CRS continues to respond to the post-election crisis in Kenya. Recently, staff from CRS and the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret trained 18 volunteers to serve as hygiene promoters in camps in the Eldoret area of western Kenya. One volunteer, Milka Nyambura Kariuki, lives with 2,000 other displaced people in the Burnt Forest camp. Here she shares how she is working with other volunteers to teach residents about improving camp sanitation and personal hygiene:

Volunteer hygiene promoter Milka Nyambura Kariuki is helping her fellow residents improve sanitation in the camp they are living in after being displaced by the post-election violence in Kenya. Photo by Gilbert Namwonja/CRS

Here I educate community members on hygiene and how to keep our neighborhood clean. Eighteen of us were trained, and later on we divided ourselves into different hygiene promotion groups. I was placed in the hygiene education group. In our group, the activities that we carry out include educating people on how to keep their water containers clean, how to boil water and how to use latrines well.

We also trained people on how to wrap food well because of contamination by house flies. We were taught that house flies can cause diseases like diarrhea, vomiting and even headaches.

As a result of our activities, we have witnessed change in the camp. Our IDP camp has become very clean. For example, the other day we carried out house-to-house visits and saw that people’s water containers were clean, food was well wrapped, and they are keeping their surroundings clean all over. Even if you visit the water points, you will find that containers are very clean. Before our activities, people also used latrines poorly, but now they use them well.

I would like to praise Catholic Relief Services very much because I did not expect to receive such training. Now I have changed as a person, and I have become a good example to others, because we were trained to be models for them. Now they practice hygiene as required.

Although peace is now holding, 150,000 people displaced by earlier violence are still living in camps. An additional 130,000 are estimated to be living with friends or relatives, too scared to return home.

Lane Hartill, CRS’ regional information officer for West Africa, recently visited eastern Congo, where he documented CRS’ response to the sexual violence that is an atrocity of the ongoing war.

The gynecologists at Panzi Hospital, a CRS partner, are some of the best in Congo at repairing reproductive systems that have been destroyed. But I wanted to find out how you fix a woman’s mind, how you heal her spirit.

So I turned to Cécile Mulolo Kamwanya, a psychologist at Panzi Hospital. She’s the head of the psychologist unit. It’s her and her team’s job to help heal women’s psyches, which are sometimes as damaged as their reproductive system.

Cécile told me a story that haunted me for days.

About a year ago, a little girl - I’ll call her Sylvie - was at home in Katama, a community very close to a forest where Hutu rebels, the same ones that committed the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, are hiding.

The story unfurled like the others: the knock on the door; the demand for money; Sylvie’s father shot. In the confusion her mother fled. Sylvie was left in the house. The seven men took her to the forest, undressed her, and kicked her legs out from under her.

The last thing Sylvie remembered, Cécile said, before completely blacking out, was her legs being spread and men, as Sylvie put it, sleeping on her.

When she came to, she didn’t know what had happened or where she was. She tried to stand up but couldn’t. When she finally made it, she realized she was incontinent. She wandered for two days before an old man found her and led her by the hand back to her village.

She eventually made it to Panzi. But she was physically too small – only 10 years old – to be operated on. So for the next three or four years, she waits, no longer able to control the urine that seeps out of her.

“With a little girl like that, the first thing you must do is show affection,” says Cécile. “You must approach them even if they smell bad. If she came to your office, you’d open all the windows. The urine flows out of her. She smells very bad.

But Cécile loves her. They chat. Cécile puts her arm around Sylvie, as if she was her daughter. The whole time, Cécile is pretending she doesn’t smell anything. Cécile says a recent conversation went like this:

“I tell her to be patient, they’re going to take care of you, but you’re still too little. I ask her what she wants to do with her life.

‘I can’t get married. I’m going to be a nun.’

Why do you want to be a nun? Why don’t you want to marry?

‘Who’s going to want me? What man is going to love me?’

Be patient. And when they take care of you, you’ll be healed. You can then marry.

‘But I’m no longer a virgin. I’ve lost my virginity. Can someone who has lost her virginity, can a man love them?’

The value of a woman isn’t based on her virginity,” Cécile tells her.

Sylvie developed hatred toward men, says Cécile. But slowly she convinced her that all men aren’t bad.

“Only the ones that did this to you,” she says. “You’re papa was a good man. He loved your mama, didn’t he? He loved you. Was your papa bad?

No, Sylvie, said. Her papa wasn’t bad.

Vicel Meregillano-Hicks, the wife of CRS Afghanistan country representative Paul Hicks, reports on the CRS response to the winter emergency in Afghanistan.

Road to remote villages in Kushk district cleared through CRS cash for work project. Photo by Vicel Meregillano-Hicks for CRS

The mountain cloaked in white looms beyond, its spires reaching up to the heavens and its crevices heavy with undisturbed white powder. It has one dreaming of endless ski and snowboard runs like those in one of Colorado’s premier ski resorts. Unfortunately, this setting is located in a country that has never known ski resorts. This is Western Afghanistan, deep in the harshest winter in decades. A winter that people were ill-prepared for. A winter made worse by the lack of food due to the drought that preceded it.

[Map of Afghanistan]

With roads covered in icy snow, vehicles bearing food, fuel, medicine and other supplies have been unable to reach remote villages in Kushk District, Herat Province. Access to the district center was also limited to the use of donkeys or walking through knee-deep snow. The district government and CRS jointly identified the most vulnerable communities in the district and villagers were mobilized to clear the roads and paid cash for their work. By paying for labor, CRS puts much-needed cash into the hands of the people. The opening of snow-covered roads enabled not only supplies to get into villages, but enabled villagers to bring their sick to the district health center.

The district governor of Kushk, Mr. Asef Sakhna, expressed deep gratitude for the rapid response of CRS to the winter emergency. CRS is the only organization working in this remote district. The Deputy of Provincial Council, Mr. Abdul Rahman Rangor, said that they were able to send a mobile clinic comprising a team of health workers from the district health center to the remote villages because the roads are now open.

Negar Jama Khan with her youngest daughter. Photo by Vicel Meregillano-Hicks for CRS

In the village of Qala Safid, a little more than 7 miles away from the district center of Rabat Sangi, Negar Jama Khan’s youngest child inserts her hand inside her mother’s sweater to keep warm. Light streaks through one small window into a damp and cold room. In the evening, in this tiny room made of mud, a heater is fueled by burning bushes and shrubs, warming a family of eight people. The heater remains unlit throughout the day.

“We only light the heater at night because we don’t have enough shrubs to burn. Our neighbors help us by giving us shrubs and some bread to eat,” Negar said.

In Adraskan district, CRS field staff and members of the district government were looking at maps to identify the most vulnerable areas. Working side by side with the government, CRS builds their capacity to identify and respond to future emergencies. In Adraskan district, vital supply routes are cleared of snow by the villagers and CRS paid cash for the labor.

In Ghor province, the failed harvest during the summer has created a shortage of food, putting over 230,000 people in need of food. In the districts of Dulaina and Chaghcharan more than 1,000 families are vulnerable to starvation. CRS field staff worked with the shura (village leaders’ council) in each village to identify and verify households that are most vulnerable: households that are unable to work to support themselves and those whose primary breadwinners are widows, elderly, disabled or chronically ill. CRS provided food, blankets and heating fuel to these households through a voucher program.

CRS continues to coordinate with other agencies and the provincial government to provide food and other essential supplies to those hardest hit by this year’s winter. With temperatures continuing at their lowest in decades, the most pressing need is getting food and heating fuel to remote districts in Ghor Province. CRS continues to clear roads, providing access to these remote districts.

Lane Hartill, CRS’ regional information officer for West Africa, recently visited eastern Congo, where he documented CRS’ response to the sexual violence that is an atrocity of the ongoing war.

The stories of rape in eastern Congo are remarkably similar in their horror. Most of them start out the same way: A knock on the door. The armed men enter. The husband is beaten or killed. Then comes the gang rape.

But when you are actually sitting in front of a woman and she’s looking you in the eye, telling you in a monotone voice how they raped her, and you can see when she looks away, when her body language shifts, you know it’s hurting her again.

That’s when the rapes in Congo hit you.

It was like that when I talked with Birava. She recently moved into a new shack because she was taunted so badly in her previous neighborhood because she’d been raped. Her new place costs, $5 a month. But as a single mother with five children to feed, she has a hard time making rent.

We sat on vegetable oil tins and jerry cans in the front room, the one with the mud floor. She sat on a discarded engine block. She’d carefully folded some cloth for cushions. She told me her story. About the 12 soldiers who’d raped her. About the 6 miles she gingerly walked to Panzi with a prolapsed uterus. About the HIV she contracted from her now-deceased husband. And about her husband’s family who showed up recently wanting to take her kids away from her.

Birava didn’t hesitate to tell her story. I can’t imagine anyone going through something like this, then pouring her heart out to a complete stranger. Maybe it’s cathartic, I thought. Maybe she needs this.

A big part of her recovery is owed to Mama Jeanette, a counselor who volunteers for CRS’ partner, Foundation Femme Plus. She has turned into an older sister for Birava.
“She doesn’t do anything without telling me,” Jeanette says. Jeanette told me when the two are alone, Birava even has a sense of humor.

“Even though I have HIV,” she’ll sing, “I’m still living.”

After a CRS-sponsored trip to Lebanon and Syria, eight women religious from the U.S. have mobilized to raise awareness of Iraqi refugees’ suffering.

The Catholic sisters, drawn from various religious orders, made home visits to Iraqis desperate for medical care, rent, jobs, and school for their children. They visited with Catholic Relief Services partners like Caritas Lebanon, learning more about day-to-day realities for the refugees. Returning in late January, the sisters have spoken to their congregations, universities and the media about what America can do to help Iraqis who fled the violence in their home country.

Last Wednesday, two of the nuns briefed approximately 75 congressional staffers on the needs of Iraqi refugees during a session in the Capitol Building. Simone Campbell, a Sister of Social Service, and Anne Curtis, a Sister of Mercy, shared stories of the Iraqi families they met, many of whom are not allowed by their host countries to work. Attendees included staffers from the offices of Senators Obama, McCain and Durbin.

The sisters urged Congress to increase funding for United Nations and other programs that help Iraqi refugees, as well as to accept more Iraqis as immigrants to the U.S. “Iraqis have run out of their savings and are getting desperate,” Sister Simone said in emailed bulletins during the January trip. “Some have decided to return to Iraq and have been killed. Others are trying to work in the underground economy” in their host countries, she continued.

The sisters will keep pressing for action. “We feel very good about the briefing,” said Sister Simone when Wednesday’s meeting concluded. “Iraqi needs are so great, and there are things our government can do to alleviate their suffering. Somebody is listening.”

Lane Hartill, CRS’ regional information officer for West Africa, describes his visit to a CRS-funded hospital in a rural area of Eastern Congo that is treating women who have been raped, an atrocity of the ongoing war.

I went on rounds with Dr. Freddy Mubuto, the head doctor at Nyamibungu Mother and Child Hospital, to see what he faces everyday. He and his fellow doctor, Faustin, are the only two doctors in an area with around 103,000 people.

Dr. Freddy Mubuto, head doctor at Nyamibungu Mother and Child Hospital in Eastern Congo. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

I knew seeing his patients wasn’t going to be easy. I steeled myself against the hot rush of emotion, but it came anyway. Reality, it seemed, was going to have its way with me.

One of the first women we saw had been taking her medicine religiously, said Mubuto, but she hadn’t eaten in days, causing complications. With a shake of his head, and in that calm, velvet voice, he explained to her why she had to eat, knowing all too well that she had no money for food.

A pretty woman, the wife of a gold miner, wearing clean red Puma slippers and silver earrings, had walked 25 miles to get to the hospital. She had the Congo’s flag painted on each toenail. She was having stomach pains, she said, could he help?

Mubuto suspected tuberculosis or a genital infection. She was only 25, but had already had three children. Only one was still alive. I didn’t have the stomach to ask her how the others had died.

The hospital has a sonogram machine and Mubuto spent much of the afternoon squirting gel on stomachs the size of beach balls and waving the wand over them. One lady had a scar running south from her bellybutton; it was as thick as a rope of licorice. Another physician had given her a C-section and done and awful job sewing her up. That wasn’t important, though: The baby inside looked just fine.

These were the easy cases. It’s when the rape cases come in – and the women who were forced to stay in the village to give birth – that things get complicated.

Mubuto sometimes finds himself facing complex emergencies he doesn’t know how to handle. He looks at reproductive systems so mutilated that he has to try something even if he’s never seen the problem. If he doesn’t, he says, they’ll surely die.

Like the time he worked on a woman - the surprise and disgust still registers in Mubuto’s voice – who had toxic leaves forced deep into her birth canal. So far, in fact, it punctured her uterus and the leaves entered her abdomen, causing her intestines to become infected.

Dr. Freddy Mubuto on his rounds. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

After surgery, piles of pills, and a three-month stay, “She didn’t pay a single cent,” he said. Instead, she went to the court and brought a suit against the feticheur, the traditional doctor who had prescribed the treatment. She accused him of premeditated murder. Many women, Mubuto said, sneak out of the hospital at night, avoiding payment. He has no recourse.

He says the women rely on feticheurs out of ignorance. It bothered him so much, he visited a few local villages to persuade women to come to the hospital. He also talked to village chiefs who agree with him and promise the village women will go to the hospital from now on. He says he’s seen a slight uptick in the number of women coming to him first, but the feticheur problem is still overwhelming.

You’d think all this would get to Mubuto, that he too would sneak out of a window at night and escape. But he doesn’t. He stays because it’s in his blood. His father was a well-known doctor and several of his siblings are also in the medical profession.

He politely asks me about how he can get additional training. He says a good anesthesiologist is needed at the hospital because many gynecological operations can’t be done with a local anesthetic. But if that’s not possible, maybe $75 a month to buy fuel for the generator is.

When I got home, I emailed my college roommate, now a respected anesthesiologist in Seattle. I told him how some men in the U.S. smirk and giggle at the mention of gynecology, how it’s a punch line, not a profession.

That’s not true. Definitely not in Congo.

Lane Hartill, CRS’ regional information officer for West Africa, describes his journey along eastern Congo’s muddy roads to see a CRS-funded hospital that is treating women who have been raped, an atrocity of the ongoing war.

The next time you’re in Kamituga, look up Jimmy and Juma. They may be the best father and son motorcycle team in eastern Congo. Jimmy, 22, has been fishtailing up the mud slopes here since he could reach the foot pegs. Juma has been doing it for decades, hauling visitors over roads that haven’t felt a blanket of gravel or a grader since Belgium left the Congo in 1960.

Jimmy fixes a flat tire. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

It’s a stretch to even call them roads. They are more of a cross between a goat path and a hog wallow. But the road I’m on —between Bukavu and Kitutu — is a major highway in the country, something akin to US Highway 101 up the West Coast or Interstate 95 between New York and Washington.

Jimmy and I were heading to Nyamibungu, a hiccup in the road where a hospital for mothers and children is located. CRS is working with doctors there to train them in gynecology. The hospital is just a shout from the forest where rebels are holed up. In some villages, says Congolese, they come into town and buy and sell with women on market days. They are also the same men who are raping them.

The head doctor at the hospital, Dr. Freddy Mubuto, who is traveling with me, says women often come to him after going to traditional village doctors who treat them with toxic leaves, only causing more damage to their reproductive systems. They often come to him when things are beyond repair. Dr. Freddy is their last option.

Read the rest of this entry »

Debbie DeVoe, CRS’ regional information officer for East Africa, provides an update from her recent visit to Eldoret, one of the regions in Kenya most affected by the post-election violence.

Life for displaced families isn’t easy, as they now must rely on others for food, shelter, water, bedding and more. Photo by Debbie DeVoe/CRS

Yesterday, rivals President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga met for the first time since the disputed election in Kenya held on Dec. 27. The meeting and the mediation efforts of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan are giving Kenyans hope that the crisis that has killed more than 650 and displaced more than 220,000 may soon end. Read the rest of this entry »

Conflict continues in Kenya over the contested win by President Mwai Kibaki over rival contender Raila Odinga. The crisis in Kenya is affecting people across the country, whether or not they have been directly touched by the violence.

In Nairobi, most businesses have reopened. For CRS staff, however, it’s far from business as usual. Debbie DeVoe, regional information officer for East Africa, sat down with John Katunga, regional technical advisor for peacebuilding and justice, and Peter Kimeu, regional technical advisor for peacebuilding, global solidarity and justice, to learn more about the reflection sessions they have been holding for staff.

The conference room was packed with staff who value the opportunity to come together to address and reduce any tension. Photo by Debbie DeVoe/CRS

Kimeu: Kenyan hearts are bleeding, and CRS staff hearts are bleeding too. We need to reconcile as members of the CRS family so we can provide the emergency response required. By bringing the staff together, they can share their feelings with each other and listen to one another.

Katunga: What has happened in the country can’t be isolated. CRS employees in Kenya are a microcosm of society, and as Kenyan society is divided by the crisis, it affects our staff.

These meetings provide a framework for staff to vent their frustrations and their feelings. By coming together, people realize how what they are saying and how they are acting are affecting others. People need to be able to say “I’m not happy about what’s happening” without saying “I hate Kibaki” or “I hate Raila.” We need to learn ways to express ourselves without antagonizing others.

Kimeu: We asked staff to write on cards how the conflict has changed their working relationships. Many of the cards have the same message: “I’m hurt. I’m scared. I don’t know how to approach my brothers or sisters anymore.” By bringing these issues to the table, we can help people listen to one another.

Katunga: These days every word can be interpreted differently. Take the word “justice.” It no longer means the same thing for everyone. Through these reflections, we are giving staff the opportunity to examine how their emotions and beliefs have been affected by the situation to improve their working relationships.

You’d think that a woman with a loving husband, newborn baby and a master’s degree in physics would be set for life — or at least not hiding out in a dank basement room bare of anything but two thin mattresses on the floor.

A few years ago, Rana [name changed] had a successful career in Iraq. Today, she fears for her life. One of an estimated 50,000 Iraqi refugees in Lebanon, Rana does not leave the tiny apartment in Beirut where she, her husband and her 10-week-old daughter wait out the time until another country accepts them as immigrants.

A young Iraqi refugee in Lebanon holds her baby daughter, whose name in Arabic means “Flower.” A Muslim, the mother ordinarily veils only her hair. Here, she has veiled her face for fear of being identified and deported. Photo by CRS Staff

A softspoken 30-year-old new mother, Rana explains that her father was murdered for his political beliefs. As his daughter, she herself was later threatened directly. She fled to Beirut to join her husband, who was in Lebanon already.

Lebanon proved not to be the asylum she hoped for. Having moved into one apartment, Rana heard rumors that her father’s enemies knew her whereabouts. She and her small family moved to another apartment, which the talented and well-educated Rana does not leave. “I am afraid all the time,” she says.

Stories like Rana’s are painfully familiar to the staff of the Caritas Lebanon Migrant Center, one of the few charities in Beirut reaching out to those fleeing Iraq’s violence and chaos. Funded by Catholic Relief Services and other donors, the migrant center helps the refugees with rent payments, medicine and household needs like mattresses.

The vast majority of Iraqi immigrants live illegally in Lebanon, unable to receive work permits or access public schools and health services. Many put their names on a long U.N. waiting list, hoping against hope that countries like Canada will take them in. Forbidden to work and afraid to go out often for fear of arrest, they sit in near-empty apartments and watch the months drag by.

This week, a group of U.S. nuns are visiting programs for Iraqi refugees in Lebanon. Hosted by CRS, the sisters have made home visits, seen shelters and met with women religious working in and around Beirut.

They are sharply aware of Lebanon’s limitations in dealing with the flood of refugees. Just a few days ago, a car bomb meant for a U.S. embassy vehicle killed several people on the streets of Beirut (everyone in the CRS delegation is safe). Lebanon has been in political turmoil for the past year and without a president since the end of November 2007, the country’s government has more problems than it can handle.

Private groups like the Caritas center are trying to bridge the gap, with case workers putting in long hours and struggling to find more resources. “There are just so many” Iraqis needing help, says one social worker.

“They are not refugees,” says a Lebanon-based Sister of the Good Shepherd that the delegation visited. “They are our brothers and sisters, because the world belongs to all of us.”