A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [46]
Wandolyn sits close to me and weeps. She hasn’t cracked a smile since we met a few minutes ago. I try to break the ice. “Did you get my letters?”
She ticks her tongue, looking away.
I show her the letters she wrote to me. “I saved them. When I was running, I had your face in my mind, sometimes for hours. I saw in your photo, in your eyes, that you’ve been through difficult things.”
She covers her mouth, mumbling something. Hortense says, “She remembers her difficulty. That is why she is weeping.”
“Would you like to talk about it?” I ask.
It’s a smaller group today, only the four sisters, so we have the luxury of time.
“Congolese soldiers came to our village and raped me,” Wandolyn says. “At the hospital, they asked why I had kept silent. It was then I knew I was pregnant from the rape.”
I keep my hand on her shoulder.
“How old is the baby?” I ask her.
“One year, eight months. I didn’t think I could accept it. Whenever I saw it, I was only seeing a sign of my bad life.”
I give her a little hug.
She smiles. “I’d like to keep you near me.”
Then Wandolyn starts crying again. “You are the only one who takes care of me and knows about my situation. The money helps me take care of my baby and my children at school.”
“I consider you my friend,” I respond. “I’m happy to do it.”
“I am extremely happy to see you,” she says. “My mom died when I was four. You are my mother. Even my husband is proud of my new mother. My children always say, ‘We have a grandmother who takes care of us. We are studying because of our grandmother.’ Every day my children ask me to show them your photo. They ask, ‘Can we see our grandmother someday?’”
A grandmother! I’m only thirty-one!
I’m stunned. A couple of postcards, letters, and photos have given me near mythic status in this family and transformed me into a kind of magic fairy godmother.
Wandolyn continues. “My husband encourages me. He says, ‘In the past, you wanted to put an end to your life, but now you’ve found a mother and that mother helps us. You should be happy.’”
I ask her, “You wanted to end your life?”
She looks me in the eye and says quietly, “Ndiyo.” Yes.
There is no way I can live up to the impossibly personal role that Wandolyn has cast for me. But there is also no way I can dismiss her at the end of this meeting, after only a ten-minute exchange. She has staked her claim.
Despite Women for Women HQ’s warnings that these visits only cause problems, I cannot leave without meeting my sweet little “grandchildren.”
Wandolyn’s son greets us as we emerge from the car on the outskirts of Walungu. He shakes my hand shyly. I follow Wandolyn up a long, winding path through the rural countryside, past banana trees, and pigs and calves munching on underbrush, to her home compound—a perfectly round African straw hut.
If I had dreamed this scene a few years ago, how absurd it would have seemed! Me, meeting my half-grown African grandchildren in their tribal compound, something straight out of a storybook but tense with the weight of war around us. I would have woken up and thought it impossibly bizarre.
The turns life can take.
I announce, “Grandma’s here!” and embrace each of the children. Wandolyn’s husband is fourteen years older than she is and he is frail, clearly in bad health. He shakes my hand with a gentle formality. I peek inside their dark hut. Scrawny white rabbits stumble around in the dark like ghosts.
Wandolyn holds her baby daughter, Nshobole, who is a stoic child. But little ones are often shy around new people, so it’s hard to measure the impact of the event on her psyche. “May I hold her?”
I take her in my arms, searching her eyes for evidence.
Neighbors gather, and I know that can mean trouble after I have gone. It starts to rain and it’s best not to stay, so I say goodbye.
Yet it isn’t enough. Not nearly enough. I ask Wandolyn, “When can I meet you again?”
A few days later, we meet