Read Online Endangered by Eliot Schrefer - Free Book Online Page B

organization. The governments of the United States of America and Belgium have already announced their intent to evacuate all citizens and France is expected to follow; specific directions will follow on this station. Again, this has been a broadcast of the United Nations command center in Kinshasa. This message will repeat until further information becomes available.”
    Patrice turned the volume down.
    â€œWhat do we do?” asked one of the gardeners.
    â€œWe stay put,” Patrice said. “You heard them. This will go like it has gone before. We will hope no one tries to enter our homes. And the roads are where you die.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about? Everywhere is where you die,” Mama Evangeline said.
    â€œWe’ll stay here for now. No one is going to attack the sanctuary,” Patrice said.
    â€œMaybe not for a few days. But once there is no government and ten million starving people in Kinshasa? The first thing that happened in ’94 was they tried to eat the zoo animals. We might as well be sitting on a herd of cattle here. Not to mention the UScurrency they’ll figure we have in our safes from our foreign donors.”
    â€œIt’s not going to come to that,” Patrice said. “Not this time.”
    But he didn’t give a reason why, and despair, already heavy in the room, grew crushing. It was something about the way Patrice said “this time”; assassinations and coups were baggage the Democratic Republic of Congo had been lugging on its own for a long time. Why should anyone expect magic intervention now?
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    Since we couldn’t risk the road, everyone stayed overnight in the sanctuary. The mamas curled up in the nursery with the young bonobos, the gardeners pulled blankets and pillows into the shed, I shared my little room with Emile the chef, and Patrice and Clément encamped in my mom’s office. The rebels must have taken down the Internet and cell networks, as we could establish no communication with the outside beyond what we heard on the shortwave radio. Throughout the night, I groggily trudged into the office, nodded to Patrice and Clément, and made herbal tea. No one talked, but we’d sit together and listen to the repeat of that same broadcast. Then I’d wander around some more, hoping to get tired. Otto seemed to love the sleepless chaos and chirped happily at the restless people we passed in the hall.
    The first light of dawn found Otto and me sitting on the front step, staring into the jungle. I couldn’t see anything, but I listened for footsteps. I listened for those four men I’d seen the day before. I listened for the sound of a vehicle approaching. I listened for gunfire from the nearby village. I listened for the first sign that death was on its way.
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    Around noon, Patrice yelled out that the UN broadcast had changed. We all piled into my mom’s office.
    It started with reports of increased fighting in the north and east, on the borders of Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi. And in Kinshasa. The president was dead, and people said it was Hutus, formerly from Rwanda, who had killed him, but it was feared that his intended replacement had also died in the fighting. No one from the TLA had stepped forward to take control, and the capital was falling apart. Banks and stores were looted. Corpses clogged the streets, mainly those of loyalists to the dead president and anyone who looked like a Tutsi, the ethnic group historically opposed to the Hutus. Most of the staff came from Tutsi families, so the atmosphere in the sanctuary was pretty grim. The mamas worried about their children holed up with their husbands back in the capital. The consensus in our group was that people who stayed inside weren’t being killed, but the radio had said nothing about that, and we’d agreed on it only because it made us feel better.
    The UN warned us that many of the slayings were being conducted with “white