Communities left in the darkness

Chronic lack of electricity is concern as eastern Congo tries to recover

(Liz Lucas photo)

At the Kotoni village community center, where the donated generator is damaged and the only illumination is from sunlight, are, from left to right: Richard Nguna Kagaba, Jean Ngabu Safari, and Malosi Lotsove. Kotoni villagers would be safer at night, Safari said, if there was light to let them see who was threatening them.

Coco McCabe, a resident of Ipswich, is a writer for Oxfam America, an international relief agency. Together with a small team from the organization’s communications and advocacy departments, she visited the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo to collect stories about Oxfam’s work in the region and to get a better understanding of the current situation for the Congolese people and their ongoing efforts for peace.

By Coco McCabe

March 19, 2008

GOMA, Congo -- I awoke at 4 a.m. the other morning in a darkness so complete that I had to work hard to get my bearings and remember where I was: in a bed at Hotel Beni New Look in Democratic Republic of Congo. The lights had blinked out at 11 p.m. -- and that was it. The TV in the restaurant across the way stopped blaring. The voices of revelers fell silent. All was suddenly still.

For many people, that’s what night is like here: absolute and black.

A few days earlier we had visited with villagers in Kotoni, a place of tiny mud-walled homes scattered along a bumpy dirt track. At mid-morning, light streamed through the windows and door of their small community center -- the only light there was. A solar-powered electrical system provided for the building by an aid organization a few years earlier had been hit by lightning and was defunct. Now in Kotoni, when night comes, there is no beating it back.

Light is what the villagers long for, said Malosi Lotsove, an outspoken woman who was among a group gathered in the community center. Sometimes, she said, the women will pool what little money they have to buy fuel for a generator, but those occasions are rare. Most of the time there is no electricity -- and that’s one of Kotoni’s biggest problems.

Part of it is a question of safety. In a region recently plagued by fits of violence -- and where armed men continue to loot civilians to get what they need -- security is a constant concern. Light would make Kotoni safer: Villagers would be able to see who was threatening them, said Jean Ngabu Safari, a local teacher.

Lying in the blackness at Hotel Beni, I imagined how unsettling it must be to live in a conflict zone not knowing who might burst through the door at any moment and invade your home. I imagined spending long dark hours listening hard for the sounds of footsteps and the rustling that would signal an intruder. Night without light becomes like an element -- like water or fire or air -- something with a force of its own.

But getting light to Kotoni -- or anywhere in the rugged hills around it -- will not be an easy task, particularly if the tenuous peace that has come to the region in recent months does not hold, and the law and order that’s so desperately needed does not follow. Along the road to Tchomia, a sprawling lakeside town about 40 miles from Kotoni, we passed one rusting tower after another. These are the remnants, our driver told us, of an effort by the US Agency for International Development to bring electricity to the area. All the wires that recently connected them have been cut down by thieves and sold.

In urban areas, the sound of night is the sound of generators roaring as they burn diesel to make electricity. Congolese rich enough to buy the fuel can have power for light, and for other comforts like computers and Internet access. Everyone else, it seems, is left in the dark -- with candles or lanterns to light their way.

How many people can afford the precious fuel in this country of 60 million that’s ranked 166 out of 177 countries on the United Nation’s Human Development Index? I think about the workers we saw along another road, this one leading to Lume. Hacking away with machetes at the tangle of bushes that threatened to swallow the road, they earn just $10 a month for their labors, enough to run a generator only about 6 hours.

In the dark at Hotel Beni, I waited for the morning to come, and as black faded to gray, I recognized a familiar sound: the slow scrape-swish of a broom on the hard earth. With the first inkling of light, someone was already up making use of it, sweeping away the detritus left from the day before.

For more information about Oxfam American and its work, please visit their website at www.oxfamamerica.org. For information on how you can contribute to the Passport blog, please contact the Globe's assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at K_Kaplan@globe.com.