People in Need at work in the Congo, part II

Writers often call just about any country a “land of striking contrasts”. In the Eastern Congo the main, inescapable contrast is that of joy and grief. As we arrived in the town of Bunyakiri a noisy procession was celebrating the birth of a child, while not far off, in a makeshift classroom on the other side of town, 26 health workers are being trained under the auspices of the Czech charity People in Need to deal with the gravest of tasks.

Bunyakiri, photo: Christian Falvey

Here in the heart of Africa, People in Need has brought together doctors and nurses from all of the health centres in Bunyakiri to train them in first aid for the treatment of sexual violence, a crime that the war here has raised to catastrophic proportions. Markéta Kutilová is the organisation’s project manager here.

“We have a huge number of new cases of sexual violence here because the military operation against the Hutus has started in Bunyakiri, so we have decided the most important thing is to ensure medical assistance for the rape survivors, and to provide them with so-called PEP kits, prophylaxis kits. With these, the woman cannot get pregnant, she cannot be infected by HIV and she will be protected from all sexually transmitted diseases. But, she needs this medical assistance within 48 hours of the rape, and many cases of rape happen in the mountains and the nearest accessible assistance is in the hospital which is as far as 60 kilometres, which means sometimes as much as a three or four-day walk.”

Bunyakiri Hospital, photo: Christian Falvey

And so People in Need started a project by which the PEP kits would be distributed throughout the region to be there, where victims need them, in the hands of people who would know how to use them. As it happened, it was more than sheer goodwill that brought the health care workers to this faraway place. As the class was set to begin, the trainees – 25 men and one woman – were holding powwows in irritated tones, and Ms Kutilová seemed to be involved in several negotiations at once when I asked her what was going on.

“Well, in the Congolese environment, when the foreign NGOs and UN agencies organise training they are used to paying very high per diem rates, like 50 dollars a day per person. And we of course are trying to limit these expenditures so we have more money for our programmes. So when we are organising trainings we provide all of the refreshments, we provide lunch, we provide free accommodation, and then we provide money for transport. But of course the people protest; they don’t want to take the training unless we pay them these high per diems, which we’ve refused to do. So now we have a huge problem because all of the nurses are protesting and want the per diems, so we are expecting hard negotiations. They have established a committee which will negotiate their per diems. We proposed 10 dollars for two days, which in this environment is quite a lot of money. Their monthly salaries are 40 dollars, so we proposed 10 dollars for two days and they are not satisfied with that.”

After protracted negotiations, People in Need agreed to pay the nurses 18 dollars a day, whereupon several new nurses suddenly appeared to enrol. And so the training began.

Refugees in Hombo, photo: Christian Falvey

One thing that is hard not to notice in the Congo is the vast amount of money trading hands in the face of such rampant poverty. For all the genuinely good and honest work that rich Western nations are doing in the Congo, the display of wealth they allow is a paragon of those “striking contrasts”. The Czech charity cannot boast the kind of budget some other European NGOs in the Congo, but there can even be an upshot to that. It’s not controversial to note that a person with less money generally makes more of an effort to spend it wisely. And the same goes for NGOs.

I went with People in Need to the town of Hombo, the first stop for many escaping the frequent conflicts of the neighbouring province of North Kivu. In the most recent exodus, refugees doubled the town’s population. With no infrastructure for such a population there was soon a cholera epidemic. People in Need was the second organisation to deal with it.

“In this quarter full of displaced people there was an American NGO that built public toilets. But they only used plastic sheeting for the toilets, and Hombo is full of soldiers. So it lasted only two days before the soldiers stole the sheeting and the toilets could no longer be used by the local population. To the contrary, the toilet remained like a source of illness, odour and flies. And it lasted like this for two years until PIN came and we made really permanent toilets with tin roofs and high quality wood.”

Markéta Kutilová and Naomi, photo: Christian Falvey

In Hombo or wherever else you go in the Congo there are hordes of children. So many, that when they inevitably surround European visitors in curious throngs you can get the momentary sensation that there are no adults. And for all their apparent joy, their situations can be the most grievous of all. Few of them go to school, many of them have lost their homes or their parents in the fighting. Some of them have been expelled from their families because they believed they were witches – sometimes a pretext for abandoning children the parents can no longer support. And some have suffered much worse still. Ms Kutilová introduced me to People in Need’s youngest beneficiary.

“This is little Naomi. She is three years old, and one year ago she was raped very brutally. The village where she lived with her family was attacked by the Hutus, by Interahamwe. They burned down the houses so the people started to escape, but they caught up with her and her mother. They raped her mother and kidnapped Naomi and two other people as well. Afterwards the [Congolese Army] soldiers went to search for her, and they found the two people killed and little Naomi was left in the forest – alive, but she had been brutally raped. She suffered fistula and she spent six months in the hospital where they tried to put her back together. But she still is not okay; mentally she is very affected and has problems with her hearing because they put sticks in her ears.”

Government soldiers in Bunyakiri, photo: Christian Falvey

It is important, critical in fact, to realise that there is virtually nothing that can be done for the Congolese without charity. The central government is dysfunctional, particularly outside of the cities, the army consists largely of city boys who have never been in the bush and are now combing it for an elusive enemy. At the time I was in the Congo they had not been paid for four months. I found government soldiers living on caterpillars and guinea pigs, but many of them subsist the same way the rebels do – by stealing from villages and capturing mines. And as in most any conflict the civilians and their children are the ones in the middle. It’s an inescapable fact that Naomi is not the last child victim in the Congo. Much of their hope depends on the goodwill and toil of humanitarians, even – or perhaps especially – from small countries like the Czech Republic.