1/23/2005
Colombo, Sri Lanka
One of the saddest sights (certainly not the saddest) around Batticaloa is the plethora of thinning, wounded, sad-looking dogs and cats. Some of these animals, especially the dogs, patiently, futilely mope around the ruined foundations of destroyed houses, sniffing at the half-buried saris and shoes. Others wait outside restaurants and snack shops for discarded scraps of food. Some of these were clearly well-loved pets, and others little more than strays, but their presence around the town emphasizes the sadness and death. There was a little cat at the hotel I was staying in. She was an adorable calico, starved and begging. She looked like a little fallen princess, bright collar and all, once loved and comfortable, now begging for her dinner. There was also a rather unlikely pair that wandered the streets together, a cute tan dog with a limp and a marmalade cat. They went everywhere together, and sometimes you would even find them sleeping all curled up with one another. It made me really sad.
Sadness is really under the surface everywhere in this country right now. I know that I keep saying that it isn’t as bad as it seemed, but that’s not to say that this still isn’t a horrible, historic tragedy from which it will take a long time to recover. I left Batticaloa yesterday morning, and along the road to Colombo, white and black mourning flags flew quietly. White flags are a symbol of mourning for Buddhists, and black flags for Christians. Even far from the coasts, the flags were stuck in rice paddies, affixed to street lamp poles, hanging from windows. In such a small country, everyone was touched with grief from this disaster.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Monday, January 17, 2005
1/17/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
We went to yet another coordination meeting this morning, this one for non-food item household kits at the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) office. This one was better than the last one, because people were talking about how they are already doing things, and what they were going to do this week. Most organizations had done assessments to find out what items were needed, and apparently the local government is gathering the names and information on all the beneficiaries. That is a bit of a different set up than what we had in the Congo. In the Congo, you would never have been able to rely on the local leadership to give you an accurate list of beneficiaries, because there are all kinds of personal relationships that come into play. They would leave off the list their political adversaries and people they didn’t like, and make up fake people so that people they do like could get multiple kits. Here, the government for the most part is working well with the relief effort, which is great.
One of the best things about working here is that it is safe, so you can move around freely. I found a great place for taking walks that starts right in front of the hotel. It takes you up by the estuary, next to a pretty neighborhood (that wasn’t affected), across a causeway, down one of the main roads of town, and then back across the bridge to the hotel. There are fishermen out in the estuary in the traditional style of boat that is like a canoe with a rectangular piece of wood on one side (not sure why, but I think it has something to do with hanging the nets). They look so peaceful out there. Supposedly, singing fish live in the estuary, and they are loudest from April to September. They say that the fishermen know they are there because when it is quiet, you can hear the humming. I haven’t heard the humming, since it isn’t very quiet along the road, but I like to believe that they are in there singing. In the air along the road, there is the pleasant salty-windy smell of the sea. It is nice, even when there is traffic.
So, as I said, it is safe here. Crime is a rare occurrence. That’s why we were all surprised when a freelance photojournalist told us that all her gear, except the cameras she had with her at the time, was stolen from her hotel room, most likely by someone who works there. She lost her laptop, external hard drive, and camera chargers, as well as all the photos she had taken here and in Indonesia for two assignments. None of it was insured, and the police were no help at all. It is easy to say, “well, the person who stole it is probably poor and desperate, and while this is a set back for her, it isn’t the end of her life.” However, anyone who has a job at a hotel, especially here and now, is not hurting, and meanwhile they may have ruined her reputation with the two magazines, because they aren’t going to get the best quality photos from her. We were all shocked. Thankfully, it wasn’t at the hotel I’m staying at, but you never know I guess.
One of the random responsibilities that has just been assigned to me is “staff care”. Not sure yet how serious this is, but I think that I’d like to do that kind of thing. Today I went out and bought stuff for the house, and I will be spending the rest of the week shopping! Not so bad, really, but admittedly I’m a bit annoyed. I didn’t get a master’s degree to go shopping.
1/20/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
Three days have gone by, and, needless to say, much has changed. The Jesuits and I have finally finished their proposal for their project that we are funding, which was hard won. They do exciting work, and are very good at it, but it was hard to wring this proposal out of them because they are very fluid, and kept changing their ideas. Finally we banged it out, but not after a short moment of tension, when it looked like they were about to start some activities that would have short-circuited the coordination that was going on in the shelter group.
I’ll be headed back to Colombo this weekend, which I’m glad about. I’m very homesick, and could use more frequent access to the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, Batticaloa is a nice town and the people are great. It is just that I’m tired of the work, and am ready to go home. I’m not really needed here that badly (as one can tell by my recent shopping assignment). Colombo isn’t bad, so I’ll enjoy some time there, maybe take a day trip to Kandy to see the Temple of the Tooth, and then I’m out of here on the 8th of February, or earlier if I can make that happen. The boss told me that I’d be doing some writing and orienting two new staff members (frankly, I’m not sure why the need any more staff here), but I can’t imagine that taking up too much of my time, certainly not two whole weeks. Besides, he is likely to change his mind yet again.
The little daughters of my fiancé’s boss gave me three of their dolls to give to children here. It was so sweet that they were so concerned about other kids so far away. Those dolls were with me in my backpack for days. I had the hardest time figuring out what to do with them. If I went over to the camp across the street and picked three children out at random, I would have been the pied piper, with kids following me forever asking for dolls. I didn’t find an opportunity to give them to kids who were on their own anywhere, since that is rare here. Nevertheless, I really wanted to give the dolls away, to help the girls make the connection they wanted to make. Yesterday, I gave them to the Jesuit in charge of the relief programs here, so he could take them to the orphanage and give them to the kids there. Then the dolls were in his bag. We went together to a coordination meeting for the education sector, and the whole time I was hard pressed not to laugh, since all three of the dolls had their heads poking out of his bag next to the table, as if they, too, were attending the meeting.
I just finished some shopping. I know I complained about being assigned so low a task, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it. I love talking to the shopkeepers, and seeing all the interesting things they have. Here, the relationship between the storeowner and the client is very friendly, even when they are trying to make you pay more than the normal price! Instead of being able to browse through everything, you just tell them what you want, and the employees run around showing you everything that they have that might suit you. In some places, you can even sit down and have tea while this happens! I wish that I could shop, or be shopped for, like this in the US.
In addition to the things I got for the Caritas house here, such as towels and sheets and pillows, I also bought some beautiful ribbon and a sarong. The 1.5” wide silk sari border ribbon with embroidery all along it that I bought cost me only $2.00 for 10 meters. A roll of ½” satin ribbon was only 50 cents! Traditional Sri Lankan men, especially outside of Colombo and the cities, wear sarongs. These are pieces of fabric sewn into a tube and hemmed that they gather and tuck around their waists. A lot of men in Batticaloa wear them. I guess it must be more comfortable for them, and cooler. Most are in relatively understated patterns, like simple solids, stripes, and plaids in blue, white, dark green, and black. Some of the fancier ones have border ribbon sewn onto the bottom. I bought a plain green one in a nice fabric for my fiancé – I figured he could wear it around the house, since a man in a skirt would look a bit funny in the States.
The stores sell all kinds of things. The fabric store, for example, sells not only fabric, but also some clothing, pillows, sheets, towels, beading, ribbon, etc. The place where I got the knives and silverware sells yarn, ribbon, toys, Hindu idols, Buddha statuettes, knickknacks galore, pots and pans, and big brass stands that you put candles and flowers on for the prayer room in your house. It can be a little confusing at first, but when you realize that you don’t have to look through it all to find what you want because someone else will do that for you, it becomes a surprisingly pleasant experience. Unlike most shopping experiences, the price is also a pleasure, because things are so cheap here.
I’m wondering if any of you who read this are disappointed because I’m not talking more about the disaster and the people. I’m sorry that I can’t give you more about that, but it just isn’t what I’m seeing. I think that is one of the parts of humanitarian work that many people don’t understand. As outsiders, we don’t really get all the way out to the beneficiaries that often. Usually, the local organizations we support do that end of the work. Sometimes we get to go to see building sites for the shelter, oversee emergency distributions, or talk to the local leaders, but those visits are shallow and short. This is especially true in a country like Sri Lanka, which has a lot of local capacity to carry out projects. Plus, my time here is short and focused on administrative issues. Those who are here longer get a better picture of things, and also have more time to work in the beneficiary communities. So, I apologize if all this isn’t terribly interesting, but it is what it is.
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
We went to yet another coordination meeting this morning, this one for non-food item household kits at the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) office. This one was better than the last one, because people were talking about how they are already doing things, and what they were going to do this week. Most organizations had done assessments to find out what items were needed, and apparently the local government is gathering the names and information on all the beneficiaries. That is a bit of a different set up than what we had in the Congo. In the Congo, you would never have been able to rely on the local leadership to give you an accurate list of beneficiaries, because there are all kinds of personal relationships that come into play. They would leave off the list their political adversaries and people they didn’t like, and make up fake people so that people they do like could get multiple kits. Here, the government for the most part is working well with the relief effort, which is great.
One of the best things about working here is that it is safe, so you can move around freely. I found a great place for taking walks that starts right in front of the hotel. It takes you up by the estuary, next to a pretty neighborhood (that wasn’t affected), across a causeway, down one of the main roads of town, and then back across the bridge to the hotel. There are fishermen out in the estuary in the traditional style of boat that is like a canoe with a rectangular piece of wood on one side (not sure why, but I think it has something to do with hanging the nets). They look so peaceful out there. Supposedly, singing fish live in the estuary, and they are loudest from April to September. They say that the fishermen know they are there because when it is quiet, you can hear the humming. I haven’t heard the humming, since it isn’t very quiet along the road, but I like to believe that they are in there singing. In the air along the road, there is the pleasant salty-windy smell of the sea. It is nice, even when there is traffic.
So, as I said, it is safe here. Crime is a rare occurrence. That’s why we were all surprised when a freelance photojournalist told us that all her gear, except the cameras she had with her at the time, was stolen from her hotel room, most likely by someone who works there. She lost her laptop, external hard drive, and camera chargers, as well as all the photos she had taken here and in Indonesia for two assignments. None of it was insured, and the police were no help at all. It is easy to say, “well, the person who stole it is probably poor and desperate, and while this is a set back for her, it isn’t the end of her life.” However, anyone who has a job at a hotel, especially here and now, is not hurting, and meanwhile they may have ruined her reputation with the two magazines, because they aren’t going to get the best quality photos from her. We were all shocked. Thankfully, it wasn’t at the hotel I’m staying at, but you never know I guess.
One of the random responsibilities that has just been assigned to me is “staff care”. Not sure yet how serious this is, but I think that I’d like to do that kind of thing. Today I went out and bought stuff for the house, and I will be spending the rest of the week shopping! Not so bad, really, but admittedly I’m a bit annoyed. I didn’t get a master’s degree to go shopping.
1/20/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
Three days have gone by, and, needless to say, much has changed. The Jesuits and I have finally finished their proposal for their project that we are funding, which was hard won. They do exciting work, and are very good at it, but it was hard to wring this proposal out of them because they are very fluid, and kept changing their ideas. Finally we banged it out, but not after a short moment of tension, when it looked like they were about to start some activities that would have short-circuited the coordination that was going on in the shelter group.
I’ll be headed back to Colombo this weekend, which I’m glad about. I’m very homesick, and could use more frequent access to the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, Batticaloa is a nice town and the people are great. It is just that I’m tired of the work, and am ready to go home. I’m not really needed here that badly (as one can tell by my recent shopping assignment). Colombo isn’t bad, so I’ll enjoy some time there, maybe take a day trip to Kandy to see the Temple of the Tooth, and then I’m out of here on the 8th of February, or earlier if I can make that happen. The boss told me that I’d be doing some writing and orienting two new staff members (frankly, I’m not sure why the need any more staff here), but I can’t imagine that taking up too much of my time, certainly not two whole weeks. Besides, he is likely to change his mind yet again.
The little daughters of my fiancé’s boss gave me three of their dolls to give to children here. It was so sweet that they were so concerned about other kids so far away. Those dolls were with me in my backpack for days. I had the hardest time figuring out what to do with them. If I went over to the camp across the street and picked three children out at random, I would have been the pied piper, with kids following me forever asking for dolls. I didn’t find an opportunity to give them to kids who were on their own anywhere, since that is rare here. Nevertheless, I really wanted to give the dolls away, to help the girls make the connection they wanted to make. Yesterday, I gave them to the Jesuit in charge of the relief programs here, so he could take them to the orphanage and give them to the kids there. Then the dolls were in his bag. We went together to a coordination meeting for the education sector, and the whole time I was hard pressed not to laugh, since all three of the dolls had their heads poking out of his bag next to the table, as if they, too, were attending the meeting.
I just finished some shopping. I know I complained about being assigned so low a task, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it. I love talking to the shopkeepers, and seeing all the interesting things they have. Here, the relationship between the storeowner and the client is very friendly, even when they are trying to make you pay more than the normal price! Instead of being able to browse through everything, you just tell them what you want, and the employees run around showing you everything that they have that might suit you. In some places, you can even sit down and have tea while this happens! I wish that I could shop, or be shopped for, like this in the US.
In addition to the things I got for the Caritas house here, such as towels and sheets and pillows, I also bought some beautiful ribbon and a sarong. The 1.5” wide silk sari border ribbon with embroidery all along it that I bought cost me only $2.00 for 10 meters. A roll of ½” satin ribbon was only 50 cents! Traditional Sri Lankan men, especially outside of Colombo and the cities, wear sarongs. These are pieces of fabric sewn into a tube and hemmed that they gather and tuck around their waists. A lot of men in Batticaloa wear them. I guess it must be more comfortable for them, and cooler. Most are in relatively understated patterns, like simple solids, stripes, and plaids in blue, white, dark green, and black. Some of the fancier ones have border ribbon sewn onto the bottom. I bought a plain green one in a nice fabric for my fiancé – I figured he could wear it around the house, since a man in a skirt would look a bit funny in the States.
The stores sell all kinds of things. The fabric store, for example, sells not only fabric, but also some clothing, pillows, sheets, towels, beading, ribbon, etc. The place where I got the knives and silverware sells yarn, ribbon, toys, Hindu idols, Buddha statuettes, knickknacks galore, pots and pans, and big brass stands that you put candles and flowers on for the prayer room in your house. It can be a little confusing at first, but when you realize that you don’t have to look through it all to find what you want because someone else will do that for you, it becomes a surprisingly pleasant experience. Unlike most shopping experiences, the price is also a pleasure, because things are so cheap here.
I’m wondering if any of you who read this are disappointed because I’m not talking more about the disaster and the people. I’m sorry that I can’t give you more about that, but it just isn’t what I’m seeing. I think that is one of the parts of humanitarian work that many people don’t understand. As outsiders, we don’t really get all the way out to the beneficiaries that often. Usually, the local organizations we support do that end of the work. Sometimes we get to go to see building sites for the shelter, oversee emergency distributions, or talk to the local leaders, but those visits are shallow and short. This is especially true in a country like Sri Lanka, which has a lot of local capacity to carry out projects. Plus, my time here is short and focused on administrative issues. Those who are here longer get a better picture of things, and also have more time to work in the beneficiary communities. So, I apologize if all this isn’t terribly interesting, but it is what it is.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
1/13/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
I finally arrived in Colombo too early Monday morning after a horrid series of flights from Baltimore. In addition to the innumerable delays, I had a long layover in Bangkok. I had expected this layover to be a chance to get a shower and some rest, and maybe do some shopping, but that was not to be. There were no day rooms to be had, so I ended up in a rather dim guesthouse taking a shower in a shared bathroom and trying to keep myself awake all day by eating, doing email, and getting a rather nice Thai massage. I had forgotten how bad Bangkok smells, or maybe it had just gotten worse since the last time I was there.
So, exhausted and jet lagged and dirty, I dropped into Colombo, Sri Lanka at 1 something in the morning on Monday, and got to the hotel and a bed at about 3:30am. Some of the staff, including myself, were put up at the Taj Samudra hotel, which is nice and, if one were there on vacation, very well located. I spent most of Monday in our makeshift office in the library of our local partner, Caritas Sri Lanka/SEDEC.
One of the odd things about the non-profit industry is that it is competitive, with agencies competing not only for the money of private donors, but also for the recognition from public donors. To this end, representation in the media is rather important, and CRS doesn’t do too much of it. The CRS philosophy in the field is that the partners should get the credit for the work, since they do most of it, and we only give them the resources and the support to do it. However, CRS also should bet some of the credit, and to that end, headquarters sent me over with a load of navy-blue T-shirts with CRS in white on front and back. When I got them to the office, no one really wanted to wear them, and we decided that we would don them dutifully for the CBS news guys who were going to film us bustling about the “office” that day, but not in the field. That way, CRS would get some airtime, but when it really counted, the partner would be front and center. I’m not sure which side of the fence I stand on regarding this issue. CRS does do a lot of the work to make a project happen, and I see no reason that we shouldn’t get credit for that. More than one agency can share the applause at a job well done, no? So why can’t the partner and CRS both get the credit? But then on the other hand, people may assume that CRS really did all the work and just let the partner do some symbolic parts, when really there was hard work on both sides. CRS can pay for publicity, but local partners need to get theirs, well deserved, as cheaply as possible without being overshadowed by a bigger sister.
Anyway, Colombo seems to be a nice enough and livable city. There are many historic sites, and it is open and on the sea and has some pretty spots, despite the oversized confetti of colorful signs posted everywhere and anywhere. The shopping appears to be great here – you can get authentic brand name clothing for very cheap in stores in Colombo because the clothes are made in factories on the island. Not to mention that the national arts and crafts are interesting and well developed.
I didn’t get to stay in Colombo long, though. CRS originally sent me out here to write proposals to get more money from the US government for our programs. However, it turns out that the effort here is flush with cash, and is having a hard time programming what it already has. One of my coworkers here said it well, “none of the important things are expensive”. Psychosocial trauma counseling doesn’t cost a lot to implement. Nor do many of the other things that CRS is doing here and is good at. So, I was “repurposed”, and sent to the field with a mandate to help set up the office in Kalamunai in Ampara district.
1/16/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
The drive across the country was an absolute pleasure. Sri Lanka is beautiful and interesting, with some really nice historic places and good hotels. I highly recommend a trip here – it would not only help with the national recovery from the disaster, but would also be fun and interesting. We spend the night in Habarana, in huge hotel called the Village. It was great, but empty. We were some of the five or so people there, and the bored staff hovered around us, waiting on us hand and foot. The rooms were clean and comfortable, and the place is really well kept.
After arriving at Batticaloa, I was again redeployed, this time to stay in the town and work with one of the partners, Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS), which was going to implement some trauma counseling and other types of activities with CRS funds. Batticaloa is a town of some size, with stores and churches and mosques and temples all over the place. I like it. Sri Lankans are very friendly people, even the police and the military, and so it is easy to get along with everyone.
On Thursday, Cardinal McCarrick from Washington, DC and Ken Hackett, the president of CRS visited Batti. We drove out en masse, a junket of priests and nuns and aid workers, to one of the areas that was hit by the wave. It was stunningly awful. Whole blocks of what were once middle-class (for Sri Lanka) homes were decimated. Chunks of painted brick, broken tiles, and piles of debris wound up with saris and other clothing are everywhere. There are still some houses standing or half-standing, and you can see that the neighborhood, called Dutch Bar, was once almost prosperous. We drove past St. Ignatius School – or at least where the school once was. It is now a blank sand flat.
While the dignitaries were show the barely-damaged church by the slightly over-zealous parish priest, I wandered off to look at the real damage. I have to admit that I was struck at first by the thought that these people weren’t really poor, so they weren’t that badly off, but then I felt guilty for feeling that way, because it doesn’t really matter who you are, if you lose your house and family, you are poor and alone and sad. Looking at a half-destroyed house, the exposed interior walls bright yellow and still decorated with a small painting of a Hindu god, I saw a shoe in the debris. Shoes show up in photos of all disasters, probably because they are so evocative and so symbolic; in a way, this makes the shoe image a bit trite. However, at that moment, I was overwhelmed with an involuntary imagining of a family in the yellow room doing what families do and suddenly the water hits the house and screams in the windows and rushes down on them. They shout and drop everything and run to the door but even the traitorous house comes crashing down on them as the malicious furniture blocks their escape. It was too much, and I lost it. I cried and cried, a lame, useless, too-little-too-late crying.
Yes, the situation here is terrible. Worse than anything I’ve ever seen. Yet it is true that there is too much money, too many aid agencies, and too little work. What needs to be done is construction and reconstruction, but Tower-of-Babel meetings of logo-wearing foreigners from all over the world discuss with local bureaucrats the fate of the people currently languishing in the “welfare” camps. These stupid meetings go on and on, discussing semantics, specifics, methodologies, and sensitivities. Meanwhile, those who lost their homes live in tents or on the floors of schools; they live with relatives in crowded houses and wait for someone to tell them where to go. Some people want to go back to their old places, but most don’t want to be anywhere they can even hear the sea. Some go down each day to clean their home sites, spending their whole day there but returning to the camps at night, even if their homes are standing. I don’t think anyone but the journalists has asked them what they want – we are all talking about theories: keeping neighbors together, 150 square meters for a family of five, the finer points of tin roofs. How noble and how completely useless. I know that these things take time, but we really should be coordinating with the actual survivors. It only makes sense.
Perhaps I am a bit too jaded. It does take a long time to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that agencies aren’t duplicating effort and that everyone is being served by someone. It is necessary to get the buy in from local bureaucrats. But more than anything else, we need to consider the people we are doing this for, and what their needs and hopes are.
JRS, the partner I’m working with, is a pretty good organization that works with refugees in many countries around the world, particularly in education. They have been working here with people displaced by the civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers in the north and east of the country. With this emergency, JRS is working with their previous beneficiaries in the displaced camps as well as the people who have taken refuge from the tsunami in the schools and churches of the Jesuits. The priest in charge in Batticaloa for JRS is the regional director of the agency from Dehli, Fr. Amal. Fr. Amal is definitely a dedicated, humble, energetic visionary, but the man cannot think rationally or practically to save his soul. He has us so confused we literally have no idea what he wants to do at any given moment. Working with him to get a formal agreement on what we are going to pay for so his organization can do their activities is maddening.
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
I finally arrived in Colombo too early Monday morning after a horrid series of flights from Baltimore. In addition to the innumerable delays, I had a long layover in Bangkok. I had expected this layover to be a chance to get a shower and some rest, and maybe do some shopping, but that was not to be. There were no day rooms to be had, so I ended up in a rather dim guesthouse taking a shower in a shared bathroom and trying to keep myself awake all day by eating, doing email, and getting a rather nice Thai massage. I had forgotten how bad Bangkok smells, or maybe it had just gotten worse since the last time I was there.
So, exhausted and jet lagged and dirty, I dropped into Colombo, Sri Lanka at 1 something in the morning on Monday, and got to the hotel and a bed at about 3:30am. Some of the staff, including myself, were put up at the Taj Samudra hotel, which is nice and, if one were there on vacation, very well located. I spent most of Monday in our makeshift office in the library of our local partner, Caritas Sri Lanka/SEDEC.
One of the odd things about the non-profit industry is that it is competitive, with agencies competing not only for the money of private donors, but also for the recognition from public donors. To this end, representation in the media is rather important, and CRS doesn’t do too much of it. The CRS philosophy in the field is that the partners should get the credit for the work, since they do most of it, and we only give them the resources and the support to do it. However, CRS also should bet some of the credit, and to that end, headquarters sent me over with a load of navy-blue T-shirts with CRS in white on front and back. When I got them to the office, no one really wanted to wear them, and we decided that we would don them dutifully for the CBS news guys who were going to film us bustling about the “office” that day, but not in the field. That way, CRS would get some airtime, but when it really counted, the partner would be front and center. I’m not sure which side of the fence I stand on regarding this issue. CRS does do a lot of the work to make a project happen, and I see no reason that we shouldn’t get credit for that. More than one agency can share the applause at a job well done, no? So why can’t the partner and CRS both get the credit? But then on the other hand, people may assume that CRS really did all the work and just let the partner do some symbolic parts, when really there was hard work on both sides. CRS can pay for publicity, but local partners need to get theirs, well deserved, as cheaply as possible without being overshadowed by a bigger sister.
Anyway, Colombo seems to be a nice enough and livable city. There are many historic sites, and it is open and on the sea and has some pretty spots, despite the oversized confetti of colorful signs posted everywhere and anywhere. The shopping appears to be great here – you can get authentic brand name clothing for very cheap in stores in Colombo because the clothes are made in factories on the island. Not to mention that the national arts and crafts are interesting and well developed.
I didn’t get to stay in Colombo long, though. CRS originally sent me out here to write proposals to get more money from the US government for our programs. However, it turns out that the effort here is flush with cash, and is having a hard time programming what it already has. One of my coworkers here said it well, “none of the important things are expensive”. Psychosocial trauma counseling doesn’t cost a lot to implement. Nor do many of the other things that CRS is doing here and is good at. So, I was “repurposed”, and sent to the field with a mandate to help set up the office in Kalamunai in Ampara district.
1/16/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
The drive across the country was an absolute pleasure. Sri Lanka is beautiful and interesting, with some really nice historic places and good hotels. I highly recommend a trip here – it would not only help with the national recovery from the disaster, but would also be fun and interesting. We spend the night in Habarana, in huge hotel called the Village. It was great, but empty. We were some of the five or so people there, and the bored staff hovered around us, waiting on us hand and foot. The rooms were clean and comfortable, and the place is really well kept.
After arriving at Batticaloa, I was again redeployed, this time to stay in the town and work with one of the partners, Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS), which was going to implement some trauma counseling and other types of activities with CRS funds. Batticaloa is a town of some size, with stores and churches and mosques and temples all over the place. I like it. Sri Lankans are very friendly people, even the police and the military, and so it is easy to get along with everyone.
On Thursday, Cardinal McCarrick from Washington, DC and Ken Hackett, the president of CRS visited Batti. We drove out en masse, a junket of priests and nuns and aid workers, to one of the areas that was hit by the wave. It was stunningly awful. Whole blocks of what were once middle-class (for Sri Lanka) homes were decimated. Chunks of painted brick, broken tiles, and piles of debris wound up with saris and other clothing are everywhere. There are still some houses standing or half-standing, and you can see that the neighborhood, called Dutch Bar, was once almost prosperous. We drove past St. Ignatius School – or at least where the school once was. It is now a blank sand flat.
While the dignitaries were show the barely-damaged church by the slightly over-zealous parish priest, I wandered off to look at the real damage. I have to admit that I was struck at first by the thought that these people weren’t really poor, so they weren’t that badly off, but then I felt guilty for feeling that way, because it doesn’t really matter who you are, if you lose your house and family, you are poor and alone and sad. Looking at a half-destroyed house, the exposed interior walls bright yellow and still decorated with a small painting of a Hindu god, I saw a shoe in the debris. Shoes show up in photos of all disasters, probably because they are so evocative and so symbolic; in a way, this makes the shoe image a bit trite. However, at that moment, I was overwhelmed with an involuntary imagining of a family in the yellow room doing what families do and suddenly the water hits the house and screams in the windows and rushes down on them. They shout and drop everything and run to the door but even the traitorous house comes crashing down on them as the malicious furniture blocks their escape. It was too much, and I lost it. I cried and cried, a lame, useless, too-little-too-late crying.
Yes, the situation here is terrible. Worse than anything I’ve ever seen. Yet it is true that there is too much money, too many aid agencies, and too little work. What needs to be done is construction and reconstruction, but Tower-of-Babel meetings of logo-wearing foreigners from all over the world discuss with local bureaucrats the fate of the people currently languishing in the “welfare” camps. These stupid meetings go on and on, discussing semantics, specifics, methodologies, and sensitivities. Meanwhile, those who lost their homes live in tents or on the floors of schools; they live with relatives in crowded houses and wait for someone to tell them where to go. Some people want to go back to their old places, but most don’t want to be anywhere they can even hear the sea. Some go down each day to clean their home sites, spending their whole day there but returning to the camps at night, even if their homes are standing. I don’t think anyone but the journalists has asked them what they want – we are all talking about theories: keeping neighbors together, 150 square meters for a family of five, the finer points of tin roofs. How noble and how completely useless. I know that these things take time, but we really should be coordinating with the actual survivors. It only makes sense.
Perhaps I am a bit too jaded. It does take a long time to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that agencies aren’t duplicating effort and that everyone is being served by someone. It is necessary to get the buy in from local bureaucrats. But more than anything else, we need to consider the people we are doing this for, and what their needs and hopes are.
JRS, the partner I’m working with, is a pretty good organization that works with refugees in many countries around the world, particularly in education. They have been working here with people displaced by the civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers in the north and east of the country. With this emergency, JRS is working with their previous beneficiaries in the displaced camps as well as the people who have taken refuge from the tsunami in the schools and churches of the Jesuits. The priest in charge in Batticaloa for JRS is the regional director of the agency from Dehli, Fr. Amal. Fr. Amal is definitely a dedicated, humble, energetic visionary, but the man cannot think rationally or practically to save his soul. He has us so confused we literally have no idea what he wants to do at any given moment. Working with him to get a formal agreement on what we are going to pay for so his organization can do their activities is maddening.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Haiti
June 11, 2004
From the start, it was clear that I wasn’t in Africa this time around. While the other passengers on the plane, almost all Haitian (well, who else is crazy enough to go there now?), were loaded up with all kinds of insane carry on items (shopping bags, radios, armfuls of whoknowswhat, food in coolers and bags, etc.), which made it look very much like a trip to Africa, the typical body odor of an African flight was absent, replaced with cloyingly sweet perfume. Upon landing, we were herded into the customs area. My experience of such places has been of major pushing and shoving, requests for bribes, unbearable heat, filth, and so on. Not in Haiti. The air conditioning seemed to be working quite well, everyone stood in neat lines without pushing to get their papers checked, and not one single person gave anyone else a hard time about anything. It was amazing. Now, that’s not to say that this airport is somehow a miracle of technology – it looks like there is some sort of rehabilitation going on in the baggage claim area, where the walls are patched and the ceiling is open, and it would be as easy as pie to import all kinds of illegal things, due to the completely lack of a customs search or bag check. But, all in all, it was so easy I kept expecting someone to come running after me with some story about why he needed $5 or for someone to try to mug me. Instead, I was picked up by a cheerful driver and taken to the air conditioned office to meet with the friendly staff.
From all reports, this place is in complete anarchy, chaos reigning over political and natural disaster. As yet, I haven’t seen any sign of either. It is very poor, much poorer than almost any place I’ve ever been, probably on par with Kinshasa (Congo). Port-au-Prince and the neighboring city of Petionville are stacks of dubious concrete-block buildings; they are bright blue, yellow, pink, and green boxes settled among sandy streets and walls, shaded with fantastically green trees. The hotel I’m staying at is lovely, especially the patio and pool areas. It has a panoramic view of Port-au-Prince and Petionville. In spite of all this seeming calm, however, thousands of people have died here over the past 3-4 months, due to political instability and disastrous floods. The latest situation report on the flooding, which hit the hardest in the southern portion of the country, states that at least 1,800 people are dead, and some 25,000 displaced. Haiti is a small country – these are astronomical figures here.
Yesterday, when I arrived, my friend from grad school, Karl, who is working with CRS, took me to lunch at a restaurant/hotel owned by a friend of his father-in-law. We ate good food with the owner, Karl’s father-in-law, and their friend in the upstairs dining room of “El Cubano”, a hybrid Haitian-Cuban place with the most comfortable atmosphere. The three older men reminded me of characters in a Cuban film. They sat talking politics over whisky and cigarettes, grinning and joking with one another, their tight friendship obvious in their communicative glances and gestures. I can imagine them doing the same twenty years ago or twenty years from now, with little change but the color of their hair. They are old-style socialists, they are café revolutionaries.
One other thing that sets Haiti apart from the Congo is that during this crisis, Haitians have been helping out other Haitians. Such would be nearly unheard of in the Congo, where people regularly steal from one another and step on one another to get ahead. Haitian banks have donated money to the flood victims. Where else in the world would banks donate money? Haitian doctors have volunteered their time to work with the injured and sick in affected areas. The Haitian Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce have raised and donated money for rehabilitation and food relief. There is no way that these things would ever happen in the Congo. Anyone there with money keeps it to himself. The Haitians abroad are giving, too. Money is coming in. It isn’t much, but eventually it will be enough to get things back to normal (not that normal is good, but it certainly is better). If people in the Congo took a lesson from the Haitians, things there would turn around in a day.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
So, on Friday afternoon, I went to the south coast to see a distribution of non-food item kits (similar to the ones we did in the Congo, but in this case made up by CRS, not UNICEF), as well as some Title II food aid, consisting of beans, rice, and wheat-soy blend (like flour, but protein-enriched), and also cooking oil and purified water.
I was with the Logistics and Finance Manager (Dutch) and the Garage Manager (Haitian-American). They are both nice enough guys, and both speak fluent Creole, which helps. We ate dinner at a hotel in down-town Jacmel, an adorable beach city with French colonial architecture, rife with double balconies and gingerbreading and pastel paint. Then, we went to the wonderful above-mentioned Cyvadier. Saturday, we hit the road at about 7:30 for an adventurous and extremely bumpy ride to the distribution site. The distribution was held in the village closest to the place where the people hit by the flood in that area had fled. The site itself was really isolated, so I can only imagine what the place hit by the flood was like. We had four big tractor-trailers and about 30 staff. Compared to the Congo, it was slightly disorganized and it seemed like there were too many staff members around. They had few control systems, and I’m still not convinced as they are that there isn’t any fraud.
Overall, the distribution went without incident. I interviewed 5 people about what they experienced for a report that I have to write. Standard story, you could probably make it up yourself, but sad nonetheless. They were farmers, they lost animals and all their crops mid-season, so they won’t have anything to eat (they grow what they eat) until the end of the next growing season, which doesn’t start for quite some time. Most lost their houses, too, and the village is completely submerged. While I think that the disaster has been exaggerated, there’s no doubt that these people needed the distribution and that what they lived through was horrible. They next step would be to get them cash to restart petty commerce and to provide for any other immediate needs with microfinance.
The road was really bad, but the ride was fun. Haiti is very mountainous, with insanely steep hillsides. The road winds up and down them, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, all rocky and narrow and rutted. There are no guard rails. The views are stupendous. Haiti really is a beautiful country. Tourists are missing out on these beaches and views and (except for at the Hotel Montana) legendary hospitality. Haitians are nice and friendly and down-to-earth.
June 11, 2004
From the start, it was clear that I wasn’t in Africa this time around. While the other passengers on the plane, almost all Haitian (well, who else is crazy enough to go there now?), were loaded up with all kinds of insane carry on items (shopping bags, radios, armfuls of whoknowswhat, food in coolers and bags, etc.), which made it look very much like a trip to Africa, the typical body odor of an African flight was absent, replaced with cloyingly sweet perfume. Upon landing, we were herded into the customs area. My experience of such places has been of major pushing and shoving, requests for bribes, unbearable heat, filth, and so on. Not in Haiti. The air conditioning seemed to be working quite well, everyone stood in neat lines without pushing to get their papers checked, and not one single person gave anyone else a hard time about anything. It was amazing. Now, that’s not to say that this airport is somehow a miracle of technology – it looks like there is some sort of rehabilitation going on in the baggage claim area, where the walls are patched and the ceiling is open, and it would be as easy as pie to import all kinds of illegal things, due to the completely lack of a customs search or bag check. But, all in all, it was so easy I kept expecting someone to come running after me with some story about why he needed $5 or for someone to try to mug me. Instead, I was picked up by a cheerful driver and taken to the air conditioned office to meet with the friendly staff.
From all reports, this place is in complete anarchy, chaos reigning over political and natural disaster. As yet, I haven’t seen any sign of either. It is very poor, much poorer than almost any place I’ve ever been, probably on par with Kinshasa (Congo). Port-au-Prince and the neighboring city of Petionville are stacks of dubious concrete-block buildings; they are bright blue, yellow, pink, and green boxes settled among sandy streets and walls, shaded with fantastically green trees. The hotel I’m staying at is lovely, especially the patio and pool areas. It has a panoramic view of Port-au-Prince and Petionville. In spite of all this seeming calm, however, thousands of people have died here over the past 3-4 months, due to political instability and disastrous floods. The latest situation report on the flooding, which hit the hardest in the southern portion of the country, states that at least 1,800 people are dead, and some 25,000 displaced. Haiti is a small country – these are astronomical figures here.
Yesterday, when I arrived, my friend from grad school, Karl, who is working with CRS, took me to lunch at a restaurant/hotel owned by a friend of his father-in-law. We ate good food with the owner, Karl’s father-in-law, and their friend in the upstairs dining room of “El Cubano”, a hybrid Haitian-Cuban place with the most comfortable atmosphere. The three older men reminded me of characters in a Cuban film. They sat talking politics over whisky and cigarettes, grinning and joking with one another, their tight friendship obvious in their communicative glances and gestures. I can imagine them doing the same twenty years ago or twenty years from now, with little change but the color of their hair. They are old-style socialists, they are café revolutionaries.
One other thing that sets Haiti apart from the Congo is that during this crisis, Haitians have been helping out other Haitians. Such would be nearly unheard of in the Congo, where people regularly steal from one another and step on one another to get ahead. Haitian banks have donated money to the flood victims. Where else in the world would banks donate money? Haitian doctors have volunteered their time to work with the injured and sick in affected areas. The Haitian Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce have raised and donated money for rehabilitation and food relief. There is no way that these things would ever happen in the Congo. Anyone there with money keeps it to himself. The Haitians abroad are giving, too. Money is coming in. It isn’t much, but eventually it will be enough to get things back to normal (not that normal is good, but it certainly is better). If people in the Congo took a lesson from the Haitians, things there would turn around in a day.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
So, on Friday afternoon, I went to the south coast to see a distribution of non-food item kits (similar to the ones we did in the Congo, but in this case made up by CRS, not UNICEF), as well as some Title II food aid, consisting of beans, rice, and wheat-soy blend (like flour, but protein-enriched), and also cooking oil and purified water.
I was with the Logistics and Finance Manager (Dutch) and the Garage Manager (Haitian-American). They are both nice enough guys, and both speak fluent Creole, which helps. We ate dinner at a hotel in down-town Jacmel, an adorable beach city with French colonial architecture, rife with double balconies and gingerbreading and pastel paint. Then, we went to the wonderful above-mentioned Cyvadier. Saturday, we hit the road at about 7:30 for an adventurous and extremely bumpy ride to the distribution site. The distribution was held in the village closest to the place where the people hit by the flood in that area had fled. The site itself was really isolated, so I can only imagine what the place hit by the flood was like. We had four big tractor-trailers and about 30 staff. Compared to the Congo, it was slightly disorganized and it seemed like there were too many staff members around. They had few control systems, and I’m still not convinced as they are that there isn’t any fraud.
Overall, the distribution went without incident. I interviewed 5 people about what they experienced for a report that I have to write. Standard story, you could probably make it up yourself, but sad nonetheless. They were farmers, they lost animals and all their crops mid-season, so they won’t have anything to eat (they grow what they eat) until the end of the next growing season, which doesn’t start for quite some time. Most lost their houses, too, and the village is completely submerged. While I think that the disaster has been exaggerated, there’s no doubt that these people needed the distribution and that what they lived through was horrible. They next step would be to get them cash to restart petty commerce and to provide for any other immediate needs with microfinance.
The road was really bad, but the ride was fun. Haiti is very mountainous, with insanely steep hillsides. The road winds up and down them, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, all rocky and narrow and rutted. There are no guard rails. The views are stupendous. Haiti really is a beautiful country. Tourists are missing out on these beaches and views and (except for at the Hotel Montana) legendary hospitality. Haitians are nice and friendly and down-to-earth.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Saturday, April 24, 2004
We did the distribution in Lokando yesterday. It went really well, and the team worked like clockwork. We’re all exhausted and proud and relieved. Far from being any hindrance at all yesterday, the military unit in the town provided security for the guys who were bringing the kits from the boats up to the distribution site, and guarded the kits at the distribution site. Now, that was yesterday, and who knows what happened last night when everyone went home with their stuff. At least they didn’t cause problems.
Long before doing each distribution, a team of “animateurs” or field agents visit the target community and do an initial evaluation. This evaluation includes focus groups and individual interviews, with community leaders and with randomly chosen individuals. The field agents also make a map of the village and surrounding smaller villages, including sites of their fields and other community assets or challenges.
After doing the initial evaluation, and determining that we need to work in that community, we plan the survey. The survey lasts for about five days. During this time, the field agents go from door to door interviewing people in the area based on a standard interview format. Nearly everyone in the target communities will be interviewed, and the field agents have even been known to go look for people at their fields. Based on the interview results, we target the neediest people in a community for immediate assistance. Since nearly everyone in these places is destitute, it isn’t easy, so we are planning a second round of assistance for people who weren’t included in the targeting the first time.
After the survey and targeting, the field agents return to the village where the distribution will take place. The first thing they do is finish up any surveys they might not have been able to be to. Then, they distribute vouchers to all those who meet the targeting criteria. Each voucher has the person’s name and a unique number. The people need to bring this voucher with them to the distribution. This helps us to make sure that we are getting the right people. We keep the surveys and they keep the vouchers, and then the two have to match the day of the distribution or they don’t get anything. There have been a few cases of people selling vouchers, stealing vouchers, or claiming that they were targeted but lost their voucher, but not too many. The kits that we are giving out include items such as cooking pots, cooking utensils, a tarp for shelter, blankets, soap, a jerry can for water, rope, a hatchet and a machete.
Under normal circumstances, no development agency in its right mind would just give things out like this. I’m sure that you can imagine the problems that would be (and were when that was the approach in the past) associated with this kind of an approach: breakdown of local markets, removal of the motivation to produce, humiliation for being beholden to charity, etc. In the case of an emergency, however, people literally have nothing, and in order for them to even have a chance to get back on their feet, they need at least some basic items. Ideally, this will be the last time anyone gives them these basics.
Eventually, each village where we’ve done a distribution will host a seed fair sponsored by my agency and our local partner.
At one point, when I was reading some book about some crazy white guy adventuring for no good reason in the forest of the Congo basin, I wondered how people were able to live in the jungle before, but now they can’t. Ok, I don’t normally wonder that, because when you’re out here, it just doesn’t matter, but since it occurred to me, and might occur to someone else, I gave myself an answer. It has been generations since these people have lived full-time in the forest. They probably still have some local knowledge about what is edible, how to hunt, how to protect themselves from animals and the elements, but basically for at least two generations, they have been living in villages, wearing clothes, cooking in metal pots over a fire, etc. Living full-time in the forest is no more natural or normal for them than it would be for most of us. Furthermore, it is a humiliation, culturally, since it is believed that people who do live in the forest are more like animals.
The Kindu Menu
Breakfast:
-Bread, staled to perfection, covered with cheese of the most mediocre quality, or margarine and overly-sweet preserves;
-A half-coffee, and half-chickory mix, with your choice of powdered milk or sugar
-Boiled eggs
-Cold boiled sardines
Lunch:
-Something very like spinach but not quite
-Rice
-Bananas or plantains fried to perfection
-Bean dish of the day
-Your choice of fish (capitane), goat, or chicken
Dinner:
-Goat kabob, roasted chicken, or fish
-Side of fries, fried plantains, or fried manioc, depending on what we felt like buying for you at the market today
-Local beer, coke, or imported beer, if you are lucky
We did the distribution in Lokando yesterday. It went really well, and the team worked like clockwork. We’re all exhausted and proud and relieved. Far from being any hindrance at all yesterday, the military unit in the town provided security for the guys who were bringing the kits from the boats up to the distribution site, and guarded the kits at the distribution site. Now, that was yesterday, and who knows what happened last night when everyone went home with their stuff. At least they didn’t cause problems.
Long before doing each distribution, a team of “animateurs” or field agents visit the target community and do an initial evaluation. This evaluation includes focus groups and individual interviews, with community leaders and with randomly chosen individuals. The field agents also make a map of the village and surrounding smaller villages, including sites of their fields and other community assets or challenges.
After doing the initial evaluation, and determining that we need to work in that community, we plan the survey. The survey lasts for about five days. During this time, the field agents go from door to door interviewing people in the area based on a standard interview format. Nearly everyone in the target communities will be interviewed, and the field agents have even been known to go look for people at their fields. Based on the interview results, we target the neediest people in a community for immediate assistance. Since nearly everyone in these places is destitute, it isn’t easy, so we are planning a second round of assistance for people who weren’t included in the targeting the first time.
After the survey and targeting, the field agents return to the village where the distribution will take place. The first thing they do is finish up any surveys they might not have been able to be to. Then, they distribute vouchers to all those who meet the targeting criteria. Each voucher has the person’s name and a unique number. The people need to bring this voucher with them to the distribution. This helps us to make sure that we are getting the right people. We keep the surveys and they keep the vouchers, and then the two have to match the day of the distribution or they don’t get anything. There have been a few cases of people selling vouchers, stealing vouchers, or claiming that they were targeted but lost their voucher, but not too many. The kits that we are giving out include items such as cooking pots, cooking utensils, a tarp for shelter, blankets, soap, a jerry can for water, rope, a hatchet and a machete.
Under normal circumstances, no development agency in its right mind would just give things out like this. I’m sure that you can imagine the problems that would be (and were when that was the approach in the past) associated with this kind of an approach: breakdown of local markets, removal of the motivation to produce, humiliation for being beholden to charity, etc. In the case of an emergency, however, people literally have nothing, and in order for them to even have a chance to get back on their feet, they need at least some basic items. Ideally, this will be the last time anyone gives them these basics.
Eventually, each village where we’ve done a distribution will host a seed fair sponsored by my agency and our local partner.
At one point, when I was reading some book about some crazy white guy adventuring for no good reason in the forest of the Congo basin, I wondered how people were able to live in the jungle before, but now they can’t. Ok, I don’t normally wonder that, because when you’re out here, it just doesn’t matter, but since it occurred to me, and might occur to someone else, I gave myself an answer. It has been generations since these people have lived full-time in the forest. They probably still have some local knowledge about what is edible, how to hunt, how to protect themselves from animals and the elements, but basically for at least two generations, they have been living in villages, wearing clothes, cooking in metal pots over a fire, etc. Living full-time in the forest is no more natural or normal for them than it would be for most of us. Furthermore, it is a humiliation, culturally, since it is believed that people who do live in the forest are more like animals.
The Kindu Menu
Breakfast:
-Bread, staled to perfection, covered with cheese of the most mediocre quality, or margarine and overly-sweet preserves;
-A half-coffee, and half-chickory mix, with your choice of powdered milk or sugar
-Boiled eggs
-Cold boiled sardines
Lunch:
-Something very like spinach but not quite
-Rice
-Bananas or plantains fried to perfection
-Bean dish of the day
-Your choice of fish (capitane), goat, or chicken
Dinner:
-Goat kabob, roasted chicken, or fish
-Side of fries, fried plantains, or fried manioc, depending on what we felt like buying for you at the market today
-Local beer, coke, or imported beer, if you are lucky
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
This is my first post to this blog. Basically, I'm just throwing up some things that I've written about the places I've seen, in a rather raw form. I'm looking forward to questions and discussions about anything here, but take it all with a grain of salt. I'm not editing as I go, so a lot of things may have been written "in the heat of the moment" so to speak!
Monday, April 05, 2004
Joe asked me if I thought that I was the only person in BWI airport that was going to the Congo. I answered yes, and we laughed. The problem was that it wasn’t really funny at all – it was terrifying.
Getting there
Overall, the series of flights from Baltimore to Atlanta to Brussels to Yaoundé to Kinshasa went well. The layover in Brussels was so short as to allow no time at all for exploration. After practically running from the arrival gate to the international departures terminal, getting there with little time to spare, I was faced with a traffic jam of historic proportions. True to the stubborn European need to avoid efficiency at all cost, the security line stretched into the main hall of the terminal and moved at an almost imperceptible pace. This, just as the flight to Kinshasa was announced. My only hope was that just as typically, the flight to Africa would depart later than scheduled. I finally made it through security, and upon arriving at the gate, saw that there was still a mad press of humanity desperately trying to get on the plane as if it were the last flight out on the eve of the Apocalypse.
While I understand the cultural genesis of this strange need to push and shove to get on planes/busses/trains etc., it always fascinates me. I mean, there are assigned seats, you’re already at the gate, they announce all the sections to board in an orderly and predictable fashion, and they do their best not to leave anyone behind. You don’t get a better seat if you push your way to the front – you still only get the seat you’re assigned. You aren’t more likely to be left behind if you are at the back of the mob, in fact, you STILL get the seat you were assigned. But, the mad shoving and pushing goes on.
We flew over the insanely blue Mediterranean, and passed the exquisite line where the azure silk of the sea meets the worn leather of North Africa. Hours later, the plan descended again below the clouds over Cameroon. The landscape changed dramatically from ochre desert to spotty bushland to dense forest to commercial agriculture. After taking off again from Yaoundé, we were soon in Kinshasa. That’s when things got a little more interesting.
We got off the plane in lacksidaisical order and filed into the airport. In the entry hall, there were four windows for passport control. Two were for officials, one for nationals, and one for other internationals. Predictably, the longest lines were for nationals and internationals. The officials went through quickly and without problems. Two windows for them, mind you, and there were far fewer officials than anyone else. The Nationals line was, like the scene at the airport, a mad press of humanity trying desperately to get in as if they would somehow be left behind in the airport if they didn’t get through first. The Internationals lines was an orderly but irritated, sweating and grumbling queue. I was last in the line. After all the officials (all ten of them) had their passports stamped, I asked the guy in the airport shirt if some of us in the long line could pass through that window.
“Oh no Madame. That line is only for officials.”
“Yes, but all the officials have gone through, and this line is very long. Things would go faster if some of us went through that line. I’ve seen this done before elsewhere.”
“Oh no Madame. That line is only for officials. He only has the stamp for officials and cannot use the stamp for non-officials.”
“Ah so it is a problem of the stamp.”
“Yes Madame. The problem is the stamp.”
So, after a long humid wait in line, I arrived at the window, handed over my passport, gave the guy some “money for a Coke” and looked for my expediter. Expediters are very important individuals to the traveler in a place like Congo. The bureaucracy, corruption, chaos, and confusion are overwhelming to most people, and if you don’t know your way around, you can be ripped off or worse. Expediters understand the system, speak the language, pay the bribes, and basically grease the cranky wheels of the baggage claim/customs system. They are wonderful. This one did his job in the airport, and then turned me over to a driver who was not the one I was expecting, but rather a friend of the one I was expecting.
Kinshasa
Having been assured repeatedly that the building where my friend lived (also the building where USAID, the US’s international development agency, had its offices) was remarkably easy to find and well-known, I was confident that when I told the driver where I was going he would just know and take me there and I would be on my way to a shower soon enough. Not so fast! How could I possibly expect a taxi driver, sent by CRS, previously informed of where I would be going, to actually know where I was going? Silly American girl! Why would he know? Moreover, why would he bother telling you that he didn’t know? So, instead we drove around Kinshasa, perhaps the biggest dump of a city I’ve ever seen, periodically asking directions of other people who also didn’t know where this famous building was. Finally, I get my friend on the phone and she finds someone who explained to the driver to take me somewhere else to meet her. After a very long drive, I was deposited at a club with my friend, who then graciously took me to her apartment where I got my much-needed shower.
I didn’t get to see much of Kinshasa, so my opinion on it is of limited validity. It seemed like a more or less livable city, with at least one very nice neighborhood, some grocery stores, some bars and some restaurants. The apartments I was in were nice, as were the people I met while there, even the Marines! However, at the same time, the city is a pit, full of ridiculously dilapidated infrastructure, crumbling Soviet-style buildings, overgrown brush, and garbage.
From my friend’s apartment window, you could see the olive-green expanse of the Congo river just below the Stanley Pool. Looking out the kitchen window, I felt a strange sensation of being at the edge of reality. The Congo had settled into my mind’s eye as a near-mythical place characterized by terrifying history, fascinating culture, stunning art, and burning fever. Like a child filling in the rough forms of a coloring-book, I was filling in the blanks of my understanding of this place, and by proxy, of one of the most fascinating and intense parts of Africa. Walking along the bank of the Congo the next day with three friends, I had the feeling again when I heard through the silence the subtle roar of the rapids downriver. This river has caused and witnessed so much death in its history – the sound of the boiling rapids was its perfect anthem.
“It can’t be done”
Everywhere I’ve traveled in the developing world I’ve experienced the “It can’t be done” phenomenon in various cultural manifestations. However, nowhere is it so amusingly and frustratingly prominent as here. I’ll give two more examples of “it can’t be done”, Kinshasa style.
1. On Saturday night, my friend ordered pizza. I asked that whatever she got for me not have mushrooms on it. So, she ordered, they told her it would be there in ten minutes. One hour and two phone calls later, the pizza came. With mushrooms. Another phone call – why didn’t you make the pizza without mushrooms? Because it can’t be done. Ah. I see. Upon pain of death, mushrooms apparently must appear on all pizzas. How silly of us to think otherwise!
2. On Sunday, this same friend and I went to the recreation club to which she belongs to get lunch. Non-members have to pay for use of the rec facilities, but should be able to eat in the restaurant without paying extra. After she signed in, we went to the restaurant, and all the tables on the veranda were full. So, we found a table next to the pool, and asked for an umbrella. The guy was more than happy to oblige with the umbrella, but he asked if we were both members. My friend said that she was and I was her guest. So, he asked me to pay to use the pool. We explained that we were just eating from the restaurant. He told us that it was not possible for me to eat from the restaurant without paying for use of the facilities. My friend pointed out that she has had guests there before, and knows that they can eat without paying for the facilities. He insisted that it was not possible. He said maybe if we were sitting on the veranda instead of on the grass it would be different. My friend asked if there were different menus for the veranda and for the grass. No, of course not. Well, being as there are no tables on the veranda, why can’t we just sit and eat at this table on the grass? It is not possible. So, we asked the manager. He said there was no problem. Then the original guy comes down to the office and says that My friend the member wasn’t the problem, but I was because I wasn’t a member (yes, me being a problem as usual). The manager said again that there was no problem. We were so tired of the other guy by then though that we just left. So, for any of you who may want to eat there, remember that if you aren’t a member, you can only eat on the veranda, not on the grass.
Issues
Things with my organization have also been a bit chaotic since I arrived. Kinshasa is very expensive. I was told that it is recommended that you bring $500 with you in cash to tide you over until you can get per diem. However, it was too late for me to get an advance from HQ, so I could only bring $100 of my own money. Even though the Congo office knew this was the case, I didn’t get any advance from them or per diem to cover my weekend. Not too much of a big deal, but $100 is just about enough to cover one day’s expenses in Kinshasa. I was also given information telling me not to bother bringing sheets or towels, as they were to be provided to me. However, the supervisor told me that I should have brought towels, since those at the place we would be staying were not good. Thanks. So, we had to find a supermarket that was both open on Sunday and sold towels. We did, and two crappy bath towels cost me $26. Some food that I thought it might be nice to take with me set me back another $30 (two packs of instant soup, a can of Coke, macaroni, and some granola bars).
To Kindu
This morning, I was supposed to be waiting in front of my friend’s building at 5:30 am. Now, those of you who know me know that I hate being awake before 10am, let alone 5:30 am in a household with no coffee. So I waited. And waited. Forty-five minutes later, the guy comes up in the minivan to take me to the UN airport. I was about to give up on him. He just got confused and thought that I was someone else, and instead of listening to his instructions, he just did what he felt like doing. I’m sure that he woke up some poor other woman who was just trying to get some sleep. If she ever reads this, I’m very sorry!
All flights for humanitarian agencies, the UN, and diplomats are managed through the Mission Observatoire des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC), the UN mission here. They have an airport that is nicer than the national airport, even though it is “temporary”, and the flight to Kisangani was in a normal-sized passenger plane. They don’t cater on the flight, but in the waiting area, they have decent espresso and some light food. I met a very nice Italian guy who works for another organization, and is familiar with my organization. We chatted, smoked a cigarette, and had some espresso. The flight was uneventful, and left us off at the Kisangani airport. I gather from the architecture that this was originally a regular national airport at some time. Whenever things were closer to normal here. Now, although the area used by the UN are clean and well-organized, the walls of the building are covered in mold, the lights don’t work, and the waiting area is made up of four rows of plastic chairs. Flight information is written on a dry-erase board next to the only gate for check-in. The baggage claim area is just a space on the floor by the door. The flight to Kindu will check in at 3 pm, and leave at 4 will check in at 3 pm, and leave at 4 or 4:30. It is now 12:02 pm. I could be flying on a puddle-jumper plane (which could really mean anything smaller than a commuter jet) or on a helicopter. My fingers are crossed for the helicopter!
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
It wasn’t a helicopter, but I was the only one on the plane! I flew on a plane called an Antonov. They are made in Russia or the Ukraine, and are mostly used to carry commodities and a few passengers. The inside is big enough to carry two cars. You would probably recognize them as the type of plane that has a ramp in the back that you can drive up on. There aren’t regular seats inside some of them, just benches with seatbelts, and needless to say there aren’t any flight attendants. The flight was smooth, though, and I got to wear ear protectors which made me feel very technical. I sat on one of the benches, and the rest of the plane was packed with food commodities, like potatoes, onions, wheat, and corn.
The Congo and the Forest
There is no way to explain the beauty of the view from the plane window. For as far as the eye could see, there was unbroken forest: deep green and shadowy, a clear inspiration for belief in magic and for fear. Through this beautiful and mysterious canopy winds the great Congo River, like a gleaming bronze ribbon. The section of river over which we flew was mostly calm and appeared navigable, but there were no boats on it that I could see. It is fed by smaller rivers that quilt the forest, noticeable only because of the slight indentation that they make in the green canopy. I was almost disappointed when we touched down into the reality of Kindu.
Kindu
I was met by the regional emergency coordinator, the base manager and the head of Caritas Kindu at the airport, and they took me to the office to introduce me to everyone. The office is in a decent building on the second floor. We share it with Caritas Kindu. Everyone seemed nice, I found my desk and mailbox, and then we left for dinner at the Procure. The food was typically African, and not bad at all. We ate and relaxed with the Bishop, the Vicar, and a couple of others.
After dinner, three colleagues and myself went to the MONUC headquarters for a beer, since I had just arrived and the regional emergency coordinator was going to leave the next day. Any of you who have been to Loki or another UN humanitarian camp know what these places are like. We sat at a long table full of other development and humanitarian workers, apparently from all over the world. The lingua franca was French, but some of us spoke English, too. The beer felt great, and everyone seemed nice enough. I’ll get into this scene more as I get to know it better.
Last night, I slept at the Procure of the diocese. The Procure is like a hostel for traveling priests, other religious, and people, like me, who work with the Church. It was clean and the food was edible at dinner. The room was fine, except perhaps the most important part, the bed. It was a military cot more or less. I barely slept all night, and today I’m a bit hazy.
One project we are going to do is to rebuild two bridges between Kindu, where I am, and Kailo, a town north of here. The people in Kailo have been almost entirely isolated due to the destruction of these bridges. The only way into the town now is by plane or helicopter. It is estimated by the local organization that we are thinking of partnering with on this that due to a lack of hygiene the death rate is 5 people a day. There are only 11,000 inhabitants of Kailo. While this is horrible, I don’t really understand the statistic. The proposal that cites it does not cite how the author arrived at it or where they found it. It doesn’t really say anything tangible about how these people are dying. Furthermore, I’m wondering why they are dying so fast when most Congolese live without hygiene systems and aren’t dying at the rate of 5 a day.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
The “You don’t speak French (or whatever language) well, so you must be stupid” Phenomenon
This particular quirk is not specific to the Congo, it is found worldwide. However, it has been years since I’ve experienced it myself, since it’s been a while since I’ve lived somewhere where I didn’t speak the common language well.
It goes like this. You ask a simple question, most likely correctly or close enough to be understood, and the person you ask treats you like a complete idiot. Some examples:
When I was studying in Argentina, I was just starting to speak Spanish. I asked my host mother where the iron was to iron a shirt or pants or whatever. Instead of just showing me where the iron was, she also commenced to instruct me in the fine art of ironing, pantomiming exactly how one goes about ironing whatever it was I had in exquisite dramatic detail, as though I had never seen an iron before in my life, let alone actually used one. The same thing happened with my roommate in the apartment to which I later moved when I asked where the washing machine was, but she went one step further and proceeded to explain how the light switch worked as well. You would have thought that I had just woken up from a 500 year sleep and couldn’t fathom modern technology.
So, today I was working on an Excel spreadsheet that will capture the monitoring and evaluation data for one of the projects we are doing. I made some of the cells automatic, and wanted to make sure that everything worked, so I asked the project officer for some of the already filled-in questionnaires. He didn’t get me, since I really was just making up the words as I went along, so I asked for help from a visiting engineer who supposedly speaks English. Instead of just telling me the words, he explained how questionnaires work, that there are some already filled-in (which I clearly already knew), that you could put the data from them into Excel (no shit – I guess that’s why I was using Excel and already had the spreadsheet for tracking the questionnaires made up), and that the word for questionnaire was questionnaire, which I already knew and had already used in our conversation several times. “Ok, madame?” Yes, fine, but are there some filled-in questionnaires that I could have please? Again with the same explanations as above as if I was some kind of nitwit. I never got the questionnaires. Something similar is happening with my supervisor here and the cell phone, but not as bad. I’m just convinced that he thinks that cell phones in the US are completely different than here.
Anyway, we bagged work early today because Abbot François gave us Holy Thursday afternoon and Good Friday off. I’m sitting in the monastery where we are living right now, since we don’t yet have an apartment. It is hot. Today makes me think of the part of the Heart of Darkness by Conrad where Marlow talks about “stony hills ablaze with heat” and later, “The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.” That is exactly what it feels like to day. My skin can’t sweat fast enough to keep me even a little bit cool. But to make it all Africa, to make it perfect and livable and gorgeous, to make it tangible, the choir is practicing for Easter in the cathedral next door. Their fantastic harmonies blow like a breeze through the air. It feels like time only moves at the encouragement of their song’s rhythm. Their singing is like a view of the African landscape: broad, colorful, and full of texture. Of course my concert is cut short by a chainsaw: the brothers have a project. Hmmm.
Friday, April 09, 2004
The annoying African day
1. I did my laundry yesterday, and hung it outside to dry, so that I would have some clean clothes to take with me to Goma. Today I went to look for them, and they were in a bucket, in a ball, soaked. Apparently the caretaker of the monastery decided to take them off the line after they were only there for two hours. Great. So, I picked out two things that were almost dry, and put the rest on the line.
2. The bread for breakfast was stale. It’s terrible bread anyway, and even worse when stale. I can deal with stale bread if I can make it into French toast or toast of any kind, or bread pudding, but since I’m not in charge of the monastery kitchen, I just tried to chew my way through a couple of pieces.
3. The Engineer, who said that he would be ready to be picked up any time after 6am was not ready when we went to get him. Then…
4. He brought a box of bushmeat with him that filled the vehicle with an odor of decay. I thought that something had died in the car before we pinpointed the source. We drove all the way to the airport with the stink, wondering whether the rather proper Swiss UN guys would even let the dead animal on the plane. They did, and thankfully it was a normal plane where the baggage and the seating area were separated.
5. We arrived in Kisangani, thinking that we were 1/3 of the way finished our trip, but NO! There were other problems. We tried to check in for our onward flight to Goma via Bukavu and Kigali (yes, the capital of Rwanda), and were turned away by one of the rudest people I’ve ever come across. He told us that the flight was full without even looking at our tickets, and then said that there were no more flights that would get us near Goma so we should just go home, but we probably wouldn’t even be able to do that because probably the flight to Kindu wouldn’t come in time. We were flying on the UN system, because it is free for NGOs, and this guy worked for them. Unbelievable. He was really rude, especially to our Senegalese boss. So, we cooled down a bit, and then tried to arrange something, and finally got a private flight ($126 per person each way for a 1 hour flight) directly to Goma. We ended up getting in earlier than we would have with the UN, but it was irritating because we had to pay. And it was raining in Kisangani, so we were wet. And there was no food so we were hungry.
While this is a particularly bad example of the Irritating African Day, there are many other examples, and also examples of the Irritating Latin American or Asian day that aren’t too different. In addition to the larger infuriating moments, there are the ever-present smaller irritations that make it nearly unbearable, like the fact that you have to go through immigration in each city you land in on private airlines, or that the local police try to get bribes from you by grabbing your ticket from your hand and making you wait to get it back until your flight is gone or you pay them, etc. I’m not sure why this happens, but it can really turn you into a jerk if you let it get to you. In small part, it has to do with everyone trying to make themselves as important as possible in their small little job, and with knowing that they can get bribes, and with bureaucracy, but there seems to be some kind of lack of dignity associated with it as well. Add to all this the heat and dust and rain and hunger and you get a recipe for a serious temper tantrum that will only make things worse.
Goma
We arrived at Goma to the welcome face of the Caritas Goma expediter. As I mentioned before, expediters are wonderful amazing people on whom your ability to do most things depends. Eddy is also the head of logistics for Caritas Goma, and is great. He whisked us (as much as one can whisk anything in the Goma airport) through immigration, health, and customs, onto the car, and worked out our return flights, hotel, car needs, and everything for our whole weekend here.
Goma was hit a couple of years ago with a volcanic eruption. Being the Congo, you can still see the black scar left by the lava within and around the city, pouring silently and ashen down the side of the stunning volcano by the city; very little has been done to rebuild since the disaster. It may be for the black volcanic gravel that paves the entire city, or maybe because it is the rainy season here above the equator (it is the dry season in Kindu, south of the equator), but Goma appears darker, although busier and more organized than Kindu. There is something a bit shadowy and sinister in this dimness that doesn’t necessarily make one feel too comfortable. Our hotel is quite nice, though, and even has TV and hot water. The food at the restaurant was good, and served in a timely fashion, and was affordable! I’m looking forward to a dinner out, pizza maybe, and some dancing!
Saturday, April 10, 2004
The Coco Jambo and the Ladies of the Night
So, last night, my two colleagues and I went to a local bar around the corner from our restaurant after dinner for some drinks and maybe dancing. It is actually a nice and comfortable bar with fun music and regularly-served drinks. We did quite a bit of people-watching at first; the place is frequented by better-off Congolese, MONUC people, and people like ourselves from international humanitarian organizations. It is also frequented by prostitutes, who make the whole scene a little more interesting, and a little more surreal.
Our Base Manager is a married older man from Senegal. His wife is still there, but he’s very faithful to her. So, when he attracted a rather persistent prostitute, he was mortified. She kept asking him to dance, and when he repeated that he didn’t want to because he was tired, she said that instead she’d give him a massage to liven him up. The poor man was mortified. She was very determined, and kept coming back throughout the night.
In addition to hitting on men, the prostitutes dance. They dance in predictably “sexy” ways, aiming, one would suppose, to attract customers (usually MONUC guys and international businessmen). The strange thing about this isn’t that it happens, but rather, how the performance is carried out. Most of the girls stand in front of the mirror on the wall at the back of the dance floor and watch themselves dance. So, instead of looking out at the crowd or dancing with each other, they line up like students in a dance class in front of a mirror and watch themselves intently. Very strange.
Just like anywhere else, prostitutes here get a bad name in their communities, are looked down upon by most people, and are more likely to be HIV positive. However, you have to give these girls a bit of credit – they are most likely the most ambitious and financially successful members of their villages, and they had the initiative to find a profitable business. While I’m not sure that the inevitable self-destruction that comes with such a profession is really all that better than the poverty they came from, one can clearly see the draw. They wear nice clothes, make a lot of money, get gifts from rich foreigners, get to eat out at nice places, etc. Most are desperately trying to support their families.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
There is a military contingent in our hotel, meeting about some kind of inclusion of the former rebels into the national military. I have to admit that they freak me out. They’re young guys, slouching about, probably have a hair-trigger…
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Meeting with the Donor
In this business, field office and headquarters offices alike complain that there is a disconnect between the realities of the field and the requirements of managing a worldwide program from a city in the US. This is true not only of NGOs like the one I work for, but also of the donors who finance our programs.
As you can imagine, it isn’t easy determining who has disarmed and decided to return for good to civilian life and who is only claiming to do so, or planning to do so for a little bit. Huge logistical, cultural, and practical obstacles prevent us from being able to guarantee that a soldier who gives up a gun to the UN and states that he wants to go back to his village is actually going to go back and stay back. However, we still need to ensure that these people get the humanitarian assistance they deserve, such as non-food household items, in order to decrease the likelihood that they will take up arms against us for not fulfilling promises, or against the government because they disarmed and then couldn’t make a living.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Lokando and other things
Yesterday, we went up to Lokando, a town down river (north of here) on the Congo. We went up to arrange the set-up for the distribution we’re going to do there on Friday, and also to make sure that things were calm. Normally, most of the towns we work in are pretty calm, but a couple of days ago, a battalion of MPs had been assigned to the town, along with an appointed “governor” from the west of the country. To you, this may seem like no problem, but to the people of Lokando, this is a potential spark for conflict.
Lokando was a center of activity for the Mayi Mayi, the home grown militias that fought against the Rwanda-backed RCD (Rassemblement Congolaise pour le Developpement – Congolese Assembly for Development, which it most certainly was not), considered an invading force. During the last war, the Congolese military was mandated to protect the population and fight the invasion of Rwandan troops and their supporters, but instead, they just fled, raping and pillaging as they went. The rebels or the Mayi Mayi (whoever the opponent of the day was) moved into the towns virtually without a fight, but they found nothing but devastation. It seems to me that more harm was done to this country by their own military than by any rebels or foreign militias, although all three groups played a significant part in the destruction of the Congo.
So, now Lokando, a formerly Mayi Mayi town, hosts a Congolese Army MP Battalion and a governor appointed to them by a leader who lives far away in Kinshasa, and who was a leader in the Mobutu era, which makes him less popular. When we met with the leader of the MPs, he asked us if we could bring tools for the men and their families when we came to do the distribution on Friday. This is where we get to the heart of why the military pillaged their people instead of fighting: lack of national sentiment, lack of pay, and the culture of “Article 15” or “debrouillez-vous” (make your own way however you can).
During the Mobutu years, the country was kept together tenuously by the magnetic personality of Mobutu and his ruthlessness with perceived threats to his power. However, in order to maintain his power, he played regions and ethnic groups off one another, deepening rather than healing feelings of antagonism between sub-national groups. He systematically kept the focus of loyalty on himself rather than on the country, in essence making of the national army a private security force with no special feelings toward their country. Since they lacked nationalism/patriotism, when the country was beset by incursions from neighboring countries, the armed forces felt no responsibility for protecting the people at the possible expense of their own lives. This was compounded by the fact that they were (and still are) paid very little, if anything.
In spite of the fact that Mobutu and his cronies were making billions by gutting formerly profitable enterprises of the Congo, including the mineral companies that were nationalized under the policy of Zairization, none of that money was seen by the populace, including the military. If they were paid at all, the recruits were paid little, and had to purchase their uniforms out of the small salary they were given, as well as support their families. No wonder that when push came to shove, they were willing to use the guns and power they had by the nature of their jobs to steal from anyone they came across. They had no loyalty to the people, so stealing from them became normal. In fact, the military frequently operated as though the population was obligated to turn everything over to them, including houses, food, clothing, tools, everything.
“Debrouillez-vous” means something like “make your own way, manage for yourself”. The trend began in the south of the country during the Mobutu era. Rather than wait for the state to provide or for things to get better, people were encouraged to make their own way. This sounds well and good, but without rule of law, this turned into a horrible degeneration of the work ethic, massive corruption and theft, and a breakdown in society. This culture is also active in the military. Because they are paid so little, they are expected to figure out how to get along on their own, even if this means pillaging. The leadership not only overlooks this behavior, but they also participate in it and encourage it. There are of course more positive examples of this mentality, such as the incredible black market in Kinshasa, but for the most part, it is played out in kleptocracy and petty corruption.
So, given all that, it is not surprising that the military commander asked for tools from us. He will never get them from Kinshasa no matter how many times he asks. He is expected by his higher-ups to find a way to get them himself. He has little if any money, and how many troops and their families to look after while keeping mutiny at bay. He probably feels that he and his men are entitled to whatever they can lay their hands on. This may cause us problems after the distribution. I’m sure that the soldiers won’t cause problems on the day of the distribution, but we have already heard stories of soldiers in other towns going at night with guns to steal items from the kits that we have given to families. What can we do? We can’t just stop giving out the kits because the people need the things, and the military doesn’t get to everyone (or not just yet). But we most certainly cannot give out kits to the military – that is the purview of the government. There is actually plenty of money to pay these guys at the national level, the mystery is where it leaks out on the way down.
Just take a second to imagine what it would be like to live in constant fear that the soldiers in or near your town will come into your village drunk with their guns, rape you and your children, take everything you own, and burn down your house because you didn’t give it all up voluntarily. There are villages where this has happened more than 20 times. There were two big “Pillages”, in 1991 and 1993, but in both cases, many villages were run into the forest several times. I can’t even begin to imagine the horrifying fear that the Congolese must live with each night. The very people who are supposed to be your proud protectors are armed villains sponsored by your government who will never be called to answer for their actions. Each night, you would lay your head down but not to sleep, just to wait for the banging at the door. Every sound becomes a footstep, voices of soldiers, the cry of your daughter. It would be enough to drive you mad. And yet, the people return to their villages and rebuild their houses and get on with their lives. What else is there to do?
When the military and rebels pillaged the towns during the conflicts, they also frequently raped women and girls. In the Congo, there are no rape hotlines, no kind nurses and doctors at hospitals, no access to the drugs that can help you avert HIV or other infections, no “morning-after” pill, no counselors. Here, women are frequently ousted if not from their communities, then from their homes, divorced by their husbands because they have been raped. These women get no treatment, unless it comes at the hand of an NGO. Not only do they have to go through the normal struggle that any women goes through after such an experience, but they have to do it alone, with almost no one to rely on for friendship, love, and support. Here, Cooperatizione Italiana, the Italian organization, is working with these women to try to help them recover and get back on their feet.
Privacy
There is none here. I’m going crazy. I can’t even have a telephone conversation in private. There is always someone listening. When I heard that my friend’s mother passed away on Sunday night, I didn’t even have a place to cry alone. No where. It is really getting to me. I feel sometimes like I’m peeing in a store window.
Monday, April 05, 2004
Joe asked me if I thought that I was the only person in BWI airport that was going to the Congo. I answered yes, and we laughed. The problem was that it wasn’t really funny at all – it was terrifying.
Getting there
Overall, the series of flights from Baltimore to Atlanta to Brussels to Yaoundé to Kinshasa went well. The layover in Brussels was so short as to allow no time at all for exploration. After practically running from the arrival gate to the international departures terminal, getting there with little time to spare, I was faced with a traffic jam of historic proportions. True to the stubborn European need to avoid efficiency at all cost, the security line stretched into the main hall of the terminal and moved at an almost imperceptible pace. This, just as the flight to Kinshasa was announced. My only hope was that just as typically, the flight to Africa would depart later than scheduled. I finally made it through security, and upon arriving at the gate, saw that there was still a mad press of humanity desperately trying to get on the plane as if it were the last flight out on the eve of the Apocalypse.
While I understand the cultural genesis of this strange need to push and shove to get on planes/busses/trains etc., it always fascinates me. I mean, there are assigned seats, you’re already at the gate, they announce all the sections to board in an orderly and predictable fashion, and they do their best not to leave anyone behind. You don’t get a better seat if you push your way to the front – you still only get the seat you’re assigned. You aren’t more likely to be left behind if you are at the back of the mob, in fact, you STILL get the seat you were assigned. But, the mad shoving and pushing goes on.
We flew over the insanely blue Mediterranean, and passed the exquisite line where the azure silk of the sea meets the worn leather of North Africa. Hours later, the plan descended again below the clouds over Cameroon. The landscape changed dramatically from ochre desert to spotty bushland to dense forest to commercial agriculture. After taking off again from Yaoundé, we were soon in Kinshasa. That’s when things got a little more interesting.
We got off the plane in lacksidaisical order and filed into the airport. In the entry hall, there were four windows for passport control. Two were for officials, one for nationals, and one for other internationals. Predictably, the longest lines were for nationals and internationals. The officials went through quickly and without problems. Two windows for them, mind you, and there were far fewer officials than anyone else. The Nationals line was, like the scene at the airport, a mad press of humanity trying desperately to get in as if they would somehow be left behind in the airport if they didn’t get through first. The Internationals lines was an orderly but irritated, sweating and grumbling queue. I was last in the line. After all the officials (all ten of them) had their passports stamped, I asked the guy in the airport shirt if some of us in the long line could pass through that window.
“Oh no Madame. That line is only for officials.”
“Yes, but all the officials have gone through, and this line is very long. Things would go faster if some of us went through that line. I’ve seen this done before elsewhere.”
“Oh no Madame. That line is only for officials. He only has the stamp for officials and cannot use the stamp for non-officials.”
“Ah so it is a problem of the stamp.”
“Yes Madame. The problem is the stamp.”
So, after a long humid wait in line, I arrived at the window, handed over my passport, gave the guy some “money for a Coke” and looked for my expediter. Expediters are very important individuals to the traveler in a place like Congo. The bureaucracy, corruption, chaos, and confusion are overwhelming to most people, and if you don’t know your way around, you can be ripped off or worse. Expediters understand the system, speak the language, pay the bribes, and basically grease the cranky wheels of the baggage claim/customs system. They are wonderful. This one did his job in the airport, and then turned me over to a driver who was not the one I was expecting, but rather a friend of the one I was expecting.
Kinshasa
Having been assured repeatedly that the building where my friend lived (also the building where USAID, the US’s international development agency, had its offices) was remarkably easy to find and well-known, I was confident that when I told the driver where I was going he would just know and take me there and I would be on my way to a shower soon enough. Not so fast! How could I possibly expect a taxi driver, sent by CRS, previously informed of where I would be going, to actually know where I was going? Silly American girl! Why would he know? Moreover, why would he bother telling you that he didn’t know? So, instead we drove around Kinshasa, perhaps the biggest dump of a city I’ve ever seen, periodically asking directions of other people who also didn’t know where this famous building was. Finally, I get my friend on the phone and she finds someone who explained to the driver to take me somewhere else to meet her. After a very long drive, I was deposited at a club with my friend, who then graciously took me to her apartment where I got my much-needed shower.
I didn’t get to see much of Kinshasa, so my opinion on it is of limited validity. It seemed like a more or less livable city, with at least one very nice neighborhood, some grocery stores, some bars and some restaurants. The apartments I was in were nice, as were the people I met while there, even the Marines! However, at the same time, the city is a pit, full of ridiculously dilapidated infrastructure, crumbling Soviet-style buildings, overgrown brush, and garbage.
From my friend’s apartment window, you could see the olive-green expanse of the Congo river just below the Stanley Pool. Looking out the kitchen window, I felt a strange sensation of being at the edge of reality. The Congo had settled into my mind’s eye as a near-mythical place characterized by terrifying history, fascinating culture, stunning art, and burning fever. Like a child filling in the rough forms of a coloring-book, I was filling in the blanks of my understanding of this place, and by proxy, of one of the most fascinating and intense parts of Africa. Walking along the bank of the Congo the next day with three friends, I had the feeling again when I heard through the silence the subtle roar of the rapids downriver. This river has caused and witnessed so much death in its history – the sound of the boiling rapids was its perfect anthem.
“It can’t be done”
Everywhere I’ve traveled in the developing world I’ve experienced the “It can’t be done” phenomenon in various cultural manifestations. However, nowhere is it so amusingly and frustratingly prominent as here. I’ll give two more examples of “it can’t be done”, Kinshasa style.
1. On Saturday night, my friend ordered pizza. I asked that whatever she got for me not have mushrooms on it. So, she ordered, they told her it would be there in ten minutes. One hour and two phone calls later, the pizza came. With mushrooms. Another phone call – why didn’t you make the pizza without mushrooms? Because it can’t be done. Ah. I see. Upon pain of death, mushrooms apparently must appear on all pizzas. How silly of us to think otherwise!
2. On Sunday, this same friend and I went to the recreation club to which she belongs to get lunch. Non-members have to pay for use of the rec facilities, but should be able to eat in the restaurant without paying extra. After she signed in, we went to the restaurant, and all the tables on the veranda were full. So, we found a table next to the pool, and asked for an umbrella. The guy was more than happy to oblige with the umbrella, but he asked if we were both members. My friend said that she was and I was her guest. So, he asked me to pay to use the pool. We explained that we were just eating from the restaurant. He told us that it was not possible for me to eat from the restaurant without paying for use of the facilities. My friend pointed out that she has had guests there before, and knows that they can eat without paying for the facilities. He insisted that it was not possible. He said maybe if we were sitting on the veranda instead of on the grass it would be different. My friend asked if there were different menus for the veranda and for the grass. No, of course not. Well, being as there are no tables on the veranda, why can’t we just sit and eat at this table on the grass? It is not possible. So, we asked the manager. He said there was no problem. Then the original guy comes down to the office and says that My friend the member wasn’t the problem, but I was because I wasn’t a member (yes, me being a problem as usual). The manager said again that there was no problem. We were so tired of the other guy by then though that we just left. So, for any of you who may want to eat there, remember that if you aren’t a member, you can only eat on the veranda, not on the grass.
Issues
Things with my organization have also been a bit chaotic since I arrived. Kinshasa is very expensive. I was told that it is recommended that you bring $500 with you in cash to tide you over until you can get per diem. However, it was too late for me to get an advance from HQ, so I could only bring $100 of my own money. Even though the Congo office knew this was the case, I didn’t get any advance from them or per diem to cover my weekend. Not too much of a big deal, but $100 is just about enough to cover one day’s expenses in Kinshasa. I was also given information telling me not to bother bringing sheets or towels, as they were to be provided to me. However, the supervisor told me that I should have brought towels, since those at the place we would be staying were not good. Thanks. So, we had to find a supermarket that was both open on Sunday and sold towels. We did, and two crappy bath towels cost me $26. Some food that I thought it might be nice to take with me set me back another $30 (two packs of instant soup, a can of Coke, macaroni, and some granola bars).
To Kindu
This morning, I was supposed to be waiting in front of my friend’s building at 5:30 am. Now, those of you who know me know that I hate being awake before 10am, let alone 5:30 am in a household with no coffee. So I waited. And waited. Forty-five minutes later, the guy comes up in the minivan to take me to the UN airport. I was about to give up on him. He just got confused and thought that I was someone else, and instead of listening to his instructions, he just did what he felt like doing. I’m sure that he woke up some poor other woman who was just trying to get some sleep. If she ever reads this, I’m very sorry!
All flights for humanitarian agencies, the UN, and diplomats are managed through the Mission Observatoire des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC), the UN mission here. They have an airport that is nicer than the national airport, even though it is “temporary”, and the flight to Kisangani was in a normal-sized passenger plane. They don’t cater on the flight, but in the waiting area, they have decent espresso and some light food. I met a very nice Italian guy who works for another organization, and is familiar with my organization. We chatted, smoked a cigarette, and had some espresso. The flight was uneventful, and left us off at the Kisangani airport. I gather from the architecture that this was originally a regular national airport at some time. Whenever things were closer to normal here. Now, although the area used by the UN are clean and well-organized, the walls of the building are covered in mold, the lights don’t work, and the waiting area is made up of four rows of plastic chairs. Flight information is written on a dry-erase board next to the only gate for check-in. The baggage claim area is just a space on the floor by the door. The flight to Kindu will check in at 3 pm, and leave at 4 will check in at 3 pm, and leave at 4 or 4:30. It is now 12:02 pm. I could be flying on a puddle-jumper plane (which could really mean anything smaller than a commuter jet) or on a helicopter. My fingers are crossed for the helicopter!
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
It wasn’t a helicopter, but I was the only one on the plane! I flew on a plane called an Antonov. They are made in Russia or the Ukraine, and are mostly used to carry commodities and a few passengers. The inside is big enough to carry two cars. You would probably recognize them as the type of plane that has a ramp in the back that you can drive up on. There aren’t regular seats inside some of them, just benches with seatbelts, and needless to say there aren’t any flight attendants. The flight was smooth, though, and I got to wear ear protectors which made me feel very technical. I sat on one of the benches, and the rest of the plane was packed with food commodities, like potatoes, onions, wheat, and corn.
The Congo and the Forest
There is no way to explain the beauty of the view from the plane window. For as far as the eye could see, there was unbroken forest: deep green and shadowy, a clear inspiration for belief in magic and for fear. Through this beautiful and mysterious canopy winds the great Congo River, like a gleaming bronze ribbon. The section of river over which we flew was mostly calm and appeared navigable, but there were no boats on it that I could see. It is fed by smaller rivers that quilt the forest, noticeable only because of the slight indentation that they make in the green canopy. I was almost disappointed when we touched down into the reality of Kindu.
Kindu
I was met by the regional emergency coordinator, the base manager and the head of Caritas Kindu at the airport, and they took me to the office to introduce me to everyone. The office is in a decent building on the second floor. We share it with Caritas Kindu. Everyone seemed nice, I found my desk and mailbox, and then we left for dinner at the Procure. The food was typically African, and not bad at all. We ate and relaxed with the Bishop, the Vicar, and a couple of others.
After dinner, three colleagues and myself went to the MONUC headquarters for a beer, since I had just arrived and the regional emergency coordinator was going to leave the next day. Any of you who have been to Loki or another UN humanitarian camp know what these places are like. We sat at a long table full of other development and humanitarian workers, apparently from all over the world. The lingua franca was French, but some of us spoke English, too. The beer felt great, and everyone seemed nice enough. I’ll get into this scene more as I get to know it better.
Last night, I slept at the Procure of the diocese. The Procure is like a hostel for traveling priests, other religious, and people, like me, who work with the Church. It was clean and the food was edible at dinner. The room was fine, except perhaps the most important part, the bed. It was a military cot more or less. I barely slept all night, and today I’m a bit hazy.
One project we are going to do is to rebuild two bridges between Kindu, where I am, and Kailo, a town north of here. The people in Kailo have been almost entirely isolated due to the destruction of these bridges. The only way into the town now is by plane or helicopter. It is estimated by the local organization that we are thinking of partnering with on this that due to a lack of hygiene the death rate is 5 people a day. There are only 11,000 inhabitants of Kailo. While this is horrible, I don’t really understand the statistic. The proposal that cites it does not cite how the author arrived at it or where they found it. It doesn’t really say anything tangible about how these people are dying. Furthermore, I’m wondering why they are dying so fast when most Congolese live without hygiene systems and aren’t dying at the rate of 5 a day.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
The “You don’t speak French (or whatever language) well, so you must be stupid” Phenomenon
This particular quirk is not specific to the Congo, it is found worldwide. However, it has been years since I’ve experienced it myself, since it’s been a while since I’ve lived somewhere where I didn’t speak the common language well.
It goes like this. You ask a simple question, most likely correctly or close enough to be understood, and the person you ask treats you like a complete idiot. Some examples:
When I was studying in Argentina, I was just starting to speak Spanish. I asked my host mother where the iron was to iron a shirt or pants or whatever. Instead of just showing me where the iron was, she also commenced to instruct me in the fine art of ironing, pantomiming exactly how one goes about ironing whatever it was I had in exquisite dramatic detail, as though I had never seen an iron before in my life, let alone actually used one. The same thing happened with my roommate in the apartment to which I later moved when I asked where the washing machine was, but she went one step further and proceeded to explain how the light switch worked as well. You would have thought that I had just woken up from a 500 year sleep and couldn’t fathom modern technology.
So, today I was working on an Excel spreadsheet that will capture the monitoring and evaluation data for one of the projects we are doing. I made some of the cells automatic, and wanted to make sure that everything worked, so I asked the project officer for some of the already filled-in questionnaires. He didn’t get me, since I really was just making up the words as I went along, so I asked for help from a visiting engineer who supposedly speaks English. Instead of just telling me the words, he explained how questionnaires work, that there are some already filled-in (which I clearly already knew), that you could put the data from them into Excel (no shit – I guess that’s why I was using Excel and already had the spreadsheet for tracking the questionnaires made up), and that the word for questionnaire was questionnaire, which I already knew and had already used in our conversation several times. “Ok, madame?” Yes, fine, but are there some filled-in questionnaires that I could have please? Again with the same explanations as above as if I was some kind of nitwit. I never got the questionnaires. Something similar is happening with my supervisor here and the cell phone, but not as bad. I’m just convinced that he thinks that cell phones in the US are completely different than here.
Anyway, we bagged work early today because Abbot François gave us Holy Thursday afternoon and Good Friday off. I’m sitting in the monastery where we are living right now, since we don’t yet have an apartment. It is hot. Today makes me think of the part of the Heart of Darkness by Conrad where Marlow talks about “stony hills ablaze with heat” and later, “The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.” That is exactly what it feels like to day. My skin can’t sweat fast enough to keep me even a little bit cool. But to make it all Africa, to make it perfect and livable and gorgeous, to make it tangible, the choir is practicing for Easter in the cathedral next door. Their fantastic harmonies blow like a breeze through the air. It feels like time only moves at the encouragement of their song’s rhythm. Their singing is like a view of the African landscape: broad, colorful, and full of texture. Of course my concert is cut short by a chainsaw: the brothers have a project. Hmmm.
Friday, April 09, 2004
The annoying African day
1. I did my laundry yesterday, and hung it outside to dry, so that I would have some clean clothes to take with me to Goma. Today I went to look for them, and they were in a bucket, in a ball, soaked. Apparently the caretaker of the monastery decided to take them off the line after they were only there for two hours. Great. So, I picked out two things that were almost dry, and put the rest on the line.
2. The bread for breakfast was stale. It’s terrible bread anyway, and even worse when stale. I can deal with stale bread if I can make it into French toast or toast of any kind, or bread pudding, but since I’m not in charge of the monastery kitchen, I just tried to chew my way through a couple of pieces.
3. The Engineer, who said that he would be ready to be picked up any time after 6am was not ready when we went to get him. Then…
4. He brought a box of bushmeat with him that filled the vehicle with an odor of decay. I thought that something had died in the car before we pinpointed the source. We drove all the way to the airport with the stink, wondering whether the rather proper Swiss UN guys would even let the dead animal on the plane. They did, and thankfully it was a normal plane where the baggage and the seating area were separated.
5. We arrived in Kisangani, thinking that we were 1/3 of the way finished our trip, but NO! There were other problems. We tried to check in for our onward flight to Goma via Bukavu and Kigali (yes, the capital of Rwanda), and were turned away by one of the rudest people I’ve ever come across. He told us that the flight was full without even looking at our tickets, and then said that there were no more flights that would get us near Goma so we should just go home, but we probably wouldn’t even be able to do that because probably the flight to Kindu wouldn’t come in time. We were flying on the UN system, because it is free for NGOs, and this guy worked for them. Unbelievable. He was really rude, especially to our Senegalese boss. So, we cooled down a bit, and then tried to arrange something, and finally got a private flight ($126 per person each way for a 1 hour flight) directly to Goma. We ended up getting in earlier than we would have with the UN, but it was irritating because we had to pay. And it was raining in Kisangani, so we were wet. And there was no food so we were hungry.
While this is a particularly bad example of the Irritating African Day, there are many other examples, and also examples of the Irritating Latin American or Asian day that aren’t too different. In addition to the larger infuriating moments, there are the ever-present smaller irritations that make it nearly unbearable, like the fact that you have to go through immigration in each city you land in on private airlines, or that the local police try to get bribes from you by grabbing your ticket from your hand and making you wait to get it back until your flight is gone or you pay them, etc. I’m not sure why this happens, but it can really turn you into a jerk if you let it get to you. In small part, it has to do with everyone trying to make themselves as important as possible in their small little job, and with knowing that they can get bribes, and with bureaucracy, but there seems to be some kind of lack of dignity associated with it as well. Add to all this the heat and dust and rain and hunger and you get a recipe for a serious temper tantrum that will only make things worse.
Goma
We arrived at Goma to the welcome face of the Caritas Goma expediter. As I mentioned before, expediters are wonderful amazing people on whom your ability to do most things depends. Eddy is also the head of logistics for Caritas Goma, and is great. He whisked us (as much as one can whisk anything in the Goma airport) through immigration, health, and customs, onto the car, and worked out our return flights, hotel, car needs, and everything for our whole weekend here.
Goma was hit a couple of years ago with a volcanic eruption. Being the Congo, you can still see the black scar left by the lava within and around the city, pouring silently and ashen down the side of the stunning volcano by the city; very little has been done to rebuild since the disaster. It may be for the black volcanic gravel that paves the entire city, or maybe because it is the rainy season here above the equator (it is the dry season in Kindu, south of the equator), but Goma appears darker, although busier and more organized than Kindu. There is something a bit shadowy and sinister in this dimness that doesn’t necessarily make one feel too comfortable. Our hotel is quite nice, though, and even has TV and hot water. The food at the restaurant was good, and served in a timely fashion, and was affordable! I’m looking forward to a dinner out, pizza maybe, and some dancing!
Saturday, April 10, 2004
The Coco Jambo and the Ladies of the Night
So, last night, my two colleagues and I went to a local bar around the corner from our restaurant after dinner for some drinks and maybe dancing. It is actually a nice and comfortable bar with fun music and regularly-served drinks. We did quite a bit of people-watching at first; the place is frequented by better-off Congolese, MONUC people, and people like ourselves from international humanitarian organizations. It is also frequented by prostitutes, who make the whole scene a little more interesting, and a little more surreal.
Our Base Manager is a married older man from Senegal. His wife is still there, but he’s very faithful to her. So, when he attracted a rather persistent prostitute, he was mortified. She kept asking him to dance, and when he repeated that he didn’t want to because he was tired, she said that instead she’d give him a massage to liven him up. The poor man was mortified. She was very determined, and kept coming back throughout the night.
In addition to hitting on men, the prostitutes dance. They dance in predictably “sexy” ways, aiming, one would suppose, to attract customers (usually MONUC guys and international businessmen). The strange thing about this isn’t that it happens, but rather, how the performance is carried out. Most of the girls stand in front of the mirror on the wall at the back of the dance floor and watch themselves dance. So, instead of looking out at the crowd or dancing with each other, they line up like students in a dance class in front of a mirror and watch themselves intently. Very strange.
Just like anywhere else, prostitutes here get a bad name in their communities, are looked down upon by most people, and are more likely to be HIV positive. However, you have to give these girls a bit of credit – they are most likely the most ambitious and financially successful members of their villages, and they had the initiative to find a profitable business. While I’m not sure that the inevitable self-destruction that comes with such a profession is really all that better than the poverty they came from, one can clearly see the draw. They wear nice clothes, make a lot of money, get gifts from rich foreigners, get to eat out at nice places, etc. Most are desperately trying to support their families.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
There is a military contingent in our hotel, meeting about some kind of inclusion of the former rebels into the national military. I have to admit that they freak me out. They’re young guys, slouching about, probably have a hair-trigger…
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Meeting with the Donor
In this business, field office and headquarters offices alike complain that there is a disconnect between the realities of the field and the requirements of managing a worldwide program from a city in the US. This is true not only of NGOs like the one I work for, but also of the donors who finance our programs.
As you can imagine, it isn’t easy determining who has disarmed and decided to return for good to civilian life and who is only claiming to do so, or planning to do so for a little bit. Huge logistical, cultural, and practical obstacles prevent us from being able to guarantee that a soldier who gives up a gun to the UN and states that he wants to go back to his village is actually going to go back and stay back. However, we still need to ensure that these people get the humanitarian assistance they deserve, such as non-food household items, in order to decrease the likelihood that they will take up arms against us for not fulfilling promises, or against the government because they disarmed and then couldn’t make a living.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Lokando and other things
Yesterday, we went up to Lokando, a town down river (north of here) on the Congo. We went up to arrange the set-up for the distribution we’re going to do there on Friday, and also to make sure that things were calm. Normally, most of the towns we work in are pretty calm, but a couple of days ago, a battalion of MPs had been assigned to the town, along with an appointed “governor” from the west of the country. To you, this may seem like no problem, but to the people of Lokando, this is a potential spark for conflict.
Lokando was a center of activity for the Mayi Mayi, the home grown militias that fought against the Rwanda-backed RCD (Rassemblement Congolaise pour le Developpement – Congolese Assembly for Development, which it most certainly was not), considered an invading force. During the last war, the Congolese military was mandated to protect the population and fight the invasion of Rwandan troops and their supporters, but instead, they just fled, raping and pillaging as they went. The rebels or the Mayi Mayi (whoever the opponent of the day was) moved into the towns virtually without a fight, but they found nothing but devastation. It seems to me that more harm was done to this country by their own military than by any rebels or foreign militias, although all three groups played a significant part in the destruction of the Congo.
So, now Lokando, a formerly Mayi Mayi town, hosts a Congolese Army MP Battalion and a governor appointed to them by a leader who lives far away in Kinshasa, and who was a leader in the Mobutu era, which makes him less popular. When we met with the leader of the MPs, he asked us if we could bring tools for the men and their families when we came to do the distribution on Friday. This is where we get to the heart of why the military pillaged their people instead of fighting: lack of national sentiment, lack of pay, and the culture of “Article 15” or “debrouillez-vous” (make your own way however you can).
During the Mobutu years, the country was kept together tenuously by the magnetic personality of Mobutu and his ruthlessness with perceived threats to his power. However, in order to maintain his power, he played regions and ethnic groups off one another, deepening rather than healing feelings of antagonism between sub-national groups. He systematically kept the focus of loyalty on himself rather than on the country, in essence making of the national army a private security force with no special feelings toward their country. Since they lacked nationalism/patriotism, when the country was beset by incursions from neighboring countries, the armed forces felt no responsibility for protecting the people at the possible expense of their own lives. This was compounded by the fact that they were (and still are) paid very little, if anything.
In spite of the fact that Mobutu and his cronies were making billions by gutting formerly profitable enterprises of the Congo, including the mineral companies that were nationalized under the policy of Zairization, none of that money was seen by the populace, including the military. If they were paid at all, the recruits were paid little, and had to purchase their uniforms out of the small salary they were given, as well as support their families. No wonder that when push came to shove, they were willing to use the guns and power they had by the nature of their jobs to steal from anyone they came across. They had no loyalty to the people, so stealing from them became normal. In fact, the military frequently operated as though the population was obligated to turn everything over to them, including houses, food, clothing, tools, everything.
“Debrouillez-vous” means something like “make your own way, manage for yourself”. The trend began in the south of the country during the Mobutu era. Rather than wait for the state to provide or for things to get better, people were encouraged to make their own way. This sounds well and good, but without rule of law, this turned into a horrible degeneration of the work ethic, massive corruption and theft, and a breakdown in society. This culture is also active in the military. Because they are paid so little, they are expected to figure out how to get along on their own, even if this means pillaging. The leadership not only overlooks this behavior, but they also participate in it and encourage it. There are of course more positive examples of this mentality, such as the incredible black market in Kinshasa, but for the most part, it is played out in kleptocracy and petty corruption.
So, given all that, it is not surprising that the military commander asked for tools from us. He will never get them from Kinshasa no matter how many times he asks. He is expected by his higher-ups to find a way to get them himself. He has little if any money, and how many troops and their families to look after while keeping mutiny at bay. He probably feels that he and his men are entitled to whatever they can lay their hands on. This may cause us problems after the distribution. I’m sure that the soldiers won’t cause problems on the day of the distribution, but we have already heard stories of soldiers in other towns going at night with guns to steal items from the kits that we have given to families. What can we do? We can’t just stop giving out the kits because the people need the things, and the military doesn’t get to everyone (or not just yet). But we most certainly cannot give out kits to the military – that is the purview of the government. There is actually plenty of money to pay these guys at the national level, the mystery is where it leaks out on the way down.
Just take a second to imagine what it would be like to live in constant fear that the soldiers in or near your town will come into your village drunk with their guns, rape you and your children, take everything you own, and burn down your house because you didn’t give it all up voluntarily. There are villages where this has happened more than 20 times. There were two big “Pillages”, in 1991 and 1993, but in both cases, many villages were run into the forest several times. I can’t even begin to imagine the horrifying fear that the Congolese must live with each night. The very people who are supposed to be your proud protectors are armed villains sponsored by your government who will never be called to answer for their actions. Each night, you would lay your head down but not to sleep, just to wait for the banging at the door. Every sound becomes a footstep, voices of soldiers, the cry of your daughter. It would be enough to drive you mad. And yet, the people return to their villages and rebuild their houses and get on with their lives. What else is there to do?
When the military and rebels pillaged the towns during the conflicts, they also frequently raped women and girls. In the Congo, there are no rape hotlines, no kind nurses and doctors at hospitals, no access to the drugs that can help you avert HIV or other infections, no “morning-after” pill, no counselors. Here, women are frequently ousted if not from their communities, then from their homes, divorced by their husbands because they have been raped. These women get no treatment, unless it comes at the hand of an NGO. Not only do they have to go through the normal struggle that any women goes through after such an experience, but they have to do it alone, with almost no one to rely on for friendship, love, and support. Here, Cooperatizione Italiana, the Italian organization, is working with these women to try to help them recover and get back on their feet.
Privacy
There is none here. I’m going crazy. I can’t even have a telephone conversation in private. There is always someone listening. When I heard that my friend’s mother passed away on Sunday night, I didn’t even have a place to cry alone. No where. It is really getting to me. I feel sometimes like I’m peeing in a store window.
Friday, November 28, 2003
11/2002
Nairobi, Kenya
As planned, I went with my co-workers Andrea and Fred and some 15 Sudanese consultants to the Kenyan town of Lokichoggio, on the border with Sudan, for a two-day training session on field research for conflict and peace-building analysis that would prepare the consultants to go into the field in Southern Sudan to carry out an assessment of the conflict and peace conditions there. I was to receive some of the training, as well as to help with administrative things that inevitably crop up at the last minute in such cases, such as getting immigration papers for people who have known that they needed them for over a month but apparently thought it would be better to wait until the last minute, typing training materials on the laptop (with unreliable electricity), etc. After having taken Practical Research Methods with Grace at SAIS, the training was not new material to me, but watching and listening to the Sudanese was a good learning experience, and it is always good to learn from other trainers.
Loki, as the town is affectionately (or not) called by the aid/development workers and others who pass through it, is very hot and very flat, except for the two mountains that seem to have been left behind by the others that went south long ago, which stand on either side of the “town”. The airport is a long runway and some plywood offices and the customs-bonded warehouse that stores the food aid that gets dropped over the towns of Southern Sudan. All along one side of the tarmac sit neat piles of bushel bags of grain, separated by square pieces of plywood, on shipping palettes, lined up and ready to be loaded onto the white planes marked with “UN” in bright blue letters. The “town” is a maze of zinc and plywood shacks, concrete buildings, and the grass huts of the Turkana. There are some stores that cater to the locals, and other stores that cater to the aid people. After passing through the town, you get to the compounds. For the first training session, we were all staying at the compound of Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), which is a sprawling, flat, sandy space dotted with wood cabins painted pink or brown. The cabins stand around a central area where the mess and the bar and the billiards rooms are. While the accommodations were very plain and the food was nothing special, it was comfortable. There were a mix of people staying there, from those hard-core MSF-France types to the upper-middle range of Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) leaders, to Sudanese and Kenyan and European aid workers.
Across the street there is the 748 compound, a much fancier establishment, with beautifully appointed “tukuls” (round mud or concrete huts with grass roofs) that each had their own bathroom and fans. The food there was catered by the Java House, an American-style restaurant that is based in Nairobi. The bar is much nicer, and the clientele include high-ranking SPLA and Southern government leaders, bush pilots, higher-ranking American development people, and some other characters. The most interesting place in Loki is the Operation Lifeline Sudan/UN compound. It is like a city in a city, with streets of tukuls for those staying there, a restaurant, a disco (!!), and more offices of OLS-member NGOs (which Pact is not). You need a passport of a UN country to get in. That is where the security briefings are held by security people known as Sierra 1-8. I think that there is something wrong with an operation that identifies its employees as numbers, but maybe I’m missing something.
The people in Loki are a mix of aid and development people on their way into or out of Sudan, bush pilots (who are really odd characters), SPLA/M officials, Sudanese refugees, Kenyan development workers, and the Turkana, a tribe that lives in the northwestern part of Kenya. Starting at around 6, people settle into bar stools at the various compounds, and proceed to get toasted. After having been to the Sudan, I think I can see the appeal, but with the heat and the exhaustion of the hurry-up-and-wait rigamarole that we went through each day, sleeping and drinking a couple of liters of water sounded more inviting than beer, which at NPA tends to be warm, even when it is supposedly cold.
As those of you who have worked in the developing world can imagine, getting together a team of about 20 consultants was not an easy task, and it of course did not turn out quite the way we expected. So, since a couple of people didn’t show up, Paul Murphy, the program director, decided that it would be a good idea for me to go. This had been discussed as a possibility when I first go to Nairobi, but I didn’t really see it happening, considering I knew nothing about Sudan and maybe even less about conflict transformation. But, it happened, and I was glad that I had packed for a couple of weeks just in case. That night, as we sat around a table at the bar at NPA, we heard the shelling of a town across the border. The next morning, I packed my things and hopped on a plane to my team’s first destination, Pochalla, in Pibor County, on the border of Southern Sudan and Ethiopia.
Before telling what Pochalla was like, I’ll say a bit about what I expected Sudan to be like. I expected desert, heat, dust, sand, distended bellies, flies, horrible odors, dead animals, constant shelling…probably what many people imagine when the think of Southern Sudan, if indeed they think about it at all. I expected the Sudanese to be hardened and sullen, angry. I expected to be mostly uncomfortable for the ten days of my stint. I expected awful food, little water, uncomfortable beds, snakes, and sleepless nights wondering what was about to sneak into my tukul. What I found was some of that, and something completely different.
We flew into Pochalla over some mountains and a couple of rivers. The airstrip was lined with tall green and brown grass, and was barely visible until we were actually touching down. I looked out the window and saw a knot of very tall, very dark people, men, women, and children, in worn second-hand western clothes, waiting for the plane. It must have been the most amusing and promising time of the day. Who was on the plane? Who was staying in Pochalla? What were they bringing? Is any of it for me? The pilots deposited the four of us into the hands of World Relief, our hosts for the next several days, and we piled into the car for the short ride to the World Relief compound.
Our team was made up of three Sudanese and me. Mama Ayen is from Bahr el Ghazal, the area that was most ravaged in the late 80’s by the Northern army and the two famines of the 70’s and early 80’s. She is Dinka, and is sweet but tough, and has a dream of opening a school for girls in her area. She is about my Mom’s age, and became like a mother to me while we were in the field, introducing me gently to Sudanese culture, and taking care of me when I was disoriented, sick, or sad. Elizabeth is also a Dinka, but from the East Bank of the Nile, from the town of Kongor north of Bor. She works for our partner organization, the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC). Elizabeth has four children, and is an intelligent and capable development worker with a degree from a university in Nigeria. Marshal is an SPLA commander on leave who just received his BA in business from Makelle University in Ethiopia. He is almost 40, but looks like an 18-year old. He is completely in love with his wife, and devoted to their children. Marshall has become a very good friend of mine, and is a committed, honest, and hard-working man.
At World Relief, we were installed in our tukuls, which had simple beds equipped with essential mosquito nets. The food was delicious. Pochalla is green and has beautiful flowers growing everywhere. Across the river, we could see Ethiopia. Everyone was very nice and made us feel at home.
That afternoon, we met with the commissioner. He assured us that the only major conflict the town faced was with the Murlei. Pochalla is inhabited by an ethnic group called the Anyuak. They are one of the smaller groups, and span the border between the Sudan and Ethiopia. The Murlei they were complaining about live under Government of Sudan control in Pibor. This group allegedly raids their cattle, kills them, and abducts their children. In fact, this kind of raiding is common among most of the ethnic groups of Southern Sudan, and has been for many generations, and is characterized by shifting alliances between groups depending on where the flood or drought of this year has hit, and which groups the GoS is encouraging in order to divide the South. Only with the introduction of light arms due to the broader North-South conflict did these conflicts become so drastically deadly. Over time, the Anyuak have limited their cultivation and supposedly the number of cattle they keep. The commissioner made arrangements for us to meet with the local women’s group, the chiefs, the farmers, and the Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the area, who are mostly Dinka.
The women’s group began by telling us of the Murlei attacks in which they have lost their children. Some women lost all of their children and were widowed by the conflicts. After we exhausted the stories of the Murlei and the impact of widowhood and orphaning of children, another issue we weren’t quite expecting cropped up when one of the older women began to speak accusingly of the local women’s treatment of the IDP women. She began to tell of several incidents that happened between them, but when the situation became heated, we decided that it would be better to broach the subject separately with each group. We met with the IDPs the next day, and heard of numerous injustices carried out against them by the local population, including beating and imprisonment, the theft of money they earned, their exclusion from aid and development, and the shunning of women and children from wells and schools. Overall, both this situation and that with the Murlei carved out an indelible impression on me. People can endure so much. I was amazed at what so many of the Anyuak and Dinka had come to see as a permanent fact of life. They herded cattle; others raided the cattle and killed them. Some people took their children. Yes, it is awful, but that is just the way it is. The others told the same story, belying the commissioner’s rosy portrait of the relationship between the locals and the IDPs.
After Pochalla, we hopped back on the plane and were whisked to Panyagor, a completely different kind of place. Panyagor was much more what I had expected of Sudan. In the rainy season, it is a swamp, but we got there in the dry season, when it is a flat, hot, dry, frying pan, swarming with flies and killer bees. The people of Panyagor and the surrounding towns are Dinka, and they, too, recounted stories of Murlei raids, also blaming them on the GoS-controlled area of Pibor. Some of the Dinka in this area practice scarification, when the skin is cut in distinctive designs (in the case of the Dinka Bor, in a V-shape on the forehead), and caused to scar permanently in that design. Among more traditional people, it is a sign of beauty. Some Dinka Bor also remove some of the bottom teeth, and having top teeth that sit horizontally out of the mouth is considered beautiful. An orthodontist would become suicidal among them.
In Panyagor, we stayed in the CARE compound, which was not as comfortable as World Relief, but was nice. The CARE guys mostly sat around all day writing reports about work that I didn’t see them do and composing emails that they would send over the Bushmail system (email over the VHF radio – wonders never cease) before going to bed at night. It was sooooo hot. The commissioner of Panyagor is a good man, and a friend of Marshall’s. He set up some meetings for us, and gave us a goat to welcome us. Yum. Goat meat. Interesting. No, I didn’t try it. I know, I know, I should be more sensitive, but I really didn’t feel like arguing with my stomach.
Again, we heard stories of cattle raiding, child abduction, and village destruction. The enemies of the Dinka in this area are Nuer and Murlei, and most of the crises are blamed on the GoS, lack of water, and competition for grazing areas. We were also told about the split between John Garang, the leader of the mainstream SPLA, and Riek Machar, the Nuer commander who married Emma McCune, the crazy British aid worker. This split caused indescribable massacres in the area around Panyagor. The leaders of each village around Panyagor had compiled lists of the dead and abducted when they heard we were coming, and handed their lists of horror to us when we arrived. There is no way to explain how you can literally see in people’s eyes the trauma caused by living in constant fear of violence and preparation for defense or revenge, the brand of hellish violence that marks them forever. But nonetheless, the people are so humble and welcoming. Everywhere we went, they offered us tea, the best seats, and the best part of the shade.
One day, we drove from Panyagor to one of the villages, Poktap, which is essentially an army garrison and the associated families, right on the front lines of the North-South conflict, on the site of the company town when the government of the North was supposedly trying to build the Jonglei canal, which would relieve the pressure from flooding and irrigate part of the north. Of course, the canal was never finished, and the people of the village mostly live in the containers that were used to bring in equipment. All around are abandoned CATs, cranes, and other machinery. Also, one can see anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, and other types of arms, which litter the landscape. Barefoot soldiers walk around in whatever kind of camouflage or makeshift uniform they can paste together, with automatic rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. The drive out to Poktap was an experience, too. The “road’ was nothing of the sort. For most of the drive, two dusty tracks could barely be seen in the grass that was taller than I and stretched for as far as the eye can see in both directions, only occasionally broken by a random tree or tukul roof. For hours, we bobbled along, getting stuck in the mud a few times. I was sure that I was going to have severe head injuries when the thing was over, and Marshall did sustain an injury to his kidney when he nearly fell out of the back of the truck at one point. No one would ever let me sit in the back, and now I know why. Our driver was older than God. The quiet, unreadable Deng Dit managed the road like the old pro that he is, having been a driver for various organizations and governments since the 1950’s. He used the radio in the car for the first time in his life to call in and tell the organization he worked for that no one else should drive on the road that day because they would get suck, but yes, we would get back for dinner. I wasn’t convinced until we did, but then I was pretty much convinced that Deng Dit could drive successfully on any road at any time in any car.
The day we were to leave Panyagor was a nightmare. The plane’s ETA was supposedly 9. Hours, hot hours, hot hungry hours passed, and the plane did not come. My team (of which I was oddly the administrator) kept asking when the plane was going to come, did I radio Loki, what was the ETA, would we have to stay another day…they asked over and over and over again the same questions, and it was hot and I was hungry and the plane did not come any faster, even though the girl on the other end of the radio in Loki kept telling me it was just about to land. At 5, we finally heard the engine of the plane like a chorus of angels, but when the plane landed, we realized that it may just have been the Sisters of Charity that were taking up the seats we thought were for us. So, Jim, the pilot, stuffed our luggage into the boot and stuffed us into the cabin, where the two nuns, three other aid workers, and the now five of us (Uncle Phillip Aguer of the Sudan Relief and Reconstruction Agency had joined us) into the seven seats. “You sit on the cold box”, Jim told Marshall. And we took off.
Our next destination was Boma, the first town to be liberated by the SPLA in the most recent outbreak of war against the North. We flew into a beautiful, green, hilly area that looked like the Garden of Eden to the five dusty travelers who got off the plane there. It was cool, and had recently rained. Everything was green. But all that was deceptive. It had only just started to rain, and the people had lost their second crop of the season. Famine was on the horizon, and food aid drops marked the hours. The UN planes roar in, circle to clear the target area, then swing back low, aim, and as they open the doors through which the bombs once passed, shoot straight up, perpendicular to the ground, letting the bags of food I saw on the side of the tarmac in Loki slide out, fall off their palettes, and thump on the ground.
In Boma, we stayed at the Sudan Medical Care compound. From the beginning, the camp manager was a jerk. I had already been a bit sick with a stomach thing for a couple of days, and was staying away from meat until I felt better. At SMC, they only served us goat and the Sudanese flat bread kisra. I wanted to be a good sport about it, but I had just had a terrible day, I felt like crap, everyone was talking in Arabic around me (I don’t speak Arabic yet), I was lonely and tired and dirty, and then they served us goat and kisra with tea. This was when I lost it and started to cry. The more I cried, the more frustrated I got with myself because I thought that I was being a whimp crying because things weren’t going my way when I had just spent the last seven days interviewing people who had lived their whole lives with famine and war. So, the more frustrated I got, the more I cried. Finally, Mama Ayen heard me, and came up and hugged me. “Don’t worry”, she said. “You’ve been doing very well, and I know that it isn’t easy.” It made me feel a lot better, and after that, everyone tried to speak a little English to keep me in the conversation, and the cook brought out bananas. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems when you have been born with as much privilege as we all have.
The next day, we went to the last day of a peace meeting among the four tribes of the SPLA-controlled section of Pibor County. They were taking care of some cattle raiding issues that had been cropping up among them, and enforcing some of the resolutions from the last time. It truly did seem like a good-faith effort to keep the peace momentum going at the level of local leadership. There were about ten women there, as well, representing the women’s groups of the various villages. Elizabeth, Marshal, and I interviewed them. It was a fascinating interview, both because it brought up a lot of new facets of the conflicts we had already heard much about, and because the women had some interesting legends built around some of the conflicts.
Boma area is settled by Murlei (who aren’t all the murderous villains that the Dinka and Anyuak would have you believe), Jiye (one of three closely related tribes, along with the Toposa and the Turkana), Dinka Bor, and Kachipo (those are the ones who stretch their women’s lips with the graduated plates. Check national geographic for them). These tribes, like the others in the region, raid one another’s cattle and abduct children. They are also under siege occasionally from outside by the Toposa who live to the south and are encouraged by a man named George Kinga. Kinga claims to have found a “precious stone” in the Boma mountains in Kachipo land, and wants the Toposa to push the Kachipo out so he can mine it. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’ve been told everything from a new, as-yet-unnamed stone to uranium to sapphires. It might be coltan, the microprocessor stuff, or tanzanite. Who knows. Anyway, he wants it, and is causing a lot of problems to get it. He also tries to hijack the local peace initiatives to manipulate the resolutions in his favor.
The various cultures of Southern Sudan are fascinating. At once they share many common traits and yet are completely different from one another. When I first arrived, I couldn’t tell a Dinka from an Anyuak, but now the difference seems obvious to me. All of the groups are settled, semi-nomadic, and rarely nomadic pastoralists who keep cows as a store of wealth, source of food, and sign of status. Girl children actually have an equal or sometimes higher status than boys, because when they marry, their husbands must pay their families a bride price in cattle. Someone offered Uncle Phillip Aguer 50 cattle for me, which actually isn’t much. I don’t get a whole lot because I’m short and educated. The best women are tall and dumb. Cattle are so important to most of these groups that they will sell their children into indentured servitude or sell them completely to childless families for cattle. Cattle are more likely to get vaccines and health care than children. Due to the desire to have increasing numbers of cattle, the groups are constantly raiding one another’s herds, and there is enormous pressure on water and pastureland. The GoS frequently exploits this culture to weaken the southern rebellion by inciting infighting.
The trade in children is centuries old. According to the people we spoke to, it likely started when the Dinka Bor began to trade the children of their communities who were born with birth defects or other taboo characteristics to the Murlei, who have traditionally been less fertile, for cattle. This was a profitable opportunity, and children eventually became the target of abduction and were a highly desired booty of war. Many people also blame the epidemic infertility that sprung up in the Murlei and Jiye beginning in the 1950’s and 60’s. This infertility is due largely to syphilis. Supposedly, the syphilis was brought in by the British who were stationed near Murlei areas during the war. It is true that this infertility exists, but it is not the main cause of the kidnapping.
Everywhere we went, the Sudanese asked me what Americans think about the war in Sudan. I had to admit that I didn’t think that many of them thought about it at all, and that most wouldn’t be able to find it on a map. That was a very disappointing thing for them to hear. Most southern Sudanese believe that the war they are having with the North is over religion. They blame Islam for all of the evil in the world, and the Northern government for anything bad that happens to them. They love Israel, and hate all of the Arab states. They didn’t believe me when I told them that I had Muslim friends and that there are many Muslims in the United States who weren’t trying to create an Islamic state there, and weren’t at war with the Christians. The love Bush because they believe that he is fighting Islam. Most Southern Sudanese aren’t aware of the global implications of the fact that there is oil and uranium, among other “precious stones” under their soil, and steadfastly refuse to believe that this is anything other than a religious war. This is only one example of a naiveté that is very dangerous in the hands of armed people. Both the North and the SPLA are exploiting that naiveté, as well as the cultural and economic dependence on cattle. There is also an ingrained sense of entitlement and dependence on aid that was constructed bag by bag, dollar by dollar by the huge humanitarian machine that carelessly lorded Western values over cultures and a conflict that defies understanding by outsiders.
After collecting a ton of information, some useful and some useless but interesting, we headed back to Loki for debriefing. I ended up staying in Loki for another week, meeting the other teams as they came back from the field with our French logistics guy, Fred, and then helping Andrea and Paul get everyone debriefed and on a plane home, and then to set up the training for the next round of assessment. Those teams, including Andrea, are in the field now, in Upper Nile, the most screwed up region in a screwed up country.
If you want to read a good book that puts a lot of Southern Sudan in perspective in an eminently readable way, check out Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins. The next time someone asks me why I have to work abroad when there are so many poor in the US, I’m likely to give them a black eye, and then tell them to read that book. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like the poverty of Sudan and countries like it. Being there was like watching some sick experiment that was testing the limits of human strength, dignity, and willingness to live.
Right now, I’m sitting on a comfy bed in air conditioning in an unbelievably luxurious house on the beach in Watamu. Bill, my boss, and his wife, and two co-workers of ours and their adorable kids rented the place for Thanksgiving. It is truly the diametric opposite of what I just came out of, but I have to admit that I needed it. I may talk more about these co-workers and their obsession with servants in my next note. I seriously think that they employ half of Nairobi.
We just ate Thanksgiving dinner, overlooking the Indian Ocean, after a day of scuba diving. It was glorious, but I feel like an ass, honestly. A colonial ass. Kenyan servants made a traditional Thanksgiving meal, and served it, and cleaned it up, as the two kids napped so they wouldn’t get in the way. It was not very real, and I missed being with my family a lot.
This morning, we were thankful especially that we weren’t Israelis and weren’t in the hotel they tend to stay at. Not too far from where we were staying, someone drove a vehicle into a hotel owned by an Israeli and blew it up, killing a bunch of people, of whom the majority were Kenyan. At the same time, an Israeli charter leaving the coastal city of Mombassa (get out your damn map and look it up) was shot at with surface to air missiles. All this in Kenya, and Bush is still staring down Saddam Hussein. I feel cursed to be a witness to history – Hurricane Mitch, the Maoists and the Royal Family massacre in Nepal, and now this.
This was a truly amazing experience. I constantly wished that I could share it with each of you, because it is too big for me to carry on my own. I’m glad that Andrea gets to go, so we will be able to talk about it with each other. It is hard to talk about Sudan with people who have worked there, because most of them have been involved for a long time and are jaded and nonchalant about it, or they are Sudanese and know no other reality. Please ask me any questions about it, because I’m still having trouble digesting it all, and it may help me to think through stuff.
If this makes you jealous or makes you wonder what it is like, get the hell out of your cube and do it. Can’t means won’t. The world is not a scary place – it is just full of people trying to get by, and the thousands of ways they find to do so.
Nairobi, Kenya
As planned, I went with my co-workers Andrea and Fred and some 15 Sudanese consultants to the Kenyan town of Lokichoggio, on the border with Sudan, for a two-day training session on field research for conflict and peace-building analysis that would prepare the consultants to go into the field in Southern Sudan to carry out an assessment of the conflict and peace conditions there. I was to receive some of the training, as well as to help with administrative things that inevitably crop up at the last minute in such cases, such as getting immigration papers for people who have known that they needed them for over a month but apparently thought it would be better to wait until the last minute, typing training materials on the laptop (with unreliable electricity), etc. After having taken Practical Research Methods with Grace at SAIS, the training was not new material to me, but watching and listening to the Sudanese was a good learning experience, and it is always good to learn from other trainers.
Loki, as the town is affectionately (or not) called by the aid/development workers and others who pass through it, is very hot and very flat, except for the two mountains that seem to have been left behind by the others that went south long ago, which stand on either side of the “town”. The airport is a long runway and some plywood offices and the customs-bonded warehouse that stores the food aid that gets dropped over the towns of Southern Sudan. All along one side of the tarmac sit neat piles of bushel bags of grain, separated by square pieces of plywood, on shipping palettes, lined up and ready to be loaded onto the white planes marked with “UN” in bright blue letters. The “town” is a maze of zinc and plywood shacks, concrete buildings, and the grass huts of the Turkana. There are some stores that cater to the locals, and other stores that cater to the aid people. After passing through the town, you get to the compounds. For the first training session, we were all staying at the compound of Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), which is a sprawling, flat, sandy space dotted with wood cabins painted pink or brown. The cabins stand around a central area where the mess and the bar and the billiards rooms are. While the accommodations were very plain and the food was nothing special, it was comfortable. There were a mix of people staying there, from those hard-core MSF-France types to the upper-middle range of Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) leaders, to Sudanese and Kenyan and European aid workers.
Across the street there is the 748 compound, a much fancier establishment, with beautifully appointed “tukuls” (round mud or concrete huts with grass roofs) that each had their own bathroom and fans. The food there was catered by the Java House, an American-style restaurant that is based in Nairobi. The bar is much nicer, and the clientele include high-ranking SPLA and Southern government leaders, bush pilots, higher-ranking American development people, and some other characters. The most interesting place in Loki is the Operation Lifeline Sudan/UN compound. It is like a city in a city, with streets of tukuls for those staying there, a restaurant, a disco (!!), and more offices of OLS-member NGOs (which Pact is not). You need a passport of a UN country to get in. That is where the security briefings are held by security people known as Sierra 1-8. I think that there is something wrong with an operation that identifies its employees as numbers, but maybe I’m missing something.
The people in Loki are a mix of aid and development people on their way into or out of Sudan, bush pilots (who are really odd characters), SPLA/M officials, Sudanese refugees, Kenyan development workers, and the Turkana, a tribe that lives in the northwestern part of Kenya. Starting at around 6, people settle into bar stools at the various compounds, and proceed to get toasted. After having been to the Sudan, I think I can see the appeal, but with the heat and the exhaustion of the hurry-up-and-wait rigamarole that we went through each day, sleeping and drinking a couple of liters of water sounded more inviting than beer, which at NPA tends to be warm, even when it is supposedly cold.
As those of you who have worked in the developing world can imagine, getting together a team of about 20 consultants was not an easy task, and it of course did not turn out quite the way we expected. So, since a couple of people didn’t show up, Paul Murphy, the program director, decided that it would be a good idea for me to go. This had been discussed as a possibility when I first go to Nairobi, but I didn’t really see it happening, considering I knew nothing about Sudan and maybe even less about conflict transformation. But, it happened, and I was glad that I had packed for a couple of weeks just in case. That night, as we sat around a table at the bar at NPA, we heard the shelling of a town across the border. The next morning, I packed my things and hopped on a plane to my team’s first destination, Pochalla, in Pibor County, on the border of Southern Sudan and Ethiopia.
Before telling what Pochalla was like, I’ll say a bit about what I expected Sudan to be like. I expected desert, heat, dust, sand, distended bellies, flies, horrible odors, dead animals, constant shelling…probably what many people imagine when the think of Southern Sudan, if indeed they think about it at all. I expected the Sudanese to be hardened and sullen, angry. I expected to be mostly uncomfortable for the ten days of my stint. I expected awful food, little water, uncomfortable beds, snakes, and sleepless nights wondering what was about to sneak into my tukul. What I found was some of that, and something completely different.
We flew into Pochalla over some mountains and a couple of rivers. The airstrip was lined with tall green and brown grass, and was barely visible until we were actually touching down. I looked out the window and saw a knot of very tall, very dark people, men, women, and children, in worn second-hand western clothes, waiting for the plane. It must have been the most amusing and promising time of the day. Who was on the plane? Who was staying in Pochalla? What were they bringing? Is any of it for me? The pilots deposited the four of us into the hands of World Relief, our hosts for the next several days, and we piled into the car for the short ride to the World Relief compound.
Our team was made up of three Sudanese and me. Mama Ayen is from Bahr el Ghazal, the area that was most ravaged in the late 80’s by the Northern army and the two famines of the 70’s and early 80’s. She is Dinka, and is sweet but tough, and has a dream of opening a school for girls in her area. She is about my Mom’s age, and became like a mother to me while we were in the field, introducing me gently to Sudanese culture, and taking care of me when I was disoriented, sick, or sad. Elizabeth is also a Dinka, but from the East Bank of the Nile, from the town of Kongor north of Bor. She works for our partner organization, the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC). Elizabeth has four children, and is an intelligent and capable development worker with a degree from a university in Nigeria. Marshal is an SPLA commander on leave who just received his BA in business from Makelle University in Ethiopia. He is almost 40, but looks like an 18-year old. He is completely in love with his wife, and devoted to their children. Marshall has become a very good friend of mine, and is a committed, honest, and hard-working man.
At World Relief, we were installed in our tukuls, which had simple beds equipped with essential mosquito nets. The food was delicious. Pochalla is green and has beautiful flowers growing everywhere. Across the river, we could see Ethiopia. Everyone was very nice and made us feel at home.
That afternoon, we met with the commissioner. He assured us that the only major conflict the town faced was with the Murlei. Pochalla is inhabited by an ethnic group called the Anyuak. They are one of the smaller groups, and span the border between the Sudan and Ethiopia. The Murlei they were complaining about live under Government of Sudan control in Pibor. This group allegedly raids their cattle, kills them, and abducts their children. In fact, this kind of raiding is common among most of the ethnic groups of Southern Sudan, and has been for many generations, and is characterized by shifting alliances between groups depending on where the flood or drought of this year has hit, and which groups the GoS is encouraging in order to divide the South. Only with the introduction of light arms due to the broader North-South conflict did these conflicts become so drastically deadly. Over time, the Anyuak have limited their cultivation and supposedly the number of cattle they keep. The commissioner made arrangements for us to meet with the local women’s group, the chiefs, the farmers, and the Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the area, who are mostly Dinka.
The women’s group began by telling us of the Murlei attacks in which they have lost their children. Some women lost all of their children and were widowed by the conflicts. After we exhausted the stories of the Murlei and the impact of widowhood and orphaning of children, another issue we weren’t quite expecting cropped up when one of the older women began to speak accusingly of the local women’s treatment of the IDP women. She began to tell of several incidents that happened between them, but when the situation became heated, we decided that it would be better to broach the subject separately with each group. We met with the IDPs the next day, and heard of numerous injustices carried out against them by the local population, including beating and imprisonment, the theft of money they earned, their exclusion from aid and development, and the shunning of women and children from wells and schools. Overall, both this situation and that with the Murlei carved out an indelible impression on me. People can endure so much. I was amazed at what so many of the Anyuak and Dinka had come to see as a permanent fact of life. They herded cattle; others raided the cattle and killed them. Some people took their children. Yes, it is awful, but that is just the way it is. The others told the same story, belying the commissioner’s rosy portrait of the relationship between the locals and the IDPs.
After Pochalla, we hopped back on the plane and were whisked to Panyagor, a completely different kind of place. Panyagor was much more what I had expected of Sudan. In the rainy season, it is a swamp, but we got there in the dry season, when it is a flat, hot, dry, frying pan, swarming with flies and killer bees. The people of Panyagor and the surrounding towns are Dinka, and they, too, recounted stories of Murlei raids, also blaming them on the GoS-controlled area of Pibor. Some of the Dinka in this area practice scarification, when the skin is cut in distinctive designs (in the case of the Dinka Bor, in a V-shape on the forehead), and caused to scar permanently in that design. Among more traditional people, it is a sign of beauty. Some Dinka Bor also remove some of the bottom teeth, and having top teeth that sit horizontally out of the mouth is considered beautiful. An orthodontist would become suicidal among them.
In Panyagor, we stayed in the CARE compound, which was not as comfortable as World Relief, but was nice. The CARE guys mostly sat around all day writing reports about work that I didn’t see them do and composing emails that they would send over the Bushmail system (email over the VHF radio – wonders never cease) before going to bed at night. It was sooooo hot. The commissioner of Panyagor is a good man, and a friend of Marshall’s. He set up some meetings for us, and gave us a goat to welcome us. Yum. Goat meat. Interesting. No, I didn’t try it. I know, I know, I should be more sensitive, but I really didn’t feel like arguing with my stomach.
Again, we heard stories of cattle raiding, child abduction, and village destruction. The enemies of the Dinka in this area are Nuer and Murlei, and most of the crises are blamed on the GoS, lack of water, and competition for grazing areas. We were also told about the split between John Garang, the leader of the mainstream SPLA, and Riek Machar, the Nuer commander who married Emma McCune, the crazy British aid worker. This split caused indescribable massacres in the area around Panyagor. The leaders of each village around Panyagor had compiled lists of the dead and abducted when they heard we were coming, and handed their lists of horror to us when we arrived. There is no way to explain how you can literally see in people’s eyes the trauma caused by living in constant fear of violence and preparation for defense or revenge, the brand of hellish violence that marks them forever. But nonetheless, the people are so humble and welcoming. Everywhere we went, they offered us tea, the best seats, and the best part of the shade.
One day, we drove from Panyagor to one of the villages, Poktap, which is essentially an army garrison and the associated families, right on the front lines of the North-South conflict, on the site of the company town when the government of the North was supposedly trying to build the Jonglei canal, which would relieve the pressure from flooding and irrigate part of the north. Of course, the canal was never finished, and the people of the village mostly live in the containers that were used to bring in equipment. All around are abandoned CATs, cranes, and other machinery. Also, one can see anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, and other types of arms, which litter the landscape. Barefoot soldiers walk around in whatever kind of camouflage or makeshift uniform they can paste together, with automatic rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. The drive out to Poktap was an experience, too. The “road’ was nothing of the sort. For most of the drive, two dusty tracks could barely be seen in the grass that was taller than I and stretched for as far as the eye can see in both directions, only occasionally broken by a random tree or tukul roof. For hours, we bobbled along, getting stuck in the mud a few times. I was sure that I was going to have severe head injuries when the thing was over, and Marshall did sustain an injury to his kidney when he nearly fell out of the back of the truck at one point. No one would ever let me sit in the back, and now I know why. Our driver was older than God. The quiet, unreadable Deng Dit managed the road like the old pro that he is, having been a driver for various organizations and governments since the 1950’s. He used the radio in the car for the first time in his life to call in and tell the organization he worked for that no one else should drive on the road that day because they would get suck, but yes, we would get back for dinner. I wasn’t convinced until we did, but then I was pretty much convinced that Deng Dit could drive successfully on any road at any time in any car.
The day we were to leave Panyagor was a nightmare. The plane’s ETA was supposedly 9. Hours, hot hours, hot hungry hours passed, and the plane did not come. My team (of which I was oddly the administrator) kept asking when the plane was going to come, did I radio Loki, what was the ETA, would we have to stay another day…they asked over and over and over again the same questions, and it was hot and I was hungry and the plane did not come any faster, even though the girl on the other end of the radio in Loki kept telling me it was just about to land. At 5, we finally heard the engine of the plane like a chorus of angels, but when the plane landed, we realized that it may just have been the Sisters of Charity that were taking up the seats we thought were for us. So, Jim, the pilot, stuffed our luggage into the boot and stuffed us into the cabin, where the two nuns, three other aid workers, and the now five of us (Uncle Phillip Aguer of the Sudan Relief and Reconstruction Agency had joined us) into the seven seats. “You sit on the cold box”, Jim told Marshall. And we took off.
Our next destination was Boma, the first town to be liberated by the SPLA in the most recent outbreak of war against the North. We flew into a beautiful, green, hilly area that looked like the Garden of Eden to the five dusty travelers who got off the plane there. It was cool, and had recently rained. Everything was green. But all that was deceptive. It had only just started to rain, and the people had lost their second crop of the season. Famine was on the horizon, and food aid drops marked the hours. The UN planes roar in, circle to clear the target area, then swing back low, aim, and as they open the doors through which the bombs once passed, shoot straight up, perpendicular to the ground, letting the bags of food I saw on the side of the tarmac in Loki slide out, fall off their palettes, and thump on the ground.
In Boma, we stayed at the Sudan Medical Care compound. From the beginning, the camp manager was a jerk. I had already been a bit sick with a stomach thing for a couple of days, and was staying away from meat until I felt better. At SMC, they only served us goat and the Sudanese flat bread kisra. I wanted to be a good sport about it, but I had just had a terrible day, I felt like crap, everyone was talking in Arabic around me (I don’t speak Arabic yet), I was lonely and tired and dirty, and then they served us goat and kisra with tea. This was when I lost it and started to cry. The more I cried, the more frustrated I got with myself because I thought that I was being a whimp crying because things weren’t going my way when I had just spent the last seven days interviewing people who had lived their whole lives with famine and war. So, the more frustrated I got, the more I cried. Finally, Mama Ayen heard me, and came up and hugged me. “Don’t worry”, she said. “You’ve been doing very well, and I know that it isn’t easy.” It made me feel a lot better, and after that, everyone tried to speak a little English to keep me in the conversation, and the cook brought out bananas. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems when you have been born with as much privilege as we all have.
The next day, we went to the last day of a peace meeting among the four tribes of the SPLA-controlled section of Pibor County. They were taking care of some cattle raiding issues that had been cropping up among them, and enforcing some of the resolutions from the last time. It truly did seem like a good-faith effort to keep the peace momentum going at the level of local leadership. There were about ten women there, as well, representing the women’s groups of the various villages. Elizabeth, Marshal, and I interviewed them. It was a fascinating interview, both because it brought up a lot of new facets of the conflicts we had already heard much about, and because the women had some interesting legends built around some of the conflicts.
Boma area is settled by Murlei (who aren’t all the murderous villains that the Dinka and Anyuak would have you believe), Jiye (one of three closely related tribes, along with the Toposa and the Turkana), Dinka Bor, and Kachipo (those are the ones who stretch their women’s lips with the graduated plates. Check national geographic for them). These tribes, like the others in the region, raid one another’s cattle and abduct children. They are also under siege occasionally from outside by the Toposa who live to the south and are encouraged by a man named George Kinga. Kinga claims to have found a “precious stone” in the Boma mountains in Kachipo land, and wants the Toposa to push the Kachipo out so he can mine it. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’ve been told everything from a new, as-yet-unnamed stone to uranium to sapphires. It might be coltan, the microprocessor stuff, or tanzanite. Who knows. Anyway, he wants it, and is causing a lot of problems to get it. He also tries to hijack the local peace initiatives to manipulate the resolutions in his favor.
The various cultures of Southern Sudan are fascinating. At once they share many common traits and yet are completely different from one another. When I first arrived, I couldn’t tell a Dinka from an Anyuak, but now the difference seems obvious to me. All of the groups are settled, semi-nomadic, and rarely nomadic pastoralists who keep cows as a store of wealth, source of food, and sign of status. Girl children actually have an equal or sometimes higher status than boys, because when they marry, their husbands must pay their families a bride price in cattle. Someone offered Uncle Phillip Aguer 50 cattle for me, which actually isn’t much. I don’t get a whole lot because I’m short and educated. The best women are tall and dumb. Cattle are so important to most of these groups that they will sell their children into indentured servitude or sell them completely to childless families for cattle. Cattle are more likely to get vaccines and health care than children. Due to the desire to have increasing numbers of cattle, the groups are constantly raiding one another’s herds, and there is enormous pressure on water and pastureland. The GoS frequently exploits this culture to weaken the southern rebellion by inciting infighting.
The trade in children is centuries old. According to the people we spoke to, it likely started when the Dinka Bor began to trade the children of their communities who were born with birth defects or other taboo characteristics to the Murlei, who have traditionally been less fertile, for cattle. This was a profitable opportunity, and children eventually became the target of abduction and were a highly desired booty of war. Many people also blame the epidemic infertility that sprung up in the Murlei and Jiye beginning in the 1950’s and 60’s. This infertility is due largely to syphilis. Supposedly, the syphilis was brought in by the British who were stationed near Murlei areas during the war. It is true that this infertility exists, but it is not the main cause of the kidnapping.
Everywhere we went, the Sudanese asked me what Americans think about the war in Sudan. I had to admit that I didn’t think that many of them thought about it at all, and that most wouldn’t be able to find it on a map. That was a very disappointing thing for them to hear. Most southern Sudanese believe that the war they are having with the North is over religion. They blame Islam for all of the evil in the world, and the Northern government for anything bad that happens to them. They love Israel, and hate all of the Arab states. They didn’t believe me when I told them that I had Muslim friends and that there are many Muslims in the United States who weren’t trying to create an Islamic state there, and weren’t at war with the Christians. The love Bush because they believe that he is fighting Islam. Most Southern Sudanese aren’t aware of the global implications of the fact that there is oil and uranium, among other “precious stones” under their soil, and steadfastly refuse to believe that this is anything other than a religious war. This is only one example of a naiveté that is very dangerous in the hands of armed people. Both the North and the SPLA are exploiting that naiveté, as well as the cultural and economic dependence on cattle. There is also an ingrained sense of entitlement and dependence on aid that was constructed bag by bag, dollar by dollar by the huge humanitarian machine that carelessly lorded Western values over cultures and a conflict that defies understanding by outsiders.
After collecting a ton of information, some useful and some useless but interesting, we headed back to Loki for debriefing. I ended up staying in Loki for another week, meeting the other teams as they came back from the field with our French logistics guy, Fred, and then helping Andrea and Paul get everyone debriefed and on a plane home, and then to set up the training for the next round of assessment. Those teams, including Andrea, are in the field now, in Upper Nile, the most screwed up region in a screwed up country.
If you want to read a good book that puts a lot of Southern Sudan in perspective in an eminently readable way, check out Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins. The next time someone asks me why I have to work abroad when there are so many poor in the US, I’m likely to give them a black eye, and then tell them to read that book. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like the poverty of Sudan and countries like it. Being there was like watching some sick experiment that was testing the limits of human strength, dignity, and willingness to live.
Right now, I’m sitting on a comfy bed in air conditioning in an unbelievably luxurious house on the beach in Watamu. Bill, my boss, and his wife, and two co-workers of ours and their adorable kids rented the place for Thanksgiving. It is truly the diametric opposite of what I just came out of, but I have to admit that I needed it. I may talk more about these co-workers and their obsession with servants in my next note. I seriously think that they employ half of Nairobi.
We just ate Thanksgiving dinner, overlooking the Indian Ocean, after a day of scuba diving. It was glorious, but I feel like an ass, honestly. A colonial ass. Kenyan servants made a traditional Thanksgiving meal, and served it, and cleaned it up, as the two kids napped so they wouldn’t get in the way. It was not very real, and I missed being with my family a lot.
This morning, we were thankful especially that we weren’t Israelis and weren’t in the hotel they tend to stay at. Not too far from where we were staying, someone drove a vehicle into a hotel owned by an Israeli and blew it up, killing a bunch of people, of whom the majority were Kenyan. At the same time, an Israeli charter leaving the coastal city of Mombassa (get out your damn map and look it up) was shot at with surface to air missiles. All this in Kenya, and Bush is still staring down Saddam Hussein. I feel cursed to be a witness to history – Hurricane Mitch, the Maoists and the Royal Family massacre in Nepal, and now this.
This was a truly amazing experience. I constantly wished that I could share it with each of you, because it is too big for me to carry on my own. I’m glad that Andrea gets to go, so we will be able to talk about it with each other. It is hard to talk about Sudan with people who have worked there, because most of them have been involved for a long time and are jaded and nonchalant about it, or they are Sudanese and know no other reality. Please ask me any questions about it, because I’m still having trouble digesting it all, and it may help me to think through stuff.
If this makes you jealous or makes you wonder what it is like, get the hell out of your cube and do it. Can’t means won’t. The world is not a scary place – it is just full of people trying to get by, and the thousands of ways they find to do so.
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