The Secrets Men Wish We'd Keep
The Secrets Men Wish We'd Keep
Notes from a tough, bright place
What I’m Writing
CNN - What’s Behind the Logjam in Mount Everest’s ‘Death Zone’
CNN - Fewer Guns Mean Fewer Killings, and We All Know It
The Guardian - Missouri may lose its last abortion clinic this week. That’s dark news for us all.
Prime Conehead Animal Content
I over-promised and under-delivered on conehead animals when I started this newsletter, but this week I have some! (Also, email me your conehead animal pics and tell me about your little conehead friend).
This is Crusoe. He has couch privileges this week and his main man Zelalem is hand-feeding him individual bites of meat to remind him that “there is joy beyond the cone.”
His sister Sadie is very jealous.
Don’t worry, Crusoe is recovering well from having two little nodes removed from his belly. The cone will be off soon and he’ll be kicked off the couch and back to barking at monkeys in his favorite Nairobi forest with his top gal Nicki. He is a very good boy, and is indeed finding joy beyond the cone.
The View From Here
Lovelies! It’s been a minute and I’m sorry (I am sure you were all waiting anxiously for the next installment of this vital newsletter). I’ve been in this beautiful place:
Reporting what is frankly not a very beautiful story. I’m in Bidi Bidi refugee settlement in northern Uganda, the second-largest refugee camp in the world (although it feels more like a series of villages than a camp). I’m working on a story about reproductive health access for women in conflict and crisis, and in between interviews I’m typing this on my phone from an under-construction thatched-roof church, the ceiling lined with UNHCR tarp. Two young men are building the church’s low walls by hand, patting each brick in place with dark mud. A few girls are hanging out and chatting with them as they work. It’s a pretty good-looking church:
The story I’m doing here is one I’ve been working on for nearly a year now, from four different countries, talking to dozens of women about their experiences — usually experiences that involve sexual violence; often experiences that involve unwanted pregnancy.
I’m struck again and again by the generosity of the women who invite me into their homes to tell me about some of the worst moments of their lives. Many of them have not even told their families or close friends about being raped; when I ask why they’re telling me, they usually say because I’m from far away — I’m a safer person because I’m outside of the neighborhood gossip chain, and being white and American means I have some power; maybe if people where I’m from read about what’s happening here, they can help.
I always hope that this is true too, that more words and stories and images of people who have incredible suffering and violence imposed upon them will translate into action from the lands of power and plenty. I also know it doesn’t work like that. I know that as important as I believe this story is, my presence will change very little for the individual women in whose homes I sit.
Some women who talk to me have slightly different motivations. A surprisingly large number — still a minority, but more than I expected — tell me to use their real names and images of their faces when we talk about options for anonymity. They often offer something similar to what one woman, Rejina, said to me today. She had been raped when she fled South Sudan, after the war hit her community in 2016, and she’s still living with a lot of pain. When we talked about how she wanted to be identified, she said I could use her full name. Especially where there’s a language barrier, I like to ask a woman’s reasons for using her real identity, just to make sure we’re all on the same page — that everyone understands how the story, with her name and often her photo, will be used, and that everyone understands I’m a journalist and not from an NGO or any other resource-giving entity. When, after a long conversation, I asked Rejina her reasons for choosing to attach her name and her face to her story, she said, “Because it is what happened to me. If I don’t speak maybe no one will.”
I’ve heard similar statements from women in radically different places over this past year, from Colombia to Bangladesh to Honduras. I hate the phrase “bear witness” because it’s trite and self-centered. Let’s put the strength where it lies: in the speaking, not in being an outsider who can listen and then walk away.
But I like to think — I truly do think — that some women derive value from these exchanges. In my work and in my own life, I’ve observed (and certainly personally experienced) a broad human impulse to seek and make meaning, including from the traumas we survive. For many women, the process of speaking their story, of having that story heard and possibly read by many others, allows them to regain a modicum of control and power.
This happened. It hurt me.
What happened wasn’t my choice; the telling of it is.
This isn’t true for all women, or even most women. But it’s true for some. And in my reporting, it’s mostly been true of older women for whom the stigma that follows sexual violence may leverage less severe social consequences. Many of them aren’t hoping to marry or remarry. Many of them say they care less about what people think. Many seem hungry for opportunities to be heard and respected, to have an opportunity to lead and influence. A woman who chooses to speak openly and freely about the secrets women are told to keep is a powerful force. Watching and listening to her is a lucky thing.
This is the best job in the world, and remains the most interesting and gratifying work I’ve ever done. But if I’m being honest it also feels awful a lot of the time. You’re mining people for their stories with nothing to give in return, other than a milky pledge to tell the story of what’s happening here — not even necessarily their story, the one they are digging deep into their belly to draw out. You can’t do this work unless you think it’s important, but in the doing you also feel the total impotence of so much of what you do. I walk into a stranger’s house and I write in a notebook and I leave. I hope that talking to me feels like a relief. But it sure doesn’t put food in someone’s belly or return them to safety or get their kids uniforms for school. And a lot of the time I’m sure it doesn’t feel like a relief, either. It probably just feels pretty crappy.
As journalists we have to strike this balance: to believe the work of journalism is meaningful and can be impactful, while not deluding ourselves into believing that we are, by our presence and our work, “helping.”
If you want to know more about the origins of crisis in South Sudan, and the US’s particular role in making and unmaking the world’s newest nation, this piece is one of the best out there (and I’m not just biased because it’s by my exceptionally talented husband). Our friend Jason Patinkin has also been covering the country tirelessly for years. You can read some of his coverage here, here and here.
My project on access to reproductive health care in conflict and crisis is ongoing, with my talented reporting partner, exceptional photographer, and darling friend Nichole Sobecki, as well as with support from New America, the European Journalism Centre, and the IWMF (it takes a village). A few photos by Nichole, published via National Geographic and Nicki herself on Instagram, are below — it’s just a small bit of what is to come.
Photo by @nicholesobecki | Riohacha, Colombia
It’s been seven years since Silvana Hinestroza Mendoza first spoke publicly about being raped by members of a guerrilla group who kidnapped and tortured her when she was a young woman. More than 15,000 Colombian women and girls were raped or otherwise sexually abused during the country’s civil war; many remain too terrified or ashamed to tell anyone. After spending most of a hot Wednesday afternoon with a reporter recounting some of the most intimate details of the worst days of her life, Silvana retreated to her grandson’s bedroom. Finally speaking the truth about what happened, Silvana said, feels good, even powerful – like a layer of shame peeled back with each telling. But each telling also means exposing painful scars, literal and metaphorical. I photographed Silvana at that axis of strength and depletion, as she sought out the grounding weight of her grandson’s small body, and offered him the soft foundation of her own. These are questions everywhere: whose stories we choose to believe, what weight we give a woman’s words against a man’s, whether women have exclusive jurisdiction over our own bodies. It is simultaneously dignifying and terrifying for women to tell the secrets more-powerful men demand we keep, and it’s never felt so important to listen, to believe, and to acknowledge the personal courage and integrity of the women who share their stories with us. “I feel light,” Silvana said after our interview ended. “Like I was carrying something really heavy and I put it down.”
Photo by @nicholesobecki | San Pedro Sula, Honduras
There may be no medical procedure in the world that is at once as controversial, as legally regulated, and as common as abortion. Abortion bans are making headlines in the United States, but laws that outlaw and even criminalize the procedure aren't some dystopian future problem. For millions of women and girls, they are reality. Worldwide, a quarter of pregnancies end in abortion every year; nearly half of these abortions are unsafe, with most unsafe abortions occurring in countries where the procedure is outlawed or tightly restricted.
I’ve spent the last year trying to understand the true cost of denying women this right with my dear friend and brilliant writer @jillfilipovic. Here, a family sleeps at the bus terminal in San Pedro Sula before beginning the journey to the US alongside hundreds of other Hondurans. Honduras has one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world, and sexual violence is endemic. Both rape and emergency contraception, though, are banned, including for rape survivors and minor girls. We traveled to Honduras last month on a grant from @theIWMF to assess the impact of these bans on women, on violence, and on migration.
A fuller story is coming soon, but what we found, in the words of one women's rights activist, is that when it comes to violence, reproductive freedom, and migration, "everything is connected." Laws that turn women who end pregnancies into criminals lead to laws that bar women and girls, including rape victims, from preventing unwanted pregnancies. Bans on abortion and contraception stem from the same root as rape and other gendered violations: An insidious and pervasive conviction that women's bodies are not their own. "A mom will do anything for her children," that women's rights advocate told us. And so to protect themselves, and their daughters, Honduran women run.
I’ll be back to regular newsletter-ing soon.
xx Jill