Back from their recent mission to the DRC, Janice Kamenir-Reznik and Naama Haviv will be speaking at the firm, with attending employees receiving .75 MCLE credits.

In the capacity of translator, I happened to be invited by the Jewish World Watch team on mission trip to Congo from 2^nd to 12^th November 2009. Though I am living in Rwanda now, I am an Eastern Congolese by birth, member of the Banyamulenge (ethnic Tutsi) community established in South Kivu with Bukavu as the Chief city.

Posted by Rev Isaiah M Seyeze, from Rwanda

Greetings JWW blog readers.  My name is Mike Ramsdell.  I have had the privilege of capturing this “Congo journey” in still and moving images.  I am pleased that Janice has asked me write a guest blog for two reasons.  The first is so I may shamelessly plug my most recent film – THE ANATOMY OF HATE: A DIALOGUE TO HOPE. (You can learn all about it at www.anatomyofhate.com)  The second, and admittedly more important reason, is to speak about the one thing my travel partners have not spoken of – themselves.

How strange to be out of Congo. As Isaiah, our incredible translator, and I walked across the border he showed me the river that marks the boundary between the two countries here: on one side, chaos – a young man shaking down every old lady carrying insanely heavy loads up the mountain side, everyone crowding the immigration window at once – on the other, relative order, neatly organized single-file lines, gas stations, power lines. How strange to be on that other side again.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.