Internally Displaced Persons

Before I arrived in the Congo I knew only one word for people who have been forced from their homes and are living in camps: refugees. I have since learned there's another word, or rather, group of words: internally displaced persons (IDPs). IDPs are "refugees" who have been forced from their homes by conflict or violence within their own countries. In the mid-1990s, most of the "refugees" in the Congo were Rwandan Hutus who had fled their country in fear of Tutsi reprisals for the Hutu-led genocide. In July of 1994, nearly one million Rwandans took refuge in Goma, where subsequently outbreaks of cholera and dysentery claimed thousands of lives. Over the past 10 years hundreds of thousands of Rwandans have been repatriated, but continued conflict (involving forces from both within and outside D.R. Congo) means there are still enormous numbers of displaced people, many of whom have been forced from their homes multiple times.

I visited a number of IDP camps in the Congo, but near the North Kivu town of Nyanzale I visited four in one day. I traveled with an MSF epidemiologist named Nicodeme, who makes the rounds of the camps around Nyanzale to register the IDP population with the aim of preventing and limiting outbreaks of contagious disease (MSF also provides health services and maternity care). In a day I visited four camps in which more than 20,000 people live in huts they have built themselves from sticks, grass and mud. A number of NGOs provide services to the camps including water sanitation, latrine and shower construction, food distribution and medical services.

In each camp, I first met the elders, to explain my visit and to learn something of the problems facing the residents of each place. In general, the problems are the same: the violence continues, in the form of rapes and robberies, there is not enough water, and there is no one providing educational services to the children. "This generation is lost," said the president of one camp to me. The president of another camp (pictured), Pascal Barimuchabo, told me he had been displaced four times. He had come to the camp where I met him, in Kikuku, in January of 2007 with his wife and four children. His fifth child was born in the Kikuku camp and is now two years old. Pascal and his family live in a hut they have built that is around three square meters in size, divided into two "rooms". His last words to me were, "Pray for us."