Back from Congo

After three weeks of bouncing around in the backseats of jeeps, our time in the Congo is over.

We left the DRC yesterday morning. Rushing out of the hotel, the touristy trinket I’d been resisting the most, a tiny wooden replica of Goma’s famous tshukudus (a kind of giant scooter made to transport goods), became too much. I bought one from the vendor as we packed our bags, happy that something tangible may house my thoughts on this place while I’m gone.

Then, after driving a few meters to the border station known as La Corniche, we got our passports stamped in the DRC, walked for a short while in a muddy patch of no man’s land where abandoned transport trucks park slanted in the ditch, and became visitors of Rwanda once again.

Just like that, the noise, the dust, the old battered clothes were gone. Beyond the Rwandan immigration office, I could see a fleet of motorcyclists ready to pick up passengers on the perfectly paved road. But instead of wearing a 1980s-style winterjacket, colourful mittens and any other kind of quirky yet stylish appendage, they all had identical helmets and vests. Just like that.

It might sound odd to fall in love with what makes a place hard to live in. But not if you think about it. The tough facts of life are what make it a life at all – an individuals or group’s experience arching through failure and struggle to reach something of their own design. To witness that arch as it’s being designed by people in places like Bukavu and Goma was the most incredible part of the last few weeks.

There are people relentless in their optimism for the country, who take the time to notice the small signs of progress; the market streets filled with people, young men taking karate lessons on the shores of Lake Kivu. There were people who don’t think the region lives up to its status as a post-conflict zone, and feel the uneasy peace may soon crumble. Others – most of them – have no choice but to carry on with quiet and backbreaking work to feed themselves and their families.

On our last night in Goma, we had to time to visit a transit centre that helps rehabilitate former child soldiers. We were delivering three boxes of toys, clothes and cleaning products that had been donated at Dalhousie University. The shipping, which took from December 2011 to July this year, was paid for by a local high school in Halifax.

We pulled up to the centre, surrounded by a high white-painted wall and ringed with barbed-wire, and a pair of eyes peeked through a small opening.

In the centre, I finally saw what we’d come her to change. Young boys walked around the yard, talking with each others or listening to a tiny hand held radios. Many of them had an awkward gait from some injury in their legs or feet. Some of them couldn’t be any older than 10. One boy clearly suffered from a neurological disorder, his eyes unable to focus on anything for more than a few seconds.

The work we’ve been doing in the Congo – training the national army on how to deter recruitment of child soldiers – is abstract. We won’t see the tangible effects take root right before our eyes. But here in the transit centre, I could see what we were working toward, ensuring a childhood for every person no matter where they’re born.

At the other end of the yard, a group of the former child soldiers were gathered around a television that suddenly began playing a music video. Their silhouettes began dancing under the blue tarp.

“C’est une chanson fetish,” said Leon, one of the mission’s facilitators. The expression means a universally popular song, and indeed, the song they were dancing to, “Sawa sawa,” can be heard at every bar and club in the country. Not one day went by over our three weeks here that we didn’t hear it.

So there was part of the design people here are trying to achieve. Children once forced to weild weapons and kill can now dance like any normal young person.

Back inside of the centre’s main offices, there was a problem. Someone had donated colourful knit hacky sacks, but no one here knew what they were.

Suddenly, I found myself leaping through the doorway. Someway, somehow, an innane skill I once used to pass the time between classes in high school became a piece of knowledge of servere importance. I picked up the hacky sack, tossed it a few times between my knees and feet, and saw one boy smile as he figured out what I was doing.

I lost it. I walked outside quickly so no one would notice the tears. Why the heck would teaching someone to play hacky sack be this emotional?

Because after three weeks of working on a problem that is so complex and difficult to understand, that little ball of beads became a tangible way to express the simplicity of the mission we’d be working on. Young people should be able to play as young people. And it’s never hard to find your own youth buried beneath the surface.

From the perspective of a hotel room in Kigali after the fact, the three weeks in the DRC feels like a small adventure inside a much bigger saga.

For DRC the country, we were a tiny team of foreigners and locals among many trying to quell an injustice that originates amid a much heavier and more complex historical tide.

For the Child Soldiers Initiative, the mission is one small step among many toward creating the best response to the recruitment of child soldiers wherever it takes place.

And for the individuals who took part, it was a month of cooperation and conversation between people at very different junctures of their lives and careers that hopefully brought them new light on why they love this kind of work.

Rain doesn’t stop Bukavu protests

In a country that suffers dearly from dysfunctional institutions, the DRC is never short on civic society picking up where leadership is needed.

During our stay in Bukavu, the city’s motorcyclists (who work as taxis) went on strike to protest a new curfew brought on by the municipality. After two days of clashes between protesters and police, the bikes were back on the road. A colleague told us they couldn’t afford to not be working any longer.

On our last day in Bukavu, we came across this band of yellow agitators:

We sped up and whizzed through the traffic to get a better view, and finally found out what they were protesting.

With a bag of cement on a plank at the lead, these cement factory workers were protesting the material’s current price. As their placard says, their locally made cement is taxed at 3 percent, while imported cement isn’t taxed at all. Many of them held white sheets of paper (soon soaked by a surprise rainstorm) that read they had the right to be employed and feared the favouring of outside cement producers would cost them their jobs.

Apologies

It’s back to Kigali, and with it, the internet!

The last week has been a hectic rush of finishing the last workshop, fighting off food poisining from a merciless grilled cheese sandwich and losing internet connections. Sorry for not keeping you updated. In the next few days, we’ll post about a few of the things we did in the final week.

Recruiting street children for war

Street children come up over and over again when discussing the recruitment of child soldiers with members of the military.

The misery abandoned children experience on the street makes them easy targets for recruiters, we’re told. By convincing them they’ll have a better life in an armed group, they’ll sign up for training no matter what the cause.

To give you a sense of how prevalent street children are in this country, and how much they present a problem for the eradication of child soldiers, here’s three different definitions we’ve heard over the course of the workshops.

First, there’s the “mai bobo,” a Swahili word. “Mai” means water, and the term translates as those who don’t care about cleaning themselves.

Then there’s “shegue,” a word in Ngala, the official language of the military that originates in the DRC province of Equateur. A “shegue” is a child who has decided to leave home on his own.

Finally, some of the workshop participants talked about “kaluna.” It’s another Ngala word but it’s a kind of slang created by street children themselves. “Kaluna” specifically means kids who are members of street gangs in Kinshasa, the DRC’s capital.

The soldier’s stigma

Last night at dinner several workers from different international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) joined us for dinner.

We were asked by one woman what we were doing in Bukavu, South Kivu, and replied that we trained members of the national army on how to reduce recruitment of children.

Her reaction: utter disgust.

She couldn’t believe we interacted, let alone collaborated, with the Congolese national army. When asked why she thought it was so wrong to work them, she wouldn’t go into details.

But her righteous manner made it clear she had a hate-on for soldiers, probably related to some story she’d heard.

The incident highlights an old divide the Child Soldiers Initiative is trying to bridge – the security world (soldiers and police) versus the humanitarian world.

For decades, development workers devoted to rescuing civilians in the thick of a civil war or a violent insurrection have watched soldiers chase down innocents with impunity. That image conjured up through experience tends to stick in people’s minds and build their impression of anyone in uniform.

Not only that, but INGOs often keep themselves at arm’s length from the military for very professional reasons. They do it to preserve their neutrality. If an ambulance service is perceived as favouring one side in a war, it would become the enemy of the other, and lose all legitimacy.

For those reasons, the INGO world doesn’t see much in the military. Brutish, ruthless enforcers is how they tend to stereotype soldiers.

But that creates a problem when it comes to preventing social ills, like the recruitment of child soldiers, before a conflict.

Right now, INGOs focus their energy on helping children after a conflict. Meaning once both sides stop fighting, child protection agencies rush in to extract the children so they can be demobilized.

But if you want to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers before a conflict, you need to work with those most at risk of hiring child soldiers, engaging them on the laws and problems associated with recruitment.

If you worked only with children before a war, you miss the point. It’s not the children who are clammering to join in the fight, it’s the armed groups that are the primary force behind recruitment.

That’s why the Child Soldiers Initiative is focused on working directly with the military, hoping that by addressing the root of the problem, we’ll see decreased recruitment.

That may upset the old order in humanitarian circles, but our belief is isolating the army doesn’t erase their role in the problem.

A sombre monument to war

A one hour’s drive outside of Bukavu, past the last stretch of paved road and deep into the jungle, the Congolese government houses a scientific research centre inside what was once clamined to be the biggest research hub in Central Africa.

Built under Belgian colonial rule in the 1950s, the palatial villa was then called the Institut de Recherche Scientifique de l’Afrique Centrale. A sprawling maze of walkways, elegant ponds and laboratory rooms, the building is like a lost world left isolated from the region’s recent troubles.

But that history caught up with the centre at the entrace to its library.

A trophy hunter named Jean Bormas killed the elephant on the 11^th of December, 1943 and donated the massive tusks to the research centre, the plaque says. The tusks were the world record of their day. They measured 3 meters long and weighed 68 and 61 kilograms. They were entrusted to the centre’s owner.

In 1990, our guide tells us, armed groups pillaged the centre, sawing off one of the tusks for its ivory.

The next year, they came for the second one.

Safety in Bukavu, South Kivu

Every few hours our workshop is interrupted by a burning plastic smell. It’s coming from the power outlet. Invariably, the lights go out a few minutes later, taking with it our PowerPoint presentation. Here we go again.

Luckily we’ve come prepared for this. There’s a generator on the roof outside and we’re quickly plugged into the alternative power source with a couple of extension cords. The workshop lives on.

On the surface, burning power outlets can feel like the biggest threat to working here in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

But being a humanitarian worker is like being kept in bubble wrap. The hotels and restaurants are mostly cluttered around the United Nations peacekeeper bases, we’re driven through town in white 4×4 jeeps, and, of course, everywhere we go has a generator to keep our laptops humming.

The reality is much direr. Bukavu is a recovering war zone, with the last bouts of urban warfare taking place in 2004. Since then, rebel groups have been pushed into the forests and countryside surrounding the city, making it impossible for the national army, and civilians, to move freely.

Violence, including acts of sexual violence, is still widespread in the province, according to the most recent report from the United Nations stabilization mission in the Congo, released last May. Towns under rebel country are subjected to exaction and looting, it says. Two nearby cities, Uvira and Fizi saw an increase in rebel activity following a withdrawal of the national army.

The rebel groups range from secessionist elements that have long been at war with the DRC government to those working to overthrow governments in neighbouring countries. Others are ethnic-based. There has been some success at integrating some rebels into the national army, the report says, but progress is limited and tenuous.

Meanwhile, the illusion of relative safety is maintained by the protection afforded to us from the thousands of UN soldiers deployed in the region. Only on the region’s biggest tourist draw, the mountain gorillas in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, where bandits who survive on the general instability of the region occasionally rob cars passing through – do we step out of the bubble wrap.

Even then, the signs of war remain only signs. A destroyed hotel on the shores of Lake Kivu, an old library pillaged for the elephant ivory used to decorate its lobby, and the constant sight of police officers, soldiers from the national army, and peacekeepers.

Only at a local dance club does life feel remotely dangerous, and once again, poor wiring is to blame. With the dance floor packed with ex-pats, a speaker blows and that pungent burning plastic smell comes back. The crowd rushes for the exits while billowing black smoke fills the room. A few minutes later, with some resourceful electrical work, the dance floor is running again, the bubble wrap safely back in place.