The one thing you're never prepared for every time you come back to Eastern Congo is how beautiful it is.
At night the fishermen row home across Lake Kivu singing in Swahili, lanterns waving from the bows that arch across the top of their canoes.
Even when you wind up through the hills, driving past Congolese army camps and watching for any signs that the militias are on the move, you still get distracted by the sugar cane sellers and the drooping red bell flowers growing wild by the roadside.
It's only when you look closer that you start to notice the abandoned huts and half burned sheds hidden among the trees.
It's kind of an analogy for the conflict itself. It seems to be hidden in plain sight from the eyes of the world.
Every time I tell people I'm visiting the Democratic Republic of Congo, they tell me "how awful".
But they also sound puzzled. It's almost like we've been hearing about this for so long that we've all kind of presumed that must mean that something is being done.
The tragedy is that we haven't heard the half of it.
When the United Nations released a report stating it believed that over the last year 15,000 women had been raped in the eastern region of Congo, the consensus in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, was that there were many thousands more.
Dr. Denis Mukwegi, the founder of the unit treating victims of sexual unit at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, said there are many more women in hard to reach areas who are going without treatment and help.
Panzi has set up mobile clinics to try to get to these women in remote communities but as long as the violence continues to block roads and isolate communities, there will be many more women here, just out of reach and beyond protection.
Panzi receives outside funding from non-governmental organizations and the United Nations Children's Fund but it is fundamentally a Congolese run initiative and that's another thing about Congo that you are unprepared for; in the midst of the most extreme horror and cruelty Congolese are trying to help themselves and each other.
Trauma centers have been set up in both North and South Kivu by local communities and there are also local organizations working to reunite and rehabilitate abandoned children and child soldiers.
CNN
