Injustice

So… we’ve been here for 5 days so far and I love it! This is the first time we’ve been able to access the internet but to be honest, it really hasn’t mattered. Being cut off from the outside world is a pretty accurate picture of life here in the DRC. For the last couple of days we’ve been mainly visiting agricultural projects in Bas Congo (the region South of Kinshasa) seeing how local people are being helped by horticultural education to improve crop efficiency and how cows and ploughs have helped whole communities really improve their lives. This sounds so cliquéd but I have been astounded by how the small things like 4 day agricultural training programmes are really helping the Congolese people to learn about and effectively be able to put into place techniques which we have known about for years.

However, despite poverty in which they are clearly living I am finding it so difficult to see these smiling, friendly and hugely hospitable people as impoverished purely because their joy and laughter are shining through. We have been made to feel so welcome by every person we have met and every village we have driven through. The Congolese people are incredible and I feel so undeserving of their love for it is us in the West who are keeping these people poor. It is such an injustice that we will be flying back in a week to our comfortable homes, our full fridges and our lives full of variety and choice whilst the people we have seen will continue to live from hand to mouth for the foreseeable future. It is just so unfair that we have so much and they have so little and I can’t wait to get back home and start telling people about the DRC and about what we can do to help these wonderful people.