Eastern Congo - the trail of tears

Goma is a pit, a lava pit. There is one road that goes through town, full of holes (the joke goes, when asked which side of the road Congolese drive on they say "the one with the least amount of potholes"), on which hundreds of cars, mostly aid workers, choke their way back and forth all day long. Everything is black and grey because of the lava. The volcano, only a few kilometers away, last erupted in 2002, destroying 60% of the city, an ironic act of God in an area that has been war-torn for 20 years. People are using the stones to build walls and make bricks, which is why everything is so dark. The setting, however, is incredible, being on the edge of Lake Kivu.

I am supposed to be looking at what the health situation is like, and what is being done for women and children, including those who are victims of sexual violence, which unfortunately is a very big problem in the region right now. Hundreds of women and children are sexually assaulted very month (UNFPA documented over 250 girls under 9 raped in 2007) and those are the ones that have dared come forward and managed to find help. Up to now the majority of cases have reportedly been perpetrated by "men in uniform" (rebel army soldiers, Congolese army soldiers, police, and even some UN "peacekeepers"). Originally, rebel forces were using this as a way to de-stabilize families. Women are the main workers in the family. By attacking, and raping women, often in front of their husbands and children, they were attacking the fabric of society. The sexual violence results in a) the woman being traumatized and stigmatized, b) the husband and children being traumatized, c) the woman sometimes becoming pregnant (although if they make it to a clinic with emergency kits, they can get the "morning after pill" and an HIV prophylaxis), d) the woman getting a sexually transmitted infection (50-70% of the victims seen in clinics are infected), including HIV, e) the woman sometimes being brutalized by the soldiers resulting in f) fistulas and complications during subsequent deliveries. Unfortuately, the sexual violence is now being committed by civilian men as well (although there is uncertainty about whether or not they are demilitarized soldiers).

Women have a terrible situation in Congo anyway. They are treated like property by their hubands, as beasts of burden, do all the work int he fields, and bear on average 7 children in their lifetime. In all of my meetings (maybe 30) I met with only 2 women in positions of power. And now this. I don't envy Congolese women at all. As one older Congolese woman said to us "La femme congolaise fait tout dans la famille. Elle travail dans les champs, elle porte l'eau, elle prepare le manger, et quand elle se couche, il ya a le monsieur qui vient la deranger!"

Congo!

I have been in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) for 10 days now but have not had the energy, or internet connection, to write about it. There is so much to assimilate that it takes all my energy just to attend meetings and figure out what is going on. The size of Western Europe, its enormity is beyond comprehension; a sub-continent (but with only about 70 million people, although there hasn’t been a census for over 20 years so they are not really sure), it’s hard to believe it is one country.

I am on a mission with the Swedish International Development Agency (equivalent of USAID) to assess the health sector in this country in order to make recommendations about how Sweden should/could help. The health needs are overwhelming. Each of the 11 provinces has its own culture, language (250 spoken here), norms, geographic peculiarities, economic base, and problems, as they would if they were 11 countries.

Although it possesses some of the greatest natural resources in the world (including coltan, used in cell phones), it is one of the poorest. One major problem that seems to be making everything else worse is the lack of roads and modes of transportation. There used to be roads all over the country but Mobuto let them fall to pieces in order to prevent his enemies from getting to Kinshasa (one should not forget here that Mobuto was put into power by the U.S. and Europe who had the first president of the republic overthrown and then supplied Mobuto with hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons). The lack of roads and transport makes everything - education, trade, forestry, security, and health care- hundreds of times harder (although I wonder if this might be why HIV – “only” at 4.1% - might also be lower than one would think given the high level of other sexually transmitted infections). The only safe way to get around (there are commercial planes but they are notoriously the most unsafe in the world) is by missionary plane or with the UN plane, which is how I got out here to Goma, on the border with Rwanda, the epicenter of Africa’s “first world war” (involving 7 nations) and the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world today…