News from Congo, not mine, and not good

Things are getting worse in Congo again. In a story I co-wrote a few months ago—and in Human Rights Watch reports that came out just before that—was a fact that felt inevitable, that as delegations sat around tables talking their way through the finer points of peace, men in the fields were still fighting. According to formalities, there’s peace in eastern Congo, as of early this year. But on the ground, there’s anything but.

Especially now. One of the rebel groups is on the offensive again, and 100,000 people have fled their homes since August. Scott Baldauf, the staff writer for the Monitor in Africa, tells the story here.

I finally understand that thing I’ve read about in books, where hardened correspondents talk about the desperation they feel to return to the completely screwed places they’ve covered when things take a turn for the worse. It means something different when you know how that place looks in real life, and something gnaws at your gut, beckoning you back.

But for now, I’m here. I’m here, wishing to be there. Which is something those 100,000 people would probably think the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard.

A look at the American heartland, from a West Virginian who can’t explain it

I keep getting asked–this is a paraphrase–”Why is West Virginia still so damn racist?” Media reports on the racism in the part of the world my home town represents have made me a token Appalachian, on the hook for explaining something I really can’t.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. All my good progressive “we’ve come so far since the 1960s” friends say, People can’t really still think that stuff, can they?

Here is an excerpt from an article about the area of Ohio that borders West Virginia. Southeast Ohio is considered the “swing area” of a swing state in the upcoming election. Here’s why diners told the Columbus Dispatch they’re not voting Dem:

“[A]n uneasiness with Obama prevails in Appalachia, and for many it comes down to race.

“I’ll be voting for a Republican for the first time in my life,” Jeff Justice, a 46-year-old ironworker, said as he finished his lunch at Hickie’s.

Asked why, Justice, a white former Wheelersburg resident now living in Florida, didn’t hesitate.

“He’s black.”

Waitress Mary Walters, 45, of New Boston, said Obama, a first-term U.S. senator, doesn’t have enough experience and she’s concerned about his name.

“I don’t know if he is truly an American,” said Walters, who hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan.”

Don’t ask me to explain. I’m not surprised to read it, because of where I grew up, but I don’t understand it any more than you.

Yes, they can

It’s the political season here, and so I have to admire the chutzpah of Paul Collier, who had an op-ed in today’s NYT.

Let’s just say Collier, for those of you who didn’t have to suffer through international relations courses, is not known as a fuzzy-wuzzy pro-aid guy. His tome Beyond Greed and Grievance is like a narrative statistics report: numbers, numbers, numbers illustrating what is (statistically) true about conflict, poverty and the like, rather than what seems to be the case from theories and anecdotes. There are no aid-cheering conclusions in his work (and nor are their aid-bashing ones).

The point is, he’s pretty a-polemical, if not a-political, and either is a welcome but rare thing as soon as you start talking about aid. So for a guy as understated as Collier, this came as a shock:

The big difference between a poor Asian household and an equally poor African one is hope, not necessarily for the present generation of adults but for their children.

I have to assume it’s not a tacit endorsement of Barack Obama for president, but in this season, language like that stands out. So does the argument. In discrete numbers, he writes, China and India have more poor people than Africa. But their incomes are rising faster and with more certainty, so getting African incomes up should still be the focus of aid conversations, and of the UN General Assembly, which opens today.

What we need to achieve that, he says, is not necessarily more aid dollars (there’s a critique of the Millennium Development project in here, for the interested, and of the “American biofuels scam”). We need–theyneed–a little…hope.

Hope makes a difference in people’s ability to tolerate poverty; parents are willing to sacrifice as long as their children have a future. Our top priority should be to provide credible hope where it has been lacking.

There’s something about the wonky language of that sentence, but its utterly poetic object: provide credible hope. top priority. Hope doesn’t usually get much play in conversations that sound like that.

Collier continues with important policy points–where was the UN after the Mauritania coup? Why has it let Africa imitate the folly of some European and American agriculture policies? What happens to market access now that Doha talks have collapsed? Etc.

All great points. But the most interesting one may be, how will our answers to those questions change if we start the conversation by saying, “Above all, the outcome must give the people hope?” I’m not sure, but I like the idea.

Women in Rwanda are all the rage

I seem to always miss the proper news. In the parliamentary elections held earlier this week–only the second election in the country since the genocide–52 percent of the newly elected were women, making Rwanda the first country in the world to have a majority female parliament.

In his speech at MIT on Thursday, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said the success of women was due largely to an active effort to engage them. They are, he pointed out, more than 50 percent of Rwandan society, so they should participate at least in so equal a proportion in politics. More interesting even than the point was the president’s tone, which seemed to say, Isn’t it obvious? How could you possibly make any other argument?

Worth nothing, before we return to women, is that Rwanda also reserves two seats in the parliament for youth (one of which may have gone to a woman, as well). Details here.

Meanwhile, everyone wants to talk about women, and not in that nasty catty way: Maria Hinojosa, a familiar voice for NPR listeners, is doing a segment for PBS’s “Now” called “Women, Politics and Power” which includes a spot from Rwanda (details here), and the Guardian Weekly published a piece on women’s role in development recently (anyone have the link? I lost it!). It’s unfair to call it a rip off of the Washington Post’s earlier piece, but it’s also true that the Post came first…

Interesting to see the role women, especially genocide survivors, are playing in society. No doubt the promotion of women Kagame talked about is having influence, as is help, from the Rwandan government and from outside, aimed at helping survivors rebuild.

A note not technically from, but in light of, Central Africa

New York City

Ever a woman of geographical ADHD, I’ve been in three cities since returning to the U.S. about 10 days ago. A few days in New York, a few days in DC, a few days in Chicago, a few weddings… but now we’re settling back into the City that, at some point in this silly exercise that is adult life, became my home.

Eight million people live here–2 million less than Kinshasa, but in New York, they all seem to be on the same part of the sidewalk as me, all of the time. This works fine most of the time, when we practice our sidewalk waltz, each person dodging to the next bit of open space on the concrete. Somehow, we all know where the other person is dodging, and where we belong, and we manage to weave seamlessly past each other, most of the time.

This city, then, feels less like 8 million people and more like 8 million discrete little worlds, each one just grazing the next, in an accident that counts as human contact, as we whizz past each other. Within our own orbits, we dictate everything: we do and say what we want to do when we want to do and say it; we spend what we want to spend–you can swipe even the teensiest denominations on your Visa card, and deal with the consequences later; we go anywhere we want, almost immediately, and go home when and with whomever we want; and we avoid each other, sending texts and leaving voicemails, for as long as we want.

And so I miss the slow “dysfunction” of East Africa, where whatever it is you want to do is going to take you twice as long as you’d wish, so you might as well talk to the guy next to you. I miss feeling connected, instead of wedged into a wrongly shaped slot in someone else’s day. I miss the idea that if I miss an appointment, or disappear traveling for a few months, people will notice, and even be a little pissed off. Because that’s just not what people do, there.

I miss, I guess, all the things I was so bad at. But I can sidewalk waltz with the best of them, which will get you farther here than being good at all those things I was bad at. But it’s still not the kind of person I want to be.

Apologies–mine, and otherwise

Oh, so many apologies.

* First, to my few but devoted commenters–commentors? how is it spelled? this new internet age!–whose wonderful thoughts I’ve let languish in the “awaiting approval” pipeline. Sorry about that; it’s been a bit crazy here, and I didn’t want to click in and out until I could really engage.

So, here I am, ready for you. Which is by no means to assume that you are still there.

* Second, an apology on apologies: My post on Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) elicited the ire of one reader (whom I don’t know), who vigorously and quite rightly nudged me to correct my assumption that there’s no reparations involved in the Canadian TRC. I had assumed–wrongly and stupidly–that if there were a reparations scheme, the BBC would’ve reported it. I’d been doing so much of my own reporting on truth and reconciliation measures, and so much work at grad school before that, and reparations have never not come up in those conversations, so I figured it would be part and parcel of any story on a TRC. (Though a bit of sympathy to the BBC: I had 4,000 words over three days to deal with Sierra Leone, and I still had trouble getting a graph about reparations in.)

My Astute Reader is not right about the amount–it’s $2 billion, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice, and not $4.9 billion as s/he asserts–but is right about the fact that it’s part of the package. In fact, the ICTJ says reparations and the TRC were negotiated at the same time, which is pretty remarkable: So often, governments fear TRCs because of reparations. ‘Open an official truth-telling process,’ the logic goes, ‘and people will eventually ask you for money for the suffering you’ve given them space to talk about.’ It’s been a problem smart people in transitional justice have been working on for a long time. So this Canadian commission is good news on that front. (Quick note, just to temper this a bit: A 2003 article in the journal Comparative Education says that more than 9,000 lawsuits had been filed against the Canadian government in a bid to get reparations–and that was just in 2003. So the reparations fight was not a short, quick battle.)

What makes me sad about all this is that the woman I met in Montreal in October 2007, who had been through the residential school system, didn’t know anything about it. ICTJ says the agreement was negotiated in 2006 and the payments started in 2007; but when I met her at the Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide, she still felt neglected and anonymous. She hadn’t seen any money yet, or heard of any.

Certainly all the press this is getting, in Canada and beyond, will change that. Also, I’m citing an example of a single individual, which certainly no statistician, and not even a good journalist, would ever get away with. But I think there’s still a lot to be learned–and not just in Canada–about how to make these institutional processes reach far and wide, to make the majority of those they’re supposed to help feel included.

Which, to be unforgivably self-referential, some of these question are part of what my series on Sierra Leone is about.

But at the heart of that post on Canada is a question that has been gnawing me for a long time. It’s not just about TRCs; it’s about the whole notion of story-telling. We say–we, journalists; we, TRC commissioners; we, peacebuilders; insert-other-we-here–that sharing stories, or “truth telling,” or “giving testimony,” or any other favored locution, brings benefits: many people say it helps the teller, by bringing closure or giving voice or some such thing (though in interviews I did for the Sierra Leone stories, many people also acknowledged ‘truth telling’ has the potential to re-traumatize). Many people say it’s good for society, a learn-from-the-past-so-you-don’t-repeat-it thing. Many people say it helps us craft history.

All these things are true, to varying degrees–and, surely, like everything, are sometimes not true. It’s the second one that concerns me, which is why I harped on that quote in the BBC piece: I’m worried that we are–that I, too, am–too quick to offer platitudes about the social utility of listening to victims. I’m not entirely sure that, if something awful happened to me, I’d want someone to say, “Tell us, for the good of America.” I think I would probably be tempted to say, “Get lost.” And I’m surprised more people don’t say that to me.

Which must mean that one of those justifications, or some other one I haven’t included, really do carry some weight. It’s just that sometimes, it’s impossible for me to understand.

Don’t say he didn’t warn you

I’ve been holding this little tidbit for the right moment… The day Clinton wins in West Virginia seems apropos.

When I was in Burundi, I met this Congolese guy who wanted to talk about the American election. He was the third Congolese guy I’d had a conversation about the campaigns with, and the first two had been…well, strident. One insisted that Barack Obama will never win the general election because he is a black man; another insisted that we would never elect John McCain because we just can’t tolerate another Republican.

The Congolese guy in Burundi agreed that Americans shouldn’t choose another Republican, and that the country will never elect a black man. But he was equally despondent about a future President Hillary.

“If she wins,” he said, in total seriousness, “she will just sleep with Ahmadinejad and give away all the state secrets.”

Having house help makes me nervous

There are two wonderful people who make our ridiculous lives here possible: Mathilde, and Saidi. Mathilde is a big, beautiful woman whose smile you have to earn. She is funny, and she has a great laugh, a kind of voiced breath that crescendos in volume and pitch until it breaks into a cackle. Mathilde cooks for us four nights a week–I have posted a few odes to her cooking, and there are more to come–and does the dishes. As if that weren’t enough, she cleans the house on the weekends. She scrubs our bathtub–the absolute filth that has collected there by the end of the week is testament to how unlikely it is we would ever do it ourselves–and mops our floor. She cuts massive, cream-colored calla lillies and arranges them, with their ripply emerald leaves, in a vase on the coffee table.

She makes our beds.

(I’m not even kidding.)

Saidi is our Renaissance Man, though I don’t know that he’s any older than maybe 19. He is tall and thin and sweet-faced. He cleans the porch every morning, does our laundry, pays our electric bill (and pays enough attention to it that it gets paid, no thanks to me). He gathers the ripened amapelas into a bucket too full for any single household to consume and leaves them outside our gate for the children. If you need something, you can give him money and he’ll go get it.

I grew up in middle class America, and despite my parents’ best political intentions, I somehow became something of a feminist, which means the notion of having house help is culturally and politically uncomfortable for me. I’m happy to be able to help employ people, and as I become less dogmatically reflexive in my thinking on this, I’m happy, too, to have the help. But I bristle when I hear things like what I was told by a foreigner (not an American, I am proud to say (and no, not a Canadian either)) at a posh restaurant a few weeks ago: “Yeah, I definitely want to stay. The weather is so much better here, and the labor class is so much cheaper.”

“Labor class.” Are those…people?

Roommates in my home rotate with great frequency, and at the moment we’re a slightly-more-than full house. We represent 5 countries, which surely means 5 different takes on the “labor class.” I can’t speak for them, and I can’t even speak for America–I went looking for an article about this to give a more considered and researched impression of why many Americans feel uneasy about maids and such, but I didn’t find one (recommendations welcome)–but here’s my take on it:

Yes, Mathilde will do the dishes…do we really have to leave her every dish to do? She’ll clean the bathtub, but that doesn’t mean when it’s all skanked out that we have to just not shower till Saturday. Yes, Saidi will do laundry…but do we really have to have it every day? He’ll go get something if you need it…but I feel like that doesn’t mean that if he isn’t around to run your errand, or it takes longer than you’d like, you can be annoyed.

I think there’s a lot going on here–cultural differences, in addition to the potpourri of the foibles we share, to varying degrees: being absent-minded, being inconsiderate, being a little lazy. I am all of those things, and I have sympathy for others who are, too. What makes me uncomfortable is how easily it seems the feeling of entitlement can creep in…

Not that I’m the picture of sensitivity on this. Sure, I picked up a sponge and cleaned the tub today…but I still let Mathilde make my bed. She does it so much better than I do….she does it like my mom.

Meanwhile, this afternoon, when I offered Saidi some of the leftover soup I had heated up, he took it gladly, even though it had become a little cold, and about 20 minutes later, the emptied bowl and companion spoon reappeared in the kitchen–cleaner than anything I’ve seen any of us wash.

There are only so many ways to say something

Earlier this week, I went through recording after recording from Sierra Leone–interviews with forced wives, and with women who suffered every denigrating crime even without being taken in marriage; interviews with ex-rebels, one so young he said he had to be taught how to rape; hour after hour of awful stories, each living in the memories of the multiple people always involved, on some side, in a single atrocity.

I’d also been doing this during and in the wake of genocide memorial week here in Kigali, where survivors have been speaking to audiences in the hundreds about what they suffered.

And suddenly, a universal language of euphamism emerges.

They did what they needed to do, a woman in Sierra Leone told me of her rape.
They did what they needed to do, a Rwandan university student told a crowd of her classmates.

There is when it came to my village, and there is It was not my choice…

A very strange child, I spent a lot of time on the Holocaust as a kid; one of the things that always interested me was the language of that genocide. Special Treatment (gassings). Resettlement (deportations). Final Solution (mass murder). There’s a fascinating panel in the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s permanent exhibit that catalogs some of this linguistic misdirection. I happen to find it not all that different in practice from the diplomatic and political speech used to discuss more recent crimes (rants here and here).

But the emerging sameness of what’s unsaid by victims makes me wonder whether, no matter what side of the violence you’re on, the things we call “crimes against humanity” are simply too much for literal speech–whether indirect speech–especially metaphor, that most developed of evolutionary powers–is really just our most instinctual coping mechanism.