06-MAR-A-12
A VERY LONG FULL DAY, WITH OUR SMALLER
TEAM DRIVING THE LONG RETURN TO KIGALI,
AN AIRPORT STOP FOR ANOTHER RUN AT THE
MAP PACK IMPASSE, AGAIN ALLEGEDLY CLEARED,
AND ON TO MAIYENGE: TOUR THE MILLENNIUM
VILLAGE PROJECT, AND SEE WATER CATCHMENT PROJECT
IN FAMINE STARVATION PERIOD
AS I DO VIDEO INTERVIEW AT HEALTH CENTER,
GIDDY RETURN IN RAINSTORM DOWN “GOOD ROAD”
TO KIGALI,
AND HASSLE ANOTHER THREE
HOUR AIRPORT
WAIT IN INCOMPLETE RETRIEVAL OF TWO-THIRDS OF MAP PACKS RETURNING IN THE DARK TO
GISENYI AFTER MIDNIGHT
March 11, 2006
RWANDAN GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST:
MAYANGE VISIT AND MILLENNIUM VILLAGE
PROJECT
MISSION IN RWANDA
The mountain gorilla is the totemic
animal of Rwanda
and one of two things people outside this small Central African nation know
about it: the other is the ever-present,
seldom-discussed recent past of genocidal atrocity that tore the juvenile
nation apart a decade ago. Ever since
Diane Fossey and the “Gorillas in the Mist,” people have known about the
former; and through the success of the based-on-true-life-and-death film “Hotel
Rwanda” many have come to be aware of the almost incomprehensible horrors of a
genocidal purge by the face to face hacking carnage of ethnic neighbors in a
hungry and hurting fragile new African nation-state. There may be a “third gorilla in the room” of
which I was acutely aware, and no one seemed ready to recognize or talk about
it on this inaugural medical mission for Physicians for Peace in March of
2006: a million people of the Rwandan population
are buried in mass graves or exiled from the atrocities of a decade ago,
brought about in part by food shortages which exaggerated differences among
ethnic groups that might have continued to live peacefully together if both
were eating and had not been squeezed into contriving differences among
themselves based in rankling long-time prejudices about the “others.” Those million lives, and mouths, have now
been made up and more again due to the high birth rate and returning refugees
into an environment where the agronomy of marginal capacitance has not
changed—this is the most recent “eight hundred pound gorilla in our midst” I
found on display at Mayange, and which no one seems ready to talk about despite
its looming ever-presence.
Mayange was a forested sparsely
populated area fifty years ago only fifteen kilometers from what became a
border twenty four years ago when the UN reluctantly recognized two nations of
the one that they had wanted to become an independent state from the breakaway
Belgian colonies of the old Congo Belge east of Lake Kivu. South of Mayange, therefore, is an
international border a distance that many women have to walk each way each day
to get water—the Republic
of Burundi. Many ethnic Tutsis, the fortunate few, were
refugeed there in camps, a comedown from being minority rulers of Rwanda,
when they made it across that border during the worst of the killings, and now
many are being resettled in what was the epicenter of no-man’s land. Beginning in 1959 the Afromontaine Mayange
plateau was deforested to make charcoal, one of the few market commodities to
be traded from this region, with severe and immediate consequences to the soils
and the sparse rains’ water catchment and water table. The eroded land did not convert ideally to
farming after the trees were removed, and the whole region receives less than
seven hundred millimeters of rain in a good year, compared to almost twice as
much in the volcanic Virunga
Mountain regions (“The
Land of a Thousand Hills”) where terraced agronomy is more productive.
The Mayange region is haunted with other
memories from the recent past, since predominantly Tutsi refugees on the run
toward Burundi were intercepted easily here since most cover was denuded, and
they were spotted in transit, even at night, the preferred time of travel
(hence the pejorative term for them “cockroaches” coming out only under cover
of darkness.) There are several large
recent cemeteries with only a few markers amid large numbers of crosses which
we stopped to view on our way into Mayange, and at Kihikira we saw a poignant
testimony to whole extended families eliminated on the spot where a
commemorative statue of a mother protecting her children from the inevitable is
still under wraps in the center of a mass burial ground. The memories of that era are some of the
unacknowledged dominant presences in Mayange, a very large gorilla, difficult
to eradicate from memory or consciousness in today’s resettlement activities
when the lucky ones who made it to Burundi are being moved back to the
vacant land near the killing fields.
With the ecologic degradation after
deforestation and the climate and soil change in a denuded area of marginal
rainfall, the Mayange area was largely vacant, so that it made for minimal
political problems of displacement to try to restore a large scale village here
of a planned 125,000 residents. Thirty
thousand are settled here now, in two cellules, with under-five child mortality
at 20%. At each stop, the villagers
crowded to see us in a nearly hostile mood when it was announced that I was a
doctor coming to review the health program, to which each responded with
unmistakable gestures—“What good is he to us if he has not brought us
food? We are hungry, and someone must
bring us help!”
In Burundi, a “water-bearing walk”
away, the government has acknowledged the declared famine and food aid is
coming in to the people across the border.
Rwanda
is reluctant to make a public acknowledgement of the food crisis, and has not
declared a famine emergency, so as not to change the course of the Mayange
resettlement and development programs to one of urgent crisis
intervention. The people we interviewed
are not subtle about the priority of their needs, and brought all of our
queries back to their preemptory question—when would food aid be arriving?
Ranu Dhillon is a Jefferson
University Medical student on a one year leave to work in the health care of
the Mayange community. His primary
interest in health has been usurped by the urgency of the food crisis, and he
is working now on water catchment and food production programs, thinking of
extending his leave another two years to get back to the original health
program objectives. He is alone as the
US expatriate aid worker, but has two Kenyans and a Ugandan who are helping
with agronomy techniques, including a model water catchment program we
witnessed as local Rwandans were filmed by our videography crew as they were
planting maize in contoured rows—allegedly a novel concept here—between water
runoff ditches to cisterns. The planting
time has come and the rains, though late, came with a vengeance as we left the
demonstration fields, and we had a chance to witness the runoff from the rains
in the unprepped barren soil and the improvements made through the Kenyan and
Ugandan advisory team. Our videography
team interviewed Ranu for his insights on the humanitarian crisis in
resettlement in an emerging famine, and we visited some of the village houses
to hear from the people, as opera lyric soprano/translator Virginia Croskery
rounded up children singing Kinya-Rwanda songs she had composed earlier in the
trip dealing with health care.
I visited the Mayange Health
Center, with a sign in
front designating that this UNHCR project was a gift from the Japan Fund. It was an impressive facility, well designed
and laid out to accommodate the growth to 125,000 in its eventual population
catchment area. It was pristine and
empty, except for one woman who had given birth and had been staying in the
maternity wing of the building. I was
interviewed at this site by our videographers, as it seemed an example of a
cart-before-horse generous aid project from a distance. The facility is here, but well ahead of any
indigenous health program or expertise in how to use it. There is not one employee available for this
facility above the status of a high school graduate. One such aid came to see me as we toured the
facility but deferred most questions as above her level and there was no one
else she could refer me to for answers.
Either the facility is premature in its completion here, or the health
program was derailed from a more measured scaling up by the food crisis which
has stalled the plan of recruiting medical personnel and the teaching of an
indigenous staff in how to use this facility, particularly now at the beginning
of the rains and peak malaria season.
Tourists may be slowly returning to
Rwanda,
to glimpse the totemic mountain gorillas.
Along the way, they may stop to see several mass grave memorials to the genocide
of a decade ago, not yet a prime “tourist attraction” since little is spoken
about the mind-numbing events and the scale and brutality with which this ugly
chapter in basest human nature was carried out, the second gorilla in our
midst. I was made forcefully aware of
the third gorilla, a nearly palpable ignored presence, which was not spoken
about as I viewed some of the marginal resettlement areas in this Malthusian
crucible: the capacitance of many of the areas in this densely settled juvenile
nation is exceeded in good crop seasons, and some may never be sustainable
without perpetual outside aid. In any
periodic and predictable failure of the rains, a humanitarian crisis will
recur, and the survival differences among Rwandans that were horribly
accentuated in prior crop crises might again be an expression of desperation,
so that “never again” keeps happening.
Health has been trumped by hunger in Mayange,
and the “third gorilla” is stirring despite being ignored by many plans for
Rwandan relief and rehabilitation. Rwanda
is haunted by a missing million; in the decade since the horror, the Rwandan
population pyramid has more than made up for that missing million, and little
else changed for the better.