Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.
I just can't stand to read these things anymore... How can humans be so evil to one another? How can we all not see that we do these things to ourselves, that we become the enemy that we seek to destroy?
Perhaps it is because I am tired, or because I have read so many stories like this, or because all they talked about on Tom Joyner this morning was a similar smattering of awful things people do to one another. Maybe it's because I am reading a feminist Utopian novel (by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, no less!), maybe I am just grumpy because it's Monday. Whatever the case, these stories make me broken hearted ... as they should and it's a small heartache compared the ones these women are experiencing.
The article talks about one woman who "said she was raped twice — first by Hutu militiamen two years ago and then by Nkunda soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her legs apart, while three others took turns violating her.
“When I think about what happened,” she said, “I feel anxious and brokenhearted.”
She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the first rape, saying she was diseased."
Then I think of myself, at my desk, a caramel latte and my iPod, sitting on my desk beside me. Typing on this keyboard, looking at this computer screen, my biggest concern of the day so far has been deciding whether I wanted the slice of pumpkin bread at the vegan coffee shop around the corner or not (I did), so what does that mean? How can I in good conscience complain about the state of afffairs in my world?
Yet, I do, all the time and so do most people I know, because we are human, and that, I guess, is part of it. But, I don't have to look as far as the Congo to witness such cruelty against human beings, women especially, but humans overall.
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I'll never understand why women seem to bear the brunt of mankind's darkest, most sadistic tendencies but stories like that - of the nearly inconceivable violence and savagery of acts like that just make me want to cry or hit something. Preferably those people.
I dunno - It's sobering to understand how lucky we are. I'm not much for the "rah, rah - we live in the best country on earth" but I am mindful that the conjunction of place and time that I find myself in is a blessed one indeed in which to be female.
~Ves
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