How Dare the Sun Rise

by Sandra Uwiringiyimana

  In New York City, the head producer of the summit, Kyle Gibson, took me onstage, and I looked around at the enormous theater.

  “How many people will be here?” I asked. It looked like thousands of seats.

  “It will be filled up to the top—to the balcony!” Kyle said.

  I was nervous. I couldn’t eat anything. I kept pacing around. Princesse tried to calm me.

  “Just remember, people have never heard this story. They will be hanging on your every word,” she said. “People are here because they want to hear your story.”

  On the day of the event, the plan changed again. The producers said that I would not be speaking on the panel. Instead, I would be doing a one-on-one interview with talk show host Charlie Rose about my experience growing up in a conflict zone.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said to Princesse.

  It’s a good thing that I didn’t have much time to think about it. That night, I walked onstage, my heart thumping. I tried to keep my emotions under control. I have a little trick that I do when I’m nervous: I hold my fingers in my palm, concentrating on their movement, rather than on my nerves. It helps keep me centered.

  The lights came up and I sat across from Charlie Rose onstage. Stay calm, I told myself. My insides were in knots.

  “You’re wise beyond your age,” Charlie said. “I think you’re still a teenager. What is it that’s important, that you know better than anybody in this room?”

  As I gathered my thoughts, a summit worker scurried onstage and handed Charlie a bottle of water. He chuckled and apologized for the disruption, saying he had a cold. I loosened up a bit.

  “Well, I know that hatred doesn’t solve a thing,” I said. “I know that justice needs to be fought for. It needs to be demanded. I know that it can come from anyone, even from a teenager like myself.”

  The audience clapped. Princesse was right: They wanted to hear my story.

  My portraits flashed on a big screen overhead. Charlie asked me about the people in the pictures, and I described a little girl in a green dress named Evony. “She’s adorable,” I said, and Charlie agreed. The audience laughed. “She currently lives in Albany, New York. When I see her, I see a little girl who can’t speak for herself. When I look at her, it reminds me that I need to go out there and share the story for little girls like Evony who can’t tell it, or who have seen things that no little girl should ever have to experience.” The audience clapped again. “She just makes me want to fight for justice, so that no little girl or little boy, or anyone that age—or anyone, for that matter—would have to experience this.”

  I powered my way through it. I don’t know how. I was so relieved when I finished, I barely even heard what Charlie was saying when he asked me a final question: Would I like to introduce the next speaker—Angelina Jolie—to the audience?

  No one had told me I would be introducing Angelina!

  “Sure?” I said.

  And then I was doing it, introducing Angelina to a crowd of thousands. She came to the stage, looking beautiful in a white silk blazer. I thanked her for her work on behalf of refugees, saying she had really helped people like me. She hugged me, and I could see that she was crying. “Thank you, Sandra,” she said.

  I made my way backstage, thinking: Did that just happen? My sister Princesse embraced me, as did the producers and Charlie Rose. He gave me his card, saying to stay in touch. Princesse told me that Angelina had been crying backstage while she listened to my life story.

  A friend of mine started a Twitter account for me that night. People began tweeting at me. The next night, I attended an event related to the summit, the DVF Awards, hosted by fashion designer and women’s rights advocate Diane von Furstenberg. She’s a big deal, but I had never heard of her until that evening. The event was held at the United Nations. I had to go alone because we ran out of time to get the necessary security clearance for Princesse. I made my way through the security line and the winding halls of the UN compound, until I reached a corner room where the event would be held. There was a table of place cards at the entrance, and I found my name. I noticed a place card for Oprah Winfrey.

  “Oh my God,” I said to the woman sitting at the table. “Is that the Oprah Winfrey?”

  “Yup, that’s the one!” she said.

  I walked into the room, which had been converted from an office space into a fabulous nightclub for the evening, with pink spotlights, zebra-print sofas, palm trees, cocktails, and a delicious Indian buffet. Diane von Furstenberg was honoring powerful women at the event, including Oprah. I was standing there, taking in the scene, when Oprah walked in, glowing in a long green dress, surrounded by an entourage. Some girls were trying to take selfies, maneuvering themselves so Oprah would appear in the background of their shots.

  And then someone was introducing me to Oprah, explaining that I had spoken at the summit. I thought I was in a dream. Oprah asked me my name and I rattled it off quickly. I was sweating; I was dying. I couldn’t grasp the fact that I was talking to Oprah face-to-face. The place was loud, thumping with music and voices, and she asked me to repeat my name three times until she got it. I managed to tell her I was from Congo. Then she got pulled in another direction. In addition to receiving an award, she introduced another award recipient, Jaycee Dugard, the young woman who had been kidnapped as a child and spent eighteen years locked up in the backyard of a pedophile.

  Still reeling, I sat down next to a young woman and told her I liked her dress. She turned out to be singer Ingrid Michaelson, and she was performing at the event. She dedicated her first song to me. Another surreal moment. I met young activists from around the world that night—a girl who had started an all-female internet café in Afghanistan; a girl who had launched a major anti-bullying campaign in America.

  On Monday, I went back to school like normal. But it was a new normal. The school had posted a notice about the summit on Facebook. People had watched the live-stream video from the event. Now everyone knew my deepest, darkest secrets. People came up to me, bursting with comments and questions.

  “You’re so brave.”

  “What was it like to meet Angelina?”

  “I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through.”

  I didn’t know many of the kids who approached me. But suddenly, they knew me, or thought they did. It was odd that people knew something about me when I knew nothing about them.

  After that, all kinds of things happened. Humanitarian groups reached out to me, asking me to get involved. My photo exhibit began traveling to colleges around New York, mainly through word of mouth. Student organizations would hear about it and talk to school officials about bringing the exhibit to campus. I heard from old friends and relatives in Africa on Facebook. And I got messages from strangers around the world. I felt honored, and overwhelmed.

  I heard from people in Kenya, Uganda, and Mozambique. People in a camp in Mozambique said they were Congolese Banyamulenge, just like me. “Can you help us?” they asked. I wanted to help them escape the camps. I realized they thought I was an influential figure in America, which of course I was not. I was a high school student. I’m sure people thought I lived a glamorous life in the States, hobnobbing with celebrities in the land where only good things happen. If only they knew.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  FIVE YEARS AFTER MY FAMILY MOVED TO America, we had a major milestone: We were allowed to apply for United States citizenship. We had never been considered citizens of any country. We had always been stateless—not citizens of Congo, not citizens of Rwanda. To get citizenship, my parents and siblings had to study a list of facts about American history, presidents, and politics, and then take a test. I was seventeen years old at the time, which meant I didn’t have to take the test because I was under the age of eighteen—I would become a citizen when my parents did.

  I watched everyone do their homework for the test, using the materials provided by officials. Every day my parents listened to audio recordings of questions and
answers: How many senators are in Congress? What are the three branches of government? They would play the questions over and over—at home, in the car, everywhere. It was kind of amusing, and also heartening, hearing my parents recite the branches of government in their broken English. They studied so hard.

  Everyone passed the test. And for the first time in my life, I became a citizen of a country. I got a New York state ID. It was the first thing I owned that proved I exist.

  It also meant that my family could vote—for the first time ever, anywhere. The concept of voting was foreign to us. Since we were not considered citizens in Congo, we could not vote. And even if we could, the system was so corrupt, it would have been futile. I couldn’t believe that I would actually have a say in who makes the laws in America. My political views were beginning to take shape, and the more I learned about America, the more liberal I became. Sometimes I talked to my parents about my views, and theirs. Back home in Africa, my parents would have considered themselves conservative. I talked to them about the difference between liberals and conservatives in America, especially when it comes to issues of immigration, women, and human rights. They listened and learned with me. I became interested in laws that help immigrants in this country. This country was built on immigrants, after all. I also became interested in laws that protect human rights.

  My senior year of high school, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Florida. I watched the news unfold on TV with my mom: Trayvon, a black high school student, was walking home from a convenience store when a man named George Zimmerman began following him, deeming him suspicious. A scuffle ensued, and Zimmerman shot and killed him, claiming self-defense. Trayvon was unarmed. Mom and I both cried as we heard the story. The coverage immediately turned political, but at the heart of the story was this boy’s grief-stricken parents. I kept thinking about his mom and dad, and how their lives would never be the same after losing their young son in such a violent way.

  At school, the black girls were on top of the news, and we discussed it every day at lunch in the cafeteria. They followed every detail of the trial. Zimmerman was found not guilty.

  It was another lesson on what it meant to be black in America. It’s a harsh lesson to learn as a teen.

  At the same time, it reminded me that there had never been any trial on behalf of my sister Deborah, or on behalf of any of my people who were killed. Our families had no chance to even try to get justice.

  When I turned eighteen, I voted for Barack Obama. I was excited to be a part of politics in America, to have a voice. That year, I also won a Princeton Prize in Race Relations due to my photo exhibit and leadership at school. One of my teachers at Mercy, Miss Clasquin, had recommended me. She was a strong, fiery woman, and she always pushed me hard. I went to the awards conference at Princeton University and met kids from all over the country—American Muslims, Native Americans, African Americans. They shared their experiences, and I learned that there was so much discrimination toward all kinds of minorities in America. I hadn’t realized how deeply rooted and wide-ranging it was. One black girl, a high school cheerleader, told me that the white captain of the squad was always talking down to her, as if she were a homeless person, when her parents were both doctors. Another black woman said she went to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy one day, and the clerk asked if she was on food stamps. I could see that I was just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding race in America.

  I could also see that American kids had a hard time understanding that I was American. Kids at school would ask, “What are you?”

  What am I? “I’m an American,” I would say.

  They would look at me skeptically. “Come on, what are you?”

  When you hear questions like that, it makes you feel like you don’t belong, like you have no right to claim American citizenship. I think it’s why refugee kids often develop low expectations for their lives. Even as citizens, they feel like outsiders.

  “Are you asking where I was born?” I would say. “If so, I was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But now, I am an American.”

  What I often wanted to say was, “I’m a human being. What are you?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE SUMMER I GRADUATED FROM HIGH school, my sister Princesse planned to marry. She had met a lovely man from our tribe, and she decided to hold the wedding in Rwanda. I was excited to see Africa again, and to see my grandparents for the first time since I was a baby. I had been so young when I last saw them, in the mountains of South Kivu where my parents grew up, that I could not remember them. As my family planned the trip back to our homeland, I began to think about visiting a refugee camp. So many of my people were stuck in camps in Rwanda, displaced and stateless, living out their lives in tents. Some had reached out to me on Facebook, gaining access to computers wherever they could, like at internet cafés in nearby towns. I imagine that it took them forever to walk to those towns. And then they would have to find a way to pay for the internet access. I wanted to connect.

  I floated the idea to Mom one afternoon while we were making tea in our kitchen. I tried to keep the conversation light, as I do when I say something Mom won’t like. She looked bewildered.

  “Why would you want to go back to a refugee camp?” she asked. “What if you have a mental breakdown?”

  It was a fair question. I might have a meltdown. Mom probably didn’t think I was serious.

  “I would never go back to a camp,” she said. I could understand that. She had been shot during the massacre, left for dead. She managed to walk away, but her youngest child did not.

  She continued to cook, and I stopped talking about it. Mom didn’t want to remember that hell. Me, I felt differently. Memories of Deborah and the massacre haunted me, lurking in the back of my mind. I wanted to conquer that fear. I wanted to visit a camp like the one where my family was attacked, to face down my past and see my people, forgotten by the world. Here in America, I had hope. I had a scholarship for college in the fall, where I would live on a beautiful campus, studying subjects I love. In America, I had books, and a bed to sleep on. I had a future. The night the man held a gun to my head, I thought I had no future. On that night, I said good-bye to my life. It’s important to remember.

  And also, it didn’t feel right to stay away from a refugee camp because someone had attacked my family. People living in these isolated places need to know the outside world cares.

  I decided that the only way my attackers could claim victory over me was if I let fear rule my life. So I made up my mind: I would go back to a camp. Princesse and Adele said they would go with me. They felt the same as I did. We picked a UN refugee camp near Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, where many of my people have been displaced due to conflict in Congo. My sisters and I wanted to go by ourselves, not in any official capacity with an organization, just us—arriving as friends, not foreigners. We planned to quietly visit the camp and talk with people about their lives. But my mother’s concerns were valid: I didn’t know if I would be able to cope. There was a chance I would panic when I saw the camp and need to turn right around. I had no idea how I would feel in that moment, but I knew one thing: I needed to find out.

  When we landed in Kigali, I could see immediately that things had changed. Paved roads and highways stretched before us. There was a glossy new airport, towering skyscrapers. The city had evolved since I had last seen it, during those impoverished years when we lived in Rwanda after the massacre. Back then, more than five years earlier, the capital city was mired in corruption, with crumbling roads and buildings, slums in the middle of the city. Now on the city streets, the kids looked like American kids, busy with their cell phones, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook. Yet a few hours outside their city, children are living in a different universe, a refugee camp where water is the prized possession.

  Before my sisters and I went to the camp, Mom warned us to be careful. “Don’t spend the night,” she said. She didn’t understand why we were going,
but she didn’t try to stop us.

  To get to the camp, my sisters and I took an early morning bus across the countryside, passing vast green valleys and hills, miles of tea fields, roadside vendors with baskets of fruit, boxy rural homes made of clay and cement. I remembered my own yellow home back when I was a girl in Uvira, where I played in the yard with my pet monkey. I loved seeing Africa again, speaking Swahili, not having to think about whether I was using the right words in English. There is something incredibly relaxing about Africa to me. Americans are always moving, always going somewhere, even if they have nothing important to do when they get there. In Africa, you’re generally home with your family, telling stories, making fun of one another, laughing.

  The bus ride was long, and it reminded me of how isolated the refugee camps are. They are completely removed from society.

  Some three bumpy hours later, we got off at a dusty corner. Men on motorbikes were hanging around by the side of the road, waiting to give people rides up a mountainside to the refugee camp. We agreed to pay a trio of young men to take us to the camp, and they handed us helmets. My sisters and I got on the backs of the bikes and sped away, holding on to our drivers.

  It was the last week of July, dry and dusty, and I could feel the sun burning my skin. My jeans were soon covered in dust; my purple boots, brown. I covered my mouth with a scarf to protect myself from the dust. The road was so rugged, my helmet flew off when we went over a bump, and I had to hop off to retrieve it. Vendors dotted the roadside, staring as we passed. We had to stop and walk a few times, traversing rickety wooden bridges stretching across ponds. Women washed clothes in the ponds; children collected the water. My mind flew back to a memory of myself fetching water as a girl in the camp, but I didn’t have time to think about it—we were heading toward an ominous rocky mountain that looked as if it went up into the clouds. As we hit the mountainside and drove higher and higher, my driver had to get off the bike sometimes and push it over the terrain. When I got back on the bike with him, I worried that we could roll backward, tumbling down the hill. I held on tight.