A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [5]
Is this article about that same family? It must be.
It will be days before I hear from one of the United Nations majors who escorted me that day, who confirms my guess. “If you remember the last walk, it was that same area.”
I went to Kaniola on a tip, a shred of paper, on a day I had nothing better to do. I spent less than a day there—just a Sunday morning—walking through the village, hoping to talk with the rescued girls. We visited the girls’ home and spoke for more than an hour with the cool-tempered teenagers, their brother, and their desperate father. Afterward, their dad turned to us and asked pointedly, “Now that we’ve talked with you, what are you going to do?”
I drag out the plastic storage bin packed with videotapes from my trip, long since left in a corner of an empty room, its contents unviewed. I’m up late, combing the unfiltered, raw footage, which are called “rushes” in the film industry. Finally I find the Kaniola tapes.
It’s peaceful enough there. Certainly, there is no gore. (I never once saw a dead person in Congo.) Still, I notice my hands shaking as I watch. I have to stop, pace the hall, and return to inch through the footage, frame by frame, until I land on the clearest image of each person I so much as scanned with the camera that day. I capture them in still frames. I export them, save them, print them out in pixilated eight-by-tens, and file them in a white plastic three-ring binder.
I missed so much when I was there. I had heard that when you cross the border into Congo, the look in people’s eyes changes. I noticed it the first day, then never again. Now, as I scan the video footage, it seems so obvious. I study their eyes. Countless people have referred to that look as one of numbness or shell shock. Journalist Lisa Ling once called it “a look of utter death.”
As days fly by and I continue to dig deep into the footage, I stumble across a shot of myself on my second day in Africa, standing on the Rwandan side of the border with a rickety wooden bridge in front of me. I’m about to cross over. I’m already disheveled from the thirty-five-minute flight from Kigali, Rwanda.
That’s odd. In the footage, I am blinking rapidly. My eyelids are fluttering. I didn’t feel afraid at the time, but as I watch myself, I’m clearly scared. Why did I invite that place in? Why did I pursue it, track it down?
It wasn’t because I wanted a feel-good pet project. I needed a solution.
CHAPTER TWO
The Greenest Grass
IT ALL STARTS with Oprah, as these things so often do.
It is August 2004 and I am sitting in my therapist’s office. She zeroes right in. “You’ve been watching Oprah a lot lately.”
I am not one to advertise my daytime TV habits, but my four o’clock appointment with Ms. Winfrey has recently become the sturdy anchor in my day. “How did you know that?”
“Depressed people who are at home during the daytime always watch the show.”
Wait, depressed? I don’t have a clue where she’s getting that. To me, depressed is someone in a dingy bedroom in mid-afternoon, blinds closed, watching the digital clock click from 2:12 PM to 2:13 PM to 2:14 PM, or rattling around the house in day-thirteen socks. That is not me. Some stress issues? Sure, and there is my dad’s end-stage cancer. But I feel fine.
I have a great life. At twenty-nine, I am on a solid trajectory, working my plan. I have a little Victorian house with a flower garden in a hip, walkable Portland neighborhood; a creative business with cash-flow charts that tell me freedom is just around the corner; and a good man to snuggle with at night. My quirky English business partner, Ted, is also my significant other. We aren’t married, but there’s no need. We have a bond just as strong, with all the legal protections to match. We are a corporation.
Ted is wonderful, truly. Everything I’ve always had on my list. Kind. Creative. Fun. Cool. Though he’s fifteen years my senior, at forty-four, he prefers to think of himself as twenty-two. Playful and charming to the bone, he can squeeze a smile out of even the most sour grocery-checkout