Finally, a rainy Saturday!

Odd as it sounds, I've sort of been hoping for a day like this for a while now. The workdays fly by in a mixture of frantic scrambling and slow but steady revelations into the mysteries of grants IRC/DRC, and by the time I get home (usually around 8) in the evenings, there's just enough time to eat, read, and pass out by 10 so I can get up at 6 and go for a run.

The weekends arrive and hold great promise for catching up on correspondence such as this one, but my innate Catholic guilt (and, okay, the lack of electricity) keeps me from staying home and forces me out to explore Bukavu. Saturdays have become market days (not that I need any more pagne cloth or masks, but still…) and on the Lord's day I've developed a fab tradition combining my love of long walks, great scenery, and alcohol: "Beer and Lake Sundays" see me striking out each week in search of a little buvette on Lake Kivu where I can install myself with a book, my journal, and a giant Tembo beer while awaiting the sunset over the water.

So you can see how tough life is and how difficult it therefore becomes to find time to write long rambling insights into life in DR Congo ;-)

But don't think I haven't been obsessing over it! My innate Catholic guilt is also great for making me feel terrible about not being in touch.

SO, what's going on? Let's see.

Well, since last I wrote 6 weeks or so ago, I've been to Istanbul for an IRC conference (hell to the yes!!), seen gorillas just a few hours outside of Bukavu (absolutely unbelievable), and thought a lot about the irony of being in a beautiful place so marred by conflict.

Yes, as many of you have probably read, the fighting has started up again in eastern DRC, mostly in an area north of us around Goma. Don't panic: I'm in South Kivu and most of the flare-ups have been in North Kivu, but it still makes for an interesting work environment. While we haven't seen immediate effects here in town, many of our field sites had to be temporarily evacuated and we're focusing on rapid relief to internally displaced people (IDPs) more than before. All of this highlights the paradox of IRC as a relief agency that's trying to do post-conflict reconstruction in a country the size of Western Europe which is not completely out of the woods yet.

To vastly oversimplify, the crux of the fighting is between a Rwandan Tutsi rebel group, the CNDP, led by the notorious General Nkunda, and the Congolese army, the FARDC. Oh, would that it were so simple, though! The FARDC was formed during the 2006 UN-brokered peace deal which ostensibly ended the decades-long war in DRC and is essentially a hodgepodge of different rebel groups who maintained the civil war for so long. Seems like a staggeringly brilliant idea, right? Well, in a way, in theory, it made sense at the time: in order for there to be peace, you had to give these people something to do, to make them invested in lasting peace; besides, people were already pretty good with guns. So the UN's brainchild was to mash the dizzying number of rebel groups into one army and call it the Forces Armées de la république démocratique du Congo (FARDC). Awesome!

Except not.

Many commanders demanded, and were permitted, to maintain rank and control over their men. So the FARDC is essentially all of the same armed groups, except now under the banner of the national army and with the vested authority therein to rape, pillage, exploit – pretty much do whatever they want. Add to that the fact that all of the armed groups here have an economic interest behind them and the picture looks even grimmer. As my Congolese colleague Ben put it, "when there is disorder they profit more."

It's important to point out that, in Angola, this theory worked much better; but in that case, there were only a few armed groups with stronger, more centralized command structures. So a few well-organized groups becoming one bigger well-organized group sounds okay, but in the DRC the scenario is the polar opposite. I won't pretend to know how many different armed groups comprise the FARDC, but the way it breaks down now, certain battalions (still under their original commanders) cause more trouble than others depending on their ethnicity, incentives, backers, etc. The national army, therefore, is one of the biggest problems the Congolese people face.

So we've got the FARDC fighting Nkunda's CNDP forces in various hotspots around North Kivu, but there are also the smaller, less centralized groups who did not take part in the peace accords and continue to try to assert themselves. The Mai-Mai, a loosely organized group, tends to side with the FARDC to oppose the CNDP simply because the CNDP are Rwandan. Similarly, the Banyamulenge, Rwandan Tutsis who have lived in the DRC for generations now, tend to side with the CNDP. So there are also incidences of the Mai-Mai fighting the Banyamulenge. And the list goes on…

What this means for me, here in Bukavu, from my walled, guarded compound isn't entirely clear. I'm watching the rain fall as I sit outside on the porch overlooking the well-tended garden. I will likely go to a party tonight at the Red Cross house and am hoping to go for a hike in the nearby hills tomorrow. In short, life goes on in a bizarre state of normalcy.

We get reports every day and have frequent security briefings, but I take my cues from my co-workers who have been here for years and no one seems particularly worried about their own safety. Bummed that their activities in the field have been put on hold for a bit, sure. Bent out of shape that certain roads outside town are blockaded and make it harder to get around, yeah. But not concerned that this will affect us too negatively. The truth is, the only people particularly interested in aid workers are the people we're trying to aid, and they are usually fairly happy to see us.

Recently, however, this isn't the case for MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force sent here years ago to enforce the peace deal. Allegations that MONUC secretly sympathizes with CNDP and has done little to protect civilians are swiftly eroding the force's credibility, and recent student demonstrations actually demanded that the government get rid of both the CNDP and MONUC. It's fascinating to see how the tide of public opinion turns…

The sad thing is, it hasn't always been like this, and everyone knows it. Congolese recall a time when things were better; Ben waxes nostalgic about a brief but memorable year when Laurent Kabila, father of the current president, Joseph Kabila, first came to power. He says it all changed rapidly – there was order, the police did their job, confidence was rising. It's hard to tell if that experience gives people hope that it can happen again, or proves to them that things would have changed by now if they were going to at all.

It's always hard for me to tell what people here are really thinking, though. The Congolese friends I've made are eternally upbeat, with easy smiles and quick laughs. But sometimes the window opens just a bit…during my Swahili lesson the other day, my teacher, Madame Veronique (a wonderful, ever-composed grandmother whose patience with my attempts at the language is remarkable) suddenly broke into French, lamenting the recent return to conflict. "These people are not Congolese," she said, referring to the fighters. "They say they are but if they truly were they would want peace. I want peace; I remember peace. Why are they doing this?"

As usual, I have no answers. Only more questions, and amateur insights based on what I see and hear.

I hope there will come a time when I can somehow respond to Madame Veronique, but then I recall the questioning looks of my friends in Togo, as we sat in village and they wondered out loud why they were so poor…

In other, more mundane news: work is going well. I don't think I'm counting days as much as I was before, when I was convinced the passage of time would magically and exponentially increase my comprehension of the Byzantine procedures and processes of donor regulations, budget narratives, and travel authorizations. As much as I try to be ever in the moment and enjoy each day for its own sake, I must admit I am always a bit relieved to see the passing of the week, since each day down means one more day I didn't mess something up ;-)

Perhaps this hints at paranoia, but it truly is the way things have been going. Each day there is some new thing that I must scramble to comprehend; several times a day the phone rings and I invariably hear the stressed voice of my boss in the capital, Kinshasa, bemoaning another slip-up that, while not our fault, nonetheless makes our jobs harder. But all that said, I'm happy that the ratio of "I have absolutely no idea what that means" to "oh, this sounds vaguely familiar" is steady moving from about 90:10 to 40:60. Progress!

I also managed to move my team into a bigger, brighter office and have spent some time spring cleaning, so those of you who know me well will realize how much more content I feel now that I am organized and truly master of at least that small room and the furniture contained therein.

The advent of the rainy season is also exciting, promising more lovely Saturday mornings such as this one. I think I'll go make another pot of coffee…