In the Mood for Imodium

When I started puking again, my first thought was of the pizza.

I can't really blame the cook, who, as I have mentioned, is normally wonderful. She's never seen a "real" pizza before, of course, and has to improvise an oven each time she makes one. Also, the only cheese for sale in the Kivus (for less than outrageous prices) is a cheddar-like round hailing from the high mountain pastures. It's pretty impressive that she's able to produce anything resembling pizza at all.

However, this time I was admittedly less than tantalized by the cook's pizza-making exploits. In a burst of inventiveness and frugality, she had decided to insert leftover spaghetti underneath the cheese and eggplant layers. When I bit into my slice and discovered this, my stomach turned, and suddenly the pizza lost all appeal.

Fortunately, the housecat was ravenous that day, what with five new mouths to feed, and she was only too eager to pick up where I had left off. After gorging herself on the cheese, however, she abandoned the slice on the kitchen floor, where the spaghetti strands sprawled like worms for the next day. For some reason, the sight of them there, as they slowly congealed to the cement, made me nauseous.

I finally gathered up the will to toss the uneaten slice into the garbage and did my best to put the image of it out of my mind. But the next day, I felt seriously sick to my stomach, and around midday excused myself from the office to puke all over the gravel driveway. I had experienced similar symptoms about a month before, and although I had recovered quickly, I figured it was time to get some official tests done. Likely, I had some kind of internal parasite that would continue to manifest itself from time to time, and I supposed I should nip it in the bud.

The vehicles were all in the field with the staff. As I waited for one to return to the base so that it could take me to the hospital, the diarrhea began. Intrepid, I prepared a sample in a plastic water bottle, stuck it in the fridge, and popped some Imodium.

When I arrived at the hospital, it was nearly closing time. Though I managed to puke on at least three of the nurses who attended to me, the laboratory was, alas, shut for the evening, so I was informed that I would have to come back tomorrow to have the tests done. Much to my disappointment, my stool sample was rejected, and the doctor suggested I supply him with a fresh one in the morning.

And so I returned in the a.m. as instructed, and produced blood and urine on command. But the third, and most necessary, sample was stubbornly unforthcoming. Determined to wait it out, I plunked myself on a wooden bench outside the lab, clutching the awkwardly tiny glass vial that they had given me with which to capture the stool.

You might think that this would be an unlikely moment for romance, but if so you know very little about Congolese men and their infatuation with wuzungu. A good dozen nurses, interns and other passersby seized the opportunity to impress me with their English vocabulary and try to weasel my phone number out of me, discreetly avoiding mention of the glass bottle in my hand. But my number, like the stool, remained locked away, and I reluctantly told the lab staff I would have to come back later, when my bowels started cooperating again.

Funnily enough, on my way back to the car, my bowels suddenly sprang to life, and I dashed back into the hospital bathroom and triumphantly presented the vial to the lab crew soon after.

The results from a multitude of tests came that evening. Nothing was wrong with me, from a strictly medical sense. No amoebas, no intestinal worms, no malaria, no giardia. Nothing.

As I considered this news, my stomach turned anew. My supervisor would be coming to visit the following day. Although my appetite was returning after this recent bout of illness, the thought of his visit suddenly made me very tense. I could physically feel my blood pressure rising.

Then it hit me...the very same symptoms - the queasiness, headache, stomach pain, vomiting - had struck me two days prior to my boss' previous visit, and had gradually disappeared after he had left.

I can only conclude that my nausea in both cases was induced by the stress I felt in anticipation of in-person interaction with my boss.

The good news is that he has decided to leave the country, and as I write this no longer has any authority over me.

The bad news is that somehow I had allowed one person the power to significantly affect my physical and mental well being. No matter how abusive, irrational and domineering he was, I should have figured out a healthier way to deal with his behavior.

But fortunately, there's more good news, if I choose to view them that way, and it's that there are several zillion Congolese males who don't much mind my non-mastery of emotions. They don't even care if I'm physically leaking out both ends. They just want my digits.

Of Life and Death

Note: The same night that I posted this, a pirogue loaded with merchandise and passengers sank near Minova, killing around 100 people, including family members of at least two of our staff. Almost no one here knows how to swim, and of course life jackets are practically nonexistent.




"We heard shots...the militias had killed a woman in the neighboring compound. So we left our post at the entrance to the base and locked ourselves in the office. We called the logistician, who told us we should evacuate, if we could find an opportunity. But the militias were everywhere. We stayed put and hoped for the best."

The base watchman is recounting a day in September 2008, when militias stormed Minova. The expats were evacuated to Bukavu, and the other staff sought shelter where they could, but the guards were asked to stay, in hopes that their presence would discourage the militias from looting the base.

At first, no one realized the severity of the situation. The guards managed to dissuade the few soldiers that showed up from entering, warning that their bosses were only a few houses away and that any troublemakers would be found out and punished afterwards. But things began spiraling downwards, and the militias shot and killed several people in the neighborhood during their pillaging. With the escalating gunfire, the watchmen retreated to the office, where they remained, unable to find an opportune moment to escape, for the rest of the day and the following night.

They were lucky; for whatever reason, the militias stayed away. All of the other NGOs in town were ransacked except our own, and calm was restored within a few days' time.

It's Easter, and almost Passover, an appropriate time to talk about life, and death.

Chatti, our base cat and my only housemate for almost two months now, gave birth to five kittens two nights ago. Our housekeeper, a pregnant single mother who initially told me she was expecting in June, quietly had a baby girl one night at the beginning of April. The cook and I went for a visit last week, and when the housekeeper handed me the heavily swathed bundle, she calmly informed me that her three-week-old baby was sick with malaria (and no, she did not have a mosquito net).

She then mentioned that one of her sister's adolescent children had been missing for two weeks now. The family feared that the girl had fallen victim to the "Kabanga" phenomenon, wherein, according to local belief, a ordinary length of rope is accorded magic powers if it is used to strangle a person to death. Such a rope can then be sold on the black market--to merchants or politicians--for impressive sums of money. Kabanga sounds so crazy to me that I am tempted to laugh it off...except that it is real. A local man's body was recently found in a nearby river, and three men were sent to a Bukavu prison, charged with his murder by strangulation.

The insecurity and violence that the Congolese have to cope with on a daily basis is astounding. What often comes across as passiveness in the face of death may actually be something closer to recognition of helplessness. Although the state has begun to regain a bit of clout since 2003, when the war here nominally ended, it is far from functional, and your average resident has little hope of achieving justice for any crimes committed against him or his family.

And so the Congolese continue to play the cards they're dealt, and to stake their claims in the future by having children--lots of them. One of my staff members, an extremely intelligent 40-something who earns about $300 a month, has nine children. And most of the other staff members are not far behind.

I often talk to them about family planning and its benefits, which are so widely accepted in the West--the idea that it is easier to properly feed, clothe, educate and provide medical care for your children if you have fewer of them--and although most seem to grasp the theory, I kind of doubt I've really convinced them.

Here, you're never sure what will happen from one day to the next. I suppose if I were trying to raise children in such circumstances, I might try to increase my odds of keeping at least a few of them alive, as well.

The Poorest Rich Country in the World

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is not a land of the wealthy. The average annual income here is 189 bucks, less than I spent during last week's trip to Madagascar. Of course, money isn't everything. But according to the 2010 United Nations' Human Development Index, which attempts to account for numerous other factors that impact quality of life, including education levels and health, the DRC trails every other country in the world except for Zimbabwe.

The crazy thing is, the DRC is a land of enormous wealth. Its elephants and rubber trees financed the construction of the decadent palaces and monuments of colonial-era Belgium. It is home to the world's most voluminous river and the vastest tropical forest after the Amazon. Its mountains teem with copper, cobalt, gold and diamonds, to name a few. Even its soil is relatively resilient, as I realized during my Malagasy sojurn (Madagascar has some of the most fragile, and the most degraded, soils on the planet.) Despite the abuse of farmland here, and the almost universal lack of erosion control practices, fields continue to produce, at least for the moment.


King Leopold II's Laeken Palace, Belgium


Political economist types have theorized that such well endowed countries are inherently destined for slow or even backwards development. While plenty of examples (including my own country) suggest otherwise, there's certainly some truth to the theory. Congo has attracted a slew of voracious plunderers, drawn by the promise of boundless riches, heedless of the welfare, let alone the suffering, of the general population.


Leopold-era rubber slaves, victims of the profit-crazed monarch's brutal regime.


It seems to me that true humanitarian intervention, that is, when people, in the case of exceptional circumstances (e.g., post-tsunami Japan), are unable to clothe, feed, or shelter themselves, and the state is temporarily incapable of addressing the need, is almost always justifiable. But a case like Congo is much more complicated. The people here are intelligent, educated, capable, and often willing to work to better their lot, but the political climate makes real progress almost impossible. This environment is incredibly frustrating for me, who
knows that in a few months' time I can retreat to
the States, my mission "complete."

I can't imagine what it must be like for the Congolese.

Passage

I'm halfway done. As of March 26th, I had been in Congo for six months, with another six months to go before the end of my contract. My second week-long break begins a week from tomorrow, and although the next six months will no doubt present more than enough challenges, I have reason to suspect that I've already passed the steepest part of the learning curve.

Some people get addicted to humanitarian work, it seems. They hop from Darfur to eastern Congo to Pakistan, drawn to...I haven't decided what, exactly. The constant novelty? The chance to trade suburban ennui for a largely unpredictable and chaotic environment? The feeling of importance and power that accompanies expat life in a developing country? The sense of making a tangible difference in beneficiairies' lives?

I am surviving, and definitely appreciative of the experience, but am not won over to the lifestyle yet. I am showing signs of extended stress, such as I've never had before. A combination of social isolation, an environment of discouraging corruption and poverty from which even the well-educated and entrepreneuring find it near impossible to escape, an unapologetically critical and often hostile boss, a neverending workload, and most significantly, a level of physical confinement I have never before had to contend with.

I would like to hop on a bicycle and expel this stress in a two thousand mile trail of dust. I find myself dreaming of the American Southwest, the northern Rockies, Patagonia, anywhere where social foibles can be forgotten and a primarily physical existence is possible.

The humanitarian world is extremely liberating on the one hand--you can recreate your image here however you'd like to--and on the other, painfully restricting.

Yet that bicycle trip (or its equivalent) is still a ways away, and my upcoming break far too short to dispel this stress completely. So in the meantime I am trying to focus on the positive aspects of this place, this project, my being here at this point in time. The deepening closeness with different members of the staff, the weekend strolls into the high country with the night watchmen, my slowly expanding knowledge of Swahili, the beneficiairies who are now able to pay their children's school fees because of their new small business, the communities who are finally starting to reap the profits of wilt-free bananas, the neighborhood children who call out my name instead of "Muzungu!", the relative ease with which I now carry out the routine project management tasks, the quiet dignity of the streams of barefoot women hauling impossible loads to market.

Militias in the Mist

"February was a busy month," says the park ranger I am chatting with. "We had a lot of visitors."

"What does 'a lot' mean"?" I ask, doubtfully.

"Maybe two per week," he replies, affably, then adds, "March has been slow..."

I am at the information center at the entrance to Kahuzi-Biega National Park in South Kivu province. The months since my last break feel like years, and I have asked for a weekend of leisure with a friend at a neighboring base. Happily, my request was granted, and now I find myself "stranded" at the gate of the only Congolese nature preserve I have yet to encounter, waiting for another vehicle to come meet me.

I have been suffering from serious nature deprivation in the overpopulated, degraded areas stretching along the western shore of Lake Kivu, where my program activities are based. I could not be more thrilled to be stranded here, and it seems the tourist-starved park guide appreciates the sudden and unexpected attention as I pummel him with questions.

According to the ranger, this park covers about 2, 316 square miles, an area two thirds the size of Yellowstone, or about the same size as Delaware. The visitor center is reminiscent of an American park service structure, a solid, spacious stone building with large panels depicting tropical vistas and wildlife.

But the comparison to American protected areas is of limited value. Whereas Yellowstone has 4000 employees (including those operating the concessions that run many of the park's amenities), Kahuzi Biega has a mere 200.

And working here is far from glamorous; in the years following the Rwandan genocide, Interahamwe militias, fearing vengeance from their now Tutsi-dominated, post-war state, fled into eastern Congo. Many of them penetrated this forest, seeking its cover and relative abundance of resources, and, later, staying partly for the mineral wealth that they began to exploit. During the post-genocide period, half of the park staff was murdered, and probably an even larger portion of the wildlife. The ranger leads me to the back of the visitor center to a display of piles of giant bones, a sampling of the elephants and gorillas that have been poached in recent years, silent victims of modern-day African war.

Still, there is some hope for this place. Its 200 employees may not elevate Kahuzi Biega to Yellowstone standards, but they're still a solid group. The ranger I am speaking with seems very keen, educated, devoted. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this park receives outside funding, which allows its staff to at least afford some protection for the resources here. While the elephant population has been all but decimated, some of the gorillas, for which this area is so famous, survive. You can even go see them, for a cool 400$ per visitor. The mountains for which the park is named are off limits to tourists for the moment, for security reasons, but they loom high over largely intact equatorial forest. Wilderness still has a stronghold here, and perhaps with enough outside pressure for protection and peace, it will rebound.

Where I Live

This is the view from our office/my front door. The highest ridge in the picture marks the start of the "haut plateau," which stretches a ways west towards the interior of DRC. As much I would like to scramble up there during my free time, I can't. A lot of militias enjoy free reign up there in those ungoverned parts. As a consequence, many former highlanders have relocated to the lakeshore, which is relatively secure. This movement of the population has put increasing pressure on the natural resources here, most notably arable land and soil. (Note the patchworked fields covering the hills.)

With a banana wilt committee, measuring their local "multiplication field." The healthy banana seedlings that are produced in the nurseries our project established eventually get planted in fields, where they grow to maturity and produce lots and lots of clones. These clones can be harvested and distributed to other villagers; this is how the impact of our project is magnified.

At the moment a lot of our multiplication fields aren't ready, and so we're taking stock of what resources are available vs. what we actually need to get all of those healthy shoots into the right growing environment. Hence the measuring tape.


This is one of our base guards, Didier, showing me the garden behind his house, in a hilltop village about 4 miles from Minova. He grows cabbages, mangoes, tomatoes, guavas, sugarcane, eucalyptus seedlings--just your average Congolese agricultural tinkerer.







Our local beach, seen from a hilltop in Didier's village. I swam there once, before learning that the lake's poisonous gases can swallow you alive. It was nice at the time. Now I just admire its apparent serenity from far-off hilltops.





For more photos from the past three weeks, click here.

Hakuna Biscuit

The MONUSCO convoy is parked in the middle of the road as I stroll by, black plastic bag in hand, on my way to return a couple of soda bottles to the corner kiosk. I nod to the sunglassed, bearded Pakistani driver and his companions. They are all Pakistanis, our local regimen of MONUSCO (the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), known to the locals as MONUC (the United Nations Organization Mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo, as it was called until mid-2010.)

White folks (or wuzungu) are inevitably associated with the UN 'round these parts, and that's not necessarily a good thing. Though the organization has a mandate to keep the peace here in eastern Congo, that's not always how it works. The last time there was real insecurity in Minova (about a year before my arrival), MONUC's (say "Mo-NUKE's") only real response was to flee. Since our organization, in typical humanitarian fashion, has a "no arms" policy, we rely on the UN in times of crisis. So when our staff evacuated in the company of the UN convoy, the local population, understandably a little miffed with their "protector's" response, began hurling rocks at the vehicles in said convoy, including our own.

When the situation calmed down and the staff returned to the base, our drivers surreptitiously painted bold red stripes on all of our vehicles, announcing to all would-be rock throwers that we are NOT MONUC!!!

Alas, distinctions between this peacekeeping mission and that humanitarian organization are not so obvious to your average Congolese villager. Lightish skin means MONUC to many (the lack of maleness or facial hair doesn't seem to deter them). When I can stand the base no longer and slip out of its confines, I am inevitably greeted with "MONUC! Biscuit!" Or "MONUC-un-bonbon! MONUC-un-bonbon!" ("MONUC a candy! MONUC a candy!")

This invaribly annoys me, because (a) My appearance is not even remotely Pakistani, and, significantly, I am not male. Why, then, do the locals not notice this? Has Congo changed me more than I realize?; (b) What on earth was the United Nations mission in Congo doing handing out candy? ("Sorry that your country is uncurably unstable, sonny. Have a lollipop."); (c) "Biscuits" are not much better. In French, this can refer to either cookies or crackers. To give our MONUC friends the benefit of the doubt, let's say it was crackers, wholesome, whole-grain, vitamin-packed crackers. STILL, what on earth were they thinking? How will crackers ease the ills of eastern Congo? Will they not merely doom every other humanitarian organization that passes this way to be seen as a potential source of ready, unconditional handouts?

So my response, unvariably, is "A pana MONUC." ("No MONUC.") "Hakuna biscuit." ("I don't have any biscuits.")

What did they put in those biscuits, anyway?