50 Women: Book One

Introduction

This week, I am wrapping up 50 Women, Book One.

What a journey.

Six years, over fifty interviews, nearly a hundred new friendships, five immigration cases, one nervous breakdown, three United Nations trips, a complete turning inside out of the self, a ninety-two-page book proposal and a manuscript that is hundreds of pages.

The recurring themes of my journey with 50 Women appear to be vulnerability, surrender, and the authentic self.

Initially I sought to compile 50 Women to heal from many things. I know what brokenness is like, I know what self-deprecation is like, and, above all, I know what it is like to endure fear, shame, and humiliation. For these reasons, I felt a sense of solidarity with every woman who participated in 50 Women.

When I was younger, I received the rare opportunity to cultivate friendships with women from across the world. I quickly learned that most women, no matter which country they were from or ethnic background they represented, shared similar experiences. Their stories transformed me and their friendships and cultural sharing gave me a sense of belonging. I wanted to go deeper into their cultures and observe and experience life from their point of view.

In 2009, the idea to compile 50 Women came to me suddenly as I sat at a desk pondering a documentary I watched about Ahmad Shah Massoud. Subconsciously, I was seeking redemption through fifty other women and over the last several years, I found what I was looking for. I was naïve going into this project. I assumed that it would not affect me as much as it did. Yet the experiences I have encountered through its course forced me to ask introspective questions. At the beginning of 2012, this journey shattered all of my spiritual constructs, leaving me bewildered, raw, and egoless. Every layer, every façade, every notion, and every aspect of me was stripped away. For those fortunate enough to experience a phenomenon of this nature, it is very humbling.

I often say that I wrote this book to find God and now that I have the manuscript, I am still striving to see how much closer I am. Can someone tell me if I am still very far?

Once you live so many different experiences and travel through so many different cultural realities, it is difficult to condense yourself back to who you were before. All the beliefs you once held no longer make sense due to the expansion of your character. Evolution and humility are the prizes you gain, yet the prices you pay for curiosity.

In literature, it is believed that there are always a context and a subtext to a person and story. The context represents the cultural circumstances in which the events in a person’s life occur. The subtext is the deep-rooted inner conviction and underlying core of a person that defines their beliefs, ethics, and values. I have gone deep inside the cultures and lives of many of these women in 50 Women on a very ethnographic level. I did so because I wanted to understand them in context and subtext. In order to write a person’s story you have to know them inside and out.

After all, this was not just a book, rather immigration cases, policy reform attempts, board of director duties, UN trips, sisterhood connections, tears, fears, a confrontation of demons and all the world’s problems.

To craft an effective narrative, one must answer a fundamental question: What is the story about?

This story is not just about fifty women, but also about a young woman, certainly not an ingénue, rather an old soul in a new body—wary and wise to her own long path—who sought to understand the context and subtext of humanity through the tumultuous lives of fifty women from thirty countries. It was not always a comfortable experience or a familiar one, but she was vulnerably ready to be molded and shaped by it as the bits and pieces from every person and culture she interacted with became pieces of her . . .

Jessica Buchleitner

San Francisco, CA

2014

The Little Box

The little box gets her first teeth

And her little length

Little width little emptiness

And all the rest she has

The little box continues growing

The cupboard that she was inside

Is now inside her

And she grows bigger bigger bigger

Now the room is inside her

And the house and the city and the earth

And the world she was in before

The little box remembers her childhood

And by a great great longing

She becomes a little box again

Now in the little box

You have the whole world in miniature

You can easily put it in a pocket

Easily steal it easily lose it

Take care of the little box

—Vasko Popa

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I want to thank all the women in this first book in the series of 50 Women for their courage. Their courage to be unconquerable, to remain unbroken by circumstances that obliterate so many others, and to relive painful memories and experiences when telling me their stories. I am humbled. You have all completely turned me inside out. Thank you.

Thank you to my three editors who helped this book make sense: Carol Pott, Patricia McKenna, and Nancee Adams-Taylor.

A big nod goes to Alan Hebel and Ian Shimkoviak of theBookDesigners for giving 50 Women, Book One a beautiful cover/face.

Thank you to my parents, Julie and Jerry Buchleitner, for always encouraging me to dream and raising me as an equal. Also my brother, Jason, for using this as an inspiration to manifest his own path.

To all of my Afghan sisters who introduced me to Islam, Afghan food, and Yak Qadam Pesh: Ta shakur.

Thank you to Dejan Petrovic for not only believing in me, but for drawing the map illustrations with such a stunning accuracy that you confirmed my belief that you are a reincarnated military general from the 1300s.

Thank you to Jean Claude Musore, author of Your Promises Stand Forever, for assisting with Swahili translation and for his partnership with 50 Women Project. God bless you and your family.

Thank you, Andranik Dedeyan, for adding to the creative process over the years. You are a very talented artist.

Thank you to Linda Fahey, who helped me outline this project in the beginning as I spent countless Saturdays at her kitchen table throwing around ideas while we drank tea and ate mango salsa.

Finally, thank you to all of you who believed in this project over the years. It is through your collective encouragement that it is now born.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the mad, the perpetrated, the forgotten, the seemingly beaten, the discriminated, the strong of heart, the fierce yet weary souls, the victimized and the 50 warriors of light (my heart and soul embodied).

May all you reading these stories have the strength to choose life.

50 Women

Views expressed in 50 Women, Book One are solely those of the participants and do not reflect the personal views, beliefs or opinions of the author. This book contains graphic descriptions of violent acts and very sensitive topics. Reader discretion is advised.

AFRICA

NEEMA

Democratic Republic of Congo

The Second Congo War began in August 1998 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and officially ended in July 2003 when the transitional government took power. The largest war in modern African history, it directly involved eight African nations. In the aftermath, nearly 5.4 million people were killed, starved, or brutally murdered.

Neema, a Banyamulenge Tutsi widow, narrates her horrific ordeals as a prisoner of war and as a survivor of the August 13, 2004 genocide at the Gatumba Refugee Camp. A force of armed combatants, many of them members of the National Forces of Liberation (FNL), massacred at least 152 Congolese civilians and wounded another 106. Neema recounts how she survived the horrifying ordeal.

Before this, I lived a calm, quiet existence. Although I am fortunate to be where I am today, I’ve experienced many difficulties in the last twenty years. Twice, I have survived intense traumas that should have claimed my life. It was by the grace of God that I did not perish.

Every time I tell my story, I feel very bad. It makes me physically ill. It takes me back to these very traumatic experiences and it is inexplicably difficult for me to recount these memories. These were horrible and shocking experiences. I am telling my story with the hope that someone can help the orphaned children who remain as a result of Gatumba. I miss and worry about them so often. I am telling it because I hope someone will understand what my people have experienced.

I was born in what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in a town called Mulenge. I was a farmer, like many others who are part of my ethnic group, the Banyamulenge Tutsi. As a young woman, I got married and had five children. Sadly, two of them passed away. I am very thankful that I still have my son and two daughters. They mean so much to me. Two of my children passed away because we did not have access to a hospital nearby and couldn’t get them to one in time. In my country, some villages do not have hospitals and you have to travel many miles to the nearest city for medical care. This is a common problem for women and prevents them from getting the care they need. Years after my children died, I lost my husband to the war and I am still a widow.

One day just before the war started in 1998 my husband went traveling for business. He decided to take a large number of cattle to several cities in the states of Shaba and Katanga in Congo and sell them in exchange for money or gold. He traveled with a group and they left the city of Kalemie with the cattle and moved on to another city called Moba where they collected the rest of the herd. Their final destination was Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the country, where they would sell the herd. After they sold the herd, he and the others were planning to retrace their route to Moba and back to Kalemie. Unfortunately tragedy struck before they left Lubumbashi. There was a massacre instigated by a rebel group called the Mai-Mai and my poor husband was in the middle of the city and was killed. At the time, I was devastated that the tragic massacre had left me a widow. Little did I know that losing him was only the beginning of my suffering and that of other Banyamulenge Tutsi.

In my country, when the father in the family dies it is very hard for a widow to support her family. Tradition dictates that the father of the family holds all of the money. In my country most people don’t use banks to hold their money, either. My husband’s killers stole the money from the sale of the cattle he had just made, leaving our family destitute. None of my late husband’s money was given to me.

After my husband died, there was so much pressure and I was under such stress that sometimes I would faint because it was too much for me to process. There was too much grief for my heart and with all the worry I felt helpless. I didn’t know how I would take care of my children. I didn’t know what to do or even what I could do. I was scared that the war and the massacres would continue. Unfortunately, they did.

In the aftermath of all of this, my son had to go outside the country to find work in order to help the family. Once he was gone, I was responsible for everything in the house, including my two remaining daughters. Life was very difficult and I lost all of my willpower and hope for the future. After my son left, the war started again just as I feared.

Life in Jail

One evening in the fall of 1998, I was home washing dishes. I did not realize that a call to violence and derogatory propaganda against the Banyamulenge Tutsi was being spread throughout the town and on the radio. Roadblocks were hastily set up and mass violence broke out. The Mai-Mai and other rebel groups, including another called the Interahamwe took me and all the other Banyamulenge Tutsi in Kalemie and put us in jail. The Interahamwe were responsible for the Genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In 1998, they came to the DRC and continued their war crimes. I was taken from my home and forced by soldiers onto a truck filled with other Tutsis and taken far outside of the city of Kalemie to jail. Fortunately, my two daughters escaped to a village called Vyura, so they did not have to experience this awful jail.

Before everyone was taken to jail, the soldiers took certain people and they were hanged and whipped. The Mai-Mai, Interahamwe, non-Tutsi residents of Kalemie, and the prison guards were trying to exterminate us all. The killers would just look at your face and the shape of your nose and if they suspected you to be a Tutsi then you would die or go to jail. It was that simple. There was no argument or debate. Death was inevitable.

I had no contact with my children during the month I was in jail. I was thinking about them all the time. I prayed that they were safe.

In the jail, the women, men, and children were kept in separate cells. We were all afraid of each other because no one knew why we were there. The women were wary of the men because we were afraid of being raped. We did not know if we could trust anyone. We had no information and no understanding of what was happening at the time.

For the entire month that we remained in prison, we were given little to no food or water. I was very worried for my family, deeply depressed, and hungry all the time. All of us were very quiet because we were afraid if we said anything we would attract attention and the soldiers and prison guards would kill us. The conditions at the prison were absolutely horrible. Many chilling and horrifying things happened at the jail and I had to bear witness to all of it. There was one woman who was pregnant and her baby was born in the prison. The guards just took the baby from her and never gave it back. We believe that they killed the baby. It was their way of emotionally manipulating us through torture. One day, I witnessed a prison guard stab a woman with a knife and watched it come out the other side of her body. This was only happening because we were Tutsi.

Every morning, the guards would come and tell us to make a line. They would count everybody—one, two, three, four, five—and tell those people to expect to be killed the next day. They did this for the entire month we were there to manipulate us with fear. The guards told us that food and water were not necessary for us in the prison because we would all be dead in a few days. They did not believe Tutsis were worth anything.

Toward the end of that month, they took people out of the jail and began to load them onto military trucks. They put all the men on one truck and I was put on another truck with the other women and the children. They drove us to a steep cliff and herded the men to a precipice and started pushing them over the edge. The man in charge was just pushing men off the cliff and watching, as they would tumble through the air to the ground below.

For those men who were not pushed over the cliff, the guards tied cords around their ankles, wrists, and arms, binding them, and then hit them with a sledgehammer on their foreheads, cracking their skulls. The guards dug a massive hole in the prison yard and dumped the bodies of all the men on top of each other. I watched it happen. It took them three days to kill all of the men, about seventy-eight men in total. The guard was calling everyone’s name, because they had lists of the names of every Tutsi in the city. It was like a death roll call. They massacred all the men at this time. It was their time to die.

After that, the prison guards told the women, We’re going to kill you tomorrow, so be prepared to die. All of you will be dead tomorrow. They told us that five o’clock was the time the rest of us would die.

At five o’clock, they brought all of us into a hall. My spirit was so weak that I was not afraid. For the entire month, I had believed tomorrow was my last day, so I never became frightened. They had often warned us that we would be killed. How could we know if this would be the time? I lost all hope at one point. Knowing that death could happen at any minute meant I was no longer afraid of it. When the Mai-Mai and guards would come into the jail to kill, the prisoners begged for death. They pleaded, Please kill me! Please kill me! Sometimes death holds more promise than life. Despite the emotional manipulation and the horrible conditions in the prison, I was very fortunate because I was able to stay alive thanks to the Rwandan soldiers who came by helicopter and landed in the prison yard. They started to fight with the Mai-Mai and eventually the Mai-Mai ran in fear and left us women all behind in prison. We were spared, and right on time!

During the entire time I was held in prison, only one woman was killed. No one knew why she was taken, but I remember the day that the soldiers came and took her. She never returned and no one knew what happened to her but I can only imagine. I thought of her the night the Rwandan military came carrying torches and searching through the jail to rescue us. They never found the body of the woman, only the bodies of the seventy-eight men.

I was freed from prison. But once free, I still had to worry about the Mai-Mai and the other groups who disliked and targeted the Banyamulenge Tutsis. We were not really free because there was no protection and we were looking over our shoulders in fear every day. People were watching everything my people did. The Mai-Mai and Interahamwe killed so many people. I can’t remember the number but it was too many.

After jail, all the Tutsi were brought to a village called Uvira and also to Rwanda. I stayed in Uvira where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) helped us set up tents so we could live peacefully. After I was reunited with my children, we remained in Uvira until 2004, when problems for the Tutsi arose again, forcing us to flee to Burundi.

Gatumba Massacre

Life was too difficult in Democratic Republic of Congo, with threats against the Tutsi rising again. Although Uvira was a nice place to live, we feared for our safety. In 2004, the situation had become so bad for the Tutsi that I fled with my son and one of my daughters to Burundi settling nervously into a refugee camp called Gatumba. We felt more secure in the camp, but it’s common knowledge that if someone wants to kill you, they will find you no matter how far you run. After two months, on a Friday night, the evil came. They came in the form of civilians and soldiers who desired to exterminate all of the Banyamulenge Tutsi in the Gatumba refugee camp.

It was the night of August 13, 2004, when four groups entered the camp: the Mai-Mai and the Interahamwe came with the Forces Armées Congolaise (FAC) and the Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL). Fortunately, my son had just returned to Uvira one week before this happened and my other daughter was also not with us. I was in my tent with my youngest daughter, the only one of my children who was with me at the time. I heard a large group of people entering the camp beating drums and singing pleasant songs. They were carrying machetes and other weapons. In only a few hours, they killed more than 166 camp residents, most of them women and children. They wanted to finish us. As the camp was being attacked, the only place I could hide was under the dying bodies of other people. I just allowed their lifeless bodies to fall on top of me. There were five, six, then ten bodies on top of me. Everyone who tried to run away was brutally murdered.

It was a scene from a horrible nightmare. The soldiers did whatever they could to kill. They were shooting people or using machetes, grenades, even gasoline to kill people. They would pour the gasoline on someone, light a match, and set the person on fire. Many people were burned alive. By the end of the massacre, there were twelve bodies on top of my daughter and me. I hid under the dead and dying bodies from midnight until six o’clock in the morning. I was too afraid to move or make a sound for fear that the killers still roamed the camp. I just stayed there under the pile of bodies to avoid detection. I did not want the killers to know that I was still alive or they would have killed me, too. I was not physically hurt, but my heart and soul were forever wounded.

The next morning, an ambulance came to take the survivors to a hospital. There was blood everywhere and bodies in piles, lifeless and limp. I was covered in blood but the relief workers eventually realized that I was alive. I was very much in shock.

I was taken to the hospital but I didn’t know where I was. My mind was lost. All the night I cried out, screaming. I was having nightmares and cold sweats. I knew the hospital staff was around me, but their voices sounded far away from me like echoes in the distance. I was lost in another world; a nightmare.

After the hospital, the only thing I could think about was going to help the children who had been orphaned in the massacre. That was what my life became. It made me feel better to help the children and they needed someone to take care of them. There was a one-year-old baby who needed a mother and I became his mother. Other people helped us as well. I know one pastor who took in many children. He was not a rich man and did not have the financial ability to support all of these children; he just did what he could. He is still in Burundi taking care of fifty-nine orphans. He was not in the camp the night of the massacre. He was in Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi. He is a man of God and that is why he takes care of these children. The children call the pastor papa and the women who care for them mother. The children became like family to us. We were all they had.

I still think about those orphaned children. I know they have many problems and don’t have enough people to take care of them and give them everything they need. Even after I moved to the United States, they still call me from the camp to talk to me. It breaks my heart to feel so powerless. I am praying that one day someone will help me to help them. They are so far away from me now. I don’t speak English and am slowly adjusting to my new life in America. It is an awful feeling when you know someone is suffering and you feel powerless to help them.

Reuniting with Her Children and Arrival in the United States

I left the camp in Burundi along with one of my daughters and we were soon reunited with my other daughter and my son at a refugee visa interview. You cannot imagine how beautiful it was to see my son and other daughter after being separated from them for so long. I had not known if they were dead or alive until that day. We, as a family, had the option to interview for a refugee visa and were told if we were chosen, then we would receive resettlement in the United States. There were only a certain amount of interviewees chosen for the visas, so we were praying to receive them and thanks to God, we did.

We moved to the United States within the following year as refugees. Now we are all together again and I thank God for that every day. My children are all I have in the world.

I know I am in America now, but I think too much about the orphaned children, families, and the rest of the Banyamulenge who are left behind and still suffer. Sometimes, when I think too much about their suffering, I remember too much about my own. I am very quiet about everything. Sometimes, I don’t eat or sleep because of these terrible memories. I have erratic mood swings during the day so I take medication for that and a pill to help me sleep. I am troubled by the fact that there is nothing I can do now to help these children in Burundi. It is also hard for me to go out of my house and see people all around living a normal life. Although my life is so much better now, in many ways it is still a struggle.

I still experience pain from what happened. I still have memories and I still talk to those children I left behind. I don’t know if I will ever be the same as I was before this happened to me, but at least now my family is living safely in the United States. At least I know none of my family will ever have to experience these atrocities again. If that is the blessing that I have, then I am thankful for it.

Neema’s Advice for Women

Life is for God. There are a lot of testimonies, but it is only God who knows the lives of the women. My testimony is for the women and the children because, after the husband dies, no one is there to help women or take care of them. After this happened to me, I became very strong. I had to. I hope God will help the women survive everywhere in the world.

PAULINE

Cameroon

Pauline was born in Cameroon and grew up with child abuse, rape, and poverty. Despite all her experiences, she discusses her willpower to move and excel beyond the life she was born into.

If I only knew what was coming when I was born, I would have chosen not to be in my father’s family.

I was born in a country called Cameroon, in a small village named Nkoumadzap, twenty-five kilometers from Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. My mother says that she did not have time to walk twenty-five kilometers to the capital city Yaoundé, so I was not born in a hospital. I was born in a cocoa field and wrapped in macabo leaves. During her labor, two farmers assisted her and afterward I was taken to the hospital. I am the second child of seven children. I have five brothers and one older sister. I was born as a member of the Beti-Pahuin group and the subgroup is Beti. My family speaks Ewondo, one of the most common dialects of the languages spoken by the Beti in Cameroon.

According to my mother, I was a small, strong, alert, and very ugly baby who cried a lot. There was nothing she could do to stop my crying. I was always sick and did not eat very well, so my mother had to carry me everywhere on her back like a little monkey. For that reason, I was nicknamed Okende (small monkey). I developed a strong mind and was rebellious from infancy.

For two months after my birth, I was the girl with no name. Like other things in my life, my name came with a lot of struggles. According to Beti culture, a baby is to be immediately named by the father who is also the first person to hold the baby after birth. The naming of the child is symbolic of welcoming a new member into the family and is also a way for the father to accept the newborn child. In our culture, a married woman cannot name her child. She needs her husband’s permission. Because my mother already had a girl with the birth of my older sister, my father wanted the next child to be a boy. When I was born, I was viewed as a disappointment and my mother as a failure since she could not produce boys. My birth and arrival was what started the destruction of her marriage to my father.

At the time of my birth, most African men within the Beti subgroup still believed that the mother determined the sex of a child. Many African women were accused of being incapable of producing boys and they were forced to let their husband take another wife who would be able to produce boys. To be considered a powerful wife, your firstborn should be a boy. That way you would not have to share your husband with another woman. Unfortunately for my mother, she had my sister first.

My mother always said that the trouble in paradise started when I was born. Not only was I not welcomed into the family and remained nameless for months, it also took my father nearly a year to hold me in his arms. After several months, my grandmother’s older sister came and named me after herself. I was named Evina Marie Seraphine Pauline. Finally, the child that nobody would name had a name.

When I was seven years old, we were forced to leave our little village because my father was physically abusive. He was constantly beating and traumatizing us so my mother decided to save her life and her children’s lives and leave him.

My mother’s decision was very courageous. Even though most African women are physically and emotionally abused by their husbands, they cannot leave because of our culture. Many women come from abusive situations in their own families and have seen their mothers abused by their fathers and yet their mother never left. To some, physical abuse by the husband is interpreted as a sign of love.

It is also taboo for a woman to divorce. The cultural practices of the majority of Africans prohibit divorce. Divorced women are shunned and singled out by the community. The act of divorce brings shame upon the woman’s family and her mother is seen as a bad mother, an incapable person, and a failure in the community. No woman wants to bring such trauma to their family so they stay with the abusive husband until one of them is dead. Culturally, it is difficult for women to file for divorce in African society. Most people believe that divorce is for European cultures and that the marriage is a family affair, not something up for the government’s jurisdiction.

Yet by the time I was seven years old, my mother had taken enough abuse. She took us four kids to stay with our dear grandmother for almost a year before the community of Nkoumadzap convinced my father to come and get us and leave my mother. My grandmother did not want us to leave but she did not have the power to fight tradition and my mother did not have any support except for my grandmother. When my father showed up to take us there was nothing they could do. We were taken to his torture camp where we were at the mercy of a man without