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When she gets off the line, she offers again. “You’re welcome to borrow my phone if you want to call. . . .”

Call who?

If you feel like taking stock of your life, ask yourself this basic question: If you were stranded in a thunderstorm for the night, on a remote African peninsula, with a militia, and just made it home safely, who would you call? Not to double-check the minutia in your life insurance policy, but just to say hi? Mom is not a possibility, given the inevitable public hysterics that would follow. Perhaps pulled by the ambiguity that stretches months or years past the last time you share a bed or say “I love you,” I think of Ted. I think of his hand on the back of my neck and I consider calling him. But I’m certain his tone will tell me I shouldn’t have, and that isn’t something I can deal with today.

Nonchalance is the easiest response. I play it off like I’ve officially earned my bad-ass credentials, like I’m check-in-with-no-one independent. “I’ll just wait until I get back to Bukavu.”

I return to my little blue and white room with its wooden wardrobe, pull the mosquito net around me, and lie down, still spinning from last night and fruitlessly attempting to sleep.

ASENDE, A SISTER I met the other day, has been on my mind since our meeting, when she spoke of surviving a massacre. Her story involves a higher body count than any other I’ve heard firsthand. We track down her mud hut in a quiet neighborhood and wait for her to return from work in the fields. She approaches; her austere eyes and modest manner give her a simple, nunlike presence. She carries a straw basket filled with rusty farming tools. Surprised to find us waiting on her doorstep, she invites us into her spotless mud row-home. It’s furnished with a couple of wooden benches, a calendar on the wall, a pile of plastic tubs and pots in the corner, and a curtain marking the passage to another room.

I begin the conversation by asking about the slaughter.

“Around five hundred of us escaped from the fighting and hid in the bush,” she begins. “The FDD militia found us and began killing people. They shot me three times before I fell down. They went around killing wounded persons with knives and taking everything they found on the dead bodies. I was wounded, but they couldn’t tell I was alive. Finally, they left. When I opened my eyes, I saw a person wearing white, who secured me. It was then that I realized I was alone among the corpses.”

“What was your life like before the war?” I ask.

“My husband abandoned me for other wives, so I was alone to care for my children,” she says. “During the war, we escaped to a place where I met my mother, who had three children left in her charge by my younger sister, who was a prostitute.”

Up until now she has maintained a plain, direct affect. While Maurice translates what she says next, Asende wipes her eyes with her skirt. She is crying. What could be worse than the massacre she just described?

“My mother became ill and went to Bukavu to be treated. She died.”

I’m surprised. She is reduced to tears not because her husband left, not because she was shot or buried alive among hundreds of bodies. Her mother’s death, from illness, makes her cry. Why? It raises such a basic question about the human breaking point. Studying her, I wonder if losing her mom marked the end of all support, beyond which she was utterly alone.

“So I took care of those three children.”

“What is it like for you raising orphans in addition to your own children?” I ask.

“I consider those children as my own,” she says matter-of-factly.

“What do you hope for in the future?”

“It is very difficult to have any thought about the future. I am living, but I have a bad life. About the future, I don’t have any hope.”

No party spin or testimony here.

Trying to nudge her towards the positive, I ask, “What gives you happiness in your life?”

“When I am angry or sad, I feel ill. So I try to consider life normal.”

We are all silent