Congolese posters in French and Swahili demanding for an end to corruption

Tous les gens sont terrorizés

(All the people are terrorized)

This is what the reggae singer is screaming through Radio France International. I am writing this as my neighbors and I settle in for the night. You are not supposed to go out at night; you should not go to the bar. If you go to the bar in town, there will be soldiers there. Soldiers usually mean trouble. Back in the days of Mobutu, the soldiers complained to their supreme leader that they were not being paid for their service. Mobutu replied that their gun was their salary, their wife, their mother, their means for feeding themselves and taking whatever they wanted from the civilian population. Although Mobutu is gone, his statement is echoed in the actions of every armed faction running around Eastern Congo. Just about everyone you meet has been affected, everyone has a relative who has died in a massacre, at the hands of bandits, or from starvation or illness directly caused by the displacement of war.

This past week, an officer from the DGM (the Congolese immigration bureau) has been storming around Uvira with a policeman, looking to arrest me because I had failed to grease his palm. As I wrote about earlier, I was already forced to pay off the ANR to get my passport back, and I had registered legally with the DGM when I crossed the border. So, now I was forced to play cat-and-mouse because some fat bureaucrat wanted his beer money from the mzungu. I decided to go to the DGM and face the music, but thankfully Arche d’Alliance sent someone from their legal team with me. I was not arrested, but I had to fill out some more forms and pay a “paperwork” fee of $40. However, there is no future guarantee of protection, and the DGM might come after me again for more money. There is zero accountability, and the government in Kinshasa is deeply corrupt, so local officials feel they have a carte blanche to make up the rules to line their pockets. However, one must remember that no matter how bad things get for me, it is still a lot worse for the ordinary Congolese citizen. This is why the work of organizations such as Arche d’Alliance is so important.

If you are trying to rebuild civil society in Eastern Congo, you are indeed a brave individual. Creating a world of law, order, and harmony in an environment filled with bloodshed and corruption is indeed a daunting task. I greatly admire these people that are trying to move the mountain, one pebble at a time.