Day 3 in Bas Congo, Part 2

 

 The thrift store t-shirts we saw on children were often oddly ironic. I saw one man up a tree gathering coconuts, with a t-shirt advertising a Connecticut landscaping company.

 

We watched men playing checkers with bottle caps.

 

I bought some boxes of matches here with Congolese butterflies on them.

 

After lunch we returned to the village from yesterday to see a measles vaccination take place. I can't tell you how hot it was in this crowded blue room; I was curious that the mothers kept their babies bundled up. Everyone was very patient and quiet until the Governor came in and there was a sudden burst of singing.

It was difficult to watch this girl have an IV put in and her little arm bound with packing tape to a splintery piece of wood.

The nurse had her own baby strapped to her back

 In the afternoon we visited other families in Mbanza-Ngungu. The health centers use hand drawn maps to navigate the paths between houses in the clay villages.

 

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.

 

Day 1 in Kinshasa

Today was my first day in Africa and I am struggling to file away all the images from the streets of Kinshasa. If I had been able to make pictures on the spot, this is what I would have chosen to draw:

The blue and yellow dented vans crammed full of passengers, patterned fabrics and brown limbs squished against the windows, men hanging off the sides and the roofs.

The men and women and children carrying all manner of things on their heads: cardboard flats of eggs, basins of baguettes, giant bags of ice, bowls of oranges and limes, trays of bananas, a stack of blue chairs.

The women in their fantastic dresses, tending vegetable gardens in a tiny strip next to the rubble and the barbed wire and the high walls of military compounds.

The young women with malaria-feverish babies in the hospital for mothers and infants, nursing under mosquito nets.

The broken down alleyways of rubble and stagnant puddles and threadbare chickens pecking at piles of garbage and planks propped over creeks of sewerage, and picking their way elegantly through it all, women in ruffles and bustles and bodices and nipped waists in cloth the colors of parrots.

 

Street photography is forbidden in the city, but when we visited the hospital for mothers and babies, some of the mothers were kind enough to let me photograph them. Today we head into the field, to Bas Congo. I'll be out of touch for a few days.

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