Mugunga is a large area outside Goma where many have fled to during the conflicts and natural disasters of the last decade. In the last month, its population has swelled once again, as people have moved there to keep safe from the fighting North and West of Goma. I’ve included an excellent article by journalist Dominic Johnson, if you want to read more about the situation. This Flickr pool also has good images of the camp.

The Goma Student Fund has run a small primary school in Mugunga for the past year. The kids just started their new year, last Monday, so Eve (Devon’s sister) and I headed out there to visit, say hello to the kids, and observe some of the classes.

We didn’t know what to expect, but thankfully, the chaos of Mugunga hasn’t reached the area where the school is situated. Joseph, the director, told us that a they’ve taken on about a dozen kids from families that have fled to the area, but the school year has otherwise begun without a hitch.

As we drove on the main road out of Goma, we passed through a checkpoint of heavily armed Congolese government troops, armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. As far as I could tell, this was the edge of town that the army was planning to hold, should Goma come under attack. Just beyond there was the turnoff into Mugunga. There’s a UN presence in Mugunga (we politely made way for this armored carrier), but it seemed clear that Mugunga was outside of the protective bounds of Goma.

The Goma Student Fund school was a relative oasis of tranquility and smiles. Joseph and Prosper took us on a tour of the facilities, introducing us to each class and pointing out high-priority improvements that they would like to make to the facilities. In each classroom, the kids would all stand and shout “Bonjour, visiteurs!” in unison. Most aren’t city kids and are less used to us strange muzungus, so we got a mix of smiles and awed stares:

The rooms are packed; 40-50 kids per teacher. That might be an unmanageable class size in the states, but in Mugunga, you can have four kids to a bench, sitting elbow to elbow. They’ll quietly take in each lesson. When they have them, the kids will even happily share notebooks and pens: These guys know that they’re lucky to be in school. In addition, the Congolese teaching style is primarily didactic. The teacher lectures: the kids listen. For better or worse, the kids are not encouraged to speak out of turn or ask too many questions.

I’ll try to come back in the coming weeks; next time, I’ll try to stay and sit in on some classes. I really hope that this school year goes well for the little ones, despite the instability they know is just outside the school walls.

Read the Dominic Johnson article after the jump.

The new North Kivu refugee crisis

A visit to the IDP camp „EP Lac Vert“ on 8 September, and subsequent conversations in Goma.

Dominic Johnson, Goma, 12 September

There is not much room in the stony yard of the primary school „Lac Vert“ in Mugunga. Usually children play here in the black sand, but today, Saturday 8 September, thousands of refugees are awaiting registration. Congolese employees of the French aid agency „Solidarités“ have set up a row of wooden tables where one person at a time is called forward and presents his ID to an agent with a registration book. Personal details are entered by hand in the book, a ration ticket is handed out. Stewards in orange overalls try to group people by place of origin, but the atmosphere is tense. The refugees are tired. They can’t wait all day, standing in a crowd in the sun. Some of them haven’t eaten for days.

School director Chuma Mulwa, a small man with twinkling eyes standing behind the registration tables, has already counted „his“ refugees in the school itself: There are 1.998. They came on 26 August, fleeing from the new war in the Masisi mountains in Eastern Congo. „They wanted to come into the classromms, and we couldn’t leave them outside“, he says. 26 August was still the summer holidays. School officially started a week later. But the refugees are still there, and the primary school „Lac Vert“ in Mugunga has become the centre of a refugee camp which continues to grow: 10.000 people at the beginning of September, 25.000 a few days later, and this last weekend the head of the refugees, Ani Mukima, says it contains 9.817 households, which means around 50.000 people.

When fighting breaks out near your home in Eastern Congo, it is easy to take refuge for a short time. You go a short distance away, you collect some branches, stick them in two rows into the earth, bend them and tie them together at the top; then you cover the wooden frame with banana leaves tied to the branches, and you have a little hut where a mother can seek shelter with her children for the night. But the first thunderstorm usually destroys the hut. And if two weeks later there is still no plastic sheeting to keep the rain off, and still nothing to eat, then the children will fall ill and the parents will despair. And if the next hut full of hungry children is just a yard away, and another hut another yard away, and so on until the end of the field and even beyond for what seems like miles, then this isn’t just a family taking refuge from fighting – it is a humanitarian catastrophe.

The entire population of the small town of Sake, centre of the recent fighting between government forces and rebels of the Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda in Eastern Congo, has moved into the improvised camp „EP Lac Vert“. Sake is an idyllic place at the northwestern corner of Lake Kivu, at the foot of an imposing mountain range where the Nkunda rebels have their stronghold. Sake is the forepost of the government troops, and a tarred road in good condition connects the town of 25.000 people with North Kivu’s provincial capital Goma, home to half a million 30 kilometres away. EP Lac Vert, where the population of Sake and of the neighbouring commune of Kimoka now lives, lies in Mugunga, exactly halfway between Sake and Goma along this road. It is the biggest of a series of camps in this area into which the population of the war zones has fled, grouped by places of origin, crowded together and full of fear.

„We arrived on Monday 3 September“, Ani Mukima, the leader of the refugees in EP Lac Vert and normally a primary school teacher in Sake, explains. „At four in the morning we heard shooting near Kimoka. The military was fighting the rebels. So we left.“ Walking to Mugunga took half a day, and lots of others from Sake were already there, in the school. 3 September was the day on which Congolese government forces accidentally bombed the civilian population near Sake. Many more refugees came a few days later, on Thursday 6 September, when Nkunda’s rebels took Sake briefly. A cease-fire is in place since then, but refugees continue to leave Sake and arrive in EP Lac Vert. You recognise them by the fresh banana leaves on their huts.

Many of these people look as if they went on a weekend trip which went badly wrong. Marcelline Manene and Elise Sifa put on their best clothes to flee, white blouses and multicoloured skirts. They didn’t take anything else, it wasn’t supposed to last long. But now they have realised they may be displaced for some time, and their clothes are sweaty, there is nothing to change and nowhere to wash. „We came on 3 September when the bombs fell“, they say. And now? „Now the soldiers are in our houses.“

How do Marcelline and Elise survive? „We cut firewood in the forest and sell it to the local people.“ For one bundle of firewood you get 100 Francs Congolais ($0.20). On the miniscule market of EP Lac Vert, which in a rich country wouldn’t even fill a single vegetable stall, 100 FC buys you four plantain bananas or a handful of sweet potatoes. But Elise Sifa, a young woman with chubby cheeks, has seven children, the older and thinner Marcelline Manene has eight. And to cook you need water. A large canister of water costs 1000 FC, ten bundles of wood. That’s difficult, especially when you are hungry. So is there something to eat for the kids every day? A bitter laugh is the response. During this conversation the pair of women has swelled to a crowd of 20, and they point at their stomachs and mouths.

Mugunga is just a quarter of an hour’s drive from Goma, where you can buy everything and where aid agencies have large stocks of foodstuffs. So there is no lack of access for aid workers, as is the case for four fifths of the around 300.000 displaced in the part of North Kivu affected by fighting. But on Saturday 8 September no aid hat yet arrived in EP Lac Vert. Only the registration process had started, first stage in the bureaucratic process which will at some point lead to humanitarian assistance. On Monday 10 September UNICEF was due to start vaccinating children – after several weeks in the bush disease is stalking the refugees, and there is not much drinking water in this area of volcanic rock. The first cases of cholera have already been noted in EP Lac Vert.

So the refugees have to look after themselves. „On se débrouille“ is the usual response to the question how they do it. The road from Mugunga to Goma, 15 kilometres through green banana fields and black volcanic rocks, has become a boulevard, busy like the main road of a city, but with no houses. Refugees with mattresses on their backs move on bicycles, others carry water or vegetables, and many are just milling around, exchanging news from home, finding out who has ended up where. Some refugees are going back to Sake on open trucks – but not to go home: they want to collect their belongings, if they are still there.

The Nkunda rebels left Sake again on the afternoon of Thursday 6 September and MONUC took over the town, only to invite the defeated government troops of the 15th FARDC brigade, which had lost Sake a few hours before, back in. The 15th brigade has a reputation of indiscipline, it is badly paid and badly trained. Even the FARDC leadership knows this. „The soldiers in Sake are all over the place“, a colonel in Goma tells his superior on the mobile phone and suggests: „A defeated force should be withdrawn. It is discouraged and can no longer act nationalistically.“ The soldiers near EP Lac Vert really are all over the place, with their trousers rolled up and flip-flops on their feet instead of boots, and a hungry look in their eyes which can become a deadly weapon when accompanied by a loaded gun.

Some refugees are now coming into Goma itself, having unsuccessfully tried to survive in Sake during the cease-fire. Gedeon Kanane, another primary school teacher, arrived in Goma on the morning of Wednesday 11 September. „You see the two opposing forces opposite each other, looking at each other“, he explains. „Since the ceasefire, people still in Sake move into the town centre for the night, to be together and to be close to MONUC in case something happens. Or they spend the night in Mugunga and Goma“. Many people sleep in one place and spend the day in another to earn money. In Goma, Kanane found his erstwhile colleague Jean Muhindo who moved there from Sake on 3 September. Why don’t more people come straight into the provincial capital, where there is shelter and food to eat? „In Goma, you have to stay in a house and you need money“, Muhindo explains. If you have no money and are forced to sleep in the open, „you shouldn’t do it here in the town, where noone will like you.“ The two teachers say they will no return to Sake as long as it remains a town on the frontline between two armies. „Either they merge into one army, or the war continues.“

Some of the suffering in Mugunga is already visible, in the uncomprehending eyes of ragged thin children, or in the exhaustion of women trudging double-bent along the road without realising that their breasts are falling out of their dress and that the baby on their back is slipping off. But in EP Lac Vert nobody asks the foreign visitor to give them something, there are no outstretched hands. These people are used to being displaced. Their homeland has been a war zone for fifteen years. They know exactly where the best place is to put up twigs and banana leaves, they know when the right moment has come to flee and they know how to organise themselves in times of danger. They are part of a Congo which no longer wants to wait for others to come and help. The UNHCR came to EP Lac Vert and told the refugees that a new, assisted camp would be set up for them in Bulenge, seven kilometres away. But the refugees refused. They don’t want to move seven kilometres away. They want to stay by the road where they can see what is going on and move immediately when the situation requires it. They don’t want to vegetate and wait for hand-outs.

But with every week that passes, this fate looks more likely, and some of the refugees are clearly getting more angry while they are growing less strong. Some aid started to arrive in the Mugunga camps this week, mainly in the form of non-food items such as blankets. But according to eyewitnesses, much of it came back to Goma straight away on motorbikes, sold by the recipients in order to earn money for food. Some Goma residents are said to have gone to the camps to try and get free stuff. The camps and Goma are too close for there to be no interaction, but if they were further away from the town, the life of the refugees would be even more difficult. They are gradually turning into a dependent slum population on the outskirts of an impoverished and war-scared capital.

„These people have fled insecurity. So they will go back when there is security“, school director Mulwa says outside his overcrowded school EP Lac Vert. It sounds simple. But in the Congo, nothing is more difficult.

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