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“We didn’t make it.

“We got in the car with the driver and Christine, who has four different cell phones, one just for security updates. She got a call. We couldn’t go down this street, a main road in Bukavu. Students were protesting. It was Easter break and the police shot someone. Protesters marched with his body over to the governor’s house and left it on the front steps.

“We immediately did a U-turn. Thirty seconds later, I saw two huge UN tanks in front of us, coming down the road, heading towards the protesters. One of the tanks passed, turned their gun at me—like two feet from my head. But I was thinking, okay, they are experts, they aren’t going to shoot me.

“The first tank passed and the second tank was coming our way. The only thing between us was a guy on a motorcycle. The tank swerved into our lane and we heard the motorcycle getting crushed. The rider started screaming.

“The tank stopped there. The guy’s legs were pinned underneath, and the UN tank didn’t roll off. One of the UN guys was just looking around, calm, surveying the scene for a good few minutes, not emotional at all. He was looking each way while the guy was screaming. A woman was right next to our car yelling at the UN to get off the guy! There were maybe fifty people around. Everyone was yelling. Finally, the tank rolled off the guy and just rolled on down the street, leaving him there. Congolese people picked him up and dragged him out of the street. Then everyone turned toward our car, and they saw me sitting in the front seat. They saw my big sunglasses. Christine told me they thought my sunglasses were a video camera of some kind, they thought I was filming. They started to crowd around the car, screaming. Our driver just pulled out and escaped up a dirt road. All the while, the Conrad Hilton judge was in the back seat.

“We decided to do interviews at the office instead of in the field.

“At the office the next day, we heard that the security situation was getting worse. Zainab said I should go back to the hotel and pack our bags, and we could be on a plane in a few hours. ‘Just lie down in the back of the car on the ride back to Orchid,’ she told me. So the Women for Women car pulled up in the middle of the street and I was walking from the office gate to the car, when all of a sudden I heard ‘pow-pow-pow-pow.’ About a hundred scared-shitless Congolese were running towards me. Christine yelled, ‘Don’t run! Don’t run!’ But I ran straight back to the gate, and all these people were crowding around, trying to get back into the compound while the security guys were trying to close the gates.

“I stuck my arm in through the crowd and they pulled me in. Zainab was just standing there asking, ‘What’s going on?’

“I decided I wasn’t going anywhere. So I started to film the rest of Zainab’s interview, then we heard shots again, right outside the gate. I dropped the camera and ran around the compound in circles, because there was nowhere to go. Zainab just laughed and said, ‘It’s worse in Iraq.’

“I was like, ‘Stop laughing. It’s not funny.’

“She says, ‘I laugh in these situations.’

“We left that afternoon.”

RICKI’S WARNINGS ARE flashing in my head like a stoplight, so the news about Orchid being overbooked does not land well. In the States, I am not known for my restraint when unhappy. Now I feel as if I have one foot on the brake and one the accelerator. Every minute of my countdown to Congo, every warning, presses down harder on both.

But I’ve also been forewarned: People in Congo don’t get mad. It would be viewed as a temper tantrum—it’s something you don’t do, like crying in a board meeting. As one Congo travel veteran warned emphatically, “If you lose it, just pack up; leave. You might as well never come back. You will have permanently lost the respect of the Congolese.”

So I smile at Christine and laugh. “Flexible is the name of the game in Congo,” I say. “It’s no problem.”

We pull off to the side of the road and I get my first glance of the border