She said she knew that it was Father’s Day in the U.S. and she began to tell me a story from the back seat as we bounced down rough dirt roads on the way to the church. I twisted in the passenger seat to watch her face even though the streets of Bujumbura were a captivating sight. Three-wheeled tuk-tuks competed with overladen bicycles and military trucks for space between deep ditches. A man walked along the side of the road with a stack of foam mattresses on his head, seven high. Another navigated his bike while securing half of a large animal’s carcass under his arm. Her husband, the local church official, kept his eyes on the road, bending the car around deep pits.
She had been a young girl when the war began in 1993. Away at Catholic school in the east of Burundi. One morning armed men appeared on campus and gathered up all the children, separating them into Hutu and Tutsi, ethnic categories that had been imposed by the former colonial powers. “You killed the president,” they told the Tutsis. Told her. She didn’t even know the president had been assassinated. “So now we will kill all of you.”
The priest who ran the school intervened. “Why are you separating my children? If you are going to kill them you must kill me first.” Because he was a Westerner, they hesitated.
“We will be back to take care of you,” they growled at the Tutsi children as they left.
The priest understood what was going to happen. He told the children that the men would return. They had to leave. To run as fast as they could. To run into Tanzania. And so little children ran alone into the jungle looking for a place they had never been.
She found her way there, incredibly. Relief agencies put her in one of many, many refugee camps for the 800,000 people who fled. Most of her family thought she had died.
When we finally reached the church, a solid concrete building with open windows, I saw again the thing that so impressed me about Burundi during my time teaching there: its vibrancy and youth. An excellent band played a kind of reggae praise taking its cues from the young teenager on the drums. An even younger boy played keyboards and, occasionally, electric bass. Two older men filled in the rest.
A youth choir was singing off-key but dancing fervently in front of the pulpit. About 150 people sat on benches beyond. Children in a section of their own. Similarly the widows, the men, the youth.
The front door, which I could see from where they sat me at the front, opened onto a view of the main road. A woman in a long green dress with a basket on her head walked alone in the distance until she disappeared around a bend. Children swung from the branches of a tree. More people passed.
A police vehicle pulled up on a crowd of young men with lights flashing. Two officers with Kalashnikovs stood in the bed of the truck. They slapped violently at the young men, threw one into the front, and then rode off. All of this I watched as the choirs came, one after another, to sing praise.
After the service the women who had been widowed surrounded me at the door and grabbed me by the hand. A woman of substance in a purple dress told me about the gardens they had started around the church. Cassava, sweet potatoes, and maize in well-kept plots. A chicken pecked at rice laid out to dry in the equatorial sun. “All these women came here in 1994 to escape the violence,” she said. “Their husbands were killed and they had no place to go. Many of them were begging on the streets.”
One woman with an ancient, weathered face grabbed my hand with both of hers and looked me straight in the eyes. I stumbled out the only greeting I knew in Kirundi, “Amahoro.”
“N’amaharo,” she responded but didn’t let go. She was telling me something with those eyes. I stayed in place and tried to see what it was.
“They started working this land,” the woman in purple went on. “Now they grow enough food to eat and to share.” Plus they kept squatters at bay.
Another of the women chanted and started dancing in front of me. Grabbing my hand every so often. “God has given us a friend from overseas,” someone translated. “God has blessed us with your presence.”
“We’re dancing,” I observed—because we were.
“We’re dancing for Jesus,” she said through the translator.
I was self-conscious to be recognized simply for being American. I never wanted to be that person. I never wanted to represent my people, my country, my accessorized Jesus. But what choice did I have? I was the only American for miles. America walking, I was. Walking through a landscape soaked in the blood of ethnic conflict stoked, in part, by a colonial pigheadedness that couldn’t escape thinking in racialized terms. Walking through the poverty of this time. Walking out of all the categories for this place I had built up in my head.
I didn’t want to be America. But I wanted to be alive. Alive like this place was. Young and old, so unselfconscious. Containing multitudes. Able to stop and look and wonder. It was as if this place had found me.
***
She stayed in the refugee camps in Tanzania for months, not sure what kind of future, if any, she would have. But her father had not given up on finding her. When the violence subsided he traveled across the country searching for her in camp after miserable camp. Until one day he found her and brought her home.
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