A Thousand Sisters

by Lisa Shannon

  We sit next to each other on the ride home, cramped in the back of the SUV as it bounces and shifts along Bukavu’s crumbling streets, around bends and past hills dotted with kerosene lanterns glowing on top of streetsellers’ wooden crates.

  With surprising insecurity, D asks, “Did you have a good time tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? You’re sure?” His hand creeps over and touches my arm, then retreats.

  “I had a great time.”

  For the rest of the ride back to Orchid, he holds my hand.

  I’m staying in a cottage on the far edge of the Orchid compound now and my nightly walk back to my room is creepy. So when D offers to walk with me, I don’t hesitate to accept. His company is a comfort on the dark, lonely trek. We barely speak as we pass the guestrooms with armed men lurking out front, the gate marked PRIVATE: NO ENTRY, the Last Belgian’s private porch, the ax-wielding security guy, guard dogs, and a hanging orchid garden. We arrive at my cottage, the last on the edge of the compound. The only barrier from the outside world is a rotting bamboo fence, with its own little terrace perched on a cliff above Lake Kivu. He kisses me.

  The whole walk across the compound, I was thinking, Whatever the question, the answer is yes. So imagine my surprise when I hear myself telling him, “I need to say goodnight.”

  He launches a fresh campaign for me to join him in Zanzibar, but I decline.

  A dog’s rabid growl comes from behind the cottage. We scramble inside my room.

  “It’s dangerous for you to be here,” I say. “I like you more than any guy I’ve met in a long time.” I might be trying to convince myself as much as him as I offer reasons why he can’t stay. “I’m just not a casual-hookup kind of girl.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  Good answer.

  I add, “It’s just that I don’t know you very well.”

  “In fact, you don’t know me at all,” he says. “You’ve only heard me give a speech.”

  We look at each other for a moment, an unspoken exchange. What are the odds, the momentary chances in life? He doesn’t push; he politely asks to trade numbers and leaves. I go to bed churning. Did I really just dismiss him? Am I out of my mind?

  I don’t see him again in Congo.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mama Congo

  GENEROSE’S LANDLADY MEANT every word of her threats. She has confiscated all of Generose’s things and thrown the children out. They are scattered god-knows-where. With friends? Relatives? Generose doesn’t know. She is distraught and dazed from the post-op medication when we briefly visit Panzi. My only comfort is a little secret. My mom has put out the word back home and we’ve raised US$1,500 to buy her a house. We say goodbye and head out to house-hunt.

  Real estate shopping in Congo proves to be the strangest business experience I’ve ever had.

  We start with the basics: Location, location, location. Maurice and I have brainstormed and narrowed our search down to the Panzi neighborhood, next to the Women for Women ceramics studio. Houses here should be in our price range, and Generose will already have welcoming friends and neighbors since several from her women’s group live nearby. It’s close to the hospital and, best of all, it is right next to a UN compound. As we get out of the car, I notice sandbag watchtowers on the periphery of the UN property, which overlooks a field and the neighborhood—you can’t beat twenty-four-hour security. Maurice asks around about houses for sale. After a few minutes we have a lead: a house for US$1,200.

  We follow a narrow path away from the road. I’m already sure this place isn’t going to work—Generose can’t navigate the path on crutches, especially the footbridge made of tree branches and tire rubber. But we will at least look for the sake of comparison shopping.

  The little house with blue shutters sits in a tidy enclave of mud huts surrounded with gardens. We greet the owner, a woman about my age who’s surrounded by a flock of young children who are just different enough in size to make me imagine this Mama has been nonstop pregnant for the past ten years. Maurice says, “They are selling because they do not have the means to survive.”

  We duck inside and tour the dark, smoky cottage. In the living room, wood-framed couches draped with crocheted orange doilies, photo displays, and a tattered buffet give the place a make-do dignity that would make any Midwestern homemaker proud. The kitchen is filled with smoky pots and piles of ash. The bedrooms are simple.

  When I peek my head in the bedroom door, I barely notice a bundle of rags resting on the bed and a skinny, pale baby swaddled in them. I move to get a closer look at him. He’s awake and quiet. Frail. But I know the look in his eyes, the way he’s floating in and out; it’s the familiar half-light of someone who is dying.

  I feel the pull back to business, back to the hallway to talk with Mama about the house, to continue with the task of the day. It’s sad, but it’s not my problem. I’m busy enough today.

  I look back at the baby.

  It’s like seeing a dog panting, sick and desperate, inside a sweltering car with the windows closed tight. You can look in at him and think, Well, it’s none of my business . . . the owner will probably be back in a minute.

  He’s dying.

  You can’t save every baby in Africa.

  Yeah, well, I’m not in the room with every baby in Africa. I’m in the room with this baby.

  I have plans today.

  I picture the identical scene playing out in suburban Minneapolis or Salt Lake City or San Diego, with a family going about their daily business unfazed while a baby is dying in the back bedroom. Unacceptable. Emergency.

  But this is not the suburbs. It’s Africa. It’s the way things are, right?

  I have plans.

  I walk into the hallway and ask Mama, “Are you worried about the baby?”

  “No, it’s only the problem of illness.”

  “What did the doctor say about the baby being so small?”

  “The doctor didn’t say anything.”

  “That’s a surprise,” I say. “Is it normal for Congolese babies to be that small?”

  Maurice jumps in. “It is not normal.”

  We move into the living room. His name is Bonjour. I rest him in my lap. He sweats, wearing a little polar fleece tracksuit. “Don’t you think he’s hot?” I ask Mama. Without waiting for permission, I peel off his pants, then his sweatshirt. It gets stuck on his head.

  I say, “You can tell I’m not a mother.”

  Mama helps me pull it off. She looks stressed that I’ve taken such a keen interest in her son. I stare at his delicate little body, his bony legs, his pale little ribs poking out. He starts to cry. I’ve never heard a child’s voice sound like this before. Not the pushy, insistent cry for a mother’s attention, but slow. Thin. Desperate.

  “Please don’t cry,” I say. Uh-oh. I feel it coming on. He pees. I grasp for something to absorb it, a towel a cloth, a doily, anything. “Oh, man! Right where it counts, too!”

  “A real Mama!” Maurice bursts out laughing, “Like you are christened! You are really Mama Congo!”

  I sit for a moment, shaking my head. Anyway. . . .

  His mama takes him. She cradles his naked body while he nurses.

  I’m tense, but I say, “I would like to take the baby to see a different doctor. The baby needs help. The baby needs food. The baby needs medical treatment. He’s not normal. He needs to be rehydrated. The baby shouldn’t be this small.”

  “Our doctor said the illness can’t be treated at the hospital,” she argues. “It needs local medicine.”

  “He’s severely malnourished,” I insist. “I would like to take you and the baby to Panzi Hospital.”

  “I took the baby to the hospital and the doctor told me to take him to traditional doctors,” Mama says. “Since I took him, the situation is getting better and better.”

  To be clear, I get how totally, radically inappropriate it is for me to march into this woman’s home and tell her how to t
ake care of her children. I’m no doctor. I don’t know this family. I remember my college seminar debates on the feminist empowerment model. It’s just that I don’t care about these issues right now. The baby is dying.

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Eight children.”

  “How many have died?”

  “None.”

  She’s annoyed. But she dresses him anyway, avoiding my eyes as she wraps him in a little white dress, then a ruffly white curtain.

  On the way out I notice her next-youngest, a little girl with thin blonde hair, a snotty nose, heavy bags under eyes, and a balloon belly. As long as I’m shamelessly meddling in this woman’s business, I ask, “Is this baby sick too? Does she need to see a doctor?”

  “The malnutrition is due to the little difference in age between the two,” Maurice surmises. True enough, with this many babies and Mama’s already slender frame, milk is likely scarce.

  Mama doesn’t say a word, but wipes little Nina’s face clean, undresses and washes her, and rubs oil all over her body, trying to give her child a healthy glow. She grabs a cotton party dress with faded yellow flowers and dresses the little girl. Nina is not amused.

  Nina shoots me the death stare on the ride to Panzi. She looks like she hasn’t cracked a smile her whole little life. I’m still waiting for the pee to dry—it covers my whole lap. At least I’m in all black today.

  THE NURSE AT THE CENTER for malnourished children is not impressed. They examine the kids, slinging them around—much to Nina and Bonjour’s horror—and stretching them out on a board to measure their height while they scream and cry. Mama strips off Bonjour’s angel outfit and the medical staff wants to put him in a hanging sack to weigh him. I hand him over, feeling jumpy. “Support his neck. Watch his neck. Gentle!” He’s swallowed by the bag. It covers his face, while half his hip hangs out, as they drop him on the scale like a hunk of meat.

  They hand him back to me. I rock him as he cries. He pees for a second time. I am truly, deeply soaked in malnourished-baby pee. Totally worth it.

  “For this one, it is no problem to be treated,” The nurse says, motioning to the girl. She wags her pen at Bonjour, “But for this one, because he was ill he became this way. It is only if the mother takes care of him, feeding him.”

  I’m dumbfounded. “They’re not going to treat this child?”

  “The problem is to be well fed.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” I say. “That’s why we came to the center for feeding malnourished children. How do we solve that problem?”

  “The mother can find maybe milk from the breast.”

  I’m shocked. “So they can’t do anything for this baby? ‘Cause the baby’s really small?”

  He’s really screaming too.

  “Being small is the fact of illness,” she says again. “The baby has been treated. We have nothing to do for the baby. If the baby becomes ill, we will treat him. But the baby is normal.”

  See? The baby’s fine. Next time, mind your own business.

  It’s all I can do to not lunge across the table and strangle this nurse. “This is not normal.”

  The nurse gives me a “piss-off ” shrug and moves on.

  My phone buzzes; it’s a text from Dr. Roger, who hosted our earlier visit to Panzi and today ushered us to the feed center between surgeries. “It’s a good thing you do. I think you saved that baby’s life. If you have any problem. . . .”

  Dr. Roger meets us following a Cesarean. We breeze past a long line in the corridor into a private examination room. Dr. Roger introduces us to a woman pediatrician. She unwraps Bonjour from the christening gown and examines him as fat tears fall down his face. When she’s finished, I re-dress him in his gauzy white outfit and ask, “What’s wrong?”

  “Complications from cutting something here,” she says, pointing to his throat.

  “His tonsils?” I ask.

  “It’s a traditional treatment for a cold,” she says. “The action provoked a chest infection.”

  “It’s serious?”

  “The baby will die without treatment,” she tells us. “Severe malnutrition, an infection in the chest. He will need to stay here.”

  Mama is exasperated. Maurice translates, “She wonders what will be the life of the other children at home if she must stay here.”

  I ask, “You still live with your husband, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can he help?”

  The look on her face says “no chance.” She shakes her head. “My husband is jobless. I am the one who is working.”

  “Maybe the husband can stay here with the baby?” I ask. “She can stay at home.”

  She looks at me blankly, as though I’m speaking the absurd.

  “It is very difficult,” Maurice says.

  “It is just not done, okay,” I say. “She understands if she doesn’t stay here, the baby will die.”

  Now I am staring at the real Mama Congo, facing yet another Sophie’s Choice. I watch her make the calculation: If I let this one go, the other seven will live.

  Dr. Roger adds, “He’s very fragile, Lisa. The level of treatment he needs . . .”

  “How long does he need to stay?” I ask.

  “Seven days of treatment.” Dr. Roger responds.

  “Do you have friends or neighbors who can help?” I ask Mama.

  “They can take care of the babies. But no one will accept to feed them.”

  “We’ll buy the food,” I tell her. “What do you need? Rice? Beans?”

  She gives us the list: Beans, rice, fu-fu, salt, onion, lamp oil, vegetables.

  Dr. Roger says something to Mama two or three times, something about aksanti (Swahili for thank you).

  She smiles and quietly says, “Merci.”

  WE DASH ACROSS TOWN to the local market, where we pick up twenty-five-pound bags of beans and rice; piles of cauliflower, onions, potatoes; flats of eggs; bananas; and maize fu-fu (“the right kind for ones who suffer from malnutrition”). Neighbors help us carry the food back to Bonjour’s home. I’ve tried to buy enough so that I can bribe the neighbor women to watch the children in exchange for food.

  While we’re in the neighborhood, we cram in some quick house shopping. Now all the locals are happy to show us their houses. They quote us prices US$2,000 and up, despite our repeated attempts to clarify that US$1,500 is the budget. There is no more money.

  Finally, we look at land instead. We find a modest plot, about the size of a plot in Portland, for US$600. We ask the local real estate mogul to estimate the costs of constructing a simple wooden house with a cement floor, finished stone-stuffed walls, and a tin roof—built quickly. We ask him to show us a house he can build for US$900. He says it can be done in ten days.

  It looks like it’s doable.

  I turn to one of the locals and ask, “Do you think it’s a good deal?”

  “Ask this guy to think about all of the material, write it down, and bring it in the morning,” the local advises.

  We do.

  “The woman will be in the hospital for two months,” I emphasize. “It needs to happen quickly, but it is more important that it happen exactly as we’ve talked about and that we stick to the price. And that Generose has the legal document to the property—that it is hers. We can’t have anyone come back and say, ‘Oh. Sorry. It’s going to cost you more.’”

  “Stone on the ground,” the developer says.

  “No—cement! She’s on crutches.” I laugh and say, “People who deal with real estate in the United States and the Congo are the same.”

  Sure enough, when we meet him in the morning, he brings a long, itemized list, with the new “after calculation price” of US$2,300.

  “Ah. Then we have no deal.”

  “The problem is they saw only a muzungu,” Maurice says.

  Maurice offers to manage the construction, in cooperation with Generose’s brother, for the stated budget.

  BACK AT PANZI, Bonjour rests in hi
s white dress on the hospital bed in the middle of the children’s ward, while Nina shovels down a banana. We’ve just paid the US$50 for his one-week stay. I lean over him and say, “You’re in a better mood. Already a little better.” He cracks a smile. A smile!

  As we leave, I ask Mama, “Do you have everything you need?”

  She replies, “I need sugar so I can make tea.”

  I laugh it off, uncomfortably. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  El Presidente

  I’M IN A PACKED SUV, cruising along a rural road, Congo landscape flying by, sandwiched between a Congolese friend and a guy by the name of

  René. The front seat is occupied by another carsick friend, who needs to look out the front window. It doesn’t matter where we are or where we are going. Why René is along for the ride, and who invited him, isn’t the point. Sometimes questions of safety far outweigh the desire to spill all the details.

  René speaks with a high-pitched voice that sounds like a woman’s, but his baseball cap and sweater vest say “suburban dad.” The whole ride, he’s been touting his feminist credentials and long history working for a variety of international NGOs. He’s angling for a job. “You should hire me to manage Run for Congo Women in Congo!”

  I smile politely, but my mind is elsewhere. I’m unhappy with my friend and the “translation” issue at the meeting we’ve just come from, which involved talking with rape survivors.

  As one woman spoke, I caught the words Mai Mai. I was surprised she was being so direct about a Congolese attacker.

  My Congolese friend translated, “She says they violated her.”

  “Who?”

  My friend added, “She said Interahamwe.”

  “What did she say about the Mai Mai?”

  My friend responded vaguely, “She did not say anything about Mai Mai.”