Rain and decay in Congo
DRC Blog | 12th November 2007
Our field director in DRC on a country where death has become a way of life.
It rained all night. I lay awake as it crashed down, worrying that the office was going to flood and my laptop, cunningly hidden on the floor, would get wet and break. This wasn’t so much the issue but that I would loose the mind-numbing work I’d done on the budget yesterday.
The rain has already started to wash the roads away this season. Last years holes, reprieved briefly during the dry season, have started to show themselves again. Water half way up the land rovers wheel, large mud holes. It was amazing to see all the staff in on time. Usually it rains and the already bad transport system collapses. It takes some of them the best part of three hours to get in in the morning when the pot-holes become lakes and the decrepit, over filled taxi buses collapse.
The rains have been terrible this year. Officially 49 people dead and 66 wounded two weeks ago. And then people fall into overflowing drainage ditches, houses are washed away, all belongings, lost. And life goes on.
Rains and aeroplanes dropping from the sky recently. They do so with alarming regularity. All you do know everyday is that something unexpected will happen – even for me who spends most of my time in the office. Sudden floods and falling objects seem to be part of people’s lives: on-going resilience and humour is amazing - when not confronted by the corrupt tax man or police man: all part of the same system.
