There is a mat on the floor of the classroom where the boys were raped. The girls were raped in the classroom next door. The boys who were raped are the lucky ones. The other boys were simply killed with machetes.

Some of the girls had their genitals cut. Some of the boys had their genitals cut off.

This is war.

There was no pattern to the rapes and the cutting. It was random. Nevertheless, the purpose was to terrorize the village which is exactly what the soldiers did.

I hesitate to call them soldiers. These are militias. They all follow orders from above.

For the past two years, governments have felt free to rape the people they see as the enemy. How children in school became the enemy is anyone’s guess.

The children in this school were not the enemy.

The enemy feared the most is called education and literacy. I have never been able to write this or show the photographs. I feel like I am exploiting the children who were raped and disemboweled.

I am not the fucking point.

There are always haters who will go to some extremes to try and make me the point.

It’s not about me.

It’s not about the proverbial hater.

It’s about the children who survived. It’s about the relationship between war, disease, rape, and genocide.

I can’t tell you where this place is although I am sorely tempted. These people know me. And I know for a fact that there are college students in the States who are not students. The blood that runs from the machete can run six thousand miles. There is no such thing anymore as six or fifteen thousand miles. Everything and everything is next door.

My fervent wish is that I could erase all of this from my brain. My brain is the last camera in the room. I wish I could get away without knowing what I know. I know this: I will not return to Africa because I know I could not resist the addiction of going back to the village where the children were taken prisoner, turned into porters, raped, and had their school reduced to now what is rubble and weeds.

They used to play soccer in the courtyard.

These children were no different from any other children including yours and mine.

There is an element to photojournalism were we get to pretend we are there for someone else.

We are there for us. Stop asking me why. I do not know why. You will have to live with the Answer: I DO NOT KNOW.

DO I LOOK LIKE THE SHELL ANSWER MAN TO YOU.

Americans always feel they have the right to know anything they want to know. We have no idea how privileged we really are.

I am tired of hearing Americans whine about how difficult their lives are. You don’t know difficult. Get the fuck over yourselves.

YOU are MY enemy.

Because you are indifferent.

These military machines that can and do wipe out entire villages are using HIV as a weapon of war, and the boys who were raped in this particular place will be victimized all over again when they begin to exhibit symptoms that HIV brings on like a train wreck.

Rape is an infectious disease. Once men feel like they can get away with rape, they will rape anyone they want with impunity.

Almost everyone in this village was complicit.

After the attack by a militia, every man in this village felt free to rape the female teachers who worked in the school.

One of these women is so traumatized that she is only able to sit at the side of the road where she now lives and where she rocks. Back and forth. Back and forth. She has begged the villagers to kill her, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does.

It is dangerous to send your children to school.

People do talk among themselves about their village being attacked.

This is code for the women who were raped.

Only a couple of the women will talk about the boys.

The boys who had their cocks and balls cut off are dead. You cannot interview the dead. They do not sit for portraits.

This is not a village where they take selfies.

In fact, HIV is a very real problem here. You will not believe this, and I might not have either, but the medical infrastructure here has run out of antiretrovirals, and there is no one in the entire country who knows how to reinstitute what was always thin ice to skate on anyway. The whole country is falling through the ice, and no one can save these people.

I have been waiting for this to happen – I said it would happen over and over and over again – and it did. The people who were lucky enough to get antiretrovirals will slowly fall back into disease mode.

You can, however, take photographs of corpses.

There is not an editor in America who will publish them. Editors are afraid of writers, but they are really afraid of photographers.

One kid pulled his shorts down so he could show me what they did to him. I am rarely shocked. But I had to look away.

There are always ditches to vomit in.

I will not go back.

I have seen enough and whether you believe it or not, is more than a little irrelevant.

I used to feel comforted when telling myself this was worth it because my cameras were bearing witness.

This is the kind of bullshit we use to justify our behavior.

Bearing witness is shit. It takes no risks. It is uninvolved. It is a disingenuous concept.

Not unlike the shit and the cum stains and the leaves and the dried blood on a mattress in a village school that the people who built the school refuse to go anywhere near, and who can blame them.

Rape as a weapon of war is motherfucking effective. There are no antiretrovirals to be had. Time will be playing a life and death game of chicken for the boys who survived.

They were meant to survive.

So they would spread the word. That it is hopeless to fight back.

You will never go to an African village in the middle of a war, and you will never walk around with a notepad or a camera.

You will never see the school that was decimated.

You will never see any of these boys when they die from compromised immunity.

It is the school that bears witness to the rape of women and children in a war that knows no end.