So this is an adventure…

Last Tuesday I rode for 5 hours in the back of a truck with Jean-Baptiste, an FHI program coordinator whom I barely know, and Gaspar, a driver I’d just met, through endless hills and winding roads that I swear to you never straightened out for more than a couple hundred feet. Tea plantations covered the earth as it rose up and fell back down into valleys of rice fields all around us. I saw countless banana trees and quite a few monkeys of some sort just hanging out on the side of the road as we passed through Nyungwe National Park. I was going somewhere I’d never been before. I had no idea what to expect at all. And the work I had to do there was pretty much just to talk to people working with the FHI projects. I felt like I had no control whatsoever, no expectations at all, and all I could do was just go. Be. Trust. It was just me. And it was pretty exciting.

We arrived at our destination in the dark, but I could see the lights from the Congolese border about a thousand yards from the balcony of my hotel room. I bathed with a bucket in the bath tub because the plumbing was broken and I ordered the “African Dish without Meat” from the menu, which was potatoes and plantains and beans and spinach and rice…and pretty good.

The next morning I went to the FHI-Rusizi site office and met the coordinators and leaders who make these programs happen. I attended meetings of the youth and low-income women community group representatives. All week I spoke with people working in various roles with FHI’s ROADS program projects and tried to gather a greater understanding of exactly how they all work together to make this all happen and how this model of community programming works.

These individuals and their group members do peer education and community theater programs to teach their communities about HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, family planning, reproductive health, and voluntary counseling and testing; they do trainings in starting kitchen gardens to improve their nutritional intakes; they participate in income-generating activities so that women who had been sex workers can find other sources of income; and even work directly with current sex workers and the wives of truckers (who tend to be regular customers of sex workers, and thus high-risk to carry HIV and other STIs) to at least educate them about how to stay healthy. FHI provides assistance and funding for these programs, but mostly they focus on building up the capacity of these people in the communities so that the progress they make is sustainable and effective for these individuals and their unique situations. Development funding like FHI’s is tricky and can vanish in a minute, and so, as the country director told me, they just do as much as they possibly can today, give it their all, and hope that tomorrow they’ll be back. But if they’re not, then they can rest with the fact that they did the absolute most they could do yesterday and the day before and that they left these communities with something really worthwhile.

In the mornings as I rode to the office, I watched the fishermen going out in their boats to get their daily catch. And in the evenings, I watched the women walking down the road carrying loads of isambaza (tiny fish) on flat platters atop their heads as Lake Kivu glistened beside them in the warmth of glorious orange sun setting over Congo. And by Saturday I made the 5-hour journey back to the city, and back to the (somewhat) straighter roads.