Day 3 in Bas Congo, part 1

This is me with our lovely driver, Papa Sebastien.

We began our morning at the hospital as it emerged slowly from the mist. Women were washing clothes in an old bathtub and as always in the Congo people were coming and going, including this beatific mother and child.

We went then to a nearby village to pick up a man whose title was alternately Governor, Activities Coordinator or Mayor. He knows all the villages in the area and passes information to the people, of upcoming immunization campaigns and outreach programs to bring vaccines to remote villages. He rallies the crowd with songs about infectious diseases and how to avoid them. I'm serious.

It's rare that I feel too tall in a group photo.

The village was bustling even at this early hour and I was eager to dart down lanes and peep inside open doors, but we had a busy day planned. We made instant friends with children, and seconds later had to say goodbye.

This mural promotes fidelity as a means of AIDS prevention.

We drove about 15km into the jungle, along barely passable roads. People were walking in both directions, laboring with basins piled high with bananas on their heads, or pushing bicycles loaded with sacks of cucumbers. When they saw the car they'd leap aside, pressing themselves into the head high grass. In the wet season, these villages are completely cut off.

We stopped at a school...

and passed a little market...

This boy kicked an ingenious soccer ball made of rags.

We went to pay our respects to the village chief, as is the custom. What we didn't know was that he had just lost his youngest daughter to the measles. She had fallen sick with a fever and rash. They carried her on foot to the nearest health center, but she died within three days.

This is the chief's house. A colonial relic.

This is one of his older daughters.

 

Day 2 in Bas Congo

Our party of five set off from Kinshasa on Tuesday morning, headed South for the province of Bas Congo. The Measles Project is sponsored by The Red Cross, in partnership with UNICEF, so traveling with me and my companion Ed, were two UNICEF representatives, Charlotte and Medard, and our fearless driver, Papa Sebastien.

We stayed in a Catholic rectory and ate fish, plantains and fufu, which is manioc pounded into flour, formed into large balls and cooked in some mysterious way. I know some of you will be pleased to know the other name for fufu is Boule Nationale.

 

After lunch we paid visits to the head of the health district, and the director of the hospital, to explain our project of researching the effects of measles on their community and to learn about their immunization practices, so that I can make my drawings.

We saw the local hospital, with a central, communal well; a formerly grand colonial building with overgrown gardens, no running water and limited electricity.

Photography in public places is illegal in DRC so I had to sit on my hands for the drive through the extraordinary, teeming suburbs of Kinshasa, through the rolling hills dotted with palm trees, passing cars weighed down with three times their height in bananas and young men planted precariously but confidently on top, passing children wheeling tin plates with sticks, and women with bowls of leaves like big green headdresses. After the hospital, accompanied by the local mayor, we visited our first village, and just being out of the car and on the ground and able to interact with people was joyous. We visited three families with young children who had had the measles, and the parents were emphatic about encouraging others in the village to vaccinate their children. The average number of children in a Congolese family is 6.3. Every doorway of every house has a child peeping out, or so it seems, and their shyness lasts approximately two seconds.

 

Africa!

One snowy morning in early February, I was sitting on a runway in Cincinnati, Ohio, waiting for the plane to be de-iced before take off, checking emails on my phone. Amongst the mundane messages one leapt out: from Christine McNab of the Measles and Rubella Initiative, the subject line read, "Proposal to travel to the DR Congo/ Illustrate." Through this small device in my hand, I was whisked from the icy Mid-West to Africa, to communities devastated by measles, to children dying in the thousands from this preventable disease. The proposal was very compelling, to visit these communities to talk with families and the immunization workers who travel across the country, often on foot, to distribute the vaccine. And then to draw. To create posters and maybe a book and a video, to communicate the toll of measles and show the ways we can prevent deaths and eliminate this disease.

I could barely wait to get back to New York so that I could say yes. In spite of reading terrible news every day from Central Africa, and in spite of my father's thoughtful links to reports of Congolese plane crashes, there were three insistent reasons to go: 1. I have never been to Africa. 2. I can hear all the news and all the statistics about measles, I can read that 380 children die a day, and yet, as I wave my own healthy children off to school in the morning, I can't possibly imagine the truth of this until I see it. 3. I love my work. I love making pictures that encourage children to turn pages or that cheer up subway commuters, but I've never worked on pictures which might conceivably save lives.

Throughout the past months of conversation and planning, Christine has sent me updates on her work with the Measles Initiative. She has told me about health workers in Nepal who climb mountains to reach remote villages, and immunization campaigns in Myanmar, where the children sit patiently in the shade with circles of bark paste on their faces to cool the skin. Inspired by her beautiful photographs, and because I was itching to get started on this project, I painted this image of a newly vaccinated family.

I have just arrived in Kinshasa and will post pictures and stories from the project on this blog. You can find out more about the Measles Initiative here.