Part 1

In the darkness, there are ominous sounds crawling across my consciousness.  Grasping hands and hearts, dragging me, half paralyzed with fear, to the window, to the door, to the staircase.  Gunshots ricocheting from buildings down the street from the hotel.  A truck colliding into a tree in front of the apartment – the driver unconscious and bleeding.  A man screaming, “fuck you” over and over again in my face while I desperately cling to him - terrified that he will leave me alone in the middle of the night.   

Perhaps it was inevitable that the shadowlands would engulf me in Rwanda.  I was lucky despite the heartbreaking chaos to have lived a life filled with a sense of wonder in Congo and the pendulum had to shift to keep this experience balanced, so that I would not bring false glory to this life and believe that it was too easy.  It is tempting to glaze over the details of how I came to leave Africa, of how I reached the point at which borderlines were crossed and darkness began.  How do I explain the way the pendulum of fear can shift in a moment and how a moment of hesitation can change your life forever?  It is painful and uncomfortable to talk of such things.  And so I don’t.  But there are words that must be said and these words hold me hostage in my bed at night and insist on taking form. 

In the years that followed my initial foray into the world of development in Congo, I continued to work with the same project that provided a platform for women to talk about the horrors they had experienced as a result of war and violence.  Through radio programs, documentaries, plays, song and dance, they told their stories and they demanded that the government do something to protect its citizens.  My work took me to towns and villages all over eastern DRC, from Bunia in the north to Baraka in the south.  In Rwanda and Burundi, I traveled from one end to the other, listening to stories, assisting with filming and recording, touching hands, shoulders, faces.  Bearing witness.

It was not unusual for me to travel between three countries in one month.  The trips were exciting at first, I felt incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to see people and villages that were so remote.  I would wake in yet another little hotel room after a long day of driving rough dirt roads to look out and take in the vivid green trees and hills and the smell of morning fires and I would think, “I can’t believe that I am this person standing here in this place.”

Only later did the loneliness of a life on the road catch up with me.  I would sit beside Lake Tanganika, on white sand and think of how this place looked like the beginning of the world to me, as if the dawn of time had never passed, the way I used to feel in the Marshall Islands many years before, as if I was seeing something secret and old.  Certain old habits move me.  A mother carefully wrapping an infant in cloth and tying him to her back.  The songs of the fishermen at dawn as they draw their wooden canoes across the lake.  It moved me to observe small gestures of kindness, moments of grace when I watched an old man help a small child cross a busy street in town.  But I couldn’t turn to someone and ask, “Did you see that?” and so rather than be alone all of the time, I started to go out at night when I was in town. 

Drinking alone in cities like Bujumbura and Goma is probably not a good idea.  But I took what I thought were reasonable precautions.  I always brought a book which usually kept me safe until I could decide if I felt like actually talking to people or if just being in the presence of others was enough.  I have never been any good at small talk.  If there is someone that I want to talk to, I have to sit and think of what to say and the questions that present themselves to me as a means of making conversation are always inappropriate. So reading my book, I would drink one vodka tonic and then pay and leave and hail a motortaxi to take me to another restaurant.  In such a way, I would make my way to different places and by the end of the night, I would have gotten past using my book as a shield and would have actually talked to several people and had interesting conversations.  There was the aid worker from France who revealed that she had slept with the two men at a table nearby on consecutive nights and that she was afraid of turning into one of those older UN women who never marry and never have children because they are always traveling and who sleep with a string of younger men until they are too old to carry on.  There was also the older American man on a field visit to Baraka who went with me to a local bar filled with men.  There were so few women that the men were dancing with each other aggressively, in the way that young men will when they are mocking not only each other but also themselves.  As we watched them in a dark humid space covered by a low thatched roof, he told me the story of how his wife had died of cancer, his grief still raw, and any words I could think to say were inadequate, so we walked back to the hotel in silence under the light of stars.  As we walked I thought of how consuming love is, how a connection like his – lifelong – must have been at the cellular level.  And it made me sad to think that even his cells must miss his dead wife and it made me wish I had someone to tell this to.

The women’s stories.  I still see their faces.  Brown, black, gold, beautiful smiles and sad eyes, hands reaching out to touch my hand, arm, shoulder.  I can hardly bear to think of the women I spoke to.  Justine, Grace, Jeanette.  To see their faces, to hear their names is to remember their stories.  We met in cold empty concrete buildings, sitting in a circle in chairs.  We met in a small dark hut in Bunia where there was one wooden bench and they made me sit on it.  We met outside of schools, churches, clinics, in the middle of communities encircled by mud brick homes, under trees, in the rain under a tarp.  They sang to me, hugged me, called me their sister, danced as they came to meet us on the road and I felt humbled, ashamed, because I knew that I was not the good thing that they were dancing for.  I knew that I would not change their life in any significant way.  I came to listen only.  To touch when I was brave enough.  

I heard my first story in Bunia, on the side of a green plowed hill next to a newly built house.  She was old and her face was lined, she was small and yet she seemed strong.  She had just finished putting the mud bricks on the sides of her home.  Her family was killed by a group of armed men from another tribe.  Her husband and sons were shot in front of her.  Her daughters were raped and then killed.  Only one daughter survived because she was not there that day.  As she told the story of that terrible day, tears rolled down her face and fell onto her shirt.  She made no effort to wipe them away.  As I stood listening to this story, I felt as if a boulder had dropped onto my chest.  I thought I knew pain.  I thought I knew suffering from my own little tragedies.  I had never heard of anything on this scale.  So I wept.  Uncontrollably.  Tears falling behind my sunglasses onto my shirt.  I held her hand and I felt a kind of fury mixed with sadness.  It was heavy and I could barely stand beneath the weight of it.  This was the first and only time that I cried while listening to stories.  After that it was as if the emotional side of my brain shut down when I went to work.  Even though I wanted to empathize and mourn with these women, I knew somehow instinctively, that if I did that every day, I would lose my mind and then I would be of no help at all.

So I listened and I recorded and I took notes and I talked and analyzed and tried constantly to figure out what would help women to be less vulnerable in this part of the world.  And underneath all of that, an anger that was born the day I heard that first terrible story, began to grow and wind itself around me like the branches of a tree.  I would hear many versions of this story in the coming months.  Sometimes the attackers were from the FARDC – the government army, sometimes they were from the rebel Lord’s Resistance army in Uganda or the FDLR.  At last count there were over 20 armed factions operating with varying agenda’s in North and South Kivu and all were notoriously ruthless.  They raped and killed, tortured and mutilated, men, women and children without discretion.  They stole whatever they wanted and destroyed communities in the most brutal of ways.  And they got away with it.  This was what astounded me.  There was no one that the survivors could call for help.  The police?  They were corrupt.  The government?  They were corrupt.  The court system?  It was corrupt.  The rape of a six year old girl by 5 soldiers in a village in Congo was ultimately settled with a case of beer delivered to her father.  The UN forces camped nearby?  By most accounts, they sat by and watched villagers being attacked through their binoculars but did nothing to intervene.  Not their mandate.  The army?  Many times the army was the perpetrator.  Mobutu began the trend of sending armies to prey on their own people.  He asked why they needed to be paid a salary when they had guns.  So they remained unpaid, left to seek out payment in whatever form they might decide to take it, with their guns.

I began to find it hard to breath sometimes when I would lie in bed at night.  I would feel as if the ceiling was too low, like it was caving in and like the walls were pressing in on me and I wanted to destroy the men who had done these terrible things and yet I knew that I was powerless to do anything more than listen and do my job so I began to feel like a fraud, like I was offering false hope by my presence.  As if they might start to believe that people in the western world had started to care about them when in fact they had not. That help might be on its way, when in fact it was not.