bg in drc

readings on genocide in the congo

2006-02-26T21:37:00.000+02:00

Pretty comprehensive page about this including the US connection:
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/DRC.asp

Fears of genocide build in Congo - CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/05/07/congo.uganda/

GENOCIDE EMERGENCY: ITURI, EASTERN CONGO:
http://www.genocidewatch.org/GenocideEmergencyIturi.htm

"Stopping the Genocide in Congo" - New York Times editorial, May 31, 2003:
http://www.genocidewatch.org/CongoNYTimeseditorial...

"Rwanda and Uganda: Who is to blame?" - BBC, June 13, 2000
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/debates/african...

Weapons from uganda are causing a genocide in Congo DRC - March 19, 2005:
http://uganda.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/03/19/weapons_...

Ongoing Atrocities in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - June 2, 2004:
http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/doc-99SRI_PR_DRC...

photos from kalima and mwenga

2005-11-04T01:02:00.000+02:00

photos

2005-09-01T04:05:00.000+02:00

here are a few photos from bryan's first 7 months in congo.

there are many more. click here to see them.

The Booty Man Can

2005-07-27T20:59:00.000+02:00

On the lighter side of things:

I am traveling in a 4x4 vehicle in an isolated territory right on Lake Tanganyika in eastern DR Congo. I’m with my organization’s (FHI) Site Coordinator for Moba, the isolated territory, a representative from USAID who is a possible donor to my organization, and 2 guys from the World Food Program’s Congo country program. We’re here to check out FHI’s activities in Moba. The population of the town I’m in is about 20,000, the population of the entire territory about 150,000 in a country of more than 55 million people. This place is isolated, man. There are no regular plane flights into anywhere in the territory. You can’t get to the town I’m in by road from the next territory over because of land mines littered along the road, effects of the wars here in the past decade. So my group took a five-hour speed boat to travel 120 km from Kalemie territory (the one next door) to Moba. But even the boat travel here is not regular—sometimes you have to wait two weeks to get a boat from Kalemie to Moba. There is almost no humanitarian assistance here, either. Whereas some territories in the Kivus north of here are saturated with ex-pats, international NGOs, UN organizations, etc. This place has almost none of that (2-3 ex-pats in the whole territory). So we’re driving through the market in the town in the landcruiser, one of a handful of vehicles in the territory, listening to a tape of old American tunes mainly from the 80s—Lady in Red, Kenny G, Michael Jackson’s “heal the world.”

Then it happened.

I hear, “one, two buckle my shoe; three, four…the booty man can, the booty man can.”

I could not believe it. I was so excited tears started welling in my eyes. I wanted to scream, I wanted to shout, I wanted to sing along. But I knew no one would understand, I knew they would not get it. So I sat back and listened and thought of those in the States who know this precious song and I smiled…

So if you ever think that the Booty Man is only confined to Eagles Mere, PA, or Washington DC, or Atlanta, GA, fear not.

I am living witness to you that yes the gospel of the Booty Man has spread to even the most remote corners of the Congo; there’s hope then that he still might take over the world.

The booty man can.

Refugees International report

2005-06-16T18:40:00.000+02:00

here is an update and recommendations for addressing a potential refugee situation in eastern congo, from Refugees International:

In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a Rwandan militia group, the FDLR (Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda), may finally be ready to lay down their arms and return in peace to Rwanda. But as the return process begins to be negotiated and organized, MONUC, the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, the government of Rwanda and other implementing agencies are not paying adequate attention to the needs of FDLR dependents, leaving at least 40,000 women and children potentially vulnerable.

Tens of thousands of Rwandans have been living in the eastern DRC since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda - some as refugees and some as members of the FDLR. As conflict has swirled through the eastern DRC, militias and fighting forces have forcibly abducted Congolese women to serve as their "wives". The UN women's agency, UNIFEM, has stressed the importance of gathering information on this group and considering their needs in the planning of the demobilization and reintegration process. However, MONUC has made no plans to gather further information on the situation of the dependent women of the FDLR and have not planned any special efforts to sensitize these women to their rights in the repatriation process. A Kinshasa-based official involved in the demobilization program insisted to Refugees International, "They have been in the Congo for eleven years already! It's not like they haven't had time to think [repatriation to Rwanda] over."

...click here to continue reading the report, including recommendations for the international community...

Hunger strikes

2005-06-05T17:26:00.000+02:00

It is not always easy being a white person here. I will never forget her face. Sometimes I try and shut my conscience off. I don't give money away here to beggars; I usually can at least tolearate the situations where I deny the poorest of the poor because I have consciously made the decision not to give money to beggars on the street while I'm here in Congo. But on occasion it can tear at my soul. I will never forget her hand.

The other day I was with 5 colleagues (all Congolese nationals) on my way back from Uvira, which is a territory in South Kivu 128 km south of Bukavu. As Uvira territory is famous for its oranges and mangoes, we stopped in a small village on the side of the road to buy some fruit. (I must say the orange juice that was made from those oranges was out of this world). With the help of one my colleagues, I found a woman from whom I decided to purchase my oranges. She had a stock full in a small house just in back of her road-side setup. I stepped inside the house, and did not even notice her upon entering. It was not very long, though, before I noticed her, arm stretched out, hand cupped as if that was the only position her old, weathered hand still knew. She was sitting on the floor, she must have been 80. At first I tried to ignore her, thinking she would put her hand away. But by the time I had my bag of oranges, she had gotten herself to her feet and reached her hand out to me again. I told her a few times I did not have anything for her. I thanked the woman for the oranges and walked back to the car, promptly taking my seat on the back bench seat of the car. About a minute later there she was. Walking with her cane towards the car. She came to my window and again the cupped hand appeared before me. For the next ten minutes she pleaded. For the next 10 minutes my heart wept. I can handle telling someone no when I pass him/her on the street, or have a split-second interaction. I can keep my logical self intact during those times.

But not for 10 minutes. She stood there, arm stretched through the car window, hand cupped for a hand-out. I smiled at her occasionally, and kept telling her no. The feeling I kept having burned through me. The wonder of how this situation had been created. The unfairness of it all. For in reality, I had plenty of money in my pockets that I could have given her. And in reality, each person, each dignified human being that approaches me on the street for a hand-out, I have plenty of money in my pockets to give. To me to give the money seems the easier choice; everyone seems happy. But what does it reinforce? What does it do long-term in a culture that in so many ways has stopped believing in itself? A culture that has in many ways become subservient to westerners? An awful effect of brutal colonialism.

To me one of the challenges that the western world faces in development is fighting against reinforcing the 'hand-out' idea and reality. It is vitally important to me that we at FHI and the other international NGOs here in Congo do not reinforce this harmful 'cupped-hand when I see a white-person' mentality. How do we as an international development organization combat this? At FHI, for one over 90% of our staff are Congolese. Two we are committed to building the capacity of all of our staff so that we each can take on new challenges and responsibilities within the organization. Three we are committed to working with local partner associations, offering training, technical expertise, follow-up, materials, and financial assistance so that these small local groups are really the ones bringing the true changes in their communities. We act as a stimilus, providing initial assistance to associations and individiuals that have been devastated by colonialism, years of misrule, and most recently a decade of conflict in which close to 4 million people have died. We at FHI are in the 'food security' business. But in a broader context at the same time we're in the business of shifting mentalities, away from people having hands cupped and prepared to receive a hand out, towards having hands preparing the soil and later cultivating a harvest.

Pangi

2005-05-23T17:33:00.000+02:00

THURSDAY MAY 7
I've had a long but good day; it's almost 7.00 pm now and I've been visiting different activities and such since 7.30 this morning. Quite a long day. But really wonderful. When in Bukavu the work we do is looked at and evaluated on such a large scale that it's easy to forget the personal individuals who are benefiting from our work. Today I went with one of our agronomists and field assistants first to visit some of the associations we've worked with in seed multiplication. The associations have all finished harvesting, and one of the things they have to do is reimburse 25% of the seeds back to FHI. FHI then usually gives these to other associations we haven't yet worked with, or maybe sells the seeds and supports small projects like small livestock breeding with other groups. Anyway, this idea to me is just really sweet, and even though there were problems w/ the seed mult activity, all the associations I met with today said the training and technical support was really strong, and so now hopefully they will use this in the future. FHI's work is trying to change really basic things. For instance most people here do slash and burn agriculture. We're trying to teach differently to save some trees and also produce more plentiful harvests. So today I went to help pick up the seeds the associations were giving back to FHI.

Then I went with our other agronomist, plus another field assistant and our site coordinator to our public demonstration fields and the fields where we train mothers of malnourished children. We also went to the General Hospital where the mothers and their children stay (a therapeutic feeding center, meaning these kids are severely malnourished). We met with a group of mothers for a while, then went to see some individuals' gardens. The individuals were all beneficiaries of trainings and seeds at either the nutrition centers or the public demo fields. It was just great to see the impact, you know? That our training was then being implemented by the individuals themselves. Plus, we give seeds and plants and we found one woman's garden where the woman hadn't received anything directly from FHI; but she had these nice amyrynth (sp?) plants growing, and her neighbor had given her these. Her neighbor had received the amarynth from FHI!

A FEW OTHER SNIPPETS:
this morning I met with representatives from 3 different seed multiplication associations in the village of Mubile (vill of about 100 Households); I asked the members to give me a summary of how things had gone, problems that had arisen, suggestions, etc. 2 of the 3 ass'ns are women's associations, one of which probably 15 or so of their members were there. At the end the women from this last ass'n all started singing and clapping a traditional song of thanks, and they were singing it to FHI. It was a really wonderful moment and I was just there, you know, clapping along with them and taking it in as a beautiful moment.

Two days ago I went to the village of Kamakozi, which was pillaged and destroyed totally by the war (it was basically a battlefield between Mai-Mai and RCD troops). The villagers fled and were in the bush for four years, and recently returned in late 2004. They are slowly putting their lives back together. They've organized associations, have rebuilt their houses (many were burned) and are hopeful for better things. They showed me their impressive recently constructed livestock pen for chickens. It was an extremely difficult road there (30 km from Kalima, only accessible by moto, bicycle, or foot), and therefore is very isolated.

I basically have spent the last week either in the FHI vehicle (about 330 km), on the back of the FHI moto (340 km) or talking with our beneficiaries and our staff. Spending time with some people who have benefited from FHI assistance has been amazing, cuz these are people in villages way out in the bush and are truly vulnerable, with hardly anything. It was just amazing at times to stop and realize what I'm doing.

"Give me a gun," he said, "and I will go get rid of them myself."

2005-05-22T17:46:00.000+02:00

In Congo, Trolling Through the Lives of Those Too Wretched to Merit Aid
By HELENE COOPER
Published: May 22, 2005, New York Times

WALUNGU, Congo

The July summit meeting of rich nations in Scotland will dwell on ways to help African countries, especially those that have shown themselves capable of good governance. And President Bush will promote his Millennium Challenge Account, which is supposed to channel money to poor countries that promise to use it to promote development and lift people out of poverty, instead of lining the pockets of corrupt officials.

But what about the millions of people who, through no fault of their own, live under bad governments? This village of Walungu, about 30 miles from Bukavu near the borders of Rwanda and Burundi, is a sad case in point, one of the most wretched places in one of the world's most wretched countries. Its people suffer under not one but several warring governments and armed groups, every one of which - but especially the Rwandan Hutus who have fled their own country - preys on the local population.

Especially the women. Last September, Rwandan Hutus kidnapped a 25-year-old mother of three, dragged her out of her house as her husband stood watching, and took her into the forest, where she was raped, again and again and again. After a month, she escaped when the rebels turned their backs as she was washing their clothes in the river, but when she returned home her husband threw her out.
...
[click here to continue reading the article]

"It's the war that has caused these problems"

2005-05-20T17:56:00.000+02:00

For Congo's Mothers, Unceasing Loss
War, Though Ended, Still Claiming Children

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 12, 2005; Page A01

SHABUNDA, Congo -- Nsimenya Kinyama carried her 3-day-old baby outside bundled in rags and gingerly placed his tiny, jaundiced body in a rusty blue crib. As the first healing rays of the morning sun reached him, he fussed and wriggled and stretched his arms up.

Kinyama, 36, stared at her new son with a flat, empty look in her eyes. She was wondering if this child, like the six who had come before him, would die.

"God help me," she prayed, "so that this child can live."

It is a common prayer in Shabunda, a former trading center in eastern Congo that was ravaged by war, then left poor and isolated by the destruction of roadways that had long given it life. A recent survey by the International Rescue Committee found that Shabunda's children were dying in such numbers that more than half would not see their fifth birthdays.

Such is the nature of death in modern African conflicts. For every soldier felled by a bullet, countless children die quietly of preventable and treatable maladies while fleeing to safety, waiting for care at an understaffed clinic or huddling terrified and hungry in a jungle hideout.

"It's the war that has caused these problems," said Kinyama, who has a gentle voice and hair woven into braids. "It has made us poor. It has brought hunger, and it has given us a hard life."
...
[click here to continue reading the article]

Shabunda

2005-02-26T00:12:00.000+02:00

February 3:

Today Jean-Marie, who’s the Food for the Hungry (FHI) agronomist based here in Shabunda, took me to see FHI’s projects in Shabunda and its close environs. We started by going to the demonstration agricultural plots that are adjacent to a Center for Supplemental Feeding, and a Center for Therapeutic Feeding for malnourished children. This other NGO Action Contre la Faim runs the centers; and FHI offers agricultural trainings, and then seed/tool distributions for the mamas who are enrolled at the centers. The Supplemental feeding is more ‘outpatient.’ For the Therapeutic, though, the mamas and children stay at the centre for a max of 60 days while they try to get the child/children to decent health. Jean Marie toured me around the field where we have the plot, and then we took a tour of the centre itself. It was like one of those ads you see for starving children in Africa or something. All these way malnourished infants and toddlers lying on mats; mothers there too some lying down also. There were just rows of mats on the floor in a big room. Mosquito nets hung above the mats. I felt like I was in one of those ads in some ways too. Like the white person coming to say look at the starving African children, won’t you give 32 cents a day to save one or whatever. BUT the thing I think is really great is FHI’s role in it all. This provision of training to the mamas to give a base of knowledge of how to cultivate and prepare soil, etc, is so important. And then on top of that seeds are given and a hoe as well.

February 2:

The messiah entered behind one man with a wheelbarrow, and another with one of his bags. The wheel barrow carried a beat-up card board box that was taped tight. He brought money in that box. He arrived to throngs of cheers, high pitched yells, crescendoing into a deafening and embarrassing welcome to shabunda for this muzungu (white man). These welcomers were the beneficiaries waiting in line to go into the FHI seed fair. For about 30 seconds or so he was the messiah; what he brought he probably wasn’t sure of. And what the people thought he brought they maybe weren’t sure of either. But a grander entrance and welcome he had never experienced. Unable to take it all in, not comfortable with the attention, he tried not to blush, tried not to be phased. But this was not normal for him. For he is not the messiah; he is not a messiah of any sort. Yet he does have white skin. And perhaps, just perhaps, the presence of a white-skinned man in this forgotten, utterly and absolutely forgotten place on this earth, meant for one moment they weren’t forgotten. They could hope that some sort of better tomorrow awaited them. Yet this man he can not feed 10,000 on loaves and fishes; he can not turn water to wine. What then can he (I) do?

Well yes that is how I was received when I arrived in Shabunda. It was absolutely awe-ing. I don’t know how to describe it; when I arrived at the ‘airport’ in shabunda, the FHI administrator here was awaiting me. We unloaded my things from the plane and walked about 30 metres to where the FHI office is and where the seed fair was taking place. Throngs of beneficiaries were waiting their turns in line, and they greeted me. Probably a few hundred strong. Crazy, crazy.

February 1:

This is I think by far the poorest place I’ve ever been. These people have nothing. Nothing. Nothing. No wonder that at times the seeds at the seed fair, which are supposed to be planted this growing season, are eaten b/c of a need to survive. There is nothing here. No one has jobs. There’s no money. The military have a huge presence here (things were really awful for about 5 years here during war) even though the security situation is calm now. The military of course are not paid by the government. So the head guys get their money from their external sources; and the soldiers steal and pillage this place, as if it had anything to pillage. But who can blame them? They also have families here and mouths to feed.

No running water. We have a bit of electricity via a solar panel and batteries. But we’re a well-off NGO. I mean I can not aptly describe it. I went to the market just a bit ago and there were hardly any vendors. You could buy fish (from bukavu and a couple other outside places), flower, peppers, beans from Bkvu, peanuts, and a couple other things. The cassava crop throughout much of Eastern Congo has this virus that yields no crops. And the prices at the markets b/c there’s nothing are 2-4 times what they are in bkvu. I mean, comparatively speaking bkvu residents are rich, incredibly rich. There’s one hospital, a few schools and churches, a ‘cinema’ where you can watch a film (I passed by there on a walk with the FHI coord here a bit ago; it’s just this small hut with some chairs and a screen). Not much else. I hope FHI’s activities are making a difference. But there is just so far to go. It is total survival mode here; and moving beyond that I honestly have no idea what is needed. I mean I think our activities here are probably helping people survive, and hopefully helping a few people begin to build a base. We’re looking to repair maybe the road b/w shabunda and kalima (another town about 100 something km away), which I also think would help. There is one car here in Shabunda.

(short note from b before a week in the field)

2005-02-01T22:16:00.000+02:00

Late nite here for me. Dane arrived this evening, so I saw him for a little bit. But I'm leaving tomorrow for 8 days and have to get my stuff together, meaning get packed physically, and also wrap up a few things here at the office--I won't have email access in Shabunda where I'll be; I'm pretty psyched to go, though, and will definitely let you know how things go when I get back. But it looks like it will be a busy few weeks. I return Tuesday the 8th and then am going to North Katanga Thursday the 10th for a few days to do some work on finalizing a proposal and meeting with some folks we're hoping would be interested in a road reconstruction project that targets disarmed and reinserted ex-combattants, as well as their host communities. Anyway, should be an interesting few weeks! Well I gotta run.

first round of photos

2005-01-31T05:15:00.000+02:00

click on this stunning image of bryan's office for more photos of bukavu:

and speaking of stunning:

it's about time we got a picture of bg himself up here don't you think?

Colonialist history of the democratic republic of congo

2005-01-30T14:02:00.000+02:00

Colonialism in the Congo: atrocities and killings on a mass-scale.

But perhaps you haven’t heard of these killings. For some reason they have not gotten the same attention other horrors committed in Africa, and a type of revisionist history seems to have occurred. Take, for example, the Royal Museum for Central Africa, located in Brussels, Belgium. The DR Congo was colonized by the Belgians. The museum contains one of the largest collections of Congolese artifacts in the world. A section dedicated to Congo’s flora and fauna displays masses of natural rubber; this section does not include however the utterly cruel manner in which the rubber was extracted as a raw material. The museum also infers that Leopold colonized the Congo to stop the Arab slave trade that had come from northern Africa centuries earlier. As Michaela Wrong states in In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo, “This (the museum’s revisionist history) was a tale…of selfless commitment and higher motives.” The museum conveniently does not provide detail on what many believe to be the most brutal colonial system (out of the many) ever practiced in Africa.

It seems westerners would rather see what Africans do to other Africans than face the fact that genocide and atrocities on the worst scale imaginable have been committed by the west. However, the barbarism that was Congo’s colonization was planned and executed by a white man in a predominately white western European country; a man whose policies reduced a population of 20 million by one-half, as an estimated 10-13 million people died or left Congo as a result of Belgian colonialism; a man who actually never set foot in Congo. In order to understand the Congo today, one must look back at the country’s history.
King Leopold II inherited the Belgian throne from his father, Leopold; from the beginning of Leopold II’s reign he desired to transform his tiny country of Belgium into a world power. There was only way to do this in Leopold II’s mind: colonization.

One of the last remaining parts of the African continent, which had already been divided up among France, Germany, England and Portugal, was Congo, a place the size of Western Europe that contained the continent’s second longest river and much territory not yet explored by Europeans. Congo also contained natural resources in vast quantities—wood, ivory, and rubber (diamonds and coltan among others were found later).
Leopold II originally set up Congo as a ‘free trade zone,’ open to all merchants. As such, the ‘Congo Free State’ came under Leopold’s personal control, rather than that of the Belgian government. And instead of being a ‘free trade zone’ the colony in reality made loads and loads of money for Leopold. As rubber began to be tapped in Congo, the automobile industry started to explode in the west and rubber tires were needed for these machines. Michaela Wrong describes the process of extracting rubber:

“Villagers, who had to tap the wild vines growing in the forest for gum, were set cripplingly high production quotas. If they failed to meet the targets, the Force Publique (Leopold’s enforcing wrecking crew composed of West African and Congolese mercenaries) would descend on a village, burn its huts, kill at random and take women, children or chiefs prisoners until the villagers came to heel. Hostages were used as porters or sold as slaves to rival tribes in exchange for rubber or ivory, and thousands of orphaned children were marched off to Catholic missions to be trained as soldiers for the Force Publique.”

There were also the Belgian forces and their practices of human mutilation—“soldiers in the Congo were told to account for every cartridge fired, so they hacked off and smoked the hands, feet and private parts of their victims. Body parts were presented to commanders in baskets” (Michaela Wrong). The chicotte was also a weapon of punishment used by the Belgians. A chicotte was a whip made from a strip of hippo hide, and if used forcefully enough, the chicotte could be used to kill. In sum, the inhumane practices of the chicotte, executions, mutilation and more were all widely and liberally applied in a campaign that M Wrong describes “often seemed to have extermination of races deemed inferior as an incidental aim.” Leopold II’s philanthropic venture was actually a sickening money making device. This colonization and exploitation of the Congo were also preceded by a few hundred years of an Arab slave trade.

Leopold was finally forced to give the Congo over to his own country Belgium in the early 1900s as the world started to catch on to his ruthless ways. Leopold sold the Congo for 50 million francs, and the Belgian government was also forced to pay off Congo’s 110 million franc debt. One would think that the atrocities would end with a change in leadership. However, when Belgium proper took over it was more of the same; brutality after brutality. Oppression upon oppression. The use of the chicotte was finally outlawed in 1959, 10 months before Congo’s independence. When Congo was finally granted its independence, the country with more than 10 million inhabitants, the third-largest country in Africa, had 17 youth who had received a university education.

I am tired of hearing the question of why the Africans keep killing themselves, of why Africa is so far behind, of why Africa is to blame for so many of the world’s problems. I am tired of only the Rwandan genocide being told; what about the colonization of a continent? Were the atrocities committed by Europeans against Africans during colonialism genocide? Whatever the response to this question, the people of the DR Congo have suffered for centuries now. To me as a westerner, I think it is time that the West takes a step back and asks itself what role have we played in Africa? Has the West truly accounted for the slavery, the killings, and the de-humanization of colonialism? If we take an honest look, I think the answers are scary; scary as hell. But we owe it to ourselves and the world, don’t we?

BLOGGERS-R-US

2005-01-23T13:32:00.000+02:00

Welcome to the age of the blog; where anyone can say anything at any time and anyone else can at any time read those anythings.

This blog is an attempt to tell my story as it unfolds in the Congo. Any story needs context, however, and therefore from time to time I would like to provide a bit of context. As one web-surfer (who happens to be my dad) commented upon reading the first entry of my blog, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost gives an in-depth and accurate historical account of colonialism in the Congo. (For more, try here, or here.) For a telling of Mobutu Sese Seko’s reign in Congo (he was president for 30 years) you can check out Michaela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo. Or there is other literature on Congo. However if you don’t have the time for these you can just keep reading here…

The Path from DC to DRC

2004-12-24T09:57:00.000+02:00

I moved to Washington DC in August 2002 to live in a communal house with five of my best friends from college. Sharing everything from peanut butter to an early '90s Dodge mini-van to the inner-workings of our beings, I spent my first months in DC looking for work, getting over a failed relationship, and giving thanks for the five men I knew in this high-powered capital of the most powerful nation on the planet. Although I had been interested in Africa ever since my Junior year in college when I spent 4 months living in Cameroon in West Africa, I realized early on that working full-time at an organization focusing on issues in Africa having no real prior experience working in or on Africa would be next to impossible. Therefore after several frustrating weeks of sending resumes to the black holes of many DC offices I finally got a chance to earn my living working for a small non-profit through AmeriCorps. While I was not exactly working on anything having to do with Africa (and rather was implementing parent-child programs in DC-area schools and family learning centers), this job in a round-about way has led me to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I began my AmeriCorps placement in late October, and although it was worthwhile it left something for me to be desired in terms of a job. In early December I began looking into internships at a few organizations with programs/focuses in Africa and offices in DC. I applied for part-time internships at Jubilee USA and at Search for Common Ground (SFCG), thinking I could intern 10-12 hours a week outside of my AmeriCorps job. While realizing a few days later that I had a horrible spelling error in my cover letter to Jubilee, I put my hopes in landing a gig at SFCG in its Sub-Saharan Africa Program. At the time, though, even with a decent overall knowledge of Africa, I barely could have found the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on a map...

Two years have passed and I have just finished my stint at Search for Common Ground. After interning there for 8 months and after completing my year at my AmeriCorps job I became a full-time employee at SFCG, an organization that just happens to have a national program in the DRC, which I supported during my time at SFCG. Mainly through the experience gained at SFCG, I was offered in November 2004 a job to work for Food for the Hungry International's DRC program. Therefore in a strange way, through disenchantment in an AmeriCorps job I ended up at SFCG, and through my time at SFCG I will end up in 10 days in the Democratic Republic of Congo. After having lived for over 2 years in Washington, DC, in myriad ways it will be difficult to move on from DC to DRC. Leaving a good job, meaningful relationships, a pleasurable lifestyle, and the feel of being in a city where so much is happening will not be easy. I go from the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet to one of the most exploited, poorest places in the world.

Welcome to the town of Bukavu on Lake Kivu on the Congolese side of the border between DRC and Rwanda, where I will be for the next 2 years.