From Rue Stanley to Stanley Livingstone

Hi everybody,



Portrait of Mr. H. Morton Stanley

 I start today this new blog, exactly one month after my entry into Congolese soil.

A new adventure that I would have never been able to foresee some months ago but that nevertheless I have embraced it with enthusiasm but also with pragmatism.

Yes, because, in order to work in a country like Congo DR (and there are not many of those countries, truth to be told), you need to be enthusiastic but also very pragmatic.

Stanley's Baobab

To sum up in few lines, Congo is like paradise in hell, the country is rich of every natural resource you might even think about (gold, iron, coltan, copper, uranium, diamonds ...you name it, you have it !!

However, the country became hell with a very small elite benefiting of that richness and the greatest part of the population living below the poverty line.

This is the most difficult part to accept: how can it be possible, in a country where fishes die of old age in the river Congo that people are starving and children are living undernourished, in a muddy hut located probably on an underground gold site?.

This happens for several reasons. For instance, imagine the richest and unexploited country in the world, one of the weakest government ever, absence of a well-trained and well-equipped army to defend your borders, huge surface extension (comparable to 1/4 of the US territory), no significant infrastructures and quite a number of "hungry" neighboring countries trespassing in your territory to help themselves with every kind of resources they need.

Stanley's journey from Zanzibar to Muanda

Well, that country, Ladies and Gentlemen, is Congo DR.

Said that, I mentioned the word "pragmatism" because you need a lot of it, considered the very scarce resources the UN has, in order to fund institution building and capacity building initiatives.

In practice, when you realise that you need to do "peacekeeping" and "conflict resolution" with almost no money, at all; there is where you start losing your enthusiasm and start acting pragmatic.

That means: you do what you can and you stop having that “I want to save the world” kind of ideas.

Idealism in this country does not help and it represents only your projection on how you would like this country to be.

Pragmatism is the only way to address real concerns from real people.

Definitely, these are my starting thoughts. Hope to keep them in the future.

Pietro