The Rwandan Hostage

by Christopher Lowery

  It took two more days for her to cover the last twenty kilometres and at long last, almost two weeks after leaving Ruhonda, she reached the outskirts of Rukara. Mutesi knelt down on the dirt path and thanked God for her deliverance. She had made it home alive, with her baby safe. Clambering painfully back to her feet she limped wearily past the line of shacks towards her parent’s home. The village seemed deserted, she could see no one around, until she came to the church building in the centre. She heard singing and went up to the door.

  The tiny building was filled with people, singing their hearts out, praising Jesus and the Lord. Thanking the heavens for their miraculous survival; against all odds they were still alive. She looked around at the decorations in the church and realised it was Christmas Day. She had lost count of time and hadn’t realised the date. Now she saw a few familiar faces, women and girls, friends from the past. She stepped inside and sat by the door, filthy and exhausted, sobbing quietly, hardly believing she’d returned home again, but knowing that no member of her family was there to welcome her back.

  Some of the women turned and came over. “It’s Mutesi. Look, Mutesi’s come back. God be praised. Mutesi is back with us.”

  Mutesi wrapped her arms around her stomach, around her unborn child, and she fell asleep, surrounded by what remained of her village friends, lulled by the musical voices in the church, finally feeling safe, finally realising that the killing was over.

  TWENTY

  April, 1995

  Bumbogo, outside Kigali, Rwanda

  Mutesi limped slowly towards the temporary clinic in Bumbogo, forty kilometres from Rukara. Emma was getting some fresh air outside and saw her stagger into the encampment, helped by another young woman. Between them, they helped the girl into the clinic. One of the beds had been vacated that morning and they lifted her onto it. Emma could see she was due to give birth soon; she looked exhausted and frail, at the limit of her strength. She bathed Mutesi gently with warm water then let her rest. Doctor Constance, the only doctor in the clinic, would examine her later, when his impossible schedule permitted the time.

  Going outside, she sat with Marianne, the woman who had accompanied her, who chattered in voluble French, which she tried desperately to understand. From what she could make out, the young woman, who Emma learned was about seventeen years old, told her that Mutesi had stayed with her in her home since she had returned to their village in December. Marianne’s husband had been murdered last July, in the same final mad wave of violence that Mutesi’s family had fled and which had spread as far as the lakes on the eastern border with Tanzania. She had taken the young, pregnant girl into her home to help her regain some strength, but even now she was still fragile and weak. Mutesi was only eight months pregnant but because of her frail condition she feared the baby would come prematurely.

  In Rukara, the Hutu had slaughtered anyone who could bring children into the world, including the wise woman, the village midwife. The village was reduced to mainly old women and children, with the few men who had escaped death returning one by one to their decimated families. Mutesi had fought so hard to survive that she was fearful of putting herself and her baby in the hands of an unqualified person. Marianne also knew she was at the limit of her strength. She would need all the expert help they could find to bring the baby into the world.

  Euphrasie, another woman who had survived to return to the village from Kigali told them she’d heard of a family clinic which had been set up in Bumbogo, about forty kilometres away, just outside the capital. It was run by French people and helped women who had lost their families. Despite the atrocious manner in which so many Rwandan women and girls had been impregnated, it was still too shameful to admit to being a rape victim. The clinic was called a Family Assistance Clinic, although almost all the patients were pregnant women in desperate need of care and attention.

  Mutesi knew that she could lose her own life and her baby’s without expert assistance and facilities, but there were none in Rukara. There was no midwife, no electricity, no tap water, no facilities of any kind to help her if anything went wrong. She told Marianne that she was determined to get to the clinic in Bumbogo to have her child in a safe place.

  At first Marianne tried to dissuade her, she was too weak to make the journey. But Mutesi was adamant. If this was the last thing she could do for her baby, she had to do it. She had to get to the clinic in Bumbogo. Marianne saw that she couldn’t win the argument, so she insisted on going with her, she couldn’t let her attempt it alone. She found out there was a bus to Kibali that they could pick up at Kayonza, about ten kilometres walk from the village The bus would take them to the outskirts of Kigali, just a couple of kilometres from the clinic. Euphrasie explained to them how to find their way, but both she and Marianne were concerned that Mutesi wasn’t strong enough to undertake the journey. It would challenge any woman, but for a full-term pregnant teenager, it could be fatal.

  The two women prepared themselves as best they could with their limited resources and set off towards Kayonza. It took them a day and a half to get to the clinic.

  Emma requested permission to look after Mutesi herself. She wanted to be the one who made a difference to the girl’s life.

  Mutesi went into labour the next day.

  TWENTY-ONE

  April, 1995

  Bumbogo, outside Kigali, Rwanda

  Emma woke up, aroused by the baby’s cries. It was evening and he was hungry. Mutesi was still sleeping. She fetched a bottle of warm milk from the kitchen and picked up the baby.

  “Mutesi, it’s time for Leopold’s first meal”, she said. When the girl didn’t respond, she shook her gently, still to no effect. Emma suddenly had a terrible premonition. “Mutesi! Wake up Mutesi!” she cried, shaking her more urgently, her heart racing.

  The young girl lay still, her eyes closed and a peaceful expression on her face. “No! No!” Emma sobbed. “Not after everything you’ve been through. Your son is safely delivered into the world. Mutesi! You’ve got everything to live for. You can’t give up now.” She replaced the screaming baby in the cot and raced through the clinic to find Dr Constance.

  He checked Mutesi’s vital signs then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Emma. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “This is all my fault.” Emma grabbed the doctor’s arm. “If I hadn’t fallen asleep she would still be alive. I should have realised she wasn’t just sleeping, that she wasn’t well. I should have called you before.”

  He shook her hand away. “I don’t think it would have made any difference. I was afraid this would happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I examined her, I noticed an irregularity in her heartbeat. It was fairly weak, which doesn’t always mean trouble but it was quite inconsistent, which means there’s a fault somewhere. Maybe a faulty valve, which causes the heart to work harder on one side than the other. Extra stress, like childbirth, added to the severe exhaustion she was suffering can place too much pressure on the heart and it can fail. I’m sure that’s what happened.”

  “But why didn’t you say anything? Maybe I could have done something. Don’t we have anything that could have helped the condition?”

  “Emma, you know what limited facilities we have here. We’re not equipped to deal with complex issues like heart problems. We don’t even have equipment to diagnose the problem. And she was about to go into labour. If we’d given her anything we might have jeopardised the baby’s birth.”

  He took Emma by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “We have saved one life today. Without our help, Mutesi and her son might have both been lost. You must think of the positive aspect of our work.”

  “But, I fell asleep. It was wrong of me. I should have been alert to her condition, her weakness. I should have been extra vigilant when she was sleeping. I should never have dozed off.”

  “What time did you start this morning?”

  “I was called at four o’clock to help with a caesarean and I’ve bee
n on ever since.”

  “That’s fourteen hours without a break. Be reasonable, Emma. Everyone needs time to recuperate. We’re not machines, without sleep we’ll make even worse mistakes. But the point is, you didn’t make a mistake. Mutesi had a weak heart and we’ve got nothing that would have helped her. Her heart failed after the exertions of the birth, but she leaves a beautiful healthy little boy.”

  “But she died on my watch. How can I rationalise that? How can I cope with her death on my conscience?”

  “Emma, please stop blaming yourself for this. If anyone is to blame, it’s me. I should have prescribed something for her immediately after the delivery, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon and I was trying to do a thousand things at the same time.” He looked down, disconsolately, “And I was half asleep myself. I haven’t been to bed since the night before last. We’re all overwhelmed here. We’ve got a team of six to look after seventy women and the chances are we’re going to see some accidents. After what they’ve been through, these girls are so weak, so traumatised, so….vulnerable. Sometimes they just don’t have the strength to carry on. Especially if they have a condition like Mutesi’s.

  “I understand you’re grieving for Mutesi, we both are. She was a sweet girl and she didn’t deserve this wretched end to her life. But the chances are she wouldn’t have made it whatever we did. She obviously had a very severe heart problem and she succumbed to it. We did our best and we can’t do more than that. But you must put incidents like this into perspective, admit that we can’t win every time, however hard we try to beat the odds, and we’re going to have a few failures alongside the many successes. If you can’t, then I’m afraid you need to evaluate your suitability to this work. I’ll tell you frankly it’s not the job I signed up for, but it’s what we’ve got to cope with. It’s not easy, nobody said it would be, but if we don’t do it then it will be a whole lot harder for these poor people.

  “Now, I want you to go and take a break. Have something to eat then sleep until tomorrow morning. “I’ll look after Mutesi. And I’ll talk to Marianne. Trust me.”

  “Then I’ll take the baby and feed him. He can spend the night with me, there’s nobody else available to look after an orphan.” ‘Orphan’. The very word rang out in her own ears. Leopold was now an orphan. Who in Rwanda would care for a one day old orphan?

  “Please let me look after the child.” She implored. “You have to let me do this for Mutesi. I promised her and I can’t break my promise.”

  Emma finally wore down the doctor until he agreed and she took the tiny baby to her quarters, changed and fed him, then made up a comfortable cot for him in a drawer in the room. Then she fell onto the bed in an exhausted sleep.

  MARBELLA

  Tuesday, July 13, 2010

  TWENTY-TWO

  Marbella, Spain

  Emma sat quietly sobbing, the vivid memories of Leo’s birth and now his abduction overcoming her again. Jenny went over and put her arms around her and soothed her for a moment.

  “No wonder you’re distressed after dredging up those fifteen year old memories. My God, that’s the most appalling story I’ve ever heard. You must have been heartbroken when that poor girl died. And she was only one of hundreds of thousands who perished in that dreadful genocide.” She paused, “Leticia’s parents have a similar story to tell about Angola, if ever we could get them to tell it. We never learn, do we? Humans. We never learn.”

  She shook her head and pulled Emma to her feet and they walked into the kitchen. “You can tell me the rest over lunch, but now at least I know where Leo came from. It’s not at all what I imagined.”

  “I know. You thought I’d had an affair with someone in Rwanda. Well, that’s also partly true, but that comes later.”

  Jenny gave her a quizzical look, but said nothing. They still had plenty of time to finish the story.

  Encarni served them lunch on the terrace. The sun was burning hot and a wide awning protected them from the direct sunlight. It seemed to Emma that it was as hot as Rwanda, but a lot more civilised. They chatted about inconsequential things, getting to know each other again after many years of little contact.

  The housekeeper brought them coffee and Jenny said, “I’d better explain the situation here. It’s a bit complicated. When Charlie, Ron’s father died, he left his estate, including this house, to me and a young Angolan woman called Leticia da Costa. She became his companion after he lost his wife. She used to be his housekeeper then they fell in love and had a son together, a lovely boy called Emilio. Leticia actually owns half the estate in trust for him, but that doesn’t really change anything.

  “Encarni is Leticia’s mother and she offered to become housekeeper so Leticia could spend more time with Emilio. He’s only four, so he still needs his mother with him. They’re on a two week holiday in France right now, with her fiancé, Patrice. He’s a banker, here in Marbella, a Frenchman. Very French, if you know what I mean.”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “It’s not that. He seems like a sweet guy, but it’s just the way he dresses and talks, very ‘in your face continental’.” She grimaced then laughed. “Listen to me. I’m getting to be a bitchy old widow. They’re getting married in October and I’m probably just jealous. Anyway, the point is we’ve got the house to ourselves for another couple of weeks, so we can stay here to sort out this business about Leo. It’s an enormous place with everything we could possibly need; six telephone lines, speaker phone, cinema screen, Internet, Fax, you name it. Charlie ran his business from here. And it’s a lot closer to Africa than Newcastle.” She pointed across the swimming pool at the distant mountains vaguely discernible in the heat mist. “You can get a ferry to Morocco from just along the road. Not that we’ll need to, but that’s how close we are.”

  “It’s a marvellous place Jenny and you were right to get me out of Johannesburg. I’m feeling more positive and relaxed and starting to think better already.”

  “Good. So before you go and settle in and have a bath and a sleep or whatever you need to do, finish telling me about Leo.”

  Emma took up her story again. “You were right about the affair, but it didn’t start in Rwanda, it started in London. It was a man who worked with SOS Médicale, Tony Forrester was his name. I met him before he joined them, when I was with the Red Cross. He was an assistant administrator at University College Hospital. I was renting a little studio flat in Marylebone then. That was before it became fashionable and impossibly expensive.

  “We met at a fund raising event for SOSM at the Langham Hilton in Portland Place. He was mad keen on joining them and working somewhere exciting, but he hadn’t had the chance until the Rwandan atrocity occurred. Then, later on when he heard they were sending in five teams, he applied to go down as local administrator and got the job. He could speak three or four languages, he was very clever. That’s how I got the job too. We were going out then and he introduced me as an experienced nurse and they hired me, so we were able to go together.

  “After Mutesi’s death, Dr Constance suspended me from maternity work. He thought I was too emotionally involved and would go to pieces if there was another death on my watch.” Emma sighed. “I hate to admit it, but he was probably right. I just couldn’t stand seeing these poor girls suffering because of what had been done to them by the genociders. If I’d had a machete I think I’d have run amok and killed half of Kigali. So, I was left in charge of Leopold until they could arrange to fly me back to London.”

  “And that suited you perfectly?”

  “I loved it. I felt so fulfilled and I believed I was keeping my promise to Mutesi. And Tony was a great comfort in helping me get over her death. He was based in Kigali, but we saw a lot of each other and he was fantastic with me after my spat with Dr Constance. We were very much in love and by this time, we were talking about getting married.”

  “What was Tony doing in Rwanda? What was his job?”

  “He was in charge of all the administration; trave
l, security, buying equipment, managing the budget, reporting to Head Office in Paris, all that administrative stuff. And, crucially, he was responsible for registering births and deaths at the clinic and making contact with the orphanages when it was necessary. But everything was delayed and complicated because the whole system was in chaos. The hospitals, morgues, schools, orphanages, nothing was working, so Leopold’s birth and Mutesi’s death hadn’t yet been registered.

  “Then after a couple of weeks, I began to feel quite maternal towards Leopold. He was beautiful, the loveliest baby I’ve ever seen. He hardly ever cried and he seemed very contented when I held him, as if I was his mother. Tony loved him too. He was made to be a father. A very soft and loving man and he was happy that I had the baby to look after because of Mutesi. So, I started to imagine he was my son, that I could keep him. That Tony and I could begin our married life with a gorgeous baby boy.

  “I couldn’t bear the thought that he’d have to go to an orphanage. Can you imagine, a tiny baby in a Rwandan….” She suddenly looked at her sister. “Oh my God, Jenny, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’m rattling on about the baby and I just wasn’t thinking. Please forgive me, I feel terrible.”

  “It’s fine, Emma. That was a long time ago. I hardly think about it anymore.” Jenny tried to bluff her way around the subject, but her sister had seen the tears that had come to her eyes as she remembered the pain of losing her baby and never being able to have another. The beautiful, helpless children she’d seen when she visited the Bulgarian orphanage, lost in a vortex of despair and desperate for love and affection, from anyone. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. And this is not about me, it’s about Leo. Tell me how you got him out of Rwanda and into the UK.”

  “Well it was really Tony who did it. First, he had to arrange for Leo not to appear in the system.”