Aimé would stand in front of my house every day waiting for me to leave. I shared the house with my co-workers and our boss. They hailed from the United States, Netherlands, Ivory Coast, Kenya, France, Italy, and Lebanon. The house had a deck overlooking Lake Kivu, where we could swim. We had guards, like all expats in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and tall walls topped by coils of barbed wire. I didn’t like that Aimé would stand on the street day after day, looking forlorn in tattered clothes and a beanie. It made me embarrassed for him.
As far as I knew, my co-workers didn’t talk to him when he stood in front of our gate, and they didn’t like his being there because he acted like a stalker. One day, a group of rowdy boys swam up to our deck and asked my co-workers for me by name. One woman, a friend, asked me to tell Aimé to back off. He was not one of the swimmers, but he had probably told them my name. My friend felt uneasy with the boys coming so close to the deck, which had no barbed wire separating it from the lake. She had recently been attacked by Congolese soldiers in an incident so violent that I hadn’t asked the details for fear of revisiting a trauma. My friend said she wanted privacy. Later, a barbed wire fence was installed between our deck and the lake.
Aimé knew most of my colleagues’ names, and he listened carefully to our guards as they signaled to each other on walkie-talkies about who was approaching and who was leaving the house. Aimé would ask me about my colleagues and make observations about them. “There are two beautiful mulattos,” he said once. “One of them thinks she needs to exercise.” And, “Why is the Chinese one always angry?” I wouldn’t talk to him about my co-workers, to protect their privacy, except when harmless details gave me the opportunity to teach him something: “She’s not Chinese,” I said. “She’s American. In the United States, people come from all different countries, and they mix together.” To this, his mouth hung open in shock. “You should write a play,” I told him, “from the perspective of a street child who observes his foreign neighbors. It could be brilliant.”
I gave Aimé advice, and I tried to teach him something about the world beyond Goma and to encourage his intellectual development. But I still hadn’t given him any money. Every day he asked for school tuition and told me how he was chased out of school on a regular basis because he owed the registrar money. I didn’t really believe this kid who spent so much time on the street, who would sometimes show up in brand-new clothes that his other “friends” bought for him.
Instead, we took long walks, and I talked about whatever I was reading about or doing. I explained the history of Liberia, told him about other Congolese cities I had visited for work, corrected his French grammar, or asked about his classes. I had the U.S. mentoring program Big Brothers Big Sisters in mind.
It was a long time before anyone explicitly told me that they didn’t like what I was doing with Aimé. I knew that I was breaking an aid-worker code, one that says it’s unprofessional for an individual aid worker to single out an individual “beneficiary” and help them with their own money.
No one would actually talk about this code, just as they didn’t talk about the code against discussing why you left home and came to work in a warzone. In fact, people didn’t talk about a lot of things, and I sometimes think that’s why we had become expatriates—to avoid talking about our lives and to avoid our lives.
Still, I had heard a number of vague reasons why I shouldn’t help Aimé. One was that if you help an individual, they will become dependent on your help, and when you stop helping them, which is inevitable, they will be crushed. Aid agencies do that all the time, though. They help a group of people here one day and then stop another day. Besides, almost everyone broke the code.
I would be out to dinner with an expat and their phone would ring over and over. I would see them looking stressed as they put the phone back in their bag without answering. On the fifth call, they might finally answer and then walk away to conduct tense discussions in private. (“But I just gave you money for the kids’ tuition. What did you do with it?”) Once, an expat returned to the table after such a conversation and said, with disgusted, mock drama, “It’s just another person who wants me to save his life.”
I met aid workers in Congo who gave more than $100 a month to their personal beneficiaries—for doctor’s fees, school fees, or food. But no one had any idea if their money was going to those things, and we sensed that scams were under way. One Sunday, for example, Aimé showed up at my house dressed in his school uniform. He told me he had just been to a special weekend meeting with the school principal, who told the students that tuition would be doubled.
One day, Aimé gave me a card to mark my departure on a work trip. I traveled a lot, interviewing teenage mothers learning about family planning, children getting vaccinated, villagers building roads, students starting AIDS prevention clubs, and towns forming democratic councils. It was a Hallmark-type going-away card, with tulips and “Bon Voyage” on the cover. “You are someone very dear,” it said in French inside. “With affection, I wish you a good voyage and agreeable times in the future.”
I had finally given Aimé $20 for his school tuition. He enclosed a receipt from the school—it asked his parents to pay another $8 to catch up on debts. He also enclosed a little plastic bag containing a gold-colored necklace and a heart-shaped pendant with an arrow through it.
“This boy needs a big brother, not a big sister,” I thought. “And I know the perfect person.”
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