All That Is Bitter and Sweet (67 page)
As we made our way back to the car through people begging for food and money, I caught the eye of a young girl who had drunk a glass of PUR. We shared a smile and a thumbs-up. She was beaming.
That night I was meditating, and before I knew it, I was sucked into a vision:
I was in dark water. I was pressed deeper into the water, into a chute, and sent downward and under. When I came up for air, I discovered I was in a cave with a very low ceiling. The water was up to my chin. The rock above me pressed onto my head. There were decreasing centimeters in which to breathe. I tried to move forward, backward, sideways, every which way, precariously maintaining my nose just above the water in order to survive, looking for a way out. There was none, the ceiling was too low, the water too high, the margin for error too tiny.
I was suffocating, and I had to snap myself out of it.
It doesn’t take Jung to figure out what the vision meant. One is born into it—the water and the cave. The structural factors that conspire against our survival press down on us and box us in. In Congo, the opportunity—the ceiling—is low: corrupt government, failed institutions, an army that harms rather than protects, armed militias wantonly roving, no infrastructure, no public works, low educational and health outcomes, stifling poverty, family and cultural systems destroyed. And the ability to change it is confined to the desperate struggle to actually stay alive, to keep one’s head barely above water.
There was a reception at the home of the fabulous U.S. ambassador, Bill Garvelink, a former executive at USAID and an expert in complex emergencies and disaster assistance. Bill and his wife, Linda, were wonderfully gracious; they even had a piece of cake and a candle to celebrate Papa Jack’s birthday. They made me feel at home, reminding me that their house was supported by my tax dollars, so I believed them. After playing tennis with Bill, I stole a moment in the yard lit by oil torches, walking in the soft, barefoot-worthy grass, with the call of frogs and insects wafting through the lush Congolese air. The great river was mere feet away; I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it moving through the night. Africa. Wow. I’ll never be over it.
After the introductions and speeches ended, I sat down with the ambassador to hear his take on the condition of the country. In particular, he described the critical importance of the $300 million a year the United States government spends in Congo (a figure that was recently cut by a third). We talked at length about the depth of nothingness here, the utter lack of everything. USAID buys pens and paper for ministerial offices, supplies some books and computers for them and the university. Otherwise, the students and teachers share books, and only from time to time do they have access to a Xerox machine to make copies to spread around. He said all the natural wealth, which is vast, leaves this country, either illegally via permeable borders into the surrounding countries (including Rwanda, which President Kagame and I bicker about—he insists Rwanda has its own minerals, identifiable through their higher quality) or through mining corporations, many of them American, which do not pay one red cent in taxes to the Congolese government. It is utterly grotesque. One of the many consequences of this is that the government’s annual budget for DRC is $3 billion, about equal to the endowment of Vanderbilt University.
I saw this paltry budget in action the next day when I met the minister of gender, family, and children, Philomène Omatuku Atshakawo Akatshi. When we arrived at the minister’s office, the staff was in a tizzy because the electricity was out. The windows were thrown open, and the street noise billowed up to where we sat. There was only one vintage computer to be seen, but the minister had spruced up her offices with electric blue drapes, a powder blue seating arrangement, and an arrangement of plastic blue flowers as a centerpiece.
Minister Philomène’s lovely floor-length Congolese dress was made out of fabric printed with women’s empowerment slogans. She is a gorgeous woman, one of those nerdy engineering types (which she is) you just know is trying to tone down her beauty with her professional demeanor. She gave me an exceedingly brilliant and articulate presentation on the status of girls and women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, I can condense the message into one sentence: The budget this year of the minister of gender is exactly $0.0 Zero. Zilch. Nil. That is the state of things here.
In talking about what needs to be done, she was equally clear. Victims of rape and sexual violence need to know how and where to receive help. The help needs to be psychosocial and physical. They need to be destigmatized so they can return to their homes, extended families, communities, schools. They need microfinancing and savings support to start small businesses (she wanted to endow a bank with $5 million in assets for tiny loans to raped women). Women need to make cooperatives, to be together, talk together, work together, heal together. The fighting must end, impunity for rapists must end, along with the brutal environment and mineral exploitation that produces such monstrous behavior against women.
Minister Philomène had a lot to do with writing a set of tough gender violence laws and passing them through Parliament. The laws are comprehensive and inclusive, codifying penalties for all permutation of rape and abuse: elders to youngers, youngers to elders, men to women, women to men, men to men, women to women, body parts, objects, persons of authority, dependents, sex slaves, incitement, pornography—nothing is left out. Of course, the laws must be enforced, and the government, with help from USAID and others, is in the progress of training and sensitizing judges and magistrates. Impunity is a fundamental social and legal laxity that allows wide-scale rape to run rampant. Just as important is changing cultural norms and reaching men with behavior change messages. The torn fabric of this society will take years to mend, but the work, at least, has begun.
After nearly two weeks in Central Africa, I was already starting to burn out. Each morning when the alarm went off, I awoke in disbelief and exhaustion, spent the days slogging through the tough times in between clinics, slums, programs; through the joyful discoveries of various successes and ideas, my amazement at the enormity of the problems, the quiet moments of desperation spiked with rage, the rage laced with utter hopelessness, the plaintive seeking of answers from the universe …
I needed to hightail it out of Kinshasa and connect with nature and animals to restore my own peace of mind. So for the first time in eleven countries, I gave myself a break and took a Sunday afternoon to visit a very special animal sanctuary I had heard about called Lola ya Bonobo.
Bonobos are a rather forgotten primate, similar to chimpanzees but less fractious and highly endangered because their habitat has been hammered by decades of war and deforestation. They exist in the wild only in Congo and in captivity in a few zoos. Adult bonobos are snared and eaten as “bush meat,” a delicacy in this protein-starved region. The babies are captured and sold in markets to witch doctors, idiotic tourists, and unscrupulous animal collectors. In 2002, in the midst of all the chaos and fighting in and around Kinshasa, a Belgian woman named Claudine Andre set up the sanctuary in what had been one of Mobutu’s deputy’s private estates outside of the capital.
Behind the gate was a sixty-acre oasis of forest and lakes and parkland where more than sixty bonobos of all ages roam about in a protected enclosure. Visitors are separated from them by a chain-link fence, which I walked along until I met the eye of a very fetching male. He solicited, meaning he was trying to entice me to play. I could not believe it. He would run, drop a shoulder to execute a perfect roll, sit up, cross his legs, look at me, and wait. I would imitate him: run, roll, sit. He would then laugh with unmistakable pleasure and joy. We ended up frolicking for an hour, running, playing, jumping, and sitting on either side of the fence, fingers intertwined, kissing. He was mischievous, tender, playful, and in general an angel from God who blessed me with an incredible experience, rare and heart-expanding, that soothed me deeply.
I later learned the name of the handsome bonobo I had loved from the researcher and conservationist, Vanessa Woods, who wrote the fabulous book
Bonobo Handshake
, about her time at the sanctuary. I emailed her photos of him and me running and rolling, laughing and kissing, and she wrote right back, “Oh, that’s Keza! And he doesn’t like anybody!” Before he was rescued, he had lived for fifteen years in a biomedical lab in Kinshasa, never seeing grass or trees, often so starved that he ate cobwebs to survive. Naturally he was terrified and quite unpredictable when he arrived at Lola ya Bonobo in 2004. The only human he likes is Mama Claudine, so Vanessa felt that Keza’s afternoon of play was probably as healing for him as it was for me!
The more I’ve learned about bonobos, the more enthralled I’ve become. Like chimpanzees, they share 98.7 percent of our DNA. But unlike chimps, who have a male-dominated social structure and engage in humanlike pathologies such as war, rape, and murder, bonobos are peaceful creatures known for strong female alliances that prevent, contain, and correct male aggression. They might squabble, but they resolve social stress without violence. Researchers like Vanessa believe that the key to their pacifism and remarkable group tolerance and cooperation is a matriarchal society: Whenever a male starts to bully or attack a female, she cries out and other females band together and discipline the males, re-establishing calm and cooperation. Bonobos relieve their tension with lots of sexual behavior, giving new and poignant meaning to the slogan “Make love, not war.” They are appealing in many ways, but perhaps what I love best is that a baby can take food out of an adult male’s mouth. A baby chimp would never do that, and aggressive male chimps are known to occasionally kill babies. The bonobos’ endangered status is salient for humans, as studying bonobos can reveal the key to the one thing we have never been able to figure out: how to live without war.
A century ago, Joseph Conrad set his masterpiece novella,
Heart of Darkness
, in the Congo. At its center is the tale of Kurtz, an idealistic adventurer who is sucked into the madness and savagery that he encounters in the cruelest of colonies. There but for the grace of God go you or I. As always, I am in awe of people who maintain their boundaries, who don’t succumb to despair. I so admire people like Theresa Guber Tapsoba who persevere daily on in the face of hopelessness, and heroes like Zainab Salbi, like Therese and Victor, like the Women for Women program graduates in Goma and other survivors, and those who dedicate their lives to supporting them. But as I packed my bags in my sad little hotel room to return to my privileged life back home in America, I found myself brooding over my own culpability in the hideous drama of Central Africa.
