Jobeda 1975-2020

Jobeda Begum Ali, feminist, futurist and entrepreneur died as she had always lived – a fierce fighter until the very last. At the age of 45, she lived more of lives, touched more people and challenged all she met to reject mediocracy and the status quo than anyone else I have known.

Jobeda was a futurist above all things; she strove for a world made better by technology; she had careers in government, film making, Ted talking, as a writer, a roboticist and finally, not surprisingly, as a successful founder of a social enterprise providing care for vulnerable people in their homes.

Jobeda was hungry for knowledge. I first met her in 1997, I was struck by the incandescent passion she had for life, I recognised in her blazing rocket fuelled version of myself – in love with ideas, science, art, creativity and wit. Her mercurial way led me to conclude quickly that Jobeda was like me, prone to the black dog and in love with life. I met Jobeda in the summer she graduated from Cambridge, and I from SOAS. Connected through a mutual friend, we became independent friends quite fast. Jobeda the street smart, sassy teenager from Tower Hamlets, deceptively clad in a pink shalwar kameez. My London – Jobeda defined my experience of being alive in the city.

Although Jobeda was born in Sylhet, she spent her early life in a two-room council flat on the Isle of Dogs, she shared this miniature abode with random cousins, brothers, sisters, aunties coming and going. And then this little girl from Sylhet who grew up eating with her hands arrives at Trinity College – the domain of cutlery, intellect and patriarchy – this fireball of energy and femininity collided meteorically with established white intellectual elitism. And that’s who I met. The girl on fire who gazed at stars and laughed with life.

I left the island in 1997, with a photo of Jobeda to stick on every wall the wide world over where I slept. I trudged the planet through wars and more wars until life crash-landed back in London in 2017. I came home for Jobeda it turns out.

Months later, Jobeda had been diagnosed with Squamous cell cancer, which we were told at the time was ultimately treatable. She embraced life more after her diagnosis. Suddenly her projects became more urgent; her drive to write her first novel, her immense wanderlust, her lust for life exploded. Sadly, I fear we caught her cancer too late, after a gruelling course of chemo and a period ‘in the clear’ Jobeda learned that the cancer had metastasised into many of her main organs. Jobeda’s reaction was to wage war on her cancer; she enrolled on immunotherapy trials, flew round the world to access the most cutting edge in cancer treatment, made bizarre liquidised drinks out of kale and beetroot. In the last years of her life, she crammed in memory, joy, fights, adventures and above all laughter. We recently took at trip to Rome, ate far too much good food and realised our lifelong dream to see Tosca at the opera house in Rome. We forgot cancer and loved life.

Jobeda died this morning at home, surrounded by her family and with a great sense of peace.

For me, Jobeda, there can be no good bye. You are always in my heart.

Good Journalism on Congo is so rare

but here is some:

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

Pre-Christmas dinner

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

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

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

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

Crazy Crazy Demographics

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

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.