Fear
By Will Okun
June 20, 2007, 5:51 pm
I can hear the music pulsating in the thick Congo night, inviting me. “Come over, dance, drink, have a good time, enjoy life.” But I am scared to leave the hotel at night.
The breaking news is just over those mountains, the stories that will bring attention to the horrific conflicts of the Congo. But I am too scared to go. There is fighting in the hills, and everyone says the soldiers on both sides are immoral, unpredictable and without remorse.
It is terrible to feel such fear, it shakes you to the core. It controls your days and your nights, your security, your freedoms, and even seeps into your dreams. I do not have to live in such fear; in one week I can go home. But such is life in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where various conflicts have killed four million people and displaced one-and-a-half million more since 1998.
Imagine living in a rural community where your daughter could be raped, or even sodomized, by soldiers every time she leaves home. Recently, Nick Kristof asked a village leader to speak with a woman who had been raped, and the line continued to grow and grow at a sickening rate. Imagine living in a rural community where you do not grow crops to feed your family, because the soldiers will simply eat all the fruits of your labor anyway. Imagine hiding the fact that you have a job, because the soldiers will ransack your house first. Imagine leaving your village and home with your family in the dark of night for places unknown, because the soldiers’ violence devours everything in its path.
The gripping control of fear is not exclusive to the Congo. I know families in Chicago who do not let their kids outside to play. I have seen children scatter when it was only a car backfiring. I have taught high school gang members who know any day could also be their last day.
People do not appreciate security until they experience fear. Fear is so encompassing that it can become a person’s driving force. It is ludicrous to expect a person, community or even a nation to prosper and progress when they are in the throes of instability, insecurity and fear. Basic human rights like education, health, liberty, etc. cannot be developed and obtained until security is established, whether it be in the Congo or in Chicago.And yet most of us, including myself, are only truly concerned about the security of our loved ones. We do not care about the other side of town, nonetheless the other side of the world. How can I care about wars in Africa when I do not even care enough to combat gang warfare, bad schools, inadequate health care, unsafe water, etc. on the Southside of Chicago? How do I change this mindset, for myself and for others?
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Visiting the “Misery Camp” (Leana’s words), a relocation camp for people who have lost their land and homes to conflict, was a breaking point in sadness for me. To meet a beautiful human being like Nzahi Kukukiza and realize his living conditions was all but unbearable.
He had no money, no clean water, and little access to health care. There was no school, no electricity, no jobs or fields to farm. His family of four was crammed into a six-foot by six-foot hut, their few belongings scattered on the floor. He had no friends; his father and brothers were killed in a war that does not exist. His children were malnourished and very sick. But still, it was not enough for Nick Kristof.
He wanted to push on to a different relocation camp or village where the conditions were even more abysmal (which is unimaginable to me). Nick’s purpose in reporting about the Congo is to open the eyes of the international community and the American public to the travesty that is unabatedly devastating the Congo and their people. I assume that he believes that the American public will only take notice of an African problem when the atrocities have reached beyond the lowest depths of human misery. Only when the previously unimaginable occurs will attention and action result.
Sadly, it is not enough for a human woman to live in squalor, to be malnourished, to be uneducated, to have no access to clean water or health care. This is not news. Only when she is raped, her children dead and her family killed in war, then we will finally take heed and demand intervention.
And so these are the people we have been seeking in decimated villages throughout the Congo in hopes of having someone finally notice this deadly war. However, these stories come at a cost.
I am leaving the Congo very dispirited and depressed. But I have no idea if my impressions are unreasonably tainted. Out the truck window, I see vibrant, beautiful men and women leading normal lives: laughing, working, dating, dancing, shopping, etc. But we are not stopping here, we are headed for misery.
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Will Okun has taught English and photography for eight years at Westside Alternative High School in the Austin community of Chicago. He is also the sponsor of the weightlifting club and, at 5' 5" (in boots), claims to still be the best basketball player in the school (unconfirmed). Will spends the rest of his waking hours operating wjzo.com, a Web site that features his portraits of high school students and documentary photographs of the West Side communities of Chicago. The site offers a unique perspective on inner-city youth culture and averages 30,000 views a week from all over the world. Will proudly hails from Carrboro, North Carolina.
