A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [23]
I position myself with the bridge in the background. Christine holds the camera for me, trying to be low-key. It’s illegal to film borders. I try to control my face twitching and I dive right in with the commentary. “I’m standing on the border of Congo . . .”
As we approach the bridge, leaving Rwanda behind, I’m amazed that this old, rotting wooden bridge from Belgian Congo is all that separates the country from Rwanda. On the other side of the bridge, a man lifts the old metal gate and lets us through.
Whew. That was easy.
We drive up a hill about two city blocks before we hit the real border crossing, on the Congo side. Men in shabby tracksuits, sporting Kalashnikovs, lurk by the side of the road. I get out and enter a small cement-block room, where Congolese border officials size me up, stamp my paperwork, and usher me out again. Back in the SUV, three men approach and survey the car’s contents, standing uncomfortably close to my window, glaring. One of them presses my hosts for God knows what. His eyes confirm the folklore—they tell me I’m in Congo, with their hard, glazed-over look that makes me wonder what he’s seen, what he’s done, and if there is a soul left inside.
Christine meets him with a laugh. Is she teasing him? I can’t tell, but I’m taking mental notes. Laugh. Laugh. When in danger, laugh. Everyone is your best friend.
They want to search the car. My driver shoves cash toward the man and says something. Christine translates, “The driver told that guy to buy himself a Coke.”
As we pull away, I hum to myself that Coke ad from the eighties, the one they played during Saturday morning cartoons.
I’ d like to buy the world a Coke,
And furnish it with love . . .
Something, something, turtle doves . . .
It’s the real thing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Real Thing
WELCOME TO BUKAVU, a far cry from Rwanda. I stare out my Range Rover window, which is rolled all the way up tight, and comb the scene on Bukavu’s main drag. The landscape is identical to what I saw in Rwanda. Hills jut along the lake, forming pockets and outcrops draped with greenery. Each hill, dotted with compounds, is a mirror image of the next one.
In Bukavu, however, the signs are everywhere that all is not well. It feels raw and dusty. Corroded shopfronts and old lakeside villas stand like outlines in chalk, sketches of a dignified past, imprints of a grandeur that has been stripped and rotted under the chokehold of chaos. I can picture the villas filled with pleasure seekers—people on holiday alongside Mobutu in the lush gardens, savoring tropical fruit and tea with sugar and milk. Today, the old villas are either roofless, crumbling shells or they’re shrouded by high cement walls capped with razor wire and jagged shards of glass, men in hand-me-down security uniforms stationed at their rusty gates.
Open-air jeeps marked “UN” crawl up and down the streets; they are mounted with giant machine guns and cramped with Pakistani army guys whose hands never wander far from the trigger. Traders line the streets with wooden crates; they’re selling phone cards, cassava flour, soaps, or clothes that look they were rescued from Goodwill bins. The washed-out roads are more like dry river-beds. I was warned I will need an SUV to drive anywhere outside of Bukavu, but by the look of things, I’ll need an SUV to get anywhere inside Bukavu too. The air is different here. Rwanda breathes; purged of demons, cleansed with soft rains and the government’s progressive agenda, it hums with prospects. Not so in Congo. The air here is thick with paranoia, like rancid garbage dumped by strangers and left to fester in the yard.
Women, like pack mules, carry loads of cassava flour, firewood, stone, and other commodities up steep hills. Sometimes their cargo is twice their size. With the impassible roads and gutted local economy, there are few vehicles left and all the livestock and bicycles have been looted. The transport