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My colleagues in D.C. often frame Congo’s problems as half solved now that elections have taken place. So I ask, “Elections have happened. Some people think the war is over in Congo. What would you say to that?”

She laughs, exasperated. “We have nothing to say. We are just like patients in a hospital, waiting to be healed. Even if they say war is over, our place is not safe. It is not over. We live in permanent fear.”

Furaha: “They came at night, took my husband and me in the bushes. I spent three months there. They killed my husband. He was killed in my sight. I remember the way they cut my husband in parts. I saw all the parts.”

She makes sharp, stabbing gestures with her hands towards her stomach.

They gutted my husband like a fish.

They cut him in parts.

I saw the parts.

I can’t tell that story. It’s not productive. If I tell that story, I’m a trash peddler. A gore-monger.

I smile supportively and look at them as they sit opposite me, on the edge of the narrow wooden bench, with their arms crossed. I feel cold and mechanical behind the camera. Something is off. This meeting has become an audition. An audition to become one of my talking points. I could have given them numbers and made a scorecard to help filter the information—charted their stories; rated them, on a scale of one to five, for usability. Which horror-nugget wins?

I’ll just ignore this sinking feeling.

SINCE WHEN AM I the enemy? Stepping out of the car and into the rain outside Women for Women’s Walungu vocational skills center, I am confronted by a crowd of women. They stand in the drizzle, huddle around trees, or crowd under the few umbrellas. At the sight of me, they run for the bushes, faces turned away, covering their heads with wraps and scarves and shooting me dirty looks. I ask Hortense, “Why are they hiding?”

Hortense, who has gone ahead, calls backwards to me. “They say you haven’t written them yet. Why should they be filmed?”

They’ve been waiting hours in the rain to be enrolled.

When we get inside, the enrollment process is in full swing, with women hoping to join the program cramped between previously enrolled participants working on sewing machines and learning embroidery. Jules explains, “We cannot enroll all the women in the community. This time we can enroll 308 women based on the criteria.”

“What’s the criteria?”

“It depends on the project: internally displaced persons, killings, rape, refugees. The problem in this community is that all the women were raped, all are refugees. So here, we have to evaluate their stories. That’s why those women outside are angry.”

There is another, even larger crowd in back. I watch them through the rusty windowpanes, hoping they don’t notice me. Women crowd around the doors, peering through. Forty or so maintain orderly lines under a plastic tarp. About fifteen more huddle under the eaves to avoid the rain, waiting their turn. Hortense explains, “These are the women who have been selected. They are waiting to be given forms.”

In a few minutes, they’ll be invited inside, where they’ll take a seat at a long wooden table and squeeze the details of their lives into little boxes on a questionnaire that will soon be entered into a database, printed out, and stapled with a photo, taken today; in a few weeks, this packet will land in an American mail-slot.

Out front it’s still a different story. Jules tells us, “We’ve told them that for today we have too many. Come next time. Go home.”

They don’t look like they are heading home. I walk outside and stand in the rain with them. “I’m filming so I can show Americans you are waiting. So they will sponsor you, okay? I’m trying to help you.”

Hortense stands in the rain and translates while I slip back inside. A few minutes later, Hortense is still explaining. The women continue to argue; someone yells from the back, louder and louder. Everyone cheers. They are shouting, chiming in together. I don’t understand a word, but it’s clear they are going off. Even the babies wail, following the leads of their mothers.

Hortense walks