President Obama's speech in Ghana

I am so proud of my president.

I think a lot of people here in Kinshasa tuned in. I hope they were encouraged in their hopes and strengthened in their virtues, by the simple and straighforward truths spoken by President Obama. It's not that he says there's no blame, there's enough of it to go round, that's for sure. It's that he simply says, let's do our best starting right now from where we are, and the U.S. is here to help.

Some of my favorite lines:

"Africa's future is up to Africans."

"Just as it is important to emerge from the control of other nations, it is even more important to build one's own nation."

"it will not be giants like Nkruma and Kenyatta who will determine Africa's future, instead, it will be you..."

"development depends on good governance... that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans"

"...governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent and not coercion are more prosperous, they are more stable and more successful than governments that do not."

"No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves..."

"That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in it."

"Strong Parliament, honest police force, independent judges, an independent press, a strong private sector, a civil society: those are the things that give life to democracy."

"[The U.S. will help with] ... concrete solutions to corruption..."

"Countries thrive when they invest in their people and in their infrastructure."

"Aid is not an end in itself."

"Wealthy nations must open their doors to goods and services from other countries."

"We will invest in public health systems."

"We must stand up to inhumanity in our midst."

"It is the death sentence of a society to force children to kill in war. It is the ultimate mark of criminality and cowardice to condemn women to relentless and systemic rape. We must bear witness to the value of every child in Darfur and the dignity of every woman in the Congo."

"I am particularly speaking to the young people all over Africa... The world will be what you make of it... You can make change from the bottom up. Yes, you can!"

Postcard from Bukavu, part 3: Marie Jeanne's Peace Village

In this letter, Marie Jeanne describes the effects of the war on the women in the group:

Here in our country, rape is an odious act. A rape victim feels humiliated and so does her entire family. That's why men, unable to stand this shame, often leave, go far away from the family and become strangers. Meanwhile, the woman suffers alone, trying to support the children by herself. To escape the scorn of people in her village, these women prefer to come live in the city where no one gossips about their situation. Take the case of Justine, who lives with a child born of rape, and forced by maternal love to demonstrate great affection to him. She already had four children so now with this baby they are five. We found a cabin with two rooms and a living room, that's where Justine lives with her little family.

We have several such cases. We have a case of two young, inexperienced 14-year-old girls who now have babies. Each one has her story, but it takes nerves of steel to listen to them and hear what they went through during their time as hostages. We have managed to send them to school. But often they have no education, because in the villages boys are sent to school more than girls. That's why we try even harder to give the girls in our program some schooling. Justine has the "Baccalaureat." She is 27. Next year I must register her for classes in university, maybe she'll study Law so that she can defend women's rights.

With our modest soap and bead-making business, and sometimes working as household helpers, we are able to help our poor women regain their dignity and personnality in spite of their suffering. We enable them.

Sister Georgette lives 2000 km away from our town. But she comes to Bukavu from time to time, she helps sell our products and gives us advice.

Your contribution: 1. Prayer, 2. Your advice, 3. See if it is possible to find people willing to sponsor us, especially these young girls. 4. If possible, send us your postal address so we can send you the cards to sell. If you have alternatives you may also suggest them.

You ask what my projects are for the future. My husband had found my cardmaking really good, so we had a plan, inspired by a Rwandan brother, to create a Peace Village where every woman will be accepted and welcomed, with their children born of rape and rejected by society, without regard to tribe or race (there are little ones of mixed race here, fathered by U.N. peacekeepers, who are also orphans).

About my school: I have 500 students, boys and girls, rich and poor. The rich ones help me send the poor ones to school for free. They live side by side as brothers. I have limited means, so I only have the kindergarten and primary school. I would love to open a high school for girls, with boarding. I am now building another school because we've run out of space. In each classroom we have 40 to 50 children.

About me: I have 5 biological and 3 adopted children. My oldest is 20, she is in 2nd year of medical school. The second is in first year of medical school. The third is a boy, in first year of secondary school. 4 and 5 are also boys, one is 10 and the other 8.

(This letter was originally written in preparation for an interview by Sunapee, New Hampshire high school student, Jennifer Coverdale, who interviewed Marie Jeanne in February 09 for a school project.)

Postcard from Bukavu, part 2: Protect life

Another wonderful piece of banana-leaf art made by the women of "Nikinge".
EVEN IF EVIL SEEMS TO BE WINNING,
GOD HAS THE LAST WORD:COURAGE.

Translation of the letter in the first photo of my last post:

Madame Odile,

We thank you very much for selling the cards and for the support that you keep giving us. We received the clothes, and on top of that the extra money, the "300$" God bless you. We used to do hard labor in spite of ("operations" crossed out) the scars of the operations we underwent here. But for now we no longer carry sand, dirt and rubble for construction. Our load has been lightened by the work we do now. We are less tired and our health improves.

God bless you.
We the mamans of Bukavu.
Our treasurer will give you a report.
In the name of all the mamans,

Marie-Jeanne Busingizi

When she thanks me for selling the cards, she's referring to cards I sold for them at a bazaar last December(some of you dear readers got them at Christmas).

The back of that letter has the report, written by Sr. Georgette:

The $300 were used as follows:

$200: in the cashbox of the "Nikinge" group of raped women, for:

(1) capital for the soap supplies whose after-sale profits are used by each, i.e. self-help income.
(2) capital for the materials for making the cards, bead crafts and clothes for the same self-help.

$100: Used for the immediate needs of women I met and listened to, when they came to share their stories with me. A total of 14 women were present, so vulnerable and so destroyed. Eleven were absent that day for health reasons (surgery, incontinence... hunger, etc)

Thank you, Petite Maman, for being for each of these women, who are physically far away yet so close to you, sister, friend, mother, listener, solidarity, love in Christ, who is the source and meaning of any encounter.

Good Feast of Pentecost !

(signed) Georgette FMM

In yesterday's post I edited out all the "how great Odile is" parts, but today I'm simply giving you the whole thing, unedited, to show you kind of gratitude always displayed over the least bit of attention and assistance.

I also wanted to witness to the extraordinary, selfless, deeply personal work done by thousands upon thousands of religious sisters like Soeur Georgette. It is of them, and the religious brothers and priests, that people should think when they hear the words "Catholic Church" (not of the relatively few priests who have given the Church a bad name. It is because these latter are an exception that the Church was so ill-equipped to deal with them. But that's another topic).

The "Nikinge" group chose this name because, as Marie Jeanne tells me in yet another letter, "Our logo shows a woman with a child on her back and a hoe in her hands, and the word NIKINGE, which means 'Protect me', that is, protect women. Women give life and nourish it, so it's in everyone's interest to protect them."

Amen. Protect life.

Postcard from Bukavu

Got a call two weeks ago from Sr. Georgette FMM (see Oct. 19, Nov. 27, and Dec 5, 2007 posts). She was going to the FMM mission in Bukavu and wanted to fill her suitcases with used clothing for the women under their care. The Embassy CLO, Megan Bard, helped me spread the word and two days later I delivered several boxes and bags. On an impulse I also gave Sr. Georgette the cash I had on hand, $300, for whatever needs she might find there. It's not every day one gets a chance to send hard cash to one of the world's most wretched ongoing humanitarian disasters.


Bukavu is a town on the shore of Lake Kivu on the eastern border of Congo. Like its ill-fated sister, Goma, its recent history is bloody, and the violence continues. Google-news it for yourself. The DRC's own military are primary perpetrators, along with Rwandan Hutus still afraid to return to their country after the 1994 genocide, Rwandan and Congolese Tutsis who chased them into Congo, etc. The situation is extremely complex, and there are no good guys. But the genocide goes on in the Kivus. Not at the speed of the Rwanda genocide, but just as ferociously, and the numbers have now added up, over the fifteen years, to five million or more. But it remains unknown to most Westerners. Why? A U.N. human rights expert recently stated that "journalists who report on rights abuses in particular have been 'killed, threatened, tortured or arrested,' if they address issues such as sexual violence, impunity for crimes and the illegal exploitation of natural resources." (AFP)

But back to Sr. Georgette: She spent 10 days there, counseling women. The photos she showed me were of a fabulously beautiful region. Green hills, volcanoes, still blue lakes, rushing rivers. And tragic human scenes: women and girls (she saw one 5 years old) raped, mutilated, and infected with HIV. And pregnant. But I'll let them speak for themselves.

The first photo above is just the first page of a five-page letter they wrote to me to thank me for the capital injection into their little mutual aid association. $200 went to buy supplies and materials for the soap-making and card-making operations. $100 was distributed by Sr. Georgette to fourteen of the women for their most urgent needs. In DC, $100 wouldn't buy 14 women breakfast, but for these women it was manna from heaven.

The woman in the photo is one of the 14 whose horrific stories Sr. Georgette listened to. But let me give it to you straight from their letter (my translation and editing):

"We, the raped women, war-wounded and handicapped, we come to you through Maman Georgette, missionary Sister, to thank you for having thought of us... It's a great comfort to know that women from elsewhere think of us... We are very many, thousands of women raped and massacred. But the small group she helps is coming out of their disastrous situation little by little... We are happy today to see Sr. Georgette who listens to us one at a time, counsels us and encourages us to go on. We who have escaped our tormentors (Rwandan rebels and others) . This war looks like it's a war against women.
[...]
[something in Swahili]
You can be our mouthpiece, our feet to take us where we cannot go. We send you. Go tell our sisters and brothers of our immense suffering [something in Swahili].
Let them call out loudly for our cause. In the east of Congo, behind the mountains, in the heart of the forest, women and children scream for help. They are killed, they are raped. They are mutilated with stones and axes. Firearms and sticks are used to rape us. There, behind the hills, life is destroyed. We are so far, no one can hear us. We die of our wounds, of illness, of exposure.

Scream for us so that the war will end. We, the kidnapped who have escaped, we have left our sisters over there, and we know what they continue to suffer. There are 12-year-old girls, mothers... There are those who cannot continue to do hard labor any more; sometimes they are buried alive.

We told Sr. Georgette everything, she'll tell you everything. We are comforted by your support.

We are still strong, despite our handicaps caused by injuries. We will work. We will regain our dignity through work. When we work, we ourselves have noticed, we forget our worries for a while, because we're busy. Especially when we earn something for it. We start thinking less about our past in the forest with our persecutors."

"In the morning we make bracelets, we learn to sew, we make cards and rosaries. In the afternoon, we sell the soaps Maman Marie-Jeanne lends us. That way we have a little food for our children. We hope to learn to do more, make progress. "LIVE" again! That's why we say to all men and women: "Nikinge, protect me."


They sent me 17 of these exquisite cards, each hand-decorated with tiny slivers of dried banana leaves. Scanned some for you:

Hey, more next time. I've run out of time.

Camp Luka

That's the name of a very poor, densely populated part of town. It's not very far from Gombe, the downtown and residential section of Kinshasa where I live - by the way, Kinshasa is a both a city and a province; Kinshasa-the-city is divided into "communes", and each one has its own Burgermeister (mayor). Kinshasa-the-province is the smallest of all Congolese provinces and includes a sparsely populated rural area around this sprawling city of 8 million. To the east it is the Plateau des Batekes, which was a desert in geological ages past, which explains why it the subsoil is sand for hundreds of meters down.

But back to Camp Luka. One of my last posts was about the "Black & White" Dinner-Dance organized by the International Women's Club to raise funds for two charities: the "Padre Guido" homes for street children, and the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary nutrition center at Camp Luka. Both of the donations were earmarked for food. I don't know about you, but I, personally, LOVE food, can't go without it for a day, and I think everyone should have plenty of healthy and delicious food every day. Food has suddenly become hard to buy for many Kinshasa organizations because the World Food Program is dealing with even greater needs in eastern DRC, the Sudan, Chad, etc.

So today, a group of the Women went to deliver the $$$ to the Sisters.

Here's a few pictures of the neighborhood. Off the paved road, onto a narrow, mucky mockery of a road - more like a river of mud. I took this shot by sticking my arm out the window and straight up (this technique requires repeated shooting before an acceptable photo is obtained - never would have done it using film).

I also took a video of this brain-churning, gut-chucking ride in the wet clay (same camera). But all efforts at uploading it have failed.

In the neighborhood of the nutrition center, like most of Kinshasa, poverty is the norm.

Here's an old man carrying a 25 kilo (55 lbs) bag of flour on his head. This is the most common method for the transportation of goods (the second most common is the "pousse-pousse", a 2-wheeled cart that is pushed by manpower. I'll try to get photos for another post).

Here's a child sitting by a small retail stand. Does she go to school? Probably not. More than half the children her age don't. And many of those who do still can't read and write when they graduate. Teachers are seldom paid their paltry salaries ($30/month) and must work without materials, not even chalk, not a single book. See the website http://www.enclasse.org/ about a project done by my friend Sylvia and other Dutch women to rehabilitate primary schools (including a video narrated in the French and English versions by yours truly).

Finally, we arrive at the center.

Once a trimester, all the retirees in the neighborhood assemble to receive their Social Security pensions. Those are the people sitting on the blue plastic chairs under the tree. This is the preferred method for distributing the money, which is so little it isn't worth going to pick it up at the Social Security Office downtown. In the foreground, children who are collecting water for their families. They'll carry the 20- or 30-liter containers home on their heads (44 to 66 lbs!).

IWC members meet the Sisters. Effie, a speech therapist who doesn't speak French, finds that she and Sister Monique, who teaches deaf children and doesn't speak English, do have a language in common: sign language!

Here is the "outpatient" part of the nutrition center. Fifty to seventy children come in from the neighborhood to get a meal every day. Some of the mothers are fed too, especially if they're pregnant. When you realize the importance of nutrition for brain development, you understand this priority status.

This is one of the outpatients.

In the inpatient section, the children are fed a liquid diet and kept for several weeks until their health is restored. No photos of those, but they're etched indelibly in my inner eye. Just look at this blow-up of this little outpatient and you'll understand. The inpatients don't have the strength to sit up, and their arms are even skinnier.

The FMM center at Camp Luka also has a clinic and a maternity ward. This is the ward for the new mothers and their babies.

On the way back, we pass children coming home from school, as can be seen by the uniforms they wear. This girl even owns a pencil!

(Note: Every part of Kinshasa is littered with plastic grocery bags and other non-biodegradable stuff. There is no trash pickup, so it doesn't do people much good to put their trash aside. They just toss it anywhere. )

How to grow rice for a better harvest

(This is the translation of a letter sent by my uncle, Fr. Christian Soudée SJ, a Jesuit priest who has lived in Madagascar for decades, about the work of one of his confrères.)

Fr. Henri de Laulanié SJ, an agronomist who has worked in Madagascar for many years , realized one day that rice that had been accidentally transplanted a month earlier than normal gave a much better yield than the rice transplanted after two months, as is the custom. This inspired him to study more closely the timing of rice transplanting.

Normally, farmers sow the rice in a small space, and densely, so that the rice grains touch each other. When the seedlings develop, they grow vertically, with very thin stems. Each plant has only one stem, because there is no room between plants so they cannot branch out. Similarly, the roots dig down vertically to search for sustenance instead of branching out in bunches.

At transplanting time, two or three months later, people take a handful of plants and tear them out roughly. The plants are damaged, and the bottom part of the roots with all the radicles (secondary roots) are left behind .

After transplanting, the plants turn yellow, which shows they are withering for lack of nourishment. They have to reconstitute their root system, which can take three weeks or more, after which growth can begin again. Since each plant only has one stem, people plant them very close together, to fill the rice paddy. Traditionally, the women who do the transplanting put 3, 4, 5, or 6 seedlings together! Which means they need a lot of seedlings.

The New Technique

Fr. de Laulanié started to experiment, transplanting the rice after one month, 15 days, 10 days, and even 8 days, sowing the grain much more sparsely, and sowing in mud instead of water. These experiments took several years, and yields were compared. He also changed the way seedlings well pulled up, so that roots would not be damaged.

He concluded that the earlier the transplanting, the better the yield. The best time was 8 to 13 days after sowing. This meant the tiny plants must be picked up carefully with a shovel, taking some of the dirt with them. Thus the roots are not damaged, and the seedling continues to grow without a break. This shortens the growing season by three weeks or more.

Since the seedlings are started far apart in the nursery plot, they are easy to transplant one at a time. They are also planted at a certain distance from one another. This allows the plant to branch out, meaning that new stems grow at the base of each leaf, and a single plant can give 10, 20, 30 or even 50 stems, and that many ears. Meanwhile, the roots grow in thick clusters close to the surface, where they get more nitrogen and oxygen than they would deeper down. And because growth has been continuous, the ears are much fuller. Yields are multiplied by 10, 20 and even more.

The main problem with this method is that water must be carefully controlled at transplanting time, so as not to drown the tiny seedling. It must be transplanted in mud, and water must be allowed in gradually as the plant grows.

Great Hope for Madagascar

The high plateaux between Tananarive and Fianarantsoa is arguably overpopulated and many young people cannot stay to work on the family farm. They are forced to migrate and either move to the city, where work is hard to find, or migrate to the less densely populated western regions.

Using Fr. Laulanié's rice-growing method should help feed more people on the high plateaux and allow more of the young people to stay on their ancestral lands.

IWC Black & White Dinner-Dance

The International Women's Club, after weeks of preparation of ever-increasing intensitey, hosted its main annual fundraising event on Saturday. The Virunga Hall of the Memling Hotel saw us carrying supplies, bringing in roses, climbing ladders, hanging drapes, arranging centerpieces, counting masks, threading sequins, making lamps, applying lace, planning seating, discussing costs, folding programs, rolling up napkins, numbering tables, arguing with hotel management, counting settings, sorting raffle prizes, admiring, discussing, sharing, laughing, worrying, giving up, plodding on, communicating and miscommunicating.

It was a great success.

Proceeds go to feed very hungry children in Kinshasa. Part to a Franciscan Missionaries of Mary nutrition center, where moderately and severely malnourished children are given a new lease on life, and part to Padre Guido's O.S.E.P.E.R, where hundreds of street children find safety, food, medical care, and something sorely lacking in their lives: affection and hope.

Ticket sales, wine sales, a raffle... all brought in much-needed cash in $10's, $20's and $100's. And corporate and private sponsors donated by $1000's, we didn't thank them enough. What's amazing is how far each one of those dollars goes here. A child can eat decently for under $1 a day. School fees at $30 a year don't seem like much but it's more than most parents make in month here.

It is sometimes argued that aid to poor countries is counterproductive: "enabling" corruption and apathy. Perhaps, but in the meantime, tomorrow's citizens aren't getting enough nutrition for brain development. You won't be able to fix that later.