The rock bottom for women and girls

“The status of women in the DRC is rock bottom,” a diplomat said to me. “It is truly, devastatingly worse here than anywhere else in the world.” She elucidated her comments with anecdote after anecdote of just how bad women have it. A recent study found that women work on average 17 hours a day and men work 7. This sounds not unlike elsewhere, where women work and take care of families, but the work here is hard; hard labor hard. Women carry backbreaking loads of goods and children, they toil in the fields under the blistering equatorial sun that splits stones and they are beaten by their husbands for not working hard enough. The diplomat also revealed the clueless, hapless world of the international community that cannot produce much evidence of  meaningful impact. Perhaps she was having a bad day. But I worry she wasn't.

This meeting reminded me where I am. The farce of capital city comfort almost got me. There were lots of discussions of issues in the abstract today, with mindless droning of some shameful UN agencies. “We issued an annual report on gender blah blah blah.” I’ve assuaged my guilt over comfort on this trip with reminders of the dues I’ve paid in Gulu and Juba and elsewhere. I may even still let myself off the hook a little bit. It’s ok that not every field trip I take consists of propelling myself on shoddy, crappy airplanes to the arse-end of nowhere to get up close and personal with human suffering.

But perhaps I can do better. When I returned to the office this evening, I made it my mission to tweak my agenda slightly. “Can we ask some of these groups if it would be possible to meet with their beneficiaries?” I worried a bit about overstepping the hospitality of my colleagues, but I suppressed my fretting. This was my shot to speak to a few women and girls here in Kinshasa who suffer the world’s worst poverty and inequity. Their world cannot be substituted by visits to refugee camps in Yei or secondary schools in Pader. I must meet women here.

I also met the Minister of Gender today. She was a fabulous woman who towered over me, dressed to the 9s in an exquisitely tailored dress. I didn’t have high expectations of the meeting, because many leaders here are unabashed patrons of power. However, she gave me some hope. She outlined her priorities and chief among them was to get out into the local communities. Programming at national or even provincial level was not enough. We needed to get to the mango tree.

As always, the mango tree is my touchstone. It propels me and engages my sense of what is responsible development programming. Although I may not bump up and down on roads thousands of kilometers from nowhere on this trip, I think I can do better. I must try.