Back In

I'm heading back.

Not to Congo this time, but to northern Uganda instead. It's a short commitment; I'll be there just two months, to evaluate a cash transfer project and write a report on it. Barely enough time to get situated. But I'm a bit more prepared this time than I was a year and a half ago to dive right in to Africa and the NGO world. And oh-so-well rested.

Nine months in Congo took it out of me. The lack of exercise, the walled-in lifestyle, the incredibly complicated and often depressing humanitarian situation, and especially the overbearing supervisor. When I went to France for break, three months in, I could barely remember how to ski. There were weeks when I literally didn't leave the compound, an area of maybe 450 square meters. I knew that I'd need a bit of free floating once I got back to the U.S. to start feeling like myself again.

nearing the summit of Mt. Rainier

And so, since my return home at the beginning of July, I've been indulging in everything I couldn't in Congo - hipster ice cream joints, burritos, rock climbing, hikes, glaciers, Goodwill, so-awful-they're-hilarious movies with the brother, half marathon preparation, wilderness medicine courses, and lots of glorious, anonymous, walking. The novelty of feeling unremarkable as I stroll down the street has not worn off.

And I've been visiting friends, scattered throughout the major cities of both U.S. coasts. Friends with architecture degrees that feel like surprisingly useless, and unbelievably expensive, pieces of paper; friends on libertarian pig farms whose swine snort up several tons of Pixie Stix, Keebler cookies, orange juice and other assorted supermarket refuse each evening; generous friends with funds who take advantage of the slow economy to get into biking shape and take me along to sample fine restaurants; friends questioning the value of their PhD programs; friends scouting out movie storylines in Madagascar; friends bewildered by the economy who have taken to living in homeless shelters to save money during the job search, or else working jobs they never would have expected to claim as their own. 

It hardly seems the time for too much introspection, especially as concerns careers. But I knew I needed a break, and that the humanitarian world, regardless of my persistent qualms about it, would be there for me if I needed it. I still feel, as I did when I left Congo in June, that I'd like to be more stable, and settled, and that I'd probably be happiest if I lived in a place more conducive to an active lifestyle, and for several weeks now I've been scoping out Seattle as a prospective home. 

But the bank account is nearly empty, and when I got the Uganda offer, it didn't take me long to accept. It's only two months, after all. And despite everything, I'm very excited to go back.

Crisis in the Congo: A Short Film

For those of you who are interested in finding out more about how the current situation in Congo came about, and what Western countries can do to improve things, check out this short film:

Crisis in the Congo: Uncovering the Truth

All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems...But all these stars are silent. You--you alone will have stars as no one else has them. In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night. You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me... You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh.  -Saint-Exupéry

Into the Blue

When we start paddling out into the lake in the early morning, the air is perfectly still. The slate waters blend into the distant mountains, obscured by dry season dust, and the hazy sky. We steer our kayaks into this surreal and sun-bleached blueness, broken only by the dark silhouette of a dugout pirogue where a lone figure hunches over, pulling in fishing net.

I am leaving the Congo at the end of June, meaning three months sooner than expected, to reduce pressure on a financially desperate mission. The news came three days ago, delivered apologetically by a country director I barely know. And so, suddenly, unexpectedly, it is almost over.

I've been on the waters of Lake Kivu only once before, during my initial trip to Minova back in October, but I spent the entire trip trapped in a tightly-packed ferry cabin, distracted by the jabberings of a stand-up comic on screen in front of the passengers and my racing thoughts as I tried to figure out where on earth I had landed. This time is different. In the kayak, I can consider this place freely, encumbered only by the memories it triggers in me and the anticipation of departure.

Departure was inevitable, of course. The when of it shouldn't really matter. I never intended to stay here forever. And yet I want to have the time to say goodbye properly. I called Ariane, the cook, yesterday to make sure she would be there for my final week in the field. Why? she asked, suspicious and shrewd as ever. Well maman, I said, I'm going home. Ariane with the cousin in the States who has invited her to come and stay, but only if she leaves her husband behind in Africa (which she can't bring herself to do, although she dreams of attending cooking school somewhere in the West). Ariane whose family takes care of eight war-orphaned children and who is an orphan herself (although I still don't have the whole story). Ariane whose hefty two year-old has clearly inherited his mother's bulk, and whose one year-old came down with mysterious sores on her tongue that prevented her from eating until we cured them with honey.

And there is Iledéfense, the night watchman who shows no sign of fatigue on our long weekend walks into the bush, despite his not having slept the night before, who took refuge in his friend's home in Bukavu during the war, fearful of a deadly encounter with the Interahamwe militias who prowled the streets, attacking anyone with the delicate facial features of a potential Tutsi, who has studied logistics and computers but makes do with the work he can get (as we all must), and spends a good chunk of his week opening and closing doors at our base, unmarried still at age 30 but with several prospects, unfailingly, excessively polite Iledéfense.

And so on.

After forty minutes of paddling, the islands we were aiming for remain distant, so we pause to take our bearings. Turning to face the shore, the city of Bukavu sprawls before us, its terraces of once-stately colonial homes succumbing to decades of neglect. Dust-filled, rust-rooved, potholed Bukavu, with hospitals full of rape victims, hotels full of mining magnates and Land Rovers toting hundreds of humanitarian workers from one gated compound to another. I have never really found my footing in Bukavu, although the occasional weekend retreat here has helped me gain much-needed perspective after long stints in the field.

Right on cue, the wind begins to blow, and the once-still waters turn choppy. We head back to shore, fighting the wind all the while. The kayak keepers chide us, politely, upon our return; apparently we had briefly ventured into Rwandan waters during our jaunt. We apologize in Swahili and head back home.

Time soothes all sorrows, as Saint-Exupéry said. And departure is inevitable, eventually, for all of us. The Congo of my day-to-day is vibrant, bold with exquistely tailored pagnes, pungent with fermenting manioc drying in the sun, heartbreaking in its hardship, inspiring in its persistence. It is not the kind of place to fade away quietly, memory blurring into memory like water into sky.

Evaluation Time

We are being evaluated.

A Frenchwoman my own age joined us in Minova ten days ago, at the mission's invitation, to examine the impact of the last two years of our project's banana wilt interventions. My team members have spent the past week in the field, conducting focus groups with banana wilt committees, seed distribution beneficiaires and plain-old community members, trying to get a sense of the strong and weak points of our project's strategy.

The conclusions thus far are on the discouraging side. It seems that any gains we've made are far outweighed by the constraints we face. Despite two years of fairly strident awareness-raising efforts, most villagers remain reluctant to put in the hard physical labor required to get rid of their infected banana plants, an essential step in ridding the region of the disease. NGOs are a mixed blessing here in the Kivus; while they bring much-needed resources to an area virtually devoid of tangible government, they also seem to stifle individual initiative and community spirit. Why take the trouble to uproot your infected banana plantation for the good of your children and your community if there is an international NGO nearby who might pay you to do it? While the committees that we put into place have managed to produce a significant number of healthy banana shoots, there's little reason to hope that those shoots will help rebuild local livelihoods over the long term. Wilt-infected plantations still dominate the landscape here, and as long as they remain, any as-yet uninfected shoots are at serious risk of contamination.

The project as conceived certainly has flaws, but the biggest barrier to real progress seems to me the very feeble position of the state. The national agricultural service is the logical actor to intervene when crop disease strikes, but even the higher-ranking Congolese ag employees that I've met suffer from insultingly low and/or nonexistent pay and few resources at their disposal that would actually permit them to do their jobs, such as a means of transport with which to get out into the field. I don't know that what we're trying to do is feasible, given the current political environment. It's perhaps another example of good-intentioned development doomed to failure for lack of long-term, realistic, careful planning.

Perhaps inspired by this bout of introspection, I decided yesterday to create my own evaluation of sorts. We ordered a batch of banana wilt t-shirts for this project. They're on the glaringly ugly side, in my humble opinion, but being new and blindingly white, they're the envy of the entire base. Everyone - the drivers, the storekeeper, the night watchmen - wants a t-shirt.

Hence the evaluation. As I see it, anyone who sports one of our t-shirts in public should have a decent sense of what banana wilt is and how to fight it, as well as how we as an organization have chosen to approach it. And so I wrote up a quick quiz. Want a t-shirt? Answer these questions, correctly, without copying off of your friend's paper, and one shall be yours: Name one difference between the symptoms of fusariose and those of banana wilt. When and where did banana wilt first appear in the world? List three means of preventing the spread of banana wilt. And so on.

The logistics manager presented me with a typed-up answer sheet this morning, and even threw a question back at me. The night watchmen last night huddled together around a flashlight-illuminated banana wilt brochure, searching for the responses. I almost gave them a t-shirt on the grounds of their enthusiasm alone.

And that's the thing. It's hard to be totally discouraged when you're surrounded by such marvelous people, who are clearly getting more out of this project than simply healthy banana shoots or a monthly paycheck. My staff have devoted the bulk of the last two years into this effort, building personal relationships with hundreds of villagers, many of them quite a ways from their spouses and children. They have learned, and shared, an enormous amount of information about how to combat the disease, and, in a larger sense, how to work towards something bigger than themselves.

I am certainly not condoning careless humanitarian interventions. I guess I'm just recognizing that every project involves people, and I am lucky enough to work with a genuinely humane group of people. No matter how flawed, I can't believe that our project has been all for naught.

Out of the Fire, Into the Frying Pan

My project is broke.

That's the latest word from headquarters. It's possible, even probable, that we will have to end our activities early, since the funds aren't available to pay the staff, and all of the associated support costs, through the end of August.

I have protested, of course, on the grounds that abandoning our banana wilt committees prematurely will negatively affect both the long-term impact of our project and our reputation as an organization, at least within the communities in which we currently work.

This budget crisis was a long time coming, I suppose. This is a two-year project, and many budget lines had already been overspent before my arrival. The entire mission is in a bit of a crisis, with many projects coming to term and very little new funding emerging. This means more financial pressure on the few remaining projects, which must cover the numerous and significant support costs, like office rental, vehicle maintenance, and paying the cook and the numerous other logistical and administrative staff. On top of that, my project activities take place in two bases, so we have twice the support costs of your average project. I deal directly only with the portion of the budget that covers program-related expenses, such as seeds for distributions and the payment for the carpenters who construct the banana macro propagators. I was only informed that we had a major problem about a month ago.

I had been hoping to relax into my last few months here, now that a lot of the major stressors up to this point are gone: my problematic boss, the planning and logistics-heavy parts of the project, the initial few months of adaptation. I'm finally finding the time to invest in Swahili lessons, evening conversation with the night watchmen (instead of working 'til I drop) and trips to various far-removed field sites.

This throws me for a bit of a loop.

But I suppose, like any unexpected change, it will simply take some getting used to. The worst part will be having to dismiss my staff sooner than expected, if it comes to that. And of course I need to consider what my next move will be. Am I hooked enough on this lifestyle to want to continue? Am I ready to return to the familiar mountain ranges of the US and start to build a life for myself there? And how to ensure financial autonomy while I make these decisions, with a crushing student loan dept?

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.