Savages

37

Ben watches CNN in the airport.

On his way home from the Bongo Congo.

Etymology—

The Congo River runs through it, and

It used to be called the Belgian Congo, and

It’s fucking nuts there.

Otherwise known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

What was Ben the Baddhist doing there?

Funding psychotherapy clinics for rape victims.

Traumatized women, multiply raped and often mutilated—first by rebel soldiers, then by the soldiers who were sent to protect them from the previous set of soldiers. So Green Is Green writes checks for health clinics and counselors, for pregnancy and STD tests, and—

—get this—

—for instructors to go out to the soldiers and hold workshops to teach that rape and mutilation are—

wrong.

Ben leaves the plastic molded chair to hit the porcelain in the men’s room again because he contracted more in the Congo than just the usual Third World Heartbreak and he really hopes it isn’t dysentery (again).

He sits Luther-like on the john and, in fact, (re)considers his own theology because—

—while he knows as a Baddhist that men who rape and cut up women should be reeducated not to do that, he also has this impulse that the more effective thing to do would be to just—

—shoot the fuckers.

He knows (ever self-reflective) that there’s more to it than that.

Maybe he’s just sick and tired but he’s also

sick

and

tired

of seemingly everything these days. He feels

ennui

depression

adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because

—dig a well in the Sudan and the janjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway

—buy mosquito nets and the boys you save grow up to

—rape women

—set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army

—steals them and uses the women as slaves and

Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon’s opinion of the human species

that people are basically

shit.