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.

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.

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.

Yesterday I felt completely engulfed by sadness. I wrote a blog entry that I will not post with you now, crushed by what I had seen and heard during a long day visiting clinics with International Medical Corps.

I had hoped that when I came here, I would be able to focus on the stories of survivors, the stories of strength and resolve. But I realize that I have fallen prey to reducing the people of Congo to their victimhood. I have given in to the faces of the starving children, the raped and burned women. I think anyone would have.

It is true that Congo is a place of brutality and atrocity. But it is not the only truth.

I have seen pain – in the eyes of hundreds of malnourished children, their bellies swollen and their hair turning orange, their mothers desperately wanting to return home and make a life for themselves and their babies away from the clamor of the IDP camp. But I have also seen healing, the kindness and warmth of Mama Gisele, the head nurse at the IDP camp’s clinic, who with tenderness and concern in her eyes shows us where children are fed, where women and girls are counseled. She tells us about doing home visits for girls that have been victims of sexual violence, trying to get to them within 72 hours so that pregnancy and HIV infection can be prevented. She and her team of nurses – all Congolese, mostly female – counsel families to ease their fears and educate them not to reject their daughters, wives and sisters that have already been violated once, and do not need more violation.

I have seen destruction – of a young teenage girl who had been recently raped, lying alone in her bed at one of the clinics we visited. But I have also seen incredible strength and recovery – of mothers collecting as associations, helping each other pay for prenatal and maternity care. Of a little girl (a rape survivor herself) who told our friend Christine, when she had lost all faith in her work caring for victims of sexual violence, that she needed to remember that even when it was cloudy, there were always stars in the night sky – so too with God.

I have seen atrocities that have made me doubt there could possibly be a higher power – women broken and destroyed, their communities destroyed with them, their children displaced, growing up without a home, raised in exile and resentment. But I have also seen amazing faith – in the beautiful children in bright yellow “Love Not War” t-shirts, singing praise with arms outstretched to God. In the women and men who have been preyed upon by armed groups time and time again, that nevertheless thank God and heaven for the blessings that they do have, the food around their table and the community around their hearts. In the grace that these same men and women show us, we offer them our prayers, from our hearts to their community.

The people of Congo are not solely victims – you and I have to break out of this routine, of pain and destruction and despair. They are survivors. The people of Congo are its greatest resource. They are not waiting for us to speak for them – they need us to speak with them, in a strong, unified, amplified voice.

I have been thinking during the last four days about the definition of a woman of valor, something we talk about in our Jewish tradition. Our time in the Congo has demonstrated to me, once again, the anomalies of life on the African continent. This is my sixth visit to Africa but only my first to the Congo.  The experience has, as previously reflected, demonstrated the heights to which a visit to Africa can take a casual visitor – the extraordinary scenery and indomitable spirit of the people; but also demonstrates the depths of despair which a visit to Africa can occasion.

 This afternoon following a short visit to a camp for Congolese displaced by the war, I watched the emotional impact on my three companions on this extraordinary visit. They were overcome by the sense of hopelessness and despair faced by over 3000 people living in squalor and disease. Together we have gone from the heights to the depths that are Africa.

On Friday Janice had lit the Shabbas candles and said the prayer in the presence of our Christian hosts and their friends. Most had spent years in the Congo as doctors or nurses or other critical professions in a nation lacking the basic expertise among their own nationals. What makes a women spend twenty years creating a school of nursing in the Congo? Why would another from Great Britain create with her Congolese husband a hospital and service center for patients often at risk of death from normally benign diseases ? These are just two of the women of valor that we have been privileged to meet.

Of course, most of the women of valor are themselves Congolese born. Their commitment to their nation and the welfare of its people are reflected each day. The young physician who is responsible for treating patients with the HIV virus, many with full blown AIDS, often due to sexual violence, was a no nonsense example of the strength of women here.

Listening to two women, the victims of horrible atrocities, tell their tragic stories of abuse has been shared by my fellow travelers in their blog. But I watched the counselor, who provides psychosocial support to a woman beaten, raped, horribly scarred by a conscious effort to burn her alive, and left for dead, quietly sit and hold the hand of her young “client”.  This too is a woman of valor who daily is a human life support to those who have suffered beyond anything experienced by any of us.

And there is the director of operations at one of the human service agencies providing a range of care for men, women and children who would never survive the cruelties of this place without that lifeline. This morning she sat in front of me in a church service we were invited to attend. It was a joyous morning where our Jewish delegation was welcomed and the congregation expressed their thanks in song and dance for the small things which most of us take for granted. I watched her smile broadly at the rows of young children sharing plastic chairs as their mothers celebrated life. These children  of serious ill and abused mothers in her charge are a symbol of her daily work.

Among others in attendance was her colleague who took us out to a village twenty miles outside of the city in which we are staying. This woman of valor introduced us to women in a safe house, who through her efforts have been removed from abusive environments. Additionally she introduced us to midwives, who in a creative project have started an agricultural collective for expectant mothers so they could receive proper medical care and a degree of independence in a society in which women are often objects for abuse. Watching her and the women she has mobilized it is hard not to be moved by these women of valor.

Finally as we spent another exhausting day traveling to distant places on non-existent roads in often dangerous areas due to the constant state of war, I could not help but be moved by the women from Jewish World Watch who are leading this extraordinary journey: Janice, Naama and Diana. Our community is blessed to have women of valor, who are prepared to take the time to come to this faraway and sad land to learn and to meet their Congolese counterparts and who are determined to return to Los Angles to mobilize our community to action on behalf of the women of the Congo.

When your translator is in tears, you know you’re in trouble.

This morning we met with two women, both of them survivors of rape. Both captured and violated by the Interahamwe – the FDLR militia, some of whom are former perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. One woman was pregnant – she said that she had accepted the situation, but it didn’t look like acceptance in her eyes. The other woman had lost her child, and had sustained burns over her entire body – her community had rejected her.

I’ve never felt more overwhelmed or hopeless, and I’m just an observer. To be honest with you, I haven’t really known how to unpack these last few days – the stories we’ve heard are unbearable. They shouldn’t be true. They should be fiction, nightmares. What do you do with this knowledge? What can you possibly do to help, to repair?

After our meeting, our team stepped out into the sunshine in front of Heal Africa’s Jubilee Center. We waited for our truck to get gassed up for our next trip out. We struggled with our emotions.

And then a man came up to talk with us, to let us know that he’d been injured in the war. Running from the Interahamwe as well, he had joined others in a lorry fleeing the village. The lorry’s brakes failed, it flipped, and they were thrown from the vehicle. Some men were crushed by the lorry itself as it rolled down the hill – this man was lucky enough to survive with two broken hands – amputated. I thought I would feel more sadness from his story, that there would be nothing but sadness in this place. I wondered again how we would bear this.

But this man is no victim – he is a survivor, in the truest sense of the word. He has two prosthetics, and he makes his living creating beautiful paintings. With no hands, he still finds the will and the way to paint, and to create beauty in his world.

Today we also met women from the Heal Africa Safe Motherhood project – women who have come together in community associations to ensure that each of them can afford quality prenatal care and reduce their risk during childbirth. They organize education about childbirth and family planning; the women learn accounting and run small businesses or cultivate fields as a collective. They manage their own money; they take care of each other:  the collective helps to care for each woman’s needs during childbirth and maternity. Their husbands help – but the women are in charge. The program is slowly changing the culture, showing that women are strong and powerful contributors to the family and household. They’re gaining respect. They’re making a difference.

This is why tonight, despite this morning’s difficult conversations, I feel optimistic. The women – and yes, also the men – of Congo are strong. They are powerful. And they have the capacity to make incredible change in this place. While people here may need tools and skill-building, they don’t need us to speak for them or work for them – they need us to join with them to make real and effective change.

Today, after meeting Mama Annie and Mama Gilberte, who run the Safe Motherhood project – I feel hope.  I think we can do this.

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.

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.

Yesterday, at the Goma border crossing, a local Congolese official told our translator that she wanted to go through our luggage. We knew it was a shakedown, but wanted to avoid any trouble. Isaiah talked to her to try to smooth things over, so that she would let it go. And she told him, “Isaiah, please, make me feel better now.”

 Making her feel better cost $10 – which seemed a small price to pay to avoid letting a corrupt official get a closer look at our luggage. And yesterday I thought it was actually kind of funny, the language she used: “make me feel better now.”

 But that was yesterday.

 Today, I met a four-year-old rape victim. That sentence shouldn’t even exist.

 And now I’m angry. At the self-serving official using her position to line her pockets, despite people all around her desperately trying to eke out a living in a country where their government has abandoned them. At the fact that not two minutes away from here there is a young man at the Heal Africa hospital with a cast up to his chest after being shot in Masisi last year – a wound that he could have just as easily sustained in an attack by the Congolese army as by another militia. And at the fact that there is a little girl, not two years older than my sweet little niece, whose body and soul has already been ripped apart.

 And for what? So that Congolese officials, armed groups, foreign governments and anyone else that has the smallest chance of exerting any power can continue to feed off the people of Congo? So that they can continue to sap the resources of this land, drain the strength and character of its people, destroy the potential of this incredible country?

 So that they can continue to “feel better?”

 Today I met a four-year-old rape victim. And I don’t want to hear it anymore. I don’t want to listen to excuses about how overwhelming it is, how complex or seemingly insurmountable. I don’t want to reflect.

 I want to act.

 And I want you to act, too.

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