The Incredible True Story of Blondy Baruti Read online

  And so, as though in a scene from a documentary about the great Serengeti migrations, a mass evacuation ensued: an exodus of black, downtrodden faces filing out of the city and into the vast and unforgiving African wilderness—a trek out of Goma.

  The plan, such as it was, involved simply running away from the center of the violence, hugging the Congo River as we made our way to the northwest, our destination being Kisangani in the north-central portion of the Congo (Goma is actually about 325 miles from Kisangani if you can take the most direct route. But by following the river we lengthened our journey by a considerable distance, heading first to the south, and then north to Kisangani). Kisangani was our goal largely because, my mother explained, a handful of our extended family members lived in the city. They would take us in and provide us with food and shelter; they would help us rest and recover; and then from Kisangani, we would take a boat down the Congo River, all the way to Kinshasa, where there would be more family and we would hopefully be a safe distance from Rwanda and the fighting in the east.

  I had no idea how long the journey would take or what we would encounter along the way. There were thousands of people trying to escape the city, with approximately one hundred in our initial group. I knew some of these people, but most were strangers thrown together by desperate circumstances. We were civilians, trained in neither wilderness survival nor combat. We were, for the most part, unarmed and unprepared for the rigors of life in the jungle. Forget about GPS devices or cell phones—we did not even have the most basic of outdoor equipment. We had no shelter, no food, no weapons, no medicine, no clothing beyond that which we wore on our backs. Under these conditions, it would be difficult to survive more than a few days in the jungle.

  Sure enough, very quickly people began to die. Some had been wounded before the journey even began. I saw them in our group, staggering along, ashen and sickly; at first, I was uncertain of what had happened. Were they ill? Exhausted? I did not know. And then I would look down and see a gangrenous stump where a hand had been, or notice a shirt soaked with blood. These were people who had been hacked with machetes or knives on their way out of Goma, and while they may have escaped the city, they did not last long.

  There were, it seemed, a thousand ways to die: starvation, dysentery, malaria, just to name a few. There was the ever-present threat of being shot or maimed by soldiers, which was only slightly more terrifying than the prospect of being killed by one of the jungle’s apex predators. I would wade into the river sometimes, just to cool off, only to be scared off by the sight of a crocodile’s snout breaking the surface of the water. Sometimes I would step over a corpse in the jungle and wonder for a moment how he had met his end. I would stand there and stare, my senses assaulted by the stench of rotting flesh and the buzzing of flies. The first few times this happened, naturally, I was so overcome by revulsion that I vomited onto my feet. After a while, though, these encounters became so commonplace that they barely provoked a rumble of nausea. In such a cold and brutal world, it’s easy to understand how children become reluctant warriors; how they are compelled to take up arms against their neighbors and become hardened killers at an age when they should be playing soccer or basketball with their friends.

  The loss of innocence is at once heartbreaking and terrifying.

  We trekked from village to village, stopping to sleep or to ask for sustenance. Sometimes it was provided, oftentimes not. Most nights we slept outside, under the stars, our bellies empty and aching. Five hundred miles might not seem like a long journey, but on foot, through the jungle, while hiding from armed soldiers? It might as well have been five thousand miles. We crept along quietly, almost stealthily, our progress as slow and thick as the muddy banks of the Congo River itself.

  Desperate for food, we would eat rotten fruit. Delirious with thirst, we would drink from fetid swamps and rivers, ingesting water polluted not merely with human and animal waste, but with the disintegrating corpses that floated forever downstream, like a horrible moving graveyard. “I don’t know how you made it,” my mother said to me repeatedly in the months that followed. “You were so sick, fevers every week. Vomiting . . . diarrhea. You were so weak.”

  But no, I was not weak. I was strong. Stronger than I ever imagined. Or maybe just blessed. I don’t know. In the beginning, I cried every day; I cried for my home and for food and shelter. I cried out of fear and discomfort. But soon I hardly cried at all, no matter how terrible the sights placed before me.

  A bomb went off in a village where we were staying. It happened with no warning whatsoever. One moment everything was peaceful, and the next moment there was carnage everywhere. Body parts dangling from trees; a pink mist hanging in the air. Mothers crying for lost children; children crying for missing parents. I was sick and exhausted, and sadly accustomed to the sight and smell of death, and so I barely reacted. My mother found me, pulled me to my feet, and off we ran.

  Days turned to weeks and weeks to months, as we walked and walked and walked some more, for hundreds of relentless miles toward our destination. We did this despite the fact that we did not know, and could not have known, whether Kisangani was any safer or less turbulent than Goma. We had no way of communicating with anyone outside of our small and ever diminishing circle of travelers. But still we trekked on, buoyed only by hope and faith that things would somehow be better.

  A full year passed before we arrived at our destination. I remember my mother being excited as we approached the city, the way she allowed herself to smile for the first time in months. There was a bounce in her step, and a quickening of pace as she dragged me along, not for safety, it seemed, but because a goal was in reach.

  “Here will be different,” she whispered. “We will be safe.”

  But as the jungle receded and Kisangani came into view, I could tell that something was amiss. At first it was just a feeling, a sense that we were no longer skipping along, but rather trudging wearily as we had so often in the past. My mother’s shoulders began to sag. She loosened her grip on my hand. Finally, she bowed her head.

  Ahead of us was Kisangani, a sprawling city of more than one and a half million citizens. And yet it seemed so quiet. Time in the jungle had taught me to be wary of silence; and indeed, Kisangani seemed foreboding, rather than tranquil.

  “What is it, Mama?” I asked. “What’s wrong?

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  How quickly hope gave way to despair.

  Instead of a city teeming with life, we discovered in Kisangani that the raw reality of war had reared its ugly head once more, and to an even greater extent than we had witnessed in Goma. The city had been ravaged by conflict, with neighborhoods dilapidated and virtually empty. The evacuation of Kisangani had apparently been just as swift and devastating as it had been in Goma.

  As we wandered about the city, searching for our relatives, vainly calling out their names, there was barely a soul to be found. Instead of walking into the waiting arms of aunts and uncles and cousins, we were enveloped by the familiar stench of decaying flesh. As bad as this smell had been in parts of the jungle, it was much worse in Kisangani, filling the air with rot, as if the skies had opened and poured death upon the land.

  We did not linger long in the center of Kisangani; driven out by sadness and nausea, we marched to the edge of the city, where we spent some time before plunging back into the jungle. In my memory, I can see the look on my mother’s face, an expression of despair and grief so heavy that it registered almost as a kind of impassivity. So deep was her anguish, and so committed was she to the task of keeping her children alive, that she betrayed not a trace of outward emotion. Maybe there was no feeling left to be wrung from her heart; the war and the jungle had left her numb. Or, perhaps, this was her way of demonstrating strength and resolve in the face of adversity and immeasurable sadness.

  I remember begging for a chance to rest, and for food. I remember throwing myself on the ground and refusing to move, like a toddler in the midst of a tantrum
.

  My mother simply shook her head.

  “Keep walking.”

  And so I did. As she disappeared from view, I scrambled to my feet and ran after her and my sister, crying and complaining every step of the way. If we were to live and not become statistics of the war, casualties of the slaughter, the only option, my mother explained, was to keep on trekking. I did not ask a lot of questions, although I knew that the plan had not changed.

  “We will find a boat soon,” my mother promised. “And it will take us home.”

  Where this miraculous vessel was located, or if it even existed, I did not know. I envisioned a giant sailing ship, with full masts, like those I had seen in books and movies. The kind that ventured out into open seas, where adventure waited. Maybe there would be pirates! A battle to be fought and won!

  From the very beginning of our journey, even as we trekked along the Congo River, I had envisioned a seaside rescue of epic proportions (though we were nowhere near the ocean). My mother’s goal of securing a spot on a simple, flat-bottomed riverboat packed with uncomfortable refugees was much humbler, but equally noble. And it must have seemed in the dreary moments after arriving in Kisangani nearly as unattainable. For me, the entire ordeal, while it stretched out over the course of more than a year, unfolded like a dream—at once endless and brief. Events both tragic and mundane bled into one another, the suffering and boredom so relentless that one day became almost indistinguishable from the next. It all comes back to me now, all these years later, as a sort of collage, scenes splattered against a canvas.

  Throughout our journey, through one of the darkest periods of the war, through one of the world’s most impenetrable jungles, I remember mainly a feeling of hunger. Raw, primal hunger. Thanks in part to having grown up in the country, my mother did her best to keep us from starving to death. She was able to concoct bush remedies to ward off infection and ease the symptoms of dysentery and other illnesses. She picked berries and scavenged for leaves and foliage to make a thin and acrid soup for our daily meal. Despite my mother’s efforts to infuse this brew with love, it was the foulest thing you could imagine. The bitterness notwithstanding, my sister and I devoured the soup as though our very lives depended on it. I do not recall either of us complaining about the taste. Hunger is a powerful motivator and an unrelenting enemy. We somehow devised internal mechanisms to trick our brains and our taste buds into believing that the food wasn’t that bad. On the nights when my mother could not make soup—and these were plentiful—we foraged with varying degrees of success from the jungle’s natural resources. There were many nights when we went to sleep with only rainwater and mango in our bellies.

  It is a common misconception that the jungles of the Congo are nourished by a nearly ceaseless stream of rainfall. While the region is generally lush and humid and torrential downpours are common, it is not unusual for many days to pass with no rainfall at all. Under normal circumstances this is not a problem, but when one is homeless and on the move, trying to live off the land, rainfall is the only source of safe drinking water. This left us at times in the unenviable position of waiting for the skies to open as our bodies ached from malnutrition and dehydration. Invariably, when the pain became too much to bear, we would walk to the river’s edge, stare into the turbid water, and use our hands as ladles. This was a willful act of self-harm, as the Congo River teemed with all kinds of parasites and bacteria. Dead bodies frequently washed ashore or floated lazily along the same waters that we consumed. But what choice did we have? A choice between likely sickness or certain death is no choice at all, really. And so we drank from the river and hoped for the best.

  The river was at once our friend and foe. It guided us as surely as a road map. We bathed in it and drank from it. And it sickened us and threatened us with disease and death. It was a constant reminder of how small and helpless we were, and of how far we had strayed from our home.

  Still, each night we gave thanks to God. Before the civil war sent us running from our homes, church had been a vital and stabilizing force in our lives. We were a Christian family, and we not only attended service each week, we kept God in our hearts and our house. My mother and grandmother had both been left to raise families on their own, and they had never known anything but poverty, and yet they still spoke often of God’s warmth and generosity. We were a family of faith, and that faith went with us into the jungle. My mother made sure that we all gave thanks every night, praying beneath the stars, for despite our dreadful circumstances, we were alive. And we had each other. As my mother pointed out, we were lucky.

  And yet, it didn’t always feel that way. Like wild animals at a shrinking waterhole, fights between desperate refugees were not uncommon. Sometimes the skirmishes would escalate for no reason other than boredom (while there were times when our trek through the jungle was fantastically violent and harrowing, there were long stretches when it was simply dull and exhausting) and our mother would quickly guide us away from the scene, hiding our faces in an effort to shield us from the horrors of what people can and would often do in their darkest moments of desperation.

  In the best of circumstances, the Congo had for years been a place in which order was a fragile and tenuous thing. Governments were toppled, rulers ousted and replaced, and the citizenry treated no better than the feral inhabitants of the jungle. But this was different. Even in a country with as much dark history as the Congo, the second civil war represented an unprecedented descent into madness and mayhem. Africans grow up believing in the importance of community—it really does take a village to raise a child—but when the community is ripped apart and every man is left to fend for himself, what becomes of the individual? What happens to his humanity?

  I still see in my mind’s eye the unforgettable image of my countrymen raining violence upon one another at the slightest provocation; men beating each other with rocks and sticks, or stomping each other to death over the smallest morsel of food. People would literally fight and kill each other for scraps that in another time might have been tossed to a family pet. What once would have been deemed unthinkable behavior became ordinary, if not acceptable.

  In many ways, people (and not just the machete-wielding rebels), especially strangers, were as unpredictable and dangerous as the wild beasts we encountered in the jungle. It still can give me a wave of anxiety to recall how my mother would spot a house, how she would cautiously knock on the door in the desperate hope of eliciting compassion. Often, she would have us wait in the background, some twenty feet behind her, so that we could not hear the conversation, but only try to follow its course through body movement. My mother would put her hands together, as if praying, and bow her head in subservience and desperation. Then one of two things would happen: she would either turn and gesture for us to join her, with a broad smile on her face, or she would walk wearily toward us, defeat and sadness etched into her every step.

  Always, though, she would recover. My mother’s courage and resilience were extraordinary. The Congo at this time was as deadly as any place in the world, particularly for a woman. War, after all, victimizes women first because of their vulnerability in the face of testosterone-fueled aggression. Men are killed or beaten; women are raped and mutilated; they are robbed of their dignity; and then they are killed. I feared for my mother every time she walked to a stranger’s door. Who would answer? How would they respond? And what would become of me and my sister if my mother were taken away? I had witnessed countless acts of brutality levied against women on this journey, and instinctively I wondered if my mother would meet a similar fate. There are nights even now when I will wake from a dream drenched in sweat, the cries of a faceless woman echoing in my head: a woman fighting vainly and valiantly to stop an attack in broad daylight, while others stand by watching.

  Every door represented both hope and horror, and yet my mother never wavered. If we were turned away, she would explain calmly that the strangers were not being cruel, but merely trying to safeguard their own interests. T
here would be other doors; maybe the next one would present a different outcome.

  We walked until the soles of our bleeding feet went numb, until we couldn’t feel the sting of the sunbaked soil. Exhaustion was a persistent state, fatigue so deep that it settled in my bones and made me drop to the ground and fall fast asleep in the middle of the day. Sometimes my mother would pick me up and carry me or drag me along. Other times I would wake and discover that I had been slung over the shoulder of a stranger. Sometimes we were virtually alone; other times our group would swell to hundreds or even thousands, a veritable army of refugees trekking single file, like thirst-stricken wildebeests migrating across the open plains. We stepped over dead bodies without giving them a second thought, as if they were human barriers in a slow-motion steeplechase race. The lines of humanity were sometimes so long you could not make out where they began or where they ended. The middle of the pack seemed to be the safest area because one was never too exposed (although this may have been merely a false sense of security).

  I have no pictures of myself on this entire journey, but I do have memories of other boys roughly my age, and I don’t doubt that looking into their faces was like looking into a mirror. Tiny, emaciated children with sunken, yellow eyes and protruding teeth, clinging to life by the thinnest of threads, the skin stretched across their bones like a carcass rotting in the sun.