A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [29]
One boy yells from the back, “Blah! Blah! Blah!”
They all laugh.
Another one steps in, “White people always say they care, they want to help. But where is the help? They never do anything!”
That went well. Nothing like teenage boys for a little straight talk. Let’s call it “open dialogue.”
There’s an old stock photo trick that always worked with kids. It’s cheesy, but it’s worth a try. I ask, “Can I take your photo?”
The boys crowd around, posing. I snap the shot and show them the viewfinder. “Shanella!” they cry—an apparent Swahili hybrid for Lisa Shannon. They are all shouting, “Take my photo!”
Vanity. Works every time. After they are warmed up, I talk with a couple of boys privately.
I SIT IN A PRIVATE classroom with Junior. He is seventeen, clean-cut, and seems like a good kid, one that in a different context might be found buried in a book or taking college prep classes.
“Can you tell me about your family?”
“Even though my family was very poor, I chose to live with them. It was by force I was taken. What the chief made us do was not good. Because I was to kill, to make sex and violence on wives and children. It upsets me now.”
I’m surprised we’re getting straight down to it. “What was it like the day you went to join the Mai Mai?” I ask.
“I was a pupil. That day, the Mai Mai came and asked us to join . . . there was no alternative. You must join or you will be killed. Once in the mountains . . . I became ill. Only after I recuperated, I became a Mai Mai. I knew how to write, so they made me the secretary of the group. What they made me do still upsets me. We are not welcome in our village because we made violence against the civil population.”
“They made you attack your own village?”
“I think the village population will understand it was not our will, but the will of the chief. Sometimes we avoided making violence in our own village. It is in other villages we made sexual violence against women. The real problem was sleep. We slept without anything, no blanket, just on the mountain. There was nothing to eat. Bad food. Bad sleep. No sanitation. We lived like savages. This led us to sexual violence against wives and to loot villages for food.”
I find it remarkable he has brought up sexual violence, all on his own, several times, as though I am his confessor. “Did they force you to rape?”
“This was a kind of revenge. Whenever we saw a girl or a wife, we had to attack her immediately. For me, it was a kind of safe defense, to reject the problems I had in the army, to forget.”
“What do you hope for in the future?”
“Even though I am poor, studies can change my situation. I hope I get my diploma, that I can be a VIP, a very important person.”
PAI PAI IS CLEAN-SHAVEN, wearing a white tank top that shows off his muscles. He has the kind of toughness that comes from having nothing to prove. He’s seventeen and though he is mild mannered, I can’t imagine anyone giving him a hard time. Something about him radiates, “Don’t mess with me.”
“I was in the government army. The salary was very little. Twenty-five dollars a month.”
“How old were you when you joined the army?”
“Twelve.”
“Five years in the army.”
“Yes, five years.”
I’m not going to get too far with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers. I try to prompt him, “Why did you join the army when you were twelve?”
“I was taken by Rwandan soldiers to the forest, to carry things of the soldiers. Once there, we were formed by RCD. Eventually, because of bad treatment, I changed to the government army. I hoped there would be a change, but the conditions were the same.
“In my mind there are remnants of violence I have done to people. Now I would like to do something to erase those souvenirs, to forget things I did in the army.”
“You had to do violence? Can you talk about that?”
Pai Pai crunches up his face, ticking his tongue. “Ugh. The problem is that I killed a lot of people.