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“What’s happening?” I ask Hortense.

“They are turning the boat around. We will spend the night in the village.”

With our new Mai Mai friends?

I ask rhetorically, “The Mai Mai . . . Do you really think it’s safe?”

She flashes a big, tension-diffusing smile. “Safer than drowning trying to cross the lake, yes?”

The canvas canopy covering the deck flaps wildly, while the first mate grasps the canopy frame, trying to keep it from flying off. He maintains a tense gaze forward, anxiously blowing a plastic whistle as if to a drumbeat. I can only imagine that he’s poising himself to send out a louder, high-pitched call for help should the boat capsize without warning.

So these are our choices tonight, more only-in-Congo choices. Would you rather be raped or watch your children starve? Drown, or camp with the militia?

So be it. We’re sleeping over with the Mai Mai.

I grab my camera and try to capture it all on video. By the time the boat rocks to shore, slate-gray clouds blot out the remaining evening light, leaving just enough for my eyes to adjust and glean detail, but causing my video camera viewfinder to go black. I wobble back down the wooden plank.

I notice a little girl I walked with earlier today among the handful of women waiting for us. I touch her shaved head affectionately and say hello while the others disembark and Hortense talks to the women on the beach.

“They are glad we have returned,” she says. “They knew it would rain and were concerned.” (Much later, Maurice tells me what he overheard the villagers muttering to each other. Tension between the Congolese Army and the Mai Mai is at its peak, they were saying; it could erupt into gun battle at anytime.)

I kneel on the pebbled shore and grope around putting my camera away. The first fat raindrops hit, warning that a downpour is moments away.

“We must hurry!” Hortense calls back to me, chastising me for dallying.

I don’t understand why you think of problems.

I look up. The others are already halfway across the beach.

The girl lingers, her reedy frame draped in a tattered white dress with a faded strawberry print, a rounded collar, and buttons up the back—the kind of dress American girls wore in the 1950s with Mary Janes. She stares at me with her thin dress flapping in the wind.

I take her hand. We walk across the beach, squinting in the wind and pelting rain. I glance towards the lake and see another girl walking beside us. I’m not sure where she came from, but she must be my little friend’s twin. I can’t distinguish her features in the dark, but she wears an identical flimsy white dress—open in the back—over her thin frame, and she has the same shaved head.

I offer her my other hand.

The rain is immediate and heavy. The instant drench of a monsoon washes over us. By the time we reach the narrow footpath that leads to the village, the others have disappeared completely.

My flip-flops slip and grasp at the mud.

I stop, lost. We’ve reached the main path, but everything is black and blurry with rain. I can’t see two feet in front of me. I don’t want to do this. I want to retreat to that familiar cocoon: I’m an American. They won’t touch me. But then, the Mai Mai are a militia that attacked the UN. Took twenty-five foreigners hostage. It is one thing to stumble without warning across unidentified guys with guns; it’s another to do so knowing who they really are. And it’s quite another to know they are here, in the dark, in the rain, after they’ve seen me wagging my oversized camera around.

I’m still clasping two small, wet hands.

The girls continue ushering me forward. I’m at their mercy.

I take slow, hesitant steps. I imagine men with guns must be just beyond the blur, waiting. The girls walk in front, patiently guiding me. All I can see is the dim glow of their white dresses and their eyes peering back at me. Wide-eyed African angels.

A lantern appears in the distance and floats across the path, then disappears.

We follow in its direction.