their neighbors. I remember my father praying that they might live to celebrate fifty years of marriage. His wish was granted in 2012, when our family gathered from several continents to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. My mother even recited one of her old poems for the occasion, about a recalcitrant cow.
3
Refugee Childhood
MY PARENTS VIEWED the date of my birth as a good omen. December 13 was the third Sunday of Advent in 1964, the day they lit three candles out of four in expectation of Christ’s birthday. I was their second child, and the first daughter.
Kibuye Hospital, where I was born, had been built twenty years earlier by American Methodist missionaries to Burundi. Since Papa was on the hospital staff, our home – a solid brick house with wood beams and tiled roof – was part of the mission compound, as were the church and school.
Thanks to an altitude of six thousand feet, Kibuye’s climate is idyllic, and we children spent our days outdoors. My older brother Phocas and I often climbed avocado, orange, and guava trees. We would pick and eat the fruit or just enjoy our leafy world, above the rest of the human race.
At bedtime, we pestered Mama for stories of her childhood. While we huddled under our covers, she would describe volcanoes on Idjwi Island and on Lake Kivu’s far Congo shore. As a young girl, she had seen their glow reflected from the clouds at night.
Sometimes our mother stretched her memories, to describe demon-people and their offspring living in the fiery cones – stirring clay pots in the smoldering heat, eating the seething contents, laughing, singing, and spewing lava over the land. It was too dark to see the smile in Mama’s eyes – night comes quickly at the equator – but I heard it in her voice. I shivered happily under my blanket and begged for more.
When I was nearly six, I started school, setting off in my blue uniform like the twenty-nine other first graders. I could hardly wait to make the mysterious marks on paper that I had watched my older brother create. Dashing home a few hours later, I took some chalk and proudly demonstrated my new letters and numerals on our concrete floor.
When my parents were out of the room, Phocas helped me get down the heavy Bible. Cross-legged on the floor, I opened it and started dissecting letters from words, eager to read at last. But there was no meaning! Disgruntled, I told my brother to put the book away. This education business would take some time.
My parents were fluent in Kirundi, the language of our adopted country. That’s what we kids used for talking with our playmates, our teachers, and each other. But when they didn’t want us to understand their conversation, our parents switched to Kinyarwanda, their mother tongue – so our ears became fine-tuned to that as well. The two languages are quite similar.
When I was seven, my family packed our belongings and left the only home I knew. I didn’t understand why, but again the reason was Hutu–Tutsi strife. Following a 1972 uprising, Tutsi leaders in Burundi incited the killing of thousands of Hutu. We saw none of this violence in our village, and our parents never discussed it in front of us children – but they decided it was time to leave the country.
My father accepted his uncle Sekabarata’s invitation to Kaziba, in the Congo, to pursue further studies at a teaching hospital there. Only six years older than Papa, Sekabarata seemed more like a brother than an uncle to my father. Years earlier, they had undertaken their initial nursing training together.
The journey to Kaziba was an adventure for us kids – five of us now. After crossing the Ruzizi River, which separates Burundi from the Congo, we boarded the truck that would take us to our new home. Papa hoisted me onto its tailgate, and I pressed my way forward.
I hoped to cling to a side of the vehicle, to have a secure handhold and watch the scenery. Instead, as at least thirty others clambered aboard, I found my face mashed into the back of a large lady. All I could see was the swirling pattern of her cotton kitenge, the African wrap-around skirt. Just when I was sure I would suffocate between strangers, I felt a firm touch on my shoulder. It was Mama, reassuring me through the press.
The road’s deep ruts, formed during the rainy season and hardened like rock, made our vehicle lurch violently. Only our packed condition prevented me from falling over. For one stretch, the road led through mountains, with a cliff falling from its edge. I could not see this drop-off or the swamp hundreds of feet below, but the passengers’ outbursts fueled my imagination. Every time the truck tilted, I was sure it would plunge us all into the Nkombo Chasm.
After six hours of standing in the truck, our family arrived, exhausted but safe, in Kaziba, our new home deep in the Congo. Uncle Sekabarata told us we could stay in his house until the mission would provide our own.
Despite my great-uncle’s hearty welcome, I felt like an alien in the Congo. Kaziba’s population belonged to the Bashi tribe and spoke an unfamiliar tongue. School lessons were held in French and Swahili, two more languages my brothers and I had to master. Being refugees and strangers was challenging for our parents, too, until matters took a fortuitous turn.
The mountains surrounding Kaziba are home to the Banyamulenge, a proud people who measure their wealth by the size of their cattle herds. Although they have been in the Congo more than four hundred years, they originally came from what is now Rwanda, and they speak a form of Kinyarwanda similar to ours.
The Banyamulenge we came to know walked barefoot with dignity, the men in long coats and felt hats – cane in hand, to guide their lethal-looking cows through rocky terrain – the women fully draped, showing only their eyes. Their families would come down from the mountains to Kaziba for medical treatment, or to send their children to school, selling cattle to pay the fees. Uncle Sekabarata always welcomed the Banyamulenge. The house we shared with him smelled rancid whenever he hosted them, because they used butter both for cooking and as lotion.
The Banyamulenge salute – Uri uwo kwande muntu?, “Who do you belong to?” – led to our breakthrough. In answering this greeting, Papa discovered that we were distantly related to some of these folk. We had known we were linked by a shared past, but it was exciting to realize we had specific ancestors in common. Weary of being foreigners, my parents decided to join the Banyamulenge tribe. That’s how we freed ourselves from our refugee status and became citizens of the Congo.
Years later Mama, in true African style, arranged a match for me – with a Banyamulenge man. My siblings joked that she was inspired by her love of cattle, because she and Papa would have gained twelve cows from the transaction.
Sometimes I try to picture what my life might have been, had I agreed to her plan. I would probably be weaving cloth for my husband’s coat right now, or cooking over the fire in the center of a round mud hut, my shins burned from squatting too near the flames. Or maybe I’d be smearing my children with butter … The only certainty is that life would have been far more serene than it turned out.
After completing his training at Kaziba Hospital, my father was assigned by the mission to direct a health center in Kalambi, a village in the Congo’s eastern borderland. That meant another move. I was ten.
Kalambi turned out to be a primitive jungle community. Once again, everything was unfamiliar. Only the few houses belonging to the mission, including ours, had brick walls and metal roofs. The other homes, on both sides of a central dirt road, were built of mud and thatched with straw.
People going to the health center had to pass our house, and they often stopped in for a drink of water. Mama always gave visitors something to eat
