I have been living nearly entirely without the internet or international news since late September. As of two days ago, I re-entered the world of Access To.
For the most part we were very busy the last few months, and focused on such clear objectives - vaccination! treatment! - that the news that was the most relevant to us was merely about what related directly to reaching these objectives: disease burdens of the communities we were visiting, the accuracy (or in-) of population figures, the patterns of health-seeking behavior, the rainy season, the election results.
What, during this time, did I need to know of storms in the Phillipines? Arrests in Bahrain? This "Occupy" business on Wall Street? (and what is it, exactly, that is being occupied? what, exactly, is it being protested?
Frankly, two days has not been enough time to get that properly googled. I feel like my mother asking a young me what it meant to 'go out' with someone. Where do you go? she would say.).
It was, in fact, less odd to be so isolated from the world news than I expected it would be. We forgot, really, that we were meant to be concerned with events in other countries. Would think of it, occasionally, when we received on the same day, from two sources, the breaking news that Gaddafi had (either) been killed (!), or retaken Tripoli (!!). Something Big had happened. But what exactly that was took a good week to get straight and only by way of broken phone calls to families back in Europe and, all in all, after a week of being amused at our own ignorance of world events it really hardly seemed to matter any more what had actually happened, beyond satisfying our own curiosity.
Coming back to the news now, after months of not following it, is disconcerting. Not because, as I might have expected it to be, it is just the same old thing (the drugstore in your home town, holiday dinners, the hallways of your high school) but because, rather, it is somehow not.
Real tension seems to be higher. And it feels that everyone has the sense of being more implicated and more involved, if not, as I might wish, more accountable. It seems (though perhaps this is just my bias of pushing my own friends and families in this direction because of my career) as if more people are considering, suddenly, that all that is happening 'out' and 'over' there might be somehow relevant Here.
Because I consider myself to be a part (small) of this jet stream of voices that make up what we think of as the News, it has been particularly strange to be absent from it, present as neither receiver nor contributor.
To come back to it now I feel a slight sickness of guilt; that I have been somehow remiss. That I have let go, irresponsibly, of whatever hold I have had on that megaphone of amplification, whatever corner I have fought out on that shaky platform of the Voices that are Listened to, Sometimes...
But who is listening? Let me tell you that the people in the little villages where I have been living were not, by and large. They followed the search for Gaddafi each morning by radio. They tuned in to the progression of the election. They muttered and repeated rumors between themselves. They listened to football scores in September.
But otherwise they were going about their business of living without anyone paying very much attention to them at all and, frankly, without them paying very much attention to anybody else.
Not that they much could have, even if they wanted to. How would they get more news?
The short-wave radios they do not own? The cell phones that have no reception for weeks on end? The non-existent electricity to fire up the non-existent TV to reach however few and biased channels exist? Or how about from drivers and passengers on the buses that do not come because the roads are washed out completely and because no one wants to travel that direction and because sometimes there just are no roads? Because to travel on the river instead you would still need to pile hundreds into an overloaded hunk of rusty metal that breaks down or sinks more often than any sense of security would allow.
News is controlled. Sometimes quite specifically (by a country blocking all SMS messages during the elections, for example). Sometimes politically (self-censorship, bribing, threatening) or educationally through mass social pressure to be One Thing, and steer clear of all others.
And sometimes, indirectly, because the movement of people and goods and resources is also so controlled. Because if you neglect the infrastructure of a country and leave untold stretches of 10 km that take an hour to drive through in a 4x4 and create an investment environment that relies on cheap, and child, labor, and promote (or do nothing to stop) an environment that relies on the expendability of females to continue functioning (and not), then you also control what people know, or can know, or believe they have the right to know, or even wonder if perhaps it would be possible to one day know.
Having just spent four months in a country that has, during that same time, actually been quite a focus of the international news, I have found myself surprised once again at the discrepancy between what it feels like to be living in, present in and experiencing the on-the-ground-reality of a World Event, and the versions of that event that are propagated around the world by media and other groups responsible for shaping what those who are not involved directly think of as the Truth that happens.
In part, this discrepancy comes from the difference that if you are living in the country during the time, you must be one place only; whereas if you are merely reporting on that country you can gather and assimilate stories from many places and perspectives and, it is hoped, get to some truth slightly more objective.
And yet, what I saw in Haiti during the elections was that the same event, witnessed by journalists and then translated by media agencies from all different leanings, would be recast in whatever light suited them and (what can only be assumed to be) the money-making potential of the representation of that event among their respective audiences best.
What I saw in DRC was that at the same time that the government was trying to organize an election we were trying to organize a large-scale vaccination campaign, and though we were in physically and metaphorically different boats we were still on the same river, in the same villages, in the same sudden torrential downpours and window-deep in the same mud on roads that people in other places might call footpaths. And it was, for all of us, some damn hard work.
Which I never really saw mentioned in any of the articles criticizing the election process or calling into question the validity of the results.
That the country is on the brink of war (an opinion generally shared by the friends and family writing to our team, none of whom were actually in DRC) was true news to us. Is this what the Brink of War looks like? Having never been there as far as I know (counterfactual knowledge that it is), I cannot say.
But wouldn't it be good for the people living there to know about it? Or, perhaps, to be the ones telling the international community about it, rather than the other way around? Perhaps they are, and just weren't telling me. Though there was a nervousness among some that would have been serious anywhere, anytime.
On the way home we drove through mining camps, and through towns where men in military uniforms rose up like spectres in doorways and walked along the road in gun-toting groups, eyes following us as we passed. One man grinned and waved, a toddler grasping his other hand.
Safer, or not safer? I asked our Congolese colleague. How did this make people feel? Safer, he said. But which people? and from what threat? and for how long?
And does saf"er" have anything to do with "safe?"
These uniformed men squatting next to camp fires underneath the tall and thick-knuckled trees did not make me feel safe. When we got out to buy bread and grilled corn I was happy to get back in; did not even think of pulling out the camera, the way I had everywhere else.
A few hours later we passed a prison, or so we were told, a prison for those unlucky enough to be sentenced to death ("condamne..." condemned).
That is the prison, said the Congolese colleague (a chin thrust to a low wall and empty-looking barracks behind it). A moment later (here there was no chin movement, just eyes turning to the right and a sudden interruption of our conversation): The fields there, he said.
We looked at the fields. They were unremarkable. Thicket grass, brush.
That is where they do the killing, he tells us. Pragmatically.
French is sometimes more dramatic in its phrasing, when back translated to English. I think about this, and we pass a teenage boy in school uniform who kicks stones in the road as he walks, his eyes lowered, away from the fields.
The killing? my other colleague says.
But that isn't the question.
How? I ask, and he says, guns, and so I translate this for the one who asked about it with a silent pointer finger and upwards thumb in her direction. She looks at it, looks at me; I put my hand down.
We have reached, by chance at that moment, the space between the songs on the MP3 player. We hear only the sounds of us bumping along the road, bouncing into each other and the seats and the dashboard.
The next song comes on. It spreads into the silent gap. It talks about the inadequacy of the person singing it to make things better. About hopelessness, and hope. About the pain of the world.
I did not want to know that, my colleague says.
She does not entirely mean this. Or, does, but corrects herself, because she knows she needs to change the thing that she wants, to get the other thing that she wants: to help decrease the pain of the world. Increase hope. To make things better.
I did not know that, she repeats.
Yes. I say.
And so we see the bimodal graph of information.
Those with the least access to information are the ones left most implicated in the reality of the events themselves; those least implicated by personal involvement so often have the greatest access to the analysis of the events, and to that privileged standing of Being Informed, while being safely shuffled away to a place protected from the impact of the information, from the reality of the event.
I kept feeling so sure that it would be a phone call from a family member far, far away from our little town that would tell us who had won the elections, and what was happening as a result.
But the radio was fired up, the signal strong, the numbers being read out with near-agony inducing slowness and care. And then, with the word Katanga (where we lived, where we were sitting, where things would happen if they were going to happen, to us, to those around us), the signal cut.
And we were left to wonder, like blinded babies, what had happened. And to wait, like innocents, for someone to tell us, and to tell us, too, what it was meant to mean and how we were meant to respond and whether or not the country would now be, on the Brink of War.
In the meantime, we went to sit on the front porch with a cup of coffee. Because even on the brink, things like front porches, cups, coffee even, these things remain. With odd static and staying power; with strange loyalty.
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