The Heart and the Fist Part 5

"OK," I said. "I will give you my film. OK." I hit the rewind b.u.t.ton on the camera and as the film started to rewind, his eyes shot from me to the camera and back again-was I playing some trick on him?-and I kept my hand on his shoulder. He stood there under his black beret, sweating through his fatigues. I popped the film out of the camera and handed the roll to him. He took the film, and suddenly a wave of relief broke over him and he smiled at me-sweat gathered on his brow-and he said, "Yes."

I walked back to Jill and we stood and watched as dozens of families straggled across the border. They filled their jugs at the water truck and boarded a bus that the UN had chartered to take them into Rwanda. They packed into the bus, four and five people per bench, bags of belongings piled in their laps and in the aisles, off to see what remained of the places they had abandoned months ago. Would their homes still be standing? Would other families be living there? If their homes were gone or occupied, where would they sleep tonight?

Men climbed atop the bus. Boys handed up bags and jugs and boxes to be lashed to the roof. Teenage girls with baby brothers and sisters strapped to their backs stopped at the entrance to the bus and s.h.i.+fted the younger children into their arms. I admired these families, if only for their stubborn will to keep going. Back at college I'd been reading about courage in my philosophy cla.s.ses. There were a number of definitions of courage, but now I was seeing it in its simplest form: you do what has to be done day after day, and you never quit.

During another trip into the field, we wound over the hills of Rwanda on our way to a health care clinic. As our tires splattered mud, we pa.s.sed small houses nestled into the lush hills. Alongside the road, a boy wrapped his arms around the trunk of a tree. He pressed the side of his face against the rippled bark as if he were resting his cheek against the belly of his grandfather. Then he set his legs to push, and he scooted up the trunk and knocked ripe avocados to the ground. Our windows were rolled halfway down, and as we pa.s.sed the fruit fields, I could smell tea leaves and the sweetness of newly ripened bananas. Coffee bushes were bursting with ruby-red coffee fruit. Thin farmers swung hoes to claw at the brown earth of the terraced hillside.

I saw only a small ribbon of a vibrant country. To the north of Kigali, silverback gorillas roamed the jungles of Volcanoes National Park. Many Tutsi rebels resided in this area, and one of the many concerns about the violence in Rwanda and Zaire was that it would destroy the habitat or increase the poaching of these endangered species. In the northeastern gra.s.slands of Rwanda, giraffe, waterbuck, sable and roan antelope, aardvark, zebra, buffalo, black rhinoceros, elephant, hippopotamus, and crocodile called the plains their home.4 On early mornings, the place took on a mystical quality as fog clung to the mountains. To the southeast, the forests supported thirteen species of primates and hundreds of species of birds that rose every morning with the sun. On early mornings, the place took on a mystical quality as fog clung to the mountains. To the southeast, the forests supported thirteen species of primates and hundreds of species of birds that rose every morning with the sun.5 It was a tragedy that such a beautiful country, so vibrantly full of life, had become synonymous with ma.s.s killing. It was a tragedy that such a beautiful country, so vibrantly full of life, had become synonymous with ma.s.s killing.

Yet the images of refugee camps and border crossings that flooded the international broadcast media did not tell the whole story. They left an impression of desperate, downtrodden, despairing people. I quickly learned that the media traffics in tragedy, but often misses stories of strength.

At the clinic, I saw dozens of women and children sitting in the gra.s.s talking under the high sun. Many of these women had walked with their children for miles in hopes of getting bandages and antibiotics at the clinic, and now they waited. They had carried children with earaches and children with blurry vision. There were other families, however, whose children seemed healthy and playful, and when I asked one woman why she had come to the clinic, she said, "So my son can play and also to talk to the doctor." Some of them had come for conversation. They waved me over. The spokeswoman for a cl.u.s.ter of curious women asked, "You have children?"

"No," I said, "I do not have any children." She translated this to her friends. Then I said, "Your children are beautiful." They all smiled.

I sat down in the gra.s.s. It was a wide-open day, and for a few moments there under the high sun as children ran and played, I felt as though I might have been at a kid's birthday party in a park. At any minute, someone might bring out a cake.

A Rwandan aid worker, a middle-aged woman with her hair wound atop her head, sat down next to me. She had an air of gravity, and the other women turned their eyes toward her. The aid worker's dress was a single sheet of blue cloth wrapped crisply about her. She smiled. I later found out that she had raised five children, that she was a former schoolteacher and a survivor of the genocide. Her husband had not survived. She had a particular way of pulling her hands through the air to ill.u.s.trate points as she spoke, almost like she was conducting a symphony. She knew some of the women seated here, and she seemed to have taken on the role of counselor or a.s.sessor of needs at the clinic. Women started to tell the stories of their survival. The aid worker translated for me s.n.a.t.c.hes of detail and dialogue.

I heard stories of families fleeing for their lives, parents running with their children into the forest to escape machete-wielding packs of thugs. A woman whose arm had been injured in a machete attack told the aid worker that she had been mistaken for dead and thrown in a pile of corpses by the side of the road. There she waited all night until the Interahamwe-exhausted by the hard labor of raping and hacking human beings to death-fell into a drunken sleep in the early morning. Only then did she run away.6 Another woman explained that her neighbor-a woman she had played with as a child-had a son who joined the Interahamwe and became a murderer. The stories they told were straightforward: "Then she ran out of her house, but her sister was behind, and they caught her and they raped and killed her that afternoon." Another woman explained that her neighbor-a woman she had played with as a child-had a son who joined the Interahamwe and became a murderer. The stories they told were straightforward: "Then she ran out of her house, but her sister was behind, and they caught her and they raped and killed her that afternoon."

I struggled with taking photographs that day. I wanted to capture their portraits, to share what I saw with others. Few Americans had seen this: Strong people. Survivors. Solid. Steadfast. I knew that these women weren't perfect, and that it was foolish to cast someone as saintly simply because she had suffered. These women might also have been trivial and jealous and mean and small. But the enormity of their achievement outweighed their human faults. These women had suffered more than I could have ever imagined, and they still were willing to welcome me, to talk with me. After all the betrayal they had lived through, all the hards.h.i.+p, they were still willing to trust a stranger.7 If people can live through genocide and retain compa.s.sion, if they can take strength from pain, if they are able, still, to laugh, then certainly we can learn something from them. If people can live through genocide and retain compa.s.sion, if they can take strength from pain, if they are able, still, to laugh, then certainly we can learn something from them.

And yet I hesitated to lift my camera. Photography is an art that-perhaps like no other-has an element of capture and possession, and because of that it can have an element of aggression. In some cultures people believe that if you take their photograph you are literally carrying away a layer of their souls. If I raised my camera, I would be asking to take a piece of each person who had suffered and then to share their story with others. As I sat debating about whether I should take pictures here, one woman stood before me, propping up her young child on his two wobbly legs, encouraging me to take his photograph.

She smiled at me and laughed, and when I lifted my camera, I looked through the viewfinder and saw a whole group of women smiling back at me.

Driving back to Kigali, I thought about what I was trying to do. Some people had spent years serving in Rwanda. I was going to be here for six weeks. How was I supposed to contribute? I decided I could at least take photographs like the ones I had just snapped, and show Americans a glimpse of Rwandan lives, with their many facets: joy, loss, displacement, strength, hards.h.i.+p, compa.s.sion.

I had learned as a teenager the importance of understanding how others lived. When I was sixteen years old, Bruce Carl, my Sunday school teacher, took me-a kid from the suburbs-to spend the night in a homeless shelter in downtown St. Louis.

Bruce was a former basketball player, probably about six foot two, and he bounded through life with the happy energy of a man with good news to share. He directed a youth leaders.h.i.+p program, and he encouraged those of us in the group to question authority and also to serve. When he took us to the homeless shelter, he said, "I want you to listen. Learn."

And so on a winter night in an urban church, I sipped chicken soup from a Styrofoam cup, pale crackers floating and softening and breaking as I talked with homeless men. When one of the men mentioned his job, my face betrayed my surprise, and he said, "You thought none of us had a job?"

"Yes, I did think that." I said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize, young man; how about you just work my s.h.i.+ft tomorrow?" He burst out laughing, and the rest of the night he kept telling everyone, "Young man here gonna work my s.h.i.+ft tomorrow, he gonna work my s.h.i.+ft."

Later, I stood with two other men at a window looking out on a freezing St. Louis night. As the shelter doors were locked, I saw a man walking hunched over on the other side of the street. He leaned into the icy wind. "Tonight's a bad night to be out," said one of the men.

Later that night, Bruce sat down next to me. I was surprised when he said, "This is terrible."

"What's wrong?" I asked.

He lowered his voice. "They're giving food and shelter, but they don't have any job-training or substance-abuse programs. They keep running things this way, these people will stay homeless forever." Just as Bruce was challenging the partic.i.p.ants in his leaders.h.i.+p program by bringing us to the shelter, he wanted to see the men in the shelter challenged as well. Just as Bruce respected us, he respected the homeless men, and he believed that if you respected someone, then you had to ask something of them. These men, he believed, should be involved in their own recovery.

Bruce was both compa.s.sionate and demanding. Compa.s.sion was primary. He thought it criminal that people could grow up oblivious and unresponsive to the suffering of others. These are your neighbors, neighbors, he would say. But he was hardheaded enough to know that having a loving, wide-open heart was only a start. he would say. But he was hardheaded enough to know that having a loving, wide-open heart was only a start.

In Rwanda, I photographed some unforgettable scenes. Hundreds of orphaned young children on a playing field, dressed in donated clothes, packed together and bouncing up and down on their toes in some game, following the chants of a man yelling through a bullhorn. A church full of the skeletal remains of dozens of people who had sought shelter from the genocide, only to be attacked with grenades and machetes.

America had turned its back when we knew that the genocide was happening. Two days after the a.s.sa.s.sination of Habyarimana, major U.S. newspapers reported ma.s.sive killings of the Tutsi population. On April 11, 1994, the undersecretary of defense, the key advisor to the secretary of defense, read a memo that stated that "hundreds of thousands of deaths" would ensue. Another memo stated that the Rwandan government wanted to eliminate the entire Tutsi population.8 We knew. We knew.

Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda, estimated that with just five thousand well-equipped troops, we could have saved eight hundred thousand people. But instead of acting, the global community dragged its feet. U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright delayed the vote in the United Nations to send troops. Even after the UN finally agreed to a resolution authorizing the sending of troops, months pa.s.sed before the soldiers actually landed. With every day that ticked by, another ten thousand Tutsis died. After two and a half months of UN inactivity, eight African nations volunteered to send their own men, provided they could get armored personnel carriers. Instead of providing the equipment to these willing nations, the United States leased it to the UN.9 Nothing arrived in time to save a single life. Nothing arrived in time to save a single life.

Almost four years after the genocide, President Bill Clinton visited Rwanda and spoke to the Rwandan people. He said, "We did not act quickly enough after the killing began ... We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide."10 His words did nothing to bring back the dead or to erase the memories of brutality. His words did nothing to bring back the dead or to erase the memories of brutality.

One afternoon in Kigali, as I sat outside a restaurant waiting for a ride, I struck up a conversation with a Rwandan man who sat beside me. He had studied English in Kigali and hid with his sister and two young neighbor girls during the violence. He told me that during the genocide he thought of Elie Wiesel-the Holocaust survivor-and he asked me if I'd read Wiesel's memoir Night. Night.

"Yes, I have," I said. "It's a wonderful book."

"Yes. It is a powerful story."

The world is full of stories of courage, too infrequently told. Many people risked their lives to care for others in Rwanda. I found that those courageous people often drew upon stories from their faith and their family. There were people, for example, who offered shelter to neighbors and friends who were in danger. Some felt alone at the time, the only person in the village providing secret shelter. Yet there were many such people across the country. I heard many stories of courage, many versions of Paul Rusesabagina and Hotel Rwanda Hotel Rwanda.11

At one point during my stay, Neil dropped me off on the Rwandan side of the border with Zaire. In Zaire, I'd learn a lesson in diplomacy and political corruption, and I'd get a taste of the complexities of international charity.

In front of me in the customs-inspection line was a man dressed as a priest-gray suit, white clerical collar. As the priest approached the customs desk, he lifted a brown satchel onto the table. I watched as the young customs agent unsnapped a silver buckle and pulled the sides of the satchel open, his eyes growing wide. Gingerly putting his hand in the bag, he pulled out a short pile of American hundred-dollar bills. I'd never seen before, and have never seen since, such piles of money-stacks of hundreds bound together crisply and tied with rubber bands. The priest was carrying, it seemed, some forty thousand dollars.

After the satchel had been emptied and the money repacked, the priest rebuckled the bag and walked into Zaire. Zaire was a dangerous place. Some of the Hutu refugees in the camps in Zaire had killed and incited others to kill during the genocide. Rumors swirled that these genocidaires were using the camps to regroup and rearm. Some of the rumors involved possible French government financing of weapons for the largely Francophone Hutus. Other rumors implicated priests in the Catholic Church. I had no idea if any of these rumors were true, but as I watched the man dressed as a priest walk into Zaire, I was reminded of how much more I still had to learn.

My hiking backpack held a few s.h.i.+rts, film, pens, and notebooks. I pa.s.sed quickly through customs and walked toward Zaire. Twenty yards of dusty road separated the Rwandan point of exit from the Zairian point of entry. As I stepped into Zaire, I bent slightly to duck under the arm of a traffic gate. A man sitting on a rickety chair next to a card table stuck his hand out, and I handed him my pa.s.sport.

"Do you have a visa?"

"No, I'm sorry, I don't have a visa."

"You must go back to Rwanda to get a visa."

"Where in Rwanda?"

"In Kigali."

I had been told that fifty bucks would get me across the border. I didn't know if the fee was legitimate or an established bribe.

"I thought I could get my paperwork taken care of here."

"Well, it is difficult to do, but it is possible."

"I understand that the fee is fifty dollars, or perhaps you could accept this from me as a thank-you for your help and an apology for the inconvenience I've caused."

"Yes, no problem, sir."

Using a mangled ink pen, I scratched my name on a sheet of white "entry point" paper. The official took the paper, spun in his seat, and lifted a rock that sat on a tall stack of stained forms. He put the sheet of paper I had just signed on top and replaced the rock. I was officially in Zaire.

As I stepped toward the customs hut in Zaire, a military jeep came barreling toward me, dust rising. The jeep stopped five feet from me. A soldier wearing a black T-s.h.i.+rt and a black beret stood in the back of the jeep, and he aimed a mounted machine gun at my chest. With his left hand, the soldier pointed to a flag being raised behind the customs hut. A scratchy recording of music played in the background. Now I understood. There was a ceremony. An anthem was being played. I needed to pay my respects. I stood straight and looked at the flag. A bead of sweat trickled down the right side of the soldier's face. He narrowed his eyes at me. The gun was still pointed at my chest, his right index finger an inch from the trigger. Once the flag was raised, the soldier shouted at the driver, the vehicle barreled away, and I stepped with shaking legs into the customs hut.

The soldier inside pointed to the floor, and I dropped my bag there. As he stumbled toward my bag I could smell that he had been drinking. He unzipped my backpack and pushed my clothes back and forth. He then stood and looked at me with glazed, bloodshot eyes and lifted his hand in front of my face, rubbing his thumb against the four fingers of his right hand-he wanted money. With his left hand, he made a fist, thumb out, and tilted his head back-he wanted alcohol. I played dumb. "No, I don't have any alcohol." He made the money and drinking motions again. Again I played dumb.

Three other soldiers carrying AK-47s walked into the hut. I studied every detail of their hands, their weapons. I had been warned by Neil that aid workers had been shot and killed in Zaire. I imagined myself having to wrestle a rifle from one of them. Who would I grab? How? They mumbled to each other, and one of them bent over the bag and pushed again at my clothes. Another soldier blocked the entrance. I knew that they intended to rob me of something, and I thought about bolting through the door, but where would I run? Back to Rwanda? My mind was racing through the possibilities of escape and the paying of bribes when a Land Rover four-by-four pulled up outside the customs hut.

Out stepped a white woman with blond hair that stood three inches higher than the top of her head. She wore a big smile. Before I'd heard her say a word, I knew: American. American. She carried a bag of cookies in one hand and a carton of apple juice in the other. As soon as she said "Howdy, y'all" to the Zairian soldiers, I knew that I was safe. She handed out the juice and cookies-"Y'all be good now"-and the soldiers smiled back. I grabbed my bag and jumped in the truck, and we were on our way. She carried a bag of cookies in one hand and a carton of apple juice in the other. As soon as she said "Howdy, y'all" to the Zairian soldiers, I knew that I was safe. She handed out the juice and cookies-"Y'all be good now"-and the soldiers smiled back. I grabbed my bag and jumped in the truck, and we were on our way.

My savior was a born-again Christian from Texas who had come to work in Zaire with the nonprofit Food for the Hungry. Karen was the first woman I had ever met who talked about Satan as if he were a ubiquitous and decidedly unpleasant neighbor who was hard to shake.

"Oh yeah, well Satan's just busy as can be here, busy as can be. You know, talkin' with people, corruptin' their minds, turnin' their hearts to evil. Just yesterday, we had a woman never did read her Bible, just get up and start a fight with another refugee over a cooking ladle. Well no wonder, she was just sittin' there all day havin' a little conversation with Satan."

She jerked the wheel and then quickly righted the truck. "Yep, Satan is everywhere everywhere," and I wondered for a moment if we had just avoided hitting Satan in the street.

Goma, Zaire, was home to the largest of the refugee camps surrounding Rwanda. Some 1.2 million survivors were packed together on an arid, rocky volcanic plain. The majority of the refugees had walked dozens of miles carrying their youngest children and everything they hoped to keep. In a train of refugees miles long on a road packed with the distraught, many spent the journey desperately afraid that they would become separated from their children.

They arrived in a camp that festered with unhygienic latrines and muddy water, a scarcity of food, and disease. When the refugees first settled in Goma, a cholera epidemic swept through the camp and carried thousands to their deaths. Refugees hiked for miles to chop down trees for cooking wood, so the area around Goma was quickly deforested. Refugees built shelters of rocks and sticks that they covered with the blue tarps provided by the United Nations. They filled these rocky hovel homes with donated blankets on which lay their often-sick children, while the parents waited in long lines for food distributed by international aid organizations.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, United Nations Children's Fund, Save the Children, World Vision, and a legion of workers from other small nonprofit organizations buzzed about the camp. I was there months after the first refugees had arrived, but the camp still had no central organization. The Red Cross put up a large wooden board nailed to two wooden poles dug in the ground. On the board families and aid workers posted pictures of missing children and pictures of children found living alone in the camp. The UNHCR was nominally in charge, but it lacked the personnel to effectively organize the camp, and the Rwandans had little interest in being controlled by the UN. By night the camp often turned violent as old scores were settled, and as the sun fell most of the aid workers drove out of the camp to houses nearby, where they slept behind security walls protected by armed guards.

The UN workers came from around the world. Many of them were highly qualified professionals: an engineer from Guatemala, a logistician from New Zealand, a doctor from Bangladesh. Some of them were motivated by the UN mission, but many also came for the attractive Western salaries, the generous per diems, the schools for their children, the homes in Nairobi. The most intensely motivated volunteers-those who worked twelve to fourteen hours per day for no or very low pay at small nonprofit organizations-were often religious, and those that I came to know were mostly American evangelical Christians.

They began every day, every meeting, and every meal in prayer. They were absolutely committed to saving souls and to saving lives, and they worked with a feverish intensity, as if the day of reckoning might come at the end of the week. While some of them fit the stereotype of the clueless Christian missionary-one once asked, "Why doesn't the president of Africa send more food?"-many were both deeply committed and deeply knowledgeable. They had attempted to learn the language, they understood the culture, and they made real friends among the refugees.

At their worst, the evangelicals seemed indifferent to the feelings or experiences of the men and women around them. One day I was photographing an outdoor church service in Goma. Karen stood up to preach, and a refugee translated as she spoke. Karen explained to the crowd of genocide survivors sitting on the rocks under the high sun, "If you do not make Jesus Christ your personal savior, you will go to h.e.l.l." She pulled a book from her chair to demonstrate. "It is a law, like the law of gravity." She held the book out with a straight arm and then let it fall. It thudded on the platform.

"It is like the law of gravity. It is a law. Accept Jesus, or spend an eternity in h.e.l.l."

After Karen spoke, I asked a man what he thought of her sermon. His answer came back to me through a friendly translator: "She had a beautiful message."

I said, "Tell me what she said."

"She said that we cannot always carry everything on our own," the man explained through the interpreter. "If we try, we will drop things. We must ask for G.o.d's help to carry our burdens." Apparently Karen's translator had taken some liberties with her sermon.

But if Karen and some of her friends were sometimes out of touch, they also rose every day with the sun and spent hours tending to the needs of sick children, ordering supplies, distributing food, tracing children, and reuniting families. They may have been culturally clumsy, but every day I came to admire them more for one simple reason: they were here in Rwanda. They were working. I was visiting for weeks. They were working for months.

I thought of the many well-intentioned discussions I'd had in university cla.s.srooms about cultural sensitivity and cultural awareness, and I could imagine some of my cla.s.smates rolling their eyes if they heard aid workers pray, "Lord, please help these Africans." But the fact was that none of those cla.s.sroom conversations ever saved a life, while some of these committed volunteers were weighing infants in slings every day and providing food to lactating mothers. A lot of the international aid that I saw was not always as helpful as it could be, and some of it was even harmful. The world, however, would be a darker and colder place without it. Whatever her flaws, Karen was feeding hungry families every day.

A young Rwandan man who volunteered with Food for the Hungry asked me to walk with him into the camp. He led me to a group of boys. Their "home" was a collection of long sticks tied together and covered with pieces of black plastic and blue tarp. Their floor was the earth, which in Goma was black, jagged volcanic rock so hard, so barren, that weeds could hardly grow there. When I arrived, a boy lay curled in a dark, tight s.p.a.ce where the back wall of the shelter angled to meet the ground. I motioned for him to come out. He crawled out of the shadow of his shelter, dragging one foot behind him. I saw the open wound on his ankle, and as I bent down I could smell the white pus-filled flesh. It was badly infected.

"Where is the nearest medical tent?" I asked.

The volunteer pointed. "It's over there, but it is a long way."

One of the boys spoke to the volunteer. "The boys say that they went to the tent before but they were told to leave."

"They won't tell me to leave," I said.

I picked the boy up and started to walk over the rocky ground. Two of his companions followed behind us. They spoke again to the volunteer, who told me, "The boys say that they were told not to come back."

"That's OK," I said. "No one told me."

The white tent stood on four poles on the rocky ground, and the bright Red Cross symbol announced it as a place of aid. I walked inside with the boy and saw three nurses sitting and talking on plastic chairs. One cot held an old man whose open, lifeless eyes suggested that he might have come here to die. I watched his stomach rise and fall against a brown T-s.h.i.+rt pocked with holes. I set the boy down and he hopped on one foot toward the nurse. I was ready for a fight if they told him to leave, but the nurse-a refugee who had been hired by the Red Cross-sucked air through her teeth as she looked at the wound. She showed the infected ankle to the other nurses, they conferred, and she reached for a bag of cotton b.a.l.l.s and bottles of alcohol and iodine. The boy sat and lifted his ankle toward the nurse. She held his leg, her hands sheathed in blue latex gloves, and as she dabbed around the wound I could see the boy's skin s.h.i.+ne as layers of dirt washed away. The nurse spoke to the boy-he was no more than eight years old-and he closed his eyes as what I think was alcohol was rubbed into the infected gash. She wrapped his ankle in a clean white bandage. I thought to ask why the boy had been previously turned away, but all of the nurses had been incredibly kind, and I didn't want my words to be mistranslated. I thanked them all and we walked out of the tent.

The boy hobbled back to his friends, and by the time we had reached his shelter, his friends were gathered outside and singing. They were bouncing on bare feet, wide smiles, elated. Some of them thought he would surely die, like so many others whose wounds became infected and went untreated. They began dancing around me and singing a joyful song. The Rwandan aid worker I was with turned to me and whispered, "They are singing 'thank you' for what you did."

I was barely able to force a smile. I was glad to help, but this was absurd. These boys had survived the unendurable to reach here, but could not get the most basic help once they arrived. As an American, I had paid an insignificant bribe at the border, was bailed out with apple juice and cookies, and could walk unchallenged into any part of the camp I wished. I told the aid worker to tell the boys thank you for their song, and I asked if I could talk with them. They gathered closer, and he said, "Yes, yes, they wish to know who you are."

I asked if I could give them a gift from my hometown, and I pulled from the pocket of my cargo pants a stack of St. Louis Cardinals baseball stickers. "Please tell them that this is from my home in America." I handed out the stickers showing the team logo, a red cardinal perched on a baseball bat, and then I sat down and the boys sat with me.

The oldest boy was sixteen, and he was the clear leader of this group of fifteen boys who lived together in the refugee camp. All of the boys were "unaccompanied," and their eyes were far wiser than the eyes of most American children. They could be playful, but they sat with a gravity and held their shoulders back with an air of self-possession that was rare among children. It was like sitting with young soldiers. When I smiled at them, all fifteen faces smiled back. The leader was wearing a T-s.h.i.+rt-holes throughout-and a pair of donated shorts. I asked him to tell me about the other boys in his group. One by one he pointed to his companions, describing them for me as the aid worker interpreted. "This one is very powerful with making fire and cooking. This one is very powerful with the soldiers from Zaire; they like him. This one is very powerful with singing." It may have been some quirk of the translation, but as he went around the group, the leader described each boy as powerful in some way.12

One of my favorite photographs from Goma was of a refugee who came every day to the center for unaccompanied children. When he walked into the aid tent, dozens of children would stand and run toward him. He would play games with the children-running, tagging, jumping, singing. He had no toys, no supplies. He simply brought himself and happiness. In the photograph, the man's arms are raised and the children are shouting, some jumping, their faces full of joy.

The international community had watched the genocide in Rwanda without lifting a finger. Ultimately, it had taken a military victory-that of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi army that swept down from Uganda-to bring an end to the killing. We should have sent military a.s.sistance, maybe even U.S. Marines. Instead, too late, we sent money and food.

I thought of the survivor who stood her child up for me to photograph, and as I left Rwanda I thought of the way that parents love their children. They hug them when they need love, they care for them when they are sick, heal them when they are injured. But parents also protect their children when they are threatened. Wouldn't it be strange to find parents who would hug their children, would tend to their wounds, but wouldn't protect them from getting hurt in the first place? Nations are not parents to the world's people. Yet the basic fact remains: we live in a world marked by violence, and if we want to protect others, we sometimes have to be willing to fight. We all understand at the most basic level that caring requires strength as well as compa.s.sion.

One day I stood outside a health care clinic in Rwanda as a volunteer pointed to a young girl with a deep machete scar that ran from behind her right ear across the back of her neck. We look at a scar like that-we reflect on the evil that human beings are capable of-and we are tempted to walk away from humanity altogether. But when that same child smiles at us, when that same child lets us know that she has survived and she has grown, then we have no choice. We have no choice but to go forward in the knowledge that it is within our power, and that the world requires of us-of every one of us-that we be both good and and strong in order to love and protect. I felt that I had done some good in Rwanda, but I knew that I had far more to learn, far more to do. strong in order to love and protect. I felt that I had done some good in Rwanda, but I knew that I had far more to learn, far more to do.