A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [50]
“I would not stay one day in my village. There was no husband there, no house.
“I can’t go back, I can’t see the souvenirs. I asked for help from a neighbor who had a car. He drove us the forty-five kilometers here and dropped us with a relative, a cousin I knew well. We grew up in the same house. We arrived, she prepared cassava. Her husband said, ‘I’m sorry, there is no place. I don’t have enough money to accept another in my charge.’
“We went to a parish, where we were welcomed. They fed us dinner. They needed to know if I was really an internally displaced person, so they called a woman to vouch for me. We ended up staying with them for two months. Then the priest rented us a house, paid for it six months in advance, and gave us food for a month.
“I spent a month begging. People gave money, clothes, food. By chance, I met an employee of Women for Women who knew the story from Kaniola. He saw me begging. He lent me twenty dollars and told me to go to Women for Women.
“When I had my leg cut off, I felt I was not a human being. But when I enrolled, I was accepted unconditionally. I began to feel like a different person. I was told I had a letter. Your letter made me very, very happy. To know there was someone thinking about me. I was a nurse in a hospital there in my village. I became a seller with money from Women for Women, and already the benefit has been more than a hundred dollars, which I used to buy a cow. I sent it to my village. Maybe in a few years, it will have babies that I can sell and buy a house here in Bukavu.”
“How are your children now?” I ask. “Are they okay mentally?”
“They are traumatized,” she says. “They passed a year without eating meat.”
We are silent.
Eventually, Generose begins again.
“I can’t find exact words to say thanks for what you did. A person can’t forget someone who does something for them. That’s why I recognized you. Since getting your photo, you’ve stayed in my mind.”
Generose’s bone infection requires a two-month stay in the hospital and two successive surgeries. The price tag? Three hundred dollars. She doesn’t have it. The surgery has already been stalled due to lack of funds.
I offer to pay. She’s over the moon and showers me in thanks as she leads us through Panzi’s maze of corridors to her ward. When we reach her bed, she asks, “Can you accept to look at my leg?”
She shows me her amputation scars, mid-thigh.
“Is it painful for you?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says. “It hurts.”
That’s when I notice her low-end, make-do prosthetic leg sitting off to the side. She has painted the toenails.
GENEROSE IS DESPERATE to get home to check on her children. We catch up on the ride. I show her my notebook with her photo and letter, which I read back to her: “‘War is a very bad thing.’”
“If you compare my photo, I have changed terribly,” she says. I think she means good-terrible. “I was thin and pale. Today I have become big and brighter. I’m fat with joy.”
She does look in good spirits.
“How’s Ted?” she asks.
I hold my two pointer fingers together, tip to tip, then split them, and tell her, “Life in the U.S.A. isn’t perfect.”
“Are you still running?” she asks. “I felt bad to see someone suffer for me, to run.”
Is she kidding? There is no trace of sarcasm in her voice. All I did was go for a run. I do a quick mental scan. What did I say in those letters? Did I complain? Was I melodramatic? God, I hope not. My poor friends; I whined for months about the mustache tan and losing my boyfriend and my toenails. All I can say to Generose is, “It was a privilege.”
We pull up next to a steep hill overflowing with makeshift wooden huts, the Bukavu slums. Generose invites me to meet her children, an offer I can’t refuse. I follow her down a narrow corridor between shacks, with thick mud squashing around my flip-flops.