(Muadi's Trip) Part III: Trip to Mbuji-Mayi

Part III
10/26/2008

I want to thank those that have shared words of encouragement and appreciation for my trip notes. Especially Dr. Tshibengabo, Tshiela, Maman Jacky, Mr. Mubalamata, Papa Kakolesha, the LB Executive Committee – everyone, you know who you are.

Today I’d like to talk about about the visit to Tshibombo Tshimuanyi to see where the refugee families live and where the LB project is situated. Mr. Mubalamata sent an email saying that for him Kasai Orientale has a mystical quality as our homeland. I felt the same way especially when I was at Tshibombo. I felt like I was walking on air, experiencing a dream, at the same time, the reality was clicking in my brain.

So, on Saturday, Sept. 27 our group sets out after lunch, in jeeps, to visit Tshibombo. The engineer of the LB clinic, Mr. Samy Tshibangu, has joined us after Abbe Muyombo put him in touch with me. We’re bouncing along on the rough unpaved road, which winds between grassy areas of land. It takes us about 30 minutes from the center of Mbuji-Mayi to get there. The area, just like most of Mbuji-Mayi, is undeveloped. The homes are not as densely placed together, they’re very small houses, and there’s just a lot of open fields around. First we get to the school that OSISA is building. It is very nice, made of brick and spacious, and will probably open in January 2009, offering an exciting beginning for many Tshibombo youth. Across from the school is a maternity whose patient ward was built by OSISA. Europeans have recently sent about 16 beds. The facility is clean and managed by professionals who themselves were victims of the Katanga crisis.

[P.S. I have pictures and video, but I’m experiencing problems attaching them to email and I hope to resolve this problem soon with the help of someone more technologically savvy. Somehow the software I used doesn’t seem to be compatible with most computers.]

Then we drive further to visit the nuns that are taking care of refugee orphans. These are the nuns that LB has also been collaborating with. We see the dormitory where the orphans sleep. It’s small and crowded, again a humbling experience and not an ideal place for lodging – but it’s something. We must keep in mind that the nuns have received no grants, no government support. They are struggling to raise these orphans. They have a field where they grow vegetables that are sold for profit. This profit was used to build a very modest school that when you look at it you can’t even call it a school. It’s made with mud by hand, with a dirt floor, the ceiling not taller than 5 feet and the room holds about 8 rows of old benches. Again, this was a moment that made us all speechless. No one should have to study like that. Nevertheless, the kids perform a song for us to welcome us. Maybe in January they can study in the new OSISA school.

We continue in the jeeps bouncing along about 15 minutes to reach the LB clinic – at long last! It’s nice! The size would perhaps be like your small town health center. The exterior is completed, but it needs paint, a walkway and clearing building materials on the floor inside. All of this is on video. Mr. Samy Tshibangu, the building engineer, says that if all funds are provided now, he can finish the construction in two months!! LB, we are that close! It’s a structure that we can be proud of. It is ready for electricity via a generator or via solar panels. Inflation has not been kind to us over the last two years. The price of cement has increased significantly since LB made the project budget; the price of wood has increased. Trains from Lubumbashi to Kasai are no longer functioning and supplies have to come by air, which is much more expensive. The longer we wait the more expensive it will be to finish the project. The population of Tshibombo Tshimuanyi has waited too long for health care. The OSISA clinic is on the northern side of the community, so the LB clinic will service the southern side. Remember everyone has to walk around there. With the two clinics functioning people still have to walk 45 min to an hour to reach health care. This is life-saving, because now people are dying from the slightest ailments. The government is not doing anything about it. People power can do this. There are qualified medical professionals in Tshibombo ready to staff the clinic. The nuns told me they want to help us with day to day administration.

Having seen the project so close to completion, I want to invite all of us to sacrifice more in our daily lives and to give more to LB. One family made a new pledge of $500 this Friday. Praise God! Let’s join them. Can we ask each family to give at least $300? If you can make it to $500 God bless you, but let’s reach for at least $300. $300 times 50 families will make $15,000! We need to do this NOW. Here’s how all of us can cut back (including me!):

a) Make lunch instead of buying lunch. $6 x 21 days = $126 per month.
b) Cancel satellite TV and stay with basic cable for at least 2 months. No pay per view.
c) If not, at least when you travel for long periods of time downgrade your cable to basic so you’re charged the basic rate instead of your normal rate. Since no one is home to enjoy, why pay full price? Then you can call to turn it back when you’re back from your trip. I do this since I travel for 3-5 weeks at a time.
d) Do your own manicures and pedicures.
e) Don’t buy the newest Warreson and Olomide CDs. Don’t. Or Usher, or Beyonce.
f) When your appliances are off but still plugged in, they consume electricity and you continue to pay. So put appliances on a power strip and unplug the power strip when you leave the house. If this is too much, at least unplug everything when you travel and you will see a dip in your bill.
g) I'm sure you can think of other ideas.

So let me rewind to other visits within the city center of Mbuji-Mayi. We visited l’Hopital Muya, which is a state-run facility that has specialized services for victims of sexual violence. With a grant from UNFPA, they are able to provide comprehensive services including exam, antibiotics, emergency contraception, post-exposure prophylaxis, counseling, fistula surgery, etc., all for free. Their services are life-saving, but it’s like a band-aid approach given that impunity for rape is the norm throughout Congo. 10 percent of the hospital’s patients are under 10 years old. The visit was quite informative and sobering. The older clients forego legal support after medical care, afraid to challenge their perpetrators and lacking support from their families as well as the monetary means to pay legal fees. Save the Children currently takes on only five victims per month for legal support. It is ironic that the hospital refers the most extreme cases to UNFPA and MONUC with the hope to attain justice – not to state agencies.

Kasai Orientale has the 3rd highest rate of sexual violence after the Kivus. In case some of you don’t know, the Congolese government passed a law punishing sexual violence in June 2006. The law is extremely far-reaching; it’s more progressive than laws that exist in countries such as Kenya and Ghana. It punishes sexual harassment, early marriage, rape, child abuse, rape via military order, marital rape, etc. Under this law, an officer who orders his soldiers to rape is himself prosecuted. Under this law, teachers who prey on female students should be put in jail. Rapists should be in jail. But our visit showed us again that law in Congo means nothing. While it’s talked about on TV and on posters everywhere, it is not enforced. The prevalence of rape is increasing, not decreasing. Elected officials and the UN say the right words, but enforcement is still not happening. If you have money to give the police and court officials, the case against a rapist will be dropped. Furthermore, families are so poor that they accept an “informal agreement” to receive financial compensation from the perpetrator instead of taking a rape case to court. So the law exists on paper only. One of our OSISA colleagues visited the Mbuji-Mayi prison and those he found there were being charged with not honoring a $20 debt or with abandoning a marriage after a husband had been absent for five years. But rapists are free to walk around the streets. Isn’t this wrong? Priorities are upside down. We witnessed a moment downtown where everyone has to stop walking/moving when the flag is being raised on the main road. It’s by law – you have to stop or you are arrested. We saw this extraordinary stillness before setting out on a site visit. So tell me, if we can arrest people for not honoring the flag can’t we arrest them for dishonoring someone’s body?

I must add that when we first arrived in Mbuji-Mayi we were received by the Executive Committee of the Provincial Assembly. They shared with us that that week they were introducing in the provincial Parliament legislation to criminalize pornographic film houses and sexual abuse of minors at the mines. Both are very important issues and both have become rampant in Kasai. But can we not extend that sexual abuse of minors to rape of anyone any age? Can we not take a position that here, in Kasai Orientale, we will not tolerate such things? Can we say we don’t care who the perpetrator is, rich or common, whether he did it for fetishe/superstition or not, he must be punished? The challenge remains for us to respect personal dignity.

I continue with what we witnessed at the mines at Bakwa Tshimuna on another day. This was a long day. It took us almost 2 hours to reach the mining sites. After passing all the homes, winding along red, dirt roads (not really roads, just where space for cars had been artificially created), past farms, past everything, and still driving further along until there was nothing along the side except lots of grass – after all of that, after passing MIBA facilities, after passing huge caverns that were former industrial mining sites that are now abandoned, after passing lines of people making the long trek to where they would try their luck to dig for diamonds by hand, after riding through dust and bumpy terrain, we finally stopped in an open field. We were tired, but this was not the end of our journey. Now we walked, for another 45 minutes, under punishing heat, to reach the area where artisanal mining takes place. So imagine rows of very small wooden structures that double as diamond selling counters and people’s homes and fast-food eateries, very densely packed together -- we pass that, to now start walking through the swamps, hilly areas, bushy areas, rocky areas, more swamps. We see smaller caverns (V-shape), earth piled on the sides and water at the bottom. People are digging through the silt water and working to find some speckle of hope in a diamond that is the exception rather than the norm. It’s sad. We talked to people there. The girls selling food there make about 20 cents a day. Here at the mines sexual exploitation and trafficking of minors is rampant. There are terms to refer to girls ages 6-8 and then those 9-15. Someone can make an order as easily as we order from McDonald’s here. So why is there money to pay for sex with minors and there’s no money to pay school fees, mechanize agriculture or create industries that can employ people? When we arrived at the Mbuji-Mayi airport, we happened to be on the same plane as the Governor of the Province, so we saw the level of security that was there for him. Can we not extend that same level of security to our minors? The Provincial Assembly must not just pass a law, they must enforce it and people must be able to see that enforcement.

I must say that our visit generated a lot of excitement. We were received with the most respect and attention by all the people and officials we met. Media sought us out for interviews, including Radio Okapi and Radio-Tele Debout Kasai. I gave two interviews. The non-Congolese in our delegation learned a lot and were able to go away with a comparative view of socio-economic challenges facing DRC vis-à-vis their own country. Suddenly, their country didn’t seem so bad. As a formality we visited the Vice-Governor of the Province as soon as we arrived and also right before we left.

As much suffering as I saw, there are good things about Mbuji-Mayi we must celebrate and work with. The air is clean, skies are clear, there are not piles of trash on the side of the road like in Kinshasa. There is a lot of potential. The people want change. That’s a big plus. And there are many Kasaiens that are ready to partner with Leja Bulela or other people that want to implement development projects.

We have to do more.

I end there today and my final segment will come hopefully before election day!

Thank you for being part of the solution.

Muadi