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发帖数: 4346 | 1 I always love to read the obituary section in The Economist.
http://www.economist.com/node/21551439
DARKNESS” was a word Lyn Lusi was used to. Western journalists
instinctively reached for it when they came to her hospital in Goma in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, in Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness”.
Goma itself was a black and grey place, a town built on volcanic basalt
tough as broken glass through which green shoots struggled to grow. She knew
; she gardened in it. But the real heart of darkness, Mrs Lusi would say
quietly, was man’s heart.
The proof lay all about her. Congo was a rich country, but its minerals were
swapped by local strongmen for weapons, or stripped away by corporations
who left the people in poverty. It was ostensibly at peace, after years of
warfare in which millions had died. But remnants of militias still haunted
the forests, preying on the villages. So much evil. So much selfishness.
Related topics
Africa
Goma
Democratic Republic of Congo
In this vast, damaged, neglected place her husband Jo, a Congolese and, like
her, an ardent Baptist, was the only orthopaedic surgeon for 8m people. He
alone had the skill to mend the crushed arms, the crooked feet.
Irrepressible as he was, bubbling over with plans, he often used the image
of a little bucket bailing out an ocean. She preferred the words of Isaiah
61:1: “The Lord hath sent me…to bind up the brokenhearted.”
Their hospital at Goma had been set up in 2000 to train young Congolese
doctors. Two years later the building was destroyed by a volcano; they built
it again, low brightly painted buildings behind battered metal gates, and
called it HEAL Africa. By 2011 they had trained 30 doctors there, often with
the help of students from American medical schools. Yet the hospital became
most famous for something different. Hundreds of the patients were women
with genital fistulas, or tears: some caused by childbirth, but a startling
number the result of rape by militiamen.
This, too, was hidden in darkness. Mrs Lusi was unaware of it until 2002,
when a sobbing young woman came to her office. She realised then that
horrific sexual violence was taking place in every village round Goma. Women
working in the fields, or girls as young as five walking back from the
market, would be abducted and raped repeatedly. Sticks and guns were forced
into their vaginas. Sometimes the guns were fired. The brutalised victims,
once home, would often be disowned by their families.
Over almost a decade HEAL Africa treated 4,800 such cases. The women would
arrive in buses, traumatised after travelling for hours and stinking with
the urine and faeces that leaked from their injuries. At the hospital,
energetic local “Mamas” recruited by Mrs Lusi would welcome them and wrap
them in their arms. “Love in action”, she called it, and she too was “
Mama Lyn” to everybody there.
She was not a doctor. Her only training, after the degree in French that
took her to Congo in 1971 to teach in church schools, was in administration.
Handling paperwork was her job both at the church hospital at Nyankunde,
where she and Jo worked for 19 years, and at HEAL Africa, where “programme
manager” was the unexciting title she gave herself. It frustrated her to
sit among a mountain of papers; but the role of a background worker,
patiently picking up after Jo, also suited her. She did not want accolades,
though she got many, and both gorgeous George Clooney and Hillary Clinton
came to call on her. At fed-up times she revived by chatting to the
remarkable, recovering women outside. If she felt bogged down, she had only
to remember that God with his strong hands would haul her out and set her
feet in a firm place. She had once risked rape herself, when militiamen
stopped her car on the road to Kigali at night. He had saved her then, and
would again.
The fact was that he intended her to be there. Like Jo, she was meant to
heal. “Isn’t that a beautiful word?” she would say. The letters stood for
Health, Education, Action, Love. Healing meant not just of the body but of
the whole person: mind, spirit and potential, bringing it back to work as
God intended. And not just of the person but the whole community, teaching
villagers to bind up wounds, support each other and provide for themselves.
While her patients were in hospital she saw that they were taught to read
and write, or to use a sewing machine, in order to go back skilled and
confident as well as healed.
Single tiny points
It had taken her time, too, to build up confidence. A Ramsgate girl, from
England’s soft south-east, she was horrified when she first arrived in
teeming, filthy, sweltering Kinshasa. Her French was the wrong sort,
incomprehensible to her pupils, and she seemed unlikely either to prosper or
stay. But apart from a few short spells abroad, mostly to keep her two
children safe from the worst of the war, she never left Congo. Her
determined mission was to tell the world about this place.
In other ways, too, she defied the darkness. In the hard black basalt of
Goma she managed to grow sweet peas and roses; she liked to walk among them
to say her morning prayers. What she was doing, she reflected sometimes, was
very small. It seemed no more than nurturing single tiny points of candle
flame. But she had faith that, eventually, they would all join up to make a
huge blaze of light. |
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