“When I heard the news my heart fell on the floor
I was on plane on my way to Baltimore
In these troubled times it’s hard enough as it is
My soul’s known a better life than this.
I wondered how so many could be in so much pain
While others don’t seem to feel a thing
Then I cursed my whiteness and I get so damned depressed
In a world of suffering why should I be so blessed.”
Brett Dennen from so much more

A few weeks ago our dear friend’s Kat and Tom gave us a CD by Brett Dennen. For no particular reason, just that they thought we’d like him (don’t you love presents like that?) and we do like him, I especially love him. And he has been particularly helpful to be in the last week (Jo I hope that answers your question).

After a few years ban on intense, real life movies I decided that I should crawl out of my hole and go and watch one. I think I ended my drought more intensely than I should. Tuesday night I saw “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo”. I was invited by the one of the girls from the migrant and refugee department at work who had a free ticket and convinced me using the tag line “their stories need to be heard”. As you can imagine it was simply horrendous. It was a documentary and the woman who made it was there on the night. She had been gang raped herself and said, as the tag line did that she and these women want their stories to be told because until they are nothing will be done. So I sat through an hour and half listening to women tell stories of been raped by up to 7 men at a time, with guns and pieces of wood and anything else they could get their hands on. Stories of rejection after been raped as their husbands and families will no longer have them as well as the fact that many can no longer control their bladders and bowels. This has happened to literally hundreds of thousands of women. Such large scale rape is a strategy of war, a war that she believes is been fought on a large part due to the fact that the Congo has 80% of the world’s coaltan, a metal used in mobile phones and laptops. There were some Congolese women in the audience. One, perhaps two, who were sitting behind began to weep and wail half way through. It was a sound I won’t forget for awhile.

Then on Wednesday as I was still recovering Ryan somehow convinced me to go and see a film as part of the Mexican film festival titled “La Zona” or “The Zone. That was a bad decision. I can not say it was equally as horrendous as the greatest silence” but it wasn’t good. All about inequality and corruption in Mexico. How the lives of the poor are just traded for money and power and everyone assumes their lives and deaths will just go un-noticed. And for the most part they do I suppose except by their mothers and one of the last scenes of this film was that of a mother searching for her missing son.

I came home and listened to Brett Dennen:

“I don’t feel comfortable with the way my clothes fit
I can’t get used to my bodies limit
I got some fancy shoes to chase away these blues
They cost a lot money but they aren’t worth a thing
I want to free my feet from the broken glass and concrete
I want to get away from this city
And lay upon the ground staring a hole in the sky
Wondering where we go when we die”