or "au terrain" as we say in French.
I'm going to the field this week with two people from my team. They are leading a briefing on self-evaluations for our partners in our civic education project. I'm going to meet the partners, see their sites, that sort of thing. This is my first time in the field with my own team, so I'm quite looking forward to it.
I'll be back at the end of the week with photos and stories. Stay tuned!
Meanwhile, if you want to hear about my weekly adventure of getting lost in Bukavu while running, head over to: http://revruns.blogspot.com
Here is a halfway decent story about mining in South Kivu:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7991479.stm
I say only halfway decent because this article does exactly what they want to pretend they (unlike "the international community") are not doing -- demonizing the FDLR.
I'd say it's probably a pretty good bet that many of the mines in the Kivus are under the thumb of the FDLR (former Rwandan soldiers who came to the Congo after wreaking genocide in 1994). If they're not directly controlling and/or taxing the mines, they are deeply embedded in the entire market structure because most of the mined materials leave the Congo via Rwanda bound for your grocery store shelves or cellphones.
However, where it isn't the FDLR, you could substitute FARDC (the official Congolese army), the Mayi Mayi, the CNDP or God knows who else and the situation for the local guy trying to dig cassiterite out of the ground is/would be exactly the same -- someone with a gun is going to force him to pay some bogus "tax" that minimizes his earnings from back-breaking work.
The other thing about this article -- all the stuff about "Hutus" and "Tutsis" you should just ignore. It is irrelevant and has little or nothing to do with the situation here, now. That's somebody else's fight.
I recommend viewing this photo slideshow on the BBC News website, to get a feel for the situation here in the Kivus:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8100850.stm
The very first photo -- I saw that truck (both going and coming) when I went to the field with Stefan and the RRM team last week. Annoyingly, most of the "official" news stories talk all about North Kivu and either just mention South Kivu or ignore us. But when they put in one line that says, "we've had similar reports from South Kivu," that means you can just translate the stories, images, reports to here and they're pretty much the same. Except we have fewer journalists.
One thing I will say at this moment, and I hope to write more about this later, is that the situation is complex, it has mothing to do with ethnicity and is totally driven by the desire to extract "la richesses" of the Kivus -- minerals of various types.
And the civiilian population is caught in the middle of this fight.
Here are a few great blogs about the Congo, in case you want to learn more:
http://texasinafrica.blogspot.com/
http://www.congoresources.com/
http://www.endingextremepoverty.org/
http://www.newsaboutcongo.com/
http://www.codinginthecongo.blogspot.com/
The last one is the blog for Peter and Simon, the two Columbia PhD students
who are living in the same house as me and doing research on IRC's Community
Driven Reconstruction programme.
