All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  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!

  Passing back into Rwanda was simple. There were no mysterious delays, no attempts at extortion or graft. The breeze off the lake began to blow freshly again, and the leaf cover from beautiful old trees provided shade as we made our way back to our hotel. I spent a whole hour in the bath that night, trying to scrub off grit that seemed to go deeper than my skin.

  Then I settled in to process the day’s many compelling events. As soon as I began to check voice mail and go online I was deluged with messages: At Dario’s race in Talladega, Florida, some other driver, well after the yellow flag had come out, still managed to plow into Dario’s car. To dramatically illustrate the crash, an image of the incident immediately popped up on my laptop screen as I signed on. Oh. Sigh. The life of a race car driver’s spouse! Dario, his mum, and someone from the team had already left messages to reassure me that he was okay, although his ankle was broken. Dario and I spoke. I can tell everything I need to know by the sound of his voice, and I believed him when he assured me he was all right. Even so, his injury would be putting him out for several races, so our conversation became about that, and what it meant for his ongoing learning curve in stock cars. People cannot stop asking, no matter how many times I answer the question, whether I feel scared about the elements of racing, and the answer is always “no.” I decided early on not to be afraid, because that would be a terrible way to live, with fear about things I so obviously cannot predict, influence, or control. My husband said he wanted me to keep my head down and carry on with my remaining time in Africa. I have seen him through far worse than broken ankles, and I appreciated that he did not doubt my concern and supported me to finish my trip.

  Relations between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were still icy, so there were no direct flights to Kinshasa, our next destination. It took twenty-four hours, including an overnight layover in Addis Ababa, to fly just over one thousand miles, the equivalent distance between Washington, D.C., and Miami, Florida. We skipped the whole VIP line when we finally arrived, as it actually draws negative attention in the form of additional requests for bribes. The ride from the airport was long, and I saw a typical poor African capital out the window, crowded with nearly ten million souls struggling, often creatively and inventively, to make it through each day. Our hotel had red carpet and low ceilings—not a good look—and there were places where they’d patched the wallpaper with matching squares. Overall, the hotel struck me as ragged and depressed, like Kinshasa itself.

  Papa Jack’s security contact at the U.S. embassy told him, “If anything goes down, just stay put at your hotel. They run out of bullets fast around here.”

  Indeed, there have been semiregular coup attempts, assassinations, and random eruptions of militia violence in Kinshasa ever since the dictator Mobutu was overthrown in 1997. Robbery, pillaging, and rape are epidemic, and few venture outside after dark. I was immediately on my best conflict zone behavior, putting the chain in the door, looking in the fish-eye with each knock (as if that would really help, but whatever, one does what one can), minding Papa Jack every step. He was physically staying very close to me, very alert. (I get a kick out of seeing him put it into high gear.) It had been fairly stable here for a year now, but nobody was taking anything for granted.

  This massive, lumbering, seemingly ungovernable nation, once known as the Belgian Congo and more recently Zaire, has not really known peace and stability since the first bloodsucking European colonists arrived in the nineteenth century. The insane and diabolical King Leopold II of Belgium looted the country for its vast natural resources—timber, copper, ivory gold, and other minerals—murdering ten million Congolese in the process. By the end of the colonial era, the country had been raped and pillaged, ancient cultures and social systems were destroyed, and the people were utterly lost. The Belgians gave nothing back in terms of education or infrastructure. At independence in 1960, there were only seventeen college graduates and less than a thousand miles of paved roads (down to a pitiful three hundred miles today), making transportation impossible in vast areas of this country, equal in acreage to everything east of the Mississippi. Mobutu Sese Seko, as corrupt as he was brutal, picked up where the Belgians left off, plundering the Congo for three decades, propped up by the CIA in exchange for his cooperation in fighting communism. What was left in his aftermath was a chaotic cauldron of warring armies and special business interests. As a result, a population of more than sixty million was left struggling to survive on almost nothing.

  On our first morning in Kinshasa, Theresa Guber Tapsoba, our country rep, took us to meet Victor and Therese, a couple whose lack of knowledge about family planning ravaged their lives until PSI intervened. Victor is thin and wiry and has a bum eye. Therese has orange-tinged hair, enormous cheekbones, and sweet, soft eyes, especially when her husband is looking at her, which he does often. They have been together since they were children. They live in a little cement house in a run-down neighborhood, with a ten-square-foot main room, and a tiny little room on either side where they and their six children sleep on dirty, ragged pieces of foam on the floor. Altogether, Therese told me she has had nine pregnancies, three of which, out of mad desperation, she aborted with herbs obtained from friends. Each time, this caused protracted agony lasting five days. But it was that or have more babies, whom she and Victor could not offer adequate care, given that they were already barely surviving.

  Unregulated fertility is a catastrophe in this country. Congo has the highest maternal mor
tality in the world, and six hundred thousand babies a year are born for no other reason than to suffer and die. Achieving universal access to family planning, which is Millennium Development Goal 5B, is considered the best way to reduce maternal mortality and is wildly unattainable under current funding levels and conditions in the DRC and throughout the global South, although the subject has recently been given more attention. The demographic household survey in 2008 found that 24 percent of women of reproductive age in Congo have an unmet need for modern family planning. Clearly, PSI and its partners have their work cut out for them in the DRC. Luckily, Therese was one of the few who could be reached and helped.

  One day, a community outreach worker knocked on the door, full of information about family planning. The couple was interested enough to visit a local clinic, and since then Therese had been using an injectable contraceptive every three months. At last, the unintended pregnancies stopped. It is very likely Therese would be dead without family planning. But the rest of their lives remained such a struggle. Their one tattered mosquito net, dating to Therese’s last pregnancy, was out of date. Their water was not safe, and they experienced recurrent episodes of diarrheal disease. Both did what they could to feed the family, but neither had a job. They ate one meal a day, close to bedtime, and sometimes nothing at all. There was violence in the neighborhood, especially because of moonshine made from a corn processor nearby, and Therese was terrified of the rapes, of which one heard much in the neighborhood. Every day as soon as the sun set she would hide herself and their children indoors.

  PSI has a lot to show for its efforts in family planning and maternal health in the DRC. But while our program has improved one aspect of the lives of Victor and Therese, the violence of poverty still threatens to overwhelm them.

  In a slum called Kingabwa, the roads are steep, raw ribbons that slope down to rice fields that abut the Congo River, which is choked with garbage. On either side are concrete houses with corrugated tin roofs that bake under the African sun. I was fascinated by the market. There was a little corner shack with a spiffy white-and-red paint job that served as a communication booth, and in the middle of the road was a little barbershop, which consisted of three plastic chairs, a small handheld mirror, and a comb. Today was Labor Day and a national holiday, so everyone was home and the kids had no school. It seemed more like National Hair Day, as everyone was being either freshly braided or styled out in the streets. Despite the abject poverty here, life still shines through in the perseverance of the human spirit. What else could possibly explain how the people find the will to live every day?

  At the next market, I was able to roll up my sleeves and start doing what PSI does so well: using local markets to allow folk to access health products, services and behavior-change communication. In this case, it was a public demonstration of our point-of-use water purifying powder, with the same ingredients as Sur’Eau but available in this country under the brand name PUR.

  I love this sort of thing, being on the street, hanging out, trading witticisms, having fun, involving passersby. I stood in front of the kiosk where PUR was sold at a highly subsidized price; about 50 francs (about 10 cents) buys enough to purify ten liters of water. I set myself up with a wooden stool and a big pail of fetid river water, thick with brown muck and filth. Using an enormous wooden spoon, I sprinkled in PUR and began to stir. A great crowd gathered, and we hollered questions and answers back and forth about water: “Where do you fetch your water?” I asked. “Do you have diarrhea? Wait till you see how PUR makes even river water safe! One capful alone cleans twenty liters!” The crowd grew.

  After five minutes of stirring, we let the water “deflock.” Particles and harmful organisms (visible and not) bonded with the chemicals and settled to the bottom. Using the clean piece of gauze sold with the sachet of PUR, we strained the water into an empty pail. After another twenty minutes had passed—which I filled with more banter—I poured the purified Congo River water into my glass and drank a toast to everyone’s health to a big cheer. We began serving glasses of water to the crowd. They drained them greedily, they were so thirsty. I’d bet that part of the reason they drank so robustly was that on an unconscious level they were relaxing, because for once in their lives a vital human need was being met—drinking water—without consequences that would make life even more difficult. Relaxing in a life this hard doesn’t come often. I will never forget the great vulnerability of their need for a simple drink of water.

  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 wa
s 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.