• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“You.” He can’t leave the car unattended.

I finger the door handle, feeling like I did in middle school, when I stood on the high-dive for the first time. I stared down at the water as friends jeered, egging me on while I measured the social cost of retreat. I remember wondering if they would see my flaming cheeks, prickly with humiliation, if I slinked back down the ladder.

Each moment that slips by fuels the awkwardness of the moment.

What’s the big deal?

I don’t move.

Just get out of the car.

I unlatch the door, step out on the road alone and dash across the street.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Souvenir

I’M SO WRAPPED up in the sea of virgin-faced killers on my first morning at Bukavu’s child-soldier rehabilitation center, Bureau pour le Volontariat au Service de l’Enfance et de la Santé (BVES), I don’t notice Noella in the crowd. It’s a flurry of activity as half of the boys get ready to depart for home after their two-month stay here. Boys collect their parting gifts—a blanket, a soccer ball, and some tennis shoes—before heading for the vans that will drive them south to be reunited with their families.

Noella’s shaved head blends in with the ninety boys’ faces in the group. Her skinny eleven-year-old frame swims in her oversize pajama bottoms. Perhaps that’s why I missed her; she doesn’t look like a girl. Or perhaps her history has made her expert in being invisible.

She comes to my attention because of her younger brother, Luc. He is the youngest here, only nine years old. I notice him, in a man-size T-shirt that hangs to his knees, dodging in and out between the older boys as they pack up the vans. How could a kid that age be a former soldier?

I ask the staff. He’s not. Luc and Noella were picked up on the road by aid workers who found them wandering, lost in the forest. They only speak Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. Despite their ever-changing story, in South Kivu that means one thing.

It is not the first time the center has aided Interahamwe children. In fact, the influx of Hutu refugee children was the catalyst that started the center, in 1995, when an earlier program split into two projects, one for unaccompanied child refugees and the other for 650 former Interahamwe children.

The center director, Murhabazi Namegabe, whom I met in Portland a year ago, is an intense man with a serious temperament that commands respect.

I ask him, “What is it like bringing children together from rival militias?”

“In Eastern Congo, children were raised with the idea that someone who is not of your tribe or ethnic group is an enemy,” he says. “There was conflict between Hutu and Tutsi children staying at the center.”

Murahbazi explains that the center was home to children from the Mai Mai, a homegrown Congolese militia known for its use of witchcraft, as well as kids from Rally for Congolese Democracy, or RCD, militias backed by Rwanda. “The children from Mai Mai were dirty, and children from RCD were clean and tidy. The clean children considered the others witches because Mai Mai practice sorcery. When they were playing cards, if the Mai Mai won, immediately a fight began with, ‘They won because of witchcraft.’ If the RCD won, the fight began, ‘They had intelligence from Rwanda! They had modern technology!’

“The key message is, You are children. There is no difference between you. You must live together, share together. We ask the children, ‘Is there someone who has chosen to be born in Rwanda, Burundi, or Congo?’

“No one among the children raises a finger to say, ‘I chose to be born here.’

“This causes a change in consciousness. After one week, they become friends.”

THE VANS DRIVE AWAY, leaving the remaining boys to file back inside the compound. As the dust settles, their focus shifts to the only remaining source of entertainment: me.

On long runs, I fueled myself for miles by contemplating this moment, rehearsing what I might say. As the boys crowd around asking questions, the moment has arrived. I step up