Mama and I got out of Congo on a banana lorry.
After we left the forest we made for Goma, on the tip of Lake Kivu. I don’t remember much of that part. In Goma, though, there were too many soldiers prowling the streets and pops of gunfire at odd hours, and after sleeping a few nights on the floor at a pastor’s home with a dozen other dazed and bruised bodies, the pastor told us the fighting was getting worse and we needed to leave. He managed to get us a lift with a lorry driver who had a lazy eye and a paunchy belly. He looked Mama up and down with his good eye, smiled and said he’d take us wherever we wanted. We thanked the pastor, and once he was gone, Mama found us another ride. Still a banana lorry, but driven by a huge, fierce woman named Paula Kubwa: “Big Paula.”
Apparently lots of would-be refugees wanted to hitch a ride out of the country with Paula Kubwa. She was said to be the daughter of one of the militia leaders, and she took no guff from militia or police. She paid her bribes at the checkpoints like everyone else and got on her way, and if any man said boo he’d be laid out cold in the dirt, his friends just pissing themselves with laughter.
It wasn’t easy to get a ride with the lady driver. Mama later told me that we included Paula Kubwa in our prayers every night because she had found us. She had rescued us. She had picked us out of the crowd of jostling refugees to act as our lady Moses, parting the sea for our escape into the promised land. I don’t know if I remember her face, or if I’ve conjured it out of what Mama told me. In my mind she was a mountain, something marvelous and terrifying like an angel with a sword.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t need my prayers.
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I guess Boyboy, Michael, and I could have taken a bus and found some way to sneak across the borders, but just the idea of sitting in a cramped space for eight hours with all those bodies and all their bags and no one rolling down the windows makes me ill. Everyone eating and farting and talking too loud, little kids peeing in their pants because the bus won’t stop, people sitting practically on top of you. A pirated kung fu movie on a too-small screen blasting too-loud static in the front. Contraband chickens that get loose and run squawking up and down the aisle until some poor guy grabs them and stuffs them back under his sport coat.
I like a crowd—it’s great for pickpocketing—but I need to be able to escape. I’d rather pay a few shillings to sit in the back of a truck full of goods headed for the interior. It might be less comfortable, but at least you can feel the breeze.
Once, because I’m an orphan kid and no one could tell me not to, I went as far as the border checkpoint between Kenya and Uganda. My plan was to go all the way around the north side of Lake Victoria to Congo. I just jumped on a bus because I felt like it, pretending to be one of a family of ten, melting into the pack of loud, wiggly children who were being ushered on board by their overwhelmed father. I slipped under the driver’s eye and slouched into a seat in the back. I didn’t want to return for good, I just . . . wanted to go. To see.
But I chickened out before crossing that invisible line that turned Kenya into another country. One foot over and suddenly I’m illegal again, my refugee documents meaningless. Or so the smugglers in the lorries told me.
They call them banana lorries because the big flatbed trucks take stuff bought in Sangui—cooking oil, pots and pans, medical supplies, stuff made in China—into Congo. Then they bring produce (lots of bananas, hence the name) and timber and charcoal and people back out. Sometimes a little smuggled gold if the drivers think they can manage to get through all the checkpoints without getting caught. More often than gold, though, it’s refugees, because they’re easier to come by than gold, and no one wants to steal them.
The lorries go out and back, single file down the disintegrating highway. Like cows heading to pasture in the morning, returning to the barn at night. On that trip I decided to skip the bus and take a lorry back to Sangui. The man I found said I could, but if I had papers to get me across Kenya, why did I want to sit in the open? Why not sit in the nice bus? I just did. He shrugged and told me the fare—nearly as much as the bus after all—but assured me there were other ways if I didn’t have the money. He gazed in unvarnished disappointment at my thighs when I pulled out my cash.
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