The girl’s dress is shiny and emerald green, and she carefully peels an orange, but little else is normal for the 14-year-old sitting on a hospital bed in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
“I was hit in battle,” she said when asked about the bandages that cover the stump of her right leg. “I joined the fight for my country . . . if I’m given the chance to return to the fight then I’ll do so to end the war against the M23.”
The girl, a minor who cannot be named, is one of about 28,000 wazalendo — which means patriots in Swahili — who have signed up to the assortment of militia fighting alongside the DRC armed forces around the city of Goma. They are pitted against a rebel group called M23 that is slowly encircling the provincial capital as part of a brutal and complex war that the outside world has largely ignored.