African Heroes: stories of brave badasses

Don’t Look Here for Heroes

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0400

There’s been little heroism to report in Goma, eastern DR Congo, over the last 10 months that I’ve lived here.

There has been a lot of sexual violence. No one knows how much, but at least thousands of girls and women have been raped here – mostly by civilians, according to one trustworthy database. I know all you hear is that Hutu rebels who perpetrated the Rwandan genocide are raping people. That’s the sexiest way to sell the story, and it appeals to a world of news readers who have been sold simplistic moralized stories about genocides for a long time.* But it’s not true. Monday I was in an orphanage for little girls whose parents offer them to horny strangers for a few bucks. Their caretakers, a couple of local social workers, told me that the majority of girls in Goma have been sexually abused at least once in their lives. I guess it’s the equivalent of leaving your kids at home for a few minutes while you run to the store and buy a carton of milk. No big deal!

I just took a walk, and the normal events that transpired during my walk more or less explain the anathema of so many men exploiting and raping women and little girls.

17:00 - Leaving the office, am hissed at repeatedly by a man standing around doing nothing on the street, one of hundreds.

17:10 - Walking down a relatively wealthy and tranquil sidestreet, I pass three boys sitting on chairs in front of a house. One is wearing a police uniform and has an AK-47. “Where are you going?” They ask.

17:15 - Rounding the corner to head towards the boulevard, I see two men conferencing in the road. “Oh, listen, I’ll catch you in a bit. I am going to go harass this white woman,” says the drunk looking one with a big scar on his face in Swahili. Or something like that.

17:17 - “Hey, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” says the drunk looking man with the scar on his face in French as he rapidly approaches me. “Where are you going?” As soon as he catches up to me, he starts to walk next to me. “Where are you going, beautiful?” I try to walk faster, and he speeds up. I stop, he stops. “Can you please just let me be?” I say in French. “I don’t want to walk with you.” “Why not!?” he says. I don’t answer. Instead, I turn around and start walking back the other way. He does the same. His friend is shouting at him in Swahili, and the kid with the AK-47 is laughing with his friends and a good view. After a minute of my deliberate and focused walking, the man stops following me.

17:21 - I pass dozens of women carrying 20 lb water bidons on their heads, others carrying food, others selling wares on the street.

17:25 - I re-enter the gated, guarded compound where I work.

Now, just imagine the whole scenario and think about rape. Is it hard to make the connection? Like, we’re inside of a private house and I’m a Congolese girl and drunk dude with the scar on his face is a family friend. “But I don’t want to take my clothes off,” I’d say as he ripped them off. “You don’t? Why?” as he proceeded to rape me. Oops! I guess he asked too late. Then when I went to tell the police, maybe one of them would take the opportunity to rob me of my last money, grope me, and then hitch a ride on a mototaxi with his gun unintentionally pointed at pedestrians on the side of the road. When the case went to trial, oh, six months later, I might be dead, because the drunk dude with the scar on his face might have killed me in revenge for reporting his behavior. Not enough people would find this unreasonable to make him accountable for it.

*Correction: The original sentence read “simplistic moralized tales of genocides and holocausts for more than 50 years.” This has been changed to reflect the fact that there was really only one holocaust, which has generally been correctly chronicled by a uniform story, but there have been many genocides, whose chronicles are rarely uniform or agreed upon.

This is a song that plays every weekend at the bar where...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:53:00 -0400

This is a song that plays every weekend at the bar where everyone in Goma hangs out. It’s from South Africa, apparently.

Update: After leaving Goma, I went to Mexico City and learned from Alexis Okeowo that this song, Sister Betina, is by Malawi singer Esau Mwamaya and British DJ Radioclit. Apparently everyone in Brooklyn is also listening to it. Go Goma!

Now I just want to know what the lyrics are about.

I am so sick of living in Congo

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:25:00 -0400

I am taking two days off right now in Goma instead of going on vacation because four days is not enough time to leave the continent. I’m telling you, if you think African warzones are exciting, think again. Some missionary may be getting shot right now on a remote road in Rutshutu territory but it is boring as a Kansas corn field where I live. The stimulation consists of relentless, pervasive shitty/sleeziness, like the flight path that is above my bedroom by about five meters and results in my being woken up every hour all night and morning by an airplane that sounds like it’s about the crash into me and is carrying probably some minerals that rebels extracted as part of a terror campaign in the bush. I don’t see the rebels, just the devastated women and children they kidnapped and/or raped brutally. One airplane crashed just down the street last year leaving a crater. And the pilots are probably my drunk Ukrainian next-door neighbors, the ones who spent three hours one night going back and forth with two prostitutes they had hired with the following conversation:

Pilot drinks vodka shot: “I’ll tell you what money is…”

Prostitute: “Money? I need a lot of money.”

Pilot: “Money? I’ll tell you what you’re worth. $20”

Prostitute: “I’m not giving you no more or no less for that.”

Pilot drinks shot, prostitute drinks shot and stumbles: “This is nothing.”

Pilot: “More than you’re worth.”

No sex commences, repeat conversation for three hours. Poor Tobias. My roommate actually had to try to sleep listening to that cause they brilliantly built our houses one inch away from each other even though they could have filled up the vacant lot/trash heap across the street and given us more room. But we did get to see into their rooms, and this drunk dude with the prostitute, who walks around the house in army pants and no shirt, sleeps on a bed of planks!

I am going to another frat party tonight at another gorgeous house on Lake Kivu. Tomorrow I will have a hangover and spend the whole day doing my laundry and wincing from the sound of the planes and wondering why the hell we pay our guards when all they do is sit on their street and jeopardize our security. They should be called insecurity guards.

Then maybe I will glance out the window at the dirt playground/trash heap and feel sorry for the kids playing soccer with no shoes on top of volcanic rock and the other kids eating from the trash or those breathing in the toxic black smoke that comes from the burning trash.

I want to move to Europe.

What's the point of this blog?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:23:00 -0400

This blog began when Emily Meehan was stuck in Somaliland without any money left to pay for her hotel, driver, soldier-security guards, or food. But she wanted to go into the desert and walk with nomads, as freelance journalists are wont to do. So she told her friend Greg Galant that she was going to send an email to every single person she had ever met asking them for $20. She asked Greg to open a Paypal account for her so they could pay into it. The Internet connection was not fast enough for her to do that in Hargeysa, or maybe, she was just saying that because she was intimidated by the prospect of opening up a Paypal account. Greg advised her not to do this, but instead start a blog and raise money with the blog via the tool Chipin, which would connect to Paypal. This Emily did. She had already decided to start a blog about how cool Africa is after much conversation with William Deed over a lazy weekend in the Mara Triangle.

After gratefully collecting $1500 from friends, readers, and her devoted literary agent, Susan Rabiner, Emily was able to pay her team and head out to the desert to interview nomads for this NPR story about drought in the Horn of Africa. (The collection was made possible by Dan Wambua Muende and Alessandra Argenti of Nairobi, Kenya, who dutifully helped their roommate by withdrawing money two days in a row from an ATM with Emily’s bank card and then trying five days in a row to wire it to her in Somaliland, where there are no banks, via Dahabshiil, a Hawala money transfer agency.)

The seed of this idea to write about how cool Africa is came out of a conversation between Emily and Neil King in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Neil and Michael Philips were coming up with story ideas for Emily to report while in Somalia. Neil said all anyone ever hears about from Africa is war and scourges. He said there must be some positive stories to tell and Emily should try to find some. He suggested one in Juba, Sudan, which Emily has since forgotten. But this got her thinking, she liked Neil’s suggestion. Neil himself seemed quite liberated for a finance reporter and Wall Street Journal employee.

And here you have the result, “African Heroes: Stories of Brave Badasses.” The original title was “African Heroes: Stories of Brave Badasses on the Last Frontier,” but when putting up the blog, Greg Galant left out the ending for reasons Emily never discovered but nonetheless agreed with. Greg is the one who chose the Tumblr platform.

African Heroes has been linked to by dozens of blogs and reviewed in a June 2009 article in the Diplomatic Courier called “Getting Out the Good News: Blogging Africa’s ‘Other Side.’”

Writes John Bavoso:

While some blogs focus on innovations, others choose to highlight the stories of people who make Africa such a unique region for other reasons. This was the reasoning behind the new blog African Heroes, which, as its tagline “stories of brave badasses” suggests, sheds some spotlight on Africans who are worthy of news coverage for the inspiring deeds they do and lives they lead. Emily Meehan, the blogger behind African Heroes and an American journalist living and writing in East Africa, chose this theme because she felt it would appeal to readers both inside and outside of Africa. “I use the theme of ‘badasses’ or heroes in proper English because I think it’s something Americans love,” Meehan wrote in a recent email correspondence. “It’s something my African heroes and most Americans have in common, they’re all pioneers.”

Meehan is familiar with both worlds – until fairly recently she was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, covering issues relating to twenty-something’s in America. However, working in the mainstream media lost its appeal after a while. “I got very tired of seeing that every media outlet was covering the same stories, very few of which interested me,” Meehan remembers. “So I decided to work on news that was under-reported.” The first step in this process was to find a location which interested her and a place where she could see her journalism making an actual difference in the lives of people. “I have always loved traveling to obscure places. I drew up a list of some obscure places with misunderstood troubles: Chechnya, Georgia, Somalia, Venezuela, Congo. The Horn of Africa was just full of my ideal content.” So, in a move reminiscent of the badasses whom she has come to portray and admire, Meehan packed up her things and moved to East Africa with what most people would consider not much of a plan.

Meehan is currently working on a five-part piece on Somalia as well as other projects for various media outlets on a free-lance basis, but she really enjoys meeting people and writing her hero profiles. Her most recent hero is a man named Dr. Dihoud, a founder of the Somali National Movement (SNM) and the only psychiatrist in Somaliland, the autonomous region of Somalia which has claimed independence but lacks formal recognition from the international community. Included on the blog is an audio clip of the man telling his story in his own words and with his own voice. Dr. Dihoud is a very prestigious and accomplished man – but Meehan did not seek him out, per se. Instead, they met while staying in rooms across the hall from one another in a hotel – which is a testament to the fact that truly great African heroes can be found anywhere, doing anything.
In the end, these blogs may never be as popular or well-read as the traditional news outlets’ – but the positive information that is being put out for public consumption is being produced by people with a true dedication to helping Africa and Africans. And, for the most part, being different is just fine with these bloggers – they’re out to provide a distinct alternative for media consumers. “When I first came to Africa I was coached by a very good journalist named Pedro. I had plans to write about corruption and war in Somalia. He told me not to,” Meehan explains. “Nobody cares, it’s been happening for so long, don’t just write the same story as all the others, he said. I don’t completely agree with Pedro … But if my only news is bad news, how am I helping?”

A man washing his clothes in the jungle of Kasai Occidental.

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:37:26 -0400

A man washing his clothes in the jungle of Kasai Occidental.

A public service announcement I produced to encourage children...

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:34:00 -0500

A public service announcement I produced to encourage children in wartorn North Kivu to go to school.

Monique Tshisombi, director of nursing at Bemba regional...

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:25:04 -0500

Monique Tshisombi, director of nursing at Bemba regional hospital, Kasai Occidental Province, DR Congo, and proud mother of 16 children. She wants more.

Troupe Nyiragongo sketch about preventing les maladies...

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:01:00 -0500

Troupe Nyiragongo sketch about preventing les maladies diarrhéiques

Interview with Issa (French)

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:38:41 -0500

Interview with Issa (French)

Issa Muhima Bach

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:28:03 -0500

Issa Muhima Bach

Photo

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:26:59 -0500

ZuluRomeo10 to Logistics

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:25:00 -0500

Two weeks ago I was at a fabulous dance club here in Goma, DR Congo, with my 28-year-old coworker, Issa. I asked him to go dancing after a.) deciding he is a badass and b.) finding out he is an R&B singer. It was loud in the club but we still managed to talk by shouting. I asked the usual pleasantries and then went right to the heart of the matter. That matter was: What exactly gives Issa this glow of badassness, and how did he get that way?

Issa shared his perspective on life, and let me tell you, it is far from normal here. Most people in eastern Congo give me a five-minute personal rundown that sounds something like this: “I am so poor. I can’t find a job. I want to go to college in the United States. I have so many dreams. Can you help me accomplish them? I would like to be business partners with you. It is impossible to get ahead in this country with so much corruption. And the war. My house burned down last year. My wife is sick. My child has malaria. Give me money. Give me scholarship. Give me biscuits. I want to marry a white person. Be my wife.” Most foreigners fulfill some of these requests on a regular basis, but it’s hard not to get sick of being treated like the Bank of America.

Fortunately, Issa is not a mooch. He’s a logistician. That means he works in the logistics department of our company. He manages transportation — 30 drivers, 20 cars, who’s leaving, who’s coming, who’s driving down a road lined with bandits, who’s in an accident, who’s held up by bandits, who can’t figure out how to work the thuraya, who is going to miss her plane. Logistics is the department for badasses, a small and elite army that protects us and procures everything from satellite phones to beer for my press conference. They give us code names, like ZuluRomeo10, and check in every night at 7 p.m. to make sure we’re alive. The term logistics evokes maps, walkie talkies, lists of rebel commander cellphone numbers, ray ban sunglasses, and neat, sturdy dudes who don’t panic, ever. Issa’s boss has a motto for his team posted up on the door to his office: Strong Partners, Flexible Solutions. Logistics is an attitude, and a lifestyle.

Issa is true to the image. He’s famous for coming to a recent house party in a white suit. He’s assertive, confident. He doesn’t smile a lot, and he always looks busy. Right before our interview, I heard that the rebel leader who is causing a civil war in this province was overthrown. Shocked, I chattered to Issa about all the possibilities. “Are you worried?” I asked. “No,” he said phlegmatically. “Do you know how many times we have heard he was overthrown? I am just living my life.”

You can listen to our interview (in French) with the link above, or read the translation below.

Hero Q&A

African Heroes: Okay, so, we talked about a lot of things last weekend, but specifically I said: “You look very busy and very confident whenever I see you in the office, and I am very impressed with your demeanor. Especially here, [in DR Congo], It’s seems difficult for people to find a job and earn money. People tell me all the time that they live on around $100 a month, they have to hustle all the time, and life is so hard. They say they wish they could live in the United States.” And you had a response. Tell me the story you told me that night.

Issa Muhima Bach: Okay, if I remember correctly, what I told you that night is really just about my personality. I said I can’t stand people who say they’re waiting to move to the west. Because here, people have the means and the capacity to achieve what they want from life if they work hard. I mentioned the way people have traditionally thought:

“You have to wait, because God will make it happen.”

No. God will not act in your place. You have to be brave. Work hard.

I said, yes, there are people who say it’s difficult to find a job in Congo, in Africa. But me, I never had that idea. When I finished my studies, I was still very young. I got a job at Medecins Sans Frontiers Holland, working on vehicles because I had an associates degree in auto mechanics. I worked there for 5 years. Then I went back to school and earned an associates degree in information technology. I decided to try and work as a consultant for various NGOs, because my whole career I had worked for an NGO. I did that for a while. And after I got my degree I got a job with the NGO we currently work for. I knew then that this would be a good job and I hoped to advance my position within the company.

To get back to your question, I will compare my path to that of my peers, who always say: “I’m smart, and I need money, and I have to find a scholarship to study in the west.” Maybe they need that. But, sometimes I detect a certain laziness in that statement. It’s sort of like saying that you would be doing much better if you just were another person in another place with different history, but you’re not. You’re you, here, now, and you have to always fortify yourself now for a better future, for your own history. And it’s just those people who I tell that I have no interest in living in Europe. Never. I would hate to live abroad. But what I would like to do is visit Europe for two or three days, or go there for a professional training, and then return to Congo.

In my career with NGOs, I can’t just move about here and there, whenever I want. I am already married, even though I’m young, and I must save for the future of my children. I’m not in a position just to make money for myself because I have to save for my family. For this reason I really don’t ever plan to move out of my country.

AH: But you said at the club last weekend that you wanted to move to another country and work for an NGO as an expat.

Issa: Yes. In another African country maybe, but not in the west. Because all the young Africans dream of living in the west — in the U.S., Europe, or Australia. But me, no. I can enjoy myself traveling around Africa. This conversation is one example of when I tell people that I am proud to be African, especially Congolese.

AH: Why? Explain to those who are listening/reading, who don’t know Africa, why you are proud to be African.

Issa: It’s not to say that Africa is better than any other continent, it’s just that I have been hearing all my life all the stories about the west. That everything that comes from the west is better than what comes from my home. In reality it’s not true. Here, I am free. For example, if I want to travel a bit, around Africa or my country, I can. If I want to develop my intellectual capacities, I can certainly find people to exchange ideas with.

[phone call]

Okay, I have to go meet my friend because he is waiting for me. So I will get to the point. If there’s a small message about Africa that I can give to people who are reading this/listening, they must know that as an artist, because I am a musician, I tell people all the time that men die, but culture never does. One has to value his own culture. I’m saying that Africa is fabulous, as long as you have an open mind, and you see la vie en rose. Because if you see la vie en rose, it’s always en rose. And if you have a really negative perspective on life, it’s always going to be bad for you. It’s really very simple: Work very hard, cultivate your mind, and you will see that all goes well.

AH: One can say always in cases of success like yours that it’s all because of a comfortable childhood. It’s an argument used all over the world, that if you were raised with money, you grow up with the idea that anything is possible, full of hope for the future. But you have told me that you are not a case of someone who was brought up bourgeois or rich. Did you learn to value hard work and a positive attitude from your parents or was it something you came up with on your own?

Issa: I got 50% of my attitude from my parents influence and the rest I learned on my own. As you say I don’t come from a bourgeois family, my father started out working as a chauffeur. Now he is also a logistician like me. And we didn’t have sufficient means to live on when I was growing up. But according to my principals, one can come from a rich family and die poor. And one can come from a poor family and die rich. It’s just a matter of courage, and developing one’s capacities.

AH: And you have two kids right?

Issa: Yes.

AH: What do you think about all the young men our age, 28, or something like that, who don’t have wives, because they don’t want to make the commitment, who don’t have children, of course. They don’t have any responsibilities because they say it would interfere with their personal interests. [No offense meant to my unmarried boys reading this, I just can’t resist asking a classic question that concerns women everywhere.]

Issa: You have to go through a period of being affronted with problems, because man is measured by what he does in the face of problems. In reality, an experience is the accumulation of challenges one faces over a given period, and the solution one implements. That’s what I call “an experience.” Therefore, I don’t fear my responsibilities. I must prove time and time again that I am a responsible father, and I must arrange things so that my family’s situation is always improving. I always say to people that they need not fear facing responsibilities. You can’t tell yourself it’s impossible. You have to try before you decide that. If you find that you have certain difficulties, well, that’s part of any experience, so look for a solution. If there isn’t one, then you may decide that the situation is truly impossible. But if you haven’t tried, the solution is simple.

Ukoo Flani Maumau, from Kenya, in Kiswahili

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:13:11 -0500

Ukoo Flani Maumau, from Kenya, in Kiswahili

Principal Dancille

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:25:00 -0500

Principal Dancille

Très Dynamique

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:20:00 -0500

There are many wonderful things about speaking French, and among them are the terms we either have in English but don’t use, or simply don’t have. These words express cultural values that don’t exist in English speaking societies.

Take, for example, the word dynamique. Yes, we have it in English, along with cadre, austerity, and other sophisticated Latinate words that have atrophied to the point of death, living on only in “New Yorker” articles and in Kenya, where they still speak the Queens English. (In Nairobi today, 19-year old minibus conductors ask passengers where they want to “alight,” inbetween the thumping beats of Lil Wayne songs piped through the soundsystems.)

Principal Dancille is one of the only women principals in the whole province of North Kivu, DR Congo. I was practically in love with her after five minutes, because she was so smooth, beautiful, shrewd, and funny in spite of her suffering. (“You see the broken window there? Bandits did that. [smiling sigh] But other than the damage that [bandits, rebels, soldiers, Rwandans and Ugandans] have done to our school, we are fortunate to have God’s blessings.”)

“She’s amazing!” I whispered to my Congolese colleague when we walked out of the meeting.

“Oui,” he said. “Très dynamique.”

Yes. It says everything.

Crazy People without Borders

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 08:56:00 -0500

I never finished telling the story of that night at the Paroisse St. Aloys. (I have since been to another Paroisse, it was cold, wet, full of mosquitoes, and had an uncomfortable feel of being below sea level, stuck as it was in a flat, dark, totally unspectacular jungle. It occurred to me as I toasted the priests at dinner each night that I was living a “Lord of the Rings” type adventure, especially when we were silenced by rumors on the radio that Laurent Nkunda had been overthrown. There was no electricity, and I wandering around with a candle each night, going to bed as soon as I had eaten, the way I imagine people did in the olden days, before there was TV. Like Bilbo Baggins, I missed the friends I had made in the last rest spot, and therefore cared little for adventure at that juncture.)

The reason I went to the dive bar, Noblesse Oblige, that day in Rutshuru, was that I wanted to see the Spaniards. But backing up, I wanted a drink, to avoid worrying about all the work waiting in my email inbox that I couldn’t access because I didn’t have a convoy to travel back to Goma with. Only a journalist’s one Toyota.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not okay,” said the boss when I pitched the one Toyota plan. “No, not at all.”

A humanitarian vehicle had been attacked the day before and the driver shot and killed. Bandits? Rebels? Interahamwe? No one knew. All the humanitarians knew was that any lone-traveling vehicle could mean a big hassle later.

Being “in the field,” as they call it in Africa when you leave your base to do work in a more rural site, is initially an unpleasant activity compared to what you would be doing at your base, just as Africa can be an initially unpleasant activity compared to what you would be doing in New York. Africans feel even more strongly about this, if they have already been living an urban life. The field seems to them boring and backward. In the field, you don’t have a computer, for fear of being robbed by bandits, nor Internet access, nor full-time electricity, and the radio doesn’t play any rap music, not even Tanzanian rap music. Folk tunes, evangelical sermons, or nothing. It’s either raining or dusty, and the only things to do after 3:00 when most rural people finish work for the day are sleep, drink, talk, or read. (They start work early in the countryside.)

After a few days in the field, the understimulation becomes normal, and hopefully, pleasant. More often than not, unexpected things happen that would never happen to you back in the city. I always think of the field as a Buddhist exercise in having no expectations. I’m really bad at the exercise, so that day I decided to head back to Goma, no matter what. My journalist friend urged me to lie to my boss and come along anyway, saying that my ride did have a convoy. But I never lie.

Instead, I decided to find a ride that did have a convoy. My colleagues wouldn’t be leaving until the next afternoon, but they gave me the number of an aid worker staying at the Paroisse.

I called Jerome, who told me his convoy would not be leaving until the next morning. It was fast approaching the deadline for departure if you wanted, or had to, make it back inside the Kibati roadblock before nightfall. I found my driver, who was hanging out with his friends on the street, and asked him to drive me to the UN peacekeeping base as fast as possible. We drove silently, arriving after 15 minutes at the gate of MONUC, inside a refugee camp.

Indians stood guarding it in their army uniforms. They make up a large part of the peacekeeping soldiers at MONUC, which is the acronym for the peacekeeping mission. I gestured assertively to them and explained that I needed to get back to Goma and wanted to go with them if there was a vehicle traveling. The colonel did not speak English or French. He called a translator and we waited, failing to communicate with gestures. I noticed that underneath his helmet was a strap filled with what looked like hair. What a strange strap, I thought.

Then a UN civilian car drove up, carrying a pretty young blond with freckles and a very good tan. She looked quizzically at me as I stood with the colonel, and after parking, she came over to find out what I was doing. I had seen the girl at parties.

“I need a ride back to Goma,” I said.

“Since when does your NGO need an escort from MONUC?” she said with a smirk.

“I don’t need an escort, I need a ride,” I said. I was sure already that the gossip mill would start running with a false story of my NGO changing their policy and asking for a security escort from MONUC. Goddamn aid community, you have no privacy, no matter where you go, because the only way to get anywhere is in a truck with a big sign on the side that says the name of your NGO.

“Well there are no civilian cars going back to Goma today,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

“What about tanks?” I said.

“Tanks?” she said.

“Yeah. I’m waiting for a translator to come and explain to this colonel here that I want to come along in whatever military vehicle that’s traveling back. I don’t mind going in a tank.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. Your NGO wouldn’t want that.”

I disengaged from the conversation, looking at the colonel to indicate that I still honored our plan to wait for the translator. A Congolese man showed up to translate, but he didn’t speak Hindi. He tried unsuccessfully to translate my French question into English for the colonel. I explained that English was my first language, and repeated my question to the colonel in English, which the Congolese man tried to repeat in English. The colonel didn’t understand anything. The blond girl, meanwhile, was standing by watching, and I increasingly felt the urge to run back to Goma.

After getting the colonel’s cellphone number under the pretext that I would call him the next morning for a ride, I went back to my car, spotting another humanitarian vehicle parked next to it. The owner was installing latrines in the refugee camp, and offered to bring me back to Goma with him the next morning in a convoy he would be traveling with.

We drove silently back to Rutshuru, and I resigned myself to an afternoon spent doing nothing.

At the Paroisse, I found the two orphans I had given $10 to the day before. One child, Martine, who is in 3rd grade, told me he was sick. He took a packet of quinine pills out of his pocket and said the doctor had given him them at the hospital, where he had just come from. Quinine pills used to be prescribed for malaria, and I’m not sure how effective they are. I was taken with Martine’s plight, because he’s plucky, and he’s a student. Most poor people in this country do not bother with school; it’s expensive, because the government doesn’t pay teachers, so students must.

Martine’s first plea was for new school clothes, as his white and navy blue uniform was in tatters. “Look at me,” he said dramatically. “I have to go to church in these clothes. Can you believe it? I’m humiliated.” I could not adopt him, although I did think about it.

I asked the boys where the Spaniards went. They took me across the street to the bar, Noblesse Oblige. It was a shack, and dark inside. The Spaniards were sitting at a table, and some teenage rebels were standing around with their machine guns. I joined the three Spaniards, who told me they were television journalists.

Juan, a striking and muscular 32-year-old with intense black eyes, told me that Martine had complicated cerebral malaria, and that they had visited his family to see if there was anything they could do to help. He spoke seriously, and with pain. Pedro, a rugged fiftysomething who explained that he and Juan were business partners, said he was trying to bring Martine back to Spain, where a government aid program would treat his illness and neurological side effects for free. Pedro said he would bring back every orphan in Africa to Spain if he could, and we all nodded our heads gravely in solidarity. Both Pedro and Juan were wearing cargo vests, and I noticed that all three Spaniards had on those expensive sports tee-shirts that are made of some technologically advanced material that causes sweat to dry immediately.

Diego, the third Spaniard, ordered another round of beers, two each. I protested, since I did not want to drink three beers, only two, but Diego wouldn’t have any of it. Pedro ordered a round of shots, which the men drank. They told me stories about their previous adventures in Cameroon, Kosovo, and Columbia. I told them about my adventures in Somalia, Laos, and Congo. We amused each other in this way for about 20 minutes before a chubby Congolese man joined us. His bodyguard, a young rebel with a machine gun, hung by a few feet from our table.

The chubby man was introduced to me as the mayor. He proceeded to get drunk, as the Spaniards tried to assuage his palpable anxiety at being among foreigners and journalists. Just weeks before, there was a massacre in the neighboring town, and Human Rights Watch blamed the rebels, with whom this mayor was aligned. The report was all over the news for a week. Now the mayor criticized journalists, and especially the BBC, saying they were really political, and pretended to be unbiased so as to discredit the opponents of their political patron, who he believed to be, in this case, the government. The massacre was a fabrication, he argued. And there were no women or children being forced to work for rebels. “Is a woman who is cleaning her own house a slave to rebels?” he cried.

That’s not the kind of slavery the journalists were reporting.

As the mayor knew me only as an aid worker, he said at this point that I had to be his counselor, a go-between in the conversation with the three journalists, who had apparently taped an interview with him in his office that morning. The mayor was pretending to be joking, but it was not a joke. Of course I was not going to do any such thing for him, so I laughed, and tried to appear stupid.

Diego, who was by then drunk after several shots and four beers, didn’t like how the chubby mayor was talking to me. The mayor was not looking at the Spaniards anymore, because he was trying to persuade me to stay with him into the evening. I was planning to leave any second. But before I could stand up, Diego asked me to go outside with him to take a picture. Everyone went silent, the whole bar it seemed.

I told Diego I didn’t want to stand on the street and take pictures, which would likely get us both arrested by the rebels who were standing guard at the crossroads with a gigantic machine gun. It’s dangerous to take pictures around militants in Africa, unless they’re your friends. Even governments perceive photographers to be acting as spies, and in Kinshasa, for example, photography is simply illegal. What’s more, any armed man who sees an expensive item can easily commandeer it, and therefore it’s best not to expose precious objects around them.

Diego’s suggestion was ill-timed, and alienated the mayor, who got angry, and said he hadn’t realized I was married to Diego.

“I’m not married to anyone,” I said.

“If you people are trying to make a fool out of me, I don’t like it,” said the mayor defensively.

“NO… We are not trying to make a fool of you. We are happy to have your company, Mr. Mayor,” said Pedro anxiously.

Juan seconded the sentiment. I stood up and told them I had to get back to my room, as it was getting dark. The mayor told me to sit down, and gestured for the bartender to bring me another drink. I thanked him but said that I had to go, because it’s a rule in my company that I can’t stay out past dark. The mayor continued to insist, and grabbed my arm to push me back down on the bench.

Character sketches are useful in these kinds of situations. I could see, for example, that the mayor was an insecure and dangerous man, eager to prove his power to me and anyone else. I decided to flatter him. I stopped smiling and sat down for a second.

“Sir, I respect you very much, and it has been an honor to talk with you. But I must follow the rules of my company and go home now. They are looking out for young ladies like myself when they make such rules, and I am sure you would not want your own daughter wandering around this town in the dark alone.”

He said he would walk me home. Diego objected, saying he would walk me home.

“I will walk home by myself,” I said, with a fierce look at Diego. Pedro winked at me to indicate he would come.

I got up and walked out of the bar. Pedro snuck out and accompanied me back to the Paroisse. He told me that when they had interviewed the mayor that morning, blood had been splattered on the wall of his office.

At the Paroisse, I saw a UN civilian vehicle, and the blond girl from earlier. She was staying there too. But this time she didn’t annoy me. I had already fended off the mayor and Diego, and in comparison, she was an ally – an aid worker and a woman like me. Small emergencies like this bring you down to the fundamentals.

Dinner that night was cooked by the priests’ servants: pork cuts with gravy, potatoes and cabbage. I ate with the blond girl and the Spaniards, minus Diego, who had gone to sleep off his drinks. His friends explained that they brought him to Africa because he had just been divorced, and wasn’t having his “best moment.” The Spaniards were hoping to tape another interview with the mayor the next morning, to find out why 40 male schoolchildren were seen being lead out of town in handcuffs earlier in the day.

The blond girl moderated the dinner conversation with flirtatious segues. We talked about the UN, and the war in eastern Congo. I asked about the hair-strap I saw the Indian colonel wearing under his helmet. The blond, it turned out, was charged with mediating between Congolese refugees and their Indian peacekeepers.

“That’s their hair,” she said. “They have really long beards, but they have to put the hair in a net to meet regulations.”

The Spaniards recounted their experiences in other countries, specifically with Zapatistas in Mexico. “They’re like Quakers, with guns!” someone exclaimed in surprise. Pedro described his journalism partnership with Juan as “crazy people without borders,” riffing on the NGO Doctors without Borders. Pedro, who is stout, with a moustache and beard and grey-brown wavy hair, reminded me of Earnest Hemingway, or someone Earnest might have idolized. I asked him what he thought of the writer who revered macho Spanish men doing just such things as Juan and Pedro.

“I tink he is estupido,” said Pedro. “I have been to Cuba many times, but I don’t glamorize myself just because I drank a mojito in Havana.”

By 9:00, we were all full and warm with talk. The bonding was brief, and wouldn’t endure, but at that moment we were close like siblings. I was so glad I hadn’t gone back to Goma.

I went to bed early and slept soundly.

You always sleep better in the field.

Mary at the Paroisse St. Aloys, Rutshuru

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 07:19:09 -0500

Mary at the Paroisse St. Aloys, Rutshuru

Here's Your Movie Character

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 07:02:00 -0500

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.

Schoolboy at Kirotshe Primary School, near Minova, on Lake Kivu.

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 08:54:00 -0500

Schoolboy at Kirotshe Primary School, near Minova, on Lake Kivu.

Why street kids may not go to school, even if you pay for it

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:08:51 -0500

AH : So I met this little boy the other day who fishes every morning in Lake Kivu [eastern Democratic Republic of Congo] with his little brother. I really admire them because they work very early and long, and the little brother strings little talapia and sardines they catch onto a reed of grass through the fish's gills. I think they give the fish to their family because their father is unemployed and extremely poor. Last weekend the oldest brother, who is probably 12, invited me to his house. It's a shack on the lot of a large house currently in construction, on a bed of hard lava rock. They are squatters. The boy is amazingly smart, and speaks French perfectly, some English, Kiswahili, and his tribal language probably. He asked me for money to pay for school, because he said it was too expensive at $10 per term. But then the father indicated to me that he pays for the boy to go to school, $6 a month. I don't know if I should give him tuition -- I mean I would be happy to help, but will it really go to the school or will the boy just take it and keep fishing to feed his family? He has five siblings.

Franc: If he speaks those languages it means he has probably spoken with a lot of tourists to get money. He knows what stories to tell to get people's sympathy and money. Those children are very difficult cases, because usually if you pay for them to go to school they will not even go, they don't want to. Because they want to spend the money on themselves and keep fishing.

AH: So is there any way to help them?

Franc: What we usually do with those cases is to help the children make more money. Maybe to change from fishing to some other business and better organize themselves.

AH: What!? So, like, you just accept that they are determined to be little business people and help them to become more successful at it?

Franc: Yes.