Wordless

In the last two months, I've travelled to three post-conflict countries. It sounds cold and meaningless, "post-conflict". What I mean is three countries that are known in Ireland (if they're known at all) as shorthand for horrific violence and brutality. Rwanda, Burundi and Sierra Leone. Countries where, in the very recent past, reports were of ordinary people hacked to death with machetes, women systematically and repeatedly raped and gang raped, children abducted and drugged to serve as soldiers, to commit the same acts of unthinkable brutality. There is something mythical about the horrors that are recorded: of individuals forced to identify their own family members, their own partners for slaughter, or else be slaughtered themselves. Places I read about less than ten years ago as the most medieval versions of hell, an ecstasy of suffering.

You'd never know to visit them. I had such a lovely time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone: they are so beautiful, people so welcoming; it was so hard to imagine what I had read about in books. I see so little, I understand so little.

I spoke to a colleague about this, she said the same was true in Somalia. "The thing is, you look around, and everything seems normal. People are in the market, they're laughing, they're arguing about the price of oranges, and you think it's normal. And you have to keep reminding yourself that nothing is normal at all."

In Sierra Leone and Rwanda, I met with so many people, and I tried not to stare at their visible scars. I am a lousy reporter, because I can't dream of asking people about their experience during the war: I have no right to. After years of doing this work, so that now I'm introduced in meetings as the "expert" (on governance, or democracy, or monitoring and evaluation), I still have no idea how to fathom collective trauma. I chatted to groups of people about their work, about local government and national policies, and it was nice, interesting, relaxed. Momentarily in a meeting, I would indulge my own imagination, wondering what my interlocutors had suffered, who they had lost, what they had seen. Then I would blink. The same dusty office, the same posters, the same conversations as I have everywhere else in Africa.

When I came home, some of my friends asked me if I would blog about my experiences. But there's so much about the countries I have visited that I don't understand, so little that I saw and could report back fairly. I look through the window of a 4x4, and I'm looking through the lens of countless newspaper articles, tv documentaries, prejudices and assumptions. I simply cannot fathom what life is like, even for the middle class colleagues that I visit in some traumatised countries.

One of the reasons I want to take up blogging again is because I like writing about my work travel. But on this occasion, certainly in Sierra Leone, my trips have left me lost for words.