D.R.Congo continues to be the most conflicted and violent country in the war, confirming its position as a war-zone since 1991. In March 2024, the UN reported that the number of internally displaced people in DRC had reached 7.2 million which was one of the largest in the world (Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo | Global Conflict Tracker, n.d.). After living in conflict as a visitor in Canada with my family and separation from my father in 1997, my mother and I returned to Kinshasa, D.R. Congo through the United Nations as an effort to rebuild the country in 1998. The period was quiet and full of despair with no school and grocery stores, vegetables vendors were also scarce and my family ate from canned food and drank unexpired military milk. The dream to reestablish the old world of Zaire with a hustling economy was cold due to on-going rebel militia driving through the Boulevard, shooting everyone in sight with AK-47s and murdering living citizens with machetes. The building I lived in was a cemetery with no coffins. I remember a morning when I ran down stairs while my mom was not there and opened a door. The apartment was covered in human blood and bodies lay hanging of a child and a woman on the ceiling, completely covered in blood with no eyes. As a six-year-old, I ran out trembling, lost in trauma and a young staff member of the building saw me shaking and carried me to our apartment.
With my memory being scattered from my escape of a mass genocide in 1998, my mother and I once again left the ruins of our home overnight, running to N’Djili Airport while rebel militia drove behind us with machetes. We drove up to a Jammat Khanne, a center for Ismaili Muslims, on the Boulevard of Gombe as a requirement for UN military family of Southeast descent. I guarded my mom and my two suitcases but my heart knew that the world had ended in Kinshasa. With only two hundred U.S. dollars as a bus ticket money from New York City to my grandmother’s studio apartment for low-income senior citizens in Scarborough, I wondered if we would ever see what money was again. My mother scavenged to quickly secure a spot for her and me on the bus to the airport which could mean our death also with sixty-seven other women and children passengers all squeezed into a fifteen seater bus. The plan was to drive to the airport in complete darkness so that none of us would the mutilated bodies that lay on the road ahead of us. As we drove to the airport, I could hear the mourning of women and sobbing of children in complete numbness and silence. Driving over bodies, required prayer and connection to God and the divine, requests to survive while a militia screamed, “Where are you going? We will catch you.” When we reached N’Djili Airport, the staff held candles to help the travelers move inside the airport. Physical tickets were prepared for all those who could afford to fly to South Africa from Kinshasa. The question was not affordability at this point. It was whether the plane could hold that many passengers. Ticket agents began saying that there was no plane that could take over two hundred female and children passengers. Doors got locked and I began begging the ticket agent to let as many passengers and my mom and me to the plane on my knees. The militia began banging on the doors and everyone ran to exit with their hand written tickets while holding candles with no suitcases. I grabbed on to my mom’s hand with one carry-on and I said we have to run as fast as we can and not look back. This was going to be the last flight out of Kinshasa before a mass genocide of four million people. People began screaming as the doors behind us shut and the militia began whipping passengers with machetes, covering the glass with human blood.
The plane took off with trauma, struggle and shock as the flight attendant held on the lock of the door before militia could open it. This was going to be the most famous evacuation of refugees out of the sickest, most violent genocide in the world. By the time we reached Johannesburg, most passengers had no money for the next trip and had to buy calling cards to contact family members abroad. Children and women sat on the floor sleeping and I laid down for a period of two weeks with no food and water due to no money. About 167 female and children passengers were picked up after two weeks because they were dead at the airport. With a high-pitched fever, I lay trembling on the floor, waiting for an angel to save my mom and me from severe dehydration and mental health illness. My mom came running to me with a flight attendant after she found me nearly dead next to other children on the floor, holding on to my teddy bear. The flight attendant picked me up and put water in my mouth for twenty minutes. My mother said, “Sonu, wake up. Wake up. We can go see your grandmother. They’re saving us. We got money finally for a ticket. Your prayers are working. Sonu, don’t die. Mommy loves you.” The American flight attendant picked me up and said, “Mrs. Aurora we have to go to the plane right now. We have to pray that she makes it to New York City.” On the plane, the same flight attendant ran with aspirin for the fever and bread because my breathing became slow. “Mrs. Aurora, we have to try with water. She can’t eat now. You are trembling Mrs. Aurora, but we have to try. Sonu might be able to make it with some water and a bit of bread if she can chew. Whatever happens, don’t let her fall asleep. She will die.” During the sixteen-hour flight, I sipped on Sprite and could barely stay awake. My mother cut small pieces of bread and put it in my mouth as I struggled to chew. My head remained in a state of coma but my physical health recovered; yet, I couldn’t walk properly anymore. As we reached JFK airport, my mother notified that she had to take me to the Canadian Embassy in New York City for my visa and that we had no money for the hotel. In front of Rockefeller Center, I stared at a hot dog stand hungry and I asked my mom if she could buy us hot dogs with water. She looked at me sad and said, “Sonu we have no money for the visa and bus if we get food.” Frustrated, I looked around and saw a man in a suit buying his hot dog. I went up to him and said, “Monsieur, j’ai faim. J’ai froid. Je suis malade. No money” with my hand out for loose change. He looked at me and said “Where is your mom?” I pointed to her and he asked her, “Would you like a hot dog?” He bought us four hot dogs and three bottles of water. He went up to my mom and asked her what happened. She told him that we ran from a genocide and that I was sick.
He asked her, “What is your daughter’s name?”
She said, “Her name is Sonu, but she is very sick.”
He said, “Sonu doesn’t speak English.”
She said, “No Sonu speaks only French. One day, she will speak nice English like you.”
The narration is just a snippet of my life as I found my purpose when I was seven years old that I wanted to be a psychologist for children who were troubled, broken and needed saving. In San Francisco, at my internship site, the Liberation Institute, I counseled individuals who refugees, immigrants, rape and trauma survivors and many with post-traumatic stress disorder. I began seeing my purpose unfolding in front of me every single day. I was also exposed to individuals who were fighting drug addiction due to childhood trauma. This was the first time I started meeting patients from third-generation immigrants who were completely traumatized and exposed to psychosis and schizophrenia. I could not understand what schizophrenia was until I began studying how it was connected to severe PTSD. Most of my education focused on veterans who had developed hallucinations during the war but very little was focused on PTSD survivors of different aspects such as war, rape and childhood trauma. My research became paved on how could we alleviate the stress of trauma through psychosocial methods. At the time, I was focused on learning about mindfulness and meditation because it was effective on my patients who had severe trauma. I had not teamed up with those who were in psychiatry due to my cultural stigma on medication. Through mass amount of psychoeducation, I began finding refuge in mindfulness cognitive behavioral therapy as my primary method in alleviating PTSD stressors during sessions. As I worked hard combining psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapy, I wondered how we could ease the stress of the brain during panic attacks and flashbacks. I wanted to create more mental awareness that mental health therapy could heal severe trauma once the potential patient overcame his or her stigma. During my research, I saw several amount of stigma based on culture and history on psychiatry and insane asylums, but in California, individuals remained opened but could not find a mental health clinician who was focused on the treatment of severe PTSD which could include rape and violence. I saw this as my calling and continued my research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In Kinshasa, I began working with doctors who focused on combining psychiatry and psychology to alleviate psychosocial traumatic symptoms from the mass genocide in East D.R.Congo. This was the first time that I was exposed to antidepressant and antipsychotics to treat schizophrenia and psychosis. I began believing that it was important to have a good relationship with psychiatry especially when working in research. I became interested in clinical psychology beyond counseling and I wanted to learn more about traditional research. I joined a lab by UCLA at the Institute National Research Biomedical in Kinshasa where we focused on research on infectious diseases and the treatment of the Ebola virus. During the process, I learned about interviewing, preparation of medical vaccinations, analysis of research, organization of laboratory data and interpreting epidemiological research. As a traditional research laboratory, this gave me a solid outlook on the world of research for about six years and prepared me to have more confidence to conduct research in clinical psychology. I continued my study on counseling by working at a non-profit, community IB school Institut Aurora as a school counselor and in January 2024, I had the opportunity to take up clinical psychology volunteer work with Doctors without Borders as a mental health clinician. During the process, I met violence survivors from the on-going genocide in D.R.Congo and provided psychosocial interventions. I teamed up with the psychiatry team to provide relief to violence survivors.
