Aria’s Story: Traveling to Burundi to Meet a Former Girl Soldier

🌍 The moment I heard Aria’s voice—low, steady, unflinching—I knew my assumptions about ‘reintegration’ had been hollow. Sitting on a woven banana-leaf mat in a mud-brick compound outside Bujumbura, she described loading her first rifle at age 12—not with anger or trauma-performance, but with the quiet precision of someone who’d learned early that survival required both memory and silence. This is how to meet former girl soldiers in Burundi ethically: not as subjects, but as guides to a landscape where healing isn’t linear, infrastructure is fragile, and trust is earned in kilometers walked together, not interviews scheduled.

It wasn’t a tour. It wasn’t volunteer tourism. And it certainly wasn’t journalism with a deadline. I went to Burundi in late March 2023 because I’d read a single paragraph buried in a 2021 UNICEF report on DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration) programs in the Great Lakes region—one line mentioning Aria Ntakirutimana by name, cited as a peer mentor in Gitega Province 1. She’d been recruited at 11 during the final years of Burundi’s civil war, demobilized at 16, and spent the next eight years rebuilding—not just her life, but a cooperative for women ex-combatants making handwoven sisal baskets. Her name appeared again in a 2022 evaluation by the Burundian NGO Association pour la Réinsertion des Anciens Combattants (ARAC), which confirmed she still lived near the village of Nyaruziba, 45 km east of Gitega 2. That was enough. Not for certainty—but for direction.

I booked a flight to Bujumbura via Kigali (RwandAir, 1h 20m, ~$240 one-way, price verified April 2023). No ‘Burundi package’ existed. No tour operator listed ‘former combatant encounters’—nor should they have. Instead, I contacted ARAC directly through their verified email (arac@burundinet.bi), explained my intent, shared my background as a travel writer focused on post-conflict mobility, and asked if they facilitated respectful, consent-based visitor coordination. They replied in four days: yes, but only with advance notice, local accompaniment, and no photography without explicit permission. Their conditions weren’t barriers—they were the first lesson.

🗺️ The Setup: What ‘Going to Burundi’ Actually Means

Burundi remains one of the least visited countries in Africa—not because it lacks beauty (its rolling green hills, Lake Tanganyika shores, and volcanic highlands are quietly stunning), but because infrastructure lags, international flights are limited, and decades of instability left deep institutional scars. In 2023, only ~120,000 international tourists entered the country 3. Most arrived via Rwanda or Tanzania, then crossed land borders where documentation checks could take 2–3 hours depending on officer availability. I entered at the Rumonge border crossing from Tanzania—a dirt road lined with mango trees, women selling roasted plantains wrapped in banana leaves, and a single concrete booth where a young officer stamped my passport after checking my yellow fever card twice.

From Rumonge, I took a 🚌 shared minibus to Gitega—the newly designated political capital—via Ruyigi. The ride lasted seven hours. No GPS worked reliably. The driver navigated by landmarks: “past the collapsed bridge where the goats cross,” “after the school with blue doors,” “where the red soil turns black.” My backpack held two changes of clothes, malaria prophylaxis (atovaquone-proguanil, prescribed pre-trip), a solar charger, notebooks, and a small bag of sugar—ARAC had advised bringing something practical, not symbolic. “They don’t need pity,” their coordinator wrote. “They need consistency.”

Gitega felt suspended between eras: colonial-era brick buildings with peeling paint stood beside new government offices built with Chinese loans; street vendors sold SIM cards alongside bundles of dried fish; and every third shop displayed a framed photo of President Ndayishimiye. I stayed at Hotel Le Relais, a family-run guesthouse with cold water, intermittent electricity, and a courtyard shaded by flamboyant trees. Its owner, Jeanne, had taught primary school for 32 years and spoke of Aria not as a ‘case study,’ but as “the girl who brought sewing machines to Nyaruziba when no one else would.”

🎭 The Turning Point: When the Map Failed

ARAC arranged for me to meet Aria on Day 4—but only after I completed a half-day orientation with their psychosocial counselor, Clotilde. She didn’t brief me on facts. She asked questions: “What do you imagine trauma looks like?” “How will you respond if she declines to speak about certain years?” “If she invites you to eat, will you accept—even if the meal is plain rice and beans?” These weren’t hypotheticals. They were filters.

The morning of the meeting, Clotilde and I boarded a motorcycle taxi (mobylette) for the 45-minute ride to Nyaruziba. The road deteriorated quickly—first gravel, then packed earth rutted by seasonal rains. We passed fields of sorghum and cassava, children walking barefoot with books tied in cloth, and a group of men repairing a hand-dug well with stones and rope. Then, at a fork marked only by a bent acacia branch, the mobylette stopped. Clotilde pointed left. “That path doesn’t exist on any map,” she said. “But Aria walks it every day.”

We walked. For 2.3 kilometers. No signage. No cell signal. Just red clay underfoot, the scent of wet earth and woodsmoke, and the low hum of cicadas. At one point, Clotilde paused, pulled a small notebook from her satchel, and showed me a hand-drawn sketch—Aria’s home compound, annotated with tree types and gate orientation. “We draw maps here,” she said. “Because roads change. People stay.”

When we reached the compound—a cluster of three mud-brick houses surrounded by banana groves and a drying rack strung with vibrant sisal weaves—I saw Aria before she saw me. She stood barefoot, arms folded, watching us approach. Her posture wasn’t guarded. It was observational. Like a farmer assessing cloud cover. She wore a faded blue dress, her hair braided tightly, a silver pendant shaped like a bird at her throat. She didn’t smile. She waited.

🤝 The Discovery: What Silence Taught Me

Aria offered water—warm, drawn from a covered clay pot—and sat across from me on the mat. Clotilde translated softly, but Aria spoke French fluently, her accent precise, unhurried. She didn’t begin with war. She began with geography: “This soil grows good sweet potatoes, but not maize. Maize needs deeper roots. We learned that after the rains washed away our first crop.”

Only later did she describe recruitment—not as coercion, but as calculation. Her family’s land had been seized. Her brothers were dead. “The soldiers didn’t ask if I wanted a gun,” she said, turning a small wooden loom in her hands. “They asked if I wanted food. I said yes. That was my first choice.”

The sensory details anchored everything: the rough weave of the mat beneath my palms, the tang of fermented milk in the ☕ she served, the way light fractured through the thatch roof onto her hands as she demonstrated basket-weaving—each movement economical, rhythmic, deliberate. When I asked about reintegration, she gestured toward the compound’s perimeter. “Look there. That fence? Built by six of us. No NGO money. Just nails from old crates, posts from fallen trees. We measured twice. Cut once. That’s how you rebuild trust—with work you can see.”

She showed me the cooperative’s ledger—handwritten in exercise books, columns for raw material costs, labor hours, sales. No digital records. “Electricity comes three hours a day,” she said. “So we write. And remember.” One page listed names: *M., 14 years old, joined 2002, mother of two, weaver since 2018*. Another: *S., 17, lost right hand, now dyes threads with wild indigo*. No trauma labels. Just function, role, continuity.

That afternoon, she walked me to the nearby health post—a single-room structure with a solar panel and a nurse who’d trained in Bujumbura. “She delivers babies,” Aria said simply. “And treats malaria. Not much else. But enough.” The nurse, Solange, invited us to share 🍜 lunch: boiled cassava, beans, and a sauce made from dried fish and tomatoes. As we ate, Aria told me about the rainy season’s unpredictability—how last year’s delayed rains forced them to shift from sisal to bamboo weaving, a skill learned from elders in neighboring villages. “War taught me how to carry weight,” she said, wiping her mouth with the edge of her sleeve. “But farming taught me how to wait.”

🌅 The Journey Continues: Beyond the Single Meeting

I stayed in Nyaruziba for five days. Not as a guest, but as a participant—within clear boundaries. I helped sort dyed sisal fibers (my fingers stained indigo for a week), carried water from the well (two trips per day, 15 liters each), and transcribed part of the cooperative’s ledger into a clean copy (with Aria’s approval, using carbon paper—no phones allowed). I learned that ‘reintegration’ here meant: shared harvests, rotating childcare duties, collective loan guarantees, and annual remembrance ceremonies held not at monuments, but at the site of the old barracks—now overgrown with wild coffee plants.

One evening, as dusk settled and fireflies blinked above the banana grove, Aria handed me a small, tightly woven basket—no bigger than my palm, rimmed with black-and-white geometric patterns. “This is umubano,” she said. “Not ‘friendship.’ Not ‘peace.’ It means ‘we hold space for each other, even when we don’t speak.’” She didn’t explain further. She didn’t need to.

Leaving was quiet. No farewell speech. Just Aria pressing two mangoes into my bag—still warm from the sun—and Clotilde handing me a folded sheet of paper: ARAC’s updated contact list, bus schedules from Gitega to Bujumbura (updated monthly, subject to fuel shortages), and a note: *Next dry season, come back. We’ll show you the new rainwater catchment.*

💡 Reflection: What This Trip Rewrote in Me

I used to think ethical travel meant ‘doing no harm.’ This trip taught me it means doing less—less assuming, less extracting, less narrating for others. Aria’s story wasn’t mine to frame. It was mine to witness, record accurately, and return with humility. I’d arrived expecting to document recovery. Instead, I documented continuity—the quiet, daily insistence on building, growing, measuring, waiting.

Burundi challenged my travel reflexes: the urge to photograph, to ‘optimize’ time, to seek ‘authentic’ moments on demand. Here, authenticity lived in the pace—the time it took to walk 2.3 kilometers, to wait for rain, to mend a broken loom shuttle with waxed thread. It lived in the absence of spectacle. There were no staged performances of resilience. Only work, rest, and the unremarkable dignity of showing up.

I also confronted my own privilege—not just financial, but temporal. My ability to leave. My assumption that ‘healing’ looked like Western therapy models. Aria’s community used storytelling, craft, land stewardship, and intergenerational knowledge transfer—not clinical frameworks. That didn’t make it lesser. It made it different. And difference isn’t a gap to bridge—it’s terrain to navigate with care.

📝 Practical Takeaways: Woven Into the Journey

Traveling to meet individuals like Aria isn’t about access—it’s about alignment. Here’s what I learned, not as rules, but as grounded observations:

• Local coordination is non-negotiable. No independent visit to former combatant communities is advisable—or ethical—without an established, trusted intermediary like ARAC. They understand context, consent protocols, and power dynamics. Their time is part of the cost.
• Infrastructure dictates rhythm. Roads may be impassable after rain. Mobile networks drop for days. Electricity is scheduled. Carry physical maps, cash in Burundian francs (BIF), and assume all digital tools will fail. A paper notebook and pen aren’t nostalgic—they’re operational.
• ‘Reintegration’ looks like agriculture, not paperwork. Programs succeed when they tie psychosocial support to tangible livelihoods—basket-weaving, poultry farming, seed banking. If an initiative has no visible output (crops, crafts, repaired wells), question its sustainability.
• Language matters beyond translation. Learning basic Kirundi phrases (mwaramutse = good morning; murakoze cyane = thank you very much) signals respect. But more vital is listening for what’s not said—the pauses, the redirected questions, the topics gently closed. That’s where real boundaries live.

⭐ Conclusion: How the Landscape Changed

Burundi didn’t become ‘easier’ after that trip. Flights remain infrequent. Roads still flood. Bureaucracy moves slowly. But my understanding of what travel can do shifted irrevocably. It’s not about collecting experiences. It’s about accepting invitation—into a rhythm, a responsibility, a silence that holds meaning. Aria didn’t give me a story to tell. She gave me a standard: measure twice, cut once. Whether building fences, writing articles, or choosing where to go next, that precision—of intention, of action, of respect—is the only metric that matters.