This lost corner of Tanzania was the closest thing to an inferno that Nicole had ever experienced. She had arrived at the Benaco refugee camp from Belgium the week before on her mission as a nurse with the International Rescue Committee, her baggage brimming with naïveté, faith and a desire to change the world, Florence-Nightingale-style. Hiding behind her mask of professionalism and her latex gloves, her sterile first encounters with the inhabitants of the overrun camp consisted of brief triage and first aid. She had been prepared for this–intellectually, in any case. She had read the documents dryly accounting for the 800,000 Tutsi men, women and children who had been brutally murdered in Rwanda over the course of one hundred spring days in 1994. Within four months, a quarter of the country’s pre-war population had either died or fled the country. Half a million of them swarmed to this hive, the world’s largest refugee camp, just over the Tanzanian border.

At around midnight on the tenth day of Nicole’s assignment, when the rays of the sun had stopped assailing her limbs like lead weights, her attention was drawn to a corner of the makeshift infirmary where she worked. A little boy, no older than seven, sat staring into space, his eyes glazed over. She approached him as she would a wild animal, crouching with a hand extended. She noticed a gash in his leg and lured him out with some dried apricots left from her rations.

“What’s your name?” she asked in French.

“Issiaka.”

“Can I take a look at your leg?”

He nodded slowly, chewing the apricots deliberately, savoring every bite.
She led him by the hand to a place where the lamplight was brighter. The wound, crimson flesh between ebony skin, was wide and gaping, like a mouth screaming for mercy. She used a local anaesthetic, even though she had been instructed to save it for only the worst cases. Issiaka relaxed a little while she worked on his leg.

“Are you alone, Issiaka?”

He didn’t answer.

“You know, I haven’t been here very long. Maybe you could show me around?”
More silence. It was too late to try to make conversation.

She was nearly done closing the wound when his voice startled her.

“I’m afraid of the dark. It was night-time and I had to go to the toilet. The locusts started buzzing. That’s what woke me. They never sing at night. I was scared, but I had to go really bad.” He stared at the ground and hesitated. “Then, I heard noises, like a hundred rhinos, getting closer and closer. Have you ever seen a rhino?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I could feel the walls tremble from the rhinos’ heavy boots stomping the ground.” Painful silence alternated with his interjections. “Then, a lion came into the house. Papa fought him off with his bare hands, but the lion was too strong for him. He was brave, Papa…until the lion stabbed him with his sharp claws. Have you ever seen a lion?”

“No, I haven’t.” She continued to treat him slowly, her white hands ghostly against his dark skin. She kept her eyes low, unchallenging, so that he would feel comfortable enough to go on. After a moment, he did.

“A huge tiger killed my mother. She ran holding my little brother in her arms, screaming, trying to escape. She didn’t know that the animals were everywhere. The tiger knocked her down and crushed her. She cried and begged, but the tiger picked up my baby brother in his mouth. His teeth were very sharp. Have you ever seen a tiger?”

“No, Issiaka.” She fought to keep her voice steady as the nerves amassed to form a paralysing lump in her throat.

“You know, my sister Odette was hiding under the bed, but a gigantic snake found her. He took her away. He hissed and twisted around her, and carried her off. Odette loves animals, and they love her back. She’s always been good with them. She’s the one who takes care of the cows every day. They won’t give milk to anyone else but her…

“My brother, Hawas, was in the hallway. Well, his head was there, but I didn’t see the rest of him. Maybe the hyena took him. His eyes were looking at me under the door. I’m sure he saw me, but he didn’t say anything.

“I saw them all, but the animals didn’t see me. They forgot to look in the toilet. They roared terrible roars, but I was very quiet. They were furious and ferocious; I don’t know why. Maybe they were hungry. They fought everybody until there was no one left. But they didn’t see me. Sometimes I still hear their roars behind the drums. I can smell them, here in this camp.”

Nicole imagined the scene: Issiaka’s family silent and slumbering in the refuge of their home, fully expecting morning to arrive just like every other day of their existence, not suspecting that they were being stalked like prey. Little Issiaka rushed to answer the call of nature in a windowless space just before bestial chaos let loose in their midst. In a fraction of a second, strident and terrible screams escaped from the profound depths of the villagers’ bodies and pierced the air before dissipating in the ephemeral night mist, disembodied. The little village returned to corpse-filled silence, save a petrified seven-year-old child. Little Issiaka peered out through the rusty keyhole, hands clasping his mouth.

Nicole wiped the tears from her face, though she could never efface from her soul the fault line of this silent earthquake. She sought some way to exorcise these demons from Issiaka’s past. She fished in her backpack and pulled out a notebook and pencil and pushed it toward him.

“Draw them for me, Issiaka. Draw the animals.”

Issiaka took the pencil from her and furiously darkened the page with shadows. Inside the keyhole shape were savage fights between wild creatures: animals with human feet and human hands, rhinos with boots, lions with blades for claws… He could not accept that humans like him were capable of such monstrous slaughter, because all hope of trust would be annihilated. He drew in silence, in need. He didn’t speak of the weeks where he lived with hunger pangs in the bush under the protection of the wide fronds of a banana tree. Or how he had walked for miles to get to this place. Or how he had sustained the wound on his leg.

When he was done drawing, he asked to rest. Nicole put him in her cot. “Good night, Nkundabana,” he said.

“I don’t know this word. What does it mean?”

“It means a dear person who cares for children.”

Nicole caressed his hair lovingly until he closed his eyes; she felt her maternal instinct grow in the place of the lump in her throat. Issiaka slept for the first time since the tragedy without fear, taking his first steps towards healing, tracking and hunting the beasts from his past that continued to inhabit his mind.