THE howls of a man echo down a gloomy green military hospital corridor. A nurse rushes past me with bloodied scissors. I follow the red drops on the floor and the screaming gets louder.
“Mama! Mama!”
As I look through the door, the window is open and I’m blinded by the bright light.
My eyes refocus. A man my father’s age is crying and clinging to a bedpost. His leg looks like it has been mauled by a shark.
Doctors scrub his festering yellow foot with a wet cloth. A surgical mask hides my open mouth. The translator faints. You can taste the blood in the air. Salty.
Like the lobster and prawns on a bed of avocados served for dinner by the poolside in the Republic of Congo.
The shattered hotel windows are the only clue that four days earlier an ammunition depot exploded 5km away.
Mikhael’s Hotel is running at maximum capacity. Brazzaville’s only five-starish hotel is packed with journalists, bomb disposal experts, search-and-rescue teams, humanitarians, four South African sniffer dogs and local prostitutes in see-through stilettos.
Twelve hours before I was at Joburg Fashion Week. My job was to report on women strutting down the catwalk on long legs.
Now I’m jumping from a plane in the heat of Congo-Brazzaville on my way to meet women who have lost their legs.
Within two minutes of arriving at the epicentre of the blast zone, Jacko, one of the sniffer dogs, scratches at a pile of corrugated iron and rubble.
The stench of the dead stings the nostrils. The flies race the dog to what could be a deep freezer of decaying food.
Or body number 251.
I have always wanted to be a foreign correspondent. I have read books by journalists who cover wars, and quizzed anyone I encountered who reported from the front lines.
They speak of coming home with a bloody camera and a muddy conscience. Of how the images stay in your mind long after the disaster.
One of their best, war photographer James Nachtwey, says battle zones strip humanity bare to its core – the horror and the beauty.
But nothing prepares me for Congo-Brazzaville.
With every building pancaked within a 5km radius, decaying bodies and lives torn apart, I still can’t force out a tear.
It just feels like walking through the set of a big-budget apocalyptic Hollywood flick.
A dead body, or 250, don’t scream.
Brazzaville resembles a tsunami without the water. But this was no natural disaster, it was man-made.
Why was there a munitions depot in the centre of a residential area?
Because of decades of civil war, arms had to be close at hand.
A row of crumbling tanks in the distance; great picture, I think.
Biting my notepad and clutching my camera I slide under the barbed wire and flaccid red tape cordoning off the area.
Congolese soldiers shout for me to turn back. “ Parlez-vous anglais?(Do you speak English?)” I ask, but I don’t stop.
The rockets, AK-47s and unexploded bombs that pave the way increase in frequency.
I’m now walking tip-toed.
This was a really bad idea, I think about halfway to the tanks. But it’s not far enough to turn back.
Risk is a cheap fix for me. It makes me feel alive. I’ve always enjoyed flirting with the line of safety.
I have been lucky. So far I haven’t had to “pay the price”. So far.
I take the picture and manage to get back behind the red tape safely.
“We don’t even send our sniffer dogs out there,” says one of the rescue team members.
“No picture is worth losing your legs for.”
It’s not until I see limbless people that I begin to understand what he is talking about.
I understand it in the military hospital.
As I walk down a bleak corridor the cries beckon louder.
And louder.
“Kill me, doctor. Kill me now,” screams a woman in French as a doctor cuts away the green gangrened flesh from her open kneecaps.
Five nurses hold her down by the shoulders.
I don’t know whether to run to the international doctors down the hallway who have anaesthetics and painkillers and tell them of the horror or to stay and witness.
So I hide behind my camera and watch through the viewfinder. Every time I look at it straight on I vomit and swallow.
On the morning of our departure I take a taxi to the camps, which now house more than 30 000 displaced people.
Things have deteriorated significantly since my first visit four days ago.
Buzzing flies and babies crying are the residual soundtrack.
The path I once knew is a murky river. Children brush their teeth in it, and women wash dishes.
It looks like there has been recent rainfall, but the sky hasn’t shed a tear all week. It’s sewage.
Doctors say the boiling pot of filth, garnished with overcrowding, is a recipe for cholera.
Thousands more will die.
As we board the plane home my lens is bloody and my boots muddy.
But I feel a bigger story is still coming.
This is just the beginning.