into the lion's den

The road bends and the path that unravels in front of you is completely different from anything that you had in mind. It’s death staring you in the face. It’s vomiting 10 times in one night. It’s the earth shifting beneath your bed. Its breaking all of the promises that you made to God.

Suddenly the thrill of crossing into rebel territory isn’t so newsworthy. It’s just another tale to tell. A conversation starter. I was in a tiny remote mountain village controlled by Nkunda’s forces. It was beautiful, lush, holy, pristine and almost all of the people that lived there, now live in IDP camps along the road to Sake. The camps are full of miserable little straw huts clustered together with pieces of UNHCR tarps clinging to the tops. Rounded alters built to the god of war. The most desperate kind of living imaginable. Pure survival. But so many don’t.

A new survey by NRC tells us that 5.4 million people have died of conflict related causes in DRC since 1998. 45,000 people continue to die each month. And in the US of A people are stressed out because they think that they are too fat or too thin. They are afraid that the person they love doesn’t love them or that the person that loves them will find out that they are cheating on them. They think that the lines on their faces make them less beautiful. I know this because every time I go home I become one of those self-absorbed people. It is so easy to let a depressive fog settle over you and to forget what it means to live on the edge of darkness.

There is a quote that rings in my head over and over like the tolling of the bells in the church steeples on Sunday. “There is a way to be good again”. This is a quote from one of the characters in the book, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It’s a man telling another man that there is a way for him to redeem himself after he betrayed his friend in the most terrible way. It reminds me of what this work has come to mean to me. It is more than just curiosity now. It exceeds my desire to expand my views and my mind. It exceeds my need to travel, the never ending restlessness. There is a purpose slowly taking shape. It has something to do with finding goodness. Not in myself because that is not where goodness lives. But within the outrageousness, the tragedy, the brilliance, the unbearable lightness of life lived in constant metamorphosis. It lies within the people that I see on a daily basis, who continually reinvent themselves in order to survive and who continue to try to work for peace, in a region that most of the world has given up on.