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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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. 

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.