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.