I do not dream. I sleep while I am awake.
I saw a man dead on the road yesterday. His body slumped, blood poured from his wound. Then they picked up dust, tossed it on the blood and threw the body in the back of the truck, and that was it. There wasn’t anymore.
I do know there is something that calls. Within. I resist. The thickness of the discomfort swirls around me and feels akin to suffocation. But maybe its a worthwhile death? The death of selfishness, of pride, of all that I resent in others but refuse to acknowledge in myself.
A UN plane roars overhead. Peace is not yet fully realized.
The warm glow of evening light illuminates the dust that swarms the air; reminders that rain has not come in months. Everything is covered in dust. Even when I eat, gentle crunches, thin layers of the ground tossed into the air that settle everywhere. My skin is always just a twinge off color. The color of the earth.
Yesterday I looked into the eyes of children who had become soldiers and then become children again in Kiwanja, eastern DRC. But children changed. Children scared. Children draped with a mantle of violence, of independence, of desire.
What do we think we can really accomplish here? Sustain here? With so much to learn and without the willingness to actually become that learner, we throw stones to the sky and create a lot of noise with very little actual impact. We must become like children. We must bend in a posture of learning.
And who measures impact anyway?
Maybe the definition includes more about relationship and less about numbers.
And that dead man on the side of the road continues to resurface in my mind. The gritty reality of death. Death and life and suffering and hope and pride and ambition and greed and outsiders and insiders and truth and lies. It all is mixed into a giant mosaic and chalked up as whatever people want to think about this place, however they want to cast it in their own way.
Congo to me today is much less the wild layered confusion that it once symbolized, and more the continual realization of my own limits and the true potential and ability of the Congolese themselves. What a brilliant, enduring people.
I type in the shadow of my own hands, the yellow light slanting and casting long dark shapes on the table. I breathe in the swirling French and Swahili around me, the sound of motos and trucks and cars crunching over the lava rock laden road behind me.
I do not see the destruction at the expense of the hope. I see both in some sort of balance. One day it leans much more biased one way or the other. Today it leans towards hope.
The suffering is still injustice. Of course it is. And I will expose it and fight it and love and be loved by the ones in the midst of it. I will never forget Safi and Amena. Amena is three years old. She was raped by a soldier. Her entire body is destroyed. When I met her on Saturday half her body was encased in a plaster cast. Her face could not smile. Safi, her 18 year-old mother, embodied courage and strength.
I am left without words when I behold humanity and the layers of complexity that are rife in people like Safi and Amena. Strength and pain, courage and devastation.
And as these two precious ones wait for help, hope for change, I am silenced.
So today I do not have answers, but just more questions. But the questions I have are rimmed with possibility and the progress I see quickens my breath.
I am so glad to be back in Goma.
