Something to remind me how lucky I am

Reason I arrived in Canada: To study
Reason Michel arrived in Canada: To escape from war

Child soldier forced to kill best friend at age 5

Former Congo resident, now a motivational speaker, to recount his experiences in Vancouver

Five-year-old Michel was under strict instructions from his father to be home at 6 p.m.

But after school that day he fell into a soccer game with some friends, and when it was time to head home, the self-described troublemaker decided to play a little longer. It was a decision that would set the course for the rest of his life.

Army trucks pulled up to the soccer pitch of the school, in the town of Beni in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Soldiers jumped out and shouted at the kids to stand up. They shot one to scare the rest into submission.

"At first I thought maybe that this was a joke," said Michel Chikwanine, now 23, who will be in Vancouver on Thursday to speak at We Day.

Undeterred, and thinking the boy who had been shot was playing dead, which children were taught to do when there were bullets flying around, Chikwanine approached one of the soldiers, who was about 5-foot-7 and carrying an AK-47, yelling that his father would find the soldiers and beat him up unless they let him go. The soldier only laughed.

The soldiers forced the children into trucks, drove them for several hours along a bumpy road and then ordered them out.

"I remember the first step that I took out of the truck. I heard crunches underneath my feet and as I looked on the ground there were skeletons, and they were scattered all over the ground and there were hundreds of them," Chikwanine recalled.

The children were then told that they were going to be initiated into an army to free the Congo. One of the soldiers grabbed Chikwanine and started cutting his wrist. As he was screaming in pain, the soldier rubbed a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder into the wound, which was very painful, he recalled.

He was then blindfolded and forced to stand up as a soldier placed an AK-47 in his hands. It was so heavy that he dropped it at first, but a soldier picked it up, gave it back to him, placed his finger on the trigger and ordered him to shoot.

The blast was so powerful that it left his hand shaking and he dropped the gun again. Then the soldiers took off the blindfold.

"I was looking at my arm and there was blood dripping from it," Chikwanine recalled. "I looked at my shirt - at that time I was wearing a white Superman shirt because I used to love Superman - as I was looking at the shirt there was blood dripping from it as well. So I looked in front of me and I saw Kevin, my best friend, lying dead in a pool of his own blood.

"At five years old, I was forced to kill my best friend as a way of being initiated into an army."

Two weeks later, the boys were told that they were going to raid a village for food and supplies. As they were on their way, Chikwanine saw a clearing in the trees and decided to make a run for it. He ran through the jungle for three days, spending the cold nights sleeping under trees. Finally, he saw a store he recognized, the place his father used to take him to buy ice cream.

His father was in the store when the little boy ventured in, and began yelling at his son, asking him where he'd been.

The Congo at the time was embroiled in what is sometimes referred to as the Great War of Africa, which has killed more people, mostly through disease and starvation, than any interstate conflict since the Second World War. Many rebel armies passed through Chikwanine's town, killing politicians and raping women, always at night.

Chikwanine's father was a prominent human rights activist, writing stories for local and international media to try to tell the world what was happening.

As a result of his actions, Chikwanine's father was kidnapped by a particularly thuggish group of rebels, taken to a secret prison under the airport and tortured for seven months. When town residents found him, the 6-foot-8, 250-pound man with the commanding presence was a shell of his former self, unable to even stand on his own. Realizing the danger he was in, he contacted a friend in neighbouring Uganda and arranged to go into exile in that country.

Shortly after his father left, rebel soldiers came to the house looking for his father's writings. It was a Friday afternoon, Chikwanine recalled, and he was doing math homework when he heard gunshots outside his house. His mother and two older sisters started screaming for help.

"At 10 years old I was so traumatized by what I had done as a child soldier that every time I heard gunshots I kept hearing all these people that I'd killed, all these voices," Chikwanine said. "Eventually I just closed my eyes and I remember just running under my bed in tears. I started crying and I didn't know what to do. And I remember sitting underneath my bed thinking to myself 'What would my father do?' " He remembered that his father had told him he was the man of the house now and must protect his family, so he decided to venture out. As he was about to take his first step down the stairs, he heard the click of a gun behind his head. The soldier marched him down to the kitchen, where he was forced to watch his mother and two other sisters be raped by soldiers.

His two older sisters, ashamed of having been raped, ran away. The remaining family members - Chikwanine, his mother and younger sister - left in the middle of the night to join his father in Uganda. They lived for a year in a refugee camp in the north of the country before moving to the capital city of Kampala, where an office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees is based. Chikwanine's father would wake up at 3 a.m. every morning and walk for three hours from the garage where the family lived to the UNHCR office, wait with thousands of other refugees all day in the faint hope that someone might help him.

When Chikwanine came home from school that day, he was shocked to find his normally stoic father sitting on the bed crying.

"Michel, always remember that great men and great women are not described by their money or their success, but rather by their heart and what they do for other people," Chikwanine recalled his father saying just before he died. The family later found out he had been poisoned.

His mother then took on the job of walking to the UNHCR every day, which was dangerous for a woman on her own, and officials were willing to listen to her now that her husband had been killed. They arranged for most of the family to emigrate to Canada.

Chikwanine's two older sisters, who had fled after being raped in the Congo, had made contact with the family in Kampala. But because they were older than 18 and had children of their own - the result of being raped as rebel wives after being kidnapped by soldiers - they were classified as separate families.

It was -42 C the day Chikwanine, his mother and his younger sister arrived in Ottawa in 2004. Chikwanine remembers stepping off the plane, feeling his face freeze, and turning right back around to get back on the plane. He asked his mother if they could come back when winter was over.

"I'll never forget that day for many different reasons," he said. "I think one of the things that stuck with me to this day is I remember looking up in the sky and the first thing that I noticed about Canada was that there were no bullets flying by."

Chikwanine now lives in Toronto and works as a motivational speaker for Me to We. He also helps arrange youth trips to volunteer abroad.

One of Chikwanine's older sisters eventually did make it to Canada, but only after being raped along with her daughter and submitting the police report to Citizenship and Immigration Canada to prove she was in danger.

The other sister never returned from a trip to collect her travel documents in 2006. The family assumes she is dead.



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