I was in the Congo several years ago and I wrote an article about that experience. We had gone around with all of these fantastic activists all day. Myself, my good friend Abbie Disney, Gini Reticker, all of us were on that trip. And midway through the trip, that night I went to my hotel room, sat down to get on my laptop to check emails and then I heard all this commotion. “He’s a bad man! He’s a bad man!” So, typical African woman will come out and put a wrap here. So that’s what I have, right up here. Ran out of my hotel room. Look, there’s this girl screaming. “He’s a bad man! He wants to do something bad to me.” So of course, the feminist in me is mobilized right there and then.
Everyone came running, police and every different group of people coming running towards. So we go to that room and whatever the talk in there, these people dragged this girl out and they’re punching her, beating her. She’s naked and they’re about to throw her in a pickup. So I run there and beg them to release her to me, that whatever the problem was we could sort it out and no one was listening to me. This is a big shot international aid worker who had taken this girl in his room to have his way with her, and she was saying that what he tried to do to her was not what they negotiated. And the police came. Instead of protecting her, he got protected and she got beaten and taken away.
So I went in my room angry, crying, mad. Fussed and fussed. Why did I have to be in the Congo to see this at this moment, God? Why is this my life? Those are the moments where I’m just challenging him and asking him questions. And then at the end of it, the still small voice says, “So what do you do about it? You can’t fight, but you have your intellect.” So I sit down and I write this article and send it off. I never see anything that I do. Someone would say, “So, what did writing that article do?” It did something.