my 1984 graduation. I was glad to support them in their many tasks, and I enjoyed getting reacquainted with my younger sisters and brothers.
A year later, Aunt Priscilla invited me to her wedding in Bugarama, in the southwest tip of Rwanda – in walking distance from both the Congo and Burundi borders. Accepting her invitation had life-changing consequences for me.
Priscilla’s bridegroom, Alphonse, gave me a tour of Cimerwa, Rwanda’s chief cement-processing company, for which he worked. As we walked, he explained that although Cimerwa belonged to the Rwandan state, Chinese specialists supervised the work, and some of the Rwandan engineers had trained in China. Jobs at this massive site ranged from quarrying raw materials and making cement to machine operation, construction, maintenance, landscaping, and office work.
Besides the cement factory, the vast complex included housing for six hundred employees, a school and nursery for their children, and a health center, to which six rooms and twelve beds were later added. There was even a resident doctor. I was impressed.
Later that year, I heard there was a job opening at Cimerwa. Determined to grab this chance, I returned to Bugarama.
There I found something better than a job. I found the man I was to marry.
5
Charles
PENDING MY HOPED-FOR JOB with Cimerwa, I stayed in Bugarama, in Alphonse and Priscilla’s house. One evening some of their friends dropped in, so I prepared a meal of ugari with fish sauce. After dinner, over milky tea, everyone relaxed and talked.
One of the guests told me that twelve years previously, he had been studying toward the priesthood at Nyundo Catholic Seminary, near Gisenyi on Lake Kivu’s northern shore. But when fellow Tutsi students were murdered in the 1973 wave of Hutu violence, he fled to the Congo and pursued a geology degree there instead. After graduating, he had returned to Rwanda and found a job with Cimerwa. He was in his thirties. His name was Charles.
I had no special interest in this young man, but he kept turning up at Priscilla’s. One day he offered to show me where Cimerwa quarried travertine, a form of limestone, and I accepted his invitation.
It was obvious that Charles enjoyed walking; he also enjoyed explaining everything we passed. Pointing out a spring beside the path, he had me put my hands in its pool. To my surprise, the water was hot.
We became better acquainted as we walked. Charles said he came third in a family of eleven children. Actually there had been twelve, but one died in infancy. In 1959, his family had fled their home village of Mukoma – on a peninsula near the southern end of Lake Kivu – by boat to Idjwi Island. Refugee life had been harsh, so his childhood memories of the following months were unhappy ones. When the family returned to Rwanda, he and his siblings were slapped and punched by Hutu classmates in Mukoma’s school.
Nyundo Catholic Seminary was one of the few places of higher education to accept Tutsi in Rwanda, so losing that opportunity, at age twenty, had been bitter for Charles. Even now, he told me, his presence at Cimerwa irked certain Hutu employees, who envied his university degree and his position in the company.
Charles said that all the discrimination and disappointment had made him disillusioned with religion; he was still Catholic, but only on paper. In contrast, my faith meant everything to me. I told him about my parents and family, my childhood, baptism, boarding school years – everything that had shaped my views. Although he could not comprehend my childlike faith, he said he respected it.
The more I saw Charles, the more I liked him. A peace-loving thinker, he was something of an introvert. He told me Cimerwa had shelves of science books, and he had read them all, because there was always more to learn. His direct manner, upright walk, and straightforward speech led me to trust him. He was strong and intelligent, of medium build, and sported a mustache. He was also constantly on guard, aware of the animosity of some of his colleagues.
Charles and I continued going for walks. One day, after watching the men and machines at work, he asked me into his office, in a building at the quarry site. Here he told me what was on his mind.
Charles said he enjoyed spending time with me, and he hoped we could be friends. In fact, he said, he hoped we might marry someday.
That was going too far for me. I was only twenty and had come to Bugarama in search of work. “What would my mother and father say,” I asked, “if I turned up with a husband instead of a job?”
I became more reserved after this conversation. Love comes slowly. Rwanda was unfamiliar territory, and I felt far from home. I had always envisioned a marriage like my parents’, so I was troubled that Charles lacked a sure belief. On the other hand, I hoped I might help restore him to faith … So I prayed, and I watched my admirer from a distance. Much later, Charles told me that he never gave up; he had believed I would someday say yes.
My first attempt to get work at Cimerwa failed, because an influential Hutu official – who resented Charles and knew of our friendship – forced me to leave Rwanda. As I crossed back into the Congo, he shook his fist. Several others joined him as he shouted insults behind me.
“You, Tutsi,” he yelled, “you will never, never, never find work in Rwanda!”
I spent the next bleak months with an aunt in Burundi. Frustration over my failure to get my dream job – and over my humiliating ejection from Bugarama – smoldered into anger. Deciding I hated the place and all the interfering Hutu there, I refused to even listen to Rwandan news anymore. I found employment as an elementary school teacher and tried to start building a future in Burundi. But life seemed empty, and I cried a lot.
In December 1986, I decided to visit my family in the Congo. I was homesick; my birthday was approaching, and so was Christmas.
When I arrived in Bwegera, my parents had astonishing news: Charles had looked them up. They had liked him. My heart leapt. If Charles had made that effort to meet my father and mother, he was obviously still thinking seriously about me. Also, he had told them that the Hutu official who expelled me from Rwanda had moved away.
Gathering my courage, I returned to Bugarama in the first weeks of 1987. Priscilla and Alphonse welcomed me back into their home. Charles welcomed me, too. When Cimerwa’s Chinese engineers threw a party, he brought me along, introducing me to everyone as his special friend.
Since I was eleven years younger than Charles, I felt shy around his fellow workers, who teased him about how young and beautiful I was. But when he and I were alone, I felt as comfortable as I did with my own brothers. Our friendship was spontaneous and natural, and we laughed a lot.
We resumed our walks, never forgetting to dip our hands into the hot spring. Once or twice a week, Charles took me out for grilled squash or banana. Sundays we often went for a drive in a Cimerwa car, occasionally making the ninety-minute trip to his childhood home. Here Charles introduced me to his parents, brothers, and sisters. Their compound was the largest in their village.
I loved Mukoma immediately and didn’t mind its unpaved roads or its lack of electricity and running water. Children’s voices, mingled with the lowing of cattle, made a fitting soundtrack for the pastoral scene of thatched huts scattered over grassy slopes, with Lake Kivu a shimmering backdrop.
If possible, it was even more beautiful at night. After the sun set over Congo’s distant mountains, a chorus of frogs and insects tuned their evening concert, fireflies flickered across the hillsides, and the sky filled with stars. The first evening, I noticed twinkling lights filling the valley as well.
“Charles!” I exclaimed. “Is there a town down there?”
“No, Denise,” he laughed. “You’ve forgotten Lake Kivu! That’s the fishing fleet. Every boat has its lamp, to attract the fish.”
As in my mother’s home area, further north along Kivu’s coast, most of Mukoma’s population was Tutsi. The few Hutu families here were entwined with Tutsi