Both Bitch Ph.D. and Kevin Drum have linked to this post, but if you haven’t been there already I highly encourage you to read one woman’s experience as an aid worker in Darfur. No bones about it, this is horrifying stuff:
She finished her mission in Chad, then went to Zimbabwe for three more weeks before she came home. She brought home a pretty good case of PTSD. What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale…beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.
What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality.
And women are the preponderance of victims. Men do not leave the villages to go to the countryside to gather firewood and other necessary items of sustenance. Women venture out, even though every time they leave their villages, they are at horrific risk of being beaten and raped and disfigured. The reason they go instead of the men? The women are only attacked, the men are killed.
We wish her a speedy recovery, and hope that someone in D.C. is reading this and has the resolve to stop this atrocity.