DRC – not just the Kivus!

I am currently working in the classic MSF post-conflict project. The history of conflict and war in the DRC is long, complex, and brutal and, as you can tell from the events still making the news, not yet over. The period between 1996 and 2003 in the DRC marks the bloodiest conflict in history since World War II with almost 4 million dead. Although I’m not going to get into details or pretend to understand the complexities of this conflict, I do want to share my thoughts on just what “Post-Conflict” means to me and to my current context.

Conflict in Katanga

While Katanga was less affected than the Kivu’s by this conflict, advancing rebel groups supported by the Rwanda army displaced thousands in the area. In response, the Congolese government armed village militias and these so-called Mai-Mai groups emerged as small groups dedicated to the protection of the population. The Mai-Mai was not a consolidated rebel group and mainly consisted of small pockets of resistance within a network of warlords and chiefs. As such, the Mai-Mai groups were not included in the Peace Agreements of 2003 and large areas of Katanga were left under their control. In principle, they were there for the protection of civilians. In reality, they were known undisciplined, abusive and ferocious fighters and the simple mention of Mai-Mai could empty villages.

In 2005, military action by the Congolese Army took place to remove the Mai-Mai from these areas and this led to heavy population displacement in much of the Katanga province (up to 400,000 people fled by the end of 2006!). After some time, one of the main Mai-Mai chiefs surrendered and, as the domination of the Mai-Mai in the area decreased, these Internally Displaced People (IDPs) started to return to their destroyed villages.

MSF opened the Shamwana Project in May of 2006 at the centre of one of these Mai-Mai controlled areas. At the time, there was really nothing here. Food was scarce and had to be shared with military. Villages were completed destroyed and people were living in grass huts and crowded camps. Water was taken from dirty streams and sanitation was poor. There was no health care and the existing ministry health centres were in bad shape.

Since then, things have started to get better and villages are starting to rebuild. While life has started again, the needs are absolutely huge, especially in the area of healthcare but also education, roads and food security.

A comment posted to one of my blog entries asked me just what does a logistician with MSF actually do?  That is a fair question and I thought that I could maybe elaborate a bit.

When I tell people that I work for MSF, it is often assumed that I must, therefore, be a doctor.  Here in Shamwana, we do have a doctor but that definitely isn’t me.  His name is Auguste, he’s from Congo Brazzaville and on top of emergency surgeries, doing rounds and being on call from time to time, he is responsible for running a 60 bed hospital in, lets say, less then ideal conditions.  He started his Sunday ‘off’ at 5:00 am with an emergency C-section and followed that by discharging 10 patients from the hospital because it’s malaria season and we just don’t have enough beds.  That was all before noon and that is definitely NOT what I do.

…but MSF is more than just doctors.  To complete the Shamwana expat team, we have an outreach nurse, a project coordinator, a mental health advisor, a lab technician, a water and sanitation specialist and me…the project logistician.  In fact, almost 40% of expat positions in MSF are non-medical.

MSF is an independent international medical relief organization and logistics is there to support the medical programs.  In theory, I do everything that is needed so that the medics can do their jobs.  The reality is that MSF doesn’t have a ‘logistics’ program on its own; however, without logistics the medical programs would simply grind to a halt.

It really is a wide range of things that fall under my responsibility.  Communications include VHF antennas and satellite phones.  I manage a medical stock worth a considerable amount of money with approximately 500 items all having different expiry dates and consumption rates.  We have 5 cars that need to be maintained, scheduled and, finally, driven.  The supply chain in Katanga starts in Amsterdam, involves sea freight, takes 4 months to arrive and is more than just a little headache.  We have refrigerators and coolers to keep vaccines cold.  We are way off the grid and use generators, solar panels and battery backup systems for power and lighting.  We have 7 laptops that seem to fail all too often and an expat team that knows relatively little about proper computer use.  We also plan to construct a tuberculosis ward, a new fuel store and a water tower in the coming months.

As you can imagine, my To Do list is literally 3 pages long and there aren’t many days without something in them to keep things exciting!

In practice, it is more about management than anything else.  Of the 68 national staff in the project, 25 fall under me.  This is not only the guards and drivers, but also storekeepers, a construction manager, a mechanic, my supply wizard and a radio operator.  I spent much more time delegating tasks and writing reports than actually getting grease on my hands and human resource management is a huge part of my job.

To borrow the words of a previous supervisor, it is my job to “get ‘er done”!  If the pumps breaks (as it did yesterday!) and I can fix it, that’s great.  If I can’t fix it then it is my job to find someone who can fix it…just get the damn pump working again!  That, in a nutshell, is what logistics is all about.