Disagreeable Woman in DRC

You look around Kinshasa and you see lots of men. You see women too, but the men are everywhere. They hang out, they sell random things. One man was dangling a tiny puppy and a tiny kitty from each hand in an effort to get someone in traffic to stop for him. They saturate the lounge at our hotel: the powerful men in their fancy suits, who most likely are in some sort of favor with the country’s current president.

On one evening, I did attempt to go a block up the road to a nearby restaurant that someone—a woman—from USAID had recommended to me. The restaurant made pizza, and man was I craving it. Well, within a half a block I knew it would be impossible. There they were: the men. I didn’t smile back and I kept on walking, but the attention didn’t stop. It was only when one overly eager fellow, probably in his 50s, started yelling, I decided it was time to turn around head back to the hotel. I killed my dream of that pizza slice.

“Tu es jolie!,” he said once, then louder twice. He then began yelling. He was reaching to grab one of my hands. If I had been in the DR Congo longer, I might have yelled back at him, or at least had a skin thick enough to keep on walking toward my destination. But I’m a newcomer, and as a newcomer, I always take precaution. It was still light out when I left the hotel, but the sun would be falling soon and there was no reason to have an incident to remember for the rest of my life. It was another dinner at the hotel for me. The life of a woman abroad.

It’s true. Men do rule DR Congo. But I guess that’s not so different from most of the world. Here, it just seems more pronounced. They are the politicians, the investors, the bankers, the leaders, and even the nurses in many of the communities where we work. They are the drivers, the housekeepers at the hotel, and a large portion of the servers. They are the majority of our country office staff, although our few strong women make up for the dearth in numbers. They are the reason for the 5 million deaths that took place in various DR Congo’s internal and regional conflicts from 1996 until 2003 and into present day. They are why more than 200,000 women were raped during those wars and why gender-based violence is still such a huge problem in the country.

I know there are good men in DR Congo. There are good and bad men everywhere, but in the book I’m reading, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, it is evident that men have the power and the sway in DR Congo. They are the root of the country’s many problems. In fact, I want to write a letter to Jason Stearns, the author of that book, to please write a second account, one that tells the history of DR Congo from the female perspective. In his book, it is just one man sabotaging the country after the other. I wonder what the women were saying during those wars, if they had the chance to say anything at all. I’d like to write that book, actually, but then I would need to live in the DR Congo, that man’s world, for long enough to gain the trust of Congolese women. And that would be near impossible.

Jason Stearns, in fact, was back in the DRC when I was, reporting on violence in the north east of the country. I just read that as I was packing my bags to return to the US, the government expelled him from its soil. I do not need to find out what the government might do to a disagreeable woman like me.

***

I never wrote about my “friend” from the flight I was on from Paris to DR Congo. He knew Jason Stearns and was anonymously interviewed for his book.

I spent about three hours practicing my French with this man on the plane. He lives in Switzerland with his Swiss wife and two kids, but is originally from DRC. He works in "security systems" for unsecure countries. We talked about his job, my job, Congolese politics, his impending divorce, and my divorce (although I didn’t dare tell his the sex of my ex). We argued about Donald Trump, his pick for the next American President. He was very interested in the fact that I was reading Jason's book. 

He not only knows Jason, but he is also a close comrade of President Joseph Kabila’s. He is the Congolese elite: the money and the power and perhaps, but I can’t prove it, la corruption.

The first night we landed in Kinshasa he had asked my colleague and I to get a drink with him. But I had declined. I was just too tired. I didn’t think any more of it.

After I returned back from Mutshatsa, there he was, hanging out in the chic lounge with the other Congolese elite. He was with two friends who looked a lot like him. Big, solid, tall, Congolese men dressed to the nines.

I had sat down in the chic bar to read my book for a while before heading back up to bed and he approached me. “Bonjour, Laurel!”

Oh boy.

He summoned me to the table with his friends. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t feel like engaging. I approached the table to introduce myself, hoping the conversation would be short. It was, to some extent. I had a short argument in my broken French with one of his friends, a Pentecostal pastor, about family planning. He asked why “us family planning people” tell women how many children to have. I told him, nicely, that that is a misconception. Our work is based on fertility preferences, which means, a woman (with her partner) can decide how many children they want to have and when, when offered access to contraception. A woman can choose the method she wants, if she wants one at all. I told him we support contraceptive access, in turn to support the health of women and their families.

“But what about the men?” he asked. “What do you do for the men?”

Oh boy.

I told him that whenever possible we engage men in decisions about family planning: a) to win their support for allowing their wives to choose the contraceptive she wants (because women in this country and many others do not have the social power to make decisions on their own); and b) so that they too might use contraception, most importantly, condoms for further protection, particularly from sexually transmitted infections.

Soon after the little discussion, his friends disappeared and it was just me and the Swiss man. And soon after that, a glass of red wine was traveling toward our table. He wanted to continue our discussion, but without his friends. I decided in a public place it would be fine to have a glass of red wine, maybe even nice, and he hadn’t done anything to make me mistrust him, yet, so what was the harm?

About five minutes into our conversation, he began hitting on me. I learned the word for seductive in French and he pleaded with me to meet him for dinner the next night, dancing out at a club, or at least breakfast in the morning. I said I didn’t think I had time, and that I had to work, and that I just wasn’t interested, not even in the most remote sense of the word.

I went back to my hotel room and thought about what I had been reading in my book, about his friends in high places, and maybe even about him. They buy their way to power. They finance killing and corruption that keeps them in high places while the majority of their fellow Congolese live in abject poverty. They take what they want. They control the destitution.

It is no wonder Mr. Swiss likes Mr. Trump. They have a lot in common. They are rich. They are aggressive. They are misogynistic. They are everything that makes me a proud, righteous feminist.

Chances and Choice

After a chaotic trip from Lumumbashi yesterday, we landed back in DR Congo’s capital city: Kinshasa. I didn’t see much of Kinshasa on my first trip from the airport. It was dark and I was subsumed with fatigue. But this time, despite an all-night rager among Congolese men in the hotel room next to mine the night before, I was awake.

When you travel out of the Kinshasa airport, you soon hit the bustle of a typically developed African city. There are massive traffic jams, suggested traffic lights, and people who decide to make their own turn lanes in the middle of the jam. Teenage boys run around in the traffic, selling Fanta, biscuits, bottles of water. There are people everywhere and there is this explosive energy. Minibuses, the same ones I rode in South Africa, in my 20s, are everywhere.

But now I’m not allowed to ride minibuses. By our project standards, they are not safe. Our project arranges our travel from the airport with a contracted travel service. We hop off the plane and we see a man with a chalkboard listing our names. We follow him to an air conditioned office behind the airport, he grabs our bag tags, and we rest there until he brings us our belongings and we are ready to hop into his van. Here, the service is called “Jeffrey Travels.”

Here, “Jeffrey Travels” serves the elite.

The chaos eventually dissipates into a section of the city with nicer buildings—real buildings, not roadside shacks and makeshift stores. These are government buildings: the national airlines conglomerate, the ministry of health, the ministry of finance. The government buildings usher us into an even nicer part of town: the place where the expatriates rest, and where we stay. There are well-pruned gardens filled with tropical flowers and an elderly Congolese man sweeps the dirt from the street corner with a small broom.

We re-enter the hotel we entered just a week ago after arriving from the US. But it looks different now, even more extravagant. I notice the pieces of art on the walls, and the beautiful sculptures of African women, who look more like Ethiopians than Congolese, behind the reception desk. I didn’t see anything like those sculptures when I went to the market with Dr. Jacquie in Lumumbashi. I imagine those sculptures were made in Europe. Electronic music pulses from the chic bar to the right of the reception desk where well-dressed Congolese business men drink cocktails along with a few, like me, who are dressed-down and probably represent the UN and NGO crowd.

I am shown to my room and everything is so clean, cleaner than I remember. I know I will sleep well. I open my window and look down and to my right and I see the pool. It is huge and blue and inviting. Fancy Arabs smoke Hookahs around it, white people who have turned slightly pink take in the African sun even though they don’t need any more of it, a group of men, probably around my age, who seem to spend a lot of time at the gym to build their hard physiques, play around in the pool. I am still in Congo, but I am in another world.

I start to think about the kids in Mutshatsa, with their little dirty hands, their big smiles, their huge joys, their huge sorrows. They will never see a pool like this. I start to cry, just a little bit; the insanity that is the difference between the have and have-nots. I think I must be too sensitive or maybe just hungry and tired after my days in the field and few calories. But it all just seemed too sad. I don’t think this clean, developed way of life necessarily buys happiness—but it does buy chances and choice.

My life has been filled with so many chances, so much choice, since I was a little baby born in California. My parents easily chose to stop having any more children and I ended up an only child. Their choice gave me the chances to take piano lessons, dance lessons, riding lessons. It gave me my education—my key to the future: Montessori school as a small child, a scholarship to a renowned private school, acceptance at an Ivy League university, and everything else thereafter. It gave me the chance to travel and be a mzungu in Africa.

At my renowned high school, I took an African history class and Middle Eastern history class, and without voyaging, I gained some global perspective on how the world works. At a young age, I gained a keen awareness of the great global discrepancy between the have and have-nots. That African history class was my favorite class. I learned about the sordid history of the continent and how colonialism contributed to where so many African countries are today. I was fascinated, disgusted, and I wanted to help. And I guess that is what I am trying to do today.

Sitting in this hotel, I am reminded how great the problems really are. We’ll never fix them. But I’ll continue to do my part.

The Mzungu in Mutshatsha (Moo-cha-cha)

Mzungu: The Bantu language term used in the African Great Lakes region to refer to people of European descent. Literally translated it meant "someone who roams around aimlessly" or "aimless wanderer."

There’s always that time on these journeys when development ceases to be. It may end for a day, a couple of days, sometimes an entire month or longer. You would be surprised. I don’t find it too difficult to acclimate. Give me two weeks and I won’t remember that I used to shower every day, wash my clothes, have Internet service, have toilet paper, hop in my car to drive down a smooth paved road to find whatever I want within a 10-mile radius. I might fantasize about having some nice cheese and red wine, but I won’t find it strange that I can’t drink what comes out of the tap or that I eat only starch and sugar (because I still can’t bring myself to eat meat). But that first taste, it is always a shock.

That shock for me today came about 20 minutes outside of Kolwezi on our journey to a place called Mutshatsa (pronounced Moo-cha-cha). The paved road abruptly disappeared. For 180 kilometers and 4 hours we were whipped, whacked, bumped, and tumbled up a red dirt road. I would arguably say it was the worst road I have ever traveled on: worse than Niger where it was sand instead of rock, worse than Ethiopia where it was paved but drivers meandered from their side of the road to ours, and way worse than the back route in Swaziland I took with a car full of naïve young women, just like me, when I was 21 years old.

We dodged and tackled 3’ deep ditches in the road filling with water, and we drove almost off into the bush to allow the dated mac trucks, with the many men, kids, and minerals piled high to pass without crushing us. I was grabbing the “oh shit” handle almost the entire way. The one time I did let go, I whacked my head on the top of the window—such a mzungu. When I looked around the car, all Congolaise and one Nigerian, I was the only one who had a hold on that handle.

Let me put this in perspective. These are the roads that must be used by Congolaise to get to the nearest health center and by the health system to deliver essential supplies and commodities. Our community-based distributors use bikes when they need to visit households beyond a walking distance—and our supervisors ride motorbikes. Two of three motorbikes are in disrepair. About three hours into the journey, my body felt in disrepair.

We saw few other cars, especially when we got more than 50 km from Kolwezi. We did see the occasional mac truck, but it was mostly desolate. In the beginning, where the big mines are, you see the men with their bikes stacked high, with 6, 7, 8 large bags of rocks, meandering along these potholed “roads” (if you can call those gaping ditches potholes and if you can call those rocky paths roads). You see women, sometimes with wood or water stacked on their heads, but they too, soon disappear. When it becomes more rural, you occasionally pass through a village where whole families are bathing in the river together, laying their clothes to dry in the tall grass nearby.

The trees along the way stand tall and proud. They are many shapes, but all of them are large like their country and strong like their people, especially their women. Even the areas where mining has likely polluted the water table below, the trees don’t fall. They’ve survived brutal wars, like many natural wonders of the Congo, but I worry for their future.

Le Chinois, the Americans, they are taking our copper, our gold, and now our trees, I have been told by a few Congolaise.

As we got closer to Mutshatsta, the road just kept getting worse. About 20 kilometers out the road was merely 3 deep crevices running parallel to one another. Like I said, I acclimate. By hour 4, I was ready to get out of the car, but I had also gotten used to it.

That rocky-rock-and-roll ride was all worth it. We rode up and throngs of young Congolese were waiting at the entrance to the health zone to usher us in. They sang in Swahili, so I don’t know what they were saying, but there was a lot of cheer. I did hear our project acronym, and I thought, wow, okay so we are making difference, even out here. In front of the zonal health office, a group of them broke into a dance and, believe me, there was such spirit, I had to stop myself from going out there to shake it with them. While I was watching, two young girls handed me bouquets of fake flowers, a magenta bunch and a fluorescent orange bunch. I’ve heard most of them have never seen a mzunga before, so I am sure that is why I was getting all that attention, but, regardless, it was a warm welcome. Instead of balking at the stranger, the different one, they were welcoming me. We can all learn a lesson from that.

We came to Mutshasta to see another community event, where people can learn about contraception and pick up a contraceptive method of their choice for free. I spoke with a young, unmarried woman with two children who now has pills. I spoke with a young man who advocates with other young men to use condoms. Before our project became involved, no one I talked to had known about contraception. I spoke with one 33 year old woman who has 7 children, but can now stop giving birth. I watched another young woman, 31 with 5 children, receive an implant in a small, thatched roof hut, with the door propped open so that the nurse would have light.

I’ve heard many times on my trip: “Why now? Where was your project before?,” and I heard it again today.  

The small children, the large groups of them who represent the large families of the Congolese, followed me around, as any brave child would if they saw something they had never seen before. I snapped photos of them and then they snapped photos of each other and me. As is habitual for me, I loved them all and could have stayed there with them forever. But I was pulled away (as I always am).

We are staying in a guest house owned by the government. The roof is rusting, we just got power after hours without, and the bathroom, well, it is not what I had in Kolwezi. I was glad I had an extra set of clean sheets. The infamous photo of President Kabila watches over the living room, where there is oversized leopard print furniture. There was a single piece of cooked pasta hanging off a hook in my room and a little white lizard traipsed around by the window. By most Americans standards, this place would be pretty abhorrent, but, here, this place is for the rich, like me.

As has been the case throughout the week, the Congolese I travel with skip lunch and have a huge dinner. I am usually shy about announcing my mzungu Western preference for maintaining a vegetarian diet, but when I was offered goat on the first night, I couldn’t lie. Since then, they have gone out of their way to make sure there are fish or beans to eat along with the foufou. Even, here, tonight, I know they added that extra fish dish for me, and I couldn’t eat it. My stomach turned when I saw it. It was black fish skin mixed in with every other part of the fish, I mean EVERY PART, and the smell bothered me. I ate my foufou and tried to hide my dislike, but I was caught in action—the mzungu stomach. Yes, I do admit.

Dr. Jacquie turned to me: “You, humanitarian, you need an international stomach!”

Yeah, I am still working on that one.

I don’t feel hungry now. In fact, I feel very full, knowing that our project is doing good work, and I can be a part of it. I feel so lucky that I’ve had the honor to meet these people, who, despite their customs, and their isolation, are open to change. They just want the power to make their lives better like we all do. I hope they can give themselves that over time and we can continue to help them along the way.

Family Planning is Not the Ugly Stepchild—It is a Lifeline for DRC

We traveled Manika health zone today, about 30 minutes from our home base in Kolwezi.

Jimmy, the director of the health zone told us, yes, your project is making a difference. “Men have learned that women are not just an instrument of men.” He said men have started to help out around the household, cooking on the weekends, and “cultivating” with their wives.

I want to believe him, but our project has been in true operation for just under a year. I am sure there are seldom cases where a man decides to dedicate his weekend to cooking for his 7, 8, 14 children, but I just don’t buy it that that is the norm—just yet.

But Jimmy, like we do, wants to show the project is successful. He wants the funds to continue with the good work.

That is the problem with these short-lived projects like ours. We come, we make a difference, sometimes a phenomenal difference in a short amount of time, but usually for a very small population, or with an approach that the government won’t support on its own.

Governments have their priorities, and family planning is often the ugly step child.

If they can do it, they will, but they will do other things first: things that are more acceptable, maybe a bit easier—fighting malaria, vaccines, offering sustainable water sources, even making deliveries safe for women.

Sexual and reproductive health—of which family planning is a part—is not always so popular. But in reality family planning affects EVERYTHING else. Without contraception, families will continue to procreate and suffer, without enough resources to support the children they love. Often, their children will die young, and sometimes they will too: working in hazardous conditions to make enough money to have a meal each day, or giving birth at age 14, and then year after year after year. Many of the kids that do survive will not have the chance to be educated, and without that, they will live in a cycle of endless poverty. The country will suffer too. Without an educated population, how will DRC ever prosper, grow, and move toward democracy and human rights?

Today, a lady nurse told me one of her clients she saw the other day was just 3 years younger than myself, 33, and she had 9 children. 9 children! She never knew that contraceptives were even an option before her husband heard about them from one of our community-based distributors. He went home to his wife and demanded that she stop having kids (like it was her fault) and get something called an implant. She rushed off to the health center the next day, and voila—perhaps she will be a mother of 9 and not 14—perhaps.

Two of the older lady community-based distributors I chatted with today had 14 children. The other 5 had no less than 5 children, but most had closer to 10. Long before contraceptives became available in their communities, they didn’t have a choice.

I feel very strongly about the work we are doing here and I want it to continue long after I step back on that plane to Washington, DC. I want it to continue for the 14 children of Marie Jeanne and Kashala and for the DR Congo as a whole.

I want there to be more women in DR Congo like Dr. Jacquie Bapura, a beautiful elegant pediatrician who joined our project in Katanga as a provincial coordinator because NGOs pay more money than working at public-sector hospitals. She lives away from her two children, who reside in Kinshasa (a 2-hour plane ride), to make the money she needs to have a respectable life. She lives with her sister, who cooked us dinner every night—a necessary and silent partner on our trip here in DR Congo. But there is little chance that women with 5, 7, 8, 14 children will ever become DR Congo’s next set of Dr. Jacquie Bapuras.

Mining for Life

The first thing we saw when we walked into the Director of Health’s Office in Fungurume Zone, Katanga Province, DRC, was one photo on a barren cement wall: it was of a newborn baby, its face deformed, and lying in its own pool of blood. The photo was hung in a cheap tin frame. The whole team of us, even the doctors and the public health professionals who had worked in some of the most desperate conditions—IDP camps on the Congolese border with Rwanda and Uganda—were staring. One of our senior advisors finally got up the nerve to ask: What is photographed there?

The director told us “this is the result of copper and cobalt mining in Fungurume.”

I couldn’t focus on whatever else the Health Director said for the next few minutes, probably several formalities of the many since we have engaged in since arriving in DRC . All that I could focus on was the horror.

The only other photo on his wall was the mandatory one: of President Kabila. As far as I can surmise, that photo is seen hanging in every public office. Kabila’s face is so familiar to me now. It covers billboards on the roads leading to Kolwezi with the slogan “Mon Congo”  - My Congo. 

Along with the billboards, when you drive through Katanga Province, one of the biggest mining destinations on the planet—copper and cobalt, uranium and gold—you see the beautiful mountain-scape punctuated by depots where the mined resources are bought and sold. You see long roads up to the mountains, sometimes behind huge chain-linked fences, where dump trucks enter and exit on a continuous basis. You see barracks where some of the hired miners live. They look like prisons.

On the other side of the road from the natural treasure chests are squatter camps where artisanal miners have set up camp to trek into and out of the mines. They are like freelance miners. They do not work for a company, but for themselves. They scrape what they can together to sell to the big companies that control the exports—most of them Chinese. I’ve heard the big companies pay them scraps compared to what these minerals, and the products that come from them, go for on an international market. I believe them. They are living in squalor.  

You will see large plastic bags loaded to the top with the minerals, stacked in minivans, on motorcycles, and on people’s backs, until they can reach the nearest depot and sell them for a small fraction of what they are worth.

The men under the mountains picking away at their living and carting around the heavy sacks need to do it. They are often supporting 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 children.

That’s why the work we are doing here is EXCITING. It is IMPORTANT.

We went to the central market today to witness an outreach event organized by our project. At these events, bands of trained health volunteers, called community-based distributors, tell the community about all the family planning methods that are now available to them and refer them to a makeshift “clinic” at the back of the market where women can receive counseling from a trained health provider, and if they wish, the contraceptive of their choice.

And many do wish. When the community-based distributors took out their megaphones and started announcing their presence to the market, flocks of women—and men—arrived at their tables. They wanted to know about this thing called family planning, in the hopes they could make things for their families just a little bit easier.

So, we are addressing one tiny slice of what these populations need for one small slice of time.

Welcome to the Heart of Africa

I’d missed Africa. After I landed in Kinshasa yesterday and left the air conditioned airport, I stepped out into the thick, humid air.  It was almost as if I carried a cloud down from the sky with me. Following a recently departed winter back home, that humid air felt like a gift.

After my colleague who is traveling with me left one of his bags mistakenly inside and ran like a bolt of lightning back into the airport, I waited there on the sidewalk with the throngs of Congolese. They wore Western dress and African dress and many held signs with Western names on them—Congolese there to safely transport foreigners within what are notoriously known as unsafe borders.

To my left was a raucous gathering of people my age or slightly younger. When they saw their friends and family members arrive from inside, they let out cries of pure joy—a kind of joy that seeps into you and rests there for a while: another gift. They embraced their loved ones with such force that couples of them almost of fell to the ground. It was unbridled emotion, not something you see often in the US. Or, even if you see something akin, you certainly aren’t gifted the same feeling very often: that feeling of not really being all alone this world, of communion, of solace with other human beings. It is something we search for all of the time, but rarely find.

So, my first thank you to DRC came at that very moment. 

The warm, fuzzy feeling, of course, comes along with quite the opposite. After all, it is Africa’s heart, my love, my continent of paradox.

I’m reading a book while I’m here, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, which is bound to pepper my blog posts from here forward. As the title suggests, the book chronicles la catastrophe that is Congo’s history and politics. “The Congo has always defied the idealists,” writes the author.

My idealism, my captured joy, took a strong hit the next morning when we returned to the airport to take an in-country flight to Lumumbashi, one of the largest cities in DRC outside of Kinshasa, far to the East and known for the province in which it is located—Katanga—one of the most mineral-rich places on the planet. I returned with my colleague, a Nigerian doctor, to the airport and it didn’t take long for DRC‘s politics to start to seep in. Because he is Nigerian, the immigration officials said he could not travel outside of the capital due to a sour political relationship between West African countries and DRC. 

I was quickly ushered into the immigration office (because my colleague does not speak French), where I had to argue, in my very mediocre French, for 45 minutes about how he is a respectable doctor, how we have visas for the travel, how our work is important to people in the rural provinces of Katanga, how we are supported by their friend, the US Government. It was only after I softened my tone with the two men (one who was asleep for the first half of my arguments) that they softened as well. I stopped trying to strong-arm them and instead smiled politely, maybe even slightly flirtatiously, to win the favor. The only thing left to do after winning my argument was to have a lady security guard make some photocopies of our documents for us. I followed her through the airport to the photocopy machine, where she paused, stood with her arms folded, stared at me for a good 15 seconds with a disapproving face, and rubbed her two fingers together.

“L’argent!” Bien sur, l’argent.

I handed her 5 $1 bills out of the stack of 200 singles I was told to bring for just such situations. She held out for more, but when I stood my ground, transforming from soft to hard again, she slowly moved toward the window where the photocopies were made.

In my two weeks here, I have no doubt that I will capture at least a few more palpable joys, and, at the same time, I will lose just a little more faith in humanity.