It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (24 page)

Vumila, thirty-eight, Kaniola.

Mapendo, twenty-two, Burhale.

So many women were casualties of their birthplace. They had nothing when they were born and would have nothing when they died; they survived off the land and through their dedication to their families, their children. I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners even read about, and they plowed on. I often openly cried during interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred toward women I was witnessing.

B
IBIANE

S
HE HAD THREE CHILDREN,
though only two by the time I met her. One had just died, most likely from malnutrition. She recounted her struggle to earn money. A woman she knew offered to pay her to carry cassava flour through the forest, and it was here that she came upon the three men. She couldn’t run away. They held her for three days and raped her repeatedly. Her husband returned from a trip, and when he heard she’d been kidnapped and raped, he abandoned her. Then she found out she was HIV positive, and pregnant. If she delivered the child tomorrow—at eight months pregnant, and thin as a bamboo tree—she couldn’t pay for the delivery. She didn’t even have sugar. All she had was the disease the men had left her with. I asked her whether she was on HIV medication, and she opened her plum-colored satchel to reveal some pills and a potato—her lunch. She was a street woman now, she said, and that was why she was crying.

V
UMILA

S
HE WAS SLEEPING WHEN
she heard a knock at her door. Nine men speaking Kinyarwanda, the language spoken in Rwanda, kicked the door open, entered, and used strips of clothes and rope to tie her and her children’s hands in order to rob them. Her husband wasn’t home. Once they gathered the things, they untied Vumila and made her carry her own belongings on her back deep into the forest. When she fell from exhaustion from walking up and down hills and through the woods for about a week, they kicked her. They arrived at the first rebel checkpoint, and men—some in uniform, some in tracksuits—untied her hands. At least nine men raped her and several other women in a large, open room while the other men watched. The commander of the camp chose Vumila to be his “wife,” and she was forced to stay inside his house day and night. She was raped over and over and over for eight months. When she had to go to the bathroom, they put a string on her like an animal and followed her to the river. Those who tried to escape were stabbed to death, and their bodies were displayed before the other prisoners. Eventually one of the men who had been detained with her was sent back to the village to find three cows to exchange for each person’s release. He found only two cows per person. Vumila and the others were beaten, whipped, kicked, stripped of their clothes, and finally told to run away. They arrived back in their village naked, exhausted, and injured. By the time Vumila’s husband returned to the village, she was pregnant with the commander’s child. Her husband was angry at her for carrying the child of a Rwandan Hutu militiaman and told her she had to go back to her family. Vumila now wanted only one thing:

“All I want is that they accept my children to school. We used to have livestock that help us pay for the school, but now we cannot pay for school, and the government said that they [were] going to help everyone with tuition, free education, but now they sent the children home with no education. What kind of a country will Congo be with uneducated children?”

M
APENDO

S
HE APPEARED TO BE
dying from AIDS-related complications. I had heard that she had been gang-raped and had been sick for some time after but had no money or transportation to get to the hospital. We arrived unannounced and found her sitting with her mother and sisters outside their hut. She was shivering in the hot sun, covered in a skin rash. Her skin, once black and shiny and beautiful, was muted and splotched. She was thin and weak and could barely shake my hand. It had been five months since Mapendo had escaped back to her hut after being kidnapped by five soldiers who also spoke Kinyarwanda. She had never gone far from her village before she was taken and had no idea where the men had come from. She knew only that each of them had raped her many times, that they had left her with some illness that caused painful sores all over her body. She lay back down on the wooden plank she used as a mattress. She was tired.

 • • • 

In this last case, I didn’t want
to monopolize her energy with my questions, but I couldn’t just walk away, either. We did a brief interview, and I took a few photographs of her lying down. The closest hospital was two hours away, and my car was full of Congolese aid workers, UN staff, and others who had tagged along in hopes of getting some sort of tip for their help. I told the crew of people I was traveling with that we would take Mapendo to the hospital, and to my astonishment, they protested. They called themselves aid workers and were refusing to help a dying woman. I told them that they could either share the car with Mapendo and her leaking fistula or they could sit on the roof of the car, but she was coming with us. I helped Mapendo’s mother lay her ravaged body inside our giant SUV, and we drove her to Bukavu, where she was admitted to the hospital.

CHAPTER 8

Do Your Work, and Come Back When You Finish

With each new assignment—whether I was in Congo, Darfur, Afghanistan, or elsewhere—I felt more fortunate to be an independent, educated woman. I was thirty-one years old, and I cherished my right to choose my love, my work. I had the privilege to travel and to walk away from hardship when it became too much to bear. Most people on earth didn’t have an exit door to walk away from their own lives.

The trials I faced now seemed surmountable simply because I now knew there were people who had overcome much greater hardship. Suddenly my childhood in Connecticut, which I had thought to be the most normal childhood in the world, seemed lavish and full of opportunity. My mother had always told me I had no patience for anything—for waiting in line, for traffic, for my career to take off. Perhaps the years of working in the developing world, where daily frustrations and delays were an integral part of life, gave me the patience and perspective I never had as a young woman. The sadness and injustice I encountered as a journalist could either sink me into a depression or open the door to a new vision of my own life. I chose the latter.

And the more I saw of the world, the deeper my commitment to my family grew. Travel and distance meant it was difficult to see them regularly, but Christmas remained sacred family time. No matter what was going on, I knew I would get on a plane to spend ten days with the people who mattered most to me. It was the only time of year I would turn down covering the biggest news stories, like the 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran or the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. I needed that time to recharge. I traveled more than ever, but the concept of home became more important, more essential to my sense of balance.

By 2005 I had lived in Istanbul for almost three years, the longest I had lived anywhere in my adult life, and the city had become my home. I rented my own apartment in the fashionable Cihangir neighborhood and for the first time actually bought a few pieces of furniture—a desk, a chair, a couch—and even some accessories, like silverware, coffee mugs, and carpets. My financial woes were behind me; I opened a savings account. In between assignments I had somehow created a life.

My social crowd in Istanbul felt as familiar and intimate as friends from high school or college. There was Behzad, a Marxist Iranian professor at Ramapo College in New Jersey, who spent his sabbatical in Istanbul writing books and dating beautiful women half his age; Ansel and Maddy, a young, witty American couple who had been living in Istanbul for about five years; Ivan, the NPR correspondent I had known since northern Iraq, with whom I could transition easily from working together in Baghdad to watching him play air guitar in his underwear in Istanbul; and Karl, the
Washington Post
bureau chief, who on the weekends invited all of us for sleepovers at his house along the Bosporus. There was also Paxton, an American filmmaker and writer from Connecticut, who had moved to Turkey fifteen years earlier to make a documentary about the Silk Road; and Jason, my weekend sidekick, who was inexplicably flush with cash. (We wondered if he was CIA.) Eventually an American journalist named Suzy showed up from New York, and we would effortlessly talk for hours—a reminder of how much I missed girlfriends with all the same New York references. Then came Dahlia (Sudanese) and Angry Ali (American and French, but from Palestine), career academics who moved to Turkey with a beautiful newborn daughter. That’s how we spent our weekends in Istanbul: sprawled out on my living room floor with a narghile and several bottles of wine, laughing and arguing and confiding in one another all night long.

So when Opheera, a reporter friend based in Sudan, asked me to look after Paul, the new Reuters bureau chief for Turkey, I was more than happy to induct him into our tight posse of friends.

Paul flew in from Ankara to Istanbul, and we made plans to meet at Leb-i Derya, my favorite restaurant, which was perched on a steep hill and had glass walls overlooking the Bosporus. I was leaving for Tehran in the morning and preoccupied with preparations for my trip. At the time, I was dating an Iranian actor named Mehdi and couldn’t wait to see him again; he was so handsome that some mornings I would just watch him sleep, wondering how I had pulled off an affair with such visual candy. I wasn’t in love with him, and I was as consumed by my work as always. But some part of me still enjoyed these passionate love affairs I knew would never last.

Paul and I met on the street, and one word came to mind: Euro. He was handsome, too clean-cut and sharply dressed for my taste, and wore a flashy watch. He had a strong English accent (in fact, his mother was Swedish and his father British). Dark brown hair fell every which way around the top of his face, and I could tell his beard had been trimmed neatly to number 4 on an electric shaver. Paul was extremely self-confident, bordering on arrogant, but dinner was pleasant, and I sensed that he, too, was obsessed with work.

“I have great contacts all over the Middle East and North Africa,” he bragged. “Before coming to Turkey, I reopened the Reuters bureau in Algeria. It had been shut for almost a decade because of the civil war and the death of the last Reuters journalist based there. I was in charge of Algeria and all of North Africa. Before that I was in Sweden and Panama City and also spent time in Peru covering the Japanese hostage crisis in Lima.”

“Why are you based in Ankara?” I asked. Most foreign correspondents based themselves in Istanbul, the bigger, more beautiful city.

“Because the Reuters main bureau is there, close to the politicians,” he said. “Ankara is the political capital of the country, and I have to work my contacts there.”

He was inquisitive, like most journalists, but ultimately interested in talking about himself. We both intermittently checked our BlackBerries when there was a lull in conversation. I gave him a few tips about Turkey, passed along contacts for a bunch of friends, and left the next morning for Tehran.

By the time I returned to Istanbul a month later, Paul was already part of our regular crowd. Everyone loved him. He was funny and smart and a dedicated and talented journalist. Over the course of the next few months, Paul and I—both in long-distance relationships—ended up spending many weekends together. We would go out for dinner or make buffalo wings at Jason’s, and stay up late into the night talking and drinking far too much. All of my friends had each endured endless conversations with me about my doomed future with Mehdi, and they were bored out of their minds by my love life. Paul stepped in to alleviate the burden of playing love therapist.