Traveling to Congo

I think we forget that there are many places in this world that are so very much worse off than where we sleep tonight - or maybe the reference frame is simply not there for most Americans. It is thankfully almost impossible to imagine the reality of many people who live in DRC - particularly women in the eastern parts of the country.

http://twitter.com/thousandsisters

This is the twitter address of a woman who runs an organization supporting women in DRC and she is there right now - tweeting about a situation going seriously wrong as I write this. I can assure you many people in this region will lose their life and for some possibly worse (and I can assure you there is worse) tonight...and tomorrow, and the next day - over and over like a twisted version of deja vous. This is the region of the country where the daughter I am going to get next week is from - and where both of her parents were murdered in this same conflict.

And no, the city of kinshasa (where I travel next week) is nothing like this region - I have never felt unsafe in the city. It suffers from crushing poverty, but almost no one has any weapons - they are all in the east on the front lines. In fact on the streets of Kinshasa, less than 50% of the police have a gun, and of the ones that do, only half have bullets - A testament to the incredible lack of resources necessary to fund basic civil services.

If you can steel yourself enough to read the tweets, please do. DRC doesn't have Bono and Bill Clinton lobbying for them - and while the 2-400,000 killed in Darfur is a scar on humanity, between 4 and 6 million have been killed in this region over the same time period. The numbers create a numbness that lends itself to a false sense of security and I encourage you to resist that.

I will travel with video and photo equipment next week - though there are STRONG cultural taboos associated with pictures - to try and convey a sens of the city and the country that has so captivated me over the last year.