beyond my control, beyond my parents’ control. I put my faith in God.
That faith would soon be shaken.
TWELVE
MY PARENTS THOUGHT IT MIGHT CHEER ME up if I could escape from our hovel and visit a cousin who lived a few hours away in East Africa. My cousin was older than me, married with kids. I adored her. Whenever she came to visit us in Congo, she looked stylish and hip, with perfect hair and high heels, and she would let me play with her makeup. I felt a flicker of excitement—the first since the massacre—about the prospect of getting away.
Soon I was on my way. When I arrived, the kids in the family welcomed me, treating me like any other kid. They didn’t treat me like the girl who had just gone through a massacre. They made fun of me, which I appreciated—they didn’t act like I was going to break.
The massacre came up only briefly, when I was playing in the yard with the youngest daughter, who was around two years younger than me.
“So you had a little sister, right?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said abruptly, hoping we could move on. Her mother must have told her about Deborah.
“How old was she?”
“Six years old.”
“Do you miss her?”
“Yeah, I miss her.”
“
My mom said you’ll see her in heaven.”
I kept quiet, ending the conversation there. I think she understood that I did not want to talk about it.
One day, she and I were hanging out together in the house when her father told her to go to the market. I will call her Ganza, although that is not her real name; I am protecting her identity because of what happened next.
I said I would go with Ganza to the market, but her father said no, I should stay. I didn’t know why he wanted me to remain with him. Ganza headed out to do the shopping, and he and I were the only ones in the house.
As soon as his daughter left, he grabbed me and threw me onto his bed. I was shocked, confused. He kissed my face, hard, and rubbed himself up against me. In a panic, I pushed back and tried to fight him off. He was a strong man, and I was just a kid. He overpowered me and held me down, covering my mouth so I couldn’t scream. He continued to rub his body against mine. He tried taking off my shorts, but I shut my legs tightly. He moved his hands up my bare chest as he continued to silence my screams with unwanted kisses. I had no idea what to do. In a culture where men feel entitled to take women, I knew that if he was successful in raping me, I could be discarded by my family, forced to marry because I was no longer a virgin. In many cultures, including mine, young women who are sexually abused are often blamed and rejected by their communities.
He continued to lay unwanted kisses on me as I struggled to escape his grip.
“Stay quiet,” he said, as if I should lie there and let him take what he thought was his—my body.
And then, mercifully, we heard the front door. Ganza was home. He pushed me off the bed and I fell on the floor with a thud, crying. I had fought so hard that he had not managed to rape me. But the sexual assault at the hands of someone I loved and trusted left me shattered. I didn’t understand why a grown man would want to attack a kid. He had a beautiful wife, an adult woman with curves. I hadn’t even gone through puberty. And I had gone to this man’s home to recuperate from the massacre, from seeing my little sister shot dead. I was in the most vulnerable state imaginable. This man was supposed to help me, not rape me. He said to keep my mouth shut or I would be sorry.
How Dare the Sun Rise Page 6