All That Is Bitter and Sweet (66 page)

Passing back into Rwanda was simple. There were no mysterious delays, no attempts at extortion or graft. The breeze off the lake began to blow freshly again, and the leaf cover from beautiful old trees provided shade as we made our way back to our hotel. I spent a whole hour in the bath that night, trying to scrub off grit that seemed to go deeper than my skin.

Then I settled in to process the day’s many compelling events. As soon as I began to check voice mail and go online I was deluged with messages: At Dario’s race in Talladega, Florida, some other driver, well after the yellow flag had come out, still managed to plow into Dario’s car. To dramatically illustrate the crash, an image of the incident immediately popped up on my laptop screen as I signed on. Oh. Sigh. The life of a race car driver’s spouse! Dario, his mum, and someone from the team had already left messages to reassure me that he was okay, although his ankle was broken. Dario and I spoke. I can tell everything I need to know by the sound of his voice, and I believed him when he assured me he was all right. Even so, his injury would be putting him out for several races, so our conversation became about that, and what it meant for his ongoing learning curve in stock cars. People cannot stop asking, no matter how many times I answer the question, whether I feel scared about the elements of racing, and the answer is always “no.” I decided early on not to be afraid, because that would be a terrible way to live, with fear about things I so obviously cannot predict, influence, or control. My husband said he wanted me to keep my head down and carry on with my remaining time in Africa. I have seen him through far worse than broken ankles, and I appreciated that he did not doubt my concern and supported me to finish my trip.

Relations between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were still icy, so there were no direct flights to Kinshasa, our next destination. It took twenty-four hours, including an overnight layover in Addis Ababa, to fly just over one thousand miles, the equivalent distance between Washington, D.C., and Miami, Florida. We skipped the whole VIP line when we finally arrived, as it actually draws negative attention in the form of additional requests for bribes. The ride from the airport was long, and I saw a typical poor African capital out the window, crowded with nearly ten million souls struggling, often creatively and inventively, to make it through each day. Our hotel had red carpet and low ceilings—not a good look—and there were places where they’d patched the wallpaper with matching squares. Overall, the hotel struck me as ragged and depressed, like Kinshasa itself.

Papa Jack’s security contact at the U.S. embassy told him, “If anything goes down, just stay put at your hotel. They run out of bullets fast around here.”

Indeed, there have been semiregular coup attempts, assassinations, and random eruptions of militia violence in Kinshasa ever since the dictator Mobutu was overthrown in 1997. Robbery, pillaging, and rape are epidemic, and few venture outside after dark. I was immediately on my best conflict zone behavior, putting the chain in the door, looking in the fish-eye with each knock (as if that would really help, but whatever, one does what one can), minding Papa Jack every step. He was physically staying very close to me, very alert. (I get a kick out of seeing him put it into high gear.) It had been fairly stable here for a year now, but nobody was taking anything for granted.

This massive, lumbering, seemingly ungovernable nation, once known as the Belgian Congo and more recently Zaire, has not really known peace and stability since the first bloodsucking European colonists arrived in the nineteenth century. The insane and diabolical King Leopold II of Belgium looted the country for its vast natural resources—timber, copper, ivory gold, and other minerals—murdering ten million Congolese in the process. By the end of the colonial era, the country had been raped and pillaged, ancient cultures and social systems were destroyed, and the people were utterly lost. The Belgians gave nothing back in terms of education or infrastructure. At independence in 1960, there were only seventeen college graduates and less than a thousand miles of paved roads (down to a pitiful three hundred miles today), making transportation impossible in vast areas of this country, equal in acreage to everything east of the Mississippi. Mobutu Sese Seko, as corrupt as he was brutal, picked up where the Belgians left off, plundering the Congo for three decades, propped up by the CIA in exchange for his cooperation in fighting communism. What was left in his aftermath was a chaotic cauldron of warring armies and special business interests. As a result, a population of more than sixty million was left struggling to survive on almost nothing.

On our first morning in Kinshasa, Theresa Guber Tapsoba, our country rep, took us to meet Victor and Therese, a couple whose lack of knowledge about family planning ravaged their lives until PSI intervened. Victor is thin and wiry and has a bum eye. Therese has orange-tinged hair, enormous cheekbones, and sweet, soft eyes, especially when her husband is looking at her, which he does often. They have been together since they were children. They live in a little cement house in a run-down neighborhood, with a ten-square-foot main room, and a tiny little room on either side where they and their six children sleep on dirty, ragged pieces of foam on the floor. Altogether, Therese told me she has had nine pregnancies, three of which, out of mad desperation, she aborted with herbs obtained from friends. Each time, this caused protracted agony lasting five days. But it was that or have more babies, whom she and Victor could not offer adequate care, given that they were already barely surviving.

Unregulated fertility is a catastrophe in this country. Congo has the highest maternal mortality in the world, and six hundred thousand babies a year are born for no other reason than to suffer and die. Achieving universal access to family planning, which is Millennium Development Goal 5B, is considered the best way to reduce maternal mortality and is wildly unattainable under current funding levels and conditions in the DRC and throughout the global South, although the subject has recently been given more attention. The demographic household survey in 2008 found that 24 percent of women of reproductive age in Congo have an unmet need for modern family planning. Clearly, PSI and its partners have their work cut out for them in the DRC. Luckily, Therese was one of the few who could be reached and helped.

One day, a community outreach worker knocked on the door, full of information about family planning. The couple was interested enough to visit a local clinic, and since then Therese had been using an injectable contraceptive every three months. At last, the unintended pregnancies stopped. It is very likely Therese would be dead without family planning. But the rest of their lives remained such a struggle. Their one tattered mosquito net, dating to Therese’s last pregnancy, was out of date. Their water was not safe, and they experienced recurrent episodes of diarrheal disease. Both did what they could to feed the family, but neither had a job. They ate one meal a day, close to bedtime, and sometimes nothing at all. There was violence in the neighborhood, especially because of moonshine made from a corn processor nearby, and Therese was terrified of the rapes, of which one heard much in the neighborhood. Every day as soon as the sun set she would hide herself and their children indoors.

PSI has a lot to show for its efforts in family planning and maternal health in the DRC. But while our program has improved one aspect of the lives of Victor and Therese, the violence of poverty still threatens to overwhelm them.

In a slum called Kingabwa, the roads are steep, raw ribbons that slope down to rice fields that abut the Congo River, which is choked with garbage. On either side are concrete houses with corrugated tin roofs that bake under the African sun. I was fascinated by the market. There was a little corner shack with a spiffy white-and-red paint job that served as a communication booth, and in the middle of the road was a little barbershop, which consisted of three plastic chairs, a small handheld mirror, and a comb. Today was Labor Day and a national holiday, so everyone was home and the kids had no school. It seemed more like National Hair Day, as everyone was being either freshly braided or styled out in the streets. Despite the abject poverty here, life still shines through in the perseverance of the human spirit. What else could possibly explain how the people find the will to live every day?

At the next market, I was able to roll up my sleeves and start doing what PSI does so well: using local markets to allow folk to access health products, services and behavior-change communication. In this case, it was a public demonstration of our point-of-use water purifying powder, with the same ingredients as Sur’Eau but available in this country under the brand name PUR.

I
love
this sort of thing, being on the street, hanging out, trading witticisms, having fun, involving passersby. I stood in front of the kiosk where PUR was sold at a highly subsidized price; about 50 francs (about 10 cents) buys enough to purify ten liters of water. I set myself up with a wooden stool and a big pail of fetid river water, thick with brown muck and filth. Using an enormous wooden spoon, I sprinkled in PUR and began to stir. A great crowd gathered, and we hollered questions and answers back and forth about water: “Where do you fetch your water?” I asked. “Do you have diarrhea? Wait till you see how PUR makes even river water safe! One capful alone cleans twenty liters!” The crowd grew.

After five minutes of stirring, we let the water “deflock.” Particles and harmful organisms (visible and not) bonded with the chemicals and settled to the bottom. Using the clean piece of gauze sold with the sachet of PUR, we strained the water into an empty pail. After another twenty minutes had passed—which I filled with more banter—I poured the purified Congo River water into my glass and drank a toast to everyone’s health to a big cheer. We began serving glasses of water to the crowd. They drained them greedily, they were so thirsty. I’d bet that part of the reason they drank so robustly was that on an unconscious level they were relaxing, because for once in their lives a vital human need was being met—drinking water—without consequences that would make life even more difficult. Relaxing in a life this hard doesn’t come often. I will never forget the great vulnerability of their need for a simple drink of water.