The good news is that I took a trip to Auckland, New Zealand last week. The bad news is that I was there for work, so my family wasn't with me, and I didn't get to see much. My days were mainly:1) Get coffee.
2) Get another coffee because that last one was insanely tasty.
3) Go to customer site hopped up on caffeine.
4) Return to hotel.
5) Relieve stress with some whiskey
6) Do some more work in my hotel room.
7) Have another drink and wander around downtown Auckland
8) Go to bed
9) Wake up at 3am to screaming fans at the pub next to my hotel. Stupid World Cup.
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By Jeff Koinange
And just when it seemed things couldn't get more depressing on a continent (Africa) where misery and hardship are an every day occurrence, I landed in a refugee camp in the town of Bukavu in eastern Congo. I walked into a hospital filled with victims of rape and mutilation and broke down.
The women here had been forced to flee their villages by marauding soldiers who weren't satisfied with just raping them -- they wanted to annihilate a generation of newborns -- mutilating their mothers by inserting knives, machetes and even pistols and rifles into their private parts after gang-raping them for days.
I have never seen such inhumanity in all my years as a reporter. And to add insult to injury, when some of these women returned to their villages, they were either shunned by their families for "allowing" themselves to be violated, or they were gang-raped again by some of the same men in uniform.
If I've ever felt helpless as a reporter, it was in Bukavu -- for these women had nowhere to run, nowhere to call home, and a bleak future that will deprive them of the ability to feel like women again.
In all of my journalistic travels, I can't help but see the images of Africa's helpless and hopeless, and I can't help but think about what is it that drives man's inhumanity.
What makes us revert to our basic, animalistic instinct? What makes one ethnic group want to destroy another? After all, this is the 21st century. Are we not yet civilized?
Questions I'll be asking myself for a long time. There seems no end in sight for the agony of Africa's suffering masses.
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