Suddenly we are surrounded by a sea of children.  As we stand there they begin to form a circle around us and move in closer and closer.

 Janice and I came outside after seeing an impressive women’s sewing collective.  We are in a remote village called Kamisimbi, two hours outside of Bukavu in the hills.  We have been brought here by Gila Garaway, an Israeli/American who heads an incredible organization called Moriah Africa, to see the women’s empowerment program she helped start.  We step outside just as one hundred children, it seems, ages 2 to 16, come pouring out of their classrooms for recess.  They surround us. We are trying to communicate with them.  Some of the children speak French so Janice and I make feeble attempts with our school French.  We are all laughing. By their expressions I am sure we are the source of many jokes.  But what we don’t understand doesn’t bother us.  So we all just laugh.  It feels so good –a welcome relief from the many days of sadness and despair. 

 This was a very hopeful, positive day.  With the help of Gila, Pastor Grace  has implemented several programs in the village to improve the lives of the mostly women and children. There are several programs that teach them skills that will enable them to live better, less arduous lives.  A sewing cooperative teaches girls and women to make beautiful bags and clothes which they then sell at market.  It also teaches them how to run their small businesses.  Most importantly, this program will spare them the backbreaking plight of the thousands of women we saw each day, who were carrying enormous heavy piles of charcoal on their heads as they trudged up and down the hills for miles trying to eke out a meager living.  Another class teaches the young men to make hand carved furniture (we were all tempted to ship a piece home, but it’s not really possible).  There was also an agricultural coop.

 For me, however, one of the most optimistic aspects of the village was the school.  There is 70 per cent illiteracy in Bukavu alone, and I have worried since I arrived here how Congo can one day heal and reconstruct itself if its children are not educated. 

 Since I arrived in Congo I have seen thousands of children, at all hours of the day, playing in the streets when one would expect them to be in school.  Kamisimbi School was an example of what can be done with determination and resourcefulness.  The Pastor proudly took us to each grade level where the students politely stood as we walked in and warmly greeted us.  In one class the geography teacher was out sick – but when we walked in, the class was sitting and quietly studying its assignment– not what you would expect to see in LA!  It struck me that these students knew how lucky they were and truly valued the opportunity to go to school.  I loved what I saw. 

 But I need to add that under this hopefulness remains a biting poverty and desperation.  For example, the roof of the school, which is made of corrugated metal sheets, had blown off twice in five months due to heavy winds.  The village was having difficulty obtaining the $100 needed to repair the roof.  (I proudly report that we exercised discretion and donated the new roof on JWW’s behalf!). In addition, even though this is probably the best of the rural villages, due to the attention of Gila and Pastor Grace, the people are still hungry, a fact which we evidenced first hand:  at the end of our visit, the villagers gave us each a gift of an ear of corn from the communal garden.  But while Janice and I were looking at the sewing cooperative, a young woman signaled to us that she was hungry and wanted our corn.  It was heartbreaking…here was a vegetable cooperative and the villagers were still hungry.  Janice and I sneaked our corn back to the hungry villagers – hiding it so that they wouldn’t get in trouble.

 With all of the challenges, it is nevertheless evident that programs like the ones developed in Kamisimbi with Moriah Africa will help to assure a better  future for the people of Congo.

I don’t sleep here, even with sleeping pills.  I wake up after a few hours, images of the day racing through my head, trying to make sense of all I have witnessed and heard.  This morning I got up at 4 am.  I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  I preferred to get up and busy myself with packing to leave for Bukavu.  It wasn’t long before Janice and Naama were up also, trying to get pictures of the sunrise—some beauty amidst all this sadness. 

 As I write this we are on a boat on gorgeous Lake Kivu going between Goma and Bukavu.  It is a very comfortable boat showing a Steven Segal movie—just what we all needed, more violence.  But this is stupid, mindless “entertainment”.  The scenery outside is exquisite.  It feels like we could be in some beautiful vacation spot.  It is a moment to decompress. 

 Instead, I talk to Giorgio, Director of Operations for International Medical Corps (IMC) in Eastern Congo.  We discuss the complexity of the political situation here.  I am trying to make sense of it all. 

 If the humanitarian situation feels desperate, the political one seems completely impossible to untangle.  There are various armed groups that continue to rape and pillage the country.  There is the CNDP, former soldiers of the ousted rebel general Nkunda, now members of the Congolese army.  Then there is the FDLR, comprised of Rwandan Hutu rebels who escaped into the Congo after the Rwandan genocide.  There are also the Maimai, who are local militias created supposedly to protect their communities, but instead have morphed into terrorist groups.  And then there is the FARDC, ostensibly government loyalists, but made up a various poorly integrated former rebel groups.

 The situation is so complex and goes back so many years.  Added to this there are the constantly shifting loyalties and allegiances of the different bordering African countries—Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Angola, Rwanda, and Namibia.  These allegiances change depending upon perceived self interest. 

 The final layer onto which all of this must be laid concerns the minerals which make Congo one of the most natural-resource-rich countries in the world.  All of this destabilization leaves different mineral mines in various hands—none of which benefits the people.  That is the tragedy here.  I am told that 70% of all the mineral resources in the world are here.  It is also one of the most beautiful countries in the world.  And none of this benefits the people.  Many tell us that the situation here is getting worse.  A village was burned recently in North Kivu and last week IMC had to evacuate all their staff from Baraka due to fighting in the area. (Although I was told that they are going back today.)

 I ask everyone the question of what needs to be done to move towards peace.  No one gives me an answer.  I come away with the feeling that until someone much smarter than I am can figure out a solution, or the various parties decide that enough is enough and the bloodshed and violence must end, all we can do is try to provide as much help and assistance to the innocent victims of this immoral war as possible. 

 While we are here we hope to identify programs that not only provide immediate assistance, but ones that help to change the culture of impunity that exists here.  Perhaps then the true beauty of Congo will be allowed to flourish.

I thought it couldn’t get worse.  Yesterday listening to Renee and Sabine tell the stories of their rapes I felt my heart begin to splinter.  But today my heart was shattered.  Today we visited one of the last remaining IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps where 3500 refugees live – men, women and children who are either too afraid or too ill to return to their villages.  They live in squalor and filth with minimal food and only the most basic medical care.  The children suffer from chronic malnutrition, their bellies swollen from starvation.  I know of no words in the English language to describe what we saw.

The children look at us with beautiful piercing eyes.  They want their pictures taken.  They want our attention.  Our visit is a diversion from the endless days of nothingness – no school, no toys.  This is all those Sally Struthers World Vision commercials, except it is real and in front of my eyes.  I am afraid I will burst into tears, and I don’t want them to see the hopelessness I feel.   It is impossible for me to describe my sadness.

 And then, we meet five more women who have been victims of rape.  Two are about 14 years old; two have babies, which I assume were babies of rape.  We do not ask their stories this time.  We don’t want to make them relive their pain, and frankly today we are not certain how much more we ourselves can hear.  But they all want to tell us something.  They want to tell us about what they need.  They want to tell us that we have given them hope.  They want to thank us for coming.  I feel so inadequate. 

 At every project, the staff and community has prepared for our visit.  They greet us with songs and we are meticulously introduced to each member of the staff.  At one remote health clinic, the entire village came to meet us.  Everywhere we go, we are told how our visit has brought them hope.  It tears my heart out.

 These truly are forgotten people ravaged by decades of war and conflict.  It feels as though, with the exception of extraordinary aid workers like those from the International Medical Corps, the world has closed its eyes.  But then, I remember that we are here and with every group, we have promised to take their words and images back home.  We have promised to let people back in the US know how the people here are suffering.  How they have been and continue to be decimated and violated by war and poverty.  Maybe the world has not closed it eyes, maybe they just haven’t been opened yet.

I was haunted by their faces. Renee with deep scars carved into what was once a beautiful face, eyes with a depth of sorrow I had never before witnessed and hands pink where her flesh was burned off. When the Interahamwe came, they burned her house after seven men raped her. She ran back inside when her eldest son slipped through her hands. As she clutched him in her arms the burning house fell down upon her. Her youngest son had already been killed by the militiamen.

This is only the beginning of her story. The degradation, misery and cruelty that Renee endured are unfathomable. Over and over people abused her while others refused to help. Then suddenly a man appeared and gave her shelter and arranged for her medical care.

Then there was Sabine, her belly filled with the child of one of the many men who raped her repeatedly over three weeks. She is eighteen years old and was captured by the Interahamwe when she was seventeen. She is alone at the Heal Africa hospital waiting for the birth of her child. She has no money and no education. She does not know how she will take care of her child.

Sabine was being held as a “wife” to the Interahamwe. One day she was sent to the market to buy milk. There a woman she had never met before devised a plan to help her escape. The next day this stranger paid for her to get to Goma and the Heal Africa hospital.

Sitting next to these women as they tell their stories is their counselor. She holds their hands and rubs their chests when they can no longer speak because the pain is too fresh and too great.

As I listen to these women and try to understand these unspeakable acts of cruelty, I struggle also to reconcile the conflicting morals of our society. When a society is in chaos, when people are desperately trying to survive, how is it that some are able to set aside their own safety to help someone else?  Where did the woman who helped Sabine find the courage to risk her life for a stranger?  What made the man who helped Renee stand up to an angry mob and give shelter to a poor, deformed woman in the street?  Why do the women we met at Heal Africa Hospital who counsel the women and dedicate their lives to improving the health and safety of other women do so?

Over and over we hear stories of such unspeakable atrocities, while at the same time we meet people doing such selfless courageous works.  History has shown us this dichotomy before.  Certainly, the Christians who hid Jews during the Holocaust is one obvious example. I find these examples hopeful but I wish I could answer the question of what makes the difference.  How do some end up perpetrators, while others end up as rescuers?  How do some end up as bystanders while others end up as relief workers in remote, desolate and dangerous places like this?  If only we knew the answer.

Congo is unlike anything I have experienced.  I can barely process what I have seen and heard today.  The poverty and desolation are unimaginable.  There is such a waste of human potential.

 Three years ago the volcano at the edge of Goma erupted destroying the entire town.  Today people live in stone huts on top of piles of black molten rock and garbage.  Electricity is intermittent as is flowing water.  It feels unfathomable that in 2009 people live like this.

 Last summer I visited Vietnam.   With outdoor markets and people working rice fields with oxen, it was like stepping back in time.  It was primitive.  It was charming. 

 Goma is not charming.  It has heartbreaking abject poverty.  I look around and wonder how it is that I was born where I was born and these people are born into these circumstances.  What flip of the coin gave me the life I have? 

 At the Heal Africa hospital, which is considered a model in the region, we met a personable young man who had been shot in the war and who needed a special diet to build himself up before surgery.  The hospital could not provide the special diet and his mother could not afford to purchase these foods.  Most likely he will die in the hospital before surgery.  He is 20 years old. 

 There is hope, however.  Tomorrow we will visit a program designed to prevent death in childbirth.  Today we saw a gardening project which will help people in remote villages sustain themselves.  But there is much to do…so many to help. 

 Tonight their faces haunt me: the faces of the women we met who had been raped and still suffer physical and emotional damage and the faces of the engaging children with no education and no foreseeable future.  But tomorrow I will wake up reinvigorated and renewed.   I believe, because I must, that our visit here will lead us, Jewish World Watch, to a project that can begin to make some small difference in these lives.

As we drive through plush verdant fields and towering mountains on our way to Kigali and the Congo border, we pass men, women and children walking and riding bicycles.  The scenery is spectacular. Children wave with bright smiles.  The women carry baskets and packages on their heads.  Life seems easy, slow, peaceful. 

 This scene is in sharp contrast to the images we saw at the Rwandan genocide museum yesterday.  There we read about and saw pictures of such atrocities–the decimation of millions, mass killing of children, brutalization of women–such hatred, such loss.

 The museum also profiles some of the other genocides of the 20th century: Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, and Bosnia.  What is startling to me is that in every case there were warnings that a destruction of a people had started and in every case the world did not come forward until it was too late.

 But there was also hope in the museum.  The goal of the museum is “never again.  It hopes to educate so that these genocides will never again be permitted. 

 Rwanda is a country that is transforming itself, economically and politically.  It has had a stable government for many years and is trying to reinvent its tourism industry.  But most importantly, it is transforming itself on a spiritual and emotional level.  Rwandans are clearly engaged in a process of reconciliation and healing.  For example, there is a program whereby perpetrators are brought to justice.  In this case justice means being required to apologize to the families of their victims who are then empowered to forgive.  The hope is that with forgiveness comes change for future generations.

 I was struck by the lack of bitterness in the people we met and their sense of optimism for and hope in the future.  As we approach Congo, my apprehension rises.  My guess is that our visit in Congo will not engender such good feelings. Perhaps, however, we will be able to carry the hope we found here in Rwanda to our experiences in the Congo.  We shall see…

I am a public relations consultant and as such I am always the one pitching the story.  I am much more comfortable to stand in the background or sit on the sidelines promoting the good work and adventures of others.  It is strange to think that this time I am part of the story itself.

I am facing this trip with a myriad of conflicting emotions. I am daunted by the possibility of witnessing something so beyond my normal life. It seems strange to believe that I will really be in one of the places you watch on the news night after night. I have never been what you would call daring.

I feel humbled at the thought of listening to and learning from women who have experienced things so unthinkable and inhumane and have survived.  I have been reading volumes about the history and the situation in the Congo.  Even before I go, I have begun to look at my life differently.  So many things seem frivolous and insignificant. I can imagine how these things will seem once I have actually been there.

And I go with feelings of trepidation. I am bracing myself for stories and images that are more ugly and hateful than I can imagine. And I have to admit I am a little scared. This is not a 100% safe trip and I have a son who just turned 18. It’s hard to leave him behind.

And yet if Janice’s trip to Chad is an indication, I feel certain that I will come back invigorated by the commitment of the NGO workers and the humanity and life still in the Congolese women.