Rape in Congo and the bandages that don’t fight bullies.

This is not the post you think it will be.

Since I slaved over a mini-thesis in Colonel Bowers’ introductory International Relations class on gender-based violence in conflict, most notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo I have been appalled and morbidly fascinated by the situation faced by women in this country. For a long time I have viewed Congo as nothing more than a cesspool of rape, pain, bullets and sorrows. Certainly nothing I saw in my research, in the news or in what people said told me otherwise.

But then I came out here for myself. I didn’t stay for a month or two to write a book, take photos or conduct interviews with the worst of the worst cases. I freed myself from that mzungu prison of thinking that because they spend a week or two in Congo a few times – they know this place.  I began to build a life for myself here. I began to work to serve women who have survived rape, buying whole-heartedly into the idea that rape is the most atrocious problem faced by the Congolese people – and the core of this country’s woes. What a silly tunnel-vision-ed girl I was.

You may re-read this blog and think…well this is directly contradicting so much of what you have said in the past Dominique. But please forgive me, I was in the throes of caring so much so that I forgot to check out my peripheral vision to get the view of the whole picture.

Congo’s problem is not just rape. (I can’t believe those words just escaped my lips). Congo’s problems go so much deeper than rape, if anything, this devastating sexual violence is a RESULT not the CAUSE of Congo’s difficulties, and it is definitely not the only result.

Care for just a starter list of problems and questions? Here goes, why do NGO’s PR stunts sometimes cost more than their actual programs? Why is it normal for the soldiers to go unpaid for months? No one thinks to stand up and say, hey maybe these rebels shouldn’t be going to bars with their grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs? Why are children being burnt alive after being accused of witchcraft? Why are cancer and AIDS so often passed off as ‘poisoning’? No one thinks it atrocious that the Mai Mai HAVE to hunt protected animals because they just have NOTHING else to eat? How about Hilary Clinton travelling here constantly and nothing concrete coming of it? People living on less than $1 day? What’s the line between a freedom fighter and a combatant? I think it pretty strange that grown women don’t know anything about their anatomy. I find it appalling that students have to trade money and sex for grades. I find it disgusting that people KNOW where the raping and pillaging rebels are and we haven’t announced a mass arresting yet? How about oil companies purchasing the right to dig wells in national parks? The border no longer accepting 6 month VISA’s from embassies? Rwanda has 3G cell service and I can’t get a call to go through when it’s windy or rainy? Oh I could go on and on and on and on about this country where there is no war…but still so very little peace.

Don’t get me wrong. Rape remains exceedingly important; it is the bane of a woman’s existence, the most difficult and sadly the most-anticipated event in our lives. Perhaps this is why I have attached myself so inextricably to this cause – it is too near and dear to my heart, a very real and very frightening issue that is the risk we are born with. It is ever-present in Congo, it has gripped this nation in its horrible claws and shows no signs of letting go, but it is just ONE display of the depravity and debasing of humanity that has taken place here. To focus only on this, and highlight only this, and champion this, no matter how much it deserves to be championed is to simplify the conflict and the current situation to the point where it loses so many of its dark and difficult layers.

Activists that shall go un-named will carry on and on and have the world believe though that rape is the biggest and the sole challenge to Congo’s peace and that your iPhone, you horrible human being is the reason for this rape.  But they conveniently ignore the fact that the main perpetrators of rape are no longer the FLDR or the FARDC, they are fathers, brothers, community leaders and men who walk the streets freely every day.  These activists will gloss over the silence of nations, churches and Christians that resulted in thousands of Tutsis massacred a little over a decade ago only a stone’s throw away, this same silence that characterizes the treatment of Congo today. They gloss over the complicity of governments and international NGO’s in the trading of sex for aid, the horribly defunct social infrastructure and the fact that somehow…we now have two men claiming to be the President of this one nation.

For me…I see Congo as being the sadly perfect example of a place where the value of a human life has only diminished over the years. This is why these men rape without concern for judgment, what are these women’s lives worth to them? What are their own lives worth? This is why soldiers fire their guns off into crowds for jokes…who cares? What is the value of this life they eke out? It’s a game of survival here. Why worry about development in 2020 when so many things can kill them today? Why govern this country with order and peace? The world surely hasn’t cared before…will they care now if massacres, executions and botched elections are quietly conducted?

Donors love the idea of saving women, providing for their needs, and in short, perpetuating what I like to call the ‘aid-addiction’. Very few donors think logically about the fact that perhaps ending violence against women goes much deeper than simply providing for their needs after they have been raped. It requires getting at bottom and top-levels of authorities, ending their corrupted reigns, demanding transparency and accountability and not accepting pathetic excuses for democracy and justice in return.

I love my work, I love the women in my program. I see the merit daily. I know it is creating so much good in the lives of women in so much need of good. I love the thought that I am helping them create their dreams, and training them to potentially live a much better life. But there is a sick feeling in my stomach that…the copybooks with the treasured notes on English and French…make for poor weapons against guns, machetes and the ‘stronger sex’.

There comes a point in every humanitarian’s life where she questions the worth and the efficacy of her work. I can honestly say at this juncture, that I don’t think rehabilitation in and of itself is going to solve the problem of violence against women in Congo or elsewhere anytime soon. This is not to say, that rehabilitation is worthless, it is definitely worthwhile. It’s extremely important to provide for the needs of these women after they have suffered so much physical and psychological damage…but rehabilitation relies on the event happening. It does little to prevent the violence in the first place. It is like the bandage you put on the bleeding bruise after the bully pushes you to the ground, though your bandage is really important, it doesn’t protect you from the bully. In fact he will probably push you harder tomorrow, bandage and all.

That being said, it is important to recognize that there seems to be no interest from the Western world in SOLVING the Congolese problem. Reasons for that, I shan’t get into in this post but it’s pretty obvious to me at least. This country on its knees is so much more convenient than it would be standing up on its own.  So hotels donate used bottles of shampoo, countries write off old bad-debts and count that as aid, laws and resolutions are passed; more and more funds go toward purchasing UN choppers so they can sit idly by, unable to fire their weapons at the perpetrators of massacres.

So we provide bandages and more bandages instead of pushing the bullies back, lest we actually beat them.

Victories

I’ve written so much about the horrors taking place in Congo, the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, the blissful ignorance of millions of people in the West that I’ve grown quite weary of it. I don’t know how people like Kristoff do it, how often can you come up with synonyms for destruction, rape, poverty and war. I for one have made ample use online synonym dictionaries and have sat for many a minute contemplating, how to describe horrible thing X without repeating the same words and calls to action that I’ve written in almost every other blog post.

As I was walking through downtown Bukavu today, checking out the atmosphere as we await the announcement of Congo’s new President and in search of canned Coke and mangoes for curried mango to go with my chapati, I had a thought. I haven’t toured through Africa so I don’t have much authority on this, but it struck me how easy it would be to forget that Bukavu is in fact a war-torn African city. It is so peaceful, beautiful and deceivingly lovely that I sometimes have to reassure myself about where I am.
I tried to look straight-ahead today as I walked, looking for signs of the battles and the bloodshed and craving some African-ness in my system.

I noticed the FARDC soldier, a sight seen so often I don’t even register it as abnormal to see soldiers clutching their AK-47s walk brazenly through the streets. I watched him with my typical but ghastly fearlessness that comes from growing up in the (slightly) developed world. He walked tiredly, barely holding on to his gun, eyes downcast and brow furrowed in the blazing Congo mid-day heat. He walked right past me – this remnant of war seemed just eager to reach a cool sitting place where he could sip a beer and get out of the sun.

As I continued down the dirt road, I came face to face with a woman of abundant girth and probably wealth, stepping gingerly, clutching her cloth wrapped around her waist with gaudy, yellow high-heels adorning her feet. A bit further on I noticed a man burning his rubbish at the side of the street, simultaneously coolly lighting his old-timey pipe in the flames that came from his rubbish. Urban Outfitters and other hipster-havens would kill for that kind of authenticity.

When I left the dirt road, and emerged onto the bustling Ave Lumumba, I was immediately confronted with local and UN police decked out in full riot gear but lazing around by the vehicles, “securing” the community during this tense time. Moto-taxis congregate at the corner, so my thought process was put on pause for a bit as I walked quickly through them denying offers of lifts to Carrefour, Essence or Chai.

I continued to walk through the crowds of people plying their goods, hailing taxis, chatting with each other, languidly smoking their Ambassade cigarettes and going about their everyday life. To my right, I could just barely catch a glimpse of the massive Lake Kivu gleaming enticingly like the teasing and deadly woman she is, and to my left I could see stores, markets, local bars, and way in the distance looming eerily over the town – the barracks that house the presumably integrated army.

I wanted to take you on this journey with me because as I walked through town today, I couldn’t help but think what a pity it is that the news on Congo focuses only on the wars, the corruption, the conflict minerals and it being the worst place to be a woman. Little to no news at all focuses on the admirable way in which the people here have sought to cling to some semblance of normalcy and the ever-elusive – peace.

Perhaps if Bukavu were more Gaza-strip-esque, it would be on the headlines every day, perhaps if people were still starving to death trapped in their homes in Port-au-Prince mainstream media would not have forgotten about the Haitian people since the excitement and the million-dollar aid shipments have ceased.

What I’ve found is this. In the worst places in the world, people continue to eke out a living. They wake up in the morning, they fetch their water, they go about their lives, because that’s what we as people do. We cling to normalcy, we cling to our routines and we cling to them even in the face of death, destruction, war, elections, and the end of the world even.

Perhaps this should be a part of the mainstream media’s depiction of these countries, perhaps that would normalize horrible things X,Y and even Z, and bring them closer to the heart of the average Jersey Shore viewer, knowing that even when there is madness in the streets, someone’s at home making dinner very quietly for their families. Even when the earth literally shook and cracked, someone woke up the next morning to prepare breakfast.

People ask me all these absurd but understandable questions about why I seem determined to travel to every place the US State Department says not to go, is it because I don’t give a rip about their website and travel warnings, partly yes. But it’s also because I know deep down inside that life goes on in these places in quietly victorious ways.

These are the victories we fail to acknowledge. The victory that some sort of dinner was served in some tent-homes in Port-au-Prince in 2010. The victory that a father consoled his hungry children until they fell asleep beneath their fabric roof, watching over them, as only a The victory that children continued playing football in cracked streets bordered by collapsed homes in Jacmel. The victory that people turn out in the Sunday-best to church, election, war, earthquake be damned. The victory that people wake up every morning no matter what, and…exist.

I find that exciting. And I think we should all think that that is pretty cool.

I know there’ve been mornings I’ve woken up praying to God all-mighty that the day before did not happen, or that I had dreamed the horrendous incident of the night before up. I can’t even bring myself to get out of bed and when I do, it’s to face the day with gloom and despair. But I make my coffee, I eat something, I go back to bed and try again the next day.

I don’t live my life in an incredibly victorious way. Its part and parcel of living in the (slightly) developed world. We don’t consider being able to break out the French press in the morning a victory – when oh…my…word – it is a victory beyond compare.

I wish the media and writers like myself (ha), would highlight these victories so much more. I can only read so many articles about civilian deaths, riots and rapes. Sometimes I want to read about the families that picked the pieces up after these events. Sometimes I want to read about the young girl in a refugee camp that dreams of going to school to become a nurse. Sometimes I want to see hope splashed across CNN and BBC.

The biggest victories are so often in the untold stories.