From the photographer: A trip down the Congo River
In November 2017 I was asked to travel down the Congo River to photograph and report on USAID’s flagship maternal and child health programme, MCSP. The project trains local leaders how to administer basic health services, like polio vaccines and treatment for diahorrea and malaria.
Western powers seem barely to notice the ongoing tragedy which is Congo. This vast country is two-thirds the size of Western Europe, thickly-forested, incredibly dangerous and has few roads. Even finding out what is happening in Congo is a challenge, much less moving around.
Tshopo province, where I headed, is in the centre of the country and has been largely cut off from recent fighting. But despite the peace, public services have been starved of investment and many communities remain cut off from basic services. The capital city of Kinshasa is a three week boat journey away and the daily flights are far too expensive for the average person.
My goal was to reach a remote community several hundred miles downstream from Kisangani. A day-long car journey along bumpy roads and improvised bridges, a ferry and boat ride later, I ended up in Yatutu Isangi.
A small village of around 2000 people, it was similar to thousands of villages I have visited before in the Great Lakes region. A village elder came to greet our boat when it pulled up on the shoreline, lots of school age children with no shoes but wearing a motley collection of uniforms, desperate to learn.
The elder told me, “There is no school here for children under the age of 7. They go by pirogue [a long, narrow canoe] every day to the mainland. It is dangerous; sometimes the pirogue turns over in the river with the children. Yesterday this happened — all the children managed to swim but it’s not good for them.”
The village is a jumble of huts built from mud and straw, carpeted in ripped cardboard boxes. The shore is lined with dug out wooden boats used for fishing: the only source of income.
Young men with no jobs follow the village elder as he leads us into the community — they all wanted to know if I could find them a job, as there was nothing for them here. Most had mobile phones, and when there was network, trawled through social media. They had a clear understanding of the outside world and what it offered, but no means of reaching it.
The scourge of plastic water bottles and bags hasn’t reached here yet. Water is collected in pots gouged from tree trunks and some women still wear skirts made from straw. But this romanticised vision is shattered by the stories of hardship I hear.
Basomboli Bolese had ten children, four of whom have died. None of her children have been vaccinated and one is sick with malaria. But for Bolese there is a glimmer of hope.
I meet her in a newly established health post — a small building made from mud with a few wooden benches. The two health workers are local village leaders who have under gone basic health training under the MCSP programme.
Bati Bobubela is the community health site worker. He is proud of his new role in the community. “What we are doing is very positive for the community and less babies are now dying,” he explains. “But I would also like to see a health centre open here for the whole village, because now we can only treat children under the age of five. The nearest health centre to Yatutu is an eight hour pirogue journey away.”
As we leave, I think what it must be like to be sick and have to travel eight hours in a canoe to get treatment. It’s hard to comprehend that in a village like Isangi, people can log on to social media, but can’t access a hospital. But the work of the newly trained community health workers is an vital step to bridging this gap.
Kate Holt is the founder and director of Arete. For the last twelve years she has photographed regularly for numerous NGOs — including UNICEF, Care International, Jhpiego, the International Red Cross, MSF and OXFAM. She is a regular contributor to The BBC, The Guardian and The Mail on Sunday and has also had work published in The Independent, The Times, The Observer, The Telegraph and The Financial Times.
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