Look at it rain

Democratic Republic of Congo, and other news

Imagine. My area of North Carolina still is navigating the aftermath of some of the country’s worst flooding in history with Hurricane Helene, and this is what residents of the Democratic Republic of Congo confront every rainy season—a mud track on a hillside that is the only road into town.

Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (photo by Moses Sawasawa for The New York Times)

Journalist Stephanie Nolen traveled this road to Kamituga, a mining town where a new strain of mpox had become endemic. Cases have been reported in the United States in recent months, one in California and one in Georgia. It took Nolen’s crew parts of two days to go 170 miles. On the second day —

We set out again at sunrise, and soon arrived at a mud pit in a hillside. There an industry had emerged in pushing and pulling vehicles up and down the hill. There were belching diesel fumes, and a great deal of yelling. I nicknamed the place Mordor, after Tolkien’s hellscape.

Scrambling up the hill, I thought about how everything entering Kamituga — construction material, clothing, rice, wheat, beer — travels this route. Which means that everything needed to respond to an epidemic, every vaccine, virus sample and latex glove, comes this way, too.

Last summer during two trips into eastern Congo I glimpsed the challenges to bring adequate medical supplies, healthcare, and stability to a country that’s been at war for almost 30 years. I traveled a similar route as Nolen: crossing Lake Kivu by ferry then going by road south from Bukavu to the rural town of Kaziba. It’s 35-mile trip that took our driver 3 hours, and in the dry season. Potholes and ruts along dirt tracks characterize travel across DRC. The eastern provinces are 1,500 miles from the capital, Kinshasa, and powerbrokers ignore infrastructure improvements with deadly results. This week a veteran health worker told me:

It wasn’t always like this. At independence you could drive across the country in 3 days. You could drive all over the country. But Mobutu* didn’t want to waste money on upkeep. Congo is unmanageable. It takes two months to drive across the country and you need a power saw, a shovel, and a 4x4 to do it.

(*Mobutu Sese Seko, the military dictator who changed the country’s name to Zaire and ruled it for 25 years.)

In Kaziba the Moseka Action Project is working with locals and their churches to care for a group of Congolese albinos, who often face threats and persecution in Africa. Albino body parts have been used in black magic rituals.

But watch them sing! —

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Moseka is organized by the family of Nobel laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege. Kaziba is the family’s native village. I traveled there with his older sister Elizabeth and visited also the home of their parents. The Mukweges’ father was the first Protestant Congolese pastor in Bukavu. Dr. Mukwege continues to run the Panzi Hospital there, specializing in trauma care for women raped in war, and also serves as a pastor at his Pentecostal church. An article about his ongoing work—as war intensifies in eastern Congo—is scheduled for the spring issue of Christianity Today magazine.

Why care about Congo? With a population of 111 million, it’s the largest Francophone country in Africa and, more than any other, may boost French to becoming the world’s most spoken language by 2050. The DRC population is 95 percent Christian with a wealth of church communities, yet beset by epidemics, war and atrocities. When I visited Panzi Hospital, 185 women were in treatment or recovery for rape-related injuries. And without its mineral resources, largely siphoned off by China, your iPhone would cost a lot more, or not exist at all. The DRC is the world’s leading producer of cobalt and other minerals essential to battery-powered technology.

Also news worth your time:

Syria: Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan this week to reaffirm Turkey’s role in NATO and call for “an inclusive transition in Syria” that prevents Syria from becoming a terror base. The call came as Turkey continues to support the Free Syrian Army, a terror group that took over the city of Manbij shortly after President Bashar al-Assad left office. And as Turkish airstrikes continue to target Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates inside northern Syria.

The United States is walking a thin but important line between Turkey and its FSA and the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces who control Syria’s northeast and have been a key U.S. ally throughout the fight against terrorism. No U.S. president has handled this one well, but Trump as president in 2019 went so far as to invite Turkey to take territory in the north. Charles Lister has helpful analysis, and there’s a good explainer also from the Free Burma Rangers.

• Returning home to Syria after the downfall of Assad is hard.

Afghanistan: It’s no surprise there’s a lot of confusion around President Donald Trump’s immigration directives issued with this week’s inauguration. To date there are 69 such directives, and you can track them at a website hosted by Stanford and Yale law schools.

• Trump’s executive order suspending U.S. refugee resettlement for at least 90 days takes effect on January 27, yet at least 1,600 Afghans had their flights to the United States canceled, despite having completed processing before the shutdown.

• Because of the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and nightmare backlogs in visa processing, qualified Afghans have used various avenues for seeking U.S. safety—refugee resettlement, humanitarian parole, and special immigrant visas (SIVs) that allow entry to Afghans who served with the U.S. military. Thousands have remained in limbo since the withdrawal, and AfghanEvac has a letter campaign to petition the Trump administration to prioritize qualified refugee and SIV applicants.

• World Relief and others have a comprehensive statement with recommendations for the administration on refugee resettlement (disclosure: I serve on the board of World Relief.).

Weekend read: Radical forgiveness after World War II by key leaders is what brought lasting peace, writes Jeff Fountain at the Schuman Centre for European Studies.

I’m reading … The Place of Tides by James Rebanks.