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…