Dispatches

The Family Contract

Aimé was different when I returned to Goma for a new job with another aid agency after two months away. (I couldn’t stay away.) He was smiling and standing up straight, wearing a button-down shirt tucked into jeans with a belt. “My gas business worked!” he said. “I made back the $25 I spent on the can of gas!”

I now trusted Aimé more than I had before; he didn’t act like a callow youth, but like a responsible young man. The sad beanie hat was gone, and his shirts were always tucked in. He hadn’t even asked for the second installment of $25 that I had promised him, which meant he must have made a profit, as he reported.

Aimé worked for two hours after dark every night, selling gas for people without electricity to use in lanterns. He stood on corners in a crowded slum that was 20 minutes’ walk from his house. He had some regular customers, and he earned $3 a week. When he came home, he fought with his parents about money. They told him the oldest child had a responsibility to feed his younger siblings. During the day, when Aimé was out of the house, his father would sometimes take the gas can and sell the gas himself, keeping the money.

This growing conflict led me to realize that Aimé’s family status was like his center of gravity. He could not but level out with them, regardless of where I tried to move him on the scale of fortune. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the social contract—one that would permit Aimé to access education for free, get a job in a deli, or entrust money to a mentor without fear of embezzlement—evidently doesn’t exist. But the family contract is alive and well. It only followed to ask myself whether I was obliged to try to improve the quality of life for Aimé’s four siblings and two parents if I wanted to improve his. This was beyond my means.

It was summer, and Aimé roamed the streets all day like a flâneur, speaking with people, watching, listening, and memorizing everything he heard and saw. I told him to visit Goma’s only cultural center, Yole!Africa, to take a painting or break-dancing class. When he didn’t go, I took him there.

But Aimé wasn’t interested. He wanted money to buy a motorcycle. He wanted to read, and he had to find material for free or borrow from people, because there were no libraries. At several of our meetings, he brought along a French-language copy of Amnesty International’s 1994 annual report, hundreds of pages of reporting on human rights violations, broken down by country. DRC was called Zaire back then. He asked me to buy him a booklet called “Young People Interview Each Other,” a self-help guide that was made up of hypothetical conversations about how handle puberty and grow up. (It was a very sweet and practical publication.) Most important to him, he plodded away at his French-language Bible.

Aimé’s family often went without dinner, sometimes for as long as three days. During this period of hunger, Aimé considered moving out of the house. He had started to believe his parents were good for nothing. So when a woman who was a regular customer offered him a bed at her house, Aimé decided to try running away. In the middle of the night, the woman came to the bed Aimé was sharing with one of her children and tried to fondle him. He ran out of her house and refused to sell gasoline anywhere near the place where he had met her, thus losing regular customers. I told Issa, and he promised to have the woman arrested if she harassed Aimé again. She didn’t. Aimé still talked to Issa, but he didn’t completely trust him. I saw this as fairly shrewd on Aimé’s part—using different people for different needs.

I was flabbergasted that Aimé’s parents wouldn’t honor his mission to save for school, instead trying to coerce him into giving them money. “Did you tell them that by getting an education, you will be able to get a job and make money to help them?” I asked him. “You will be able to give them much more as an educated adult than you can as a teenage gasoline vendor!” Aimé just looked at me like there was so much I didn’t understand. “I’m the eldest child,” he said. Now that I look back, I realize that I didn’t understand what it feels like to go hungry for three days and what that feeling may lead people to do.

If he moved out of his parents’ house, he would be like an orphan. He would be homeless, sometimes staying at his aunt’s home and other times at friends’ houses. This would expose him to more time on the street—and to the truly unfortunate children who live there, including those who have been kicked out of the house after their parents accused them of sorcery. These children sometimes harassed us as we took our walks. Aimé feared them. “Watch out for that girl,” he once said of an older teenager who often approached me, asking for cookies. Once she had grabbed me with strong arms and shook me, screaming violently in my face. “She’s a sorcerer,” Aimé said. The girl heard him.

“YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS,” she hissed, “I’m a SORCERER! HA HA HA HA.”

Aimé looked absolutely terrified.

“How can they be sorcerers?” I said. “They’re just children. And magic is a myth.”

At my job, I had read case studies of children accused of sorcery. Some had developmental problems, which their parents or religious leaders interpreted as demonic possession. Others behaved badly or were the illegitimate children of philandering fathers. Calling them sorcerers was a way to scapegoat them for the problems they might have caused, intentionally or not. One boy was dipped in boiling water by a deacon in an exorcism, which killed him. Another was beaten to death by neighborhood kids.

To Aimé, and to most Congolese, magic was very real. Sometimes Aimé would take out an unmarked bottle and drink a thick green liquid from it. “I’m sick,” he would say. “I have malaria.” I told him that traditional medicine doesn’t work. “No,” he said. “Western medicine doesn’t work.”

Aimé’s other option was to live in an orphanage. I took him to Don Bosco, a highly respected Catholic orphanage and school. We had an interview with one of the alumni who worked in reception. If Aimé qualified as vulnerable enough, he could go to school and live in a house with orphans who were learning to support themselves. Some would be former child soldiers or children of destitute parents. After thinking it over, Aimé said he wouldn’t live with child soldiers or orphans. The former were “savage,” he said, and they picked fights all the time. And he wasn’t an orphan.

So Aimé stayed with his parents. This decision was validated by an ancient Italian nun who ran an aid program for the children of parents with AIDS. Aimé thought the nun’s charity might pay for his schooling. We visited her modest compound and explained Aimé’s situation. We asked if she might be able to pay his school fees, considering his problems with his parents.

The nun yelled at Aimé in Swahili. Then she explained to me that he was lucky to have two living parents who didn’t have AIDS. She said that he should be sympathetic to their plight rather than righteous about his gasoline profits and selfishly obsessed with his education.

I told her I didn’t think it was selfish for him to want an education. Why should kids with sick parents get money for school but not kids with impoverished, unemployed parents? She ignored me, saying it would be a terrible idea for him to run away, that children without parents have no rights in Congolese society, and that he would become more destitute than he could ever imagine.

Aimé wasn’t sad when we left; he looked steely. I had never seen this expression before. “It doesn’t matter what she said,” he told me. “Her staff is corrupt. They pay the school fees for all kinds of kids, not just AIDS orphans. I will figure out a way to lie to them and get my school fees paid.”

But the school term was fast approaching, and Aimé didn’t have time for deceit, even if I had approved his plan. His parents had steadily increased the acrimony over his gasoline profits, demanding that he give them money, and he had.

I couldn’t blame him, and I couldn’t forsake him.

So I gave Aimé money for tuition and a school uniform and new shoes and notebooks and folders. I thought about how easy it had been for me: Go with Mommy to McWhorter’s on Santa Cruz Avenue and spend $175 on all the stuff the school put on a list. Aimé also wanted a backpack, which he called a “bag,” one of his efforts to speak English with me. I told him to buy one of the 20-cent hand-woven plastic bags like the one I sometimes used. We were in my front yard during this discussion, and my gatekeeper was standing nearby when I brought down my plastic sac to show it to Aimé. Aimé’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, and the gatekeeper burst out laughing. “You expect me to use that as a book bag?” said Aimé. “Why not?” I asked. “They’ll laugh at him,” said the gatekeeper. “That’s for women to take to the market,” said Aimé.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I thought, annoyed. But I gave him $5 more. After all, didn’t he deserve to go to school without being laughed at? In the end, Aimé chose a pink backpack, with fake fur attached. He had no idea it wasn’t cool, because he had never bought a backpack before.

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