All That Is Bitter and Sweet (65 page)

His main work was in obstetrics, but every week he made home visits in the neighborhood to generate interest in modern family planning, birth spacing, and pre- and postnatal care. He told me that twenty to twenty-five new women showed up each month to access the clinic’s services. Although this number sounded small, he said it represented significant cultural change; men here generally want their women to produce as many babies as possible. Seeking to regulate their fertility was big news.

As he spoke, I tried to keep track of the litany of horrors he encountered in his daily work: The babies he delivered were often premature, and infant mortality here was the highest in the world. He treated women who were victims of sexual violence daily. Rape, including gang rape, has become an appallingly common occurrence in militia populated areas around Goma—meaning everywhere, as militias often roam. A frequent consequence of such rapes is fistula, when the wall between the rectum and vagina, or bladder and vagina, is torn open—and more. The doctor told us he had treated children, little girls as young as three and four, for rape-induced injuries. He also saw a lot of obstetric fistulas, caused when such tearing occurs in childbirth. It often happens because the mother herself is a child and her pelvis is not fully formed to accommodate childbirth, or as a result of other complications that in the United States would not have to cost a woman her health or her life. But when you try to give birth unattended, as 66 percent of African women do, fistula is a very real, life-destroying problem.

When I asked where this pervasive practice of rape came from, was it embedded in the culture, he said it was not cultural to begin with. He confirmed what I had heard from Zainab Salbi: Raping began here as a weapon of war, a way to dominate the enemy by terrorizing women, regarded as the backbone of the family, and destroying family structure. Now, gang rape was used by various armed groups, often on behalf of government and army officials and their proxies, in the artisanal mining of Congo’s extraordinary mineral wealth. The mass raping allowed groups to access the lucrative elements just under the soil without resistance, clearing out entire villages (hence the massive problem of forcibly displaced persons in eastern DRC). And now there had been violence and instability in this region for so long that war had become a way of life, and rape had become normalized—in the same way that poverty, lack of services, and hardship were the norm. Now, it was all generations knew.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Goma is a shithole. The stench is putrid. There is no sanitation. The water is unsafe. The rooms of the next clinic I visited were stuffed with malaria patients of all ages. They looked dazed and miserable, their bodies sagging, their eyelids heavy.

I sat on a few beds, making small talk about how to prevent the disease and, in my own hopeful way, introducing the possibility of each individual making a commitment to sleep under a
mousquetaire
—or mosquito net—at home.

It was a visiting day, so most patients had family in, grandmothers, other children, and siblings. Someone had brought a transistor radio that squawked out a tinny disco tune. My attention was drawn to one man who was feeding his small son. The boy was lethargic and mute, his nose ran, and an IV PICC line was taped awkwardly to his hand, which it dwarfed. The man fed him black beans from a tin plate, around which gnats flew.

This man was a hardened person, and our presence in the clinic that day seemed to irritate him. Unprompted, he started raging at the pregnant women who were given nets free of charge when they came to the clinic. The men still had to pay for theirs, although at highly subsidized prices. And the tough guy with the beans thought this was fundamentally wrong.

“Am I not a man?” he complained. “Should I not be given a net?”

I decided to engage him and try to lighten the mood with some playful questions. I asked him—in French—if nets were available in the private sector.

Yes, he said, but he had no money to buy them.

I scoffed. It is well documented that women in the developing world save and invest every pittance, while men waste money at shocking rates. This man, who was dressed in clean, matching, store-bought clothes, did not seem like a pauper.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I bet you have a little money from time to time for a smoke!”

“No!” he exclaimed.

“Beer, what about a glass of beer?”

Again, “No!”

“Ah, you have so much virtue! Such a clean life!” I said. “But … I bet from time to time you have a little money to spend on a woman!”

The room erupted into roars of laughter.

We debated the value of investing in prevention by spending half a franc on a net. “Wouldn’t it be wise,” I said, trying again, “to spend a little money for a net, so as to save all it costs when you’re sick? When the children are sick?” I gestured to the tiny, stifling room loaded with inert bodies. He had no response to that.

I didn’t think he had anything against buying products for himself. For example, he had a high-end mobile phone with the latest bells and whistles, to which he turned his attention when our conversation ended.

A lovely little girl sitting near the man’s son was eyeing me cautiously. She began to stare at me more openly, and I thought to take her picture and show her the image. Perhaps it would please her. I took my camera out of its bag and aimed it in her direction. The man leapt up in front of my camera, blocking me from photographing not just his boy, but everyone in the room.

I put the camera away but explained what I had meant to do and that it was a means of reaching out to a new friend. The man started mocking me. He took out his phone, scrolled through its zillion features, found the camera, and ran all over the room as if taking my picture with it. I hammed it up, posing from each angle to which he darted—voguing in the DRC. Everyone giggled, and the tension was slightly broken.

Finally it was time to go. I thanked everyone for the visit, wished them a good afternoon, a speedy recovery, and good health. I may have been wrong, but I walked to the car wondering not if but how many women and girls that man had raped.

Everywhere the car lurched, children with stunted growth stared. Once eye contact was made and a wave offered, their faces would joyously crinkle into smiles. They wore tattered Western clothes. I saw one little girl in a raggedy pink tutu. The sight of her still haunts me, the distorted Goma version of the precious little American girl who discovers ballet and won’t take her tutu off for weeks at a time.

Our next stop was the HEAL Africa hospital in downtown Goma, a 180-bed hospital that specializes in repairing fistulas and reconstructing the damaged genitals of rape survivors. There is so much demand—there are usually 150 women on the waiting list at any given time—that dozens have taken up residence outside and around the facility. I visited with some women who were squatting in the courtyard, washing their clothes or children in ubiquitous plastic tubs that serve many household purposes. Inside, patients were sitting blankly on beds. All looked unbelievably traumatized and dark. Most clutched babies, and a few had been made pregnant by their rapists. One was disfigured from having been burned, her otherwise night black skin raw and pink. A clutch of women in a doorway, mute and scared, stared at me when I wished them a good afternoon and said goodbye and thanked them for letting me visit.

It was like walking out of the gates of hell, and I was ashamed of myself for feeling relief at escaping, to put this place behind me and head for the Women for Women International compound.

In the midst of this ragged and seemingly doomed city is a walled courtyard filled with grass that is actually green, a garden that is actually tended, a building that is clean and proud. Zainab Salbi had notified the women in advance of my visit, and I was greeted with joyous clapping, singing, and ululating, the great African vocalization. I ran to the throng and threw myself at them, dancing and exclaiming my hellos.

We sat together for hours, each woman taking her turn to stand before her sisters and me, sharing her life story. They were each so incredibly beautiful! The eyes, the cheekbones, the lips—but mostly their spirits. They wore traditional, colorful dresses, and I so wanted to learn to wrap a foulard (head scarf) like that! WFWI teaches appressed, victimized, poor women to bathe, to feed themselves and in fact produce and sell food to others, to read, count, and write, and offers them parenting skills, social skills, money skills, a trade. Almost as important, it then gives them a network of sisters to rely on for support. Each woman is in contact with her American sponsor, who donates $27 per month—less than $1 a day—to pay for her counseling and training. All of the women had been in the program for about one year and would soon graduate. Having sponsored in WFWI for three years, I was familiar with the radical improvements self-described in a sister’s entry and exit interviews.

This is what their stories that afternoon sounded like to me:

I am an orphan, my husband was killed, my three sons were killed, I could not read, I could not write, I could not count, I lived like an animal, I have thirteen children, I have ten children, I am a widow, I am a refugee, I fled with nothing, not even a cup, I was half-mad, I was crazy, I was a corpse … People in the street were afraid of me, I begged, I scavenged in the dump, I treated my children like animals, my husband went to other women, my husband’s people pushed me from our home when he died, I was run off the land, I was cheated because I did not know how to sign my name, my children died, I knew nothing, I was filthy, I smelled bad, I came to this area to escape violence, I carried loads with my body to earn money for food, I starved, I had nowhere to go, I was dead, I was in a constant panic, I lived in terror, I abused everyone around me, I was in a rage, I was abandoned …

And then, the transfiguration:

I am the happiest woman in the world, I am so blessed, I know my rights, women have rights. I learned to read, I learned to write, I received a small loan to buy fabric, I sew now to earn a decent living, I can calculate my profit so I can manage my finances, I save a bit and I use my capital to expand my business, I learned about nutrition, I know how to eat, look at me I am clean, I use soap, I use lotion, my children eat three meals a day, my husband and I are partners now, I have a voice, I keep my pamphlet that describes my rights in my pocket, it is with me at all times, I was able to save enough to buy a small plot of land, I built my home, my soul opened up, a new woman was born inside of me …

Their sacred narratives were mind-blowing, each woman a Congolese Lazarus, nothing short of a miracle. As we listened, members of the group made clucking and groaning noises of recognition and would burst into applause at a particularly heightened expression of empowerment.

When the entire group finished, we talked in more detail about sexual exploitation, rape, HIV, malaria, and unsafe drinking water. Each of these women had had malaria, yet strangely, not a single one had slept under a net last night. Half had babies die from it. A few knew their HIV status, and oddly, only one was using modern birth control.

During this roundtable dialogue, I was able to complement WFWI’s extraordinary work by sharing reproductive health, safe water, and malaria lessons with them. We talked about injectable birth control as long-lasting and safe, but how they needed to use a condom each time to protect from HIV. Then I asked if they would be willing to make a commitment to buy long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets.

“Imagine how you would feel,” I said, “if you had to write your sponsor that you had missed your WFWI graduation with a case of malaria!” Each woman raised her hand and said she would begin sleeping under a net immediately.

These lessons shouldn’t be taken in any way as a criticism of WFWI’s life-changing and society-building work. They do so much in such extreme circumstances. But I think it takes all NGOs working in partnership to provide a complete solution to the exceedingly complex and varied series of life-challenging problems that confront the poor.

After our session, we went back on that lush, soft grass for more dancing, clapping, hugging, and smiling. At the very end, I led a passionate salute to Zainab Salbi. Her name rang through the air in a series of mirthful waves, sung by beautiful, clean, fresh-smelling, literate, skilled, empowered standing-tall Congolese women!