"I could never do that."

How often have you heard people say, or said yourself, "Oh, I could never do that."

In the course of showing my photos of the Congo to friends, I've heard more than one person say those words, or words like them. My friends seem to think they could never survive being shot in the leg, or that they could never build and live in their own grass and reed hut, or collect water and food every day in order to prepare that day's meals.

My friends are wrong, of course. Hundreds of millions of people do those things every day, because if you have no choice ... you have no choice.

Are we in the developed world "soft"? Yes, most of us are. We worry about trivia, because we have nothing worse to worry about. We convince ourselves we can't do things, because, if the going gets too tough we can always climb back into our BMWs and Audis, turn up the heater (and CD player), pick up a coffee at Starbucks, and have a hot shower when we get home, before deciding between ordering Chinese or pizza for dinner.

When you have no choice, things are simpler. If you have to collect 20 liters of water per day per person in your family, you know you need to wake up early and get moving with that 5-liter jug. If your child is sick and the nearest health clinic or hospital is 20 kilometers away, and there are no buses or other transport, you know you need to start walking.

If you had to run out of your house right now because drugged and drunken gunmen were attacking your community, indiscriminately spraying automatic weapons fire, and you had to hide in the woods for three days without food, returning to find that your home had been burned to the ground and you'd been left with nothing but the clothes on your back, could you handle that? You probably could.

Home, Sweet Home

Before I came to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a refugee camp, in my mind's eye, comprised orderly rows of blue United Nations-supplied tents, perhaps even including an Internet cafe tent, and Silvio Berlusconi wandering around in expensive loafers, an expensive sweater draped over his shoulders and a fake look of concern pasted onto his face.

The Congolese reality is somewhat different. "Camp" simply means "place where people have started to live together, for (often illusory) security and because aid (food/medical) distribution more easily finds large groups of refugees".

Refugees/IDPs build their own huts, from sticks and grass and mud, and hope that aid organizations will eventually build toilets and water sanitation facilities (and distribute food). The plastic sheeting that covers some huts is (as far as I heard and could see) no longer distributed by the U.N. (perhaps this distribution is done only during "emergencies" ... not sure) – those who have plastic sheeting were given it years ago, or bought it from others.

The huts are tiny, only a few square meters (in which it is impossible to stand upright), sometimes divided into two sections, one for "living" (cooking/eating) and one for sleeping. Families of up to half a dozen (and sometimes more) adults and children live in these huts, and when you look inside, you can understand why the MSF medical teams encounter so many burn victims; cooking is done inside the huts as well, either over a small open stove (rocks on which a pot can be rested over charcoal) or a small oven (sculpted from mud).

Not a pair of Ferragamo loafers in sight ...