A Makeshift Existence
War in E. Congo Has Driven More Than 1 Million People to a Life of Continual Wandering

by Delphine Schrank, 2008 IRP Fellow
Reprinted with permission of The Washington Post

Rutshuru, Democratic Republic of Congo -- Even before fighting flared, Anita Kakule and her smallest son lived on a tattered straw mat in a corner of a schoolroom. When classes met, she relocated their mat and three salvaged pots to the shade of a nearby eucalyptus tree.

"It's because of Nkunda. Because of Nkunda, I'm here," she said, directing her anger at rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, who since 2006 has fought to control North Kivu province, which includes Rutshuru. "This is the second time I've had to leave everything. And this time, all I've got are those pots. And that bag of flour."

But her new borrowed perch offered too fragile a refuge. On the night of Oct. 28, Nkunda's forces stormed Rutshuru, pressing southward toward the provincial capital of Goma.

The offensive, coupled with the chaotic retreat of the national army, forced at least 100,000 people onto the roadways, a surging human column fleeing in panic. According to U.N. officials, all makeshift camps for the internally displaced, including Kakule's temporary home, and three U.N.-administered camps in Rutshuru have been flattened, burned and looted by unidentified armed men, their 40,000 to 50,000 residents dispersed toward unknown locations.

"These places look like a football field now," said Ibrahim Coly, bureau chief for the U.N. refugee agency in North Kivu.

In a war of ever-shifting fronts, where, in sporadic bursts, Nkunda's forces fight the Congolese army and at least six other predatory militias, more than 1 million inhabitants of North Kivu have become perpetual nomads, many of them uprooted multiple times. The new exodus deepens a crisis that already threatened to overwhelm international aid efforts.

At the first crackle of gunfire from militias or soldiers deployed from hill to hill, villagers caught in the crossfire flee, terrified by men in uniform who loot their homes, rape their women and force their men or boys to follow them and take up arms. Often at night, and always on foot, they abandon mud-and-banana-leaf huts and flood the roadways, balancing mattresses and other salvaged objects on their heads.

Most languish in one of 16 tent cities administered by the U.N. refugee agency. Others head to the homes of acquaintances already overburdened by survivors of previous clashes, or to temporary sites at schools and churchyards, their lives held in suspension by fear and uncertainty.

In the courtyard outside the Rutshuru schoolroom, Frederic Mburano Ntibimenya, a teacher with a clutch of pens in his breast pocket, said he has not been able to convene classes in his village since September.

Looking hard at his shoe, he explained that he had left behind his wife, who was too sick with malaria to leave her bed. He had no choice, he said. It was that or risk the lives of his seven children. He had no idea whether she was alive or dead.

But he dared not venture back toward his village until he was sure the situation had calmed. When, he had no idea.

He clutched his hands in prayer and glanced at the sky.

For those who make it to one of the sites, the initial panic of arrival subsides, then the daily struggle for survival begins.

"What disgusts me is we left everything. We don't have anything left at all. Everything we built is gone," said Ramonia Agamie, 56, swaying slightly in a white linen jacket.

From his pocket, he took out a day-old medical certificate scrawled in the round, childlike handwriting of his 13-year-old daughter, Justine, in which she testified to being raped a day earlier by a man who claimed to own the field where she had ventured with a friend to forage for roots.

Justine was already back in the fields, Agamie said.

"She has no choice; she needed to risk it," he said, pausing a moment and swallowing hard. "Because we are starving. We have to get food."

On another day, at another makeshift camp in a churchyard near Rubare, just south of Rutshuru, a furious burst of hail destroyed the lone prospects of a cooked meal for a group of displaced villagers huddling under the corrugated roof of an open-walled hangar.

"Our wood, it's ruined," lamented a young man, gesturing toward a pot of withered manioc leaves that had simmered outside the hangar before the storm extinguished the fire.

Near him, Jeannine Muhawe clutched her 2-week-old son to her chest. She had given birth on the road, in mid-exodus from her village, she said, and had yet to name the child for want of input from her husband, who had gone missing when Nkunda's forces appeared.

Tonight, like the night before and the one to come, Muhawe and her newborn slept outside.

The prospects for food and shelter are scarcely better at the official camps for the displaced.

From the sky, the camps look like white gauze patches on the dense green landscape. From the ground, they sprawl to the horizon, labyrinths of silver and white tents that shimmer like pools of water.

Even before the recent fighting pushed thousands of new arrivals to their gates, the camps around Goma were filled to capacity. But late last month, about 25,000 people fled the Kibumba camp north of Goma as the fighting approached. Most of them headed a few miles south to another camp, Kibati, which steered the arrivals to another half-formed settlement a few miles away.

Aid workers say they had been scrambling for weeks to find more space.

At Mugunga 1 camp, the numbered blocks of tents wind jaggedly along the rutted black soil of a lava field like a post-apocalyptic suburbia. The largest and oldest of the camps, it holds a transient society of 28,000 residents who have variously lived there two years or a day.

On the other side of the city from the recent fighting, Mugunga has been spared the worst of the displaced crowds, but the more than 1,000 new arrivals in the past two weeks are still hard-put to find a patch of land for themselves, according to assistant camp administrator Jeannot Muhavi.

It has been a month since Mugunga camp last received a food delivery -- and more than six months since it received new tents. To feed their families, some residents head back to their fields, and some scratch a living from menial jobs in nearby Goma.

Others, like Charlotte Nyandwi, head out along a footpath into the treacherous hills.

"Of course, I'm obliged to swallow my fears," Nyandwi said, surrounded by several of her children on a corridor crammed with tents. "What choice have I?"

But even as residents settle in, Mugunga remains a makeshift world, everything fluid and frail.

There are no schools here. Instead, children walk the long road to Goma each day, or head to the only other camp with a primary and secondary school, or skip their education entirely. A few convene three times a week under the auspices of a choir mistress.

On a slanted patch of muddy ground between two rows of huts, two dozen children, in soiled velvet dresses with torn lace trim or in tattered plaid shirts and muddy neon flip-flops, clapped and chanted religious songs of hope to the beat of the mistress's drum.

"It's to give them some structure," said Farah Nem, the choir mistress.

Ten minutes' walk from the children's choir, a camp administrator led two dozen people to a hangar, which sometimes doubles as an instruction center where sewing classes are taught. On their way, they passed a woman combing out another's tresses on a stool that served as a temporary beauty shop and interrupted a soccer game on an open patch of muddy ground.

In the absence of resolution to the war, some slide reluctantly into a semi-permanent routine.

"I live on Block 77," said William Kisumbi, 17, when asked where he was from.

To pay his way through school, Kisumbi said he works one day a week as a sand porter, trekking several miles from a quarry to Goma.

For a long time, he assumed he was orphaned after fleeing through a window when Nkunda's forces burst into his family's hut, hauling off his brother as a recruit. His 13-year-old sister died in a hospital after being raped, he said.

But five months after arriving at Mugunga, he discovered through a Red Cross letter-writing program that his parents were in another camp.

"By God's grace, I found them," he said.

It gave him hope, focusing the pictures of his dreams.

"I thought I wanted to be a doctor," Kisumbi said. "Now I work hard so I can become a humanitarian."

Copyright © 2008 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.