“The bridge is down” “Yes”, I said, “I have to take a boat along the lakeshore to get back onto the main road. It’s been organised by OCHA.”
Blank incomprehension from my friend. “Boat? In Morobo?. The bridge is down just near the Uganda border”. There isn’t a lake anywhere near there.
“Aha”, I said, “I’m not talking about South Sudan this time; this bridge is on the road to Baraka in Congo. And the boat runs along the shores of Lake Tanganyika bypassing the area where the road is cut”.
The rain is falling incessantly in both the places where I am working now, Southern Sudan and South Kivu in Congo. Two months ago everyone was wringing their hands over the drought. As always the variation in weather in Africa over two months is far larger that any change global warming will throw our way. I already live in places where the temperature never falls below 25° and often goes up to 40°. We’re used to it.
It’s pouring down all over Uganda as well. Lake Victoria is said to have risen a foot in a month (though this figure, which would seem to be quite easy to measure, is just as disputed as the contention that - unnoticed by thousands of fishermen and millions of citizens around the lake - it fell 3 metres over the last few years, severely reducing the electricity supply throughout the region).

This time we had agreed that I would be picked up at the Congo-Burundi border as War Child’s car couldn’t reach Uvira or Bujumbura because of the broken bridge. This meant that I crossed the border on foot and not by car. Once again, I thought that it should be compulsory for all expatriates and senior politicians to cross borders on foot, or take a road journey to know what is really going on. When I crossed by NGO car, no one checked my bags or gave me any trouble. When I crossed on foot, the Congo customs opened all my bags, despite the fact there was nothing you could carry into Congo that could do more harm than what is already happening in the country.
I was also asked for my Yellow Vaccination Card, a requirement abolished in most countries of the world. Again, what possible disease could I be bringing into Congo that did not already exist here?
The yellow card is the cause of a lot of problems for ordinary African travellers who find themselves being asked for it by ordinary policemen in the middle of nowhere, who will demand a bribe if you don’t have it. Of course, the principal result of this lack of control is that everyone, fearing getting AIDS from an injection, just buys a ready completed yellow card (conveniently available just behind the vaccination office under that mango tree over there).
So, it’s similar to getting your passport in Mogadishu where, at the collapse of the government 15 years ago, one man fled with the passport books but another fled with the Ministry’s embossing stamp. Both have set up shop in the market, and you need to see both to get your passport. Again just as with the yellow card it is remarkably quick and convenient. It rarely takes more than an hour, unless youinsist on an already used one (it has more credibility).
Unfortunately these days not many countries accept Somali passports and they will have probably have problems when biometric passports come in.
OK I was stopped at customs, but I was brought to the head of the queue, thus giving everyone a chance to see what I had in my luggage. Once, crossing into SPLA controlled territory with a Kenyan Indian researcher, we were stopped by two very young-looking soldiers in flip-flops who demanded to see inside Dr Anisa’s luggage. They pulled out her bras and panties one by one, handled them, held them up to the sun. Obviously never having seen anything like them in their years in the bush war. Meanwhile, they ignored all the things like the video equipment which we thought they would have concentrated on.
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I am now finally in Baraka after flying to Bujumbura, taking a taxi to the border, travelling with Ciceron and Alimasi – as pillion passengers - in a convoy of ‘boda-boda’ motor bikes into Uvira, then on a rubber Zodiac boat to Kigongo where Ben picked us up in the War Child pick-up. A train would have complemented the trip but the railway that existed in colonial times has long disappeared. There are just a few rails to mark its existence.

The middle of Africa, up and down the western Rift Valley where if you spill a glass of water, or piss for that matter, on the top of the escarpment, part of the liquid will flow to the Congo and thence to the Atlantic and the rest into the Mediterranean, courtesy of the Nile.
This watershed is interrupted by volcanoes and takes some crazy turns on the map caused by very recent rises and falls of the landscape, including volcanic eruptions. The result is that the Great Lakes also drain in unexpected ways. Lake Kivu ends up in the Congo passing through Lake Tanganyika on the way. Lake Victoria and Lake Albert end up in the Nile.
No wonder the explorers were confused about the source of the Nile, especially as the Nile adds a few extra kinks just to confuse. On my last flight from Juba to Entebbe we crossed the Nile six times on a straight trajectory north to south. In South Sudan the Nile’s present course is so recent that there is hardly any valley, just a small furrow in the landscape. Just a kilometre away from the Nile you can’t even detect its existence.

I work now in both Southern Sudan and eastern Congo (South Kivu). What there is in common is that both are areas recovering from wars. In Congo the war was more violent, and more rapid. In South Sudan, in their quiet, slow war, the main problem was isolation and a slowing down of the pace of life.
However, both were destructive in their own way. A figure much bandied around in Congo by agencies and politicians is that 3 million extra people died because of the wars in eastern Congo, some as a direct result of fighting, but most because of the collapse of medical services and of law and order. Politicians like to claim that the war killed 3 million people as they blame the ex-rebels who are now standing for political posts in the coming elections.
In Southern Sudan there were six million people in the census in the early eighties (including me). Most people believe that by the mid-nineties only 2 million remained in the south, 2 million had fled and 2 million died who shouldn’t have.
I have always said, never believe any figure ending in three zeroes, especially if it comes from a UN body or an NGO. It is usually plucked out of the sky.
So what about these figures ending in six zeroes? Well, certainly, it is impossible to verify them. I have a close knowledge of certain parts of the Southern Sudanese population, originating in Equatoria. I taught the parents and now know the children and I have to say that one third of them have certainly been in exile (probably more), another third are in a strange limbo, sometimes in, sometimes out (it is a border area) but I could not justify a claim that one third of them died. That would mean that of the six hundred students we had in our first year in Juba Day Secondary school, 200 had died. Even allowing for the normal death rate, and for specific cases I know about, such as one executed for some infraction when he became an SPLA officer, and the baby of one of my ex-clerks who died from his father’s drunken neglect, and a group of wild life officers executed by the Arabs in 1992 for suspected sympathy with the SPLA incursion into Juba (which left lasting resentment, as the SPLA didn’t follow through, so many were punished when they withdrew). I cannot say that I know that one third died.
In Congo, through knowledge of people I work with, the ‘extra deaths’ theory would seem to be more plausible. The mother of one of my trainers was the only one of nine Hema women captured by the Lendus one day who was not hacked to death. There are huge areas where there has been no modern medical care for years, even preceding the war. Still, three million ….
I do not think these ‘what if’ scenarios have much use.
Of course, statistics are bothersome even at the best of times. A couple of years ago UNICEF conducted a very detailed multi-indicator household survey in many parts of DR Congo. One of the questions was about the vaccinations children had received. Over the country the figure averaged out that about 40% of parents reported that their children had been vaccinated against polio (higher in the cities).
At exactly the same time, the joint WHO and UNICEF national polio vaccination campaign was reporting between 90 and 105% success (the latter figure in areas with more people than the baseline showed because of displacement by war)..

And then, what about the fact that most school attendance statistics in Africa do not include refugees? So, for Somalia and South Sudan where MOST of the children in some border areas are educated in another country the figures of school attendance are consistently under-reported. In Gedo Region in Somalia we counted the children in school and in the camps and main nearby towns in Kenya and concluded that UNICEF’s statistics were reporting only half the real school attendance figures.
Or the case of Congo where the primary age bracket is, at 6 – 14 a period of 8 years. But primary school is only six years long. So school attendance percentages are consistently wrong and under-reported by as much as a third.

After very different types of peace settlement, both areas where I work are destinations for refugees returning after years in exile. In both places the refugees had a better time in their camps and settlements than those who stayed and had to face rebels, bombings, starvation and deprivation. There is a difference though. In Congo, the country is rich, but even with peace, it is difficult to see how this wealth will get to the ordinary person, because it is being corruptly managed at the highest national and international levels.
In South Sudan, the peace deal allocated a lot of oil money to the South, which will probably reach some people in the form of salaries, but otherwise the country has no natural resources at all. As so often in areas which have money from only one resource which costs relatively little to produce (notably oil) other parts of the economy will be depressed

On a more domestic front, Echo and Bravo, my two dogs in Uganda have been joined by six puppies (16% of whom died by falling into the pit latrine). I hope most of them will have been taken over by those who claim to want them by next week. Otherwise I will be overwhelmed.