Trade in Truths

I always had a passion for places that are difficult to reach and stories that are difficult to tell.  Women’s eNews granted me three months to work remotely and file stories from abroad during the summer of 2008.

Police states like Syria and post/in-conflict states such as the Democratic Republic of Congo are out of the mainstream news cycle except for small spells in which they are suddenly in vogue.

Access is difficult, not to mention expensive. Once you get there, corrupt border officials, weak media laws, intimidated sources and random acts of violence can roadblock reporting. In this lump of limitations women’s issues simply get lost.

Only extreme tragedy – honor crimes in Syria, mass rape in Congo -- tickles the front pages and headlines of the mainstream media. Missing from these snapshots is the strength, courage and resourcefulness of women living in the throes of poverty and tyranny.

Women’s eNews went deeper.

From Damascus, Syria, I filed articles on Iraqi women refugees eking a living in a police state that receives minimal international aid. Although the opportunities where limited, most women found ways to survive and sustain their families, often foregoing their own nutrition and honor in so doing.

A second article focused on Syria’s women rights activists fighting against paternalistic laws that cloak crimes of passion (or convenience) as honor crimes. While Syrian law makes limited room for NGO’s or women’s rights, activists and lawyers are laying the cultural foundations necessary to end honor crimes.

Earlier this year, The New York Time’s and Lisa Jackson's documentary The Greatest Silence put the plight of Congolese raped women under the spotlight. In viewing this coverage, one of the questions that plagued my mind was: What are the Congolese themselves doing to counter this? A lot, it turns out.

At the turn of the century, the Democratic Republic of Congo found itself at the epicenter of a regional war that claimed over 5 million lives. The country is vast and fragmented. Goma and Bukavu, the capitals of North and South Kivu respectively, are not connected by road to the country’s capital, Kinshasa.

In a country where the state is a sham, where police and politicians are suspect, a refreshingly resourceful population has flourished. It is one that fights violence against women while struggling to put food on the table for families as large as ten to twelve children.

Organizations like S.O.S. SIDA and AFEM, highlighted in Women’s eNews east Congo articles, make a powerful impact in their communities with limited help or attention from the outside. Touched by Women’s eNews coverage, our readers have responded with words of encouragement and reached out helping hands.

The last stint of the journey found us relaxing in South Africa.

It ended in style: sipping strawberry mohitos at the seafront and plunging into a pile of fresh sushi. If you are ever in this corner of the world craving raw fish, let me recommend Wakame. Do not skim on dessert. South Africa's dessert wines—particularly Darheims and their straw wines –are delicious. Wakame's chef concocts the best tease to the palate: banana spring rolls with nutella. Hungry now? Head to Cape Town. It is the ultimate culinary experience.

We visited the Stellenbosh region on a shoestring budget. To prepare our stomachs for professional wine tasting, we first lunched a Djakharta, an Indonesian restaurant, a little jewel hidden by hills and valleys of vineyards. The owner was a Dutchman born in Indonesia. The recipes belonged to his grandmother. We tasted everything from chicken satay to egg curry to nasygoreng. This food intake was pure bliss but it blew our budgets out of water.

In Stellenbosch, we made two vineyard stops. This requires updating as the names were immemorable in Afrikaans after four glasses of red, three glasses of white, one rosé and two dessert wines. I remain most impressed with Stellenbosh dessert wines. In reds, you will find that the Pinotages are not a bad bet, world standard. On whites, these southern wines hold the fort across the board. South Africa has also taken a stab at whiskey and brandy production but I have yet to sample these fine brews so no specific recommendations.

Our stop in Cape Town included high dosages of shopping and sleeping. We wanted to shop for winter clothes since we had nothing to counter the temperature drop. The truth is, we still have none. South Africa's fashion was less impressive than its arts and crafts. I heavied my bag with  knickknacks for the family instead of extra layers. As for sleeping, I hate to admit it, we were true grandmothers: early risers and in bed shortly after sunset. One day – perhaps for the football World Cup, Cape Town is currently building the stadium – I would like to return and experience the nightlife.

Airport check-in at Kigali airport? 5 a.m. Argh. I landed in bad shape at Entebbe. Death by diarrhea on board was followed by violent vomiting before clearing immigration. This was not a fun spectacle. I hid under my hat and wobbled onwards.

Our first stop was Entebbe's beautiful botanical gardens. An expert guide showed us every type of tree and creepy crawler under the Ugandan sun.

Henna,  frankinsence, strangling ficus, nutmeg, bambu, eucaplyptus, cacao, ostridge tree, and canon balls towered above exotic shrubbery and mating dragon flies.

With each of our steps, microscopic insects surfaced from the soil. The dragonflies swept down and swallowed. Ant hills -- the size of hobbit homes-- portruded from the base of trees.

We encountered one ant colony marching across the road in multiple columns. Workers opened the path while soldiers stood guard, each waiting for the queen. Ants -- one of Aristotle's models for the polis -- are insanely structured animals.

On the banks of Lake Victoria we saw small monkeys, including a one-week-old baby. Unlike the aggressive monkeys that tend to crowd Buddhist temples in Thaliand and Indonesia, these were passive creatures, bored, almost, by our presence.

The 1930s black and white version of Tarzan was shot at Entebbe's botanical garden. Given the flora and fauna --the looping lianas, the white orchids, the fabulous fish eagles, the silly simians--it is easy to see why.

The road from Entebbe to Kampala was a marked improvement from Rwandan and Congolese roads. Homes also struck me as higher quality.

The city was clogged by lunchtime traffic when we reached it. In the absence of more creative alternatives, we stayed at the relatively cheap Tourist hotel.

After a 2-hour nap, we ventured out to the streets and supplied ourselves with some basics -- plane tickets, sim card, aspirins, pain killers, water.

To end the ordeal of our sleep-deprived day, we treated ourselves to an early, spicy dinner at Handi, an excellent Indian restaurant. Handi is theoretically owned by the sister of Kigali's best Indian restaurant, Khazana.

If this is true, the sister outdid the brother.

Kicking back in Kigali...

This is not a bad place to kick back. There is good coffee and internet, two essentials when you are filing stories. My productivity curve has been sharp. The only distraction was a short adventure into African cinema.

Daddy Ruhorahoza is rolling a film about a disenchanted expat and her African lover sharing a surreal bath and joint during a Halloween party. The script is fabulous. Audra and Daddy star. I and other budding actors party in the background.To read more about it, visit: www.torerofilms.blogspot.com

Tomorrow, at 5 a.m, we leave Rwanda for Uganda. Our layover there is just shy of 24 hours. The plan is to visit the botanical gardens in Entebbe and hang out in Kampala in the evening. We then take another wee-hour flight to Cape Town.

It is hard to digest that the African adventures end in a week.

We are now in Gisenyi, at the Paradis hotel. The volcano is behind us and Lake Kivu in front of us. Kivu shines silver, swelling mercury in the wind. Orange and purple flowers have colonized its muddy banks. Fisherman cut across the water singing in their wooden boats. The rain tap dances across the landscape. We are sitting under a banana leaf umbrella, drinking white wine and devouring fresh, grilled tilapia. Join us. Take a seat.

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The border crossing from Congo to Rwanda was easier than our arrival in Bukavu or Goma. In Rwanda, a greater degree of legality is expected from us Mozungos. After a week in the Congolese Kivus, this felt unfortunate. I was getting used to the bureaucratic-balloon-popping bribes. It devastated me when a smile was not enough to get a week long tourist visa versus a two-day visa for Rwanda. I was told to check-in Kigali within 48 hours.

Hotel Paradis is as beautiful as its name promised. Sadly, we did not do too much sightseeing or swimming. We collapsed into a food and drink comma at five p.m. By midnight I was awake again and wired. I was planning the rest of my life when I suddenly noticed a shadow on the door. It progressed to the third window/door. As it reached for the handle, I shook Audra awake, started speaking loudly and stomped to the lights. The intruder, real or imagined, was gone.

I don’t think it was the Lariam with its hallucinogenic side effects since I forget to take it. After our camping experience on the crater of the volcano – where after days of hearing rape testimonies we suddenly realized in the middle of the night that we were beyond the world’s earshot—I was curiously calm. Paul Kagame, I know, has put the fear of God into his citizens and turned the country into a law abiding Mecca. So, when I saw the shadow, I knew that at worst we would be dealing with a petty theft incident.

But it is a good thing we woke up. The door was unlocked. We are a little too carefree post-Congo. Better work on raising the paranoia levels before arriving in street crime intensive South Africa.

Camping on the crater of an active volcano was not among the harebrained schemes I hatched during sleepless nights in New York. There are certain things in life that are just too cool to for your cranium to conceptualize. Camping on the crater of an active volcano in the Congo counts as one of them. Personally, I had digested Congo, volcano and camping in that order. The last element, "active", was a last minute throw-in to the travel facts-on-file. It came as a pleasant surprise.

 
On August 6, 2008, at 11 a.m. exactly we set-off on the ascent with four fit porters, an erudite park ranger and an alcoholic armed guard. The volcano erupted in 2002, killing dozens and destroying much of the vegetation. But Mother Nature is superior at recovery, so for the first forty five minutes we found ourselves crossing a new rainforest. Clearings on the brush afforded us a hazy peak at a white tents refugee camp and the distant, muddy gridlines of Goma.

We marched over ants, brushed foliage aside, and arrived at the first stop: three logs lying in a c-shape. At this point, I learned that the four remaining segments of the journey got steeper, harder and longer. The park ranger's assessment was spot on. As soon as we broke clear of the rainforest, the soft muddy footpath gave way to giant rubble, coagulated volcanic ash that cut into the soles of our sneakers. One porter persevered like a mountain goat on flip flops. I had nothing but respect as I fell further behind, short on oxygen.

The journey began at 2000 meters. It ended at 3470 meters. I am not sure at which height exactly it got hard to breathe. But it got very hard. Audra was used to walking long hours in high altitudes from her time in Tyazo. The porters, surefooted and graceful like gazelles, do it everyday. I, despite my Alpine and Andenean gene-code, however, fared badly. Breathing was a struggle from stop two to three. By the time we crossed a second, steeper patch of rainforest, and reached stop four, I was in a murderous mood and ready to forfeit the final ascent to the crater. Pigeon, a Muslim Congolese porter who patiently followed my pace, lauded my ambition. It was not ambition, I told him, but absence of choice.

The final ascent was steep but not long. Thunder teased us the last half hour to the top. For all my silent cursing, reaching the crater was all the reward I needed to erase the final two hours of climbing misery. The red crater spewed sulphuric acid in welcome. I cracked a smile. Pigeon brewed coffee and sugar. The others made a fire. We chugged down the brown syrup and ventured to the crater's edge. It gurgled and spouted flames at the sky.  A rudimentary cross marked the place where a Japanese, female tourist fell 800 meters to her death. That can’t be a fun way to go.

We roasted hotdogs on the coals and sung African and American songs. Our socks dried on stones by the fire.At around 10 p.m. we collapsed into our wet sleeping bags (it rained for a good portion of the day). Thunder and lightning storms whipped our tent through the night. We couldn't sleep. The crater roared. At midnight, I had a migraine that fortunately passed after three Tylenols and two hours. The sulfuric fumes, the climb and the dehydration must have gone to my head. So much for mind over matter. I tossed and torned over a thin mattress contemplating the meaning of "hard core."

The next day, we woke up at 6 a.m., drunk more coffee, and packed up our drenched belongings into plastic sacks. While the climb up was bruising to the ego, the climb down almost cost me life and limb. Miss rubber ankles poor-grip-sneakers fell at least a dozen times. The soft landings were humorous. Less entertaining was slipping into a bush of pricklies. Even less entertaining was a 6-feet-look-out-below-fall that smacked me straight into a jagged stone surface. I thought my elbow cracked. It creaked for the next 48 hours but I didn’t break anything. Thank god I have my grandmother’s solid bones.