An Impossible Choice

Sasha Chanoff — An Impossible Choice

I’m looking out a hotel suite window in the capital of Congo in the middle of Africa. There are bullet marks on the buildings out there, because war is raging. But it’s nighttime and quiet. There’s a nasty cockroach infestation in the kitchen and a putrid smell in the air. I’ve turned the TV volume up loudly, because the Congolese government has bugged our room. 

turn and face Sheikha. She is a woman from Kenya with the brown skin of the coastal people, and thick black hair, and intense dark eyes. Tears are welling in her eyes and she’s pleading with me, ​“Sasha, we have to take these people along with the rest. If we don’t, they’ll die here and their blood will be on our hands. Please, you have to trust me.” I’m facing a terrible decision and I’m afraid no matter what I do, people are going to be killed.

A month earlier in Kenya, my boss, David, at the International Organization for Migration where we worked, called me into his office. He handed me a list with 112 names on it and told me he was sending me into the Congo on a rescue mission. The job was to evacuate 112 massacre survivors. He warned me really explicitly that under no circumstances could I include anybody else on that list. If I did, we would fail to get anyone out and they would all die. David knew because he’d spent the past six months in the Congo evacuating people.

I’d met one teenage girl that he pulled out. She had these nervous eyes, and she told me that the killing started when the President of Congo went on TV and said that all people of the Tutsi tribe are the enemy and need to be hunted down and exterminated. This was an extension of the Rwandan genocide in ways. This teenage girl went into hiding that day, but had to eventually come out to look for food. As she was sneaking around town, she saw a mob chase down and catch another woman. They put a tire over her body, pinning her arms to her side, and doused her in gasoline and set her on fire.

They were killing people in terrible ways, because Tutsis were seen as the scapegoats for the Congo’s problems. This teenage girl had lost her own parents, but she had four brothers who were still alive and they were on the list that David handed me. David also warned me about Sheikha. She’d been on every previous mission with him, but he told me that I couldn’t trust her, that she always tried to include additional people and I had to stop her from doing that. 

Sheikha and I flew into the Congo, and we rented a car and a driver and went to the safe compound where the 112 were gathered. These big black gates swung open as our car drove into this two-acre compound with 10-foot walls and jagged shards of glass topping the walls. There were guards with AK47s slung at their sides, dangling around. A one-storey building was in the middle, and a large tent off to the side, and latrines on another side. Somebody saw Sheikha, and all of a sudden there was a mob around our car and they were pushing it up and down and chanting her name. I remember David telling me, ​“People are going to go crazy with relief when they see you, because they think they’re going to die there. When they see you, they’ll know there’s another flight.”

But it felt really scary and out of control for me, because there were way more people than the 112 on our list. We set a table up on the top of a little hill, and the crowd gathered below, and I called people up one at a time. I took their name and their birth date and their photo and I told them we’d be flying them out in a few days’ time. I had to give this information to the Congolese immigration officials. I got really excited when I saw the four brothers of that teenage girl come up. 

When we were done and trying to leave, a guy who was working in the compound said, ​“Before you leave, you have to go into that tent over there and look at the people who just came in.” And I thought, ​“I don’t want to see anybody else. We can’t take them, so why even look.” But my feet were walking towards the tent as I was thinking that, and I stepped inside, and it was like time stopped. 

It was really hot in that tent. I remember the sweat trickling down the small of my back. But what struck me was how completely quiet it was, which seemed impossible because there were 32 widows and orphans standing and sitting in that tent. The guy who brought us in leaned into me and said, ​“They were in a prison camp for 16 months where most of their family members were executed. We don’t know how they survived.”

They all looked traumatized and emaciated, and they had these hollow stares like there was nothing behind their eyes. Sheikha leaned down to a little girl holding a doll and said, ​“Let me see your doll.” All of a sudden, the doll’s eyes popped open and its tongue lolled out of its mouth, and we realized it was an infant child that looked more dead than alive. I went over to a 13-year-old boy and said, ​“What’s your name?” And another, smaller boy grabbed his hand and said, ​“He doesn’t talk anymore. I talk for him.” That 13-year-old had been brutalized so badly, he just stopped speaking.

Sheikha and I left. And that night in the hotel room, she was holding the list of widows and orphans and begging me to take them. I held the list of 112 and I said, ​“We can’t.” But I wondered, ​“Can I live with myself if we leave these widows and orphans here and they’re killed?” No, I didn’t think so. ​“But could I live with myself if we tried to take them and we failed to get everybody out and they all died?” No.

And then I thought about who Sheikha was. She had this clear moral orientation. She did what was right in her heart and wasn’t concerned about personal gain or recognition. And then, I wondered, ​“Who am I?” My great grandmother had come to the US as a refugee fleeing anti-Semitism in Russia. She was a widow who raised four orphans or four children on her own. I’d been working with refugees since graduating from college six years earlier, but nothing had prepared me for this. 

And then, Sheikha said words that changed me. ​“Sasha, we’re humanitarians. We’re here on the ground now. If we don’t do this, these people will be forgotten and they’ll die here. This is up to us. It’s our decision.” And in that moment, I trusted her. So, I called David. He got really angry when we told him what we wanted to do. He said, ​“Listen, I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen. You have to tell the Congolese immigration authorities and then they’re going to include their own people on your list. And then, at the last minute, maybe even on the plane, they’ll pull your people off and you won’t get anybody out. You can’t do this.” And I said, ​“David, I get it, but we have to try.” And he was quiet. And then I heard him say, ​“Okay, then here’s what you have to do. This is a US rescue mission, so get the US Ambassador’s approval. Try it.”

We got the US Ambassador’s approval. And then, on the last night, as the sun was setting, we went to see the head of Congolese immigration, a stocky man with beady eyes who already told us how much he hated Tutsis. When we told him we were taking the widows and orphans, he said that he had seven additional people we had to take. And we said, ​“That’s fine.” And then, he pulled out this whole new list and said he also wanted to take all these other people. And we said, ​“We can’t.” We argued with him, and we even tried to bribe him. But as we were leaving, all he said was, ​“I’m in charge here. I say who leaves and who stays. We’ll just see what happens tomorrow.” Those words terrified me.

Back in the hotel, we realized we had another big problem. We had too many people for our flight. But then, we thought that the children all looked so emaciated that we could change the birth dates and make all the four and three-year-olds less than two, and in that way we’d free up enough seats. So, I spent the night doing that. And at 03:00 AM, as I tried to close my eyes, I couldn’t sleep. I was so wired with exhaustion and fear and the uncertainty of it all. I thought, ​“Have we just condemned everyone to death with this decision?”

A few hours later, I went and got four buses, and I had four armed guards per bus. I went to the safe compound, and we started loading everybody on. And the people who weren’t coming started yelling. One man grabbed me and he pulled my face close to his and he said, ​“Sasha, you have to take me with you. Look at my face. I’m a Tutsi. I’ll be killed here.” But we couldn’t take him or so many others, and their cries faded into the distance as our buses pulled out. And now, my heart jumped in my throat because this was the most dangerous part of the entire mission. 

The Congolese government had told us that they would let us do this, but unofficially, they didn’t want us to succeed. I worried that maybe a mob would attack our bus or maybe gunmen would start shooting from around a corner. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their lives already, and no one would notice a few more. An hour later, we finally pulled into the airport and we stopped 50 feet away from the plane, and I thought, ​“There’s the plane. Let’s just get everybody on that plane.” Congolese immigration police hustled me and Sheikha off the buses, and then they started checking people, using the documentation we had given. 

As the widows and orphans came down, they stopped them. I had this terrible thought, ​“Oh my God, these people are witnesses to terrible atrocities. And the Congolese immigration police aren’t going to let them leave, because they don’t want them talking about what they’ve seen.” I thought, ​“Everything that David said is coming true right now.” And I felt so helpless. I looked around for Sheikha. She was talking to the head of Congolese immigration and waving her arms. And the seconds ticked by, and then they let them off the bus, and they boarded the plane. We all boarded the plane. And I stepped on last. 

The cabin had turned into a furnace, because the plane had been sitting on the tarmac for a couple of hours. It was so packed with people, there were so many children sitting on laps of adults. The door shut behind me, and I felt the plane engines rumble to life, and cool air came into the cabin, and we started down the runway, and we lifted off the ground. I’d imagined that in that moment people would erupt into cheers of joy, because they were finally safe. But when I looked, everyone was crying for the people we had left behind. It was at once the most joyous and heartbreaking moment. And in that moment, I thought about Sheikha pleading with me in the hotel, and I was so thankful.

We couldn’t get everyone out, but we got those on our list out, and those widows and orphans, and they were the worst off. I looked at the tiny infant, and there was a 13-year-old boy, and there were the four brothers who were going to be reuniting with their teenage sister soon. As their eyes met mine, I felt this incredible sense of connection and shared humanity sink into the deepest core of who I am. And that feeling has motivated and inspired me ever since.