When I’m speaking about Congo I make sure that I provide a political and historical context often not presented in Western media – “What is taking place in the Congo is a resource war, a geo-strategic battle being waged on the backs of the Congolese people and in the wombs of Congolese women. Congo is the home of the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world and since 1996, nearly six million people have died.
As I awoke on this Christmas morning from my dream in which I was in Eastern Congo again, I realized that too often I suppress what it was like to experience the energy of war, for the first time when I visited Congo earlier this year. In my dream I felt the intensity of these feelings again. The part of the dream I recalled began with an officer stopping me in the streets of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, asking to see my papers. I questioned the officer’s request, but while in the D.R.C. this year when asked for my passport, I contained my righteous indignation. The surge of anxiety I walked with, in the dream and in my recent visit was emotionally paralyzing, as I was starkly aware that there was no real safe harbor anywhere in my sight. Everywhere in my dream just as in my visit, armed soldiers lined up against store walls as if they owned the air that the Congolese people breathed and it was hard for me to differentiate between the varied armed groups I passed on the street. The UN forces, foreign troops from the neighboring countries of Rwanda & Uganda and the Congolese army all seemed to have one thing in common – their presence was elusive at best and deadly at worst. These young soldiers were now reduced to mere mercenaries for US and foreign corporate interests and governments such as Rwanda and the small percentage of Congolese élite – hired hands in a global resource game in which Congo loses while the rest of the world wins.
As I continued walking down the streets of Congo in my dream, a woman in her early 60′s, held her breath as she briskly walked ahead of me, passing a group of soldiers. She seemed to have mastered the stealth of a samurai warrior – deliberately disengaged with the sights and sounds in her line of vision, possessing the ability to stay almost undetected by the human eye. Within seconds, I saw a soldier raise his machine gun as if he was lifting an amulet to the sky to receive God’s blessing and fire into a crowd of people. I attempted to slide under a table when a soldier grabbed my ankle flinging me against a wall to be used as cannon fodder. A slew of soldiers were already firing in my direction and seemed eager to find the “right landing” for their bullets to pierce. Lucky for me, I was in a dream and was able to escape from the onslaught of machine gunfire, possessing the power to defy gravity and my likely fate.
I woke up in my warm bed relieved and thankful that this dream wasn’t my life. I thought about how I stood out as a foreigner in the refugee camps of the Congo months earlier during my “real” visit – how the eyes of the displaced men and women seemed to meet mine with fury and envy and say, “You get to go home.” The intense guilt I felt was palpable, as I knew that I had personally benefited from the Coltan and Cobalt in their soil and yet did not have to live their nightmare. I could go back home, in my nice warm bed and forget their faces if I chose to and on this Christmas morning I could even pretend that they don’t exist.
What a powerful dream. I think it is saying that you choose what path you take with the info/experience you were able to receive. You choosen to be the sounding board and that beaken of light…