This journey to the Congo has not been easy.  Not physically.  Not mentally.  And certainly not emotionally.  There is so much to be done, it becomes overwhelming.   I can understand the burnout that occurs among relief workers, and NGOs.  Sustaining oneself during this process is as important as caring for others, and few really develop the staying power to last over years.  It’s tough.  Really tough.  The bad days are horrible, and the milder days carry a sadness of their own. 

The worst part of this for me, has been meeting the child soldiers, wondering who they might have been had they not been taken.  What gives anyone the right to ‘take,’ another human being?  To ‘take,’ a child?  To stop a life?  To kill a spirit?  No one has that right.  And yet,  it is happening every day, and few will be able to stop it.

I learned of Jewish World Watch several years ago, when my synagogue became involved in the solar cooker project in Darfur.  People were deeply touched by it.  Touched by the fact that the simple act of  gathering firewood targeted women and children for abduction and rape.  In order for a woman to cook a meal for her family, she had to leave the safety of her camp, and subject herself to great danger.   This moved our Jewish community, and mobilized them into action.  It was a groundswell movement that built a momentum of its own, and grew the organization.  The beauty of Jewish World Watch is that its roots are in community.  It was born in community, and it cares for community.  Community is an important word for us as Jews.  It holds particular meaning, because so much of our own community has been lost over the years, either to inquisition, pogrom, shoah,  atrocities or genocide.  It was Martin Buber who admonished Jews in his teachings, not to separate ourselves out from the community.  For us, community is everything.  Havurah.  Chevruta.  Chevre.   Different words, same heart.  Community.  And so in the Congo, it is about community, and the work that Jewish World Watch does on the ground, is extraordinary.  As much as we can hear or read about their work, it pales next to witnessing the effects of it.

We have seen projects that have been funded by Jewish World Watch, some as simple as providing a small piece of land for  a village community of women to farm, as part of the safe motherhood program, in conjunction with Heal Africa.  To us it may seem minimal, but to them, it is the world.  That land provides them with income, and enables them to care for their children.  It affords them safe births, and proper medical care, and from the output of their fields, they can feed their families.  Some of these villages are extremely remote.  It can take days, perhaps a week, to walk into Goma from these hills.  For the people of these villages, it may as well be a lifetime. It is the same all through this region, as Jewish World Watch deepens its roots here in Eastern Congo…

The projects that Jewish World Watch funds, are giving the women back their dignity and pride.   This we have seen.  They are becoming self sufficient.  They are learning how to save and grow their money.  They are able to build small houses, and their children are now going to school.  Simple , yes?  To us, perhaps, but to the Congolese, this can be the difference between death and survival.  The simplest of acts in the DRC, takes on a meaning all its own.

If I have learned anything from this trip, it is that the important work here isn’t just about the women, but rather, it is as much about the men and the boys.  The culture of the Congo is changing.  You can feel it in the air.  They are in the midst of a paradigm shift that may take generations to fully realize, but to be here for the beginning of it, is moving beyond description.  We speak a great deal about the rapes and the abductions, and the brutalization and torture of the women and children, but we know little of the men.  The perpetrators of these war crimes have a specific face, but the men who father the children and marry the women, are faceless to the world.  It is common to see the women working the fields, and walking the roads carrying heavy sacks of bricks and stones on their backs.  For this they get paid little, if they can get the employer to pay them at all, yet still they work to bring in whatever possible.  But what of the men?  What of the men who have been rendered almost irrelevant by this society?  Too many are jobless.  Too many feel the effects of the devastation of the conflict.  Too many abuse their wives, and too many try to keep their daughters down.  Too many.  Too many.  Too many… 

Jewish World Watch has given funding to ‘Sons of Congo,’ for their ‘listening project,’ a pilot program created solely for the men of the Congo.  It was the program in the prison in Goma, and in several of the villages among the Pastors, each having many disciples.   In a short time, this program has grown from a few, to hundreds of  men.  This is the work that teaches men who they really are, and how much more they can be.  With this program, there comes a shift in the consciousness of their society.  Nothing in the Congo can – or will – change, unless there is a change in the men, and I think that sometimes we forget.  That Jewish World Watch is playing a part in all this, is extraordinary.    In the groups, the men are by no means, ‘there,’ yet.  They have a long, LONG, way to go, but it is a step.  It is a beginning.  An important beginning.  Imagine if this had happened years ago, how many women and children would have been spared their anguish and torture.  Imagine how different their lives would have been, and how these boys taken as soldiers would have thrived in their world, and what they might have become.  While they still will ‘become,’ there is a part of them that has been destroyed, and in all likelihood, will never be brought back to life.  This is the work of Jewish World Watch, through their partners on the ground, and through the generosity and  compassion of our Jewish community.

In our time in the Congo, we have seen not only the projects that Jewish World currently funds, but candidate projects for potential funding, some more urgent than others, but all worthy.  The impact that Jewish World Watch has made in a short period of time, takes my breath away. 

As difficult and challenging as things are in the Congo now, I cannot imagine what they would have been like, if Jewish World Watch had not been a presence there.    And then I realize that Jewish World Watch isn’t separate from us – it is who we are as a community.  It was built on the strength and vision of   Rabbi Schulweis and Janice Kamenir Reznick, and continues because we are all there together.    We understand community, and we reach out to community.    As we stood together at Sinai, may we continue to stand as one, and reach out to the rest of the world, and may there come a day when there is no longer the need for the work of Jewish World Watch.  At least not in this form, and not for these reasons.    This has been a powerful, powerful, experience, and it will take some time for me to process it.  I’m not sure that I will ever fully be able to process all of it, nor will I understand the impact this has had on me, for quite some time.  As we near Rosh Hashana, and the yomim tovim, I say my prayers for peace, and I pray that we all may be inscribed, and that the coming year holds only blessings for us all…