Law student Elysée Ngirie Zawadi. Photo ABA-ROLI.

If you’re not yet aware of the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative (ROLI), you just might be missing something. This nonprofit program of the ABA has outreach programs in 40 countries, including the DRC. Working in eastern Congo, the ROLI runs legal aid clinics, does training of police and other public servants regarding women’s rights and gender roles, and—in an innovative program—has established mobile courts for trying soldiers and others accused of gender-based violence. One of their missions is combating the culture of impunity that is so pervasive in Congo.

All of which is leading up to a new bit of good news here: An individual donor who noticed what ROLI was doing came forward with funding for a scholarship program to enable Congolese women to become lawyers. The story on the ABA-ROLI website is well worth reading, especially if you need a little boost of encouragement. Here’s the punch line, in the words of a young woman law student in Bukavu: “After my studies I will become a lawyer, speaking for those with no voice.”

SAJ   2/8/2012

Mrs. Genzambe Gulia William received a loan from the Loko office among the small wholesalers. The small wholesalers receive money, not more than $ 100. We have now in Loko 10 small wholesalers. Mrs. Genzambe Gulia’s husband died and she has 2 children. One already finished the secondary school and the second is now in the third level of primary school. Since her husband died, she is staying at her uncle’s house. She works on a small business to take care of her children, selling at the Loko market.

She got money from FTM at Loko on November 17th and signed an agreement to pay back 3 months later with 2% interest per month. She had 37 000 FC [Congolese Francs] as capital before getting the loan from the Loko office. Her loan was 90 000 FC (like $ 100). She went to Maniko village, located around 20 km from Loko when you are going to Gbadolite, and bought 10 oil cans holding 25 liters each. All the oil cans and the transportation cost her 127 000 FC. FYI: She used a bicycle from one of the [FTM] bicycle entrepreneurs, and the transportation cost was 5 000 FC.

When she sold the oil, she got 210 000 FC. She paid directly back the loan of 90 000 FC and took off her starting capital, 37 000 FC. She had 83 000 FC net profit. Then she bought 3 cans of her own for 15 000 FC (before, she borrowed cans from a neighbor). She bought semolina for her children, it seems that it is nutritional, for 15 000 FC, and she bought cloth for herself. She ended up with new capital of 57 000 FC.

Now she is coming to the Loko office to get a new loan. She told me that she will change the product for selling – she will now buy coffee because the price of oil is going down now. The price of coffee is going up because everybody in the morning drinks coffee before they go to the farm. Presently in the Ubangi area it is the dry season, and it is cold in the morning and in the evening. She will go 10 km to buy coffee beans that cost there 800 FC per measuring unit. In Loko the same measure sells for 1 200 FC.

Now Mrs. Genzambe Gulia William is working as a small wholesaler from the Loko Office. She has asked the Loko office if she can increase her loan to $ 150. She thanks the leaders of the Project for bringing FTM into the Loko area, and encourages all the donors that their money is serving someone, somewhere faraway in the world. God bless you!

Posted by SAJ   6 Feb 2012

Farmers to Markets Demo Crop

Byron Miller, the executive director and president of this organization, sent three articles to our board of directors recently. Taken together, they provide more evidence, more particulars, on the difficult situation the people of Congo find themselves in.

The first article sets the broader context. Last November the United Nations Development Programme presented its 2011 International Human Development Report. This index incorporates measures of health, education, income, inequality, poverty, gender, sustainability, and demography. Scroll down the landing page a bit and you’ll find the full list of countries with their rankings on the Human Development Index. The page offers tools for looking at each country’s data and setting the rankings in context — but the bottom line (literally) is that the DR Congo comes in last on the list of 187 countries.

The other two documents deal particularly with food insecurity in Congo. One is the annual Global Hunger Index, released in October by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Here Congo came in…..last again (in this case, the higher the score the greater the hunger). Sub-Saharan Africa overall had some of the worst scores, including all four countries in the world whose hunger status was deemed “extremely alarming.” Among those, Congo stands out because its score rose (worsened) by 63 percent compared with its 1990 baseline number. The Institute attributes that to “conflict and political instability.”

Finally, an article in the New York Times on Jan. 3 focuses on hunger among residents of the city of Kinshasa. It’s painful but important to read the descriptions of families who must alternate who gets to eat on one day and who has to wait till the next: one day the older children eat, the next day the younger ones do, and so on.

We do need to remember that food insecurity is not the same all across Congo. Life in the cities is very different from life out in the villages, where the mother can go into the forest and bring back enough cassava for the family to eat each day. And the continuing violence in the eastern part of the country makes food insecurity worse (as mentioned by the International Food Policy Research Institute above), as refugees are constantly on the move, militias may move in an take all the food in a family’s garden, and so on.

But the northwestern Equateur province, where we are at work, has plenty of problems with malnourishment in children. Nearly half of all children under age 5 are stunted in their growth, indicating long-term malnourishment — the most dangerous form. Our Farmers to Markets microfinance program is beginning to increase production and cash income for 3,000 farmers in the area, but malnourishment is a major threat to families right now — in its own right and for the way it leaves a child more vulnerable to other serious health threats.

SAJ   3 Feb 2012

Keep in mind that the distance between Kinshasa and Gemena (the main city in the region where we work) is about 650 miles as the crow flies — or the grey parrot.

SAJ   25 Jan 2012

Hip hop gives street kids a voice. Under Didjak Munya’s coaching, they come up with songs that highlight topics like awareness of HIV/AIDS, and the wrong of sexual violence. In fact, a couple songs created by the street kids and recorded by Munya and some of the kids have been played on a major radio station.

Take a look at the full article here. Scroll down the screen until you come to the video in the lower right corner–it’s well worth watching. And be thankful for creative people using new ways to reach kids living in the streets of Kinshasa.

SAJ   24 Jan 2012

Malaria is a huge problem in Congo. In a country of 69 million people, there are nearly 30 million cases per year, by US Agency for International Development (USAID) statistics. That’s equal to 43% of the entire population. It is especially dangerous to children. Twenty percent of Congolese children die from some cause before the age of five , and nearly half of those succumb to malaria — nearly a tenth of all the kids in Congo.

Think about it: There are currently about 74.2 million children in the U.S. If 7,400,000 American kids died of one disease — a preventable disease — what kind of public outcry and mobilization of resources would we see?

The best preventive measure is long-lasting insecticidal nets. Hung and draped over a bed, a treated net wards off the mosquitoes that carry malaria. Again according to USAID, “nearly 30 million LLINs have been brought into the country by the government of the DRC and the donor community.” Yet numbers reported by the World Health Organization indicate that still only a low percentage of children sleep under treated nets.

The 11,000 bed nets are the product of a partnership between the Paul Carlson Partnership, Covenant World Relief, and the ECC Dept. of Christian Formation. CWR and CF raised funds from Sunday school children in ECC churches, and our role at PCP is the acquisition and distribution. Through another partner of ours, IMA WorldHealth, we were able to buy these nets at $4 each. And 11,000 children out in the villages of the Ubangi region will soon sleep in safety.

SAJ   19 Jan 2012

The Ericsons returned to the U.S. in 1974, and Dan later served for several years as a leader in the Paul Carlson Medical Program (before it began doing business as the Paul Carlson Partnership). His daughter, Judy Ericson Anderson, has followed her parents in service to Congo, as executive director of HEAL Africa, based in Goma.

The full ECC article is found here. Thanks be to God for the life and witness of his servant Dan.

SAJ   11 Jan 2012

Texa Dembele Training FTM Leaders

“Here in Kinshasa, the Government declared today holiday for all services. I am at home with my Family.

“Kinshasa had a critical  critical political situation in especially, Friday, the day Tshisekedi ( the Guy who didn’t be elected) decided to take the oath. He was been stopped in his house by the police. He couldn’t go out of his house. Some of his militants tried to go to the Martyr Stadium the place of the ceremony, the police scattered them by tear gas. But in short, this day was not so bad. We didn’t note any death. I heard that one person death because when he did run, he walked on the electricity cable . . .

“Christmas week was a little bit disrupted by this event. The Christmas day passed well.”

Texa himself was a candidate in the parliamentary election. Results from those races are not expected before mid-January.

Photo: Foreign Policy

“I want you guys to read this article on the Congo.” That was our friend and former summer staff member Nyenemo Sanguma, sending us an article from Foreign Policy about the disputed results of the national presidential election and the attitude of the West toward this outcome.

We’ve been watching news sources during the past few weeks, as we’ve tried to follow and understand what was happening over there. The opposition insists the election was rigged and on Dec. 14 called for mass protests. The Carter Center and other observers have pointed to a number of reported problems, the archbishop of Kinshasa has said the results “do not conform either to truth or to justice,” the U.S. ambassador to Congo called the process “seriously flawed” — and the Congolese Supreme Court must decide by tomorrow, the 17th, whether to validate the results.

We’ve also been in touch with Nyenemo periodically during the past few weeks. Following the (delayed) announcement of the results on Dec. 7, he reported that Kinshasa was filled with soldiers and police. It was forbidden for even three people to assemble in Kinshasa, and text messaging was down throughout the country. Nyenemo also told us how, shortly before the elections, Kabila increased the number of members on the Supreme Court from 7 to 27 by adding his own appointees.

As tense as the country has been, Nyenemo’s feeling was that life will return pretty much back to normal in January. “People don’t like it,” he said, “but they have to go back to their lives.”

The article he sent is well worth reading. It appeared in Foreign Policy last Wed., the 14th, and is written by Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, a Congolese currently at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Here’s the link.

SAJ   16 Dec 2011

Kole-Tonga and Her Mother

“Her name is Kole-Tonga. She is two years old. She arrived at the hospital in Karawa with severe abscesses in both thighs due to poor injection technique at a local health center. She was in septic shock upon arrival. Her abscesses were debrided by the surgical staff [a process that removes dead skin and tissue] and she was placed on antibiotics. Her wounds were difficult to treat and she had to remain in the hospital for a total of four months. She was not able to walk after her legs became infected. I thought it was going to take her months to walk again because one of the abscesses had progressed to full thickness over the majority of her left thigh.

“We treated her with moringa leaf powder, too, because she was also severely malnourished and only weighed 6 kg. [13 lbs.]. After two months of treatment with the moringa leaf powder regimen she weighed 9 kg. [20 lbs.] and had gained 6 cm. [over 2 in.] in height! I just saw her right before we left from Karawa and her wound on her left thigh is only a bit bigger than a quarter. Plus, she is running around like crazy! Praise God!”

Marta Klein is a physician assistant, ECC missionary at Karawa, and member of the PCP medical steering committee.

SAJ   16 Dec 2011