Learning Under a Canopy of Stars

It is no secret that I love the stars and some of my best memories in Africa have taken place under them. It should be one of the natural wonders of the world. When I look up, I am reminded I am so small and in the grand scheme of things, not that significant.

I am nearing the end of my first year here in Congo. Upon commencing my contract, I wasn’t sure how long I would stay – one year, two, maybe longer ?!  I am headed home to the States next week with the intention of returning for a second year. This past one hasn’t been easy. I, however, have learned and grown so much. For the first time in my life, I have felt free to do what I love – no school to go back to, no apartmenet to pay for, or other obligations tugging me in different directions. I have had the ability to be present in the here and now not really wondering what was next because this was it and for once I was ok with that.

Over the past year I have spent a significant amount of time filling positions, being several things to several people at the same time, and overseeing many responsibilites. I have obtained some valuable management skills, a second language, and a new experience in another African country I have learned to love despite all of its disfunction.

Throughout all of this time of long office hours and many days with only my Congolese staff to keep me company, they have become very near and dear to me. I wondered out the other night to give the garage keys to the guards, who I always enjoy talking to. They were lounging in the yard on their wooden chairs listening to the news transmitted in French, happy-go-lucky as usual.

Two of my favorite guards were working and they set out a place for me, as if anticipating my arrival. Due to their position, they do not have many tasks aside from maintaining security ; therefore, they always find the time to ask me how I am doing, how my day ways, and what is new in my life. The guards probably know me better than anyone else on my base : they have seen me in my pajamas, seen me when I am sick, they witness the amount of hours I spend in my office, and at the end of every day when I wearily walk home at night.

I pulled up a chair. We shared our day together which then easily shifted to topics such as politics, what life used to be like here, our families, rememberance of past employees, arranged marriages, and my vacation plans. While sitting there engulfed in darkness covered by the stars these are the moments I treasure the most. I easily forgot the trials of the day, my laundry list to be completed before checking out, and the un-read emails still left in my inbox at 9pm. My mind finally slowed down. We exchanged stories, experiences, opinions, and ideas together. Even though many things separate us such as culture, age, race, and gender we are also beautifully connected merely by shared time and space under the African sky.

These are the small, significant moments that shape my life. These are the special people who day in and day out, little by little, mold me into the person I am. Of all that I will take away from this experience the past year, the most meaningful, impacting, and important is to always remember to stop, pull up a chair, gaze at the stars, and listen to the heart of someone else.

Shamed in Silence

What is justice ? I have recently been wrestling with this word. In many respects, I think justice is defined individually. Sure there are universals symbols and acts of justice, or even injustice ; however, many a debate rises over people’s personal opinions surrounding the actions of these words.

There are many more examples of injustice surrounding me than not. Injustice is very blatant and frequently accepted, or rather ignored. What triggered my initial pondering of injustice was a ride to the airport about one month ago. The airport is 9kilometers (about 6 miles) from the base but takes a good 30minutes to travel due to the poorly maintained roads. This is the main road leading in and out of Isiro to the surrounding areas, including the forest where a large part of the population goes in search of supplies. It is quite common to see pilgrimages of bicycles loaded down with firewood, bananas, or bush meat.

This particular trip to the airport was different, or perhaps I was different – more aware. This time marching out of the forest pushing laden bicycles were children. It seemed that the overwhelming majority were boys, and even girls, under the age of 13.

Going into the forest to collect food or wood is no walk through Central Park. Many start the journey before sunrise and re-enter the town at dusk. I was catching a glimpse of these travelers on their final leg of the journey, only about 4kilometers left to reach the city center. You could see in their eyes a sense of determination to complete their task. They knew they were almost there.

Despite all the time that I have lived and worked in Africa, the site before me still struck a cord in me. This is so unfair. These are children. They should be sitting in classrooms with their blue and white uniforms. They should be doing household chores like washing the dishes, cutting the grass, or cleaning the house not trekking 30kilometers in search of a consumable product forcing them to do the same thing again a few days later. For the first time I realized I was witnessing blatant injustice.

Only a few weeks later I was challenged along this same theme. I was the guest in the house of a Congolese family. Through the help of some translation as they didn’t speak French, I was informed that the father of the household was 27years old, only 2 years my senior. He proudfully proclaimed that he was the father of eight children, his oldest already twelve years old. Despite his boasting, I never saw him once verbally address or physically touch one of these eight children.

Throughout the course of our exchange, I was asked the expected question if I was married, to which, with equal pride as my host, responded « no ». I was not asked how old I was but that wasn’t important information. I was visibly older than marrying age. The only words the wife of my host addressed to me my entire stay there were words of disapproval, shock, pity, and a bit of disgust that I was unmarried. They eagerly offered to save me from my demise and find a husband for me as soon as possible before I was too old to be marketable. I gracefully declined.

I took all of this bantering in stride until the conversation switched from me to their 12 year old daughter. A friend of the host pointed to her and exclaimed that even she was close to marrying age, at which point the conversation lost any sense of humor. I do not think this innocent child could understand our discourse in French but she surely new the topic of our discussion and she now being being the center of it. She was already demonstrating her wifely abilities, serving us food and tending to her fathers every need as his own wife was incapable to do so with suckling child number eight attached to her breast.

Out of respect for my host, the father of this twelve year old and seven others, I held my tongue of which now I regret. There are so many things I wanted to say to him. So many questions I wanted to ask. In my own quiet way I am sure I showed my disgust as my face tends not to hide my opinions very well, even those unspoken. For the sake of this girl, I wish I had vocalized my thoughts. Perhaps I am naive to think that I could change the opinion of such a strong cultural inbreeding on the role of woman and the family, but for the sake of just this one child I wish I had tried. I would rather be kicked out of someone’s hut in an effort to spare a childhood arranged marriage than stay there in respectful silence to only three years later see this beautiful adolescent carrying an infant, herself brainwashed that this is normal and the only option for her life.

It is so easy to know such injustices exist but until it stares you right in the face through the eyes of a twelve year old girl soon to meet her fate in arranged marriage and early childbearing, possibly risking her very life in an effort to fulfill societal demands, only then is it truly believable. This family could not shame me in mocking my own un-wedded status but they did manage to shame me in my silence in defense of their own daughter. Never again.

The Voice of Pain

Once you hear it, you can never forget the sound of a wailing woman. It is the audible voice of pain, the retching of the heart. Infant and child mortality steals many lives in Africa. It is a thief that permits miniature coffins to be sold on the roadside next to the potatoes and cabbage. Infant mortality is easily thought of as a statistic until you gaze upon the tiny figure of the immortal. In the west, we have the expectation that someone will live until their 70’s. In Africa, people call it a miracle if a child sees their 5th birthday. I prefer my culture’s way of thinking even if it is a bit naive. The death of a child will never be normal for me or acceptable.

This past weekend I was asked to give the congregational prayer during the main service at church. I had heard during announcements that a baby had died that morning in the hospital and the mother was still there sick herself. Upon entering the back room preparing to enter the sanctuary awaiting the que of the all familiar tune regardless of the language it is sung in, Open My Eyes, Lord, to my left sat a baby coffin – empty but ready to be filled. Just the sight of this solemn symbol of death made my stomach uneasy.

The melody started ushering us inside and I didn’t have time to contemplate the sight before me. After the opening prayer and hymn, my peripheral vision to the left caught sight of a room full of women. Laying there rested a very still and perfect baby. Perhaps the baby is just sleeping, I thought. It only took me a few minutes to realize this was the very precious child that had exited this world and it’s mother’s arms only a few hours prior. The fact that this little being didn’t move in an hours time and was clothed in probably it’s whole wardrobe and two blankets in 90* heat confirmed my initial assumption.

At the end of the main service, the funeral commenced without the presence of the father, as he already died months prior, or the mother as she herself lied in a hospital bed to ill to attend her own child’s funeral. The empty coffin easily swallowed up the innocent body. The hymns of mourning and the tears of grief flowed. Sitting there, I couldn’t help but feel as though this small child is departing this world alone. The church was filled with other people who loved and cared for this infant but not the the same degree of the mother’s. Her absence was a weight in my heart – the one’s whose arms greeted this new life with joy and the arms that were forced to let go in premature death.

The funeral continued with a procession to the cemetery. The small coffin was placed on a motorbike followed by the mourning mass on foot and chanting choir to the freshly dug jungle grave site 5 kilometer’s away. Today, a sweet lifeless child rests awaiting the opportunity to actually live.



As I witnessed all of this, in many ways I felt like just an observer, removed from it all. Of course there were words that were spoken, cultural practices that I didn’t understand but the reality of death transcends all differences and the loss of life, especially a child, is horrific no matter what background you represent. I was surrounded by physical pain and suffering and I found it challenging to connect to. Normally I am quite empathetic and all too easily feel the pain of those around me. Has something died in me as well ? Have I been desensitized ? These questions in and of themselves horrified me. Then I realized, in some ways I envied this baby. He only knew the joy expressed in his birth, the protection of love, and now the overwhelming display of affection and grief in his loss. Of course he didn’t get the opportunity to experience the other joys in this life but those also come at a cost of significant pain. This child entered this world innocent and departed innocent, only marred by the grip of death – which is inevitable for all. He does not carry the scars this world so easily wounds us with. I was reminded that this is how we were meant to be : perfect, innocent, unscathed. Tossed around, battered, and suffering is not natural and it should never be considered as such. We can only endure for a short period of time.

I didn’t exactly grieve the same way as everyone else who attended this event thus provoking my initial self-questioning but I did grieve for the human race as a whole. The death of a child I didn’t even know brought a piece of me to life. It revived in me the consciousness that being jaded is not natural ; death is not natural ; and pain is not natural. But hope is. Hope is the only thing that keeps us going day in and day out. Hope is the only thing that can allow a mother to release the body of her deceased infant – hope that she will hold that child again, healthy and alive. And at the end of the day, hope is the reason I do what I do – the belief that somehow, someway things can and will be different.

Two Page Broken Heart

Beni Airport Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Last week I was leafing through an East African tour book checking out different places in Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya. I randomly stumbled upon the Democratic Republic of Congo section. Due to the size of DRC, it can be considered West, Central, or East Africa. I wasn’t sure if it would be included in this book but it was, all two pages worth. Two pages ? Seriously ? Congo is the largest country in Africa now after South Sudan’s split from Sudan, it is the size of western Europe and there is only enough tourist info to fill up two pages.

I am presently reading a book called Blood River. The author risked his life in 2004 traveling the same route the great explorer Stanley traveled in the 1800s down the Congo River. It was estimated that the exploration in 2004 was more dangerous than Stanley’s voyage in the 1800s despite Stanly facing cannibals, tropical diseases without modern medicines, no technological resources, or language capabilities. The Congo River forms the shape of half a heart thus labeling DRC the broken heart of Africa joining the other equally depressing name for the DRC – the Heart of Darkness.

Throughout this book the author recounts how beautiful and marvelous this mighty country once was. Like the majority of other African countries, Congo had very harsh colonizers. The height of DRC’s economic stability and flourishment was towards the end of the colonial period in the 1950’s. There was an amazing road, train, and river transportation system ; medical care ; and booming industries.

Unfortunately the rest of the world doesn’t realize that Congo is not the broken heart of Africa but rather the lungs of the world, well, perhaps they do as exploitation and corruption continue to ravage this mutilated society. DRC has the second largest rain forest providing oxygen to this half of the world and is the richest country in the world with natural resources such as gold, diamonds, and coltan – a mineral used for cell phones where 90% of the world’s supply is found in Congo. Unfortunately at the end of 2011, the Human Development Index rated Congo dead last on the list of developed countries, number 187.

Amongst all of my interest for this continent, no country has intrigued me more than the Democratic Republic of Congo. I can visibly see how beautiful Congo was sixty years ago as the remains are still standing rusted. At the same time, I can imagine what Congo, and even Africa in general, looked like one hundred and fifty years ago as this country has sadly backslidden to that point today. Democratic Republic of Congo 2012 is a glimpse of Africa 1900. Everyday I wish that these walls could talk and tell me their story, because I know there is one and it is unlike any I have ever heard.

Regardless of the story of 50 years ago or even 150, I know the story of today. I am living it. I don’t need to hear the walls talk, I can just look out my window. The citizens of Congo still face insecurity. People are dying of curable disease like malaria because medicine prices have gone up and treatment is not affordable. There is political gridlock in the capital, Kinshasa. The east is still fighting over land rights. People are worked like slaves in the mine fields to supply the rest of the world with diamonds and cells phones.

The tourist guide for Democratic Republic of Congo should be its own separate book, not a mere two pages combined with Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Burundi, probably all combined together equaling a quarter of Congo’s land mass. Despite the evident darkness and brokenness that still claims much of Congo, this Heart of Darkness has brought much light to my life and this Broken Heart of Africa has mended many pieces of my soul.