Here's Your Movie Character
On a recent day I was in Rutshuru, a town in North Kivu, the wartorn state in eastern DR Congo. We stayed in the Paroisse St. Aloys, a Jesuit mission with a lovely guest house. It reminded me of the old days of Sacred Heart, my elementary school in Atherton, Calif., before the earthquake forced us out of the red brick building into gray one story classrooms and the administration was seized by sleazy Catholic pretenders.
Rutshuru was bound to get into trouble that week, and on my first day in the Paroisse it happened. I was hanging around the town crossroads, pretending to be rubbing off celltell scratch cards at a kiosque with my driver. Like the rest of us, he was intently watching the Tutsis as they shifted machine gun guard and spoke into walkie talkies, shaking hands with police and generally distracting me from details with an uncanny resemblance to the praying mantis. Especially the 6’2” one in a red warm up suit.
We eventually set off towards the hospital for a walk and were making our way down the shoulder of a dusty road when a truck came barreling down the street and screeched to a halt in front of us. Another one of our drivers was hanging on the railings to the truck bed and hopped down to talk to us with wide, scared eyes. “Everyone is running out of Kiwanja! They’re heading towards Rutshuru! There’s bad news! We have to get back to the Paroisse and tell the others!” We got into the cab of the truck and headed for the mission. The other passengers talked excitedly about the prospect of a battle between CNDP, the Tutsi rebel group, and Mai Mai, a nationalist militia coming down from the woods.
It was pandemonium at the mission when we pulled into the courtyard. A stream of humanitarian Land Cruisers pulled into the lot and everyone paced on their cellphones, trying to find their teammates and find out what was happening in Kiwanja.
Ultimately I gave my room to a local staff member named Dieu Donner, and a driver, and went to sleep at a colleague’s boyfriend’s house, where I reread the Mogadishu section of “Emergency Sex.”
That night there was no battle in Kiwanja, it was an empty rumor. But that week, the rebels rounded up schoolchildren in Kiwanja and Rutshuru, accused them of being Mai Mai, and did who knows what with them.
The next day we worked, and the next night, after inadvertently drinking beer with a war criminal in a dive bar called Noblesse Oblige, I went back to my room at the Paroisse. As the cicadas turned on their hum and the sun started to set, I took a wander around the mission, sneaking through the rectory into a private backyard that looked out on a vast valley of Virunga Park, the lush and renown home of some of the last mountain gorillas. I sat there for quite a while, watching a mist cloak the silhouetted palm trees and thinking back to similarly wrenching moments of romanticism in the hidden gardens of Sacred Heart school. Thank God for Catholicism, I thought, or maybe just for Italy’s pivotal role in Catholic style. (A driver who was standing around with me earlier made this distinction. “The Catholic church comes from Italy,” he said quietly, with dreamy eyes. “The Italians, they make everything so beautiful.”) Yes, when I was a child I used to seek out grottos on the school campus alone, just to think amid roses and Mary and history.
As my inner peace mounted to a degree not experienced since before I went to work at the Wall Street Journal, a door was shut and locked. The stained glass one that I came through to reach the yard. I ran, shouting, to get the man to open it. It was Pere George, a sixtysomething with white hair. “We have to close this door at night,” he said scoldingly in French. “It’s not secure otherwise.” I imagined rebels climbing the wall in the dark to rape the women servants. “What are you doing here?” he asked me as we walked through the rectory and into the courtyard. “I was just thinking, it’s so beautiful here,” I said, explaining the resemblance to my childhood school.
As he came to know me, Pere George told me his origin, Poland, and his tenure at the Paroisse St. Aloys. Since 1982, Pere George has lived there in Rutshuru, through volcanic eruptions — “the lava flowed like a river!” — dictator Mobutu and coup d’etat. Now, he lives among Tutsi rebels. Sort of like St. Aloys. What does he think of them? I forgot to ask.
Saint Aloys
Was the Bishop of Blois,
And a pitiful man was he,
He grieved and he pined
For the woes of mankind,
And of brutes in their degree,
He would rescue the rat
From the claws of the cat,
And set the poor captive free;
Though his cassock was swarming
With all sorts of vermin,
He’d not take the life of a flea!
Kind, tender, forgiving
To all things living,
From injury still he’d endeavour to screen ‘em,
Fish, flesh, or fowl — no difference between ‘em —
Nihil putavit a se alienum.
