Gorillas and monkey business

June 25, 2006

Can I tell you of my week? I’ve had quite the adventure and if it weren’t for my lack of IT-savvy, I’d let my pictures tell the stories. Aside from trying to figure out how to set up a ‘out of office’ message on my email client, I’ve spent most of the last week or so in the field, edging around the mountainsides of the escarpment leading down lake Tanganyika and racing along the paved(!) road up into kangya beizi[sic] national park…Spectacular! Bamboo forests, mahogany forests, rain forests, grasslands, highlands, lowlands, and two great lakes(and they truly are huge)
Late last week I went to Uvira—on the edge of lake T.—to check out how my team goes about a Non-food item distribution…Torrential rains had washed a number of houses into the lake, leaving a sizable population without shelter, etc, and as the Rapid Response Mechanism(my office) is charged with responding to just such crises, the team intervened…I went to see the actually distribution, see how they get it done, and well, to say the least, it gave me lots of material for the following Monday morning meeting…at the end of the day, ot took 2 days to do the distribution—how long should it take to hand out 700 bags of NFIs?—and part of the team was trapped in the city’s admin building by a frustrated crowd of less-needy people who wanted the left over kits.
After the Monday meeting, we moved on to Bunyakiri to (re)register families displaced by military activities in the area. The first time around, once the team had hit the 10,000 household mark and realized that the local authorities had falsified the beneficiary lists, the int’l community got involved and threatened to cancel the whole operation if the leaders failed to follow the criteria for eligibility(people displaced 7 years ago don’t count, when the kits are destined for those who have fled in the last 3 months) and allow us to work. So we went to do it again, verify the new lists and plan out how we’d pursue the work as it was quite removed from Bukavu, up in the mountains, through the park which is full of gorillas and guerillas(who have a nasty habit of pillaging folk after distributions). Up into the mountains, on a mostly paved road(an unbelievable artifact and testimony to what Congo has lost and what it can become)…it was also the day a former Mai Mai child soldier turned gov’t General came home for a visit after ten years in orientale province…suffice it to say, I had ample time to enjoy the view….monkeys on the road, monkeys with blue bottoms, a flying squirrel, and apparently, though I didn’t see him, there’s a mean one armed giant monkey that lives on the road and takes food from people…apparently some soldiers chopped off his arm and now he’s really aggressive (who would’ve thought?)
So we made it to bunyakiri and got to work right away, checking in with the same civil administrators and the local peacekeeping outfit(monuc)…well, I’m not sure what will come of this situation. At the end of the day, we had collected lists claming to represent 11,500 households displaced in the last 3 months, and our verification didn’t support the number and I wound up with observations enough for another ‘Monday meeting’—anyone looking for a job? I have a mind to dismiss everyone!—But it was a wild trip to the field, a wild introduction to the scope of this work, the very real challenges facing congo on eve of their first legitimate election since independence(there’s been a number of ‘elections’ however)…
Some random vignettes: I saw a baby Gorilla and leopard, orphans but ‘saved’ by some guy who thinks his doing them a favour keeping them captive in his house until a better home/price can be found for them. I was given some coltan tailings by a little girl under a tree. I saw a green snake, and then I saw it killed by a bunch of frightened grown men! I saw the lights of Emmanuel N.’s city across the lake. It get cold at the equator.

(Anyone know the best way to get photos into blogs?)