How You Can Help & Partner With Goma

PRAY FOR PEACE, SAFETY AND RESOLUTION BETWEEN GEN. NKUNDA (CNDP FORCES) AND KABILA (CONGO PRESIDENT)

To Donate:
1) Send us an email with the amount of your donation prior to mailing a check at cristina.m.edelstein@gmail.com. This allows us to approve funds for food relief and pre-approving medical procedures in a timely manner.
2) Write checks out to HEAL Africa with “HEALing Arts- EMERGENCY FUND” written in the memo. Mail checks to Harper McConnell at P.O. Box 147, Monroe, WA 98272.

To Advocate:
1) Write to your politicials using the letter below. To find them:
Senators: http://www.senate.gov/index.htm
Congressman: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

2) Letter to ban "Conflict Coltan" from being imported to the US; to advocate for conflict-free trade of minerals.
http://healafrica.org/cms/files/media/Coltan%20Letter.pdf
To understand about the coltan problem, read http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-h

3) To receive a copy of the Global Call for Action to Stop New War-Rapes in Goma & Eastern Congo! please email Harper McConnell at harper@healafrica.org to sign the petition and distribute it.


On behalf of the people of Goma, thank you for helping us. We thank God for his continual protection of our friends and that nothing- even catastrophes and evil people- is outside of his control. We will once again stand strong. ASANTE! (THANK YOU!).

Countdown to our Evacuation

Sunday, October 26
2:00 PM Chelsie and Cristina walk 30 women from the fistula transit center and 8 children over to the sports center, where Yole! Africa has organized a festival for peace and safety. Today’s activities include a ‘battle of the bands’ from local hip hop dance groups and a film about this year’s election conflict in Kenya. The women love the entertainment as we sit in the sweltering heat with 3,000 other Goma residents enjoying local talent.

Monday, October 27
7:45 AM Sun shining bright. Chelsie does some yoga as Cristina rides the stationary bike and studies Swahili. We go to the breakfast table and meet Lyn, who somberly warns us that we should know where our passports and money are. Nkunda took over the neighboring town of Kibumba and pushed back the UN forces in the Congo (MONUC). We expect 20,000 refugees running to Goma.
1:28 PM Distracted day with news reports; regardless, we plan for growth of HEALing Arts and Upper Room and CPC’s involvement in DR Congo. Cristina’s French lesson with Stewart is all about the imminent war. Thirty rounds of bullets go off two blocks away in the center of town, where we had heard reports that civilians were stoning MONUC for running away from the war; the UN soldiers responded by killing two civilians and wounding several others. As usual, HEAL Africa has to take care of them. Within one hour, tensions rise. Chelsie downloads some news articles before we race home past thousands of residents heading home.
8:00 PM We send house staff to purchase extra gas for the house and for the motor for our boat. He reports that gas and food prices are already increasing quickly. All short-term volunteers are ordered to return to their home countries the next morning.

Tuesday, October 28
7:04 AM Chelsie is getting dressed and Cristina is in the shower. Jo Lusi knocks on our door saying we should leave Goma immediately for a few days, because “the soldiers will see young girls and then there’s only me between them and you. Better leave and come back in the weekend.” Soon after, Lyn learns that the MONUC general resigned which pleases the people and gives hope. We decide to remain and go to work to fight for normalcy of life.
11:40 AM All our Congolese friends urge us to leave; they say it doesn’t matter that we don’t want to leave them. We are different and an easy target given the attitude towards the UN at the moment. This is the third time they will have lived this war in Goma, they tell us. “We just want them to do whatever they are going to do, kill and steal and then let us get back to life.” Government soldiers lost again and are fleeing to Goma, which is only worse than bad. Many prisoners from the local jail have escaped and increased the chaos. A sense of anarchy settles in.
2:15 PM We cross to Rwanda, our border friends eyeing with reproachful eyes, “You’re abandoning us, too?” We try to justify it, convinced we will return in a day or two. On the Rwanda side, there is a deluge of mzungus who have also been ordered out of the country. Unlike the wealthier NGOs, Chelsie and I are the only white people riding motos to the crowded bus on the way to Kigali. Friends open their homes to us, having cooked fresh lasagna for us. What world do we live in?

Wednesday, October 29
8:00 AM First thoughts after restless nights with dreams: our friends. We call the Lusis, HEALing Arts, Yole Africa and others. Only one friend’s dad was shot by a stray bullet, stores pillaged, bullets ringing all night long. Government soldiers are the main instigators, followed by hopeless and angry young men. HEAL staff lost in the region; found at a Red Cross camp that was later looted.
2:00 PM The urgency for food increases as we worry about our friends locked up in their homes with no provisions and the little groceries and gas available with sky high prices. We worry about how they will survive, since payday has not yet happened for the month and probably won’t anytime soon. We spend at least $20 per day on phone credit, checking up on people and assuring them we are praying and that God will keep them safe and that the world has not forgotten them.
6:15 PM Reports say Nkunda has taken over Goma. Any remaining NGOs are evacuated; Goma residents cringe all night long as more homes are looted, people hurt and many dying. Around 45,000 internally displaced peoples have arrived in Goma in two days, hoping to find safety there- which continues to elude them.
Night Nkunda steps back his CNDP forces, ‘generously ‘allowing the MONUC to keep Goma calm under the chaos and panic caused by the defeated soldiers and fear of the CNDP forces, under the claim that it is to “stop panicking the population of Goma.” Looting and the sound of bullets continue to assail our friends, who still have no food. Rwanda exchanging gunfire over the border into the Congo.

Thursday, October 30
6:50 AM First text messages from Congolese friends assuring us they are OK other than losing belongings to theft. The silent but screaming question demands: how will everyone eat?
9:00 AM Once the roads are a bit less dangerous, our friend finally carries his father to the HEAL hospital for treatment to his gunshot. His medical bill will be passed on to HEALing Arts as his family has not money to pay and surgery is needed immediately.
2:00 PM Hope seems dim that the door will be opened for us to return anytime soon. We now focus on pooling together our resources via friends who care, to start supplying starving people with food and medical treatment.

The Hardening of Boyhood

We received a little 7 year old girl at HEAL Africa last week. She arrived on emergency at midnight. She was brutally gang raped in her home and then shot in the vagina. She will never have babies and her pelvis is shattered. Although she is “awake,” due to severe trauma, she is completely unresponsive emotionally and psychologically. Her father had both of his arms smashed for trying to save her. Her brother is in intensive care from a gunshot to his stomach.
When I have no way to express the injustice that happens to innocent people, what I call “free verse” is my outlet. Forgive me for sharing so blatantly some of the thoughts that cross my mind, the struggle I experience in trying to make sense of the world I am faced with- the reality I have to face, but others have to live.

This free verse was inspired by this child’s experience, and my thoughts about the members of her family.

The Hardening of Boyhood

Fathers emasculated by their inability to protect their daughters and wives.
The blank stare of trauma, the troubled mind eased by its surrender
To nothingness.
The anger, the pain, the inability to change
The government, the soldiers as they range
With empty, greedy, starving eyes.

Too easy to blame them, but little would you know
Their wives have also been ravaged with that blow
The stripping of feminine privacy, purity marred for the world to see
But would you believe it?
Often children they may be.

The destruction of war is destruction by greed.
Mask it as tribal, mark it as sexist; hatred is only the seed.
Who doesn’t want more- more wealth, more power?
More ability to protect one’s own family?
Dignity vanished…

A young boy dreams of becoming a doctor;
His impoverished father hands him a gun.
“Your work is cut out for you now, boy.
No, in this hard world we live in,
I must teach you to fight for survival.
Education is for the wealthy, not for people like us.
Let go of your childish dreams, wipe your tears, and straighten your back.
Today you will learn to defend your family so that when you are married,
No man will be able to do to your wife and daughters
What those men did to your mother and sisters.

Listen and learn:
Run until you can go no further, fight for what is yours.
In this world of evil, in this war, there are no rules.
Grab what you can, eat it while you have it.
Trust no one and do not plan for a long life.
This world is not a happy place,
So wipe your tears, straighten your back and
Stop your hand from shaking
As you hold this gun.
This is your future.”

The boy tightens his grip on the cold metal,
Wipes his cheeks with his tattered shoulders,
Bites his trembling lip and with eyes still welling with tears,
Learns as he looks up into his father’s hardened eyes.

Back to My World: A Dichotomous Life?

Fifty-some hours of travel back to the Congo after my whirlwind of a fun and intense “vacation” in Minneapolis, San Francisco and rural Minnesota. Eating food from all over the world with people, enjoying Caribou coffee, friends and family, jogging alone around the clean lakes by my old house. Paying over $4 for a simple coffee in the London airport.
My new coworker, Chelsie, and I arrive to Goma from Rwanda in a crazy thunderstorm, our taxi driver evading fallen trees on the road, driving through muddy fields to find an opening back to the main road, windshield wipers speeding like crazy to whisk away the torrential drops battering our car. We cross the no-man’s-land border by foot in the now sprinkling rain, pay a total of $4 to the four porter boys who are grateful for work in this weather and greet my border friends, flying through the paperwork for our visas without a problem. We wait tired and somewhat frustrated in the darkening evening by the border crossing for over 40 minutes until the driver arrives to take us home.
We pile in with about 8 other HEAL Africa staff into the vehicle, tossing our luggage inside. I am happy that I did not forget Swahili (as I feared) during the 3 weeks I was gone; instead, it’s almost as if it settled in. I catch up with the driver and some of my friends, all of us laughing and excited to see each other again. They update me on how Nkunda has been shelling the refugees in Masisi Center… my memories go back to the people I met there, the destituteness of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of lives compacted into a small geographical area.
I arrive home and am instantly inundated by guests’ needs. Practically hallucinating from exhaustion, I answer questions, concerns, collect rent payments and more until well after 9:30 that night, trying to shower and pass out before the lights are shut off. Sleep eluded me. I had been moved to another room during my vacation. I tried to calm my speeding thoughts as I sought sleep and readjustment to life in Goma yet again.
I leave my beautiful home by the lake, the morning sun glistening happily on the gentle waves by the flower garden. I drive over the lava rock and bumps, that familiar jostling of my body and feeling of dust invading my eyelids.
Joyous cries of “Cristina!” greet me as I walk past the smelly, bare-essentials transit center for fistula patients. They crowd around me, touching my clothes and my hair, “You are back! You were gone for so long. What is the news of your family?” They eagerly show me the scraps of African material they are sewing together into the body parts for the baby dolls at Healing Arts. “You know,” they tell me, “we are almost done with the order of 1,000 baby dolls. What will we sew after that?” I tell them of plans to make banana leaf jewelry and other items. The newer women that arrived during the time that I was gone eye me from afar. Their glazed-over eyes slowly warm up at the strange sight of a mzungu talking with them familiarly. They begin to laugh with me- and sometimes at me- along with the women who know me better. They like to tell me, “You, we know you well.” They love to laugh at my attempts at expressing more complicated thoughts in Swahili, and giggle whenever I get any phrase right. “Cristina loves to dance!” they chuckle to each other whenever I shake to the music in the sewing room.
My heart is at peace again. “I love these women,” I think to myself, “I didn’t realize how much I would begin to see them as friends.” During the days that pass, we joke together, I hear their stories, learn more about their children back at home, their extreme poverty. We pray together and sing songs about Jesus with the pastor who stops by to greet them. Oddly enough, I feel comfortable, albeit the smells of smoke, urine and dirty babies with ringworm. Even as I write this update, I sit comfortable by the lake with the breeze and the slowly-setting sun gleaming gently on the water.
A week flies by between the ups and downs, stresses and joys, lack of sleep and exhausted rest, wealth and poverty, successes and challenges: I am back in Goma, and most of the time, it makes me smile.

The mother, little girl and baby brother who carved permanent places in my heart (part II)

Eugenie is the mother’s name; she showed up at HEAL Africa a few days later with her disabled daughter Evira, and starving baby boy strapped to her back. Upon being consulted, she was referred to our disability program, Children Like Us, to get physical therapy. As usual in this region, they must remain in Goma for the duration of the treatment, as there is none in Masisi. They have no money to buy food, let alone travel back home. Lacking income to rent anywhere, the hospital grounds have become their home, as so common for the impoverished, but lucky, patients who succeed in arriving for medical treatment. She and the other women mix fuofou from the meager- and sometimes moldy- cornmeal donated by the World Food Program.
Within the first few days, Eugenie and I laughed as we figured out that not only is my Swahili very much in the learning stage, but that it is also her second language after her tribal tongue. Since she speaks no French, we are limited to communicating in our developing Swahili. She had asked me for money to buy food one day, at which I agreed to help her for one month on the condition that she come to the sewing classes at HEALing Arts to learn to sew. It was painfully obvious she has never learned any marketable skills in her life, nor received any education at all. I had to lead her by her hand into the room and introduce her to the head seamstresses the first day. I led her by the hand again the second day, as she timidly entered again into the busy, loud, orange room that has become a place of hope for the fistula patients waiting at the transit center. I had to insist every day for over a week that she show up, scolding her when she was absent. After several days, she finally passed the “sewing straight lines on paper” stage. Every time she mentions needing more food, I challenge her to earn her own money, since we pay for every item each woman sews.
This week, as I was working in HEALing Arts, Mama Eugenie eagerly showed me a beautiful coin purse that she had sewn all by herself- to perfection. I was beaming for her, my heart glowing to see her proud face and growing confidence at her accomplishment. She is sewing regularly now, and making friends with the community of women.
As for Evira and her baby brother, they have also carved their own special place in my heart. All I can say is that we mutually understand each other. Yes, me and a 9 year old girl with cerebral palsy and an 18-month old infant (whose severe malnutrition makes him seem half his age, except for his teeth), both of whom are constantly covered in food particles, slobber and who knows what else. We’re friends…
How the baby, still urgently suckling on his mother’s breast, laughs joyfully every time he sees me. We giggle together as he shrieks when I tickle his tiny body; his mother shyly smiling at the boy’s wriggling body on her back. Personally, my joy comes from seeing his mind more at peace these days, his behavior less erratically desperate. And Evira, how her face transforms into a shining smile when she sees me. How she crawls right up to me and leans her body heavily on my legs until I play a bit with her, scratch her back and make her smile. How she then proceeds to drag herself up by my legs and clothing until she stands upright on her weak limbs, reaches for my hands, her gentle eyes and toothy smile begging me to go for a walk with her. This week- the same week her mother successfully sewed a coin purse- we managed to make our way up the steps of HEALing Arts and slowly amble over to her mother, baby boy peacefully asleep on her back.
Even when I don’t see them in a day, I think about them every day. Maybe, for this one woman, her life can change. Maybe she will return with a girl who can walk, as she should have always been able to, had there been medical services in her war-torn homeland. Maybe Eugenie will return with a new sewing machine and become the neighborhood seamstress. Maybe she will one day teach other women and maybe even hire some of them to work for her. Maybe her little boy will grow up to be a strong soccer player, or an orthopedic surgeon. Maybe things can change.
Today, her daughter starts physical therapy.

The little girl who broke into my heart

I feel like it is time to talk about her, as she has become a delightful, yet occasionally painful, part of my life. Maybe I was unprepared for her entrance into my life. This story, like any other, has two parts – first, when you meet someone and second, the development of your relationship- the second of which I’ll try to post soon.

Part I
To acquaint you with this little girl, I must first tell you about her mother and the story of how we met her little family. It was on a dirt path next to a trickling rivulet that runs next to the Nehemiah Committee’s building in war-torn Masisi, on that particular trip that I blogged about in July. A woman with sunken eyes, pleading for hope, had brought her little girl to us for help. Plagued by untreated cerebral palsy, this girl had been dragging her atrophied little legs on her calloused and damaged knees for the first 9 years of her life. She had a long-ago deformed shoulder, most likely from being roughly pulled from the womb at birth or early in her infancy. Her ankles were stiffly becoming fixed in a hyper extended position.

That fresh and sunny morning, her mother showed up at our doorstep with the Nehemiah Committee, her few belongings wrapped in African cloth and begging us to take her to HEAL Africa, saying she heard we help all people. This woman had a squealing baby boy strapped to her lower back, whimpering and demanding more milk, chomping violently on her breast, beating it for milk it couldn't give. The baby malnourished, the mother finished. She looked to be 45 but could not have been more than 30. Another of her children sat by her feet, and the little girl sitting in the middle of the road, disabled, on her knees, hands with fingers interlocked nervously, staring off into space as we all regarded her state.
We were fortunate enough to have a physical therapist with us on the trip. As Loran looked at the girl’s little legs so encrusted with dirt you could hardly tell the difference; with gentle touch, this previously unresponsive child started to smile, then followed directions and within minutes, clung to Loran. The mother watched us as her baby boy peed uncontrollably on her, the hot liquid dripping all the way down her back and skirt, creating a puddle behind her worn, green sandals as she tried to explain her needs to us. The troubled baby screamed disturbing, high-pitched shrieks, demanding to be fed.
I cannot imagine waking to her life every day.
She watched confusedly as everyone argued about how and when we could help the little girl, some of the men forcefully grabbing the child in typical African manner. The mama produced a letter of recommendation from a regional disability center for treatment in Goma. Finally, we gave her transport money to get to the hospital.
To me, she is an example of selfless sacrifice for the good of her family at whatever cost to her, a classy quality that often permeates this society. Women like her have my respect, however, I mourn for her above anything. Is there not something we can do to help women like her engage in their lives with dignity- as women, as mothers, as human beings? How did someone like her end up with so much trouble, with so little opportunity?
My heart suffocated, I watched as she balanced all her belongings on her head- a pot and a pan wrapped in a big cloth- and, the baby still strapped to her back, her skirt still soaked, she lifted her little daughter onto her shoulders, her other child trailing behind her as she made her way up the path. Maybe with some hope renewed, yet her problems, in essence, unchanged.

Singing for AMANI

Amani means ‘peace’ in Swahili. Every Saturday that I go to Yole! Africa’s Jam session, I am constantly amazed and energized at the commitment and vigor of Goma’s Congolese youth who fight to communicate their messages of peace for their country. These teenagers and youth in their 20s write hip hop songs about ending war and ethnic conflicts, fighting sexual violence, building people’s rights and opportunities in their country.
These days, HEAL Africa has partnered with Yole! Africa to produce a CD of music from local artists, with songs expressing HEAL Africa’s themes of holistic healing of the people of the Congo. Last Saturday, they held a competition for the bands to participate in this CD. Yole’s driveway, which is regularly transformed into a music stage and benches for the audience was packed tight in the bright sunshine of the afternoon. Eager artists were prepared with their best, the neighborhood was watching and cheering, street boys in their tattered outfits giddy with excitement. At least 16 bands played, each displaying their own style and original lyrics, although most are hip hop artists. The harmony among these bands was evident as they cheered each other on, high fives flying everywhere, voices in the crowd singing along in support the different artists.
To wrap up the whole afternoon of fun and music, Yole’s organizers presented some surprise guests. Sekombi worked up the crowd with cheers as he introduced the three famous Congolese artists, each from different generations. They sang songs with joy; the crowd was ecstatic. The last artist called all the artists up on stage with him as they sang a chorus in French, saying, “unity, unity for the Congo; let no one divide us again.” Interspersed between each chorus, every musician sang an improvised stanza- the whole experience was electrifying!
Keep your eyes open, your ears listening and your wallet ready for the HEAL Africa/ Yole CD that will be released in September! If you can’t come to hear them sing live, buy it: you won’t want to miss this production.