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.