From the auther: This story is based on Anselme Sadiki's experience but is not a fiction. In a corner of the world where we often overlook, these kinds of misery occur and numerous people die without outcry for their sacrifices. When you feel something from this story, please refer to another story from a different point of view and let me know what you think.
I appreciate Anselme's cooperation and contribution for making this story, and his friendship for me. Thus I devote this story to his late sister, Anonciata Makuza.
Smile, Lucky, Intelligence and the World
He is a man of smile. He has a bright and wide smile. Whenever he laughs, which is very often, he always looks like Eddy Murphy, with pure white regular teeth appearing proudly. He had to be born smiling, not crying, 33 years ago. However severe a condition he is in, he can smile; in fact he has done, except in only one occasion in a northern Kenyan refugee camp.
Anselme Sadiki comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly called Zaire, where the President Mobutu had been dictating for more than 30 years. Anselme's birth place was a eastern small regional capital city, Bukavu, but his family soon moved to Goma, the second largest city in the east of Congo, and then to a southern tiny rural village Rutshuru which is isolated from rest of the country and he spent most his childhood in.
"We were imbedded the President Mobutu was like God, mystical individual with magic forces, who canユt be criticized or gone against."
When he was admitted to the National University of Zaire in Kinshasa (Kinshasa University) in 1989, he found that Mobutu was not God but just an oppressive dictator and everybody in the academic circle disdained him not only because professors had not been paid for more than six months and exploited by the president of the university, but because the president never allowed freedom of expression and his government was terribly corrupt.
"Mobutu was only one chess player; He could move or remove personnel as he liked," remembers Anselme.
"Tension was worsening. From 1989 there were several student demonstrations demanding that teachers be paid appropriately and change of education system." The government replied with real bullets instead of change demanded.
At one night in September 1991 with blackout by Mobutu, nightmare, thus Anselme's long journey to freedom, came into reality. Around 11 p.m. in the midst of screaming of his colleagues, four soldiers came into his dorm at last with their guns, knives and shoes drenched in blood.
"They argued who should kill me and how to kill me. They were savage animals, blood-thirsty animals." Anselme repeats メhorrifyingモ with his forehead held by his two hands.
Anselme chose to try committing suicide rather than be murdered by such animals, by throwing himself out of an open window in his room on the second floor. He did. He couldn't move for a while, which convinced the soldiers that he was dead. He fell onto "a pile of bodies covered with blood" which turned his friends' but he couldn't recognize whose they were due to pitch-black darkness of the night. They saved his life. He kept hearing his colleagues screaming from everywhere.
He is a man of lucky. He narrowly escaped genocide, eluded more than 50 roadblocks protected by child soldiers in Uganda on the way to Kenya, and finally reached to an office of The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Nairobi, Kenya. He was now under protection of the UN.
"Life (in Nairobi) was really good. I learnt Swahili there from other refugees."
This ease, however, didn't last long. In February 1992, a civil war in Somalia adjacent to Kenya worsened, which led a lot of Somali refugees flooding into Kenya with their weapons and crime rate in Kenya skyrocketing. Kenya government decided that any refugees had not to remain in Kenya, which resulted in that Anselme was forced to abandon a relatively stable life and to move to Kakuma refugee camp in the north in the desert.
"There was no water. Just the sun. It was above 110 degrees Fahrenheit." He details a life there. "The UN supply of water and food was every two weeks. Five litter of water per week per person. A small tent was shared by three or four person. Cholera, malaria and diarrhea broke us down. 20 to 25 people died every day. I lost my weight, to less than 40 kilograms and was as skinny as a mosquito, maybe you canユt believe."
For him, the condition was "worse than hell" and thus than the atrocity he had escaped. He did nothing there simply because there was nothing to do. He lost hope thus smile either.
"Just waiting for my turn of dying," he mutters with his eyes empty.
A French-speaking woman working for a NGO who had helped Anselme in the UNHCR office in Nairobi came to investigate this inhumane situation as a member of a UN team. He recognized her at once, but he had changed in appearance so much that she couldn't tell him.
"Anselme, really are you?" This was her remark then.
After that she worked hard to manage for him to get back to Nairobi and receive medical care even though Nairobi kept refusing refugees coming. She succeeded in. He had a small studio of his own and even made some money by translating French or several native language of a lot of incoming refugees to Swahili for a NGO office while going to school to study Swahili further.
"The room was my royal paradise. A roof on top of it! I had freedom. I was able to take shower. She is my savior."
He has other savers. One day an American scholar whom Anselme had become familiar with in a church there called him from the United States to go to American embassy in Nairobi on a certain day. The scholar arranged for him to seek an asylum in the U. S. and was supposed to accept Anselme in Iowa.
An officer in the embassy asked him the same questions three times. When the officer inquired "why are you here?" for the fourth time, Anselme got so irritated that he didn't reply. Silence continued for a minute. Then Anselme told the officer that "if you can't believe me, let me go." The American "huge white man" with small rectangle glasses sat back deep in his chair with smile.
"Smile? I couldn't believe it," says Anselme, "then he said 'Good luck in the United States. You are allowed to go to the U.S.' I couldn't believe it again because I had seen that a lot of refugees were refused by the U.S."
The officer had needed just his confirmation to send Anselme to the U.S. because he happened to be in Kinshasa when Kinshasa University affairs happened so he recognized Anselme's situation very well, which contributed Anselme's asylum. And it was when Anselme knew his university had been burnt down to the ground just three days after he had got away.
He is a man of intelligence. He was the third out of 23,000 passed in a National Examination that is a qualification test required for the young to go to universities. That enabled him to proceed to Kinshasa University with a promise of the government scholarship (yet not realized) even though going to a university was not affordable for his family.
He can also use his brains quickly. When he arrived at one of the international bus terminals in Nairobi after escape and was left alone, he didn't know Swahili. It resulted in another disaster. He had nothing to drink or eat, and spent whole three days in hunger and thirsty in fear of detention. He observed people passing and exchanging salute each other with attention, and learnt some pieces of Swahili. In the end of the third day, he could not bear anymore but he dared to help a woman carry a large baggage. After saying only few words he learnt he didn't recognize what she was speaking but said one word, "Zaire." She was a secretary working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kenya and recognized his situation soon. It was she who took him to an office of UNHCR.
When he came to the United States, he could hardly understand English. He studied so soon to get an A in a psychology class in Idaho State University in Pocatello.
"I just wanted to go back to school, sitting in a class room again," he recalls. He recorded lectures and asked his friend to translate, and learnt English.
It took six years to graduate and get a bachelor degree in Social Work, but during those days, he could get in touch with his family again. His family fled to Rwanda for fear that ethnic cleansing in Congo became more severe and impartial while that in Rwanda had been alleviated somewhat till then. It also burdens him to support not only his own life but also that of his family in Rwanda of more than nine members. Now his strife continues in SIPA, Columbia University because he is funded only partly here, but rather in freedom.
Congo is not stable yet. Through his confession, he shows distinct hate to the dictator, and to another coming after demise of Mobutu, Kabira from 1996. Anselme doesn't want to belong to anybody, any countries. His present dream is "to be an international person."
Where does his identity rest?
"I want to serve and help other people, especially Africans who are often overlooked and mistreated, and suffered oppressions. It is why I took a Social Work degree and now take International Affairs. I identify myself as 'Congolese' because Congo is my mother country and my root in my heart, but I want to consider myself that I am rather the product of the world," he answers.
"Hope in mind keeps me going." His expression based on his experience is always poetic and aesthetic. Mystically he has no nightmare here. He explains it is because "I can keep my mind sane" despite those tragedies. His smile represents his strength in his mind, which, along with lucky and intelligence, makes him alive. Thanks to these now he is about to acquire a broader sense of identity as a man of the product of the world.
(as of May 2002)
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