My space

I sit here in my shared office this Monday morning listening to my two guys fighting over the only computer in the office. It is an aged machine (just like everything else here) suffering from overuse, bad electricity, dust and finally, I just realized, a virus. Donne-moi une casse! It has taken us all day to get the hebo sitrep off to Lumbu.

The office is small building just across the path from the house and is enclosed in the same type of woven bamboo fence of about 5 ft in height. The parcel enclosure surrounds both the office and the CNS (centre nutritional supplementaire) or the supplementary feeding center.

The office has five rooms as well and a common area. The construction is of cooked brick (as opposed to dried mud or adobe) so should survive the rains. The interior walls have been plastered with cement smoothing the surfaces for whitewashing - there is a small line of blue paint to add a bit of colour! So far only three of the rooms are offices and have been taken by the Nutrition program, the Food Security program and the Administrator. Currently I have taken the large table of the administrator and we share his small room while we wait for the completion of the new Log Stock building.

When we move the logistics materials out of one of the other small offices, someone can move in and this should leave me with my new office. I have a promise that I can move in by the end of the week… The common area is where the assistant logistician, José, resides next to the jumble of wires which is the radio and computer area. The office is wired for electricity and lights but it is only due to the good health of our small 4kva generator (gas powered Honda). We have no water, but there is a nice new latrine out back! This is where I split my head open almost every day trying to gain access.

Around the office, one can find a 2-door latrine (now functioning as storehouse for charcoal and odds and ends), a Stock log full of diesel and gasoline and cement, the new Stock log for logistical items to be shared with the CNS program. There is the Codan HF antennae smack dab in the middle of the parcel making it hard to move the truck around the pole and the four cable supports. Finally, under the two mango trees next to the antenna post is the workshop for the handful of carpenters cutting and pounding wood for the variety of furniture or windows or doors.

Just a few meters away is the CNS program (centre nutritional therapeutic) or the therapeutic feeding center where every Friday it is inundated with families designated to receive free food distributions. There are three Paiottes the classic stick hut topped by a grass roof familiar in all the TV shows; one for the kitchen, one for the education and one for the health checks.

Here, the graduates from the CNT come with their families for education, health follow-up, vitamins, hot steaming food and finally a weekly dry ration. The healing children get specifically a premix of 150g corn flour/50g Soya flour/ 30g Oil/25g Sugar per day for the following 7 days. Meanwhile the families get a ration composing of: 14 kg of corn flour, 4.2 kg petit pois (beans), 1.05 L Oil and 0.175kg salt – this is calculated as the amount for 5 persons for 7 days. The kids get checked over each time and are tracked for their weight gain and are expected to follow along at the CNS for up to three months.

There are occasions when we find mild cases of malnutrition and these cases skip the CNT and are embraced by the CNS. The stats are something like 30 percent of the CNS folks are graduates from the CNT. The rest come from our field trip investigations/collections or spontaneously arrive and meet the entry requirements.

The house is a brick affair – made with cooked brick like the office. It has five rooms and a small salon. One of the rooms is being used by the cook as the kitchen – a kitchen without water, a sink or even a stove. All cooking is done on a brazier with charcoal – no wonder there are no trees hereabouts. There are two single beds, one has a mosquito net now; three tables; five chairs and a new shelf unit in the salon with my books and the water filter unit. The steel roof is hot and the place needs a false ceiling to shelter the heat. The bathroom sink is porcelain and is delicately perched upon the pedestal and it has the drain pipe running from the sink, around the room to the drain. The Shower stall is really only the shower stall floor fitted into the cement floor somewhere the middle of the room – there are no walls or tiles or curtains … it just is. The toilet is a western affair, but it is not all that functional, as I have previously mentioned. The hand-dug well is dry but it doesn’t matter as it is inside the recommended safe distance from the guard’s pit latrine. It is a large parcel of about an acre surrounded by a small fence of woven bamboo strips.

The house parcel is graced with several mango trees and a few clusters of aloe plants. That is it, the rest is just dust. Sometimes hard packed and sometimes not the surrounding area is brown, dry and sad. Dust is everywhere and lately it is latent in the air – the rains are coming and so the winds are picking up in anticipation.

The house has electricity (supplied by an extension cord hung from the office all the way to the house) but only when the generator is running – meaning only during the daylight office hours! No good for evening studying le francais.

Food: Action Contre la Faim, hey Joe how ‘bout my hunger? Whatcha gonna do about it? It is already an old joke and has worn itself out. What do I eat? I did a bit of a shopping in Lumbu before I came knowing that selection here would be thin – but I bought wine and beer and scotch and chocolate (gifts; no really!) so that left a meagre selection of tinned corned beef, tuna, tomato paste, pasta and a few spices. Adolphine does the shopping here at the market and has brought home ‘viande sauvage’ of unknown and questionable parentage. Sometimes smoked and dried sometimes fresh it could be buffalo, pork, mutton, goat or clearly exotic like wildebeest or gazelle. I eat rice at every meal; and the meat (always meat) generally comes cooked in tomatoes. Sometimes there is chopped and stewed cassava leaves sometimes there is fou-fou (uncooked ball of cassava flour dough) and more often stewed kidney beans. There is bread and I eat it for breakfast with loads of peanut butter or nutella.

It has only been a week, but it should start soon….I can feel the rumbling inside.

Inside this same parcel is the new building called the ‘food security stock’. This is where we will house the seeds and tools and admin stuff for our food security program. I will reserve one of the four rooms for the new kitchen so Adolphine can cook under shelter but leave the smoke outside of the house. The building is long and narrow and has been without a roof since we arrived in May so it is exciting that it has been completed in the three days since my arrival.

We have another parcel, a small piece 200 m distance which houses the ‘Food stock’ that is the supplies we get from the WFP (or in these francophone parts PAM). There has been spotty delivery of supplies and we have on occasion purchased food and transported it here for our beneficiaries – just another problem in a list of events. So just as PAM has finished installing a huge tent – warehouse exactly beside my house we continue to rent this building. Here inside this parcel we have just finished the latrine for the guards in the three days since my arrival.

Finally the fourth and final parcel is the CNT (centre nutritional therapeutic, therapeutic feeding center). I was constructed by MSF-B and was handed down through MSF-H to ACF back in May/June. This is the heart of our operations, thanks to MSF and it is not surprising it is located between the MSF compound and the MSF hospital. There are four large buildings made of cooked brick again and tin roof. Phase 1 and phase 2 are joined and the children move from one to the other as they gain weight over the month they stay in the CNT. There is a half-finished building which shelters the unit kitchen as well as the caregivers (the mother and often her other children) while the malnourished get help. We provide a daily cooked ration as well as a dried weekly ration to these caregivers during their stay. The fourth building inside this parcel is another large food stock CNT housing the PAM supplies dedicated to the CNT. There are of course latrines (4) and bath houses (2) and a water supply inside this parcel.

Beside our CNT and CNS activities other activities include: a mobile CNS to be done in two villages in the countryside. Kato is only 22 km from here but it is over an hour drive on the sandy broken terrain. Lukonzwola is 35 km away on the shore of Lake Mwero but that is a 3 hr drive and has been banned by me as it is outside of our radio contact. We are about to start a VAD (visite à domicile or home visits) where we can follow-up on our beneficiaries and concurrently continue to dépistage (track down) new cases. And finally, we have a small WATSAN program to begin in mid-October to do some minor rehab work in Dubié (MSF and Concern have some huge WATSAN activities happening in and around Dubié so we hope to limit any overlap in activities).

All in all this is a tonne of work to do in a short time with a base barely functioning in its equipment (no radios, no security, no computers, missing furniture) and a mid-December contract term from the donors. We started late, hit a slow patch due to logistic supply problems as well as expat vacancies and now are feeling the pressure of the end of term for the funding. It is a wonder we just don’t quit and I think it is because the staff are superbly motivated.

This is a refreshing change from Liberia – something is different here. I can’t figure it out just yet but there is less begging or dependence and there is certainly considerably more capacity in our national staff here in a country less rich and less supported than Liberia. I am enjoying myself here, tho the work is just starting for me. I like the early am ramble to the office stepping over the suckling sow sprawled over the path and the children’s excited cries of ‘Mzungu!’ and sometimes ‘Action!’ The whole place seems to lack malice – tho that cannot be true as the fighting has been horrendous and quite contrary to the Human Rights regulations as a rule. This is the deep Africa, and it is kind of cool.