“If I don’t get an education, I think I will go back.”

Vainqueur Faida, the perfect spy (Redemption Songs No. 5)

Vainqueur Faida doesn’t attract a lot of attention. He’s always been small for his age, and he can be inconspicuous when he wants to be.

At 12, it made him the perfect spy.

Now 16, Vainqueur sat at a wooden desk in a large empty classroom at ETN. His hair is cut close to the scalp, contributing to his look of childlike innocence. He fidgeted and squirmed in his chair like any teenage boy as he described the two years he spent as part of a rebel militia.

He was playing soccer with his friends when the FDLR militia came to his town, Masisi. When gunshots rang out, the boys raced home. Vainqueur reached his house and found his mother dead.

The soldiers killed her when she tried to keep them from looting the family’s home. His father was heartbroken and withdrew from the world.

Left to fend for himself, Vainqueur joined a local militia that was fighting the FDLR and other militias. He already knew some villagers who had joined. The commander called himself Gen. Bwira, which means “friend” in the local Kihunde language. He commanded a force of more than 1,000 soldiers.

For Vainqueur, Gen. Bwira came to be a second father.

The general soon noticed how well Vainqueur could blend in and assigned him to become a spy.

After leaving Gen. Bwira’s camp, he would dress like a soldier from the opposing force and walk into the enemy village miles away. Once there, he would infiltrate meetings, his presence and figure so slight he would go unnoticed.

More than once, he learned about an upcoming attack in time to warn his general, he said. He never was caught.

“It wasn’t dangerous at all,” he says now. “It was just a good job.”

One of his fellow soldiers would be waiting nearby to help him if he got in trouble, but that never happened.

“The secret was that no one could ever guess that I was a soldier,” he said. “In the village, I wouldn’t be noticeable at all.”

When he was 14, a delegation from the Red Cross came seeking the release of any children in the camp.

“They asked my commander for me, and so he gave me up,” he said. “They were going around all the groups asking for little boys like me.”

He spent three months in a rehabilitation program for child soldiers. On the day he graduated, Gen. Bwira came to the ceremony.

“It was nice to see him,” Vainqueur said. “He was happy to see me. He took my certificate and read it.”

The general told him that the fighting in the area had stopped and their enemies had fled.

“He is still doing his job of being a general,” he said. “They are just protecting the population.”

Vainqueur returned to Masisi and lived there until a recruiter from ETN, the retraining program in Goma, came looking for child victims of the war. Vainqueur signed up for vocational training.

At 16, he is happy learning carpentry but wonders whether his new skills will be enough to keep him from rejoining the rebels. He would rather be in high school, he said, where he could learn to read and write better.

“Sometimes, I think about going back to the militia,” he said. “If God helps me, I can have a better life and get an education. But in the end, if I don’t get an education, I think I will go back.”

This story is part of the series Redemption Songs produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in the San Francisco Bay Area, in partnership with Medium.

The series was edited by Robert Salladay and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee. Reporter Richard C. Paddock can be reached at rpaddock@cironline.org. Photographer Larry C. Price can be reached at lcprice@mac.com.

The nonprofit Eastern Congo Initiative provided logistical support for this project. It also provides funding for Let Africa Live and ETN.