What I Learned about Happiness, Hardships, and Humanity from broken Women in the Congo and a Vietnam Veteran

"But some, who like one old man whose name was called, had no problem sharing the joy of the moment by performing a little impromptu dance for my camera, making this crowd of people laugh with abandon. Everything had been taken from them--but their humanity."
                                                                                                       --Kevin Sites, In the Hot Zone
I realize that there is really no reason to be sad sometimes. In the last chapter I read, Kevin goes to the Democratic Republic of the Congo attached to a low-key humanitarian aid organization. He encounters boys not old enough to drive legally in the US who have been recruited by the various militias with confusing acronym names. These little boys have stories of how they have killed several people--not because they want to, but because they're being shot at. One of the boys talks about how he is haunted in his dreams by a man he killed for food.

I don't think I'll ever say "I'm starving!" when I mean "I'm a little hungry" again.

Mr. Sites then heads off to a women's shelter. As an aside, I've volunteered going door to door asking for donations for the local shelter and received good responses from people who have been there. For the women in the Congo, their shelter is the banana plant groves. There they hide from raping rebel soldiers, because if they were all in one place it would be horrible. Some of them have gone through several rapes and widowing experiences, yet Kevin Sites always describes how calm they talk about their experiences. He talks about their singing, their laughter, their dancing.

I don't think I'll ever complain about Mondays again.

Later in the day, I sat down with a professor who is a Vietnam veteran. He told me about several people who went through Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. He tells me how he once sang old songs with his guitar at a veterans convention, and how those suffering from PTSD were able to open up. He told me, "I knew God had sent me to do this, and now I do it in prisons and I always get the same effect."

I don't think I'll ever complain about how hard something is if I PTSD is not a common consequence of that action.