The Year of Living Almost Dangerously
I went to Congo seeking adventure. I found something even more frightening.
By Elettra Pauletto
On one of my first mornings in Goma, a city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I took a picture of a woman walking along the side of the road. She’s not dressed like most of the people around her, whose fancy shoes and leather briefcases suggest they’re walking to work. This woman is not wealthy, not of the city, and may even have come from one of the nearby camps for the internally displaced, where people from the countryside take refuge whenever fighting erupts in their villages.
She’s looking straight at me as I snap the picture, giving me a slight scowl. I think she’s angry with me, but I can’t be sure. Still, I can’t help but think she knows something about me, something ugly. My colleague, Leonello, is also in the picture. He’s driving the car we’re in and he’s looking into the camera too. It looks like he’s somewhere between afraid and annoyed. Both faces seem to be reproaching me for my very presence in that car, that city, that country. I would come to see that same expression on face after face throughout the year I spent in Congo, always believing that it represented an accusation.
When I was twenty-three years old, I lived for a year in a small house on the edge of Goma, in eastern Congo, less than a mile from the border with Rwanda. The city stands at about 60 miles south of the equator, in a mountainous region where active volcanos threaten to erupt, a methane gas filled lake causes high cases of drownings, and a low level conflict among rebel groups and the army pushes waves of people from the countryside to the city each year. I went there to work for a local non-governmental organization, where I distributed food in camps for displaced persons. But when I first arrived in the fall of 2007, all I could do was wonder what the hell I was doing there and what was making me stay.
The one thing I knew, was that I wasn’t there because I wanted to help anyone. I was fresh out of college, I had no practical skills, and even fewer illusions that I could make a dent in a decades-long humanitarian effort that had done little to elevate people affected by conflict. I was there because I wanted adventure. And as sure as I knew I couldn’t help anyone, I also believed that my presence couldn’t hurt, either. But that’s not how I felt by the end of it.
I grew up moving back and forth between northern Italy and suburban Massachusetts. In college, I spent short periods studying abroad in England, France and Senegal. I tried acid, cocaine and other drugs, and once got drunk on homemade palm wine. I traveled a lot, and went skydiving and bungee jumping in New Zealand, sailing in Australia, and hiking in the Alaskan wilderness. By the time I graduated UMass-Amherst, I was out of conventional possibilities for excitement. I’d just ended a significant relationship that I’d thought was going to be my everlasting, and I was back in suburban Massachusetts thinking my only option was to get a job in a small town. I needed something to jolt me out of that.
I’d taken some classes in international relations as part of my college degree, and knew about volunteer opportunities overseas. I applied to the Peace Corps. They decided to send me to Senegal, but Senegal is safe aside from a sporadic conflict in its southern region. I found a volunteer program in Rwanda, but the country has been at peace since the Rwandan Patriotic Front took power and reestablished order after the 1994 genocide. Then I found the year-long program in Goma. This city, sprawling westward from the border with Rwanda, was exposed to many different kinds of dangers, and the Italian government was prepared to send me there for free, with a monthly salary, despite my lack of experience. It was dangerous, it was accessible, it was perfect.
More than 40 different militias fight, pillage and rape in the North Kivu region, of which Goma is the capital. Much of this can be attributed to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which in some ways never really ended. It crossed into Congo, where intense hostilities between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups — which led to extremist Hutus killing 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 — combined with animosities between hundreds of other ethnic groups. The conflict can also be linked to the exploitation of mineral resources, which causes different armed groups to fight each other for control of the mines.
That isn’t all. An active volcano, Nyiragongo, sits directly north of the city. It last erupted in 2002, when lava crawled down the mountain slope from a side crater and carpeted the city streets, burying the ground floors of many buildings and blowing up gas stations. Geologists say the volcano is due for another eruption, but it’s unclear whether this would be another slow encroachment, or whether it would burst forth from the central crater, an open cauldron that releases a constant stream of smoke and gases, and emits an orange glow at night.
Goma sits on the northern edge of Lake Kivu, an exploding lake. At 120 cubic miles of water volume, it contains 16 cubic miles of methane gas, and over 60 cubic miles of carbon dioxide. I swam in this lake many times, and noticed nothing unusual. The gases, in most places, are trapped well below the surface. But if they were to be disturbed by underground volcanic activity, they could be released all at once, suffocating the more than 1 million people who live along the lake’s shores.
There are also earthquakes. One night I was woken up by a deep rumbling, a noise that came from my dream at first, and continued well into wakefulness. I listened to the ground move. But it was just one of the many aftershocks that came after a large earthquake the week before, which had killed at least 39 people in Bukavu, a city on the other side of the lake.
A plane once crashed near my house after overshooting the runway, killing 21 people, all of whom had been on the ground milling about a busy market place. The airline that operated it, Hewa Bora, crashed so often that it was known by the people of Goma as the “flying coffin.” It was the cheapest civilian airline that flew to the capital Kinshasa, 1,500 miles away and across dense rainforests, and most people using it did not have the luxury to choose life over money. The airline finally folded in 2011, after a crash landing in Kisangani killed 74 people.
The safest way to get to Goma, is to fly to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and drive three hours through the hills. This avoids two significant perils of traveling in Congo, which are its airlines, and ambushes by rebels or bandits, which occur frequently on the country roads outside Goma.
In contrast, Rwanda is idyllic. On the surface, there is no indication that mass killings took place over 20 years ago. Even in 2007, only 13 years after the genocide, there were no telling signs — the roads throughout the capital were paved and well-maintained, there were business centers and multinational banks and new housing developments, and the grocery stores sold what one might expect to find in any Western European grocery store. The government had recently banned the use of plastic bags to avoid pollution, and the directive was strictly enforced. Upon arriving in the country, airport officials checked my bags, and I wasn’t even allowed to keep my shoes in plastic bags to protect my clothing.
Leonello and I spent a few days in Kigali and then headed to Goma. The night before we crossed the border, we stayed in the Rwandan town of Gisenyi so that we could meet with other Italian aid workers stationed there.
Gisenyi is a sleepy town. Luxury hotels dot a lake front of green, manicured lawns and a long sandy beach. Toward Goma, the beach gives way to a rocky shore, where waves lap quietly under the porches of high-end restaurants and private villas.
The night we arrived, we met Filippo for dinner. He’d been in mine and Leonello’s position the year before, and he was going to talk to us about what to expect from Goma. Filippo was garrulous, energetic, and seemed happy to be passing on some of the more exciting details of his life. He wore a thick black earing in one ear, and his beard was slightly unkempt. He was speaking Italian, and his Roman accent, with the doubling of all the consonants, seemed exaggerated to me, as if he didn’t want us to miss any part of his fascinating story.
He told us of the time he was ambushed by two rebel soldiers on the road back to Goma. They belonged to the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), a predominantly Tutsi group led by Laurent Nkunda and backed by Rwanda. Filippo had been traveling with colleagues from the organization Leonello and I would be working with. The group had just visited a child soldier transition center, where former child soldiers live during a three month rehabilitation period before returning to their families. The team had $800 in cash and one cell phone per person.
As the group drove around a bend in the road, they saw two men standing in the middle of it, pointing their guns at the car. The driver wanted to make a run for it, but Juvenal, the team leader, was a cautious person.
Juvenal ordered the driver to stop the car, and the gunmen pulled its occupants out and onto the ground. The rebel soldiers demanded that Filippo and the others hand over all valuables, which they did promptly. But the gunmen were nervous. Their eyes were red, and they looked high, or possibly drunk. They ordered Filippo and the others to lay down in a ditch on the side of the road. They beat one of the other aid workers, a slight woman who worked as a psychologist. They made Juvenal kneel on the road with his hands up, and they pointed an AK-47 at the back of his head.
Then, for whatever reason, the rebels stopped there. They took their loot and left. The team drove back to Goma to report the attack. The aid organization was not pleased, its leadership made some calls, and before too long, Filippo was riding back into the bush with Abbé Claude, one of the organization’s affiliates. They arrived at an unremarkable patch of woods. A high-ranking CNDP officer met them and escorted them deeper into the bush. They arrived at a compound surrounded by armed soldiers. Filippo and Claude were taken into a sitting room, given glasses of milk produced by Masisi cows, which famously belong primarily to members of the Congolese Tutsi community. Then walked in Laurent Nkunda, the leader of the most powerful rebel group in eastern Congo at the time, a man who was wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and who at that moment said, “I’m sorry. You can have your things back.”
It turns out, Abbé Claude was somebody’s cousin. The head of the aid organization in Goma was also somebody’s cousin, and in short, these were the close family connections of the organization I was about to start working for. This was no ordinary NGO. It had a role to play in the ethnic animosities that dominated the region, that pitted Rwanda against Congo, and Congolese Tutsis against other ethnic groups.
Two days later, Leonello and I were in Goma. On our first night, while our permanent home was being made ready, we stayed in the prefecture, a building that acted as part guest house, part dining establishment, and part home to the head of our organization. The doors to each room gave out onto a walkway that overlooked the city, while interior windows looked out onto a quiet courtyard.
We arrived during the day, and by the time I settled in and stepped out again to join Leonello at the walkway, it was night. The first thing I noticed were the street lights ahead. I remembered all the warnings I’d heard from other expatriates who’d lived in Goma before. They all came down to the assessment that “Man, this place is tough.” I imagined crime being committed under those streetlamps, thinking I might glimpse an attack, a murder. I was terrified, and I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to be there anymore. Why had I come? I scanned the darkness along the side street that led to the prefecture. I examined the tall iron gate that closed off the property to the road, and watched the guards sitting near it. The prefecture, like many residential buildings around Goma, was encircled by a cement brick wall topped with barbed wire. I thought that “tough” meant dangerous things happened all the time. I just wanted to keep my head down, do as I was told, and maybe I’d survive the year.
I caught site of the volcano to my right. In the night, it was nothing but a red halo aloft in pure darkness. To my left Leonello was looking out onto the city. I joined him and we discussed the plan for the next day, the meetings we had to go to, the people we’d meet. We’d go into the office and see where we were going to be working. Someone would show us around town.
“Look at it,” I said, with my face turned toward the volcano. “It’s like it’s fueling all this. All this conflict and hate. Literally fueling it.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Leonello. “I think that if they all just stopped and contemplated it for a moment, they’d realize they have nothing to fight about.”
I knew he was right, but I just couldn’t see it that way. I couldn’t take my eyes off that floating red glow, that open cauldron casting red strands of light onto the sky, as if monsters were reaching ghostly fingers in sinister supplication to an unfathomable universe. It looked like hell itself. It was surrounded by death. This place was a nightmare. I was terrified.
I needed to feel that I was there for a reason other than adventure. I needed to have something to show for my presence. One thing I could do with my limited skill set was sit at a desk and check off names. So I volunteered to help distribute food in camps for people who had been displaced by fighting.
The camps sprawled over fields, volcanic rocks and ancient craters just outside of Goma. Flying above them, you could see clusters of white dots gathered over fields, and next to them, hundreds and hundreds of craters, filled in with vegetation or sometimes water, and varying in diameter and depth. The UN Refugee Agency gave out white tarps to people arriving in the camps, who used them to waterproof their huts of grass and banana leaves. In some camps, more than 25,000 people lived in these constructions, so close together they appeared to be on top of each other.
The camp I went to most often was called Mugunga II. At the time, it held about 25,000 people and was the largest. I worked with a team of Congolese aid workers. We would arrive around 8 a.m. to set up a table for checking names, while making sure the trucks piled high with food had arrived and were being unpacked.
My table was their first stop before people could receive their provisions, which consisted of salt, dried peas, palm oil, and maize. Those who came to claim were usually women, or children who’d lost their parents. One day at one of the larger camps, a woman, baby on back, came up to me in line, bared her breast and shouted at me in Swahili, pointing repeatedly at me, her breast, and then her baby. I couldn’t understand her words, but it seemed clear she was hungry, and could no longer produce enough milk to feed her child. She looked at me, pleading. I could do nothing but stare at her, stare at her breasts, at her baby. “Watch out for your jacket,” said the UN representative I was working with, referring to the jacket draped over the back of my chair. “These people will snatch anything as soon as you look away.” I quickly tied the jacket around my waist, but when I turned back the woman and baby were gone.
My role was simply that of asking for names and checking them off my list of people who were entitled to food rations. My team and I sat under the sun most of the day, having eaten nothing but breakfast at dawn. Still, by the time distribution ended around 5 p.m. I was usually reluctant to eat anything. There was no place to hide, and children especially stared at me, perhaps curious about my appearance — white, not Congolese. Once, as the distribution died down, I attempted, fleetingly, to nab a biscuit from my pocket. I glanced over and saw a child, crouched on the ground scraping up the dried peas that had fallen out of some of the bags into the crevices of the volcanic rock ground. He was staring at me, grinning. He didn’t look upset that I was eating. I felt ashamed.
My Congolese colleagues sometimes became so frustrated by the long, slow lines that they would yell at the displaced people. “These country people! They’re so dirty. They don’t even deserve this,” one of them said to me. “Can’t they just take care of themselves?” He complained that he should get paid a lot better. He wore shiny new shoes, but I said nothing. I knew that I could leave whenever I wanted. He was Congolese. He might never leave.
The weather was capricious and spells of searing heat and cold to the bone could alternate effortlessly any given day. Women and children huddled under rainbow-colored umbrellas in both sun and rain, staring listlessly at the feet of the food distribution table. Those who could not find shelter stood motionless under the weather, their faces falling as their feet sank ever deeper into grey mud. Nobody cried, but the rain poured down their cheeks as they stared.
Riots often broke out. I was with a team in Rutshuru, a town about 30 miles north of Goma, sitting at my table when a rock landed on the World Food Program truck in front of us, cracking the windshield. Then more rocks came, falling onto the grass in front of us, nearing us with each thump. They were coming from the crowd.
A group of displaced women hustled me to my team’s Land Rover. Just then, the rock throwing stopped, a scuffle broke out as angry men made for the maize sacks, and the police launched themselves in. A dense crowd closed in on the table where my team and I had been sitting only moments before.
I hadn’t even realized there was a danger of getting caught up in a riot. But it turned out to be even worse than that. When I reached the Land Rover I saw that my colleague Mango was sprawled across the back bench with his head in his hands.
“What happened to you?” I asked him.
“Malaria,” he replied. “It’s better now the bombing stopped.”
“What bombing?”
“You didn’t hear? Over there…” he said, pointing to the dipping tree line behind the distribution truck. That’s where the jungle started, and behind that, villages.
I recalled the hollow, metallic booming sound from earlier that day. I had thought it was sacks of maize being loaded onto trucks. It was the sound my father’s pickup truck made when he loaded cement sacks onto its bed.
As I thought of this, I became aware of a man staring at me through the windows of the Land Rover. He stood alone, a few paces away from the vehicle, wearing a jet black cowboy hat. His suit looked like it had been black too, once. Now it was scuffed with grey marks, and it was slightly oversized, as if he had once filled it, but now his shoulders struggled to keep the jacket aloft. He stood splay-legged with his arms crossed in front of him in a pose he seemed comfortable with.
I locked eyes with him, then looked away. He wasn’t fazed by this and kept his attention firmly on me as police descended on the scene of the fight, men in tattered shirts made off with a sack of food, and the rest of my team sprinted for the Land Rover. For the first time I felt afraid, not for my safety, or of the riot outside, but of how this man might judge me. It was the face of the woman in the picture I’d taken, and again what I saw was an accusation: I was safe in the Land Rover and he was not; I didn’t even know enough about a life lived in danger to be afraid of rocks thrown at me by people who were hungry and afraid; I had carelessly let those women risk injury to themselves to save me; I was leaving as soon as things turned ugly.
After the riot, my team was escorted back to Goma by a convoy of UN soldiers because of reports of fighting along the route into the city. I spent the drive staring into the bushes, alert to any hostile movement, but nothing ever happened. And nothing is what continued to happen.
I grew confident with my surroundings. Meanwhile, as I worked in the camps, Leonello had been tucked away in our little house — a three bedroom place in a compound run by the church — writing articles on the political situation in Congo. It all seemed very official to me, and he was so confident in what he was doing that I felt comforted by his sense of purpose. I could tell myself I was there for a reason.
Before Goma, he was someone I’d had little in common with. He was six years older than me, which at my age, seemed like a lot. He was intellectual and analytical, and I still felt young and careless in comparison. When I ask him about it now, he says I did seem young to him. So when he kissed me on the neck one day at dusk, as I stood outside peeling tomatoes for dinner, I was surprised. It was soft but short, and he pulled away and walked back into the kitchen without awaiting a reaction.
For Leonello, Goma held a certain enchantment, the fascination of a border city, a frontier where civility meets lawlessness. He wishes we’d delved into that more fully together, that sensation of being with another person as you pass from one stage of life to another. Because that is what we were doing. I was learning two things I never really had before: compassion and patience. Yet there were times when I felt harshly toward the displaced people in the camps, just as my Congolese colleagues did. There were so many of them and it took so long to get them processed and it felt like they weren’t cooperating. They’d forget their IDs or they’d start arguing. There were some days when I wanted to go back to Goma and eat something, take a shower, and get out of the cold or heat.
I was learning things about myself I didn’t like. I had always thought of myself as someone who champions justice and equality, and who understands that poverty and displacement are not choices but products of war and economics. But I wasn’t this person.
Leonello also felt like he was losing part of himself, the boy he’d been. Whenever he came to the camps with me, he watched the feet of the displaced people standing line. They wore no shoes, or broken shoes, or flip flops, leaving their feet naked to all the elements and the hard volcanic rocks, unprotected from everything and still holding the weight of each body, each bundle of clothes and soap and maize that were the entirety of a displaced person’s material life. Leonello saw this on the one hand, and on the other he knew that the Congolese Tutsi CNDP bore an enormous responsibility for creating displacement, and that the organization we worked for was in some way complicit given the obvious family connections. It hurt him so see the suffering. He left Goma halfway through our program, after which I lived there alone for five more months.
I would like to recall this time as one during which I threw myself into the lives of the people I was helping to feed. That I continued waking at dawn each day, driving to the camps, sitting at a table as thousands of people streamed before me. My Congolese colleagues continued to do this, but I did not. I wrote reports by day and by night I went out to dinner and sometimes to clubs, building a protective shell around myself. I made friends with expatriates who had come to Congo for humanitarian reasons and who spent their evenings partying by the lake.
Adventure is a quick and short-lived sensation that inevitably gives way to settling in. I adapted by ignoring the poverty and displacement I’d seen so that I could still believe in the romance of living in a war zone.
On the day I left Congo I waited in a car with a nun. The head of my organization had left us there as he stopped by the office to pick up something before driving me to Kigali, from where I would fly home. The nun was just catching a ride. “Thank you for coming,” she said to me as we waited. “It must have been hard for you to leave your comfortable home to come see all this.” I was watching a group of fat middle aged men waddle around a van looking very pleased with themselves, their bulbous cheeks poised for chuckles as they put on flak jackets and slapped each other on the backs. They looked like I felt when I’d first arrived looking for adventure. Before I’d seen the children standing in the rain, the naked feet, and the faces of those who seemed to demand more of me. They looked like I felt after I’d built my protective shell, but before I’d torn it down.
“Thank you,” I said to the nun. “But I really don’t feel like I did anything.” Just as I was leaving, the rebels were about to capture the city, the violence in the countryside was worsening, and more and more people were crowding into those camps. Now they would all be hungry again.
The volcano never exploded, nor did the lake, and the danger I had come for — the war — was about to hit the city just as I was leaving. I wasn’t going to see any of it, but now I was grateful.
A few weeks before I left, a plane had gone down with sixteen aid workers. All of them — friends, and friends of friends — had died, likely upon impact, when their plane lost altitude in rough weather, and crashed into the jungle not far from Lake Kivu. All those dangers surrounding me and the people that I’d met no longer held any appeal. They were simply frightening, and horrific, just as they’d been all along.
Those faces in the picture, the woman bearing her breasts, the man in the camp. Maybe their expressions weren’t accusations. When I asked Leonello about the picture, he said he remembers the day I took it. He reminded me that we would take that road to and from home, even though it was longer than the other road, because it was wider and therefore safer.
Leonello also remembers me behind that camera. He says he knew me at extremes, both delicate as I measured my every word and move, and strong to know how to live alone in a place like Goma. He remembers that I hated going to the market. This is true, I thought it was too crowded, and confusing, and I was afraid of the street urchins who buzzed around our car and asked us for money. Their clothes were so dirty and tattered, and some of them were verging on adolescence, which meant they were probably stronger than me. But these children, I hated them. And I wanted to hurt them for getting in my way. I felt this way for many months, as I grappled with this idea that I hated poor and probably homeless children just because they wanted help from me. This didn’t make sense, I wasn’t supposed to be like that. And yet there I was.
It took time, but eventually I realized that it wasn’t the children I was afraid of. I was afraid of my own reaction. I felt myself reacting to the people around me in ways I’d never expected, with behaviors that I hated seeing in myself.
So I stopped. I started talking to the children. I learned that one way to look at it, was that if I didn’t pay them, they’d slash my tires while I shopped in the market. But that a better way to see it, was that if I paid them, they would watch my car and protect it from anyone trying to steal it.
Maybe the woman in the picture had seen in me a capacity for ugliness that I did not yet recognize myself. But after at first adapting to Goma by ignoring what I thought were its flaws, I was now learning to change my very outlook. This meant acknowledging what I did not like in others, and in myself.
Writers need readers. Follow me @ElettraJP.
