BIBIANE
SHE HAD THREE CHILDREN, though only two by the time I met her. One had just died, most likely from malnutrition. She recounted her struggle to earn money. A woman she knew offered to pay her to carry cassava flour through the forest, and it was here that she came upon the three men. She couldn’t run away. They held her for three days and raped her repeatedly. Her husband returned from a trip, and when he heard she’d been kidnapped and raped, he abandoned her. Then she found out she was HIV positive, and pregnant. If she delivered the child tomorrow—at eight months pregnant, and thin as a bamboo tree—she couldn’t pay for the delivery. She didn’t even have sugar. All she had was the disease the men had left her with. I asked her whether she was on HIV medication, and she opened her plum-colored satchel to reveal some pills and a potato—her lunch. She was a street woman now, she said, and that was why she was crying.
VUMILA
SHE WAS SLEEPING WHEN she heard a knock at her door. Nine men speaking Kinyarwanda, the language spoken in Rwanda, kicked the door open, entered, and used strips of clothes and rope to tie her and her children’s hands in order to rob them. Her husband wasn’t home. Once they gathered the things, they untied Vumila and made her carry her own belongings on her back deep into the forest. When she fell from exhaustion from walking up and down hills and through the woods for about a week, they kicked her. They arrived at the first rebel checkpoint, and men—some in uniform, some in tracksuits—untied her hands. At least nine men raped her and several other women in a large, open room while the other men watched. The commander of the camp chose Vumila to be his “wife,” and she was forced to stay inside his house day and night. She was raped over and over and over for eight months. When she had to go to the bathroom, they put a string on her like an animal and followed her to the river. Those who tried to escape were stabbed to death, and their bodies were displayed before the other prisoners. Eventually one of the men who had been detained with her was sent back to the village to find three cows to exchange for each person’s release. He found only two cows per person. Vumila and the others were beaten, whipped, kicked, stripped of their clothes, and finally told to run away. They arrived back in their village naked, exhausted, and injured. By the time Vumila’s husband returned to the village, she was pregnant with the commander’s child. Her husband was angry at her for carrying the child of a Rwandan Hutu militiaman and told her she had to go back to her family. Vumila now wanted only one thing:
“All I want is that they accept my children to school. We used to have livestock that help us pay for the school, but now we cannot pay for school, and the government said that they [were] going to help everyone with tuition, free education, but now they sent the children home with no education. What kind of a country will Congo be with uneducated children?”
MAPENDO
SHE APPEARED TO BE dying from AIDS-related complications. I had heard that she had been gang-raped and had been sick for some time after but had no money or transportation to get to the hospital. We arrived unannounced and found her sitting with her mother and sisters outside their hut. She was shivering in the hot sun, covered in a skin rash. Her skin, once black and shiny and beautiful, was muted and splotched. She was thin and weak and could barely shake my hand. It had been five months since Mapendo had escaped back to her hut after being kidnapped by five soldiers who also spoke Kinyarwanda. She had never gone far from her village before she was taken and had no idea where the men had come from. She knew only that each of them had raped her many times, that they had left her with some illness that caused painful sores all over her body. She lay back down on the wooden plank she used as a mattress. She was tired.
? ? ?
In this last case, I didn’t want to monopolize her energy with my questions, but I couldn’t just walk away, either. We did a brief interview, and I took a few photographs of her lying down. The closest hospital was two hours away, and my car was full of Congolese aid workers, UN staff, and others who had tagged along in hopes of getting some sort of tip for their help. I told the crew of people I was traveling with that we would take Mapendo to the hospital, and to my astonishment, they protested. They called themselves aid workers and were refusing to help a dying woman. I told them that they could either share the car with Mapendo and her leaking fistula or they could sit on the roof of the car, but she was coming with us. I helped Mapendo’s mother lay her ravaged body inside our giant SUV, and we drove her to Bukavu, where she was admitted to the hospital.
CHAPTER 8