Read Online A Thousand Sisters by Lisa Shannon - Free Book Online Page A

guy’s legs were pinned underneath, and the UN tank didn’t roll off . One of the UN guys was just looking around, calm, surveying the scene for a good few minutes, not emotional at all. He was looking each way while the guy was screaming . A woman was right next to our car yelling at the UN to get off the guy! There were maybe fifty people around. Everyone was yelling. Finally, the tank rolled off the guy and just rolled on down the street, leaving him there. Congolese people picked him up and dragged him out of the street. Then everyone turned toward our car, and they saw me sitting in the front seat. They saw my big sunglasses. Christine told me they thought my sunglasses were a video camera of some kind, they thought I was filming. They started to crowd around the car, screaming. Our driver just pulled out and escaped up a dirt road. All the while, the Conrad Hilton judge was in the back seat.
    â€œWe decided to do interviews at the office instead of in the field .
    â€œAt the office the next day, we heard that the security situation was getting worse. Zainab said I should go back to the hotel and pack our bags, and we could be on a plane in a few hours. ‘Just lie down in the back of the car on the ride back to Orchid,’ she told me. So the Women for Women car
pulled up in the middle of the street and I was walking from the office gate to the car, when all of a sudden I heard ‘pow-pow-pow-pow.’ About a hundred scared-shitless Congolese were running towards me. Christine yelled, ‘Don’t run! Don’t run!’ But I ran straight back to the gate, and all these people were crowding around, trying to get back into the compound while the security guys were trying to close the gates.
    â€œI stuck my arm in through the crowd and they pulled me in. Zainab was just standing there asking, ‘What’s going on?’
    â€œI decided I wasn’t going anywhere. So I started to film the rest of Zainab’s interview, then we heard shots again, right outside the gate. I dropped the camera and ran around the compound in circles, because there was nowhere to go. Zainab just laughed and said, ‘It’s worse in Iraq.’
    â€œI was like, ‘Stop laughing. It’s not funny.’
    â€œShe says, ‘I laugh in these situations.’
    â€œWe left that afternoon.”
    Â 
    RICKI’S WARNINGS ARE flashing in my head like a stoplight, so the news about Orchid being overbooked does not land well. In the States, I am not known for my restraint when unhappy. Now I feel as if I have one foot on the brake and one the accelerator . Every minute of my countdown to Congo, every warning, presses down harder on both.
    But I’ve also been forewarned: People in Congo don’t get mad. It would be viewed as a temper tantrum—it’s something you don’t do, like crying in a board meeting. As one Congo travel veteran warned emphatically, “If you lose it, just pack up; leave. You might as well never come back. You will have permanently lost the respect of the Congolese.”
    So I smile at Christine and laugh. “Flexible is the name of the game in Congo,” I say. “It’s no problem.”
    We pull off to the side of the road and I get my first glance of the border crossing, just a simple bridge, shorter than a city block. I recognize it from Lisa Ling’s report. I pull out my broadcast-quality HDV camera.

    I position myself with the bridge in the background. Christine holds the camera for me, trying to be low-key. It’s illegal to film borders. I try to control my face twitching and I dive right in with the commentary. “I’m standing on the border of Congo . . .”
    As we approach the bridge, leaving Rwanda behind, I’m amazed that this old, rotting wooden bridge from Belgian Congo is all that separates the country from Rwanda . On the other side of the bridge, a man lifts the old metal gate and lets us