by Lisa Shannon
I’m sure he won’t call today. Best not to wait around. Time to go for a run.
The phone rings; it’s my friend Lana. “Have you checked your email yet today?”
“Why?”
“Just do.”
I open my inbox to find a message presumably emailed to our entire guest list. Evite Reminder: Ted and Lisa’s Wedding.
Just so all of my friends and family really, really remember exactly what is not happening today. Mercifully, none of the recipients ever say a word.
Why mope? I leave for my run.
I get out of the car at the trailhead and stretch next to the two-lane road sandwiched between the river and the airport. It’s mostly used by truckers as a back route to industrial parks and freeways. I like it because the path is paved and flat. It’s my “I don’t feel like running” course.
I notice a man on a bicycle in the distance. I’ve learned how to distinguish recreational bike riders from the transient car thieves that comb isolated parking lots off this road. This guy is of the car thief variety so I stay near my car, waiting for him to pass. I don’t want to lose my stereo.
He doesn’t pass. He rides straight up to me and stops. He’s normal looking enough, but tattered and greasy around the edges in a way that reads transient. He blocks my way to the path and thrusts out his hand for me to shake.
“I’m James.”
“Hello, James,” I say, keeping my hands to myself.
“What’s wrong? You won’t shake my hand?” he says in an unsettling, sharp voice. “What’s your name? Why won’t you shake my hand?”
Alarm bells start to blare in my head. Isolated road, no clear path forward or back. Truckers whizzing by, oblivious.
I hold up my hands and gesture towards the path as if to say, “Back off.”
This does not fly.
“What? You’re too good to shake my hand?” He thrusts out his hand again in confrontation. “Just shake my hand and I’ll leave you alone. Hi. I’m James.”
I shake his hand.
“I’m Lisa. Nice to meet you.”
He doesn’t let go of my hand and barks, “What’s my name?”
“James.”
“What’s my name again?”
“James.”
“See? Was that so hard?”
He lets go of my hand, turns his bike around and begins to walk away. I take a few steps toward the trail. He stops, turns back and spits, “I hate people like you.”
A dead calm comes over me. This is not the nonsensical raving of a mad-man, but cool, palpable rage. Staring at me, he says, “I hate women.”
I remain detached, as if watching a child throw a temper tantrum. In an effort to soothe him, I start to say, “I’m sorry you are in so much pain.” But all I can get out is “I’m sorry” before he interrupts, shouting, “Sorry? No. No. You better get out of here!”
I’m calculating. He’s blocking my path to the car. If I start to run up the trail even a hundred yards, I will not be visible to traffic. I will be completely isolated. He could easily follow me on his bike and attack. With no way forward and no way back, I stand still.
“I said you better get out of here—I’ll hurt you,” he threatens.
I stare at him with icy reserve. He is testing me, playing at controlling me, and he’s clearly aggravated that I refuse to obey. If I turn my back to run, it will be an invitation to chase.
I back away, moving steadily toward the trail with my eyes on him, as he shouts louder and louder. “You better run! Don’t walk. Run! You better run! Now!”
Then he spews like a drill sergeant. “Run now! Run now! Run now!”
I peel around toward the road and walk directly onto the two-lane highway, holding up my hands like a prisoner surrendering. A yellow semitruck slows and stops in front of me. I’m safe, blocking traffic, watching James slink away on his bike and disappear down the road.
Driving home, I think about all the brides who shape-shift into Bridezilla on their big day. It rains, or the orange-peach on the cake clashes with the pink-peach on the flower girls’ sashes, and they declare, “Crisis!” I want to tell them it could be worse, much worse. I wonder if today qualifies as the Worst Wedding Day Ever. Wedding called off. Sitting here in Portland instead of Italy. Groom left for Berlin. Bride accosted by a sociopath.
I’ll joke with friends about it in the weeks that follow, until one of them will point out, “That’s not the worst wedding day ever. The worst is to have the day go perfectly, but you’ve married the wrong guy.” Well put, though we are both wrong. It won’t be until I get to Congo that I will hear about the worst wedding day ever.
Today, walking into the kitchen door of our little Victorian bungalow, I’m not amused. I try to call my mom, Lana, even Ted in Berlin. No one is home. I sit on the prop couch in my empty house. It doesn’t feel like home. It feels more like a disease.
Meanwhile, Congo has become magnetic. I don’t care what I might lose. Numbness has made room for craving. I want to tear my life to shreds and see what’s left.
CHAPTER SIX
I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke
BRITISH AIRWAYS FLIGHT 0065, London to Nairobi. I wake up on one of the empty four-seat “couches” in coach (lucky for me, it’s not a big week for African pleasure holidays), untangle myself from the synthetic blankets, and check out the seatback flight map. We’re in African airspace. I study the territory: Mogadishu, Darfur Mountains, Kigali, Lake Kivu.
We land in Nairobi at night, when it’s too dark to get a sense of the place. At sunrise, on the ride back to the airport to catch my plane to Rwanda, I notice that beyond the stretch of modern office buildings, hotels, and high-end car dealerships lining the main road, there’s a scattering of windswept trees. I decide I love Africa. The feeling builds as the plane takes off and cruises above long stretches of Kenyan and Tanzanian savannah, rolling red hills, and the stunning Lake Victoria, which stretches out like an ocean. When we’re flying over it, there’s only water visible in all directions. I’m shamelessly excited. I scan to see if the other passengers share my enthusiasm. It’s all I can do to not squeal with delight to everyone in the plane, “We’re in Africa!”
Instead, I peel myself away from the window and read the Lonely Planet guide to Rwanda, tagging pages that describe the genocide memorials I hope to visit, refreshing my memory and filling in the gaps by reading the history section. Rwanda is a fitting place to begin my journey because the war in Congo began with the 1994 genocide there.
For hundreds of years, Rwanda has been comprised of three ethnic groups: Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. Historically, these ethnic lines were loose, and intermarriage was common. But Belgian colonists wanted ethnicity in writing. They measured people’s noses, counted their livestock, and issued ethnic identification cards accordingly, grooming Tutsis to be the ruling class, despite their minority status. There were several outbursts of major ethnic violence over the course of the twentieth century, but tension reached an all-time high in 1994. When the plane carrying Rwanda’s Hutu president was shot down that April, Hutu extremists vowed to kill all the “cockroaches,” as they called Tutsis, igniting a four-month bloodbath. Hutu extremists, known as Interahamwe, slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The international community did not intervene.
It was ultimately a Tutsi-led rebel army that secured the country in July 1994 and ended the genocide. When the Tutsis took over the government of Rwanda, two million refugees flooded over the border into what was then known as Zaire (and is today known as the Demoratic Republic of the Congo). Among them were countless thousands of Interahamwe—Hutu genocidaires—who found safe harbor by melting into refugee camps that were facilitated by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). While regret-steeped aid dollars from around the world poured in to rebuild Rwanda, no effort was made to identify—and bring to justice—the thousands of Interahamwe hiding in Congo’s refugee camps.
They soon became the catalyst for Africa’s Worl
d War.
AS THE PLANE DESCENDS, we see the landscape: lush, rolling hills dotted with a patchwork of postage stamp-size farms, clay huts, tin roofs, and banana plantations.
Rwanda is beautiful. The city of Kigali rolls out across steep hills. Its roads are lined with flowering trees and filled with orderly traffic. Everything seems in good repair. The 1994 genocide seems incomprehensible.
Though I don’t stay at the InterContinental, a.k.a. Hotel Rwanda, my hotel is a lovely four-star place with gift shops and terraced gardens; it’s filled with African dignitaries and European businesspeople.
I want to visit the genocide memorial schools, where bodies and bones are still on display, or the churches, where all the personal effects of those killed have been left exactly as they were at the time of the massacre.
After settling in, I hire a taxi to go to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, abandoning hopes of visiting the churches after the driver quotes a $200 fare for a two-hour drive. We pull up to a large cement building that’s surrounded by linear pathways and gardens. The memorial center was built on top of a mass grave that holds more than 250,000 genocide victims. Massive cement slabs run across the front; a metal opening allows visitors to peek inside at coffins decorated with crosses piled on top of each other. A couple of floral arrangements wrapped with bows and cellophane crackle in the breeze as the faint voices of children chatting with their neighbors drift in from the hills.
Inside, I walk past walls filled with snapshots of victims. With each photo of a child, a few details of his or her life are listed:
Francine Murengezi Ingabire
Age: 12
Favorite sport: Swimming
Favorite food: Eggs and chips
Favorite drink: Milk and Fanta Tropical
Best friend: Her elder sister Claudette
Cause of death: Hacked by machete
I wonder if Congo will ever have a memorial like this.
On the drive home, I chat up my taxi driver, who speaks some English. I tell him my destination. He volunteers, “I studied in Goma and Bukavu in the 1970s, but I’ve not returned since.” He pauses for a moment. “Laurent Nkunda is over there straightening it all out for us. He’s taking care of that situation.”
I know about Laurent Nkunda. His attacks have been in the headlines. But my taxi driver’s comment is hardly a shock. Nkunda is widely known to be backed by Rwanda. He’s the leader of the rebel group the National Congress for the Defense of People (CNDP), claiming to protect his fellow Congolese Tutsis from Interahamwe aggression. But his militia is known for the same atrocities as any other, and the presence of Nkunda’s CNDP has resulted in the displacement of more than 750,000 people.
My driver chews on his thought for a moment, then adds, “In Congo, they hate Rwandans. If we go there, they kill us.”
We are quiet for a while.
He says, “You should let me drive you to Bukavu. Forget your flight.”
I picture myself crouched in the back of this taxi as we crawl across the border into Congo, trying to be inconspicuous in a car with Rwandan plates that’s boldly labeled KIGALI CITY CAB.
“I will take you! It is no problem!”
“You are kind. But no thanks.”
At dinner on the hotel terrace, I watch the other guests. Much to my relief, I notice a woman traveler sitting by herself. Women travel by themselves in Africa all the time. I’ ll be fine. Several minutes pass, then a male colleague joins her.
In my brief stay in the hotel and around Kigali, I don’t see another lone woman traveler.
All the same, by morning I am starting to feel confident while listening to the birds, enjoying the relaxing breeze, and having a lovely breakfast amid flower gardens. Watching businesspeople in their tropics-friendly, ohso-colonial business wear, I think, Rwanda, easy. Africa, no problem. Orchid Safari Club is probably a lot like this four-star hotel, with terraced views and lovely buffets. Bukavu might be an awful lot like Kigali—clean, organized, with calm, happy people. Maybe everyone is being dramatic when they talk about Congo. Maybe it will be no big deal.
I stop at the front desk to check out. A fellow guest, an older gentleman who seems to be a seasoned African traveler, nods hello. “How’s your stay going so far?”
“Brief. I’m flying to Congo in a couple of hours.”
He remarks flatly, “Well, that will be a different experience, won’t it.”
WHEN I LEAVE THE HOTEL, the doorman calls a taxi for me. I wait by the curb next to a white South African with red, leathery skin who is wearing a khaki safari vest—a cue that he is an old-school African journalist. I’m not surprised when he introduces himself as a television producer. He’s shooting a documentary about Francophile Africa for South African television. My taxi driver, a former employee at the French Embassy, is among his subjects. I agree to allow his Rwandan crew to ride along with me to the airport. While we wait, he asks, “Where are you headed?”
“Congo.”
I stare ahead, waiting for the requisite sizing up. But standing side by side on the curb, we both maintain a forward gaze. He’s quiet, then offers, “That place . . . Be careful. You can’t trust anyone. Last spring, I was in Goma for three days.”
I continue to stare forward.
He asks, “How long are you staying?”
“Five and a half weeks.”
On the short drive, my destination catches the camera crew’s attention. “The Congo, huh?”
“What’s your take on the conflict?” I ask.
“The Congo people brought it on themselves. They harbored genocidaires , you know. They welcomed killers into their country. So, now they have problems. Whose fault is that?”
Congo’s bad karma aside, it is hard to argue the facts. I don’t. The cameraman chimes in. “We have a saying here in Rwanda about the Congo: The end of logic. That is where Congo begins.”
THE TINY AIRCRAFT ascends and spends thirty-five minutes bouncing around the clouds before descending to a tiny landing strip carved out of a hilltop on the Rwandan side of the Congo border. It is a picturesque, remote African airport with a simple fence, one red-and-white cement building, and a few rusty hangars in the distance.
My first look across the border to Congo is a stunning view of Lake Kivu and the rolling blue hills beyond. I collect my bags and leave the airport.
I have made arrangements with my “Congolese twin,” Christine, to pick me up, but when I come out no one is waiting. I sit down on my bags, watching as other passengers are picked up or wander down the hill. An airport guard lounges nearby. A woman swings her keys, following behind schoolchildren in red dresses and backpacks who walk holding hands.
Kelly is arriving in Bukavu today too. To be honest, it’s a relief to know there will be a friendly face from home waiting on the other side of Lake Kivu. She flew into Goma, via Kinshasa, with a church delegation led by a California-based Congolese expat, and we have plans to meet up as soon as I arrive.
Finally, a Range Rover with a Women for Women logo pulls up. Christine hops out for an embrace of welcome. “Karibu! Welcome!”
She seems to have changed since we met in the States; perhaps it’s because I’m seeing her now in her native environment. Her stature is striking. She carries herself with the dignity of African royalty. The ongoing half-joke at Women for Women is that Christine could someday become the first woman president of DR Congo, and it doesn’t seem so much a stretch. Her wedding is only a month away and she is in the thick of planning a celebration for five hundred guests.
We drive down the tree-lined, paved road that runs above Lake Kivu. Christine explains, “There was a problem with Orchid Safari Club. They are fully booked with a group for the next few nights, so I’ve made arrangements for you to stay elsewhere.”
I have been emphatically warned by Ricki, a staff member at Women for Women headquarters. “Orchid is the only place to stay,” she told me. “Nowhere else is secure.”
It was a major point of discussi
on, actually, when Kelly announced she wanted to do a homestay for a few days. When I ran the idea past a few veteran Congo travelers, they all said the same thing. No way. Not safe.
“What is Kelly doing in Congo, anyway?” they all asked.
In her own words, I told them, she wants to “cry with the women. To grieve with them.”
My policy-wonk friends scoffed, but hey, more power to her. There will be plenty of time to sing “Kumbaya” with the people. And I’m happy to be with a friend and split expenses. I do, however, have a tangible goal. Congo needs a movement. We only raised US$60,000 in the second year of Run for Congo Women—nowhere close to the million dollars I hope will spark a movement. But if we can put a human face on the horror, and document all facets of the conflict in a film, we would have ammunition for advocacy meetings. We could raise that million dollars through screenings and house parties, and generate a buzz that could ignite the grassroots movement for Congo. A good omen landed in my email in-box just before my departure: A producer from a major news network is interested in an American angle on the conflict. They might want my story and footage!
Goals aside, the security threats are real. Before I left, Ricki also impressed on me how quickly things can go wrong when she filled me in on her visit to Congo.
“We were there in April 2006,” she told me. “Zainab was shooting follow-up footage for Oprah, and I was supposed to show our program to a judge for the Conrad Hilton Award, a major humanitarian prize. The first day, Zainab went to the Bukavu ghetto to follow up and we set out to a rural area to meet women.
“We didn’t make it.
“We got in the car with the driver and Christine, who has four different cell phones, one just for security updates. She got a call. We couldn’t go down this street, a main road in Bukavu. Students were protesting. It was Easter break and the police shot someone. Protesters marched with his body over to the governor’s house and left it on the front steps.