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“Beatrice was called here to meet Kelly,” Hortense says, “I’ve already told her Kelly didn’t come.”

Ouch. Beatrice keeps her eyes cast downward to hide the awkward, sinking look of someone trying to hide disappointment. I pull out Kelly’s packet, tied with a bow, and say, “Kelly was so sorry she couldn’t be here today. She wanted to meet you so badly. She asked me to send you her love. It just wasn’t possible.”

I snap a shot of Beatrice holding the photo of Kelly and her husband.

We move on with the meeting, while Kelly’s sister holds a half-smile, fingering the photos and letter quietly. Still, she looks like a person who’s shown up at the wrong party, like she wouldn’t mind disappearing.

We begin with “the trouble I got from war,” but conversation quickly shifts when one of my sisters says, “Some children died.”

That’s one of my talking points. I ask, “How many have children who have died?”

Six out of nine raise their hands.

“How many of you have had more than one child die?”

They hold up their fingers. A couple of them hold up two fingers. One of them holds up three fingers. Another woman raises four. “Four children died.”

Another explains, “The twins died, and a baby after.”

They each launch into their own one-line explanations, “The baby was tired after birth and didn’t breast-feed.”

“My 13-year-old daughter died from anemia, after she had four packs of blood.”

“Two babies, both died at the clinic. I remain childless.”

Therese adds, “One child died because of bad living conditions in the bushes. We buried her in the yard.”

These stories always shock me, though they shouldn’t. I’ve been citing the statistics for years. Congo’s child death rate is twice that of sub-Saharan Africa, which is already the highest in the world. Fifteen hundred people continue to die every day as a result of the war. In fact, less than one-half of one percent of the war-related deaths in Congo are violent. The vast majority of the deaths are due to the war’s aftershocks, primarily easily curable illnesses. Almost half of the deaths are children under the age of five.

We get so wrapped up in the discussion about everyone’s lost children that the meeting time flies by. I hear almost nothing from Therese, who remains quiet and unassuming. When it’s finally her turn to speak, she says, “I escaped with my children. It was dark, but I saw them take my husband away.”

The Interahamwe took five girls and eight other men that night. “The abducted girls escaped death, but the other eight men were tied on crosses and killed, except my husband.”

“Did your husband become an Interahamwe soldier?” I ask her.

“He was a slave, cooking,” she says.

“He was sent to get firewood the day he escaped,” she continues. “When he came back home, they sent letters. They say they will come for him one day. My husband is a good cook, so they say they want him back because they can’t find someone else who cooks like him.”

“Can’t you move to Bukavu and open a restaurant?” I ask. “Do you still live in the same house?”

“We’re still there.”

Sadly, we are out of time. We take a few group photos and I give Therese a big hug. We wave to each other as I pull away, and I call back to her, “Kwa heri!” Goodbye.

On the drive home, as we peel around corners that reveal soaring views of Lake Kivu, the meeting feels like a letdown, as much for Therese as for me. After her months of waiting and wondering who Lisa Shannon might be, and after my years of thinking about her fuzzy, dark photo while I ran miles on the trail, rehearsing what we might say to each other, I’ve met her in person. I’ve embraced her. But we spoke for less than five minutes. We exchanged only a handful of sentences. I know almost nothing more about her.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Gift from God

SO THESE ARE the Walungu sisters, whose black-and-white photos radiated damage. Here in Walungu, an hour from Bukavu, the town itself is secure. It’s crawling with Congolese Army and UN officials, but it attracts Women for Women participants from villages neighboring