A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [31]
The littlest girl excuses herself to go to the bathroom.
“I want to go out,” Luc says, startling me with his English, but continuing in Kinyarwanda. “I want to pee.”
That leaves only Noella. I sit down next to her on the bed. “My niece is like you, your age,” I say. “She’s thirteen.” I show her Aria’s picture. “I hope you find your parents very soon.”
She looks indifferent, moves with the slow, defensiveness of an animal under threat.
“What do you hope for in the future?”
“I want to be a child forever.”
OUTSIDE ON THE STEPS, the boys again crowd around me as I show them photos and postcards from home. Maurice translates, “They encourage you in your job. You are doing a good thing.”
One boy points to a photo of my niece, taken when she was ten years old, and says, “What about her breasts?”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I reply curtly. “Clean your mind.”
Then I look at Noella.
The next day, when I come back, her little girlfriend is gone; she’s been sent home to reunite with her family. Noella is now the only girl here. She holds Serge’s hand as we wander around the compound. While I take photos and look at boys’ sketchbooks filled with drawings of guns and military uniforms, I note the paths to the bathrooms, the little corners of the compound, and I keep checking back in on Noella, tracking her on the periphery of the crowd.
I ask Murahbazi, “Do you really think it’s safe to keep a young girl with all those boys?”
Those boys with the habit to kill, among other, um, habits.
From Murhabazi’s long pause and stare, it is clear I’ve overstepped. “She has a separate room. We have female staff. She’s okay.”
CHAPTER NINE
When I Cry
MARIE, A GIRL about seven years old, with kinky braids bent like wiry antennae and a big gap in her toothy smile, sizes me and my camera up from across the walkway. She is standing among the scraggly rose bushes that line the corridor, with the women in bold African print dresses, waiting. She seems oblivious of the gravity of this place and of her status in it as Panzi Hospital’s youngest victim of fistula from gang rape. For a moment I contemplate filming or interviewing her. I conclude, No way. I hide the camera. The little girl returns to bouncing around in her party skirt, visiting with the nurses.
If Congo is the worst place on earth to be a woman, then Panzi Hospital is sexual-violence ground zero. Kelly has joined me to visit this high-profile treatment center for traumatic fistula, which occurs when the wall separating the vagina from the bowels or urinary tract is punctured and cannot heal. The damage creates a steady, uncontrollable leakage of urine or fecal matter. The victim smells bad, causing her to be rejected by her family and community. In most of the world, fistula can occur as a rare complication during childbirth. In Congo, traumatic fistula is a common form of sexual torture, inflicted with guns, tree branches, or broken bottles.
I do notice a bad smell, now that we are standing outside the fistula ward. Dr. Roger, a slender man in a white doctor’s coat who carries himself with a quiet elegance, has led us through Panzi’s outdoor walkways and neatly cut lawns, past the “bad fed” (malnourished) children, the rows of male patients with bandaged gunshot wounds, the maternity and C-section wards, and finally, here, to the fistula ward. An unmistakable odor—like that of a long-neglected urinal—wafts out into the open-air corridor.
The air here is weighty, like the wailing that filled the parking lot when Serge shut off the engine. I spotted a girl in the corner, doubled over, crying out some Swahili lamentation over and over again between her sobs. I averted my eyes, watching the rain collect on the windshield, as we sat quietly listening to her cry.
Dr. Roger calls Marie over,