It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (23 page)

At every water source the rebels would stop and fill their bottles with brown mud mixed with water, but we knew that this would make a
khawaja
, foreign white person, deathly ill. We rationed the few bottles of water we had brought and wondered what we could do as the signs of dehydration—exhaustion, lethargy, headaches—plagued us. I became obsessed with finding water. I had never been in a situation where there were no taps, no wells, no clean streams—no sources at all, really. The sun seared our light skin, and liquid evaporated from our bodies faster than we could sweat. The rebels were so busy drinking pure mud from streams, they barely noticed our desperation for anything remotely resembling water. They just kept pilfering our empty water bottles as we tore through them. In Darfur plastic was like gold, and money was almost worthless.

Finally, on the third day, we arrived at a rebel base in Shigekaro, a tiny village of more sand and emptiness, interrupted by a few thatched huts and one tiny shop that sold flavored drink mix, salt and sugar, pasta, and little else. A dried-out wadi rimmed the village, its trees providing fundamental cover for what had become a natural toilet. No water.

The SLA had a mini training camp in Shigekaro, and we camped out and photographed the soldiers in formation doing training at dawn and dusk. Our fighters regrouped and rested. I walked around the village in search of water as a vampire hunts for blood; I might have pounced on a child if she had water. Then I saw words I never thought I would be so happy to see in Darfur:
SAVE THE CHILDREN
.

It was a well! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I leaned over the edge to see if there was actually water in the well, and indeed the rust-colored, stagnant water looked leaps and bounds cleaner than the muddy stream. Save the Children, an aid group headquartered in my little hometown of Westport, Connecticut, would save us from dehydration.

We spent the afternoon trying to devise a water-purification scheme: Jahi and Jehad found a villager with a bucket and another with a cooking pot—there was actually only one woman with a pot in the entire village—and we spent about five hours each day, with the help of villagers, fetching water, boiling the water, and pouring the water into the plastic bottles that kept mysteriously disappearing from our stash and reappearing among the heap of the rebels’ belongings tethered to the back of our truck.

Most of the rebels had never received a formal education past grade school, but they listened to the BBC on shortwave radios and could rattle off the names of every single international figure involved in the Darfur conflict, from the UN to U.S. government officials to Sudanese bit players. They were eager to show us the toll of the war, including scenes of devastation that hadn’t yet been accessible to many international journalists: burned-out villages, abandoned and looted. In one a charred pot sat upright amid the charcoaled remains of the town, and I could imagine the scenes of panic and fear as the villagers were chased out of their homes by the janjaweed, many women raped as they tried to flee. Skeletons were scattered across the ground, some still fresh, with leathery skin in varying states of decay stretched across the bones; some had clothes, some didn’t, but most of the dead’s shoes had been removed and stolen. Good shoes were always valuable in war.

Every so often we’d come across civilians en route to the safety of the camps in Chad. It was a long, difficult walk under the intense summer sun, and people spent the hottest part of the day cowering under scrawny trees. Everyone was terrified of the janjaweed. But the trees provided only psychological cover from them at best.

One day we stopped in a village, and when I got off the back of the truck to shoot, a little girl about three years old took one look at me and started screaming in terror. She tore off, running for the horizon. I was confused.

“What happened?” I asked Mohammed, the interpreter who was accompanying us.

Her female relatives were laughing, which was doubly surprising to me.

“Is she scared of the camera?” I asked.

“No,” Mohammed explained. “Your skin is dark for a
khawaja
. She thinks you are an Arab.”

My Italian American, olive-hued skin had never been a liability before. I watched with horror as the little girl continued running, wondering what atrocities she must have witnessed at the hands of Arab militias.

For the next five years I returned to Darfur for about a month a year, for the
New York Times
,
for the
New York Times Magazine
, and later with a grant from Getty Images. As the situation in Sudan worsened, the Sudanese government became more stringent about issuing visas to journalists. Visas weren’t the only obstacle to covering the conflict in Darfur; the bureaucracy of permits, useless papers, stamps, and photocopies was nearly insurmountable. But I was persistent and patient with my visa applications and paperwork and became one of the very few photographers to consistently cover the conflict there from 2004 to 2009.

In Darfur, I understood the conflict intimately, understood how the players operated and how to maneuver within the system to get my work done. Over the years I photographed the plight of refugees, villages on fire, ransacked homes, victims of rape. As my images appeared in the
Times
and the
Times Magazine
,
the combination of photographs and beautifully reported articles by my colleagues elicited significant reactions from readers, from UN and aid workers, and from policy makers. It was one of the few times I actually witnessed the correlation between persistent coverage and the response to that coverage by the international community.

Kahindo, twenty, sits in her home with her two children born out of rape in the village of Kanyabayonga, North Kivu, in eastern Congo, April 12, 2008. Kahindo was kidnapped and held for almost three years in the bush by six
interhamwe
, who she claims were Rwandan soldiers. They each raped her repeatedly. She had one child in the forest and was pregnant with the second by the time she escaped.

Darfur—unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, which were wars instigated by an invading foreign military—exposed me to the kind of war where people killed their own people, on their own land. It was a war that perhaps started as a genocide but eventually devolved into a civil war, where every side was responsible for murder, for rape, and for pillage, and all the players were guilty.

Over the years I forced myself to be creative in how I covered the same scenes over and over. I started shooting refugee camps out of focus, sometimes in abstract ways, to try to reach an audience beyond the typical
New York Times
readership—an audience geared more toward the visual arts. As ugly as the conflict was, the protagonists were beautiful, wearing brilliantly colored fabrics and, despite the persistent hardships, wide, toothy smiles. The Sudanese were lovely, friendly, resilient people, and I wanted to show that in my work. It seemed paradoxical to try to create beautiful images out of conflict, but I found that my more abstract images of Darfur provoked an unusual response from readers. Suddenly I was getting requests to sell fine-art prints of rebels in a sandstorm or of blurred refugees walking through the desert for several thousand dollars.

I was conflicted about making money from images of people who were so desperate, but I thought of all the years I had struggled to make ends meet to be a photographer, and I knew that any money I made from these photos would be invested right back into my work. Trying to convey beauty in war was a technique to try to prevent the reader from looking away or turning the page in response to something horrible. I wanted them to linger, to ask questions.

 • • • 

B
ETWEEN THESE VISITS
to Darfur, beginning in 2006, I made frequent trips to another civil war, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been displaced from their villages in the east and were living in overcrowded camps across North and South Kivu provinces. Attacks from both government and rebel soldiers left millions dead and a countless number of Congolese women sexually assaulted. The soldiers raped women to mark their territory, to destroy family bonds (rape victims were often ostracized from their families), and to intimidate civilians as a way of establishing power. They forced the families of the victims to watch the rapes. And they gang-raped women and often used their weapons to tear them apart, causing fistulas, or tears between the vagina and anus from which feces and urine leak. The stories were unbearable. As a photojournalist, I felt there was very little I could do for the women in the DRC but record their stories. I hoped awareness of their suffering might somehow save them. I returned the following year.

In 2008 I was given a grant by Columbia College Chicago’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media to document gender-based violence, and rape as a weapon of war. The roving exhibition, “Congo/Women,” consisted of work from the DRC by photographers James Nachtwey, Ron Haviv, Marcus Bleasdale, and me, which traveled to more than fifteen venues across the United States and Europe and raised funds to help women in the DRC get surgery for fistula repair. It was my first grant—the Getty grant for Darfur came a few months later—and the first time I was able to go to a place and focus solely on one project, without the responsibility of deadlines and covering breaking news.

I spent two weeks traversing North and South Kivu, interviewing and photographing women who were victims of sexual assault, surprised by how many women agreed to speak openly about their experiences. Some spoke about how they became infected with HIV, or how their husbands left them upon learning they’d been raped; some spoke about how they were abducted and kept as sex slaves for up to several years, forced to bear the children of their rapists. It amazed me that all the women had the maturity and strength to love their children regardless of the circumstances out of which they were born.

Bibiane, twenty-eight, South Kivu.