Good & Bad

My mood (I am sure you are thrilled to hear reported) is lovely cheerful happy today! Really I don’t know entirely why: I’m still sick.

Maybe it is the fact that at breakfast this morning, when I could barely speak, JB made me a concoction of ginger, Ugandan honey, and hot-HOT-hot water which was delicious. Or maybe it’s that my cold is partially a badge of honor from marching side-by-side step-for-step with colleagues yesterday beneath rainclouds spitting freezing drops while we cheered for women’s rights. Hell, maybe it is the fact that between my painful throat and fluid-filled lungs, not enough oxygen is reaching my brain so I am a bit woozy and giggly. Who cares!

I am coughing up a storm and wheezing for breath and singing in the office and dancing with my colleagues in the hallways and life today for me in Goma, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, is good.

There is more to be said about the women’s day march and pictures to show you, but I haven’t had a chance to think it through/download them yet.

However, to end this gleeful blog post on a terrible horrible sour note, let me quickly report this: While us women were stomping and cheering in our matching outfits with our signs proclaiming our RIGHTS, a handful of policemen were beating the shit out of some guy by the side of the road. You know when you watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and she does a roundhouse kick to destroy an evil baddy? It was like that, I saw an actual ROUNDHOUSE KICK, before the crowd around the spectacle got too thick and I couldn’t see anything more. Only, of course, and this is THE KEY POINT of the matter: It wasn’t an evil vampire. It was a human person a young man, brown eyes and a blue shirt and a personality, a being. With, I presume, a mom, and brothers, and a family. And with his hands BOUND BEHIND HIS BACK.

And this is right, right, right beside our march for women’s rights.

As if it’s too much work to concentrate on both article 2 and article 5 at the same time. O! Goma policemen. Please. PLEADINGLY: Please. Can’t we learn to multitask?