“There is no trust.”

Mugoli Shukuru, forced to become commander’s wife (Redemption Songs No. 2)

At 19, Mugoli Shukuru wears blue coveralls to work. Her hands are stained with grease and oil. Even so, she looks elegant with hair tied back and a multicolored blouse peeking through the top of her jumpsuit.

She is as an auto mechanic in a country where female mechanics are rare. She enjoys working on cars, but her real motivation was not learning a trade. It was getting a chance to learn how to drive — and the feeling of freedom that comes with it — after her years in captivity.

Mugoli has been studying at Laissez l’Afrique Vivre, or Let Africa Live, a nonprofit in the city of Bukavu that provides vocational training and counseling for former child victims of Congo’s long-running wars.

She sat on a couch in the director’s office and told her story, weeping as she talked about the loss of her father and the brutality of her captors.

She realized too late that rebel soldiers had been stalking her.

The armed men came for her in the middle of the night and demanded that her family hand her over. They said they were taking her for their commander. She was 14.

Her father, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, said Mugoli wasn’t home. But the rebels said they’d seen her that day in her school uniform. The men went to her room and dragged her out. Her father continued to argue.

“Why is the commander looking for my daughter, who is still a child?” he asked.

Without warning, one of the rebels shot him dead.

The men tied Mugoli’s hands behind her back and led her from her village of Ziralo into the jungle. She was to be the commander’s wife.

Her new home was a primitive camp. There were no buildings, only shelters made of branches. Everyone slept on the ground.

The soldiers belonged to a mai mai, as local militias are called in the Congo. She never learned the group’s name or whom the band was fighting. There were about 50 soldiers and four girls in the camp.

“They were just little girls like me,” she said.

She was held captive there for two years. She belonged solely to the commander, a brutal man.

“He hit me every day,” she said. “He never said anything. I thought he would kill me.”

She became pregnant and gave birth to a girl when she was 15. A year later, she became pregnant again.

When she was days away from giving birth to her second child, the commander relaxed his guard. Mugoli took her daughter to the market to get food. When none of the soldiers followed, she made her escape.

She walked for two days with her daughter on her back before reaching safety. Two days later, she gave birth to her second daughter.

Soon after, she heard on the radio that Let Africa Live was offering vocational training for child war victims. She was accepted into the program and chose auto repair.

Mugoli said she has been receiving counseling, but she never talks about her experiences with others at the center, whether they were sex slaves like her or child soldiers.

“We don’t know each other’s stories because we never share them,” she said. “I can say there is no trust. I don’t know what is in the mind of my colleague. I don’t know what he would do with my secrets.”

Mugoli said she heard recently that the rebels who held her captive joined forces with a much larger militia, M23, before it was defeated in November by U.N. forces.

The commander died in battle.

But the rebel who killed her father — a man she saw in camp every day for two years — remains in the jungle. She said she has no hope of bringing him to justice.

“I know him, I know his name: Francois,” she said, burying her face in her arm and sobbing. “And I know he is still alive.”

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.