I returned home less than 40 hours ago.  Images of Congo are still fresh in my mind: the children slaving in the Bunia goldmine, the rape victim who told us how her captors held her down in the field by driving a stake through her foot. I am driving to Wildwood school to report on our trip and our work.  I am still jetlagged; still, in many ways, dazed from the dramatic contrast between my life and theirs.  The images in my mind dance back and forth between the various people we met and the stories they told us.

There was the young 18 year old youngster in Bukavu, an orphan, who told us of the months he served as a child soldier; he recounted stories of his “kills” as if he were an old man talking about someone else’s life.  He told us about his being rescued and about how he is now being trained to support himself.  He told us how he dreams of finding a wife and starting a family. There was the beautiful young 22 year old girl next to him who told us of the years she was held captive as a sex slave.  She told us of her ultimate, daring escape from the clutches of the militia and of her days hiding in the forest “like a wild woman.”  She then told us of the local Congolese organization that took her in, 7 months pregnant, fed her, cared for her, loved her, and sent her to school.  She is now studying to be a lawyer; her goal is to represent women who are former sex slaves to pursue their rights and remedies.

I drove up to Wildwood, not really knowing what I was going to say and uncertain whose story I would tell.  Should I tell them about the depth of the suffering?  Will they be able to hear the message at 8 in the morning?  Would it be too much for them to bear?

The hour with the students passed; they listened in utter silence as I told the stories of the places we had been and of the people we met.  The students stayed after the bell rang and asked intelligent, sensitive questions; questions asked by people who really care…people who will make a difference.  They took the Conflict Mineral petitions and resolved to get them signed; they took the forms to register to participate in the Walk Against Genocide.

As I left Wildwood, I no longer felt dazed, and even my jetlag had subsided.  I felt re-grounded here at home, and I felt rededicated, yet again, to the mission of Jewish World Watch and the critical vitality and significance of the work we do.  This journey has connected the lives, suffering and aspirations of the people of Eastern Congo to our Jewish community.  The empathy which we seek to awaken in our community “here” to what we saw “over there” is our primary objective and our reason for existence; empathy is the first, and essential, step to helping to bring change to these regions where killers of humanity seek to destroy all that is good and all that is peaceful.  We know what those killers look like, as we have seen them time an again throughout history.

We say each Passover, “In every generation it is upon us to feel as if we, ourselves, were slaves in Egypt…”  From our slavery in Egypt, to our expulsion from Spain, to the ovens of Auschwitz, to our struggle for freedom from Soviet Russia; these are all ways in which we have been reminded of the face of those who seek destruction and of the need to continuously pursue freedom and justice.  Our Passover reminder extends, of course, not only to our freedom, but that of all of humanity.  The divine vision is not a world where Jews are free, but is a vision where all of humanity is free and living in peaceful harmony.  This is the vision that propels Jewish World Watch; and Passover is an especially apt time to focus on that vision and take special steps in pursuit of that dream.

Dr. Mukwege is the great Congolese surgeon who performs or oversees all rape-repair and fistula surgeries in the South Kivu province; we had the privilege of meeting with Dr. Mukwege on both of our trips to Bukavu.  Last week, speaking of his work with the rape victims, Dr. Mukwege said, “If we have saved one life here, we feel is as if we have saved the entire world.”  The words shocked Tzivia and me, as it was a verbatim quote from the Talmud, which Dr. Mukwege has never read and of which he is probably completely unfamiliar.  Dr. Mukwege is right, and the rabbis who wrote the Talmud articulated for us what they hoped would become intuitive to those who pursue the lessons of our Torah.

I wish you a wonderful Passover, full of conversations of our past and our present struggles to help shape a world which is closer to the image envisioned by its Creator.

Ten days ago we arrived in Kigali with trepidation and expectation.  It seems like a day or two ago in some ways; yet in other ways it seems like a lifetime ago.

Today we drove across the entire country of Rwanda—from Bukavu at the Congo-Rwanda border to Kigali.  It took almost 8 hours.  The countryside is completely gorgeous.  But I was struck by how different Rwanda looked to me today than it did when we stopped here en route to Congo.  Once you have seen girls and women brutalized by repeated gang rapes, or children with swollen bellies and infected watering eyes, men full of shame for having failed to protect their wives and daughters,  widows carrying hundreds of pounds of charcoal or produce in massive bundles on their backs, strapped around their foreheads, bent over as they climb up and down the mountainous terrain to sell just enough to put a totally inadequate amount of food into the mouths of her children – once you have seen those things everything looks different.

The other day we were at the famous Panzi hospital in Bukavu; Panzi is the hospital which treats the massive majority of the most brutally raped rape victims in Eastern Congo.  Panzi receives an average of 300 rape victims each month. We had the honor of meeting with Dr. Mukwege, the surgeon who runs the hospital and who, with love, sensitivity and enormous skill, does everything that is humanly possible to put the women’s bodies back together.  Dr. Mukwege told us, with tears in his eyes, about the destruction and devastation he sees every day.  It is almost impossible for me to write about what he sees…what we saw…it is unfathomable…it is unspeakable.

But, we have no options.  We must fathom the unfathomable and speak the unspeakable.  If the women of the Congo must endure the brutality, and if Dr. Mukwege must confront these ravaged women each and every day and reassemble bodies which have been so hatefully and brutally destroyed, then how can we not speak?  How could any person with even a small modicum of humanity not be outraged and stirred to action to learn that men threw acid into a woman’s body, destroying that very part of a woman that was intended to bring forth life?  How could anyone with a conscience not be impelled to act when he hears about a woman whose insides were decimated by sticks and prods?

We don’t want to speak these things.  We don’t want to hear these things.  It’s too terrible and too sad and too distracting to our lives.  But, how can we pretend we do not know when we know?

What John, Diana, Naama and I experienced over the last ten days has been life changing.  None of us will ever forget the women we met.  We will remember the faces of the children and we will remember the incredible humanity we found as well.  We return to Los Angeles in 24 hours.  We do not return depressed by these images.  We do not return in despair.  We do not return with lost faith in humanity.  No, we return to you.  We return to the warm embrace of our families and loved ones.  And, we return to our incredible community of people of conscience who know that we must mobilize into action.  We know this because lives depend upon our actions, and our humanity gives us no choice.

We are taken by convoy on an impossible 3 hour drive, high up in the mountains where the Congolese Tutsis control the terrain.  The “roads” are indescribable.  Half the time our vehicle is gliding through the mud and the other half it feels as if it is almost on its side.  Torrential rains fall, the wheels of our Land Rover spin in the mud at one moment and get caught in a crevasse of the boulders that purport to be part of the roadway.  When Naama and I are not holding each other for dear life (no fear of violence, just of the lack of infrastructure that would have provided roads suitable for driving—but, it is definitely starting to feel like the violence and infrastructure failure are two sides of a single coin) we look out of the windows to see magnificent mountains, valleys and rivers which give new definition to the word “green.”  It’s Maui on steroids.

 When we arrive at the International Medical Corps clinic in Kausa, a village  where 17,000 Congolese Tutsis live and control the land, John, Diana, Naama and I were stunned by many things. First, we were stunned that we had safely arrived.  (To myself I did say a sort of “shehechiyanu” blessing thanking whatever spirit had safely guided our drive.)  We were stunned by the torrential rains and by the sheer beauty of the cliffs.  We were stunned by the welcome speech which Sebastian, the IMC clinic director gave—he welcomed us with a booming voice, words rehearsed, as if he was giving a speech in front of the United Nations to dignitaries who were powerful enough to change the very direction the earth is spinning.  And then after Sebastian led us to the birthing room where two women had just given birth, we were once again stunned to find out that nearby lay a young teenage girl who had been raped just a few hours earlier.  We do not feel prepared or equipped to speak to this young woman lying just behind the door. They open the door and the beds in the small room are full—one with a young woman who laid silently, her head covered under a blanket.  Next to her lay a woman who had been severely beaten by her husband, and in the middle was a woman and her very young baby—something about rectal bleeding…we did not ask.  We then proceed to the small covered porch where a hundred or more male villagers and their village dignitaries are seated to receive us.  Several of them give nice speeches about how grateful they are to IMC and how without IMC they would have no care at all for their people.  Now they have nurses, some very basic medicines, a few hospital beds and a birthing room. 

 They are right to be grateful to IMC—it is a miracle, given the terrain, the political climate, the war, the weather, and so many other variables, that IMC has actually built and staffed a medical clinic on this remote cliff.  I suspect that they might not even realize how lucky they are to have people with the extraordinary humanity and quality of Giorgio, head of the IMC Eastern Congo team and Lorenzo, the Projects Manager for this and other clinics, living here and working here and risking their lives here to bring services to remote places like this

 I am then, as I am so often on this trip, invited to say some words and to offer some prayers or thoughts.  So, I thank them for welcoming us and agreed with them that they should feel gratitude to be working with IMC and its spectacular staff.  I wish them peace.  Then, after I completed my 2-minute “thank you for inviting us” speech, I felt a rage building inside of me.  I had already relinquished the floor, but I ask if I could address the community one more time.  I am not quite sure what I am going to say, or if it is even appropriate for me to express myself in this context, but I decide that my conscience requires me to say something honest to these men in light of everything we have seen over the past four days, and specifically, what we had seen 2 minutes before in the room right next to the porch on which these men comfortably sat.

 I am so shaken as I speak, that I do not have full recollection of what exactly I said, but it went something like this:  “We congratulate your community on the birth of the new beautiful babies, and we share your joy in this gift of life.  But, we cannot leave this place without expressing our profound sadness about the violence being done to the women in this community.  The tragedies which lay before your community and your country will not be solved by foreign relief workers or donors alone; these problems can only be solved if the people of your village are willing to take responsibility for your actions and make violence unacceptable amongst yourselves.  When the day comes that your community wants to roll up its sleeves and confront the issue of gender based violence and wants to protect rather than victimize the women, we will be first in line to forge a three way partnership between IMC, the Kausa community and Jewish World Watch.”  

 I simply could not ignore the culture of rape and violence and their responsibility for the 13-year old rape victim and all of the others.

 I am so grateful for the people at IMC and those at Heal Africa, and those at all of the other NGOs who have the humanity and courage to be here every day, exposing themselves to the sadness, grief, and disease.  I am also so grateful to my dear travel mates for agreeing to make this very difficult and trying journey.  Diana, Naama and John are amazing human beings, each of whom is guided by an oversized heart and a supersized conscience.  I am also incredibly grateful to YOU, the Jewish World Watch constituency, which has enabled us to fulfill the lessons of our rabbis and our Torah by not standing idly by while the innocent are destroyed.

As she entered the room, my eyes froze on her scarred and disfigured face.  Skin melted like a plastic mask.  I winced and a pain shot through my heart.  I instructed my eyes to move off of her face; but where should they go?  On their own, my eyes darted to her arms bound in gauze, and then to her hands, charred, de-pigmented.  What should I do with my eyes?  I forced them to move away from her damaged parts.  My heart was racing.  I closed my eyes for a moment, and when they reopened, I saw it there, right in front of me.  She was wearing my favourite blouse. It was Carole Little’s collection from 1982, the year I graduated law school.  I bought a whole collection of lawyer clothes.  And then, a decade or more later, when shoulder pads were passé, I donated the blouse (and the suit that it matched) to some rummage sale.  Funny, I have thought of that blouse on many occasions.  I loved the wide shoulder pads, the floral design and the beautiful rust and red tone colors. I never thought I would see that blouse again … and now, here it was sitting in front of me, worn by Renee, a woman about whom I knew nothing, yet I thought I could tell almost everything just from looking at her face.

Renee told us of the day in 2005 that the Interahamwe militia came into her village, guns blazing, entering home after home gang raping the women and setting the houses ablaze.  They entered her home and threw her crying baby against the wall.  Renee was then raped sequentially by seven men while her 1 ½ year old lay motionless on the floor and her 5 year old son stood in the corner.  After the rapes she gathered her babies and hid under the bed hoping that the nightmare would end.  She then smelled fire and saw that her home was ablaze. She became separated from her children in the frenzy of the burning village.  It took years for her to find out that her baby was dead and that her older son was alive and in her village. This is just the beginning of her story.

Her nightmare continued as she ran from the village.  Her body burned to a crisp, her organs destroyed from the rapes, yet finding no one who would help her or take her in, as she was suspected of being Interahamwe.  This wandering, unaided, went on for months and months, interrupted by only occasional acts of mercy, which kept her alive.  Often she was given food, but had no use of her hands so she was starving.  She could find no one to put the food into her mouth.  Once she tried unsuccessfully to kill herself, wishing nothing but to end her misery.  Then, miraculously, Renee was guided to the Heal Africa Hospital where she has lived for the past 4 years, enduring more than 7 surgeries for her burns and fistula repair.  She expresses her profound gratitude to Heal Africa because she is better now – now she can use her hands.  She even hopes that one day she can go back to her village.

We cried together; there was nothing either she or we had to give at that moment, but tears.  The tears were unending and came from the most sorrowful place where only despair resides.  After an hour of sitting together, my swollen eyes settled comfortably on Renee’s face, which I now found to be quite beautiful.  My life and Renee’s are as distant as two women’s lives could be.   Two lives, so different…wearing the same blouse at different times and in such different places.

For nine years Mama Francine (for her safety I cannot reveal her true name) has lived in the safe house in a remote and isolated area outside of Goma.  For six years before that she lived at a hospital and endured surgery after surgery to repair the damage to her body caused by violent rape.  Even six surgeries could not repair Mama Francine’s body.  “She leaks” the translator explained to us.  She is in constant pain. She has not returned to her village since she was raped 15 years ago because after the rape, she was no longer welcome in her village.  For 15 years she has not seen her children because after the rape, she was no longer accepted by her family.  Mama Francine’s only connection with her family is Sabar, her granddaughter.  When I asked Mama if she’s seen her daughter in all these years, she responded, “They sent Sabar to me”.

 A dozen women, all rape victims, live the lonely days of their lives together at the “safe house” with their new family, a family borne of tragedy and circumstance. Their lives are bound together by solitude, shame, rejection, sorrow, boredom and loss. They wash their clothes, they prepare their food, they tend to their children, and no doubt, they silently relive their horrors of their past and dream of their former families and of the lives that could have been.  And they pray with what appeared to me to be passionate devotion to a loving God. 

 There is no relief here from what I would call the living hell in which so many of the people we met today live.  I am overwhelmed by sorrow and cannot imagine what additional sadness we will confront for the next seven days.

 Before we said goodbye to Mama Francine and the other women, I asked if we could join hands and pray together. While I wished that Rabbi Schulweis could have been here to offer one of his brilliant and eloquent blessings, since he wasn’t, I offered a blessing with him in mind.  With the women of the safe house, we prayed together for the healing of their bodies.  We prayed for the restoration of their health and we prayed for the day when women would be free of abuse and violence.  We prayed for the day that these women would be welcomed by their families and would return to their villages.  At our guest house tonight I lit Shabbat candles, and as I did, I  prayed again for Mama Francine, for all of the women, and for us.  Amen

I met Ingrid in person in April, 2007 when she came to California for her admissions interview at Stanford University.  At the time, Ingrid was 19 years old.  But I had actually seen Ingrid a few years before…when as a young teenager she was prominently featured in a documentary film (brilliantly produced by Global Nomads) about the Rwandan genocide.  In the film, Ingrid told the story of the day her mother, Jeanne Niyimurora, father, Mbonigaba Charles, and brother, Inama Ireni, were murdered by a Hutu neighbor.  Ingrid was only 6 or 7 at the time, but her personal story and her description of the Rwandan genocide wrenched my heart and seared my soul.  I had no idea at the time that I saw the documentary that only a few years later, Ingrid would participate in our family’s Passover seder; and, I certainly had no idea that I would ever be in a position to place a bouquet of lilies (Ingrid’s mom’s favorite flower) at a mass grave site in Kigali in which lie Ingrid’s mother’s remains.  Today I was blessed with the opportunity to do just that.

We entered the Rwandan genocide memorial museum today with the primary purpose of paying tribute to the victims –to dignify and sanctify the memories of the more than 1 million Rwandan Tutsis who fell prey to senseless hate and division.  We also went to the memorial museum to try to understand why and how this genocide happened.  The museum was incredible in every respect.  Testimonials from witnesses, survivors, perpetrators and relatives were presented with sensitivity and brilliance.  Historical and political overview and analyses were clearly articulated and thoughtfully presented.  The theory and practice of propaganda campaigns were revealed, and all of the other genocides of the 20^th century were thoroughly presented, analyzed and memorialized.  It was truly a superb museum, as evocative as the United States Holocaust Museum, if only on a somewhat more modest scale.

We spent hours at the museum, and hours afterwards processing our experience with our Rwandan guides and friends.  We tried to understand how bad people can manufacture hate and turn otherwise God-fearing and law-abiding citizens into mass murderers.  We tried to wrap our arms around the notions of reconciliation and forgiveness.  We compared and contrasted the Holocaust with the Rwandan genocide, theorizing at length about the different religious, emotional, social and political grieving experiences of Jewish and Tutsi genocide survivors.   At the end of the day, I am left feeling (once again—as I did in connection with Darfur) a tremendous sense of love, compassion, intimacy and grief for a people whom I might otherwise conclude were vastly different from me.

As I placed the flowers at the mass grave site today, I cried for Ingrid, for her mother, her father, her brother, her cousins, her aunts and uncles.  I cried for the people of Rwanda–the victims, the survivors; I even cried for the perpetrators.  As we huddled together to honor Ingrid’s family, we tried to find a blessing in the midst of the bones and blood and ashes on which we were standing.  It was very difficult.  But, in the end, we felt that we were blessed to be here representing the Jewish community and to give honor to the victims of this genocide.  We felt blessed to be able to honor the memory of Ingrid’s family.  We felt blessed to have Jewish World Watch through which we can help build the anti-genocide movement that will move the world towards finding genocide intolerable.  We also felt it was a blessing to have the people of Rwanda confront their crimes and engage in the painstaking and seemingly impossible task of reconciliation and forgiveness.  And, we also knew that above all, Ingrid is the ultimate blessing who brings meaning, brilliance and immortality to the lives of her mother and father.  To Ingrid and to the thousands of other of beautiful children who were orphaned during this genocide, your lives are blessed and your parents’ legacy is surely guaranteed—through you.

Tomorrow we cross in to Congo and will surely meet families who have been devastated by the ongoing atrocities there.  We will be exploring ways for Jewish World Watch to not only lay a wreath but to help ameliorate the suffering of Congolese survivors.

It took us 30 hours from the time we departed from Los Angeles to when we arrived in Kigali, Rwanda. We spent the evening visiting with our new Rwandan friends who will be our guides and translators   While we have not yet seen Kigali in the daytime, from our conversations tonight and by the looks of our brand new hotel, (which has free wireless, a swimming pool befitting a Hawaiian resort, a workout room, and more), Rwanda is working diligently on its tourism, its urban development, and on its economy.  And, of course, wants desperately to create an all time record for post genocide reconciliation.  We will learn much more tomorrow as we visit the genocide memorial. 

 I have the question lingering in my mind about the small village “justice courts” by which genocide perpetrators are supposed to seek direct forgiveness from the mother whose baby he killed or from the husband whose entire family he destroyed.  When almost one million were slaughtered in 100 days, can an apology assuage the pain and reduce the rage?  I know that our day tomorrow will give me lots more to think of on this theme.

In just a few hours our small group representing Jewish World Watch leaves for the Eastern Congo. Every day for the last week, my sisters each call me and ask me if I feel that going to the Congo is really necessary.  My parents and my in-laws ask me on a daily basis if there is anything they could say to persuade me to cancel the trip.  Of course, my husband and children have demonstrated great respect for my decision to go, but I know how anxious they are for the trip to be over and for me to be safely back home. I am definitely apprehensive; how could I not be!  Actually, this is not a trip that I really want to take.  Even as an “adventure”, this trip falls short. (Would a trip in 1940 to a concentration camp in Poland or Germany be considered an adventure?) Rather, this is a trip of duty.  This is a trip that tests the very principle on which Jewish World Watch was formed; and, for me, this is a trip that tests my commitment to that principle.

Two years ago when I traveled (with Rachel Andres, Director of the JWW Solar Cooker Project and Tzivia Schwartz Getzug, JWW Executive Director) to the Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, I did not know what to expect.  In fact, in the midst of that trip, there were several occasions when privately I asked myself if I would have traveled to the refugee camps had I known of the dangers and of the depths of sadness and tragedy we would be forced to confront head on? Once was when we were being whisked from the UN compound in Abeche, Chad, to a “safer place” in the midst of a failed coup attempt.  Another occasion was when we sat for hours inside a sweltering grounded airplane on some God forsaken air strip waiting for a local warlord and his entourage to arrive  (they ultimately sauntered on board with their bare chests, gold chains, red berets and fully loaded assault rifles – so much for TSA rules in Chad!). And, of course I asked myself this question when we sat for hours with women in the camps listening to the horrific tales of brutality, torture and death.  I never had to answer that question…until now.

I know about the dangers in Eastern Congo.  I know about the lawlessness and about the militias.  I know about the violence, killings and massive rapes.  While we have taken all precautions to ensure our safety, the facts are inescapable.  In four days, we are going into an area that has been at the epicenter of the murder of almost 6 million people over the last several years and the locale of hundreds of thousands of devastating rapes.  This trip will be very difficult.  It will be very dangerous.  It will be very sad.    But, if Jewish World Watch as an organization, and if I, as an individual, intend on mobilizing against these horrors with the greatest possible effectiveness, as our JWW mission requires that we do, we have no choice.  We must go and witness Congo first hand.  We must be willing to bear witness.  We must be willing to listen to the voices of the women who have suffered.  We must be willing to look into the eyes of the children who have been orphaned.  We must be willing to cry with those who were forced to watch as their children were killed and we must be willing to embrace those whose lives have been shattered by unspeakable acts.

My husband’s parents are survivors of the Holocaust.  I have spoken with hundreds of survivors in my life.  One of the paramount lessons I have learned from these survivors, is that their greatest sadness and despair came from their complete and total sense of aloneness; a sense that they had been abandoned by the entire world who kept silent, thereby allowing 6 million Jewish souls to be burned, starved, shot, and buried alive.

There is no doubt that I am apprehensive as we ready ourselves to leave for Congo.  But, I also feel incredibly blessed and fortunate to be able to do what I am doing. I know that through this trip we will help give birth to our JWW “Congo Now!” campaign, which will educate and mobilize tens of thousands of people to decry the horrors in Congo, just as we continue to successfully educateand activate the community to decry the genocide in Darfur.  I know that through this trip we will find incredible projects to fund and organizations to support, which will alleviate the suffering of the victims of this horrible debacle.  I am moved by what I learned from survivors of the Holocaust and dedicate this trip to the memory of the 6 million who died alone, in a silent world where far too few were watching.  How blessed are we, that we have the awareness and the capacity to do what we are about to do.