By all accounts I shouldn’t be making this trip. My mother keeps tracking me down to tell me that she is “opposed”\u009d to it, my father sent me several emails reminding me that “Congo is not Cancun”\u009d (thanks for the reminder, Dad), and therefore, perhaps I should reconsider. But most importantly, most pressingly \u2014 perhaps I shouldn’t be making this trip because I have a five and a half month old daughter at home.<\/p>\n
Will Lena miss me? Will she cry in the middle of the night and I won’t be there? She has her Daddy, who she obviously loves, but will she still somehow know that I’m gone? Worse yet, what if she doesn’t miss me? What if she has a fabulous time and has no idea who I am when I get home in two weeks?<\/p>\n
Everyone I talk to asks the same thing: But what about Lena? And I only have one answer \u2014 that it’s because of Lena that I’m going. Since I had Lena, the women and children of Congo, the mothers and the daughters \u2014 they are even less of an abstraction to me. That they are suffering keeps me up at night even when Lena is (miraculously) sleeping. That Lena, by sheer circumstance of birth, is not at daily risk is a treasure \u2014 but that the Congolese are subject to constant threat is a stain on all of us. Congo has unbelievable potential to be a peaceful and strong country \u2014 in the strength of its people, the depth of its culture, the richness of its resources. I look forward to someday telling Lena that I did everything I could do to help \u2014 that our family does not stand idly by.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By all accounts I shouldn’t be making this trip. My mother keeps tracking me down to tell me that she is “opposed”\u009d to it, my father sent me several emails reminding me that “Congo is not Cancun”\u009d (thanks for the reminder, Dad), and therefore, perhaps I should reconsider. But most importantly, most pressingly \u2014 perhaps…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,176,191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-blog","category-jww-on-the-ground","category-190","category-176","category-191","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}