isa traverso-burger

After I saw this, I had to write something… anything.

It’s the toughest thing I’ve read in my life. But we can’t close our eyes.

My aim is to denounce rape. I am 52 years old. I have nine children. We are suffering a lot even if they say we have peace. We do not. I will tell you what happened. I was selling beer in the market. We met some Interhamwe. They stopped us. They were talking Kinyarawnda. There were 12 of us. They said. “Today you will see. Today you will have other husbands.” They told us to lie down. They started beating us with sticks. They all started raping us. They took us into the forests. They beat us more. They raped us again. They walked us again to another camp until one in the morning. Then they tied us to trees. They tied us so tight. There were six women then and two husbands. They raped us in front of them. All the misery of the world was in our heads. We woke up so hungry. They said we had to wait for guests. New sex slaves. They came with a pregnant woman. They told me to cut her open with a knife. I couldn’t do it. My hands were trembling. They opened the belly of the woman and threw the baby on the ground. The woman died. Then they chopped up the baby and cooked it. Everyone peed on it with urine and put feces in it. Then they said we had to eat it. They bought bananas. They made us eat it. They said. “You fucking Congolese. You are eating your own sisters.” Then the husband of the woman who had been pregnant came looking for his wife. They took him to show where his wife gave birth. He gave them his small dollars. Then another soldier came and hit him and then they killed him. They kept us for two months. They said now soon you are going to die. Oh God, we said. They said, we don’t know God. In the morning we heard Congolese soldiers. They screamed for us to lie on the ground. There was lots of shooting. Then they told us to stand and we went to Panzi hospital. We were treated. We were not HIV. After a few days at home, the Interhamwe came again. They killed my uncle, my son, the wife of my brother. I could hear them cutting their heads.

Claudine,
your story makes me weap,
you are alive
it’s a miracle I know,
but how do you
continue to live,
after what you’ve been through?
Oh Claudine,
You changed my life,
You went through hell,
You’re living in despair
And it won’t stop,
Until the massacre
Ceases to exist.
Until the rapes,
The mutilations
And deaths
Become the past.
How will it end?
Will it end?
It is possible to change,
But when?
It’s already too late,
Those lives will not come back.
Those women are forever marked,
With the scar of abuse,
With the tattoo of
The beatings.
Oh Claudine,
You made us see,
That the world is not
The life with live.
That reality is harsh
And cruel and vicious
Where you live.
And it’s the Earth,
We share the same home,
And we complain about our jobs,
Our daily chores.
At least we have all that,
When all you have is faith
On a tomorrow that will
Bring a sun to shine your way,
On a future filled with justice,
A future where peace prevails.
You are a hero,
You are a survivor,
And I love you.

I feel your pain,
I’m here for you Claudine,
I want to be your friend.

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This is not plagiarizing…. This is me doing you a favor; I wrote down my favorite quotes from one of the most enlightening books I’ve read: THE NEW EARTH – By Eckhard Tolle.
I warn you: It’s deep stuff, -life changing- deep stuff. ENJOY IT and SPREAD IT!

Driven by greed, ignorant of their connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that, if continued unchecked, can only result in their own destruction.

I didn’t realize yet that thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.

The ultimate truth of who you are is not I Am This or I Am That, but I Am.

Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

A long-standing resentment is called a grievance…a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes-distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking.

All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them.

When you don’t play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do…you are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it…you are the most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don’t try to be yourself. That’s another role.

Don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem.

Cleverness divides, intelligence includes.

The ego doesn’t know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now.

Peace, after all, is the end of the ego.

To create suffering without recognizing it –this is the essence of unconscious living; this is totally in the grip of the ego.

It comes as no surprise that those people who work without ego are extraordinarily successful at what they do. Anybody who is one with what he or she does is building the new earth.

Many people are truly their own worst enemy.

Alienation means you don’t feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get ‘home’ but never feel at home.

An emotion that does harm to the body also infects the people you come into contact with and indirectly, through a process of chain reaction, countless others you never meet.
There is not good without bad, no high without low.

Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind’s identification with external factors, which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment.

Because of the human tendency to perpetuate old emotion, almost everyone carries in his or her energy field an accumulation of old emotional pain, which I call ‘the pain-body’.

Some couples who may think they have fallen in love are actually feeling drawn to each other because their respective pain-bodies complement each other.

There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet; human unconsciousness.

When you can’t stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to awaken.

Someone with a heavy pain-body easily finds reasons for being upset, angry, hurt, sad, or fearful.

Pain-body and ego are close relatives.

Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment.

Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in being, instead of lost in your mind.

Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for abundance…The fact is: whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.

Knowing yourself is being yourself, and being yourself is ceasing to identify with content.

Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space.

Most people are so distracted by their thoughts, so identified with the voices in their heads, they can no longer feel the aliveness with them.

Some changes may look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.

Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny.

Stress always diminishes both the quality and effectiveness of what you do under its influence.

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