A Thousand Sisters (23 page)

I say, “You can tell I'm not a mother.”

Mama helps me pull it off. She looks stressed that I've taken such a keen interest in her son. I stare at his delicate little body, his bony legs, his pale little ribs poking out. He starts to cry. I've never heard a child's voice sound like this before. Not the pushy, insistent cry for a mother's attention, but slow. Thin. Desperate.

“Please don't cry,” I say. Uh-oh. I feel it coming on. He pees. I grasp for something to absorb it, a towel a cloth, a doily, anything. “Oh, man! Right where it counts, too!”

“A real Mama!” Maurice bursts out laughing, “Like you are christened! You are really Mama Congo!”

I sit for a moment, shaking my head.
Anyway. . . .

His mama takes him. She cradles his naked body while he nurses.

I'm tense, but I say, “I would like to take the baby to see a different doctor. The baby needs help. The baby needs food. The baby needs medical treatment. He's not normal. He needs to be rehydrated. The baby shouldn't be this small.”

“Our doctor said the illness can't be treated at the hospital,” she argues. “It needs local medicine.”

“He's severely malnourished,” I insist. “I would like to take you and the baby to Panzi Hospital.”

“I took the baby to the hospital and the doctor told me to take him to traditional doctors,” Mama says. “Since I took him, the situation is getting better and better.”

To be clear, I get how totally, radically inappropriate it is for me to march into this woman's home and tell her how to take care of her children. I'm no doctor. I don't know this family. I remember my college seminar debates on the feminist empowerment model. It's just that I don't care about these issues right now. The baby is dying.

“How many children do you have?”

“Eight children.”

“How many have died?”

“None.”

She's annoyed. But she dresses him anyway, avoiding my eyes as she wraps him in a little white dress, then a ruffly white curtain.

On the way out I notice her next-youngest, a little girl with thin blonde hair, a snotty nose, heavy bags under eyes, and a balloon belly. As long as I'm shamelessly meddling in this woman's business, I ask, “Is this baby sick too? Does she need to see a doctor?”

“The malnutrition is due to the little difference in age between the two,” Maurice surmises. True enough, with this many babies and Mama's already slender frame, milk is likely scarce.

Mama doesn't say a word, but wipes little Nina's face clean, undresses
and washes her, and rubs oil all over her body, trying to give her child a healthy glow. She grabs a cotton party dress with faded yellow flowers and dresses the little girl. Nina is not amused.

Nina shoots me the death stare on the ride to Panzi. She looks like she hasn't cracked a smile her whole little life. I'm still waiting for the pee to dry—it covers my whole lap. At least I'm in all black today.

 

THE NURSE AT THE CENTER for malnourished children is not impressed. They examine the kids, slinging them around—much to Nina and Bonjour's horror—and stretching them out on a board to measure their height while they scream and cry. Mama strips off Bonjour's angel outfit and the medical staff wants to put him in a hanging sack to weigh him. I hand him over, feeling jumpy. “Support his neck. Watch his neck. Gentle!” He's swallowed by the bag. It covers his face, while half his hip hangs out, as they drop him on the scale like a hunk of meat.

They hand him back to me. I rock him as he cries. He pees for a second time. I am truly, deeply soaked in malnourished-baby pee. Totally worth it.

“For this one, it is no problem to be treated,” The nurse says, motioning to the girl. She wags her pen at Bonjour, “But for this one, because he was ill he became this way. It is only if the mother takes care of him, feeding him.”

I'm dumbfounded. “They're not going to treat this child?”

“The problem is to be well fed.”

“Yeah, I get that,” I say. “That's why we came to the
center for feeding malnourished children
. How do we solve that problem?”

“The mother can find maybe milk from the breast.”

I'm shocked. “So they can't do anything for this baby? ‘Cause the baby's really small?”

He's really screaming too.

“Being small is the fact of illness,” she says again. “The baby has been treated. We have nothing to do for the baby. If the baby becomes ill, we will treat him. But the baby is normal.”

It's all I can do to not lunge across the table and strangle this nurse. “This is not normal.”

The nurse gives me a “piss-off ” shrug and moves on.

My phone buzzes; it's a text from Dr. Roger, who hosted our earlier visit to Panzi and today ushered us to the feed center between surgeries. “It's a good thing you do. I think you saved that baby's life. If you have any problem. . . .”

Dr. Roger meets us following a Cesarean. We breeze past a long line in the corridor into a private examination room. Dr. Roger introduces us to a woman pediatrician. She unwraps Bonjour from the christening gown and examines him as fat tears fall down his face. When she's finished, I re-dress him in his gauzy white outfit and ask, “What's wrong?”

“Complications from cutting something here,” she says, pointing to his throat.

“His tonsils?” I ask.

“It's a traditional treatment for a cold,” she says. “The action provoked a chest infection.”

“It's serious?”

“The baby will die without treatment,” she tells us. “Severe malnutrition, an infection in the chest. He will need to stay here.”

Mama is exasperated. Maurice translates, “She wonders what will be the life of the other children at home if she must stay here.”

I ask, “You still live with your husband, right?”

“Yes.”

“Can he help?”

The look on her face says “no chance.” She shakes her head. “My husband is jobless. I am the one who is working.”

“Maybe the husband can stay here with the baby?” I ask. “She can stay at home.”

She looks at me blankly, as though I'm speaking the absurd.

“It is very difficult,” Maurice says.

“It is just not done, okay,” I say. “She understands if she doesn't stay here, the baby will die.”

Now I am staring at the real Mama Congo, facing yet another Sophie's Choice. I watch her make the calculation:
If I let this one go, the other seven will live.

Dr. Roger adds, “He's very fragile, Lisa. The level of treatment he needs . . .”

“How long does he need to stay?” I ask.

“Seven days of treatment.” Dr. Roger responds.

“Do you have friends or neighbors who can help?” I ask Mama.

“They can take care of the babies. But no one will accept to feed them.”

“We'll buy the food,” I tell her. “What do you need? Rice? Beans?”

She gives us the list: Beans, rice, fu-fu, salt, onion, lamp oil, vegetables.

Dr. Roger says something to Mama two or three times, something about
aksanti
(Swahili for thank you).

She smiles and quietly says,
“Merci.”

 

WE DASH ACROSS TOWN to the local market, where we pick up twenty-five-pound bags of beans and rice; piles of cauliflower, onions, potatoes; flats of eggs; bananas; and maize fu-fu (“the right kind for ones who suffer from malnutrition”). Neighbors help us carry the food back to Bonjour's home. I've tried to buy enough so that I can bribe the neighbor women to watch the children in exchange for food.

While we're in the neighborhood, we cram in some quick house shopping. Now all the locals are happy to show us their houses. They quote us prices US$2,000 and up, despite our repeated attempts to clarify that US$1,500 is the budget. There is no more money.

Finally, we look at land instead. We find a modest plot, about the size of a plot in Portland, for US$600. We ask the local real estate mogul to estimate the costs of constructing a simple wooden house with a cement floor, finished
stone-stuffed walls, and a tin roof—built quickly. We ask him to show us a house he can build for US$900. He says it can be done in ten days.

It looks like it's doable.

I turn to one of the locals and ask, “Do you think it's a good deal?”

“Ask this guy to think about all of the material, write it down, and bring it in the morning,” the local advises.

We do.

“The woman will be in the hospital for two months,” I emphasize. “It needs to happen quickly, but it is more important that it happen exactly as we've talked about and that we stick to the price. And that Generose has the legal document to the property—that it is hers. We can't have anyone come back and say, ‘Oh. Sorry. It's going to cost you more.'”

“Stone on the ground,” the developer says.

“No—cement! She's on crutches.” I laugh and say, “People who deal with real estate in the United States and the Congo are the same.”

Sure enough, when we meet him in the morning, he brings a long, itemized list, with the new “after calculation price” of US$2,300.

“Ah. Then we have no deal.”

“The problem is they saw only a
muzungu,”
Maurice says.

Maurice offers to manage the construction, in cooperation with Generose's brother, for the stated budget.

 

BACK AT PANZI, Bonjour rests in his white dress on the hospital bed in the middle of the children's ward, while Nina shovels down a banana. We've just paid the US$50 for his one-week stay. I lean over him and say, “You're in a better mood. Already a little better.” He cracks a smile. A smile!

As we leave, I ask Mama, “Do you have everything you need?”

She replies, “I need sugar so I can make tea.”

I laugh it off, uncomfortably. “Maybe tomorrow.”

I'M IN A PACKED SUV,
cruising along a rural road, Congo landscape flying by, sandwiched between a Congolese friend and a guy by the name of

René. The front seat is occupied by another carsick friend, who needs to look out the front window. It doesn't matter where we are or where we are going. Why René is along for the ride, and who invited him, isn't the point. Sometimes questions of safety far outweigh the desire to spill all the details.

René speaks with a high-pitched voice that sounds like a woman's, but his baseball cap and sweater vest say “suburban dad.” The whole ride, he's been touting his feminist credentials and long history working for a variety of international NGOs. He's angling for a job. “You should hire me to manage Run for Congo Women in Congo!”

I smile politely, but my mind is elsewhere. I'm unhappy with my friend and the “translation” issue at the meeting we've just come from, which involved talking with rape survivors.

As one woman spoke, I caught the words
Mai Mai
. I was surprised she was being so direct about a Congolese attacker.

My Congolese friend translated, “She says they violated her.”

“Who?”

My friend added, “She said
Interahamwe.”

“What did she say about the Mai Mai?”

My friend responded vaguely, “She did not say anything about Mai Mai.”

What?
I may know fewer than twenty Swahili phrases, but
Mai Mai
is one of them. “Yes, she did,” I say. “Was it the Mai Mai who raped her?”

My friend was quiet.

I pushed harder. “Can you please ask her.”

My friend asked again, then acquiesced. “Yes, she was raped by Mai Mai.”

Now, fried after an exhausting trip on this long, bumpy road, I'm thinking about the meeting when I spot soldiers on the side of the road. As is now the routine, I ask, “Congolese Army or Mai Mai?”

It's quiet for a minute. Then my friend says, “I don't know.”

They all stare forward, eyes on the road. “If you want to know about the Mai Mai, ask the man sitting next to you. He is the President of the Mai Mai for South Kivu.”

There's no time to let it land, to shoot my friend a disapproving, “What the hell are you thinking?” look or to calculate the ramifications of what this might mean.

I feel the fear slip around inside me as I try to convince myself this is a great opportunity. The undeniable fact has settled into my stomach: In spite of all the paranoia floating around Congo, this guy really is dangerous. I need to tread lightly.