How Dare the Sun Rise

by Sandra Uwiringiyimana

  I didn’t keep my mouth shut, at least not at first. Almost immediately, I told Ganza he had attacked me. Her response was devastating.

  “Sandra, my father would never do anything like that,” she said, in a chilling, matter-of-fact tone.

  She didn’t believe me, or maybe she didn’t want to believe me. She was young, around nine years old. She could not accept that her father would do such a disgusting thing. I’m sure it made no sense to her, just as it made no sense to me. But it happened. She brushed me off and moved on to the next topic. We never discussed it again. She was the last person I told.

  I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed, even though I had done nothing wrong. I thought that if I told my cousin what her husband had done, she wouldn’t believe me either. And anyway, rape was not something we discussed in my culture. There was a culture of silence surrounding the crime. There wasn’t even really a word for “rape” in my native language. The closest phrasing would be something like, “He forcibly took me.” It was a heavy load for a child to keep inside. But I kept it to myself. I locked it away.

  I had to stay in that awful house for three more months. I made sure I was always in the company of someone else, never alone with that man. He pretended that nothing had happened. He did not attack me again, but I lay awake in fear at night, remembering the assault. He had shaken my trust to the core. I didn’t know who to trust now. Strange men had killed my sister; a man I knew had attacked me. My life, my spirit, were crumbling.

  When I finally went back to my family, I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I buried the experience deep down inside. But it kept rearing its ugly head, coming out in different ways. My attacker’s actions changed the way I looked at older men, and at male relatives. If an older uncle or male cousin tried to hug me, I got fidgety and nervous. My mom noticed, but clearly did not know why. She probably thought it was one of my quirks. I tried to make sure I did not look attractive if older men came to our home.

  I never did tell my mother, or anyone at all, about the attack. I thought I would keep that secret inside of me until I died.

  I am telling the story for the first time now—in this book. It is incredibly difficult for me to tell this story. I thought for a long time about whether I should do it. I thought about how it would be painful for the man’s children if they were to find out. I considered how it could hurt their relationship with their father. The man’s wife has since left him, but the kids would not want to hear that their father is a pedophile. I thought about how they might not believe me, how they might call me a liar. I don’t know if Ganza remembers the day I told her, all those years ago; my guess is that she buried it. She would be upset to hear this now. My community might be upset as well, because I am breaking the culture of silence. They might not understand why I would tell this story. My family might worry about my divulging something so personal.

  But it is not my responsibility to protect a predator. I’ve stayed silent for nearly a decade, never telling a soul. He had counted on that. He had counted on the silence of a child, confused and embarrassed by the actions of a trusted adult. But I do not need to protect him any longer. He did this. He is a sexual predator, a pedophile who attacked a little girl. If it causes problems in his family to hear it, then he should have thought about that before he tried to rape me. I am the victim. He is the predator. If people want to blame me for telling the truth, that’s their problem.

  I have decided to tell this story because I have learned that I do have a voice. I do not want to be a part of this culture of silence. This book is my voice. I am telling my life story in these pages, and so I want to tell my full, authentic life story. So many girls around the world—refugee girls in particular—suffer in silence after being sexually assaulted by someone they know. Most rapes happen at the hands of a relative or friend, not a stranger. I want girls to know that they have the power to speak out. They don’t have to stay quiet. No matter what culture or country you are from, there will always be pressure to remain silent, to never tell. But you don’t have to protect sexual predators. By speaking up, you are standing up for yourself. And you might be preventing it from happening again. Tell people what happened. The predators expect you to stay silent. You can prove them wrong.

  THIRTEEN

  BACK WITH MY FAMILY IN OUR DIM LITTLE shanty in Rwanda, we continued our struggle to survive. There were many nights without dinner. My mom couldn’t afford to buy much food at the market, usually just a half pound of beans, a few ingredients to make gravy, and some cornstarch to make kaunga, a traditional doughlike dish. We would each roll a piece of the kaunga into a little ball, then dip it in gravy, until it was gone. We ate this all the time. Alex made light of the situation, teasing my mom.

  “Mom, here’s an idea,” he said. “What if one day you skipped the beans and bought a half pound of meat instead?”

  “Alex,” Mom said. “You think I don’t want to buy you meat?”

  But then she thought about what he said, and she tried something new: She bought a small amount of chicken—a quarter pound—and mixed it with beans and cabbage. It was her own recipe, and a welcome change.

  “This actually tastes better than beef!” Alex said.

  Then he had another brilliant idea: He suggested that he and I should get more food than anyone else, since we were the youngest and had been eating for the least amount of time. “We need to catch up!” he said.

  Alex always made us laugh, even on those dinnerless nights.

  Sometimes a neighbor would stop by and bring us food or money. And one of my cousins in Burundi, Deborah Rose, helped as well. She started a small business selling clothes and brought us money when she could. Once when she came to visit, Mom sang a song about how God lifts people from the garbage and cleans and dresses them. My cousin found this song annoying.

  “God doesn’t do all that for you,” she said. “How could you be singing that? You had such a good life, and look where you are now.”

  Still, Mom kept the faith. She believed that a lot of miracles happened in that home to keep us alive. My own faith had wavered. It was hard for me to see God at the time.

  But Mom was right. Princesse got a scholarship for college in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. She also got a job at a government minister’s office, which was rare for an undocumented immigrant, but she had impressed her employers at the interview. She started bringing us money she earned on the job.

  My family got involved with a local church, and my dad formed a choir with the kids in the congregation. We began singing in churches around the region. Dad suggested that we raise money from the performances to help educate kids from our tribe who had survived the massacre, and so we did.

  Around this time, a man at church befriended my dad and took an interest in our family. He came to our home and talked with us, asking questions about our life. As it turned out, he was a director of a boarding school.

  When I heard him say this, I said, “I need to go to school. I miss school!”

  Mom gave me the stink eye for blurting out my personal desires to someone we hardly knew.

  “You’re not in school?” the man asked.

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t been to school for a long time.”

  “We have scholarships at our school for smart students,” he said.

  “I’m the smartest student!” I said, unable to contain myself. “I’m really smart! I promise you, I would do well!”

  Then my mom backed me up. “It’s true,” she said. “Sandra was always at the top of her class.”

  This kind man helped Alex and me get scholarships. Before long, my brother and I were on our way to boarding school, which was about three hours away by bus.

  On the morning Mom escorted us to the bus stop, I could barely control my emotions. I was so eager to get to that school. Mom was busy giving us all kinds of advice.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Study hard. Always tell the principal if something is wrong.”

  I no
dded. “Yes, yes, yes.” I couldn’t wait for the bus to come and take me to school, finally.

  And then I was back in uniform—this time, khaki shorts and a white shirt. The school was small and intimate, perched in the mountains. The weather was cooler than we were used to, especially in the mornings and evenings, but it was a heavenly oasis. We spoke French there and fit right in. Alex and I made friends quickly.

  I stayed in touch with my parents by phone and saw them on trimester breaks. My older siblings Chris and Adele went back to school as well. And Dad got a job in the church. We were coming back to life.

  Toward the end of 2005, about a year and a half after the massacre, Dad heard a rumor about a United Nations resettlement program for people who had survived the massacre at our camp in Gatumba. There was a chance we could move to America. But it would mean a series of interviews with UN workers in Burundi, the home of the massacre, and my mom didn’t want to go. There were too many horrendous memories there. She also found it hard to believe that we could get to America with the help of white people; it seemed like an impossible dream. I was equally skeptical. I didn’t think anyone cared that my people had been killed.

  “Why don’t we just find out if this thing is real?” Dad said.

  “If it’s real, why don’t they come to us?” Mom said.

  In 2006, my dad went to the first two interviews in Burundi alone.

  After the interviews, he rounded us all up, including my reluctant mom, to travel to Burundi for the next round of interviews. Dad convinced Mom to go by telling her, “If it doesn’t work out, we’ll come back. But if it does work out, then our kids deserve a better life, don’t they? We should give them that opportunity. Why not try?”

  At the UN office in Burundi, we sat in a crowded room with other families from the massacre, our first reunion. It felt good to see my people, but sad too. Everyone had lost loved ones, and no one looked quite the same as they had in our happier years in Uvira. It was like an eerie dream, seeing faces of ghosts from the past. People looked older, although not much time had passed.

  The workers in the office were all white, and I saw an obese woman for the first time. I had never seen anyone so heavy. An American, she wore a blue shirt and black pants, and she spoke in a no-nonsense tone. She rattled off a list of questions with the help of a translator.

  “How many people are in your family?”

  “How old is everyone?”

  “Tell me everyone’s birth dates.”

  Then she asked, “How many people did you lose?”

  This question seemed so matter-of-fact, so emotionless. We had lost our beloved Deborah. Her violent death had left a hole in our family that would never be repaired. We had lost cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends.

  I understood that the woman was doing her job. She was resettling people from our massacre, and she needed to make sure the right people were being relocated. But she did not seem to understand that we were grieving. Our world had been turned upside down, and now we had to retell our horror story. I saw no empathy; she was recording facts. My mom was having a difficult time talking about Deborah as if she were a statistic. After that, Mom said she didn’t want to go to America.

  My dad, however, said we should keep trying. We went in for another round of interviews, and this time, we were all separated in different rooms, with officials asking us questions individually. Since I was young, my mom was allowed to sit with me during my interview. I feared that if my answers didn’t match up precisely with those of my family, we would not get to go to America. I didn’t want to blow it for my family, although I still found it hard to believe that any of this was real. I didn’t know how to feel about moving to the States—I just knew that I needed to say consistent things and not mess up. But people don’t always recall the same details from traumatic situations. I had noticed this from the members of my own family: We were in the same massacre, but we sometimes had different recollections.

  An official asked me a long list of questions.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Who are your parents?”

  “How many siblings do you have? How old are they?”

  “What are their names?”

  “When did you go to the refugee camp in Gatumba?”

  “Where were you the night of the attack? Who were you with?”

  “Who survived?”

  I was nervous as I answered, even though I knew the answers well.

  My mom was nervous too, and she managed to mix up some of our birth dates. I was born on June 22, but in her anxiety-ridden state, Mom said it was June 1. Because of that, my birthday is now officially June 1.

  During this time, most of us stayed with relatives or friends in Burundi so we would be available for the interviews. Mom and Princesse stayed in Rwanda, traveling back and forth for the interviews. Mom wanted to spend as little time in Burundi as possible. Sometimes the UN officials would pay the rest of us a surprise visit in Burundi and ask questions about our family, again checking that we were who we said we were.

  “Where is everyone sleeping?” they would ask. “There don’t seem to be enough beds.”

  We would explain that when you lose everything, you can’t afford much of anything. This went on for months. We waited, answered questions, waited some more. You really have to want to get to America to put yourself through the process. Anyone who thinks it’s easy to get to the States as a refugee has no idea.

  Finally, we got the news: Our application had been accepted. We would be resettled in America. For me, it was a bittersweet moment. I knew we would have new opportunities in America. But at the same time, we would be leaving behind our life in Africa, everything we had ever known. We would be saying good-bye to people we loved—other families from the massacre who were still waiting to hear their fate. I had the uneasy feeling that we were abandoning them, as if we had the magic ticket and they did not. We did not know where we would be living in America. And we did not know the date of our move, so it still seemed like an unattainable concept, not a reality.

  As we awaited our departure date, we continued to live in our temporary circumstances, in limbo. I was staying with a family in Burundi, not going to school, and so I spent my time helping to babysit the kids in the family. For weeks, our move to America continued to feel unreal—until the officials took us to a health clinic, where we got tested for things like HIV and tuberculosis. That’s when we knew we were really going.

  My family began attending classes to learn about life in America. We watched videos and listened to advice from a caseworker, with the help of a translator. I didn’t learn much about America during these sessions: Mostly I learned that it was cold and snowy. We watched a lot of videos that showed piles of snow. I had never experienced snow before. I remember the translator giving us this piece of advice as well: “When you get to America, don’t stare at people. Don’t point.”

  I thought that was funny. As if we would go around staring and pointing at people!

  And then one day, we got some solid information on our departure for the States: Heritage would go first, and I would follow with my parents and Alex. Then Princesse and Chris would go. We were scheduled to go at different times, not as a family unit, because the UN handles people who are over the age of eighteen as individual cases. Since Alex, Adele, and I were under eighteen, we were grouped with our parents.

  In April 2007, my time came.

  My parents, Alex, Adele, and I packed our suitcases for the journey of our lives, not that we had much of anything to pack. Dad, who had saved the shirt and belt riddled with bullet holes from the massacre, left them behind.

  With our few bags of belongings, we went to a hotel in Burundi, where we stayed for a week with other families who would be relocated. It was our last week in Africa. We were finally going to America, to a city in New York called Rochester. Heritage would be there waiting for us.

  I didn’t really know how to picture America. I had no solid frame of refer
ence, no true mental image of the place. I had the general impression that in addition to being freezing cold and snowy all the time, it was a land where people were happy and rich. That’s the idea I had gotten from the UN caseworkers, and from anything I had ever seen on TV over the years. I also figured there were a lot of white people there. I had the feeling that nothing bad ever happened to people in America. The caseworkers painted a picture of America as a dream, the land of opportunity.

  I thought that once we got to America, everything would be fine. Little did I know.

  FOURTEEN

  THE AIRPLANE WAS HUGE, THE BIGGEST thing I had ever been inside of that was not a house. As my family boarded the enormous vessel, I had many burning questions for my parents.

  “Where do we pee?”

  “What about food?”

  A flight attendant showed us the bathrooms, and I thought: Where does the pee go when we’re in the sky? Does it land on people’s heads?

  Other questions churned in my brain. How are there lights on the plane? How can there be electricity in the sky? I didn’t see any wires, any outlets. I had never flown before. It was all a mystery.

  When the plane took off, the engines roared like a beast. As we sliced upward through the sky, I looked out the window at the vanishing ground below, and thought: Oh my god, we are going to fall. It seemed as if the plane was too heavy to fly. My dad looked out at the wings, with their flaps moving up and down.

  “I don’t think the wings are working!” he said.

  The plane began to rattle and rock from choppy air. Mom gripped her seat, bracing herself. The look on her face said: What have we gotten ourselves into?

  Once we rose above the clouds, no longer bumping around in the turbulence, the excitement set in and I started having fun. We were flying to a new life on the other side of the world.