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July 05, 2007
Kiziba
In western Rwanda the collines (hills) become mountains, and the mountains drop off suddenly to a placid and sheet-like grey lake called Kivu. The grey contrasted with the green, and the perpetual mistiness, is less appropriate for an equatorial African nation, and seems like it belongs instead in the Adirondacks. Only at close distance does one begin to see banana fronds and terraced tea farms, and mud-brick houses built into the hillside. Nothing is flat. People make do with what flat territory they can find, and soccer nets are set up in the blank spaces in the S-curves of the perilous roadway. The mountains converge into harsh valleys, and ascend again like a roller-coaster.
The slick vinyl seating on the buses adds to this amusement-park feel, as all four people seated abreast slide inexorably into one another as the buses hurtle around corners, none-too-aware of the white dividing line in the center of the road. The shoulders of the people on each end are pressed into the glass of their windows. Rwandan peasants, unaccustomed to the speed and the motion, look out of the car, down at their laps, and out again rapidly. Once one person starts vomiting, it is almost infectious… Pretty soon you have an entire roller-coaster scene, and not a plastic bag in sight because polyethylene bags were outlawed.
I came to Kibuye to visit my friend Lindsay’s former boss, Iris, the regional head of the UNHCR camp. I came also to visit the camp itself, having never seen a refugee resettlement situation. Iris had mentioned the fact that the peer education project in the camps could use some information specific to the refugee situation. As the modules I am working on address Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD) as well as other topics on HIV, we thought there might be room for collaboration.
The Kiziba camp is nestled onto one of the hilltops just under the highest mountain in the region, a 45-minute wash-board drive with some incredible views of the lake. When you round the corner to the road that continues to the camp, you can see the white tarpaulin cover from afar. The camp looks almost organic, like a fungal growth on a log. Even when you draw close it is hard to imagine that it is home to 18,000 people. You can see the schoolhouses first, long and rectangular, and the sprinkling of students dressed in strikingly sharp blue-colored uniforms wandering in and out for their morning break. Some of the students had wandered a little far on their recess; on the road to the camp we passed several youth dancing a little jig of freedom, the dance of “youth-cutting-class”. We pulled the car over to scold them in several languages for their lack of attendance.
I had in my mind the images of displaced populations in Rwanda as they are described by General Roméo Dallaire. I was imagining constant motion, deprivation, pup tents, and chaos. This camp is surprisingly methodical. The houses are as dense as I had imagined, made of sticks woven into walls and then covered with red mud for siding. When one UNHCR tarpaulin wears thin, another is added on top. Some houses looked like cakes, having been “iced over” so many times. There is perhaps 3 feet of space between houses, with a curved path sunk into the surrounding soil and little rivulets for water waste. But there are regular water pumps, little ambient trash, and a solid health center in the process of being expanded. As Iris pointed out, in some ways it the services here are better than the surrounding villages.
My initial lack of horror at viewing the camp was counteracted when I was told of its age. This camp had been around since 1996, a completely un-temporary timeframe. The residents of this camp came from Congo during the first of the Congolese wars, sparked by the migration of 2,000,000 Hutu refugees into the Congo after the genocide, and a Rwanda-supported-invasion-cum-civil-war to overthrow Mobutu. Congo became an unsafe region, and many Congolese Tutsis (a very nebulous and multinational category) “returned” to a land they had never known. The camp seems quaint and quiet at first, but no one invests the time and energy to construct well, because people’s homes are not their own, and no one knows when the camp will be closed. People have not put down roots, and it feels as though one could easily scrape the camp off the side of the hill, as if it were, in fact, a fungus on a log. The residents have had 11 years of World Food Program oil tins for windows, a tarpaulin for a roof, one room shared by many, no clothing, no public transport, no right to land, no right to collect firewood (that is brought in by a German partner to the UNHCR) and a thin mud wall in a cold and rainy climate. There is no income, little commerce (except for the trading of UN dried peas after 3-4 hours of walking each way), no higher education, and no resettlement as the Congo remains in perpetual flux. The UN does a good job keeping these people afloat, and yet they are exactly that: floating.
I will not expand on the Congo wars here. They are complex, and worthy of pages. I will recommend a newly-minted book on the subject: The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth, and Reality by Thomas Turner. My brief comment on the subject is that four million have died in the Congo since 1996, making the wars the most deadly since WWII. Yet the Congo wars are poorly understood, and considered non-important compared with clearer-cut conflicts. Congo is also ignored because the majority of deaths are not brutal slaughters, but are due to displacement, starvation and disease. The situation in the Congo has been called “a war against women” as rape is actively used as a weapon. The rates of fistula (tearing between body cavities, usually the anus, vagina, and urethra) and of HIV caused by these rapes are horrifying. I hope that the modules I am working on might be appropriate for this refugee population, but at the same time, I feel foolish hoping that health education might result in mental relief to victims of PTSD or earlier care of new rape survivors. There is a feeling of incompetence inherent in picking up some small pieces of a conflict rather than preventing it.
In light of the craziness of the great-lakes region, it is hard to see past the damages to the successes. But I take them where I can get them:
Wita, a refugee, is making a small living my crafting little poupées (dolls). She carefully braids their plastic hair and sews on red-painted toenails to the dolls as they are represented pounding grain or carrying firewood.
Close to 20 men, women, and children were waiting for Voluntary Counseling and Testing for HIV when I arrived. One family had come to be tested as a whole. We were all engrossed in a rather graphic video on STIs, and a couple of the francophone women translated the banter: “I want to get tested for that one, too! God knows I don’t want my penis looking like that!”
When the car comes to take the AIDS patients to Kibuye hospital for treatment, people no longer fear that it will contaminate them. They no longer really notice it. Half the AIDS patients participate in the support group.
Outside the clinic there is a garden, expressly for baby food. The nutrition center houses slings and scales, stoves, cups and dishes. It is heartening to see the nascent peas and peanuts in the hard soil.
The wall of the primary school house has “Work+ Discipline= Success” written on it in mud. It’s a simple equation, and despite massive evidence to the contrary, some part of me believes in its power.
Silas, the head of their AIDS program, explained to me that one of the biggest problems with respect to sexual behavior change is the simple fact that there is nothing to do. Kids grow up in tiny crowded rooms, seeing their relatives have sex and then as teenagers they get bored. The camps distribute 1200 condoms every month. Silas suspects that many of them turn into soccer balls: blown up, tied, and wrapped with twine. Maybe, if they give the teenagers something to do, the condoms vicariously serve their purpose.
Maybe the breakdown of our “ideal” can show us where the “ideal” is found in reality.
Posted by Caitlin Lee Cohen at July 5, 2007 10:37 AM
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