what Alice found there

After the Rape, I left the Compound and finished my time in Africa living in a nearby town with some American missionaries that I knew there. I never went back to the compound and I don't know what happened to Isaac or if any of the Church Administration listened to my amended version of events. I was ashamed of what happened, still am, and left out the part about the actual rape.

In the town, being able to speak English all the time, working at a real orphanage, and having the freedom to go where I choose and use public transport; life was vastly different. I had friends, I had kids surrounding me all the time, I even had access to a library (up to this point I had been reading the same two Bridget Jones books over and over again). I went white water rafting on the Nile river, tasted African Beer, and met some amazing people from all different parts of the world.

This town was sort of a missionary town. There were churches and orphanages and lots of ministries in town and so many people coming to Africa to do humanitarian type work ended up there.

For the rest of my time there, I forgot what had happened. Just sort of blanked it out. Even when I got back to the states and I told my pastor and my community service supervisor about it, I told them the amended version. I began to believe in it, myself. And then, with school and work and everything, I just forgot about it again.

I know, it doesn't seem right that you can just forget about something like that. But you can. Its called a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. Your brain knows that you can't deal with it emotionally, so it shuts that memory down. It hides it until you are ready to deal with it. I probably would have repressed the memory for most of my life if I hadn't had so many stress factors to deal with when I got back.

My college was so proud of me. They had me giving talks about Africa right and left. I had to write reflection papers and give interviews, all the time trying to hide the darker side of the experience.

See, when I first got back and tried to tell my pastor about all the corruption and devastation in the country and the church, he didn't want to hear it. He wanted to hear about all the good I'd done and what the church's money accomplished. I tried to caution him about our involvement as a church; to be more careful of who exactly we gave our money to and what specifically it was for. He went himself a month or so later and came back feeling so assured about the Leader and the projects of the Church, it felt to me as if he was calling me a liar; not believing anything I had said. I knew no one would listen to me if I started talking about the bad stuff anymore. I stopped going to Church after that.

Then, there was my community service organization. My supervisor had decided to leave and find a job elsewhere. It wasn't a parting on the best of circumstances and I had this wild idea that by not telling her anything I was protecting her. I didn't want her to feel guilty about leaving.

Our acting supervisor was a senior student and a friend of mine. It seemed like things would work out even with all the changes going on. Then, I began to have trouble managing all the stress I was under. 18 hours of classes, plus a huge workload for my Community Service projects. I had this big event that I was supposed to be planning for a "drug free" Halloween thing and then the senior wanted me to be wing man on this big new project of his. The problem was he wanted me to do all the legwork and my partner in the Halloween thing wasn't helping me out like she should have been. I got really frustrated with it all and wrote a blog on myspace and facebook to vent.

The shit hit the fan after that. Even though my blogs were set so that only my friends who I trusted could read them, some one told the senior about it. In the blog I called him an asshole, which was apparently unacceptable. The girls who read the blog and decided to spill it to him, also decided then that I was a bitch and deserved to be punished for what I had written. They spread rumors and lies and even printed off all of my blogs for the Senior to use. In the end, my job was threatened and my reputation in the organization was ruined. It took me until the Senior actually pulled out the printed off blogs in front of our Dean to realize that I had trusted the wrong people. Up 'till then I still considered the ones that did it to be my close friends. My projects fell apart and so did my faith in people. I got really paranoid about what I said and who I told what to. I quit the program out of anger and embarrassment over the fiasco.

While all that was going on, I was dating like crazy and sleeping around. I had gotten on birth control and gotten tested to make sure I didn't have any STDs. But, something inside me just had to be touched and to be loved, I guess, although that didn't happen. The touching did, but not the love or the caring. I let people set me up, would get drunk and sleep with whoever was convenient. I had two "serious" boyfriends too. Neither one was very nice to me, but I felt like I didn't deserve anything better. As much as I wanted to feel connection to something again, I still felt like I didn't deserve it.

My life got so messed up after the blog thing. I felt worthless and useless and betrayed yet again. I started having nightmares and not sleeping unless I was drunk or just too tired to do anything else. I stopped going to class. Eventually, my roommate and the people I drank with were the only people that saw me on a daily basis. Even failing class didn't bring me out of it all, and class was something that I had once had great pride in. Straight A student, brilliant mind, great writer. That was gone.

I thought it was the place. The people. Those things that had betrayed me. So I decided to move closer to home and transfer schools. It was November now. Nearing the end of the semester. It would be easy to switch everything between semesters. However, I made what I considered at the time one horrible mistake.

I got drunk one night and slept with a close friend of mine. Instead of doing the one-night-stand thing I had been doing, we starting hanging out. While I didn't like the gossip going around about me, I still really wanted that connection. I wanted to feel alive instead of like I was dead all the time. He was such a nice guy and I took advantage of that. But more than anything, he made me feel safe again. So I told him.

I cried and cried the second time we had sex. I was sober and it scared me, having sex with this person without the dulling of alcohol. When he asked me what was wrong, I finally told someone the truth. I told him about Isaac, about being raped. And he held me. That's all he did, was hold me and tell me it was going to be all right.

But I was leaving. I had already made plans and was going back home in two weeks. So I tried to cut myself off from him. I gave up being held and packed my stuff and that December, I left. I thought going back, being around my family and friends and familiar places, would help me deal. I could somehow just put what had happened behind me.

Most of the time, I've learned, things don't ever work out how we plan them to.