Bohemian Frog Hunting

Good Journalism on Congo is so rare

2010-02-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

but here is some:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgianne-nienaber/kabila-says-peace-before_b_454375.html

Pre-Christmas dinner

2009-12-04T00:26:00.000-08:00

It’s nearly Christmas and I am heading home after nearly two years in the Congo! Being in Africa is always a massive relief this time of year because I don’t have to listen to the Fairytale of New York, apart from when I play it on my IPod, and I never feel cold! I guess the nearest thing to a Christmas dinner was tonight in Masisi, in the company of Alpha Battalion of the MONUC Indian peace keeping force. The officers plied us with Indian scotch and tandoori chicken and we reminisced about the highs and lows of building peace and protecting the vulnerable people in Masisi. Conclusion: life hasn’t gotten a whole lot easier for the civilian populations trapped between the warring groups in North Kivu, but things would have been a whole lot worse had we not done what we did. In the middle of the meal the phone rang: 15 kms down the road the army has engaged in a full on shoot out with a breakaway ethnic militia group, one soldier and one rebel killed. The Christmas dinner is drawn to a premature conclusion. The Indians are deeply apologetic.
As I drive away from Congo, I learned to switch off quickly, blotting out the violence, the corruption, the endless tracts of mud roads. Its OK for me, I will spend Christmas amongst those I love, but our beneficiaries will have to confront the violence and poverty of daily life in Masisi… I am not sure they will know its Christmas time at all.

of Cows and men

2009-11-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

Sipping Indian sweet tea in a Khaki tent with a Major from a Kumaoni Mechanised Regiment of the Indian army in the foothills of Masisi. The major is enthusing about the rain, and the climate, and the Bollywood picturesque quality of the undulating pasturelands that encompass his little army base.

Driving the 48 kilometres from Goma to Osso farm, it’s evident that people are on the move. The IDP camps on the tarmac beside Lake Kivu have all but vanished, if the government are to believed, their residents have returned to till their land in tranquillity and prosperity. The villages along the road glitter metallic and plasticy white: signs that the returning IDPs (or ‘returnees’) have already received building materials to help them reconstruct their homes. In the town of Mushake, the azure banner gashed with a red sinister flash flutters, a stark contrast to the louring grey rain clouds of the rainy season sky above the settlement, reassuring the passers by that we are in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Timid signs of peace and reconstruction have been tangible in this part of DRC for the past few months, but it’s the subtle differences in the last few weeks that make me worry about how this peace is really going to play out. Until now, the internally displaced, mostly cultivators have moved home to start planting their crops - camp closures coincided neatly with the beginning of the bean sewing season.

One such community moved back to their village in April but were told they couldn’t return because their land had been sold to a Rwandan businessman based in Goma who needed the land for grazing. Instead, they now inhabit a slope on the roadside owned by the same business man where they work for him as tenant farmers. The Irishman in me can’t help but compare these people to the landless tenant farmers of Sligo and Leitrim in the days leading to the 1849 potato famine.

But today, the most startling difference is the cows. Pedigree Guernsey, Charolaise and Swiss breeds: everywhere. The Indian Major beside me informs me that they are very healthy dairy cows, and that five litres of milk are available in the village for less than a dollar. To informed observers, the cows represent a significant ethnic and cultural change in the territory, and a way of life that is synonymous with a minority pastoralist group in the great lakes region. These cows were just not in these hills a matter of weeks ago, and on discussing them with the local communities, its clear that they came from far beyond the borders of the DRC. Last week we learned that 320 families in Kirolirwe were told to quit the land where they were seeking refuge as IDPs to make room for Congolese refugees returning from Rwanda and their cattle. Unsubstantiated reports from other areas in Masisi talk of ten thousand new armed returnees ordering people off the land in Lukopfu.

The astonishing increase in the number of cattle in Masisi for me represents the biggest challenge to any hope for peaceful transition in the area. Until the legitimacy of claims by pastoralists to the lush pastures of Masisi is squared against the rights of the indigenous cultivators, peace will elude us.

An Indian MONUC patrol rolls back into the camp, the detachment alight from the vehicle and line up to attention, standing in formation they raise their assault rifles skyward and free their magazines with a unified clack, my colleagues jump nervously a few inches into the air. The heard of cows on the hillside above swish their tales.

Concerning Concern

2009-06-06T05:26:00.001-07:00

Karambi Village, Masisi Territory, North Kivu. I am standing on a rocky outcrop on the edge of a dust road in Masisi Territory, North Kivu, talking to a group of men and woman through a Kinyarwanda interpreter. The skies have cleared and as far as the eye can see in every direction, the lush mountains of North Kivu unfold into dreamy infinity. We have walked and driven a 15km stretch of road on which Concern has been working with the displaced and returnee communities for the past months. Members of the community are explaining to me how the road repairs were carried out, I am trying to be excited along with them as they explain how the water drainage systems will ensure the durability of the roads, I get genuinely excited when they start telling me that they are trying to work out a way of setting up road maintenance committees to ensure a long term maintenance of the roads.

Its hard to believe that a matter of months ago, this little corner of North Kivu witnessed the latest movement of armed groups across this scarred land. The newly integrated forces of the Congolese government and the CNDP, heavily supported by the Rwandan Defense Forces moved across the hills to finally resolve the problem of the long time resident Hutu Forces Democratique pour la Liberation du Rwanda, the descendants of those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In truth it seems unlikely that the coalition has been successful in routing the FDLR, however a semblance of peace has settled over the hills.

Concern has been present in Masisi since the violent events of 2007 to work towards the strategy for stabilization and post conflict reconstruction of the war torn Kivus. In Masisi, Concern identified 30 km of key roads that will facilitate the return of displaced people and to open up access for poor farmers to the local markets. And today at the end of our project cycle I am talking to a group of Congolese farmers who are returning to rebuild their homes after fleeing the ethnic violence of the early 1990s. Mr Yoramama, a Hutu farmer shows me where his home once stood, here in his village of Karambi, the stone foundations of several homes are visible, overgrown with weeds.

He tells me that there are about 100 households which will return to Karambi in the coming weeks, work is already underway to prepare the fields for cultivation by these longtime displaced farmers, who have been living as IDPs in Matanda, 30 kms away for the last 14 years.

‘We have our land, all we have been awaiting has been the peace…..Now the road has been opened, the bridges repaired we can return, trucks arrive here to collect our harvests…. It’s the same for all off these villages you see around the sides of the hills…’

He points out the scattered homesteads, conical grass roofs dotted across the green hills.

‘These people have all started to return in the last few months’

The possibility of going home is not so bright for everyone; only 10kms away in Masisi town, at least 15,000 displaced people are living in four IDP camps, still fearful to return home.

Another man from the group told me that before the war his family had 58 head of cattle, all of them pillaged in the past years. He hopes slowly to start rebuilding his herds to graze on the lands that he left behind so long ago.

something to cheer you up.. thanks Arnaud

2008-11-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aximuI4q1X0

Crazy Crazy Demographics

2008-11-21T01:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday.....

We left Goma early to try out the landcruiser on some very bad roads in Masisi Province. After talking to the big league emergency response actors, in North Kivu we identified a community in North Kivu in need of emergency assistance following the latest fighting in the province.

By a magical stroke of serendipity we found what we were looking just under our noses: Rubaya, a small town that over the last few weeks has astonishingly doubled its population size.

Before the latest war, Rubaya had a population of 13,400 people. This population deserted the town in October 2007 following heavy fighting between the government and the CNDP. CNDP fell back from Masisi and established their front line not very far from here and started to run their own administration in Rubaya, and in that remarkable, humbling Congolese way, the communities started to come back. The thinking is now that 60% of the population has returned to get back to their agriculture, trading and mining the cassieirite and coltan that is found in abundance nearby.

It’s a tidy little place, wooden houses with tin roves that sparkle in the brilliant high altitude sunlight. Rubaya has a vibrant market and the usual quota for motorbike taxis, cheap and shiny Chinese radios and bad taste Congolese bling wide boys.

The thing that strikes you is the children. Hoards and hoards of snotty nosed toddlers are to be seen around every corner, and the most of them were very exited to see me! With my demographer’s glasses I was struggling to understand how the mothers of this little town could be so fecund? The administrator explained to me that although only sixty percent of the community had returned to Rubaya, the town is now home to approximately 20,000 more IDPs who have been fleeing fighting that started up again in September and continues to the present day. This migration would confuse even the world’s leading demographers, and for us the task of identifying the people with most needs is going to be complicated; and complicated by yet another factor: all of the IDPs are hidden. There is no camp, no distribution centre. We visited houses built for a family containing not one but three households; the pressure that this population is putting on the carrying capacity of Rubaya is immense. At the moment, the host families are apparently extending hospitality to the IDPs, but we know that IDPs are being forced to labour for the host families in return for shelter and, even though the authorities have denied it, that the IDPs are being forced to contribute five dollars monthly to the hosting families.

So Rubaya is buzzing; the feeling of relative prosperity is most likely attributable to the productive artisanal extraction of minerals from open cast mines near the town. Mining towns always have their dark side: an extremely wealthy commercial elite, and a dirt poor majority population. The violence that exists around similar cultures in Congo is in evidence here, people making money, getting drunk, and taking out their drunkenness on their wives and children. I would be very interested to look at HIV rates in Rubaya.

Its not very surprising then that CNDP control has been beefed up: if you control Rubaya I would guess you control some of the most productive mines in Masisi territory. CNDP foot soldiers were volubly in evidence around the town, faces hardened to the elements, sincerely lacking in any warmth, and armed to the teeth. Reminded me of Sri Lanka, Sudan, you name the internal armed, conflict: a disciplined motivated armed group ready to make war with a national army which is not committed to the cause, and would really rather be at home watching the football with a can of beer. What makes the whole thing a little bit spiceier in Rubaya is that it’s fairly obvious that some of the CNDP’s plain clothed colleagues, only speak Kinyarwanda and English. Is this a resource war with an ethnic tinge, or an ethnic war with a resource tinge, or is it a plain old international resource based conflict?

I didn’t really have time to think about these imponderables today, Brid and Me spent most of the day measuring MUAC’s. And the good news is that the grand melee of under fives in Rubaya are not malnourished. The suffering of these people is a lot less difficult to measure than the mean upper arm circumference of a sick kid. In our protection monitoring yesterday we understood that this community had been systematically pillaged and the prevalence of gender violence in our sample indicated that its not just the FARDC and the Mai Mai who violate in this town.

Some important information about Sloths

2008-11-16T04:44:00.000-08:00

Not my Own work, thanks to my goregeous researcher/best friend for pulling this information from various Sloth databases.....

Sloth fur exhibits specialized functions: the outer hairs grow in a direction opposite from that of other mammals. In most mammals, hairs grow toward the extremities, but because sloths spend so much time with their legs above their bodies, their hairs grow away from the extremities in order to provide protection from the elements while the sloth hangs upside down. In moist conditions, the fur hosts two species of symbiotic cyanobacteria, which provide camouflage. The bacteria provide nutrients to the sloth when licked during grooming.Sloth fur is also host to algae; this algae colors the coat green and acts as camouflage. Because of this algae, sloth fur is a small ecosystem of its own, hosting many species of non-parasitic insects. Sloths have short, flat heads; big eyes; a short snout; long legs; and tiny ears. They also have stubby tails, usually 6-7cm long. Altogether, sloths' bodies usually are anywhere between 50 and 60 cm long.

Despite their adaptation to living in trees, sloths make competent swimmers. Their claws also provide a further unexpected deterrent to human hunters - when hanging upside-down in a tree they are held in place by the claws themselves and often do not fall down even if shot from below.

It had been thought that sloths were among the most somnolent animals, sleeping from 15 to 18 hours each day. Recently, however, Dr. Neil Rattenborg and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, published a study testing sloth sleep-patterns in the wild; this is the first study of its kind. The study indicated that sloths sleep just under 10 hours a day.They go to the ground to urinate and defecate about once a week. They go to the same spot each time and are vulnerable while doing so. The reason for this risky behaviour is unknown.

Living sloths have in fact three toes; the "two-toed" sloths, however, have only two fingers. Two-toed sloths are generally faster moving than three-toed sloths. Both types tend to occupy the same forests: in most areas, one species of three-toed sloth and one species of the larger two-toed type will jointly predominate.

Besides the fact that one has two toes on its forelimbs and the other three, they have different numbers of vertebrae (three-toed ones have nine; two-toed ones have six or seven). Also, Three-toed sloths have a small tail and its forelegs are substantially longer than the rear ones. The two-toed sloths do not have tails and its front and back legs are closer to the same size.. The two-toed variety also has a shorter neck, larger eyes and move more between trees. (sloths switch trees for new leaves to eat).

They eat leaves and buds. The two-toed species also eat twigs, fruits, and small prey. Their low rate of metabolism enables them to live on relatively little food. They do not have incisors and crop leaves with their hard lips. Their teeth grow continuously, as they are worn down by the grinding of their food. They don't drink but get their water from eating juicy leaves & licking dewdrops

They do most things upside down: eat, sleep (an average of 15 hours per day), mate, and give birth. Because of their upside down life, many of their internal organs (liver, stomach, spleen, pancreas) are in different positions from other mammals. Sloths sometimes let out a cry or hissing sound.

Masisi, Thursday 13 November 2008

2008-11-14T10:09:00.001-08:00

Concern’s first day back to full implementation activities, the day started at five am, with the sounds of a child’s deathlike wailing just outside my window, someone banging nails into a piece of corrugated iron, and a very fervent Pentecostal prayer meeting within a range of less than ten meters.

Life is pretty normal in Masisi !

To my astonishment, my lean mean logistician was already up, bristling with enthusiasm and pride in the fact that he had just taken a cold water bath, he hit the ground running an hour later and spent the day in the most masculine of pursuits: washing and drying clothes which the next day are to distributed to the IDPs. It seems one of the warehouses sprung a leak during our absence and some of the cloths got a bit grungy. What is remarkable about our recent evacuation(s) is that none of the stocks of supplies which we were about to distribute were robbed, and none of our warehouses pillaged; maybe an indicator of the long term relationship that we have built with the people in Masisi.

My first job of the day was to sit down with Olivier, our chief security guard, and have him teach how to get by in KiHunde. The Hunde make up the majority of the population in Masisi. I was well pleased with the results, which made nearly everyone grin at my very poor pronunciation. After a brief intensive language session I set off to spend most of the day with Robert, Concern’s wonderful, pacific one legged agricultural technical advisor. We drove back down the dirt track (which is, in fact a leg of the Route Nationale 1 of the DRC), to Katale, the last town held by FARDC before you enter CNDP country.

Along the way, we were greeted by groups of women digging and pounding the road. Despite the insecurity, in the last month, Concern has worked with IDPs living the camps and in the communities to rehabilitate fifteen kilometers of road, the leg from Katale to the village of Mashake being one of them. Then as suddenly as the good road had started it stopped, and the road to Mashake resumed its previous long suffering identity as a dirt track, barley wide enough for a motorbike, let alone a 4x 4. We walked for about 2km, greeted occasionally by passing Mamas carrying heavy sacks of coal and beans, often with a baby tied around their backs as well with a Pagne.

Finally we arrived at Mashake were we took a look at a vegetable garden which had been supported by Concern, Leeks, Onions, Cabbage all revelling in the fertile soil. I very excitedly brought out my new KiHunde phrase book and greeted the people. They responded with smiles:

“You are speaking in KiHunde? Sorry, here we speak KinyaRwanda!”

Just five miles away from Masisi and I find myself with a totally different language group. No wonder the Kivus are so complicated!

We spoke with a group of ten women who had been selected by Concern with the communities as beneficiaries, they had all been displaced from their homes, many of them were widows. A woman explained that with the money that she would make by cultivating seeds given to her in the project, she would be able to rent some more land and plant more.

We ended the day in Lushebere IDP camp, very tired I listened to the camp committee, who told me about new IDPs fleeing the CNDP to Masisi, they gave me lots of new ideas about how we can work to support them better. I met a woman in the camp who was involved with the Cash for Work on the roads. She told me that she had used the money to pay the school fees for her children. A small step for her, a great leap for Concern as we win victories in the lives of very poor people. Just as I was leaving the camp a man sneered at me:

“Look at these children! They need new clothes! Will you look at the state of them?!”

I smiled to myself and said,

“Give us a couple of days, my Logistician is just doing the laundry!”

On Saturday, November 15th, Concern distributed clean underwear and sanitary towels for women and second hand clothing, for the 13,000 residents of the four IDP camps in Masisi and Lushebere.

On the Road to Nowhere ....

2008-11-11T11:43:00.000-08:00

We travelled in a convoy with NRC to Masisi today, seven cars leaving Goma on a spectacularly brilliant morning, marching 'as to war' with flags flying and hazard warning lights turning heads as we slowly made our way through the populous suburbs of Goma town. Travelling in a convoy is one of those occasions when you are pumping a bit of adrenaline and you feel for once that what you do is somehow noble and elevated: logisticians get very excited and show off how savvy they are about security management, and I try to hide myself in the back of the last car in the convoy to avoid the embarrassment of being spotted by my friends.
Travelling in well organised convoys around North Kivu has proved to be essential for security for humanitarian actors: with more than ten attacks on NGOs just on the Masisi road, short of an armed escort, the convoy system has provided a safe and effective way to mitigate against armed attacks.
Little seems to have changed on the Masisi road, gregarious FARDC troops give way to the gaunt and smileless CNDP soldiers in their signature black wellington boots and state of the art Khalshnikovs,- surrounded by countryside that would make Connemara or Donegal look a bit tame.

The journey was normal and uneventful for Masisi road in the rainy season. We saw encouraging signs of life in Bihambwe, with families returning to their abandoned homes, cattle grazing the lush high pasturelands and a steady flow of people moving on foot to the regional markets. We stopped at the last MONUC base in the CNDP-controlled area to greet the captain there and to check up on security on the road - apparently no shooting since Saturday so we continue from the MONUC baptised 'gates of hell' into the no man's land between CNDP and Government control. We emerged from the 2.5 km stretch of no man’s land five and a half hours later, having had to pull four trucks out of the metre deep mud-infested, barely recognisable road. Thankfully we were jollied along in our endeavours to cross the red zone by a patrol of South African MONUC soldiers who encouraged us in our desperate efforts to de-blob ourselves out of the quagmire. I think they should change the name of the red zone to something more appropriate, like the light brown zone.

We finally turned the last corner to see Masisi twinkling before us; in almost biblical proportions the dark clouds rolled away to reveal a cluster of IDP camps, glittering white with the brand new plastic roofing sheets we had distributed a matter of days ago. The changes in Masisi town are imperceptible, but if you look carefully in the dark corners along the main street, you can see some fairly heavily armed soldiers sporting Light Machine Guns and Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers. If you really strain your eyes as you scan the hills behind the Concern base you can see troops moving like ants across the ridge of the high hills; moving artillery, preparing to defend Masisi town in what is universally recognised to be potentially the most bloody battle for the Kivus so far.

Goma, Yesterday

2008-11-10T00:41:00.000-08:00

Goma, Monday 10th November 2008

Yesterday, I went to visit my friends at Don Bosco vocational training centre; out on the edge of Goma town on the Rutshuru road. Mount Niriyagongo towers over the large compound which provides a home to Goma’s orphan’s, Mai Bobos, and handicapped kids. The centre has also become Goma’s newest Internally displaced people camp in the last 72 hours: 1, 250 women and children are now calling the training centre home.

Fleeing violence between the Mai Mai militias and CNDP, these people have walked 60kms from Kiwanja in Rutshuru territory seeking the protection of Goma town. On the way to Goma, many of the people fell sick, with diaharroea, malaria and vommiting.

Yesterday moring, the centre became not only Goma’s newest IDP camp but possibly the fastest set up Cholera treatment unit ever. MSF- France worked swiftly with the Bosco team to set up an isolation unit, to treat thirty patients with Cholera, and to assist in the hosing down of all of the other newly arrived people. After that the Bosco team spent the rest of the day disenfecting the large warehouses which had been used as temporary shower rooms for the IDPs and distributing new (second hand) clothes.

I went to visist these people following an early morning SMS message from Chloé, BOSCO’s administrator, in her somewhat clipped english :

We have alot of needs cause we have more than 900 idp’s. We need NFI and food. What do you need, lists, lists of needs ?

The noise of 1250 people crammed into a courtyard is fantastic, people laughing, crying, eating, sleeping. Curious children run towards me, crying ‘Muzungu !’ eager to make friends : inspite of terrible hardship they maintain a smile. Cholé walks me to the back of the compound where beyond a gate controlled by a secuirty guard, well an ex-child soldier about 16 years old, beyond the gate there more people arriving : another 220 in the few hours that I was there. Journalists mingled with the crowd an in an iconic moment, I shed a tear as I watched a white female journalist photograph and abandoned raggedy toddler, the camera lens about double the size of the child.

Humanitairans watching the voyers who will fill the worlds websites and news reports with grotesque images of these beautiful people.

There are currently 1,250 women and children inside the centre, and 220 waiting outside. The ones inside will enjoy the protection of the high compound walls, the ones outside will be targeted by drunken soldiers and thieves. Amoung this group there are 798 children under the age of five, and 99 unaccompanied children.

Concern was able to immediately hand over 1,500 blankets for the IDPs and is working to find other means of providing food and non food assistance to this community.

Damien Gugliermina 1972-2008

2008-09-10T02:51:00.000-07:00

This Elegy for my friend can not be a very long one.

I love him and he loved me, and I was made so much richer by his caring for me.

When I first met him, in Late 2004, in Asmara, I was struck by a man with integrity, devotion and a creative approach to the vast arena of a very bloody Horn of Africa. I used to tease him for being a UN paper pusher, but Damien was one of a rare breed of folk who believed in the United Nations and who devoted himself the essential core of being a humanitarian. He supported me through difficult times and often defended the controversial decisions that I took in my own career in the interest of the most marginalized of communities.

When I met him in Congo, first in Kinshasa in a noisy, whore filled bar on the Boulevard I laughed and reminisced with him about friends and experiences in Eritrea, but his heart was already in the Kivus.

By chance, I wound up coming to the Kivus (like a whirlpool in a bathtub, we all ultimately seem to end up in Goma), and on my first evening in town, the first person I bumped into was Damien, a bit browner, just as skinny and just as handsome as when I had left him in Kinshasa. He made Goma feel like home for me, he welcomed me; he helped me to understand this particularly grizzly context. Our second conversation concluded with my understanding that the tragically flawed Stabilisation plan for the Kivus was, well tragically flawed. We moved on, to discuss the women that we shared in different conflict zones; and that set the tone: extreme wit, sharp analysis tempered with a cynical bitter sweet lust for life.

And now he is dead, and he leaves us behind with an enormous task.

I want us to build a memorial for Damien in the Kivus.

We owe it to him to live his life, to fulfill his mission for the sake of peace and for the sake of all those who have waited so long for justice. Can we not lay aside our differences, our egos, our NGO flags and work together? Our tears will make us strong, and we must insist on the truth: he gave his life for peace, now we will live our lives (and on his behalf), to bring peace to DRC.

Sometime when I am feeling emptied by this terrible loss, I ask that you will help me to have courage and to follow Damien in the path to peace. I would offer this last tribute to him, Einstein talking about Gandhi (….although there are some parallels between Damien and the Mahatma that would just not mesh, especially the whole sexual abstinence thing!):

“Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this, ever, in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”

Goodbye my big brother.

2007-12-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

Photostory about Ebola on theIRC.org

2007-12-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

Please click on this link for a visual essay on the IRC response to the ebola heamorragic fever outbreak in Mweka...

http://www.theirc.org/resources/essays/responding-to-an-outbreak-of.html?

Great Western Radio's Christmas Message

2007-12-15T03:11:00.000-08:00

African Darter

2007-12-09T15:09:00.000-08:00

On Friday night I took a friend to see the Belgian bridge over the Lulua river...
a straight concrete structure spanning 800 meters, straight and bold as the colonial despots.
They say in Kasai that they used to 'feed the blacks to the crocodiles' off this bridge.
There is blood on the rails of the bridge, and slavery has as way of not disappearing.

As the sun set, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water flowed beneath,
this meisterwek of bridge building....
to harness the power of this torrent would mean untold richness and development of this
lost little world.

The sight of the green savanna and the pregnant river fills me with joy and i start to sing.
Dayo- Me Say Dayo!

And then i see him, approaching me with swagger. He must be fifteen, a fisher boy of the river..
He reacts like a little man, his dreadlocks are braided, with bright colored cotton.
I think of a Lost Boy, a child soldier in Monrovia, a Mai Mai infantry man with a Kalashnikov out sized.
In his left hand a brace of river fish, blood dripping onto the concrete, the fish are for sale.
In his right hand tied to a piece of fishing line, is a river bird, shimmering and shivering.
Iridescent, petulant eyes, bright orange webbed feet for negotiating the currents of the water.

The bird is for sale he announces, 12 Dollars!
I hand him a brand new five dollar bill... he scowls and raps the fishing twine around my hand,
spitting an cursing he rambles off towards the town...

After ten minutes i have untied the twine, with the help and concentration of my friend,
the river bird, more and more nervous struggles against my attempts to free it from the tangle of nylon.

I find my way to a sheltered cove on the river bank, under the cover of mangroves, i find a huddle of small pirogues; and there on the roots of a mangrove I place the river bird, who without even nodding
Plunges like a stone into the river and is gone without even a trace of bubbles..

My friend said: You did for the Bird what Jesus did for us.
I did for the bird what anyone who listens to his ego would do,
its a lame dog over styles thing!

And i wonder, who was the real slave here? the Bird? the boy who in order to live, taps beauty and does his bit to eradicate our biodiversity

...in order to survive?

Blogfamine

2007-11-10T05:22:00.000-08:00

Oh dear! its been a little while since I found time to sit at a computer for recreational purposes to write a blog. Mea Culpa.

Now i am not sure where to start!

To quote Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazing_Saddles), 'My mind is a swirling vortex of creative possibilities!'

Should I talk about the Gay wedding of the century in New Delhi in August, or the Celebrations of the New Millennium in September in Addis Abeba? and an epic road trip with my increasingly eccentric but also deeply lovable parents?

Or should I recount for you the frightening story of an Ebola epidemic in my back yard? or the tale of how an intrepid few did so much in such little time to help sick people get better in Congo?

No, i think i will tell you about the Buddha of Kampungu. Last week I traveled in a Cessna caravan, a twelve seater mono-prop cargo plane to a town about 300 Km from Kananga: Luebo. Luebo is a sleepy little place with an impressive bridge across the river Lulua (one of the few examples of good Belgian civil engineering in the Congo) and a string of mission stations; like their sisters in Ndemba, the nuns have had their funding source (Rome, Brussels, Canterbury) cut for a long while and now rely on selling cold beer and hospitality to anyone with the money to pay. The rambling religious buildings are impressive, but dilapidating, crying out for a little investment.... I have ideas of buying out the sisters and setting up an eco-retreat of my own!

We went to Luebo to carry out a distribution of essential non food items to the communities affected by the outbreak of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. To allay fears, I have to explain two things about this Epidemic. First of all, We visited the area in the aftermath of the the outbreak. It had been more than 21 days since the last death caused by Ebola, and 21 days is the maximum incubation period for Ebola; secondly whilst an outbreak of Ebola is no joke, of the 212 mortalities, only 25 were identified as having been caused by Ebola, the others perished of your regular endemic nasties in the Congo: Typhoid fever and dysentery.

We decided to go ourselves to the villages because we know how things work: all of the assistance donated for the victims of the outbreak was misappropriated by the authorities in Kananga. Maybe as a result of this, the Provincial Inspector of Health is now under house arrest and a replacement hastily installed.... but thats another blog altogether!

We arrived to distribute soap to school children along with some basic hygiene sensitization and to distribute mattresses and bicycles to the community health centers in the eleven most affected villages. Our hunch about misappropriation was confirmed when the Zonal chief for Health in Mweka (in the epicenter of the epidemic) thanked us saying:

"You are the only ones to have delivered assistance to us, as with the train crash [which happened in the same area], many organizations promised us support. But none ever arrived."

I am sure there is an element of flattery in his words, but I would not be genuinely surprised if he was speaking the truth. Corruption is a way of life in Congo; and until the government regularises the economy, pays peoples' salalries, then I am sure that Hedley Lamarr of Blazing Saddles would give the authorities the same accolades as he gave his band of felons in that great movie:

"...... rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists!"

One such upstanding servant of the state presented me with a sinister souvenir of my trip, a hoi-toi or a Chinese/Kasayan Buddha. My team begged me to leave him in Kampungu, but he has his uses... he now sits in the Kitchen in Kananga to observe my less than honest cook!
Truly a face from the heart of Darkness!

In other news the situation in Nord Kivu is a mess with five waring parties at the last count wreaking havoc on the civilization population... spare a thought and a prayer for Congo!

On a lighter note, I am soon to have a very important new Neighbor. How many times in ones life can you say that the President of Republic is about to be living across the wall. Well in two weeks time the His Excellence the Honorable Joseph Kabila Kabange is moving in. Hopefully this will be a good thing, guaranteeing 24/7 electricity and improved security. I am wondering how to react when he knocks on my door to ask to borrow a cup of sugar!

Leubo takes off!

2007-11-10T05:08:00.001-08:00

this is a little film i took with my Fuji finepix of our take off from Luebo airstrip on a 33 min flight to Kananga. By road the trip takes 8 hours

Danceynewsy

2007-08-15T03:21:00.001-07:00

My first venture onto Youtube is an oscar winning short film of a bunch of little sticky girls doing a very funky dance in Kasai Occidental... enjoy

Coordinating a Catastrophe or catastrophic coordination: the Kakenge Rail accident.

2007-08-05T07:28:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday night, at about 11pm a cargo train was derailed about 170 miles away from here. The train was travelling on the Illebo to Kananga stretch of the colonial rail link, constructed to convey copper and other ores to Kinshasa from Katanga. In any other country a cargo train derailing would not really be newsworthy. However, Congo being the way it is, the train was carrying more than 100 clandestine passengers. The death toll after 5 days is in the region of 90 with 130 casualties. The road linking the crash site to Kananga is a dirt track, so treacherous that it takes a day to make the journey.

The next day the Provincial Inspector, the head of the ministry of health in the province, came to my office for a meeting to discuss the response to the accident. It seemed, hours after the accident, the best response would be to equip the Ministry of Health with sufficient surgical materials, anaesthetics and antibiotics to respond to at least 200 injured people. We also proposed logistical support to the MoH to med evac. the injured, however finally the UN offered a helicopter reducing an 8 hour road trip to 40 minutes. The Provincial inspector departed in the helicopter with a team of nurses and surgeons.

The next day the UN called for a meeting of international agencies to coordinate the response. The meeting took place almost 48 hours after the accident, reports coming in that the injured were being transported by bicycle to nearby hospitals, and that many of them were succombing to their wounds.

The next day a high level delegation of ministers - representatives of President Kabila - members of the UN, BBC, Reuters, photographers and entourage descended on sleepy little Kananga to visit the crash site.

In a typically Congolese chaos most of the delegation discovered on arrival that they were not going to travel to the crash, since with only 18 seats on a UN chopper, at least 50 impeccably dressed Kinois were left behind to sample the delights of Kananga. Three days after the event the UN and NGO community had collected meds for the crash victims: about 400kgs of drugs ranging from ORS to Atesunate, entirely inappropriate meds. As they loaded these huge quantities into the chopper we cynically estimated the delay time before these drugs, (which had no delivery notes, or packing lists) would appear for sale in the pharmacies of Kananga.

Seeing a chaotically organised disaster response was heartbreaking, with NGOs and UN and government all trying to play a lead role... Hearing a UN representative explain that the helicopters could not be used to med evac the remaining crash survivors as they were reserved for the visiting VIPs.

What makes it worth even commenting on this incident? Trains derail, busses crash, choppers go down in some place on the globe almost every day. I guess it has disgusted me for two reasons: first of all there are train accidents all over but rarely in such inaccessible places and rarely in places where there is no infrastructure to respond. The train accident amplifies the predicament of the Congo: criminal neglect and dilapidation of a country that once functioned as a country. Secondly I write about it because I am nauseated by the inadequacy and inappropriateness in the response of the authorities: a lack of unity of international players and then the arrival of the Kinshasa circus (a huge expense to the UN who provided helicopters, and two passenger planes). Of course I am glad that the crash made CNN, but I felt such deep cynicism at the barrage of domestic and international journalists flying into the most marginalised province of the country for a horror story of the crash and the blood-on-the-tracks photographs.

In a country experiencing excess mortality of 10,000 people per week as an indirect consequence of the internal armed conflict, 89 deaths in a train accident seems like a tiny blip. Is my heart becoming too hardened toward humanity ?

Can anybody find me a Piano Tuner

2007-08-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday was a particularly unusual Saturday in the great tradition of unusual Saturdays in the life of Fergus Thomas. It has taken me the whole week to mull over it and formulate my thoughts. Putting it down on paper, it does not sound like anything remarkable, but last week Kananga experienced the first piano recital in over 50 years…. and a piano recital in a city of 1.3 million people and only two pianos, neither of which could really be described as being in tune is breaking news!.

The Pianist, Kristian is a young IT professional working with an NGO in Kananga; when you meet him, you sense a wistfulness in his eyes: is the fact that he is an artist, that his gaze is constantly fixed in somewhere in the undefined middle distance? Or the sadness of displacement and loss that gives him the air of a profoundly pensive and yet optimistic individual?

Kristian sometimes drives me to distraction, his office, a den of laptops and hard drives emitting a manic profusion of piano sonatas that he has downloaded from the web. He has been talking for months about giving his first concert in Kananga, stealing into my office when no one else is around to conspiratorially confirm that he has identified a location, a functional piano. He’s been talking about this for so long that I was beginning to doubt that he was a pianist at all.

Finally last weekend he invited a select audience of 20 music lovers to a dilapidated and sprawling Belgian villa in the city of dilapidated colonial houses for a concert of his personal selection of pieces, followed by the invitation to a ‘cocktail’ of luke warm Skol.

Kristian was visibly nervous as he took his place at the keyboard and launched with great gusto into his renditions of Bach, Chopin, Vivaldi and even ‘Rule Britannia’ (which, embarrassingly twinged in me a slight feeling of patriotic pride, I must must must go to confession ASAP); It was obvious that Kristian was out of practise, with small slips from time to time, however to the untrained ear the overall effect was incredibly uplifting.

My eyes filled with tears as I recognised his unique approach to pieces of music: to attack with the greatest energy and gusto as possible and not give up till the very last bar; additionally I realised fast that Kristian was playing intricate minuets and sonatas completely from memory. Of course I remembered someone else very important in my life and how he would play the piano that way.

In a flash of an instant of a morsel of time, the concert concluded to enthusiastic appreciation by the audience and visible relief from Kristian.

Kristian’s effort stimulated great enjoyment in the crowd and has motivated Kristian to perform more. On a much deeper level this was a significant achievement for Kristian, a rediscovery of something that has been long suppressed by traumatic memories. Kristian belongs to another place; his strange otherworldly aura is because he is otherworldly…. for Kananga. Kristian was born in Lubumbashi, where he grew up as a happy bright student learning the Piano at the conservatory there; eventually he became he pianist accompanying the Lubumbashi choir. In 1993 when ethnic hate and killing was beginning to ferment in Rwanda, and apparently unknown to the outside world, another genocide was well underway in Katanga, which ultimately resulted in the entire Kasayan population being expelled to their ‘home’ province of Kasaï, (although in reality the majority of Katanga Kasayans had no links with Kasai). Many returning Kasayans starved to death in a crisis that was not sexy enough to make the international media. Kristian was lucky; he came to Kananga with his family intact: he is certainly a rare exception, most of the other raffoullés traumatic tales of killing and loss.

Kristian played many, many times in public in Lubumbashi; there he had a piano in tune, and sheet music. When he fled from his home, he did not have time to rescue his piano or his sheet music from the burning and the riots. Now he has no sheet music.

After 14 years then, Kristian played his first concert, from memory. My hope for him that this performance is a symbolic act of looking towards the future and of healing from a very fractured past. In the meantime classical music lovers of Kananga are rubbing their hands together in eager anticipation of Kristian’s next performance, but we really do need to find a piano tuner!

Malaria Daze

2007-07-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

I have to start by saying that I am very sorry for this rather long silence, I am swamped with stories to tell, midsummer/midwinter nights dreams to relate, depending on your hemisphere. Since I last wrote I have been lucky enough to explore some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, I have also entered my 33 year which gives me again the terrible sensation that life, and time is slipping away like sand in an hourglass.

The unfortunate coinciding with all this auspiciousness of my first bout of malaria is probably the reason that I have been particularly lacking in creative energy to blog a bit. Now I have had my ‘African Baptism’ aka the Kananga Cocktail (a rather alarming diagnosis of Malaria with Typhoid Fever) I am almost back on form again.

That which does not kill us, makes us stronger… in a kitchen in Cotham, Bristol my mother is ruefully notching up the list of tropical diseases suffered by her eldest boy. Nothing so far compares to Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever in Sri Lanka, but I don’t want to talk about my peculiar morbidities today…what a freak show must reside within my internal organs!

So Malaria daze strongly correlated to cyber silence.

I think I have had malaria for possibly as long as two months, but denial is a powerful thing (not just a river in Egypt). I procrastinated utterly about my symptoms, convincing myself that uncomfortable sweating, feelings utter miserable loneliness and chronic fatigue was down to being bored in my job, being a celibate thirty something and most of all due to consuming the rather vile local brew in Kananga: Skol. I spent a miserable exhausted birthday Sunday, without any human contact. Convinced all my friends had forsaken me until almost my entire office arrived to take me out for beer and kebabs and then I spite of feelings of utter depletion on into the night at Equinox, a night club equally as tacky as its namesake in Leicester Sq, only a thousandth the size with a great many more underage prostitutes.

For my Birthday I added to the menagerie, two pigeons and a cat with a kitten. The cat has subsequently devoured one of the pigeons, so the remaining pigeon I have named Crispin and the cat has been banished to hunt rodents in the office. The final important livestock news is that three lady ducks are now sitting on eggs, very broody. Ducklings anticipated in 3 weeks. Confit de Canard and Pate de Fois gras in 6 weeks.

Hang on, though there are greater things to write about. We travelled with the team on an expedition to Lac Mucamba, a lake about 100km from Kananga toward Mbuji Mayi. Mucamba is a vast fresh water lake with a fresh water spring in its centre. I have never been so breath taken with a place of natural beauty before. Its by far the most beautiful lake I have ever seen, (and I am somewhat of a lake lover: from our very own little lake at Henleaze to the mighty alpine lakes in Switzerland and Austria, I have done lakes!). Mucamba is in the form of a human body when viewed from the air, with a head, arms and legs clearly visible. A very happy outing, impressing upon me again the huge natural wealth of the Congo and a huge potential for tourism, unfortunately I was already suffering with the fatigue of malaria, but I plan a weekend by the lake to do some sub aqua investigations very soon.

Otherwise life in Kananga goes on in a calm and methodical manner. I am scarred about the volume of work in the next few years, our project has some pretty ambitious targets. To achieve them is going to be nothing short of a miracle; but its in the small faltering steps that we will ultimately achieve our great victories.

2007-06-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

7 June 2007 The Dry Season, Commune de Lukonga

Some ‘saison sèche!’
Here midsummer is Midwinter. Is this Africa ?
In the market place soft wet soil collapses underfoot, dark and moist.

I pull back the fumes of the scene into my lungs
And spit on the rich black soil that glows black in the
Luminescence of a subtropical morning.

There is no sunlight-
Only grey ultra violet intensity in the market
The place where I spat on the ground
My spit has already absorbed on the floor of the market
Of small things, of poor people
Matches, batteries, cigarettes by the stick, nail polish pink

-the Hat’s not for sale, with all the pride of Papa Mobutu himself
An old man at his little stall informs me
Shame, it’s a very fine hat!

School children, street children, old children, inner children
Old shopkeeper in a fine hat in Lukonga Market
Beautiful young mothers, infants marsupially attached
On their backs with bright ‘pagnes’
Groceries stacked high on their heads.
Do you know your own beauty?

Lukonga Market
10 minutes. 3 conversations
A boy whose name is unpronounceable. Bilingual confusion; but satisfaction
Second a man with holes in his teeth. Whose twin daughters will celebrate
First communion in one day’s time.
Finally on this midwinter midsummer morning the Dr. stands before me,
His one good eye scrutinizing through opaque wrap around distance.

I can remember the massacre.
They looted the campus
The windows were all smashed
Blood on the walls
Feaces on the floor
Screaming
Raping

And the morning passes to noon

2007-06-07T00:16:00.000-07:00

these are my Duck children, Baluba, Bakuba, 47, 66 (named after roads i like) and Mlle Shambui

you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.....

2007-06-02T04:03:00.000-07:00

At the end of a ‘road,’ 70km from here, a road that really only exists in the colonial maps of the Belgian civil engineers, lies the Cite de Ndemba. The road snakes its way between Kananga and Ndemba like a parabola along a baseline that is the railway, the chemin de fer, linking Lubumbashi to the railhead at Illebo where goods arrive, and depart on the Kasai river en route for Kinshasa. Apparently, in the day (dans l’epoche, as people around here love to refer to their golden age when Papa Mobutu was doing great things for Zaïre) there was a regular passenger service up the Kasai river to the capital, nowadays the occasional barge chugs up the Kasai and joins the Congo to descend on Stanley pool in a journey that takes more or less a month. The town of Illebo is currently coming to terms with a devastating outbreak of typhoid fever.

Sounds like a great trip, and a great way to use up all my accumulated leave days, luckily I belong to the school of thought where process is as important as result, and where journeying is about being in a state of movement, not about arriving anywhere in particular.

One journey I was happy to terminate however my road trip was on Wednesday to Ndemba. Even before leaving Kananga any hint of a tarmac road evaporates into a sandy clay track. The road is crowded with caravans of Bayanda. Men who travel over hundreds of miles with bicycles laden with agricultural produce, maize whiskey, cloth, chickens…. You name it. In Kasai the beast of burden is the bicycle. Every single day you see the immense agricultural wealth of Kasai pouring out of the villages along dirt tracks to the market centres, and you cant help but thinking: if these farmers and traders had even a slightly improved road network, they would without a doubt become prosperous, and fat.

But the agricultural economy is undermined by a darker, more seductive business, which drives the subsistence farmers further and further from prosperity and development.

The story is not one that you could have a Leonardo di Caprio re-enact, because there has never been links between organised militias and the diamond trade in the Kasai. But as far as I can see, these diamonds have got blood on them too. Ndemba is a fairly typical small town of the Congo, a few remnants of a more developed past, a hospital and health service that functions with heavy support of NGOs. Schools full of children in white shirts and navy blue trousers, a proliferation of evangelical churches and at the head of the town the mission station. You can tell the houses where the diamond traffickers live. They are brightly painted adobe structures, often distinct because they have a hedge and a garden instead of a dusty yard. On the exterior walls are crude drawings of diamond helixes. You can also easily spot the traffickers in town too, dressed in designer clothes, designer sunglasses, driving too fast along the dirt tracks on scramblers. Their wealth is ostentatious.

Twice a week on Saturdays and Mondays, the diamond market opens up. Twenty or thirty middle men set up shop in the market place, Congolese, Lebanese, even Chinese with minute weighing scales to trade in rocks. A group of South African prospectors left Ndemba the day I arrived, loading sack upon sack of soil into their helicopter and departing directly for South Africa.

In order to exploit the diamonds of the Kasai, you need a mining permit from Kinshasa, obtained by paying off the relevant official. There are inevitably more bribes to be paid to the Administrateur de Territoire and his cronies in situ, but still the region represents rich pickings for the diamond miner.

The impact of the trade on the economy has so far been negative. I see two large negative impacts of the industry in terms of economy and in terms of societal impact. First of all the diamond trade fuels the extreme over inflation of cost of consumable products in the province. Riding on the back of the trade, business people import packaged food into Kananga and the other towns of Kasai selling them with an enormous mark up. Goods that are already inflated in price by the mafia controlled consumer market in Kinshasa are often double the cost in Kananga, and reportedly goods in some areas, such as Kalomba can cost as much as 3 times higher than the Kananga cost: justification, transport cost. Real reason, greedy traders making a fast buck on the back of the diamond trade.

The sociological impact is even more worrying. Diamond miners employ local farmers to dig in the mainly opencast mines. The farmers (already notorious for neglecting their agricultural duties to their womenfolk), leave to work in the mines, and their wives are simply overwhelmed with the volume of work involved in tilling the soil and in bringing up children. Money raised from mining usually goes into luxury items and into drinking alcohol. Net result: family breakdown, malnutrition.

So why tell this story of woe? Surely nothing to be done about it ? What I would argue is that in the Kasai the diamond industry must be forced to commit to a higher level of corporate social responsibility.

Right now the very wealth of this land is keeping the people poor.

Maybe its alarmist to draw a link between child morbidity and an extractive industry, but the reality is not far off that. Something that we can start to though is talking about this, engaging with the market to impress up on it its potential role for social upliftment and for justice for poor people.

In Ndemba I stayed at the mission station, a band of matronly Carmelite sisters rather partial to a wee drop. The mission station doubles as a watering hole for the diamond traffickers, local salesmen and itinerant expatriates like me. Every night the cloisters of the convent are filled with the unholy drunken songs of people making merry and elated with the fact that diamonds, square cut or pear shape… are still a girls’ best friend!
In my head the tune playing is the very sinister Hotel California, apparently a song about much more than a lodging house in Santa Barbara….. /Then I said to the captain/ bringing me my wine/he said/ we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969/.

….Strangest convent I ever been to!

Time passes; Listen. Time passes.

2007-05-27T04:57:00.000-07:00

Could someone please explain to me how come it is already the middle of 2007? Sometimes I fear that I will be bald, toothless and incontinent very shortly, with no tales to tell about my three score years and ten.

I have been under increasing pressure to produce another blog posting, I have even been approached to blog ‘semi professionally’ however I am fiercely convinced that writing a blog is for me, it represents my view of the world, and unless a company or an individual were to offer me an unimaginably huge amount of money, I would NOT consider selling my innermost musings.

This posting finds me back where I love to be, my favourite spot on the veranda in the presbytery (for indeed it seems my house was constructed by an intrepid band of Belgian fathers), with my parrot children, soundtrack today supplied by Orchestra Baobab, and some very good spicy Tamil coffee (more on that later). The only thing to complete my ideal Sunday brunch would be some select human company and Shisha-al- toofah (and if you need that translating for you, well stop reading my blog).

More than ever I feel like a very fat, very contented smiling Cheshire cat. My soul has been so well nourished in the past weeks that I could write and write and write about my adventures from the top of skyscrapers in NYC to the floor of the stormy Indian Ocean. This is one of those many times when I kick myself for not having a diary.

The trip to New York was quite remarkable on many accounts, it permitted me to travel outside of the city to visit dear friends in Baltimore; a picturesque journey which took me through New Jersey, Philadelphia, and finally to Maryland. A short sojourn there preceded a very intense week of meetings in my NGOs HQ; that was a great chance for me to put names to faces and to learn more about the work that we are doing within the US as well as internationally. If the week was important professionally, then personally the experience of being in the capital city of the world (sorry London, you jus’ too Goddamn cold!) was one of the richest human experiences I have ever made. New York really seems to be the city that welcomes outsiders; and its undoubtedly the constant waves of people, refugees and economic migrants. It is this constant flow of cultures and people that in my opinion make it the world’s capital.

My first cab ride from the hotel in 42nd and 3rd Avenue to Penn Station: The concierge hails a taxi. The driver is obviously from East Africa, I guess by his features and scarification he is either Sudanese or Eritrean. I ask him where he is from; he appears not to understand or not to be listening. So venture to speak in Arabic. After a minute of so he stops me, and in very chaste English he says, yes I am from Sudan, and your Arabic sucks! We then proceed to talk about the situation in Khartoum; he is a dissident school teacher from Om Durmann who has been driving a taxi in Manhattan for seven years. By the end of the ride, I am invited to meet his family and to eat Sudanese delicacies the next day at his home in Brooklyn. We reach the railway station, and he refuses to accept the $6.50 fare from me! Such a Sudanese response. I insist on payment and thank him for his kindness. I didn’t see him again.

On my day off, I went walking with a friend. My mother had impressed upon me (with sewing machine like regularity) that I must visit two things in NYC. The first being the Irish Famine Memorial and the second, taking the Staten Island ferry for the best view of Ellis Island and that French Statue on that other island out there... The Famine Memorial is impressive, not big, but well considered and sobering, it lies directly between the Hudson River and Ground Zero (a place that didn’t interest me to visit particularly), it’s a little memorial considering the scale of the holocaust in Ireland in the 19th Century.

From there we walked beside the river to the ferry station. Apart from the boat trip, there was another important mission to be accomplished on Staten Island (which is a sudden leap into suburban America in comparison to Manhattan only a few miles away). Legend had it that the best Sri Lankan food in the world outside Sri Lanka is to be found in Staten Island.

For all true devotees, the pilgrimage is worth it, the place is called ‘New Asha’ 320 Victory Bvd. Mr. and Mrs. Asha run a Sri Lankan grocery store/ restaurant. They are Jaffna Tamils from Valvettithurai (VVT) who had moved to Colombo due to the troubles (a bit of historical background, VVT is the hometown of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader and demagogue of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). By an amazing coincidence, the day we decided to go and eat there, the Cricket World Cup Final was playing in Jamaica. Sri Lanka versus Australia. So the little restaurant was packed full of both Singhalese and Tamil Sri Lankan, the beer was flowing free and the atmosphere was electric. I was delighted to be able to speak Tamil and Singhala, they were quite happy to share the excitement of the match with us. What a privilege! Suffice to say I came away with $100’s worth of Sri Lankan groceries… no place like home.

The last NYC human story has a heavy Jaffna slant to it also. I had heard that in Washington Square Gardens, the centre of NYU, there was a Jaffna Tamil man selling proper Jaffna Food. I checked this out and ended up chatting with him for 20 minutes about life in New York, which pissed off all the other customers waiting to be served. Ended up with a huge platter of Jaffna vegan food at a rather huge discount. If that was not the end of this Karmic gastronomic experience, just after I had washed my hands in the bathroom, I walked straight into my Yoga teacher from Jaffna. The last time we met was in 2003! She got married to an MSF nurse and now lives in California, like me she was visiting New York.

There are lots of tales of New York that I can not tell yet, maybe in the future, but for now these will have to suffice. And as for being back in Congo? And for my misadventures in Kenya? I will have to write again. Now the muse is not here. To quote Bjork I am violently happy. Alone, inspired, empowered.

is this what it sounds like when doves cry ?

2007-04-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

Ooops, a few things have happened in the DRC since I last put pen to paper, and I fear that my entry today could just roll on and on and on. I think I will however restrict my commentary on the events that took place in Kinshasa three weeks ago at the risk of my blog descending into an overtly political rant, which would risk getting me and my colleagues into plenty of trouble with plenty of interested parties.

Suffice to say it, while my colleagues and friends were holed up in their homes and offices in La Gombe, under gun, tank and RPG fire, the sunset over Kasaï, full of reds, oranges and golds made for an incredible sense of wellbeing. Sunsets in Kananga are incredibly dramatic after a heavy downpour. It was very difficult to imagine that anything was amiss in the capital, and it made me wonder whether such an entity as the Democratic Republic of Congo really exists.

We sipped out beers in an makeshift beer garden beside the behemoth Belgian administration complex, and giggled, slightly nervous at our good fortune of not being in Kinshasa. I found it hard not to draw the parallel of mad Emperor Nero who played his fiddle while Rome was engulfed in flames…

Street fighting lasted for about 48 hours in Kinshasa. The official death toll was 65 people; numerous other (respectable) sources have put the figure at between 500-600 people. Congolese TV aired a chilling ‘No Comment’ report on down town Kinshasa: a morbidly prolonged reel of footage showing a proliferation of shell casings and corpses along the main arteries of the city.

Travelling down Boulevard 30. Juin two weeks later, normality seems to have been largely restored. Many buildings are seriously bullet riddled, including some European embassies, which caused indignation from the EU, who collectively declared the violence an infringement of the Vienna Conventions; in the great tradition of the so called western democracies, a denunciation of the collateral damage to one’s own property whilst failing to condemn the unnecessary slaughter of hundreds of Congolese people. At the junction between the Boulevard and Avenue Nelson Mandela there is a crude sculpture of a huge white dove alighting on the globe. A high velocity bullet has pierced the doves chest: a powerful, maybe even prophetic image for the status quo in DRC; in my cynical soundtrack of flow of consciousness, I can hear Prince singing: ‘this is what it sounds like when doves cry.’

I spent Easter weekend in Kinshasa, lodging in a palatial residence on the hillsides above Kitambo Magasin. The joy of being with friends, of eating frog’s legs for the first time in my life and of spending a day discovering the Bonobos will have to be reserved for another chapter in this story. What was remarkable about the weekend was the extent of normality after such turbulent times.

Comme même ça bouge, Kinshasa! Which I guess makes it one of the most fascinating places on earth.

Dancing with the Kimbanguist Church Band

2007-03-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

It’s a lazy Sunday in Kananga, the temperature is a very manageable 26º C, I am sitting out on the veranda at the back of the residence, with my parrots. Nearly all the generators are shut down for a Sunday siesta. Tony parrot is very animated, not very pleased that I am ignoring him for some grey book like thing on my lap; he’s got lots to talk about. Cherrie on the other hand is hiding out in the rafters of the parrot house. I feel sorry that urban life in Kananga must be far less attractive than life in the rainforests of Muetsche. I am admiring the papayas, coconuts and a cornucopia of vegetation that I can not name (I think of that wonderful expression in Under Milk Wood: ‘the vegetables are making love.’). I am remembering my roots, listening to the Chieftains in honour of St Patrick’s Day, which was yesterday. Tony Parrot likes good Celtic music.

It’s been a few weeks I since I wrote, and its not for a lack of stories to tell. Things are limbering up here to be busy, I have to contended with a constant flow of visitors to Kananga and have had the pleasure of making a trip to Kinshasa to sample the delights of the private healthcare system – not that I was sick – I needed a Hepatitis booster. I quickly deduced that the safest and most effective way of getting vaccinated was to avoid the Kinshasa health system altogether, to purchase the vaccine in a chemist’s shop and to administer the jab myself…. Don’t try it at home, but honestly intra-muscular jabs are not a very complicated thing.

During this visit to Kinshasa, I managed to stay over the weekend, do some serious ‘Pagne’ shopping, dance rather a lot, learn how to play the tom tom with a bunch of street kids and, best of all to catch up with one of my oldest and closest friends who is working on a short assignment in Kinshasa. A real privilege.

I seem to have spent many days out of the office in the past weeks, thank God, as the old adage goes: you can take the boy out of the desert, but you can’t take the desert out of the boy! Kananga and its hinterland seem to be cursed with some of the worst infrastructure anywhere in the world, and so I have been travelling to villages on scrambler bikes, on foot even by dug out canoe! One of our projects is to provide training and meds to very remote communities in order to provide free treatment for 0-5 year olds. We completed the training in January of about 150 community health workers; and now we are facing the challenges of delivering the essential meds packages to these villages.

I wanted to write about my experiences of dancing in this post; and the story of setting up these remote healthcare ‘sites’ ties in nicely with a dancing theme.

In one of the health zones we travelled with the Administrateur du Territoire, and lots of other important senior men bearing fly whisks and natty, but ill-fitting suits. At the end of a treacherous dirt track we arrived in the village of Tshibambula; I would compare our reception to that of Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem, all the way down to the palm fronds waving exuberantly in the air. Jubilate indeed! Awaiting us at the entrance of the village was the local church band, banging out a rhythmic anarchic Congolese-Irish reel that only got faster. The band comprised of ten drummers with home mad drums of varying sizes and about seven whistle players. Just when I though I could pick up a tune it changed again. The entire child and female population of the village appeared to be dancing with the band. Of course as the representative of an NGO at this ceremony I had to observe the protocols of such an occasion. I dutifully sat through a few hours’ speeches, mostly in Tshiluba. I tried to stay awake as best I could; finally however I could no longer resist, I broke protocol and joined the hot and steamy mass of women and children who pretty quickly taught me the dance moves and we spent a joyous sweaty hour whilst the men of the village looked on disdainfully. Getting down with the Kimbanguist church band!

I have to stop here; Tony Parrot is removing my glasses and is fed up of me typing. Stay tuned for more tales of dancing the DRC.

You've been nowhere and you know nothing.

2007-02-26T00:48:00.000-08:00

The longer you stay in a place, the more complex that place becomes, the less you understand. I am envious of so many of my colleagues in the humanitarian business who profess to the intellect and wisdom of being able to understand a community, a conflict a culture in matter of weeks. I am afraid that I don’t share their skills and rather prefer to tread the more Buddhist path: true wisdom begins when you know you know nothing.

I have now gone beyond my initial fears about being based in Kananga. For sure the place lacks the dynamism of a big city - you need to compensate for the lack of leisure activity options in creative ways; but for all that it lacks the town and the province is unique, quite unlike any other part of this vast land. Today is one of those days that I wish that I had read Anthropology instead of South Asian languages at SOAS! My understanding of the history of Kasaï is still very rudimentary, but it seems that this area was in pre-colonial times was the domain of the Kuba kingdom, which along with the Kikongo kingdom in today’s Bas-Congo region (close to the Atlantic ocean) were two of the most sophisticated feudal societies in Africa. The first outsiders to succeed in making contact with the Bakuba discovered a culture which had highly developed industries in metal, wood and textiles, a taxation system and an, albeit feudal, system of democratic representation.

The BaKuba people resisted the incursions of the Force Publique, Leopold II’s bloody mercenary force of colonisers far later than any other community in the so called Congo Free State. Leopold greedily eyed the Kasaï for its rubber reserves. The bloodiest pillaging ensued, with missionaries sending reports of annihilation of entire villages, severed hands and slave labour in the name of a free market economy.

A statistic that disturbs me the most, and qualifies, for me the Leopoldian era in the Congo along with the other great atrocities of modern times (Samantha Power, please revise your book), is that in a period of slightly less than 40 years, the population of the Congo was reduced from approximately 20 million people to 10 million. Apocalypse then: anarchy now? I am sure the linkage is slightly more complicated but in essence. There is a lot that colonialism has to answer for. Suggest that anyone who wants to explore this thesis more examine the arguments presented by Adam Hochschild in Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.

On a more pedestrian level, my quality in of life has improved in two drastic ways: Firstly and most importantly I have to announce that I am a father! On Friday a man from Muetsche, about 200kms from here came to the door with a pair of rather lovely Grey Parrots; I have baptised them Anthony Aloiscious St. John Hancock and Cherrie Booth, and I have spent the majority of the weekend bonding with them, they are very beautiful, very keen on peanuts and their beaks are very very sharp! In the next few months, I hope that my offspring will become fluent in English, French and in Tshiluba … they are my (adopted) children after all; with that foundation we can work on the Dravidian languages.

The second great discovery is that Kananga produces excellent coffee; for sale in the market place for next to nothing. With my new companions and access to a high quality cup of Congolese coffee in the morning, Life in Kananga is becoming more and more bearable! I am even inspired to think of setting up an income generating project processing and marketing high quality café de Kasaï: with a little hard work I think Kananga can match the famous Asmara double Macchiato… coffee drinkers of the world: word up!

To Kinshasa and Back... Phew!

2007-02-11T08:01:00.000-08:00

A week spent hopping on and off domestic flights between Kananga and Kinshasa. . I am beginning to understand that in the Congo, the bribe culture is pretty much accepted as the way to make an honest buck… and the fact that government employees have often not been paid in months really only compounds the problem, making the recourse to ‘fundraising’ a la bribery and corruption an essential way of life.

I was relieved to get back to Kananga after a week of life in the big city. I narrowly avoided being laid off my flight back to Kananga when the representative of the Director General for Migration at Kinshasa airport informed me that I would not be permitted to travel as I carried the wrong type of visa and did not have a mining permit (which, apparently all NGO workers involved in Primary Healthcare must carry in order to travel to Kananga).

The aforementioned office bearer continued that he would hold my passport until the plane took off, after which I would be free to leave the airport. There was however a get out clause: I could buy him a scratch card for his telephone in order that he could call his bosses to discuss my case. He refused to use my phone (my number was, of course not registered with the Director General!).

In this situation, I was mildly amused and I asked him to clarify: I was not permitted to travel, but if I purchased calling credit for his phone, he could facilitate my travel. I am afraid that this request for clarification ignited this officers simmering temper, he ordered me to leave the office, without my passport, by force, if necessary! I was summoned back to the great man after a long half hour. He handed me back my passport and explained that as I was assisting needy Congolese children that I would be permitted to travel. I was glad that I stood my ground!

So, good to be back in civilised Kananga. Here we may not have the vast array of bright lights and big city diversions…. We may not even have any electricity or running water, but when you have, the architectural grandeur of Belgium’s last ditch attempt at establishing its capital city in Kananga, clear skies, fair climate, and ‘Monolux’ the most up market joint in town, serving delicious chicken and chips in the strategic position directly on top of the petrol station… my choice will always be to be a resident of Kananga with the minimum necessary trips to Kinshasa.

Kinshasa not all bad though: 3615 the pizzeria is pretty good, although obviously the haunt of most of Kinshasa’s commercial sex workers. My big recommendations for Kinshasa are an evening run beside the Congo: the road is located in Gombe, and across the river (which is much smaller than I imagined), you can see the lights of Brazzaville in the twilight. The other top tip for all my Bollywood buddies is the Taj Tandoori, on the top floor of an ultra art deco apartment building, apparently constructed as a vantage point for the last Belgian King to be sovereign of the Congo Free State, a misnomer if ever I heard one.

Work stuff’s hectic. Lots to do, and some interesting results, judging from several emails form colleagues I am the latest in a long line of Aid worker avatars to be in Kananga. As one of my beloved cousins observed: it’s a funny old business we’re in!

first vision

2007-02-08T06:34:00.000-08:00

Happy to introduce you to the Kananga chapter of Frog men and women....

its a kind of David and Goliath thing.....

2007-02-03T03:05:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile south of the Equator....

in Kasai Occidental, as life in every other human community accelerates towards it's ever more self destructive, self obsessed point final, the people of Kananga are going about their quiet existence, trying not to hit the potholes in the main street, wondering when the next train will arrive from Lubumbashi, laden with everything a town of 1 million people needs to survive. The only thing that seems to function in the SNCC (Societe Nationale de Chemin de Fer de Congo) is a siren which announces, with Swiss German accuracy 7am, 1pm and 7pm. At first I thought it was some sort of air raid siren, but over the days, I have come to realise that its far more likely that George Bush would visit Kananga than there being a risk of an Aerial attack!

Thinking about it, I would prefer the former to the latter, in a sick kind of a way. I can't imagine anyone in this part of the world having the capability of orchestrating hi-tec Aerial combat which would be accurate enough to do any damage. A visit to Kananga by the most powerful man on the earth on the other hand would indubitably create more conflicts than it would solve.

Nothing much to report from Kananga this week; Elections for the new govenor of Kasai Occidental were halted when the electoral commission announced that the leading candidate was not a Congolese citizen: not only did he hold Belgian nationality, but a British passport (so no hope for my political career in this country). In the Province of Bas Congo a Christian group protested in the streets against corruption, which is refreshing, resulting in the Police shooting at the demonstrators and killing five, which is ghoulish and nauseating.

Having succeeded in an electoral process last November, which observers adjudged free and fair, Congo now has to work out a way to reverse decades of what Michela Wrong describes as kleptocracy in her book 'In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz.' (my very first Bohemian Frog Hunter recommendation!). Decades of corruption will be hard to reverse, we see that in our work here: a health care system robbed of any resources; NGO/Public sector interaction seen merely as a conduit for obtaining financial resources. In the light of this bleak economic reality however there is hope; we are succeeding in improving access to healthcare for communities living in remote underserved areas, we are increasing the availability of essential drugs and having an impact on reducing high risk deliveries and improving post natal care. Its easy in the Congo to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the poverty and the corruption: but for me personally, its about helping 'lame dogs over styles' to coin an old North of Ireland Presbyterian saying. Of course we can't change the world, of course we cant change the Congo, even the province. But if we can assist one community have better health care, assist one family to protect themselves against malaria by providing a net; then I think we are succeeding.

In a very little way.

Bingo Bango Bongo

2007-01-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

One week and 22 hours into a new country and a surprisingly pleasant introduction to how things are set to be for the next few years. I think its probably time to re-baptise my blogspace, so to all you bohemian frog hunters out there: welcome back and get ready with your wetsuits and blowpipes !

At the risk of disappointing all my adrenaline junkie fellow travellers, this is just not the Congo I was expecting. Two years in the Sudano-Eritrean desert makes any other post conflict setting look a little bit like Surrey on a late summer’s afternoon, strawberries and cream and all!

I am writing from my office in Kananga, the Province of Kasai Occidental in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The office is located within a bungalow that could be described as ministerial were it not for the fact that it needs a little touch of Feng Sui and some magnolia silk paint. Out of the window is a tastefully laid out garden in immaculate condition. The perimeter of the compound is demarcated by a high wall, clad with Bougainville running riot. Out side the compound the ‘City’ of Kananga rolls out in long wide tree lined boulevards, large governmental buildings.. Possibly a Belgian Art Deco attempt at Asmara? The villas of the colonial age are still mostly intact and in spite of no electricity or running water or particularly good road quality, it’s a very attractive town. Downtown you can find a number of decent restaurants, a huge bustling municipal market which is bordered at one end by the railway line (infrequent trains to Mbuji Mayi) and at the other by the big colonial government quarter. They tell me there are a number of places to hang out and dance, although, in a security meeting given by MONUC (the UN Mission to the Congo), they advised against places as being ‘plein de voyoux et putains’ sounds like my kind of place! This it seems is the height of security concerns in Kananga for the United Nations... great job guys!

I am finding it a bit weird being referred to all and sundry as ‘Le Coordinatuer’, I am trying to move towards people just calling me ‘Fergus’, which somehow is a difficult combination of syllables for French/Tshiluba speaking Kasaiyans. The major challenge appears to now be, establishing a strong sense of team here and ensuring that operational structures are in place that will facilitate the efficient running of the programme.

The team is not as big as I expected, about thirty people that I could count, its set to grow though now, with a construction coordinator coming in at the beginning of March and the primary healthcare adviser moving to a new office in Katanga, it looks as if there are going to be plenty of changes here in the coming months. The target of the project: reduced mortality rates in three health zones will be achieved through a combination of constructing better health centres, ensuring the provision of drugs and continued training and capcity building support to the employees of the zonal health authorities. In a way it’s the Sudan project; the same only different.

I have been to visit the thee health zones, again: Ghosts of Sudan, inaccessible places, terrible roads and lots of bumping about in 4x4s; we have a Land Rover here which makes a nice interlude to the ubiquitous Toyotas. Health centres look like they are in need of much support and the morale among health teams is tangibly low, with staff not having been paid for months and months, NGO incentives are the only source of income that many of the health workers have… which begs lots of questions about the sustainability NGO involvement. We are facing the next phase of the project: of making consultations absolutely free, with some small trepidation!

Will endeavour to update this weblog as much as I can, when I am busy maybe slightly less than when things are slack, I will wrap up here saying Come to Kasai! Its not like the rest of the mad house that is DRC, I promise a warm welcome to any visitors.

Comment from the Peace Council, Colombo on EU Sri Lanka Resolution

2006-05-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

Further draconian sanctions imposed on the LTTE will not achieve a breakthrough in no peace no war for N E Sri Lanka....

National Peace Councilof Sri www.peace-srilanka.org

25.05.06

EU Resolution Calls for Immediate Political Response and not More Violence

The resolution of the European Parliament, that among other things, advocates a ban on the LTTE contains a strong indictment on the use of violence to attain political objectives. The resolution also strongly condemns the high level of human rights abuses by the Sri Lankan government and LTTE and their constant breaches of the Ceasefire Agreement. Those living under the shadow of intensifying violence and a debilitated economy, would be hopeful that this international interest in Sri Lanka would cause a reversal of the negative trend that threatens to plunge the whole country into war.However, being truly independent and sovereign means to be able to solve problems through internal processes rather than relying on others. Unfortunately, the indications from the ground are that violence is continuing unabated. The National Peace Council condemns the acts of violence that continue to kill security forces personnel in claymore mine and grenade throwing incidents, and the killing of LTTE's eastern intelligence wing leader Ramanan and others. We also condemn the violent attacks on three international NGOs in the east, which reflects the continuous expansion of targets. NPC rejects the opinion being canvassed that a quick resolution of the ethnic conflict, or gaining a decisive advantage, is possible through renewed war. The experience of the two decade long war of attrition that only came to a halt with the signing of the Ceasefire Agreement in 2002 should caution against such a reliance on a military response. The costs of war will be unpredictable and also very high. A protracted conflict could sap the life and wealth of the country. It would be extremely counter-productive if the proposed EU ban on the LTTE would encourage reliance on more violence, which currently appears to be the case. NPC pleads that the immediate response to the European Parliament's resolution should be a political one by both parties, and not more violence. An immediate reduction, if not cessation, of violence would be a token of good faith and an essential confidence building measure in this regard. We call on the government and LTTE to utilise the good offices of the Norwegian facilitating team that is presently in Sri Lanka to enter into peace talks that deal with the issues raised by the European Parliament in its resolution on Sri Lanka. Despite the deteriorating ground situation, NPC believes that a positive political initiative that is taken by either the government or LTTE, in the form of a concrete offer, and one that is matched by the other, could transform the situation in the best interests of both parties and the people. Executive DirectorOn behalf of the Governing Council

2006-05-24T15:28:00.000-07:00

"Ghosts of Rwanda: The Failure of theAfrican Union in Darfur," November 13 & 20, 2005:http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=535&page=1andhttp://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=534&page=1]

Bristol 23.5.6

2006-05-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

Just watched Hotel Rwanda at the cinema; the cool thing about the screening was that it was in the presence of the real guy who managed the hotel in Kigali. And a time for Q and As. I wanted to know if he was happy with the portrayal of himself and his family in the film... and he was quite. liked the film, it made me feel ignorant about the Lakes region.

I should take some time out from traumatic african subjects a while.

I feel astonished by his bravey and quick wittedness, but more i felt overwhelmingly powerless. Rwanda happend in '94, this man saved the lives of someting just over 1,000 IDP, but 999,000 others died. Can individuals and groups in the socalled developped world really respond adequately.. especially in a Sudan context where economic resources play such a huge part in the dynamic?

Hmmm more analysis to follow. still need to deprogramme.

2006-05-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

Well Ladies and Gentlemen, and scum of the earth this is the first one, my maiden voyage into Blogdom.

Lets see how it goes. I am back in the UK. Eritrea was a dream, is now a dream. More analysis asap.

caio for now.