What will remain

After so many kilometers of track, after so many encounters, after so many jerry cans in the warehouses and in the distributions, after so many figures of epidemics or massacres by the armed groups, what will I have left?

I had not anticipated this feeling of responsibility for the funds used. When designing and running a project, this awareness of the importance of the funds that have been given to us is particularly strong: how to use them most effectively? How to make sure that we do a job that will ensure that we have as much or more funds the following year? Humanitarianism is sometimes less about taking care of people than about taking care of the means to help them.

Finally, I will remember the feeling of having shared with my colleagues a rare experience, a form of solidarity that is rarely found anymore, but also an understanding of the emotions of others without the need to speak, because the circumstances already say so much. Because we also share an aspiration, a project. It may seem a bit naive, a bit utopian to say that we work for “the little Congolese children”, but it is in fact true. This is our horizon, which makes us choose lives that are a little strange compared to those of our contemporaries.

There remains the feeling that despite all our efforts, we have not drastically changed the lives of the people we have helped. Looking back, the situation seems particularly inextricable, with the feeling that a form of damnation has been affecting the DRC for almost thirty years now, between wars, epidemics, corruption, without any lasting and hopeful solutions being proposed to the populations. And yet, without humanitarian aid, it is easy to imagine the fate of these millions of people in Eastern Congo. It is not much, but it is something. I would like to end this blog by quoting Paul Valéry, a French author: “Hope is a skepticism. It is to doubt misfortune for a moment.” It is a question of reliving this moment unceasingly.