The Road to Bukavu and Other Happenings

The bridge at the border crossing between Rwanda and DRC.  Bukavu is on the right.

I swear, some weeks I have to be quite creative to make these weekly entries engaging.  Especially when a week with little going on and not much travel is always welcome here as a good thing.  Some weeks, however, this blog seems to write itself, and this is one of those times.  In fact, so much has happened that I have enlisted Rebecca to help me recall it all.

You may remember, if you have been following this blog, I was beginning the week with a trip to Congo. More specifically, I was going to Bukavu, a town that borders Rwanda and sits at the South end of Lake Kivu.  Zachee and I set out Monday morning and got there by noon.  We had lunch in Rwanda before crossing the border on foot, leaving our car at a nearby parking lot created for this purpose.  The Rwanda side is really quite beautiful with some lovely guest houses and restaurants overlooking the Lake from a high vantage point.  Bukavu from a distance looks quite picturesque.

Crossing the border on foot gave quite a different impression.  This was a busy border with many people crossing, mostly on foot.  After passing through immigration in Rwanda, we crossed a small bridge and entered DRC.  Bukavu is a town on the border and in certain ways reminded me of other border towns, I am thinking about Tijuana or Juarez Mexico.  It has a certain feel of dirt and seediness.  There are lots of petit commercants going  back and forth.  It was markedly poorer and more run down than the Rwanda side as well. 

Zachee and I got a cab and were at our guest house in about 5 minutes.  We did pass a huge number of fortified clotures of different AID organizations.  They all looked like prisons with very high walls and guard towers, but they were just the charities that do work here.  Many seemed to have names that suggested work with women and children as well as refugees. 

We met Tim Lind our MCC counterpart in Congo in the afternoon and had some very good talks about getting an MCCer placed in Bukavu that could help with programming in Eastern Congo.  We told him this was a priority as well and we would be able to give team support to someone in Bukavu as they would be very close to Bujumbura.  We are hoping an ad will be going out soon in case anyone reading might be interested in a service worker position in Congo (French and or Swahili is a must.)

We stayed the night in Bukavu and caught a cab back to the border the next morning.  I saw little there that I found particularly appealing about the town with the possible exception of a place called Café Rendezvous that was quite an anomaly.  We went in for dinner and found what I can only describe as a Seattle style coffee house, not Starbucks, but really more grunge style with sofas and people on computers and snacks like homemade chocolate chip cookies. It was run by a young American woman who spoke many languages.  We asked her if this was some kind of mission project and she said no.  She had opened it to give kids here a place to hang-out without alcohol.  We asked how she decided on Bukavu and she said she was a 3^rd gen. missionary family.  Her father was actually born in the jungle and she had spent much of her life here.  …So if you do find yourself in Bukavu, this is one place I can say is worth checking out.

I was really looking forward to getting home before noon and relaxing a bit after many days of driving, (we were just in Rwanda and Burasira the week before.)  But as we headed away from the border in our car the phone rung and it was Rebecca.  She said ‘Paul we have a serious problem”.  I knew my plans for a relaxing day were not going to be realized.  I will let her pick up the story here.

While Paul was in Congo with Zachee, his son Tim came to stay at our house – for Oren and Tim to play, and for greater ease of getting Tim to school on Tuesday morning. The kids did really well together, jumping a lot on the trampoline, of course, and enjoying their dinner of hot dogs (yes you can get those here, I discovered) and homemade mac & cheese (no Kraft dinner to be found). All three boys, including David, piled into Oren’s bed for a bedtime story. It was very sweet. I was really glad Zachee’s sister Ina came to join us overnight, for another adult pair of hands to help out with the kids.

In the morning, I got up super-early to do all the morning things that Paul normally does: make breakfast, make school snacks, get the kids dressed, etc. I was almost ready to put the kids in the car when I heard a hair-raising series of barks and howls from Bella. I ran outside at the same moment as our worker Odifax came around the corner. We were horrified to see Bella fighting with a cat We had seen that cat walking along our walls before and it had occurred to us that Bella would probably attack it if it ever came in the yard.. They rolled over and over a few times before the cat jumped free and leaped up into our avocado tree. Bella chased her, barking furiously under the tree. I wanted to get Bella away, but I was honestly afraid to disrupt her hunter instinct at that moment. And then suddenly the cat dropped out of the tree again and Bella had her by the throat in an instant. I helplessly watched another short struggle before Bella killed the cat. And then we had to chase after Bella for a while to separate her from the deceased cat – I was thankful Odifax was able to do that and get her leashed to a tree. I’ve seen Bella successfully hunt down lizards, birds and rats, but this was quite differen and traumatic for me.

Fortunately, Bella just had some minor scratches on her ear, but I had real fear that she might have become infected by rabies. That is when I called Paul.  We wanted to at least revaccinate her, but feared we would be counseled to put her down.  When Paul arrived home he made an appointment with the vet right after lunch. But shortly before he was going to put her in the car we started hearing the sounds of a huge crowd passing along the main road two blocks down from us. And the crowd kept passing and passing, with singing, drumming, shouting, honking. We then learned that 10 major opposition parties had decided to band together and do a march on the final day of campaigning for the communal (county-level) elections. Paul tried to get through to the vet and he just kept running into huge crowds of people. Finally he gave up and came home again. I cancelled a playdate for the kids across town, and we just decided to lay low for the rest of the day. As Paul was driving home from teaching his dance class in the evening, the opposing traffic was sweeping the current president back home from a campaigning visit at the lower class neighborhood to our south. We heard that the ruling party demonstrations kept crossing paths with demonstrations from other parties, but that each group swirled around the other without risking confrontation. That was truly good news on an emotionally charged day. (We did succeed in getting Bella to the vet the next morning, and the vet was not really concerned, but agreed it was good to revaccinate her for rabies).

Paul again:  I can’t tell you the dilemma we felt ourselves to be in.  Bella is adored by Oren and David, and she is a great watch dog and a necessary part of our home security system.  BUT the advice we got on this type of event is to put the dog down to make sure she does not have rabies or quarantine her for 6 months.  We did take her for a booster vaccination (for which she was overdue) but we decided not to put her down.

In some ways I think our decision was fortuitously right as you will read further down.

Wednesday the US embassy had a ‘town hall’meeting for American citizens at the ambassador’s house to keep us informed on the latest intelligence related to elections and security of Americans.  They are doing this monthly now, I think. 

Frankly it is quite good to speak to them.  They were able to answer many of our questions about rumors we have heard.  The feeling is generally cautious optimism.  That is, that the elections will not be an extremely destabilizing event here but that Americans should avoid traveling around during election day and shortly after when results are announced in case there are some problems at that time.   They did also say that the bigger problem is that crime is on the increase (probably unrelated to elections.) and the new trend is to see more sophisticated gangs of armed bandits, even using Landcruisers, and wearing police uniforms and carry automatic weapons hitting businesses frequented by mzungus.  There has also been an escalation of home robberies.  We all confirmed that indeed we are now used to hearing gunfire almost every night in the city that we were told is crime related.

I had written earlier about the ‘peace dividend’ of unemployed former-rebels finding the best opportunity for income generation is this kind of crime.

The punctuation on all this is that that night our house was robbed.  From what I understand from Odifax (who was doing substitute night guard duty that night), several bandits came in and stole things that were outside the house.  To wit: my 3 favorite shirts hanging on a line, and our iron.  We heard Bella barking at one point in the night and we suspect she heard them and scared them away.  Odifax said he heard them but locked himself in the servants quarters for fear that they would force him to open the house as he has a key to the kitchen door.  (Our normal nightguard does not.)

We took this as a wake-up call to get more serious about security and have improved our protection in several important ways.

1)      We put razor wire on the back wall which abuts a school yard that is not well secured.

2)      We gave the guard a remote control doorbell that rings in our room.  And also a loud whistle

3)      The guard has our cell #s as well and can call us.  We have the cell phones by our beds as well as loud whistles we can blow.

4)      Zachee talked to our neighbor who happens to be the former minister of defense and has a detachment of soldiers guarding his house all time.  The man gave Zachee his # to give to us and said that if we called anytime he would send the soldiers over to our house.  (This is our ace in the hole.)

5)      We of course still have Bella and have suggested that the guard (Gaspard) do his rounds around the house with Bella as most Burundians are terrified of dogs and Bella is as mentioned above, quite savage when she wants to be.

All of this has given a sense of security now as we face the new realities.  One thing I know, is that an unarmed night guard would have no defense against several armed bandits so we are counting on him to play a warming function by phoning us or ringing the bell so we can whistle and yell inside, alert Bella as well as call the minister to send his soldiers from next door.

Thursday was quite quiet and pleasant.  By law all campaigning for Friday’s election ended on Tuesday.  The only problem was that I started getting quite sick.  Weakness and bad headache, and other virus symptoms but not a high fever.  I spent the day in bed.

Friday, election day, was quiet too.  Too quiet!  It was a holiday, but late Thursday night we got the news that the communal election was being postponed for a few days because of ‘ballot irregularities”  I will let Rebecca explain:

Everyone in Burundi struggles with doing things on a schedule, because of the logistical challenges here. For example, we had a tough time getting applications in for all the election observers we will be sponsoring through our partners. But on the other hand, the Independent Election Commission (CENI) was unable to meet its deadlines either. On Monday we found out that CENI would no longer prepare the badges for election observers – we would need to do that ourselves using printed materials from CENI. The materials arrived Tuesday night, and we were so grateful that our 3 SALT volunteers were able to join a team of people assembling the election observer packets on Wednesday. It was a big job for our network to support 250 people. Imagine the situation for other NGO’s, sending out up to 6000 observers! The packets were just barely ready on Thursday morning, for pick up and distribution to provinces all around the country in preparations for the Friday election. Distribution itself is incredibly complicated in a country with virtually no postal system. People just send things with friends, or with a taxi driver who hopefully hands over the goods intact at the other end. (Sometime I’ll have to list in the blog all the public service vehicles pictured in Oren’s book on transportation which are not found here in Burundi, contrasted with the vehicles that serve the purpose.)

We shouldn’t have worried so much about getting the election materials to the observers on time. The government and CENI have as much trouble as anyone meeting deadlines. Late on Thursday night we got the news that the elections had been postponed to Sunday. The reason? Voter card distribution had started late and inefficiently. Many, many people had not yet been able to get their cards and they were angry. And even more importantly, the ballots had not yet arrived in the polling stations. I think that many had not yet made it into the country from where they were being printed in Uganda. (Without making any accusation, more than a few news reports noted that the ballots for one particular party HAD BEEN distributed accurately to every polling station, but there were many mistakes on the ballots for the other parties.  (For the sake of political sensitivity we will not mention any party names in this blog.) It’s even more confusing because each party has its own ballot, and some parties have the same name. And there are at least 12 parties in the running. At this point, the election has been re-postponed to Monday because so many pastors complained about the disruption to church services.

 Paul--Saturday and Sunday were pretty normal.  Rebecca prepared music for the afternoon service on Sunday and David really wanted to help as you can see above.

After church in the morning we had lunch with some German Friends who work with Germany’s development organization GTZ.  They are parents of one of Oren’s classmates.  It was really interesting and enjoyable to go over there.  We had filet mignon for lunch and then enjoyed the pool in their yard.  Their house and yard is palatial with a great view that overlooks the City.  It was like a day at a resort.  It is always interesting to go out and see how the ‘other half’ lives.  (That is non-missionary expatriates.) 

We ended up on Sunday evening again to have dinner with Tim and Jeanette our South African friends then headed home about 8pm along the Lake only to find an enormous hippo walking along the side of the road.  Thank God for high-beams!

Bonus photo: another Oren original, he seems to be into these sort of Andew Wyeth looking tableaux--muted colors, light reflecting on surfaces, --studied, formal composition.