Through the rain, mud and hardship

December 21, 2010 7:39 pm by Emily Sloane

Repairing the road

The road to Nyabibwe just keeps getting worse. Minova and Kalehe, the bases I divide my time between, are only 45km and 35km, respectively, away from Nyabibwe. But on this road, distance is relative. Traversing this 80km stretch in our sturdiest 4 x 4 takes five hours – on a good day. In other words, you have the time to take in the countryside.

From Minova, the “road” skirts Lake Kivu for a long spell. Four months of rainy season have taken their toll, but the potholes and mudflats along this initial, flat stretch are relatively benign compared to what’s ahead.

Rounding the bend after the coastal village of Mukwija, Nyabibwe confronts you from an imposing ridge, its tin roofs and communication towers taunting from their perch, 400 meters above the lake. From here, you begin to climb – up what soon becomes more river than road. Without any outlet, the considerable rainfall that works its way downhill from the high country traces this path, gouging out crevasses in the dirt as it plunges towards the lake.

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Protecting the banana nursery

December 17, 2010 6:39 pm by Emily Sloane

A field of banana plants

We are sitting on the lawn of an aging coffee plantation, the ruins of a once-imperial stone manor from the colonial era before us. The chairs are arranged in a line, all facing one direction, taking advantage of the thin strip of shade at the edge of the grass. Here, less than two degrees south of the equator, people shy away from direct sunlight. Colourful umbrellas dot the rural landscape on a cloud-free day; farmers even carry them into the fields where they sow beans and dig up taro root.

The line formation of the chairs bothers me, so I move my chair out of the shade, to inspire a slightly more participatory feel. We are here to meet with the members of a banana wilt committee and a regional chief. Someone has stolen some of the wooden planks and plastic sheeting from the banana nursery that the committee built with ACF’s guidance, and the committee believes it was a local job. Although this is the first such incident, the members’ morale is suffering; they’re worried that their efforts to propagate disease-free bananas are largely unappreciated by their neighbours. We are here to remind them that banana wilt is a community problem that warrants a collective solution, and to work with the chief to find ways to encourage the local population to help the committee with its tasks, such as watering and transplanting.

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The banana wilt committee

November 30, 2010 6:42 pm by Emily Sloane

The banana wilt committee

I had just arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo to find the wilt committee was waiting for me before harvesting the first bunch of bananas; it hardly seemed right. The committee members, along with our extension workers and the Food Security Program manager who preceded me, had done all of the work that made this moment possible – training community members on banana wilt eradication, digging up infected fields, installing and caring for a macro propagation unit and the resulting banana shoots.

As a year-round source of income and a highly nutritional food staple, the banana represents an irreplaceable part of local livelihoods here in eastern DRC. Or at least it did, before the arrival a few years ago of a bacterial disease that has since been decimating banana fields along the western shores of Lake Kivu, where I am based.

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