From California to Congo: A Mom on a Mission to Enact Change

Writing Mama Janine Kovac interviews fellow member Mindy Urhlaub in a profound and heart-rending piece.

“In the countryside, the air is very clean [but] the air outside my Goma hotel constantly smells acrid—like a cook fire. It makes your eyes feel like beef jerky.”

Mindy Uhrlaub, a Writing Mamas member is writing a novel about Congo, one of the most ravaged places on Earth. She writes about the devastation of a land, the oppression of a people, and the corruption within a country. It is a place where malaria is deadly instead of treatable, and where women are raped and mutilated and then ostracized for the crimes they’ve suffered. She writes about teen-aged mothers and the sick children who play in the dirt at their feet. She writes about the brave women who school the young mothers, feed the children and risk their lives by caring for their kin.

She isn’t writing a novel by choice; she writes a novel because anything but a fictionalized account of quotidian life in Congo will put the lives of these women in danger. Her research began 10 years ago after reading the book, King Léopold’s Ghost. What began as a passing interest has spawned two identities that feed off of each other: Mindy the writer who is inspired by activism in Congo and Mindy the activist who uses writing as her medium for change.

In February 2011, she visited Congo for the first time.

“I could hear the drums before I got there.”

Celebratory drums, she explains, for the opening of Eve Ensler’s City of Joy, a woman’s center in Congo that educates and empowers the women of this battered region.

However, as excited as she was to visit the country that had fascinated her from afar, Mindy had no illusions about the dangers of traveling to a place known as the most terrible place on earth to be a woman, a country saturated with intimidation and violence. Here, men are classified by their weapons. The men with side arms are privately hired guards. The men with AK-47s are military. Those are the ones you don’t look in the eyes.

And how would Mindy seem to the women she sought to help? Would she look like just another privileged woman who had developed an obsession with a faraway country?

We know your kind, Mindy imagined the women of Congo would say. You’ll forget about us as soon as you get home.

It is the question in back of every budding activist’s mind—“drop in the bucket” syndrome. What difference can any one person make? To this end, in addition to arranging her visas and her vaccinations and alongside the donations of pens and crayons and books and blankets, Mindy packed photographs of her children. She gave the pictures to the women she met. For her own children, she took pictures of the women posing with their children, in turn holding the pictures of Mindy’s children. It’s like a mirror that reflects a mirror.

This is their common purpose, she assured the women of Congo: motherhood. They are united by a mother’s love, the universal instinct to ensure the best life possible for your children. Back in California, Mindy shared the photographs with her own children, a reminder to them of another world where moms love their babies—it’s just like their world and at the same time, is nothing like their world.

When she returned home, it was 10 full days before Mindy could talk about what she’d seen in Congo. It was as if, in her words, she was “gestating this trip. Writing was like post-partum depression.”

Now the writing is gushing out, she reports. The images of the devastated women who risk their lives to clothe, house and educate other devastated women are finding their voices through the characters in her novel. For the women themselves, Mindy is on a mission: to draw attention to the atrocities that are just a way of life in their homeland. She has produced the play Ruined, (for which playwright Lynn Nottage won the Pulitzer Prize. It is currently playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.) She works with other activists such as Adam Hochschild and Eve Ensler. And she writes whenever she gets the chance.

Will these combined efforts help fix a broken system? Only time will tell.

“Until then,” Mindy says, “I’m going to do what I can—wake up at 5:30 in the morning and work on this book.”

To learn more about Congo, Mindy suggests:

See:
The play Ruined now playing at Berkeley Rep Theatre through April 10th

Read:
King Léopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
A Thousand Sisters by Lisa Shannon
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

To help the women in Congo, Mindy suggests:

Donate to:
V-Day’s City of Joy, http://drc.vday.org/city-of-joy
Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/
Heal Africa, http://www.healafrica.org/
Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic, http://floatingclinic.org/