June in Congo

A month has gone by, and still no decision on our salary and job function scales! The team in Paris who should validate these has been decimated lately by illness and family problems. Hopefully, the team will be complete next week so that we can get some decisions. I need to put the changes into our human resources management system, and then I have to make a tour of the projects to explain the changes, all before the end of June.

And it is going to be difficult to find the time. My finance collegue just returned from her break in France, and she must go out to the field all of this week to finalize the budget revision - she is also under time pressure. So I am covering for her. And my own two assistants are at the MSF-France general assembly for the moment, so I am covering for them too. It’s pretty hectic. But it is the same for all of us. When I leave on vacation for the month of August, my finance collegue is going to suffer!

For the moment, security here in Goma is changing for the worst. There have been a couple of attacks on some of the other big Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) here in the las couple of months, and these robberies were very violent. About 80 homes were burned and looted this past week in one part of town. And at 8:00pm last night as I was preparing to leave the office for the house, there were a few gunshots just behind the office. The guards actually saw the bullet traces go over our compound.

But this is still very calm next to the towns where we have our programs. The people living in the compound in Rutshuru spent part of last night in the security room due to shooting. In Kayna, this happens fairly regularly (as it did when I was there in 2005-2006). The attacks are usually attributed to one armed faction or another. The soldiers are paid sporadically and they have guns, so the take what they need. For various reasons, the unemployment here is very high, and MSF is known to pay our staff rather well. This makes our people good targets for bandits, and aggressions against them are rather common.

Our head of mission and medical coordinator get back this week from strategy meetings and the general assembly in Paris. We will have all the project coordinators here in Goma next weekend with us, to hear the results of these meetings and to plan the process of achieving the strategies. We are all looking forward to hearing which of our proposals were accepted and which were not.