For those of you who have been pre-warned, this is the first "chapter" in a short series. This is what I've been thinking about lately. This is what God has been teaching me:
It all started the day I sat down to read Journey to the Heart of Darkness, a non-fiction book written by Tresor Yenyi, a man born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). After graduating from an American college, Tresor returned to his home country to research ways to help his people. What he found shocked him. Traveling through the countryside, interviewing former child soldiers, village girls who had been raped by rebel militia, men who had fought in the jungle wars, Tresor collected a series of horrific stories.
Torture. Child abuse. Slavery. Terror. Death.
Today.
All of the stories were happening today.
I read the following quotes from Tresor’s book as he fought to be a voice for the voiceless:
“I saw so many bad things when I was in the militia. We were considered animals. We were made to be criminals and murderers. They made us evil, and we could not tell the difference between good and evil anymore. Everyone thinks we are murderers and, therefore, we deserve death. We end up becoming thieves and some are burned alive in the streets . . .” (written by a former child soldier; he was 10 years old when he joined the army)
“I still have my parents and they welcomed me, but my brothers were mocking me. They were saying I called the Interahamwes [Rwandan militia] to come rape me. I don’t know what illness I have, as my belly is swollen. People think I am pregnant, but I am not. As for my daughter [born of a rape], people accept her but I can’t feed her. I am really worried about the fact that my stomach is hurting. I am traumatized. I have dreams of them raping us in the forest. I sometimes spend a week without eating . . .”
“They tied my dad, looted everything we possessed, and raped me in front of my father. I was fifteen when that happened. I am still in primary school, and my grades are not good because I cannot concentrate. I keep thinking about what happened to me. I don’t have any peace in my heart. At school, people laugh at me because they know what happened to me . . .”
That’s a very tiny sliver of what I read. Are you starting to feel what I was feeling? Is there a knot at the back of your throat?
And while I sat in my comfortable chair, sipping my hot chocolate and reading these stories, my dad ran across an article in the paper entitled, “Judge to decide if Sea World orcas are ‘enslaved.’”
“In San Diego,” the article began, “where what goes on in Sea World is more important to many than what goes on in the White House, a federal judge is deciding whether the famous orca whales are slaves under the 13th Amendment of the Constitution. That, of course, prohibits slavery.”
I had just read about a 15-year old girl getting kidnaped by rebel militia. I had read about a 10-year old village boy who knows what it feels like to kill a human being. And now I was reading about the heroic efforts of Americans to free whales from slavery.
“The whale warriors argue that slavery does not depend on species any more than it does on gender, ethnicity or race,” the article declared. It then went on to muse, “It would be kind of cool if a federal judge ruled that huge, magnificent creatures such as orcas or gorillas may not be kept in tanks or cages and forced to perform on demand. It would be, well, very modern of us.”
Do you see the problem here? The danger? The sickening, twisted irony? We can sit here in our comfortable chairs, listening to the clock ticking on the wall and smelling fresh-brewed coffee, while reporters tell us about the battle to free the whales in California. And meanwhile a 15-year old is getting raped in her own home in front of her father.
The article ended with a joke. A light, fluffy sentence not meant to be taken literally. “Of course, there shouldn’t be protection for cockroaches or winged monkeys.” In other words, save the whales! But you’re still allowed to squash a nasty cockroach or two.
In the summer of 2008, I took a two-week missions trip to Rwanda. While there, I visited the museum in Kigali commemorating the 1994 Rwandan genocide. An estimated 800,000 people were killed (most hacked to death by machetes) in the span of 100 days. Would you like to know what the murderers called those they were murdering?
Cockroaches. They called them cockroaches.
Ironic, isn’t it? The word a reporter uses to explain that there are certain species we don’t need to protect. The same exact word the killers in Rwanda used to convince themselves they weren’t killing anything precious.
How many people in this world have no more protection than a cockroach? How many girls are sold as slaves while we read the sports page? How many boys march at the front of rebel armies while we stop in at our favorite drive-thru? How many children know exactly what it feels like to be a cockroach? Because of our inaction, because of our ignorance, because of our deadly, deadly silence. Because we’re too busy arguing about the rights of animals at Sea World.
That article pushed so crudely into the midst of the horror stories from the DRC was a wake-up call for me. This is not okay. I am not okay with a 15-year old girl getting raped in the Congo. I’m not okay with a 10-year old boy who knows what it feels like to kill people.
Now hear me. I’m not pointing fingers. I’m almost 30 years old, and I haven’t really done any more than the rest of you. But that is going to change. It has to change. I don’t know if it’s going to change for you or not, but for me, it must.
They can do what they like with their magnificent whales in California. I’m not fighting for them.
We have a world of people - live human beings created in the very image of God Himself - who are dying because the people who have the power to create change are spending that power on comfort. And personal gain. And orcas.
Does that make you a little uncomfortable?
It made me uncomfortable.
But maybe that’s what we need. Or just me, anyway. Maybe that’s what I need. To get uncomfortable with being comfortable so I stop using what I have on myself and start caring about the precious children in the Congo. And Rwanda. And Haiti. And Columbia. And the Philippines. And India. And North Korea. And Russia. And Cuba.
Start caring so much that I actually do something about it.
