Journey to the Heart of Darkness

I visited several places outside of Bukavu. I traveled from village to village meeting with churches and community leaders. I wanted to understand what was happening. Everywhere I went; people were living in unbearable conditions. The war had taken everything away from them. The people of Sud Kivu were walking corpses. There seemed to be no life in the green hills. I visited different villages, all of them broke my heart but one of them was the most significant to me: the village of Kidodobo. This rural community is located about forty kilometers from Bukavu. I decided to go despite the dangers in the area. The next day my companions and I embarked in a journey to the rural village of Kidodobo. The trip to Kidodobo was long. We had to move fast, leaving a trail of dust behind us. The red cloud we were leaving was blocking the view, and we couldn’t see what was in front of us. There were fewer and fewer people on the road the further we got from Bukavu. The look on people’s faces was different, and they seemed to be afraid of something. I understood we were entering an area that was not safe. As we drove into the mission, the cloud of red dust dissipated, and I could see a school that looked like it hadn’t been used for years. Time and wars had left their footprint on the buildings in the mission. There were no windows and no doors in some of the places I saw. There was still a long road ahead of us, and there was a beautiful building at the end of the road. My friend Jean-Pierre told me it was the mission. I was amazed by that building; it looked like villas I saw in other parts of the country. We had a little audience forming with peasants and children. They were curious to see the crazy people who came to visit their village. They were staring through the window as if they were intrigued about our presence in their land. After a long journey through the hills of Sud Kivu, we were in Kidodobo at last. . Kidodobo is a place of amazing beauty. The station dated from the colonial period, and it seemed to have kept some of its colonial splendor. The white building was a villa that was turned into a church by the early missionaries in the area. It was a white building with windows around the top. There was a hole in one of the windows in the upper part of the edifice. A rebel group came to loot the place and shot a rocket there. It was a reminder that we were in militia territory. There was a very deceiving serenity in Kidodobo. The white walls of the church were obviously hiding a lot of secrets. The large green yard on the front of the church seemed so peaceful, yet there was unrest in the eyes of the peasants. Before I came to Kidodobo, I was warned that the area was unstable. The Interahamwes, a Rwandese militia allegedly responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, were still operating in the region. My assumptions about the dangers of the place were confirmed when the pastor of the church told me he was kidnapped and tortured by the Interahamwes two weeks before my visit. The pastor gave me a tour of the place. The building behind the church was a youth center. The missionaries turned an Olympic pool into a building that they used for children’s church. I could see a few eyes staring from the houses on a little hill behind the building. The pastor told me it was the old orphanage. Children were there no more. They had abandoned the orphanage because they could not feed them. Not many people lived in Kidodobo. A little audience followed us. We walked down the hill through the green grass and found a few houses that used to be missionary dwellings. Now there was a group of eight soldiers stationed there with their heavy machine guns. The soldiers had a few prisoners. They were Interahamwes that they had been caught in the area. After visiting the house, I was brought to the clinic. From outside, it looked like a lovely place; its past beauty still had some remaining elegance. The clinic in Kidodobo was a magnifying glass that exposed the extent of suffering and misery in the region. There were people in the hospital suffering from all sorts of illnesses. Most were sick with malaria. I toured the clinic with the director. As we were visiting the different rooms, we passed by a little girl. “She walked on a landmine,” the director told me. He went on to explain the girl was lucky the evil thing did not explode on her foot. We went into a room full of spider webs that used to be an orphanage for babies. The few cribs still there were covered with dust. I walked passed a group of ladies. I initially assumed they were sick but there was something about them that caught my attention. I could not take my eyes from them; there was a pain in them that was obvious. The women were sitting on a bench with their heads bowed. Their Kikwembes (Congolese dress) covered their heads to protect them from the sun. “What happened to them”? I asked. “They are vsv” the doctor replied. “VSV” stands for victims of sexual violence, the “proper” term to designate women who have been brutally gang raped during the war. Some of these women have been gang raped by fifteen militiamen. They have gone through the most horrible things one can imagine. After I saw these women, I remembered a story my dad told me about a girl from the east who was being sent to Spain. She had been so forcibly raped that all of her insides were no longer holding. I wanted to talk to the women, but I was not sure how. After a moment of hesitation, courage grew inside my heart. I asked the doctor if could speak to them. “Sure,” he replied. I went to them and told them that I was visiting. I told them that I wanted to know more about them. They were hesitant at first but they began to warm up to me and began to tell me their stories. A lady in yellow was the one who spoke the most. She told me about being raped in front of her children. Ten militiamen gang raped her. They used knives and sticks and inflicted indescribable pain on that woman. Her lips were trembling while she spoke. Her eyes had a kind of glow, and tears were not far off. Then suddenly she stopped talking. I was petrified by what I had just heard. I was so moved that my heart was beating faster. The doctor, however, did not seem bothered - he still had a smile on his face. I was so troubled by what I just heard that I asked the doctor if we could leave. I could not stand listening to any more. We had taken just a few steps when I felt a hand holding me with a firm grip. I looked back and it was the lady in yellow and, with a strong hold on my arm, she lifted her eyes to meet mine. She then told me in Swahili: “Tell my story so that no woman will live what I have lived!” She spoke with such determination that I was terrified and troubled by her request. I left the clinic to continue my visit but my heart was heavy and the words of the lady in yellow were still resonating in my mind. Before I left Kidodobo and its beautiful green hills, I stood at the top of the white church’s stairs. The elegance of the growing flowers contrasted with the dark story I had just heard. The tea plantation nearby wafted a fresh scent to the mission. The pleasantness of being there was tarnished by the reality that the land I was walking on bore witness to the disturbing human brutality. Now that I had heard the stories with my own ears and stared into that woman’s eyes, I could no longer say that I did not know. I had to do something to change the plight of rape victims in that area. In telling these stories, I am keeping a promise to a woman who first opened my eyes to the horrors rape victims have to live each day. I will never see that woman again, but I will keep my promise to her. Through this book I hope that these people and their stories will no longer be seen as mere statistics.