by Lisa Shannon
A couple of hours later, we cross back to Congo and a different landscape: miles of flat, wide-open plains covered in grass and shrubs, with cloud-capped blue-green mountains in the distance. Tiny children spot us and leap to their feet, delighted. They run after us pointing, waving. To four-year-old Congolese kids, every white person must be with the UN. They scream, “MONUC-ay!” which is the children’s name for MONUC—the French acronym of the UN mission in Congo.
They also yell, “Muzungu!”
“What does muzungu mean?” I ask.
“White person,” Kelly says.
“Sometimes you can also call a Congolese a muzungu,” Hortense adds.
“What is a Congolese muzungu like?” I say.
“They are an important person like your boss,” she says. “Someone who will take care of you, give you money.”
When we are outside the city of Uvira, we pass our first militia. The Mai Mai attempt to flag us down for a lift. Fortunately, this is a common issue with a common solution. All charitable vehicles display a special sticker—a gun with a red X through it, like a No Smoking sign, but with a gun instead of cigarette. It is a universal symbol indicating that the vehicle is for humanitarians only. No guns, and hence no militias, on board. It is surprisingly well respected. We breeze straight past the hitchhikers. Within a few miles, I lose count there are so many Mai Mai around. We make it into a road trip game, watching out for them like wildlife, trying to guess who is Mai Mai and who is Congolese Army.
“What about that one?” I ask.
Maurice and Hortense alternately answer, “Congolese Army.”
“What about those guys?”
“Mai Mai.”
I don’t have a clue as to how they can tell the difference. To me, they look exactly the same. You could argue the Mai Mai look a little scruffier and occasionally wear red, but the Congolese Army is pretty ragtag too. Even after passing more than fifty Mai Mai, I still can’t tell which is which.
We pull up to a gas station in Uvira, about halfway to Baraka. It’s already past four in the afternoon. The fill-up takes forever. Hortense chats on the phone.
My cell phone is out of range, and I can’t say I’m sorry. My mom has been calling twice a day, giving me anxiety-ridden pep talks, as much to calm herself as to soothe me. I’ve tried to keep my reports lightweight and clean, partly for her peace of mind, but also because she takes notes and likes to broadcast “what Lisa said,” peppered with editorial embellishments, to the whole Run for Congo Women email list.
Hortense approaches Kelly and me with some news. “The UN advises no travel after dark,” she says. “We will need to spend the night here and make the rest of the journey in the morning.”
We check into a grossly worn-down motel with open corridors and balconies. I bypass the Presidential Suite, with its crusty patchwork carpet, for a smaller, more basic room. I peek out of the sliding glass doors to the panoramic view of Lake Tanganyika, the longest lake in Africa, which is swarming with mosquitoes. I retreat and lock the sliding glass doors. Double check the locks. Triple check the locks.
I lug my camera bag onto the bed, tuck in my mosquito net, snuggle up to my prized equipment, and spend the night spooning my camera bag.
I dream that a man breaks into the room and looms over me in my bed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Separate Peace
I OVERSLEEP. By the time I scramble to pull it together, the others have been waiting for me outside for quite some time. Today is my thirty-second birthday.
Outside of Baraka, the landscape tells the story of the past decade. It’s obvious the region was abandoned for years. Villages are mostly ruins, their mud-brick huts, roofless and crumbling, are overgrown with weeds. Hortense says, “In the next village, there were only four civilian families left.”
We slow down as we drive through a village. I notice a large cement slab, painted with a mural: huts burning, soldiers hacking people with machetes. It reads: MASSACRE DE MAKOBOLA/BANWE, 20/12/1998.
Hortense points toward the hills and says, “They buried them up there.”
We pull off the main road and drive up narrow grass tracks. In a clearing above the village, a stone monument marks the site. A local villager tells us the story, which Hortense translates: “People hid along the waterways to escape war. Then those people came and called out that peace was recovered. Soldiers gathered people, telling them there was peace already. Once the people got here, they killed all of them.”
I follow Hortense behind the memorial. “They buried them here,” she says, pointing to a wild patch of yellow cosmos. “Seven hundred and two people were killed. They buried them in four graves.”
Three more mass graves, overgrown with weeds taller than I am, are just beyond the sunny wildflowers. Hortense repeats the story, boiling it down to basics. “They told the people there was no more war, gathered them, and killed them all.”
As we continue down the main road, spanking new huts on freshly cleared plots, paid for by refugee resettlement projects, are beginning to creep into the landscape.
We pull into Baraka, which has the distinct feel of a Wild West frontier town. Its wide main drag is a dirt road lined only with NGO offices. Congolese soldiers with guns linger on every corner, bored, just hanging out.
We dump our stuff at the spotless UN guesthouse. It is decorated in UN blue and white, with spare, utilitarian furniture; it feels like the kind of austere vacation cottage you might find on a Greek island. When I ask a group of UN staffers about security in the region, a young European woman answers. “The FDD [a Burundian militia] and other foreign militias are gone,” she says. “There is a Mai Mai general on the peninsula who’s been making threats, but just rapes and looting for the moment. No attacks yet.”
I sit quietly for a moment in the spare, whitewashed community room, balancing my gratitude for a clean place to stay and the generosity of my hosts with the implications of what she has just dropped into our conversation. I contemplate this young, wild-haired woman, with her slightly sweaty, disheveled look and the crusty demeanor of a seasoned European aid worker. As a staff member of the UNCHR, her task is to encourage refugees to return from Tanzania. She is currently working on a video project she can use to convince people it is safe to return home.
“You don’t consider rape a security threat for returning refugees?”
“Rape here is so common,” she says. “It’s cultural.”
Wow. I say nothing but allow the weight of her comment to settle in the room.
NEXT, WE HEAD out for our meetings.
As we pull up to the Women for Women center in a village south of Baraka, we are greeted with an archway of flowers. I’m presented with a little bouquet of marigolds, gathered in a rusty can, and a goat. A goat! That’s what—forty dollars? I’ve gotten lots of chickens and eggs, but this is remarkably generous. This may be the best birthday celebration I’ve ever had. Just one little snag: I’m a strict vegetarian.
I joyfully receive the squealing, upside-down little gal, grabbing her bound feet. I set her down. “Thank you so much for this wonderful gift! I am so grateful for your generosity, so proud of you all, that I am presenting her back to your group as a celebration of our friendship. I have only one condition. You must never hurt the goat. The goat is blessed. The goat is sacred. Never, ever kill this goat.”
One of the participants leads the group in a cheer and dance. We settle into a large circle, shaded by ancient trees, and shoo away eavesdropping teenage boys. Almost all of these sisters have just returned from Tanzania, where they lived in refugee camps from eighteen months to ten years. Freshly resettled, the women boast about buying new plots of land every month with sponsorship funds. “We can buy a farm of twenty square meters for twenty dollars,” one says.
I’ve developed a quick survey to take at these meetings. How many have suffered a violent attack on their home? Had a relative killed? Lost a child? The women are always open. But I have never asked a
bout rape directly at these forums. Maybe if I’m nonchalant, it’ll put them at ease. I try to slip it in as part of my survey. “How many of you have been raped?”
A few hands go up then quickly retreat. It’s a group of fifty, but only three women keep their hands raised. They stare at the others defiantly, stretching their hands higher. This is why oft-quoted statistics on rape in Congo are ridiculously low. Even in a group that’s all women, including Western women who have supported them financially, Congolese women won’t talk about sexual violence in public, at least if no one else does.
Hortense shrugs. “They are hiding themselves.”
They stare at me blankly. Okay, that was tacky and insensitive. I shouldn’t have asked such a personal question in a public survey. I try to rectify it, take them off the defensive. “In America, we believe if a woman is raped, it is never her fault. She has nothing to be ashamed of. So if any of you know someone who has been through this, I hope you will support her and let her know she didn’t do anything wrong.”
I’m ready to call it a failed experiment. I’ll just leave it alone.
We begin with “The trouble I got during war.”
Like most groups I have met with, these women are open about violent attacks. But an hour or so into our meeting, no one has mentioned rape. We land on the participant who led the singing earlier. She shifts on the edge of her wooden bench and speaks with a defiant tone. Even with the language barrier, I can tell by the others’ body language—they are folding their arms, rolling their eyes, or adjusting their dresses—they find her brash. Hortense translates. “When you asked about it earlier, we were not honest. Even if the others are hiding themselves, we were all raped. All of us.”
She continues with her story, motioning to her lap, slamming her fist between her legs, as she describes the attack. Some snicker with discomfort.
I thank her profusely for her courage to speak up and tell her story.
Later, others open up.
“They treated us the way they wanted. They met us in houses. They did what they needed.”
“When in the field, they were beating us with sticks, chasing us, doing whatever they were doing, downgrading us through raping.”
“They obliged my husband to have sex with my daughter. He refused. They killed him immediately.”
“All of my clothes, including my underwear, were torn to shreds.”
“My womb was seriously destroyed.”
“They tried to make my older brother rape me. He refused and was killed. So they raped me. They took my husband and raped him. He died from that incident.”
“We were sleeping in water, in a marsh, with so many mosquitoes. It was so cold. The FDD came at night. They made so much trouble. They took all our clothes. I was eight months pregnant, standing naked in front of my daughters and my husband. They inserted money and did the same to my daughters who were twelve and fifteen. They raped me. My husband ran away. We were left naked. I fell ill. I didn’t know where he was. People in the village found me naked in the forest. They took me to the hospital, but there was no one there. They took me to Lake Tanganyika, where they put me on the boat to Tanzania. I don’t know where my husband was. I delivered a baby there. The girl is six years old today. I came back in April. I found my husband, now old and poor.”
I ask, “How many of you have been attacked since you returned from refugee camps?”
About half raise their hands. A woman in her thirties explains, “Peace has not really been recovered. They are still raping women. When we go to our farms, we are stopped on the way to the fields and raped. Especially in the bush. In the center of Baraka, no. But when we go to the fields . . . it’s like me with my age, they ask me to stop.”
Another woman adds, “It was said the war ended, we were called back here. But since being back we had an attack from FDD.”
“Who has raped you since you returned?”
They all chime together: “FDD.”
This confuses me. The UN staff verified there are no longer foreign militias in the area, including FDD. I recall Maurice explaining, “A Congolese woman can never say she was attacked by another Congolese. It is not culturally acceptable. It is not safe.”
I think of the main drag running through Baraka, the armed young men standing idly on every corner, the innumerable Mai Mai along roadsides. The Congolese Army is in large part comprised of former militias. In the disarmament process, brassage, militia members are integrated into the Congolese Army and promised US$20 monthly. But they are rarely paid. They are expected to take what they need—food, money, supplies—from the locals. In the process, they rape.
“Peace” and “stability” here seems to mean that people are no longer slaughtered by the hundreds (mass killing is at least one activity from which the Congolese Army refrains). But women, well, they have to feed their children. If that means the long daily walk to farm their fields and risking rape on the way, the alternative is watching their kids starve.
One woman asks, “Do they also rape women in America?”
I answer, “Women are raped all over the world. It is not as common in America as here. But a number of American women who have been raped have run to raise your sponsorship. Because they know that in some ways, you feel the same. They asked me to especially extend their love to you.”
They nod.
One woman raises her hand and asks, “What can we do to manage and improve so we can support other women?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
An Odd Paradise
KELLY AND I shoot each other looks as if we are kids on a remote corner of the playground, hoping to not get caught.
“HQ will not be happy we did this,” I say, as we step through leaky canoes onto the rusty, faded, red and teal motor-powered fishing boat. I decide to think of it as charming, well art-directed. A weather-beaten skipper and his first mate await us on board, disaffected guys who walk around barefoot and in swimming trunks. They barely say hello.
There is a Mai Mai general on the peninsula who is resisting disarmament and threatening a fight. Christine was clear: Under no circumstances are we to go without the UN boat. We need it for security. The UN speedboat is also fast, while local boats are notorious for capsizing. A few months ago, two Japanese visitors took a local boat and when a storm hit, it sank a short distance from the port. They had to be rescued by the UN.
When we arrived at the port a few minutes ago, Hortense announced, “The UN boat is booked on other business.” She smiled and gestured as though she was revealing a big birthday surprise. “So we’ll take this one, a local boat.”
Cancelling is not an option. We sponsor women in two villages on the peninsula, which is a two-hour boat ride from Baraka—twelve new sisters in one village, five in the other. Hortense has already notified them we are coming. One of them, Fitina, is on my short list to interview. Her enrollment form indicates that seven of her children have died.
It is a stunning day as we roar across Lake Tanganyika—clear, blue skies; calm water. I feel dorky for wearing a life jacket, especially next to our barefoot crew. We sit on wooden plank benches on the boat’s deck, munching on rolls and peanuts, taking in the scenery. Hortense tries to brief me, yelling over the engine.
“When we did our assessment in this village . . .” She trails off, something about rape. I can’t make it out.
“What?”
“Ninety percent.”
“Ninety percent what?”
“Yes. Ninety percent of the women in the first village have been raped!”
The sleepy fishing village is an odd paradise with a crystal-blue lagoon and a pebble beach, backed by cascading forested hills and terraced plots hosting mud huts. It’s a last little slice of paradise not mapped and quartered by Lonely Planet, a place that would be high-end vacation property if it were anywhere but in Congo.
The village women gather to greet us, waving flowering tree branches and palm leaves in the air, dancing in time. As the crew shuts dow
n the engine and we drift to shore, the women’s ebullient singing takes over. They throw cloths on the ground to welcome us and initiate a procession through the village, one that gives me a piercing headache because I’m smiling so wide for so long.
The two celebrations today are nearly identical, as are the villages.
I don’t bring up rape. Neither do they.
Kelly is quiet through the first meeting, as always. I encourage her to join in, but she keeps it to a couple of brief sentences. On the way to the second meeting, I ponder out loud. “I wonder if I say the right things to them.”
“What you say is too complex for them,” she says. “Keep it simple. Just say, ‘Your sisters love you. You’re good dancers.’ Stuff like that.”
I am wearing thin. I hang back during the second procession, focusing on the children who have joined in. I touch their clean-shaven heads or hold their hands, which elicits smiles. When we reach the center, I slip to the sidelines and let Kelly take center stage.
I scan the crowd for Fitina, or anyone in bright pink, on the off chance she would wear the same headscarf and top shown in the photo that is stapled to my paperwork. I can never pick out my sisters in these crowds.
Then a heavyset woman lumbers up the path, wearing a bright pink headscarf and top. It is Fitina! She looks exactly like she does in her photo.
Our twelve sisters give stiff before-and-after speeches that feel more like testimonies. I ask Fitina to stay behind.
She sits alone on a wooden bench. I join her and pull out my notebook. “Mama, this is the intake form I received about you. Is it true you have had seven children die?”
Fitina looks a bit lost, but she searches her memory, counting aloud. “Nine . . . Ten . . . Ten children have died.”
“How many children are living?”
“Five.”