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.

Solar potatoes!

Sophie gave me a Solar Cooker for my birthday. It consists of a dark metal pot and lid, a folding cardboard contraption lined with foil on one side, and a few other items - a plastic baking bag, two clothespins. Here it is on our front lawn on Saturday, NOT cooking potatoes, because Saturday's kind of partly cloudy was just too cloudy. Those potatoes had to finish cooking on the stove even after 6 hours of partly sunny. We placed it on a large plastic bag because the grass was wet. That may be a clue: if your grass is wet, it just ain't sunny enough for Solar cooking. Picture 3 gives you a vague idea of the glare you get if you stand in the wrong place. It is completely blinding. And picture 4 shows the potatoes we cooked on Sunday, a very Sunny day indeed. In less than three hours, the potatoes were done to perfection!

Recipe: Partly peel 1 lb potatoes as desired. Cut into thick slices. Place in pot. Toss with olive oil, rosemary, salt and pepper. Cover. Place the pot into the bag, loosely twist the top of the bag and tuck it under the pot, and place the pot in the reflective thingy. Leave alone for 3 hours but check regularly to make sure some palm tree's shade hasn't intruded on your energy source. Open carefully, steam comes out! Mm, mm, mm!

Stand Proud

"Stand Proud" is the English name of a non-governmental organization created in Kinshasa by an American USAID Officer, Jay Nash, and run by a British Embassy spouse, Lisa Seymour. Its mission is to rehabilitate children with lower limb handicaps: some are victims of polio, some of quinine shots to treat malaria (see Uganda: Post-Injection Paralysis - The New Polio at http://allafrica.com/stories/200712100090.html).

About 130 children of all ages live at the Stand Proud home, get surgery and rehab, and braces that the older children have learned to make from scrap materials bought at the local markets. Their workshop is around the corner. To make a brace, an outline of the leg is drawn on sheets of used paper taped together - just like you drew an outline of your hand in kindergarten. Then the braces are made to measure using steel rods and leather, with a locking hinge at the knee so the child can sit down as needed - this is enables them to use public transportation (tighly packed minivans).

When we visited the workshop, they had run out of money for materials, so no work was going on. This is the shelf where they keep the braces they're working on.

The home has rooms for the girls and the boys, who sleep on mattresses that cover the entire surface of the bedroom floors. This is an improvement for most of the kids. They go to school nearby. They may stay at the home for months or years, depending on their condition.

This is the bathroom where children of both sexes and all ages clean themselves:

Not much privacy! By the way, this standpipe is the only source of water for the kitchen and all other uses as well. In the background there is a garden patch where the children learn to grow vegetables for their own nutrition. The toilets are much, much worse than the "bathroom." After an appeal by Lisa, the International Women's Club scraped the bottom of their piggybank and funded the design and construction of real showers and toilets, two toilets and one shower for girls, and the same for boys, including grab bars and other special conveniences for handicapped kids. This will make a tremendous difference in everyone's health and comfort. This is the corner of the yard where the new bathrooms will be built: This structure will be removed, of course. Just around the corner to the right is the laundry area, with the kitchen all the way in the back, in another corner that has recently been roofed, for $200, so that cooking can happen even if it rains. Here is a closeup of the "kitchen":

All Aboard!

This is what public transportation becomes when deregulation is taken to its logical extreme.

More bird songs

Another, longer, recording is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4MOR8X7GZU Enjoy!