Into the Fray

 Six  years ago and it is  2005. It is hot and heavy before the rains in the Democratic Republic of Congo and at this moment I am sitting in the airport in Kinshasa the capital, waiting to be called fora flight to take me to Ituri region  in the north east of the country.Bunia is the main town in this part of the world and it is my second time to go there in six months.One third of children under the age of 5 there are considered to suffer from malnutrition, my reason for going. I have worked overseas in emergency nutrition programmes for several years.

Driving in Ituri during the rainy season

To be honest, after reading a few reports on the north east of Congo my heart had sunk about six feet the first time I went there. Even travel guides only devote a couple of perfunctory pages to this massive, diverse country, declaring most of it as a no go zone.They warn any traveler who may haplessly happen to wander into north east Congo by mistake, on the dangers of banditry, rape, erupting volcanoes and other apocalyptic type events.

Sitting in the airport I remember the last time I arrived to Ituri, It was in a tiny Cessna – the size of a model kit aero plane that dipped down into a heavily militarized town bristling with rolls of barbed wire, tanks on street corners and UN peace keepers. I remember the Congolese staff with whom I worked and one person in particular. Like many people who have done great things in a modest way,

Liathi was unassuming, quietly firm and to be honest often overlooked. Like many people he had a history.He came from an area hard hit over the last couple of years by fighting.It started one day when the militia entered his town and everyone had to flee.All that he and his family had owned was razed, along with the town. He had to flee with his family through the streets – him trying to cover the eyes of his 3 year old daughter with his hand, trying to protect her from the sight of the corpses slung all around. Tragically he somehow became separated from his family. For the next 3 months he did not know whether they were dead or alive. But all stories have some sort of ending which if not altogether happy is one we can all live with. And so it is with this one. He found his family after 3 months. They had lived for weeks on end in the vast Ituri forest hiding from militia. So when I met   him   all was well – they have all had to start from zero but are getting there and Liathi has only two regrets:

-          that the last view his children had of the home his family had lived in for generations was that of a place completely tattered by conflict.

-          That he still has to comfort his daughter at night. Somehow even his hand over her eyes as they were running through the streets could not protect her from the awful sight of those bodies. And so she still dreams of them.

Still musing in the airport   I remember the place where I used to stay in Ituri,  a small  hotel around 10 minutes walk from the office of the aid organization with whom I was working.The hotel was  a bit ad hoc. 

My hotel room

But I was very fond of Maurice who worked there.He wore a red apron with a picture of a beaming marmalade cat on the front. He never tied the apron at the back and he was always rushing around a lot with the result that he looked like an aeroplane about to take off – his apron constantly billowing. Maurice seemed to do everything. I used to meet him cleaning the bathroom, filling up the barrel with water ready for our bucket baths, sweeping bedrooms, cooking, rushing off to market, starting the generator whenever the town electricity went off and in the evenings ironing away in a lather of sweat. He zoomed around everywhere, always with a beatific smile on his face and generally accompanied by the hotel cat (lurking round Maurice hoping that he would drop one of the many meals he was always transporting from kitchen to table). Generally the hotel trundled on in a haphazard town under chronic conflict sort of fashion. But on a few mornings I used   to get  up and come down to find the hotel in a sort of post  Bacchalian stupor – empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, chairs overturned and hotel workers staggering round clutching hung-over heads (except for Maurice and the hotel cat of course).

On those days when I did not go out to the villages I would walk to the office from the hotel in the mornings. Everyone was very friendly and wished me Good Morning (Bonjour) in French or Swahili (Jambo) with a big smile. It was a strange contrast, the forbidding military aspect of a town under siege with the bouncy gaiety and chatter of everyone I would pass by.I would  think of London and going to the train station in the  morning. I would pick up my free copy of the Metro, stand on the platform and wait for the train.There would be  an eerie silence although the platform is choked with people. The train would  arrive and I would  get on. Immediately  confronted with a fug of misery – a carriage full of people staring ahead, hunched away from body contact, eyes resolutely not meeting other eyes, no chatter, no cheery smiles or Good Mornings.

Not much to smile about for this young mother and her malnourished child. Leave him at home and he may die. Bring him for treatment and she runs the risk of being robbed raped or shot

And yet in London there is no barbed wire everywhere to snag yourself on, no hushed talk of the latest conflict/ethnic killing/ harassment of people, no checkpoints, no 1 in 5 children dying before they reach the age of 5 years. Nothing like that…….. so why all the misery I wonder to myself?

Back to walking to the office in Ituri …….One day I walked past a billowing roll of barbed wire sitting on the top of a wall like a rather sinister Swiss roll.Except this particular bit had a fabulous blue tide of Morning Glory   wreathed around it. You see Morning Glory a lot in Africa in white or blue. It is from the bindweed family. It fascinated me that something so beautiful was growing around something so horrid. I promised myself that the next time I passed by I would take a photo. However the next time I passed by all the flowers had shrivelled up and died.I used to  ask myself how the Congolese in Ituri manage to be so cheerful, friendly and courageous in what must have  been at that time  one of the most god forsaken places on earth – up there with the Sudans, Somalias and  Iraqs of this world.  Personally I think that they have realised that when for a brief moment something is going well  – they take that moment and enjoy it even if it is just to look at a flower. Because unfortunately in the Ituri of 2005  the next time you passed by everything would have changed – you arrived back  to a village you had left that morning to find it razed to the ground or you look at a flower one day and then the next….  all shrivelled up and dead  like that that beautiful tide of  Morning Glory that I used to pass each morning.

And so here I am still sitting at Kinshasa airport waiting once again to go to the north east of Congo.  I can see an aero plane on the runway so that looks promising. There does not seem to be a tanoy system here for calling the flights or if there is I cannot figure it out. What seems to happen is this:

-          a bus arrives at the door to take you to your plane I presume.

-          Everyone in the airport stampedes forward towards the bus which disappears under the onslaught of people. You can see the bus driver’s face fixed in a sort of horrified rictus smile before he also disappears under a flurry of people.

Every time this happens I join in the fray and when I am in the middle of the crowd breathlessly ask someone if this is my flight. Each time I return to my seat a little more bedraggled than before.

And so it is again. I sense a change in the crowd around me. A silent heave is beginning. I see a bus in the distance and I see everyone around me gathering up various boxes, bags, parcels, infants sleepily swinging around in bright coloured sarongs used as slings on their mothers’ backs, the odd chicken or two.  The surge forward is about to start. I better gather myself up too, just in case. Here goes ………… and so, into the fray once again.