Photo: A scene from IC’s Rehabilitation Center in DRC

Invisible Children opened the doors of its Rehabilitation Center in Dungu, DRC, this past September.

This photo, taken inside the IC Rehab Center, shows a teenage girl talking with her counselor, Catherine. After both her parents were killed, this girl was abducted by the LRA and spent 3 months with them. She’s now living in one of the region’s large displacement camps, and her road to recovery will be a long one. This is her first session; her nightmares have been terrible, and she can’t even speak about the LRA.

This girl is just one person of many who have been severely traumatized by the LRA and need intensive therapy. The IC Rehabilitation Center currently has 9 patients, and we are constantly implementing the next stages of development as we secure funding and anticipate patients’ needs.

Don’t worry: we’ll definitely keep you updated as the Center develops.

An inside look into IC’s work in Congo

Construction of the Rehabilitation Center is underway!

David, one of Invisible Children Uganda’s Schools for Schools (S4S) Engineers, is headed off to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) this week.  Once there, he’ll continue working with our IC staff as well as the Congolese people to finish the Rehabilitation Center.  David has been in Congo for the past month, and he briefly came back to Gulu, northern Uganda, where we had the chance to catch up with him. (more…)

Oxfam: 90 percent of people in LRA areas of Congo still live in fear

Photo courtesy of Oxfam

As we continue our work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s studies like this one from Oxfam that confirm the sense of urgency we feel to protect those who are living in constant fear of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Residents of eastern provinces left feeling abandoned, isolated and vulnerable

Kinshasa (MMD Newswire) August 2, 2011 – - In a new protection survey undertaken by Oxfam in areas affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the majority of people said they feel less safe in 2011 than they did last year.

This is Oxfam’s fifth such annual protection assessment in eastern Congo since 2007, but the first time that such a comprehensive survey has been conducted in the areas affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

In the region of Haut-Uélé in Province Orientale near the border with South Sudan, 62 per cent feel less secure, 28 per cent feel security threats remain the same, and only 10 per cent feel that their security has improved.

The communities surveyed painted a grim picture of a continuing cycle of poverty and violence. People said that they feel completely abandoned and believe that neither their government nor UN peacekeepers care about their security. In seven out of nine communities surveyed in LRA areas, UN peacekeepers were said to be not patrolling enough in the most important places, such as in fields and roads to markets.

A person interviewed in Haut-Uélé said: “Our future is dark. We are scared all the time. The LRA continue to kill us and burn our houses down. We have a family that has been staying with us for a week, after they fled Doruma, where the LRA have been abducting day and night. We are not safe here.”

Read the entire article here.

Find out more about Invisible Children’s plan to protect the people of eastern Congo here.

“If anyone ever doubts evil… Look at Kony.”

This weekend U.S. General Cater Ham announced that America will be joining in the hunt for Kony. Wait, weren’t we already? Yes and no. Gen. Ham’s blueprint for the US military’s involvement with Africa’s longest running war was covered by the Daily Monitor, check it out below. And don’t skip the last paragraph. -LE

via Daily Monitor

The United States Military has pledged to join the imminent hunt for Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, by providing logistics and surveillance support to the militaries of Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic who are preparing for the exercise.

Addressing journalists at the US Africa Command base in Stuttgart, Germany, Gen. Carter Ham, the new Africom Commander, said the US military will encourage and facilitate the coordination between the three primary countries who are engaged in the exercise, encourage and foster the sharing of information that can be useful to the parties involved.

“As you know, this is the hunt for one man with a small number of his followers in a very extensive geographic area,” Gen. Carter said, adding, “So it is kind of tough. It requires very precise information which can be provided by people from his area of operation or from his camp.”

(more…)

Peace and Conflict: The Packing List

Mission Department Director, Adam Finck, recently returned from the Congo. Before he left we had the chance to get “The Packing List”. Here’s an inside look, inside his bag:

1. First Aid Kit- Just in case.

2. French to English Dictionary

3. Moleskin- Holds a trip’s worth of field notes.

4. Outlet adapter

5. Cliff Bar- On the go meal replacements.

6. Camelhide Messenger

7. Kindle- A month-long battery and countless books will turn any ebook skeptic into Kindle convert.

8. Cipro – When the going gets rough..

9. ID tag

10/11. International cell phone and charger- Useful for cross border SIM-swapping.

12. French-translated IC media

13. Canon 5D with 50mm 1.2 lens – lightweight and great in low light.

14. Business cards

15. 1TB External hardrive – For media assets from the field.

16. RayBans – keep the dust out

17. Passport and DRC Visa – No passport/visa, no trip.

18. Water purification tablets – to avoid item #8

19. Satellite phone- the only way to reach home base in remote areas.

20. One-hand Trekker Swiss Army knife- Useful in life

21. Regional Maps- no google maps makes hard copies crucial.

22. MacBook Pro & Incase pocket

23. Saddleback passport wallet- Holds passport, credit card, currencies, and ID

24. Official papers- Ordre de Mission, travel itineraries, flight maps, and other useful documents

Peace and Conflict: Breaking Ground on the Rehab Center

Last year more than 650 children were abducted in northeastern DR Congo and with no professional psychosocial support systems to facilitate their reintegration back into society, children who have experienced high levels of trauma face extreme difficulties upon their return home. To address this area of great need, Invisible Children broke ground on the first rehabilitation center for LRA-affected communities in northeastern Congo last month. A few days ago we received the first pictures from the refurbishment of the main administrative and rehabilitation block that will facilitate much of the treatment for children who have experienced trauma at the hands of the LRA as former abductees.

As always, we’ve partnered with local Congolese leaders to work alongside to ensure that this project maintains cultural integrity and sensitivity to maximize the project’s effectiveness.

Here are the original plans that we received from local engineers working with our partner organizations the Commission of the Diocese for Justice and Peace.

Our Director of Congo Initiatives, James De Le Vingne worked for 2 years managing IC’s Schools for Schools program in Uganda. Below are the plans that he and the team of Schools for Schools engineers worked on for the center, as well as correspondence regarding the center he recently wrote to our staff in the US.

“The good news is that construction of the center is well under way; your dollars are now transforming a dilapidated skeleton of a building into what will soon be a hub for rebuilding lives. Despite the many challenges of working and living in Dungu, we’re making rapid progress. Construction is providing much needed jobs for internally displaced persons who commute from nearby camps each day to work as part of the huge workforce needed to make the center a reality. If all goes to plan, the centers doors should open in late July.”

Visit our blog next week where we will post video of the center’s construction.

-Sean

Guardian: Worst places for women to live

As if we really needed another reason to start partnerships in the Congo other than the LRA.

Adam Finck, our Director of Programs in central Africa, gave a training session yesterday about our collaborations. Adam mentioned that one of IC’s markers for success in the Congo is “putting ourselves out of a job.” Now to most, that sounds crazy. To us- we know its crucially fundamental to our organization. What Adam meant by that is- IC will be ’successful’ when all the various research we are collecting and protection strategies we are helping implement are being used by the U.N., Congress, DDRRR Congo, etc. The infrastructure of the strategies is versatile, so it doesn’t have to be used only for the LRA. It can be used to track and stop other atrocities (like the one below).

Pretty long intro for an article, I know. Sorry I’m not sorry. I just love our organization people. – LE

The Worst Places in the World for Women: Congo
By Jack Kahorha

The price of womanhood came brutally to Odette, born in a wartorn country often dubbed “the rape capital of the world”.

The 18-year-old from Minova recalls the day that members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), came to her village in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and scarred her life for ever.

“FDLR militia attacked our village, looted and burned houses,” says Odette, who does not give her surname. “My father was burnt in one of the houses and my mother was raped and killed.

“I was taken away by the militia for seven months. Every day, I was obliged to have sex with any of them until I managed to escape.” (more…)

From Wired: Obo village vs. the LRA

We were honored to make the front page of Wired this morning with a four-page spread featuring the FM radio project that Invisible Children recently funded—with your help—through the Protection Plan in the Central African Republic (CAR).

The upside: It gives great coverage to a much needed issue in a very under-served area. When we were last in Obo, there was no UN presence, no peacekeeping troops, and almost zero humanitarian response – despite massive displacement and a constant threat by the LRA. For all the shortcomings of this article, we’re glad that the LRA-affected communities of CAR are finally getting some solid press.

via Wired

Local Defense Units / / Obo, C.A.R. from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

An old woman had died. Before burying the her, the residents of the village of Obo — in southern Central African Republic, just north of the Congolese border — gathered around a campfire to eat, drink, cry and sing in celebration of the woman’s long life. It was a night in March 2008, just another beat in the slow rhythm of existence in this farming community of 13,000 people.

Then the dreadlocked fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group — tongo-tongo, the villagers call them — rose from their hiding places in the shadows and advanced toward the fire. Others blocked the paths leading from town. The rebels killed anyone who resisted, kidnapped 100 others and robbed everyone in sight.

Keep reading, and don’t skip pages 2 or 3.

The heart of bleakness

via  Viceland

Walking through the jungle in the dead of night with a group of Rwandan rebels best known for their expertise at rape and murder wasn’t exactly what we had planned for our first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. All we wanted was to make a little film about the controversy surrounding the so-called conflict minerals that make our cell phones work, drop a couple Conrad references, and drink a Primus. Just one Primus.

A week earlier, our team landed at N’Djili International Airport in the capital of Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville. The place looks like it hasn’t had a scrub since Muhammad Ali dropped by for the Rumble in the Jungle in the early 1970s. After having our yellow-fever cards checked for the first time in our well-traveled lives, we ran a gauntlet of sweaty police officers and other officials—each with his own laundry list of infractions that we had apparently already committed. In an amazing stroke of luck, they were willing to overlook all these violations for a small fine, payable in person, to them.

We’d come to Congo to try to find out more about the developed world’s thirst for coltan, cassiterite, and the other colorfully named minerals that make the electronics industry go round. These are part of a group of natural resources that have been dubbed “conflict minerals” because of the alphabet soup of armed groups (FARDC, CNDP, FDLR, PARECO, etc.) who have found them a very portable and highly profitable way to fund their activities—which mostly consist of killing people. Since 1996, these guerrilla insurgencies have led to the deaths of more than 5 million people, and in one particularly horrific year—2006—the rape of approximately 400,000 women. (more…)

The Congo goes green

The Congo has caught the “go green” bug. The government has decided to ban the production, distribution and use of plastic bags all throughout the country. The litter in the streets due to the grocery bags has gotten out of hand and the bags are clogging the sewer drains. Who knew San Francisco and the DRC would have so much in common?  - LE