Le Congolais

written Sunday 3rd, posted Monday 4th


On each visit I use my French less, and particularly this time people are trying to speak English - not only professionals (such as Antoine) and students but also the driver of the church car, the house worker where I am staying...

This evening French was just what I needed, however. Solange, Rachel and I had done our final planning for Monday and were eating at the long table in the guest house dining room. To our side were two young men. One left and the other turned to me. I'd said something to Rachel in English and then used French to the buffet atttendant. 'Oh, you speak French.'

He is a Congolese doctor, one of many employed to work in government hospitals because there are not enough Rwandan doctors. (Rachel says there are plenty in Kenya, and in the USA where they go for specialised training not available here and don't return. I wonder if DRC has enough or if it's the bottom of the chain.) He asks what we are doing here and is full of approval. The commonest illness he treats in the local hospital is child malnutrition. Typically a child is fed and nursed back to health; six months later he is back with kwashiakor again = from parental ignorance. There are greens growing wild that even the poorest people could eat but they don't know they should. He's hardly ever seen malnourished adult women in Congo, he says, despite the fighting, but he sees them here. He observes in passing that the obesity in developed cultures and the starvation he sees here are both forms of malnutrition.

I wonder aloud why there seems to be no human instinct to eat green stuff - even dogs have it. Even cattle, he adds. Rachel says there is a long way to go in combatting ignorance. There is also a problem with traditional culture, still observed and passed on by some old people: women shouldn't eat chicken. Why? It's the culture. But how could that have come to be the culture, I ask. Those foods are for the men! Solange adds that it used to be common for people who keep chickens to ignore the eggs (and when I check this improbable fact with Rachel later she says that used to be so and isn't now, but many would still rather sell the eggs and have the money for other things than give their children the good nourishment).

The doctor excuses himself - the ambulances bring people to the clinic early on Mondays and he must sleep. We toss around ideas for overcoming ignorance and outdated customs. Rachel, whose own garden is so productive they hardly buy vegetables, is hatching a scheme to get 9-12 year olds to spend a week learning to grow and cook vegetables during the school holidays, if she can find the funding. You have to start young, she says.

[Today was the first day with the Twa - very rich but I'm not ready to write about it yet. I need to choose a couple of photos. And it's about to rain so I must get back to the guest house quickly.]