During the worst of the dying in Rwanda an ABC crew interviewed on Nightline tried to convey the experience of being there. They spoke with a depth of introspective anguish journalists almost never permit themselves in public.
“There’s no escaping the decay, there’s no escaping the death,” explained producer Rick Wilkinson, who said he’d seen things that made him “personally insane.” Possibly because he felt Koppel had questioned his professionalism, his reply rambled. But it concluded, “I guess we’re just not as tough as we think we are.”
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Here Wooten uttered heresy. “Well, I think there’s a difference between what they’re doing and what we’re doing. We spend our long days here doing what we came here to do, but it doesn’t help much. It doesn’t help these kids that we–that we see and that we find, and it doesn’t help the old people who are dying by the side of the road. It just doesn’t help. It just doesn’t help. We don’t do anything to help. These aid workers are all day long doing what they can, one person at a time, trying to save a life at that moment, the person they’re touching.”
“I think the most touching and devastating deliveries from Goma were the orphans. They had lost their parents en route, they’d gotten separated from them in Goma, and they were simply following the hordes that were returning. They didn’t even know what they were doing or why they were following them. They were just in a line.”
“Yeah, they came and went. You had to be reasonably nice because it was good for AmeriCares, but there just wasn’t the time.” The journalists came by jeep, and we asked if they ever took anyone with them to Kigali.
“Only in the sense that they’re not involved in the real killing or the real action. They’re there after the fact, picking up the spoils. And that’s how I felt on the scene. Now I know having a free press is a real important thing. I don’t want to say–”
(Wooten continued, “‘I can’t go back [to Rwanda],’ she says, and turns back up the road toward her family, bearing the water that will eventually kill them all.”)
