Day Ten: Field of Hope
This is how my day started: up after dawn, I tune on Aljazeera to start the daily injection of news. The first video on the live streaming is called Field Of Hope. Coming out of the speaker is an unfamiliar language mixed to some French. On the screen is a woman with a purple-coloured veil on her head, a green blouse and what in my family we call pagne – a sort of fabric wrapped around the legs and waist like a skirt. The rich pluvial forest in the background confirms we are in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Despite my obsession/affection with the country, this is a totally random encounter. And how not to include it in my contribution to the 16-day of Activism Campaign to fight violence on women?
Field of Hope, is the story of a group of Congolese women who gathered together and started to earn money through agriculture. They have no family to come back to. Rapists have taken that away from them. Instead they gave them children, sometimes many of them. And raising a child born from a violence is anything but easy. As one woman explains in the documentary, hate sometimes is stronger than love.
BALOBESHAYI 