“You act like we had a choice. We didn’t. We had to save ourselves,” he said as he navigated the potholes in the road. After a long pause, he added, “The war was good and bad for us.” Measuring his words carefully, he said, “But so many of us died. If you go to the high plateau, you won’t see a cemetery. But every family there has lost at least one child, if not more, to the war. Our dead are buried across the Congo. We have nowhere to go and mourn for them.”13 He estimated that up to a quarter of all youths joined the war. Very few of them had returned to the high plateau.
