First Curfew

After a month to the day in the DRC I finally went to my first field assignment - one that did not involve hanging out with VIPs in luxury hotels, but that was to include visits to remote sites in the North Kivu Province to see how the programs are actually acted out. My adrenaline was certainly mounting, building on an already high doses, due to the brilliant long weekend that I had spent half playing basketball half indulging in great foods and beers – all by the side of the beautiful lake, mostly in the company of the enchanting metisse Congolese.

So come Tuesday morning, rested and certainly curious, I joined our party of five and took off from Goma at about 10 a.m., in a convoy of two Land Rovers. The road north – which meanders through and next to the mighty Virunga National Park - used to be goudron in some better ages, but is now just one DEEP pot-hole after another. Yet, as it counts as the ‘main road’, it is quite heavily trafficked, as well as patrolled by the army up and down. The one thing you do not want – to be stuck behind some other vehicle, as the dust is really just overwhelming. We advanced however quite steadily for some 70kms., during which the biggest problem was losing phone reception in a couple of spots.

The most remarkable thing of the day, actually – passing through a Centre de Brassage at Rumangabo – where men of different armed groups (there are SO many in this region) now and then come to be integrated into the regular army (the barriers delineating ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ armed people are quite blurry on many occasions, as slip-ups are certainly not uncommon). However, this center seemed like quite the established place – with dozens of living blocks (from the Belgian times, of course), where the military have brought their extensive families and now live in VERY large groups. Yesterday no one had any issues with us passing by the instruction camps (?!), so we continued on to ‘our’ villages, to visit local health centers.

It is one of those things that will just stick to your mind forever – the maternity and the post partum rooms. And, by God, if I had to give birth in one of those places I would definitely forfeit having children forever (of course, not an option for your regular Congolese woman…) We actually stumbled upon a whole pregnant-women gathering, and they were all so happy, and the small babies up on their backs so cute, that one could almost be mislead about the kinds of lives these people live…

Zigzagging through incredibly beautiful landscape we spent a few hours in different communities, only with a small break in the meantime, to have lunch at our beautiful house (yes, another beautiful house…) When we finally arrived to our regional office I found an email immediately requesting me to Kinshasa – so frantic calls back and forth resulted in a compromise: I would go early next week, and in the meantime take it sort of easy with my field work and go crazy with preparing materials for this mega-event coming up in Kinshasa.

The greatest part of the day was still to come though: the first curfew of my life. Scary and exciting at the same time, it conjured in my mind memories of a distant past in Romania, when all of us were gathered home, in the long winter evenings, without electricity. I came home on foot at 6, but since everyone else was still out and the only key to the house with someone else, I hung out with the guards among pomme-granate trees, learning some Swahili and giving solicited advice, in French, on contraception, to a guy who has 9 kids and would like to stop there...

At 6.30 we all got into the house, barred all doors, and prepared for a long evening, calling in with the radio room every so often to report that there is nothing to report. However, in all honesty, I was expecting something a tad more dramatic, but this curfew was actually just one fun, big evening, with colleagues from Italy, El Salvador, France and Guinea: an impromptu gym on our beautiful terrace (where I toned my muscles, aggravated an ankle twisted over the weekend and further injured my right knee), some Amstel sessions complemented with some Congo-style Spanish tortilla, a long chat with my Italian colleague (he is my house mate in Goma as well, but somehow we had to come all the way here to actually bond), and a fascinating Burkina Faso soap opera on TV (on which occasion I found out the VERY important fact that someone from that country is called a Burkinabé).

At 9.40 p.m. it felt like we had partied for weeks already, so I took to my small, cozy room, and sheltered under my very sexy blue mosquito net. With ear plugs on I slept all through the night – so I would have even been unaware of guns shots around -- which are apparently a common occurrence here, and therefore a main reason for our curfews…