Diary of an International Development Worker

Trouble in Kinshasa the last few days, with fighting between President Kabila's troops and the former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba who lost to him in the presidential elections last year. Probably always on the cards, since Bemba's been smarting from his loss and Kabila wanted him to 'down-size' his private army which protects him. BBC reports today around 150 deaths counted so far, including civilians, from the fighting which started on Thursday and involved rifle-fire and mortars (see accompanying photos, c. AFP; there were even mortar shells raining down on the capital of Congo Brazzaville, just across the river Congo from Kinshasa and damage caused to the town hall there.

 

Real tragedy and just goes to show that you can never take anything for granted here, including peace and stability; at least here in South Kivu things are calm, although we have had a new brigade of 'integrated' troops (comprising former rebel soldiers and military troops) stationed here recently to ensure the peace. The handful of existing Mai Mai rebels are supposed to group together and leave for the provincial capital Bukavu and be 'brasseed' (integrated) within the national army following a period of training, but they are proving suprisingly stubborn to leave, or rather their leader, Colonel A. is. Will be a big change from being the 'big shots' (pardon pun!) in the area once they form part of a regular army and are treated like regular troops.

 

So my team here is anxiously awaiting the arrival of the General of 10th Military Region based in Bukavu for discussions with Clnl. A. which will hopefully result in his brigades departure, which could happen anytime this side of Christmas, although the General was supposed to have arrived here last week.

 

On a coincidental note, today is the 200th bicentenniel anniversary of the passing of the Abolition of Slave Trade Act in the British parliament, which started the process of bringing to an end the slavery of millions of Africans by the colonial powers, including Britain. Perhaps it was slavery that put the 'Great' into Great Britain, but there's no doubt that the slave trade and the resulting economic boom generated by this trade certainly paid for a lot of economic development there.

 

For more interesting background information to slavery, click on the following link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/abolition/

 

Well here we are, New Years Day in Congo and I'm sitting typing this in the office in the field base with Vaughn Williams 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis' playing on my lap-top to remind me of home. I spent Christmas here accompanied by a few  expat and inpat colleagues whilst most of the local staff were celebrating during their annual holidays – our organisation has a policy that all field bases be manned at all times, so we alI decided to stay and oversee the base during the holiday period.

 

A skeleton staff of locals has been working here on the base, mostly the guards as well as the cooks, and during this quiet period of the year we have carried out the annual stock take of all our items in the various depots scattered around the base - medicines and medical equipment, engineering items (gutters, pipes, tools, cement), fuel, vehicle parts etc. It took over four days, with the help of the local depot manager, financial assistant and expat heads of departments, and it's a relief that it's finally over. Now I just have to look forward to the annual donor reports, which I'll start on tomorrow.

 

Christmas was quiet here in the field, and we did our best to enjoy ourselves despite being in the bush miles from 'civilisation'. Ben, our community development officer from Jersey had bought some coloured tinsel, a Father Christmas hat and furry reindeer antlers when he was recently in Kampala on R&R to liven things up a bit, and we certainly created a stir when we wore the decorative headgear on our base the other day.

 

On Christmas day itself I popped into the local Catholic church in the morning for the Christmas service, which was conducted in Swahili, so obviously I understood very little. It was interesting being there though and seeing how enthusiastically the locals participated, singing animatedly and swaying in the pews in time to the loud drum beats – they were practically dancing down the main aisle when we queued for the money offering and I wondered how such a service would go down back home in the UK.

 

Afterwards along with my expat and inpat colleagues, we visited the local hospital in town and handed-out sweets and biscuits to the children in the TFC (therapeutic feeding centre) and paediatric ward. Some of the children in the TFC were severely malnourished, so I guess that feeding them biscuits might not be the recommended thing to do; however, it was a festive gesture on our part which I hope went down well with them. Some of the children were so ill though that it looked as though they really weren’t bothered one way or the other, including one little girl who had been brought in with severe anaemia, and a 2-day old baby with suspected tetanus. Serge, our local staff member, has been looking after the TFC in the absence of our team nutritionist (spending Christmas and New Year in Goma with his family) and distributing the UNICEF rations for the children – hopefully they will make a recovery, but malnutrition is pretty prevalent in the area, and the only TFC is here in our town. We have a plan to set-up ‘mini-TFCs’ in the health centres all around the area in the New Year, equipped with UNICEF feed rations specially formulated for malnourished children – we’ll see how feasible this will be in practice.

 

You wouldn't really know it was Christmas here in our town last week as it was pretty quiet in the town itself, and on the base we had a delicious Christmas lunch of BBQd pork marinaded in a special mixture of honey, soya sauce, crushed garlic and local chillies, accompanied with a nice bottle of red wine, Cotes du Rhone, especially flown in from Goma at our request.

 

Yesterday to celebrate New Years Eve we again had a BBQ lunch, with chicken marinated instead of pork, however it didn’t really come off since the chicken was a bit rubbery. And in the evening we sat around chatting in the lounge by candle-light, discussing the highs (and lows) of the year gone by, whilst outside a strong storm ravaged, the rain lashing against the veranda and punctuated by sudden flashes of lightning, which had forced us indoors to the relative dryness of the lounge in the main house in the first place.

 

It was a shame that the bad weather put an untimely end to celebrations here in town: throughout the day and especially in the evening the local people had been chanting and singing to celebrate the New Year. However, this morning we awoke to the singing again and the throbbing of drums as the locals moved around town proclaiming the New Year to all and sundry.

 

Our new midwife Lysan (Congolese recruited from Goma to replace the Angolan mid-wife who finished her contract at the beginning of December) informed us that her highlight of the year was the holding of democratic elections and her hope was that peace and stability would return to the DRC.

 

I’d written in a previous blog of the first round of elections held at the end of July; the result was a large vote in favour of the presidential incumbent Joseph Kabila, with 45% of the vote, whilst his main rival, Jean Pierre Bemba, had polled only 20% of the vote. This meant that a second round of elections would be held to decide the victor, and this was duly held at the end of October. Despite the considerable logistical difficulties which presented themselves to holding elections in this war-torn country, and despite fighting between rival supporters of the two candidates in the capital Kinshasa which led to several deaths, the second round passed off reasonably quietly in the rest of the country all things considered.

 

To all intents and purposes it looked as if Kabila had won – he certainly had won the votes in the east of the country, his power-base, although Mr. Bemba had won the vote in the capital. Despite claims of vote-rigging by both sides (which were subsequently found to be true by independent voting observers, although to a much lesser extent than had originally been claimed), Kabila was adjudged to have won the second round by the margin of 16% (he gained 58.05% of the vote compared to Bemba’s 41.95%). Of course Bemba and his supporters contested the result in the official court, and so some time elapsed whilst the court considered his appeal before eventually dismissing it; Joseph Kabila was subsequently declared President in November, and he was officially sworn-in on Wednesday 6^th December, a day which was declared a national holiday.

 

Last Saturday Kabila appointed the Prime Minister, who just happened to be none other than Mr. Gizenga, who came third in the first round of presidential elections in July. It’s clear that some sort of deal was agreed between the two men since Gizenga officially supported Kabila during the second round of elections. Anyway, now the dust has settled on the elections everyone has high expectations that peace and stability will return to the country.

 

Here on our base we too sincerely hope that this will be the case and that the on-going fighting in the east of the country will subsequently come to a halt so that ordinary Congolese can start afresh. The new president has the mandate from the people who have voted in the first ever democratic elections held to make a huge difference to their lives, it just remains to be seen whether he will have the courage and motivation to push forward the many reforms that are necessary for peace to return to this troubled country.

 

Hopefully the year 2007 will finally see an end to the bloodshed that has dominated Congo’s recent history and the turning of a new page in its history.

 

 

It’s difficult to really put into words what life is like here without actually being here to appreciate first-hand the terrain, the climate, the people or the general working environment, but I’ll try……

 

First the work – there’s a lot to do where we are, in South Kivu, stuck out miles in the Congolese jungle. In our area of operation, with a population of approximately 135,000 inhabitants, we have four main axes or access routes, to the east, west, south, with our base located fairly centrally. It was originally chosen since there was a (disused) airfield nearby (later rehabilitated by us) and also because the main reference hospital, BCZ (Bureau Central de Zone) is located in the village. The BCZ is the principal local partner with whom we work, since the Primary Healthcare Programme (PHC) is the main focus of our activities here. A protocol (or convention) has been drawn-up with clauses relating to tasks and responsibilities which both partners agree to carry out.

 

Secondly, the logistics side of things is quite a challenge here. Our principal port of entry / exit is the airstrip in which we fly into on small planes, along with the cargo. EVERYTHING is flown in – food supplies for us (including meat, vegetables, eggs, crates of drinks all sourced in the provincial capital Goma); medical supplies for the health centres that we support here (including medicines, mattresses, blankets, UNICEF milk powder for malnourished infants, boxes of condoms); all engineering and water sanitation equipment (bags of cement, 1,000 litre plastic water tanks, tubes and piping); communications equipment (satellite telephones, satellite dish, PCs, printers etc.); even the transport that we use here (motorbikes, quad bikes, bicycles and, incredibly, the landcruiser – shipped in two parts and then re-assembled on the air-field and driven back to the base) has all had to come by air.

 

It’s quite an administrative nightmare each week trying to get the PAOs (Purchase Acquisition Orders) sent up from the field to the logistics department in Goma, who then have to source the equipment there, buy it, store it at the country office depot before filling up the plane and sending it down to us the following week.

 

There are regular weekly flights from the provincial capital to our field-base, with two different air companies. They can load up 2 tonnes and 1 tonne respectively (including passengers), and they usually arrive at the airstrip on alternate Wednesdays. The airstrip incidentally was rehabilitated by our organisation: originally part of the jungle, it was miraculously cleared of vegetation, flattened, compacted, drained and covered with sand and pebbles along its few hundred metres length. It is, as I say, the main port of entry and exit for us (and escape route in the case of emergency evacuation), but has also had an important additional impact on the local community, as small commercial planes coming from Bukavu use it too (Bukavu is the other main provincial city on the south side of Lake Kivu). This has opened up all sorts of commercial possibilities for the local population, and apart from bringing-in much needed supplies, also serves as a conduit for ‘exporting’ mineral resources (in particular, cassiterite), which are mined locally and which provide an important source of revenue for the villagers. I will talk more about this mineral as well as other mineral resources (including ‘conflict diamonds’), in future blogs.

I was at the local hospital recently, walking around the TFC (therapeutic feeding centre or nutritional centre), where malnourished children are taken in and cared for. They usually follow a prescribed dietary regime and are fed in order to rebuild their strength. Phase 1 is really acute malnutrition and they are fed UNICEF milk powder (special concentrate C-75 for those affected by ‘kwashiorkor’ or protein deficiency) for up to a week if necessary, according to how their condition progresses. They then pass to another ward in the hospital (phase 2), and they are given UNICEF milk powder C-100 to help fortify them, over a period of 20 days to a month, depending on the severity of the initial state of malnutrition. Interestingly, they’ll actually start to lose weight when they’re put on the initial milk powder (which I confirmed on looking at some weight charts), as opposed to gaining weight which you might expect; however, this weight loss is due principally to the re-absorption of fluid (oedema) which has built up in their bodies during the period when they have been underfed.

 

This chronic malnutrition is, unfortunately, rather common here, and there are always cases coming in. Last month there were 37 new admissions at the TFC, which added with the 25 existing patients made a total of 62 cases. Of these, 33 were treated and left the centre. How long they stay depends on the severity of their malnutrition, but I saw one child who was extremely thin, disturbingly reminiscent of the photos of Ethiopian babies that were seen during the ‘80s famines. Chronic cases of malnutrition exist here in the jungle because the diet is very monotonous and not very nutritionally rich, consisting mostly of carbohydrate and little in the way of protein or minerals; fufu (made from cassava powder), and some boiled vegetables (cassava leaves) constitutes the basic diet for most of the local population. Protein in the form of milk or eggs is pretty much non-existent, and as for meat, chicken is probably the most likely source: beef or pork is pretty scarce, and even though there are cattle that occasionally come up the road, probably too expensive to buy. As for chicken, not everyone has them: you see the occasional chicken scavenging by the side of the paths, but they are not raised in a suitable manner and are prone to dying easily. There are rivers that criss-cross the area, and people do go fishing; perhaps there are not enough fish to feed a whole family though, and the fish that I have seen caught and brought up to town are quite small; they are of the Tilapia variety, and in fact one of the activities in our Food Security programme involves the introduction of fish-farming to the local communities.

 

We offer a dietary ‘package’ for the affected children at the end of the course of treatment to help them continue with progress in recovery: they receive a month’s supply of oil, corn-soya mixture and sugar, which is made up into a specifically calculated ration according to WFP (World Food Programme) requirements. This is given to their mothers and signed off on registers. The mothers are also given packets of vegetable seeds (aubergine, tomato, cabbage, onion, spinach) and taught how to grow these vegetables by our resident local Food Security technician, Miss Gillette. She is very dynamic and speaks to them in their local language, showing them how to sow seeds in the vegetable plot attached to the hospital; the idea is to help the mothers improve their families’ diet on a long-term basis. We will supervise the families to see if what success they have with growing the vegetables in their villages.

 

Here in Goma exciting happenings the other night, my first night here on R&R after spending five very busy weeks in the field – I was woken up at 3 am by the security guards at the base because of a volcano alert! There is a volcano just outside town, the Nyiragongo volcano, which erupted in January 2002. It was following the eruption that the humanitarian organisation that I work for decided to start a programme to help the victims here in Goma; at the end of the Goma programme, it commenced work in the south-eastern province of Katanga in July 2002, and in South-Kivu (where I am based) in May 2004.

 

Today the volcano is still simmering, although is quiet enough and there were no signs of impending activity. It is actually the nearest thing there is to a ‘tourist attraction’ in this neck of the woods, and quite a few expatriates have climbed it and camped overnight on the rim, overlooking the bubbling lava. I have yet to do the trip, but I will one of these days, when I can persuade a couple of colleagues to accompany me that is.

 

Anyway, I was woken up by the guards at 3 am, calling out something just outside my bedroom door. I was cross enough at being woken at this unseemly hour, but when they mentioned ‘volcan’ and ‘eruption’ I became suddenly wide-awake, hurriedly threw on my clothes and rushed outside. The air was muggy, smokey, and there was a strange smell in the air, which I later assumed to be sulphur. There was also the sound of human voices babbling away in the distance, quite unusual at that hour of the morning. Occasionally the babbling would rise to a crescendo and then die down again to a quieter level, but it was there all the time in the background.

 

I tried to make sense of the guards and driver’s claims about the volcano, and they were talking of an impending eruption, which had been provoked by the glow of fire coming from the general direction of the volcano, and also the smoke and odour hanging in the air. People had been collecting their belongings and passing by outside, and there was also a lot of movement of vehicles passing outside the base gate.

 

The guards had contacted their bosses and were remaining on stand-by; however, in light of all the commotion, they had decided to wake me, just in case. I asked if the Country Director had been woken, and they said that they had not called him. They were loathe to wake him up, also because he is recently arrived in DRC, so they lacked that confidence. Also he doesn’t speak any French and the guards were worried about the language barrier and communication. In the end they persuaded me to call him on his mobile, and I explained the story. It was just as well that I did call him, as coincidentally at the very moment that I called, the security guard at the base where he was living had been tapping on his bedroom window and trying to explain, in French, the general situation about the volcano. I was able to explain what I had heard my end of town, and he confirmed that he could hear the general babble of voices nearby.

 

He contacted the other humanitarian agencies and the UN based in town for further information, and I remained on stand-by. When it became obvious that, in fact, the volcano was not going to blow immediately, I went back to bed, not a little shaken by all the fuss.

 

The following day I was requested by the CD to attend the weekly Heads of Mission meeting (of all the humanitarian associations based in Goma), given in French, and to obtain feed-back on the previous night’s activities. It was the guy from the UN OCHA office (Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affaires), who gave the explanation for last night’s general commotion.

 

Apparently the whole thing started when a woman living near the airport (at the far end of town, in the general direction of the volcano) raised a fuss about vampires ‘stealing her blood’; apparently this is a recent phenomenon that has been occurring in the province for the past two months, starting up in Beni in the north and coming down, affecting each city on the way, until finally arriving at Goma. Locals have been claiming that there are vampires or spirits that are taking their blood, and this has resulted in a lot of mass hysteria, especially at night-time when the supposed vampires come out. People light fires to ward off the vampires, which apparently don’t like light; would that things stayed like that. However, things have evolved on a different level, since there have been accusations of people being vampires, resulting in violence and, incredibly, their deaths. To date, about fifteen people have been killed, about twelve were killed in one town alone, for their supposed connection with the evil spirits.

 

To us Westerners living outside, the whole thing seems incredible, that people should take so seriously such ideas that they would be capable of lynching suspected ‘witches’ and killing them in an orgy of mass violence, without so much as even a judicial trial. But then again, we also have our own superstitions – rituals are carried out on mid-summers night day in certain spots back home (Stonehenge, Edinburgh); we also ‘celebrate’ (if that’s the right word), the coming-out of spirits at the annual Halloween parties; and we certainly take an interest in witchcraft and sorcery in our popular entertainment – witness how popular Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films have been. So it’s easy to scoff, but here sorcery and all things mystic take on an even greater significance and may push the locals to believe things that they wouldn’t normally believe and commit acts that they wouldn’t normally do. It seems quite easy for people here to get whipped-up into a wave of mass hysteria and panic, especially with the general tension that exists in the zone, exacerbated by the presence of militia rebels in surrounding areas, and the fact that the presidential elections have just taken place.

 

Anyway, this woman’s declarations were the cue for much movement of people in the streets and lighting of fires (including old tyres) to ward off the vampires – and people further downtown had mistaken the smoke and fires for signs of volcano activity! The smell of burning tyres – sulphur is produced from volcanoes – and the general smoke in the air had also contributed to this general perception. At least no violence was reported last night, and hopefully things will pass quietly now that it’s obvious that the volcano isn’t on the verge of erupting. We shall see…….

 

One of the base drivers later confided in me that it was all just political, that the accusations and provoked mass hysteria were an excuse to get rid of certain people who were political opponents of certain candidates in the recent elections. This may be true too, but whatever the facts of the case, one thing is for certain: sorcery, witchcraft and stories of evil spirits are still very much alive and present in this part of the world. Good-night and pleasant dreams!

 

Today is a historic day in DRC – the holding of Presidential and parliamentary elections, the first democratic elections held in the country for 45 years. There are 33 candidates for the presidency, including the current incumbent, Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent Kabila, previously president as well and who led the rebellion which ousted the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

 

Apparently the whole exercise will be a contest between two major candidates, Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba, former warlord. There is a lot of rivalry among the candidates, which is shared by their supporters, leading inevitably to a build-up in tensions generally. This is further augmented by incidents such as that seen during campaigning last week in Kinshasa, when a couple of people were killed in clashes between Mr. Bemba’s supporters and the police force.

 

The elections should have been held last year in June, but were delayed because of failures to register all the voters; the registration process itself was only completed last December, and the elections were programmed for the 30^th June this year, date of the anniversary of Independence from Belgium in 1960. Again, the elections were postponed for a month later, and finally, to everyone’s great excitement, and a lot of trepidation too I’m sure, the day has arrived.

 

There are just over twenty-five million registered voters in the country, and the whole operation has been supported by the United Nations Mission (MONUC), with its contingent of 17,000 soldiers at a cost of $1 billion (incidentally, the largest ‘peace-keeping’ operation in the world). The EU also sent in its own forces recently, thought to number around 1,700 soldiers, who are mostly based in the capital Kinshasa. The MONUC forces, mostly based in the east of the country, are there to ensure general security and to keep the peace, although they regularly engage in clashes with militia and rebels based in the jungle areas.

 

There are also lots of international observers present to witness the whole process, although it remains to be seen how effectively they will be deployed, to cover such a huge country: DRC is as big as Western Europe, and there are huge logistical difficulties to overcome in reaching the towns and villages located far out in the bush.

 

The village where we have a field base for which I am responsible for managing, is far out in the bush; there are no decent roads to get here, only tracks through the forest, which are not wide enough for cars or lorries to pass along, only motorbikes. There are numerous rivers to cross, for which our programme has constructed bridges with the help of the local communities. Even so, it would possibly take up to a fortnight’s march to get down to Bukavu, provincial capital for South Kivu. My team of expats and I are flown in from Goma, provincial capital of North Kivu, on small chartered planes, which take about 45 minutes to cover 200 kms (approximately 125 miles). I mention all this just to give an idea of the logistical problems for the observers as they try to cover the territory, and it will be interesting to see how they manage to cover the whole election procedure.

 

 

Campaigning only officially started over a fortnight ago in the grandes villes, and permeated even to countryside level: parliamentary candidates arrived in our village, their arrival heralded with much singing and chanting by the locals. To be honest though, it seems that local people don’t really know much about the candidates, judging from informal conversations with members of my local staff, and as for the whole voting procedure (which will take place in the local school), it remains to be seen how the local population will be able to vote effectively when illiteracy is still very widespread here.

 

Here everyone is treating the whole elections as a huge festival really – first time the vast majority of the population have ever had to vote in their lives, and so cause for celebration. I personally find it hard to get optimistic about the whole process, cynical as I am about the whole thing and about elections on the continent generally, stemming from my Togo experience I guess. I should try and be more engaged but just can’t get excited about it.

 

There is a strong possibility of violence breaking-out during the elections, or even during the declaration of the results, and if things do get hot here it will most likely be in the capital Kinshasa or Goma; if it gets very serious, our country office based in Goma may eventually have to be evacuated – in which case we in the field would almost certainly follow suit, even though things seem generally fine out here.

 

As team Security Focal Point, I’ve had to go through security procedures with the expatriate team, as to what to take with us if we do need to evacuate (including passports and other documents, emergency money, satellite phones, emergency phone number list, equipment including lap-tops and printers, money boxes, communications gear etc.). Quite a responsibility – and in the event of a plane not being able to come in to our airstrip because of insecurity, we may even have to call up a MONUC helicopter to pick-us up from the local football field, which also doubles as a helipad.

 

We are currently on ‘stand-fast’ on our base, i.e. no leaving the base whatsoever, as of lunch-time yesterday, until Tuesday morning – a basic precautionary measure, of course, but one which all 7 of us expats here have to adhere to. Hopefully we won’t get ‘cabin fever’ from our temporary enforced ‘imprisonment’, and we’ve tried to alleviate any possible boredom by playing badminton on our grass court, and by watching DVDs on our lap-tops.

 

One thing’s for sure, interesting times ahead, lots of trepidation, not just for the results, but for the outcome afterwards. The international community is also following the whole procedure with a keen interest. Funny how previously Congo was considered as a strategic player in the whole ‘cold war’ era, with the communists and the allies positioning themselves over the country; now, in the 21^st century, the EU, US and the West generally are still very interested in the geo-political balance of power in the region, but it seems largely concerned with the huge amount of mineral wealth found in the country (more of which in a forthcoming blog).

 

We’ll see what happens after the elections and I’ll let you know.