Below is an excerpt from our Congo book in progress. We are currently interviewing narrators throughout Eastern Congo and Rwanda. Check back for more excerpts and clips from this and other Voice of Witness book projects.
After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, millions of Hutus fled the country in the fear that Tutsis would seek retribution against them. Whether or not they had participated in the killings, Hutu people sought refuge in neighbouring countries like Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jean Luc, whose mother is Tutsi and father is Hutu, was only fourteen when his family left Rwanda for Congo DR.
In 1996 the Rwandan army invaded the Congo and they started advancing, destroying all the refugee camps along the border. They took Bukavu, the town I was staying in. In the classroom we started hearing boom, boom and we looked and it was bombs falling on the next hill and smoke going up. Oh my God, you saw people running crazy, you saw people going through the window. I ran and I got home and I saw my mom was getting ready, carrying my brother who was nine months old, and so it was like, “Okay, it’s time to go.”
So, that’s when we left Bukavu and we went to this area where there was a big refugee camp called Kavumu. That’s where we stayed for three weeks until we realized the Tutsi army had surrounded the refugee camp—one morning in the camp there were bullets flying. Oh my God, imagine, a hundred thousand people immediately moving in all directions. It was nuts, people running in all directions, people losing their kids, and the kids crying and screaming, calling their moms, and bullets flying. There was no protection; all of the houses were made of plastic. It was insane, bombs suddenly flying on both sides.
That is where I lost my mom. How could I tell if she took this way or that way? I couldn’t tell if she went to the right or to the left. So I was stuck with my grandmother and I told her, “Grandma, let’s go.” We hit the road walking in the day. We were trying to go to Goma but somewhere in between, we came to a gigantic parking lot. We met people who had come from Goma because there was war there. Refugees had come from that way, and couldn’t go anywhere. We met my uncle there, who was stuck like everyone else. There was war in Goma, there was war where we were coming from, and we were right on the lake. People had their cars and couldn’t go anywhere.
People were just saying, “So this is where everything ends,” and then, “What are we going to do?” And we knew we were going to have to climb through the forest to this gigantic chain of mountains. It was a 3,044-foot elevation, and we had to hike that thing. It was so steep, I remember, I told my grandma, “I can’t take you there, you go stay with your son.” I hooked up with a family I knew from Rwanda. They were good friends with my dad, and I knew them in Bukavu. I went to school not far from where they lived so we hung out and played basketball—we were really good friends. So people left their cars and we started walking through the forest, and I started walking with the family.
It was a pretty bad forest—you had to walk all day and there were mosquitoes, red ants, and quick sand. We had to cross rivers because there are no bridges, so we had to cut a tree on both sides so the trees fell in the river and you could walk on the branches. They weren’t so strong, some people fell in, like women and kids. The water carried them and there was no way to save them.
The family I was walking with, there were four kids and the mom and the dad, and there was the housekeeper—she didn’t carry anything. They had three bodyguards but I was the guy who had to fetch the water. It was hard because I was young and I was naïve, so the family used me. I had to carry baggage; I basically became their slave. I was the one who got water, wood, and stuff. It was something that really broke my heart, to see how people treat each other.
The next day we had to move again, because people were saying the soldiers were coming. We had to climb this mountain. From the bottom, you couldn’t see the top. At the top, because that family was sort of a family of soldiers, the soldiers were like, “You can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous.” So we started back down. People started drinking water and all the refugees were passing by, passing by. There was a bamboo forest down the hill. Suddenly we started hearing machine guns—that was the first time in my life I’d ever been shot at really close. The machine guns were on the other side—there was a mountain opposite to us, so they were shooting at us from there, bullets flying over your head like zoom, zoom, zoom. Everybody fell on the ground. People were crashing—women, kids, falling all over the place.
I think on the top there were more than sixty people that were hiking. Because of the machine gunfire everybody ran back down. They cut in half the whole mountain, I’m sure. People on the side of the mountain died—when they fell, the bullets were in their backs. On the top, when we fell, the bullets were flying above our heads. So we get in the bamboo and lay on the ground and they keep shooting. When it’s time to change the ammunition you stand up and run, and they start shooting again and you fall. The leaves and the bamboo—when the bullets go through the bamboo it is an explosion because of the intensity. The bamboo explodes and the leaves and the branches fall on your head. Oh my God, I lost my mind, I lost everything I had in my hands; I had something to sleep in, and I just lost it. I was just running, running, running. After maybe five kilometers I had to catch my breath and had to sit and wait for the others to come—those who survived—and I was thinking, “Yeah, I’m here.” It was insane. At the age of fifteen that makes you go, “Wow, what is this life?”
I tried to survive and tried to get out of the thing. It was really nasty for us because it was mountains and the mud, and every morning there was the fog and it was cold and rainy. And you don’t have proper clothing and you’re hungry, and you have to walk every day and carry things for the kids.
So, after that, we reached the road—the family that I was walking with—and we crossed this bridge and started walking to Walikale. When we reached Walikale we stayed there for a couple of days. After the first day, we met some people who said, “Yeah, I saw your mom passing by. I think she went up to the refugee camp in Tingy Tingy.” The family paid for the bus there, but said, “We can’t pay for you,” and they abandoned me. So, I had to walk two hundred kilometers to get to where my mom was. For those two hundred kilometres I was just crying and sobbing—I was really sad.
On the way I met my niece, and she said, “Yeah, lets walk together, can you carry my stuff?” And I said, “You know, never in my life am I going to carry anybody’s stuff again.” And she said, “Yeah, I understand. It’s okay.”
This and future Voice of Witness excerpts are available on the McSweeney’s iPhone app The Small Chair.
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