Day 3: Bukavu

It's day three and only our first full day in Bukavu but we are already so amazed by how things have progressed. Two chance meetings have already begun to help our project take shape.  

Last night we met Christine, the hotel manager's wife (we should pause here to say that we're staying at a Gorilla Safari camp that in the absence of tourists is now filled with humanitarian aid workers and mining industry folk). She also happens to be the President of Eve Ensler's City of Joy outside of Bukavu. We've been trying to connect with this organization since April and last night she came over to our table to say hello. Welcome to Congo! 

We also spent this morning and part of the afternoon chatting with Janny (a mental health advisor working with John's Hopkins in conjunction with the IRC - International Rescue Committee). We need to pause here, yet again, to note that we've been trying to contact the IRC for months. We were literally picked up this morning and told that there was a woman who was willing to chat with us about her work here. The meeting could not have been more successful in helping us achieve our goals. 

As we sat in Janny's apartment overlooking beautiful Lake Kivu (which is strangely reminiscent of Lake Cuomo in Italy!) we talked for hours about the realities of the conflict, the violence, the stakeholders, the failures of intervention and possible ways forward. Janny spoke honestly and openly speaking outside of her official capacity as a representative of the IRC with us, pushing the conversation far beyond the official rhetoric. It turned into a real dialogue about her observations of the sexual violence and its effect on cultural and state structures. 

We plunged into the depths of the violence and the the broader conflict fueling it. We also began to dissect the failure of both the UN missions and massive NGO presence to bring an end to the violence (we'll follow up with a longer post giving our thoughts on the peacekeeping mission etc. and also try to convince Janny herself to write a guest post). While Janny said many things we had not heard or thought of before, her one word response reenforced our own thoughts on what continues to fuel the violence,  "greed". She told us to "look around, the opulence is everywhere". And she's right there are multimillion dollar homes intermixed with hovels at every corner. 

When we came back to the hotel to debrief and film, we sat down with a sheet of paper and started to map out the complex web that is the conflict in the DRC. We came in thinking we were armed with all of this knowledge and had all this research under our belts. But now we feel like investigative journalists in search of the truth, the full story. Because of the nature of our project we have a freedom not enjoyed by many people working in the NGO/UN community. The freedom to peel away and uncover the real forces at work here.

As the day winds down we wanted to share a final thought sent to us today by a dear friend. He said, "You are on a great journey of not only adventure, but of the heart and human spirit." We couldn't have said it better ourselves!