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7 Hunted by the Rebels and the RPF It was difficult to make much progress. Zairian soldiers had gone ahead of us, and provisions were practically impossible to find. The soldiers arrived in the villages shooting in the air, took women by force, and robbed the population of everything they had—clothes, bicycles , food, and money. People fled to the forest. We passed through dead villages, abandoned by their inhabitants weeks before. We contented ourselves with green papayas cooked like vegetables or a few leaves and tubers from the colocases, which grew around the abandoned houses.1 We spread out our sheetings in the courtyards of houses to sleep. The area swarmed with snakes of all kinds, and sleeping under the stars was dangerous. One night a woman was bitten in the eye by a snake and died the next morning, her face so swollen that even her family did not recognize her. Between Hombo and Walikale, I was hungry all the time. One day I was resting in the square of a small abandoned village. There must have been a few hundred of us who had stopped there. Some tried to protect themselves from the noonday sun by looking for shade under the trees or in the ruined houses, others prepared a few tubers. I was stretched 122 1. Colocasia Esculenta, a kind of taro, is very high in protein and rich in vitamins A and C as well as calcium and phosphorus. The corms (roots) must be cooked for at least an hour to remove an irritating substance. The leaves are also edible but must be boiled for at least forty-five minutes over low heat. out on a sheeting in the shadow of the trees, but hunger and ants kept me from closing my eyes and tasting the rest that I had been longing for. To pass the time and keep my spirits up I began to look at the people around me. That was how I noticed a young man who was preparing beans. I could not take my eyes off of him. I hadn’t eaten beans for weeks. Beans had never been my favorite dish, and even less beans cooked in palm oil, like those the young man was cooking. And there, in a little abandoned village in the middle of the equatorial forest, my mouth was watering watching him stirring his spoon in the pot and bringing it to his mouth to taste if there were enough salt. I wanted to ask him to give me a little, but I was afraid he would refuse, even though it would have been only one more refusal among the many I received every day when I asked for some water to drink or some sugar. I was so hungry and the beans looked so good that I didn’t stay where I was for long. With a smile and a little voice that didn’t resemble mine at all I asked the young man if he would give me a few beans. I spoke so softly that I had to repeat the question. To my great astonishment he went to get another pot, into which he put half of the beans. He handed me the pot and a spoon. I couldn’t find the words to thank him, so I muttered my thanks and fell on the beans. I devoured the first mouthfuls without raising my eyes. I was so astonished that someone would give an unknown person half of his beans, something so rare and expensive, in the total destitution that we found ourselves in, that I wanted to know who he was and where he came from. I found out that he was from Ruhengeri and, like me, was a refugee. To reach help as quickly as possible, we raced the 117 kilometers between Irangi and Walikale. We wanted to get there before the rebels who were coming from Goma to attack Kisangani. Goma was only about one hundred kilometers from Kisangani, and the maps that some of us were using showed a road between Goma and Walikale. In reality, this road, which had existed during colonial times, had returned to its natural state because it wasn’t kept up, but we didn’t know that. We ran with hunger and fear in our stomachs. A few kilometers from Hombo, we met some Zairians who had picked up a tiny baby just a few weeks old from the road. They asked all the...

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