Immunization Project 2014
Each
year the SE Africa Area Welfare Manager, headquartered in Johannesburg, South
Africa, polls the humanitarian missionaries to find out what projects they
might like to do the following year. He
takes this input into consideration, makes his recommendations to the Area
Presidency, and the Presidency then issues the Area Plan which the humanitarian
missionaries are expected to follow.
When
we arrived in the DRC on January 11, 2014 we became aware of the 2014 Area
Plan. We noticed that there was an
Immunization Project in Congo-Brazzaville identified in the Area Plan, but not
for Congo-Kinshasa (DRC) where we are posted.
However, in February we were contacted by Van and Marie Christensen of
Idaho Falls who indicated that they were the Immunization Specialists for the
DRC, having served as humanitarian missionaries in the DRC in 2005-07 during
the Civil War, and that they would be coming to the DRC in late March to
support an immunization campaign there. We
thought that the situation was rather confusing, and so set up a Skype session
with them in which they indicated that they knew nothing about an immunization
campaign in Congo-Brazzaville but that there were really four measles/polio
campaigns sponsored by the Ministry of Public Health happening in the DRC this
year—one already underway in Katanga province (Lubumbashi) in the SE part of
the DRC; one in the Kasai provinces (Kananga and Mbjui Mayi) in the central
part of the country scheduled for late May; one in Kinshasa scheduled for late
July; and one in the Bas-Congo, the extreme western part of the country,
scheduled sometime thereafter.
The Christensens
indicated that they were coming for two purposes: to train priesthood leaders
how to select and train local church volunteers to go door to door in their
neighborhoods to encourage parents to have their children vaccinated in
neighborhood public health centers; and also to orchestrate a donation of
$20,000 worth of printed materials or other supplies to the Ministry and other campaign
partners. We could participate in as
much or as little of the project as we wished, as we were not obligated to get
involved; our participation was welcome but not really needed. We indicated that we would be happy to be
involved and to assist if needed.
Over
the next few weeks we followed the email correspondence in which the
Christensens attempted to set up training sessions in the Kasai provinces and
in Kinshasa. The Area Welfare Manager
surprised both us and the Christensens by telling them that they should take us
with them when they did their training in Mbuji Mayi. We dutifully calendared the Christensens’
three scheduled meetings in Kinshasa plus the dates scheduled for a trip to
Mbjui Mayi, but truly thought that our involvement would be as passive
observers only. Somewhere along the line
we learned that Marie Christensen was raised in Belgium with French as her
native language so clearly she was the principal spokesman for the project. Apparently
the Christensens had returned to the DRC in 2010 to do a similar project but which
was not successful because the government cancelled the campaign after the
Christensens did the training.
The
Christensens arrived in Kinshasa on Saturday, March 22 and installed themselves
in the Hotel Leon nearby our apartment.
Sunday was ward conference in Limete where our site monitor Eddy Matondo
is the new bishop. He had invited us to
attend conference, and as the Christensens remembered Eddy from their mission
in Kinshasa, they agreed to accompany us.
It was wonderful to see Eddy in action.
Afterwards we provided lunch and got better acquainted. We learned that Marie and Van had each gone
through a nasty divorce but found each other through church Single Adult
activities in Idaho Falls about 15 years ago.
We have found so many missionary couples are on their second marriages.
At 3 p.m. we went to
the GB building to meet with the Area 70s and Stake Presidents. Van and Marie
gave a presentation on how the church members could be involved in the project.
We were introduced to Laurent Kassa, a member of the Kintambo Ward, who has
been called to be the local coordinator of the project. The Stake Presidents were asked to call a
coordinator in their stakes and to ask the Bishops to call a coordinator in
their wards. Brother Kassa’s job was to teach
the stake and ward coordinators how to train the 40-plus volunteers that
hopefully would be identified in each ward to go door to door in their
neighborhoods just before and during the actual campaign periods. The Christensens spent much time explaining
the dangers of measles and polio but also explaining that the volunteers were
not to argue with parents who declined to have their children vaccinated and
were certainly not to proselyte for the Church.
On
Tuesday March 24 we and the Christensens spent several hours in the small
conference room adjacent to our office to train Brother Kassa in how to
accomplish his calling. He seemed very
timid and unsure of himself, and we were concerned that he was not up to the
task. We could begin to see how
monumental and time-consuming this assignment might be. Fortunately, Brother Kassa works in the
health field as an instructor at a nursing school, but he needed to learn how
and what to teach the stake and ward representatives.
The morning of
WednesdayMarch 25 we, the Christensens, and Brother Kassa all met with
representatives of a partner organization, the World Health Organization (the
chief physician’s name was Dr. Obama), to talk about the campaign, followed by
a meeting with the top two head physicians of PEV (Programme Elargi de
Vaccination), the division of the Ministry of Public Health that is actually
conducting the campaign. Not
surprisingly all of these meetings started about an hour later than scheduled,
although I was surprised to learn that the dates of the campaign were still
somewhat uncertain, as were the locations of the centers where parents could
get their children vaccinated.
Fortunately, the principal players remembered the Christensens from 2010. The Christensens then explained what the
church’s involvement would be this year, including the volunteers’ assignments
and the monetary contribution the Church was prepared to make to the campaign
as a whole.
The next few days the
Christensens were busy getting bids on printing banners (to put on church
buildings and elsewhere throughout the areas where the campaign would be
concentrated), badges for church member volunteers to wear when they went out
door to door in their neighborhoods, flyers for the volunteers to give to their
neighbors, and on the megaphones that the PEV insisted would be useful in
notifying the public of the campaign.
Friday March 28 we all
met again at the PEV offices with representatives of all of the partner organizations. By this time the Christensens had the bids
and therefore could begin planning the number of banners they could offer to
PEV, and how many should be printed in the
national languages of Tshiluba, Lingala and Mikongo (nothing would be
printed in Swahili, the language of Katanga province, because the campaign
there was already over), as well as the number of megaphones to deliver to PEV.
On Saturday the
Christensens put on another major training session for each of the stake
representatives. It was supposed to
start at 10 a.m., then it was moved to 1 p.m. but didn’t actually start until
2:30 p.m., and the last straggler didn’t show up until 4:00 p.m. Brother Kassa was invited to do a part of the
training, but still seemed somewhat weak.
I translated for Van when he gave his portion of the program, but
otherwise Glo and I continued to stay in the far background. We viewed our job as simply transporting the
Christensens where they needed to go and being a local presence.
On April 1 we
accompanied the Christensens to the Kinshasa airport for the trip to Mbuji
Mayi, the fourth largest city in the DRC and which is situated in the province
of East Kasai, where they intended to put on a training program. Neon, a member of the Ngaliema Stake high
council, drove our truck to the airport and Antoine helped us through the
madhouse of chaos and confusion that is the Kinshasa airport. I did enjoy seeing a local chief sporting an
extremely large feathered hat on the airplane.
The trip took about 90 minutes, although we lost an hour in a time zone
change. We had to wait about an hour in the sweltering sun
at the Mbuji Mayi airport before we were cleared to leave. Unfortunately we had not been told that we
needed to bring our yellow fever immunization cards with us, so we were very
concerned that we would have to pay substantial fines before being allowed to
board the airplane for the return trip to Kinshasa.
We got installed
comfortably in our hotel, although it had no running water for the entire 48
hours that we were there. We then went
to the church’s District Office to meet with the District President and his counselors
to explain the training program scheduled for the next day with priesthood
leaders from Mbuji Mayi and the cities of Luputa, Gandajika and Muene
Ditu. In the evening we went to the
hotel where the Luputa and Gandajika brethren were staying. We learned of their great devotion to the
cause, as illustrated by the 6-hour journeys on foot, motorbike and local bus
that they each endured just to get to Mbjuji Mayi. That evening an employee of the Church’s
Facilities Management department took us on a tour of Mbjuji Mayi, which was
the center of the important diamond industry when the DRC was a Belgian colony.
The next day we enjoyed
a walking tour of Mbuji Mayi before participating in the afternoon training
session. My involvement was simply to be
friendly to all of the priesthood leaders in attendance and then to translate
for Van and Gloria who each had brief comments.
We returned to Kinshasa the following day, fortunately without having to
pay a fine for not having our immunization cards. That evening the Christensens boarded their
return flight to the US. Little did I
know then that my involvement in the project was just beginning; I hadn’t
grasped how much running around I would need to do to support Brother Kassa in
his calling. And because he doesn’t
speak any English, Gloria would not be able to share much of the load.
On April 7 Brother
Kassa called me to ask for a meeting. He
told me that on April 9 he was flying to Matadi in the Bas-Congo province to
put on a training session for the branch leaders. I was informed for the first time that I
would need to provide him with cash for his hotel room, his transport to and
from the airport in Kinshasa, his food in Matadi, his transport to and from the
hotel in Matadi and the airport, his telephone calls that had been
accumulating, and the cost of photographs he would want taken of the training
session. I hadn’t realized that I should
have asked Johannesburg a few weeks earlier for advance funding for these
purposes, and because my working fund balance was low, I had to fund most of
these expenses out of my back pocket and wait for reimbursement from
Johannesburg. When Brother Kassa returned
on May 11 he asked for more money to cover his ongoing out of pocket expenses.
On April 22 Brother
Kassa suddenly materialized again. This
time he informed me that it was imperative that we get the materials needed in
the Kasai province printed immediately.
So in the late afternoon we raced out to Limete to put in an order with
a printer, and then raced back out two days later to review and approve the
proofs. On April 29 all the couple
missionaries met with the Area’s mental health counselor at the S & I
building to discuss how to deal with stress in our callings. Unfortunately, the meeting caused us an
enormous amount of stress because of all the work waiting for us at the office,
including meeting with Brother Kassa and beginning what turned out to be a
week-long process of getting the massive amount of materials (banners, badges
and flyers) organized, packaged, and ready for a shipper to deliver them to
Mbuji Mayi. For one week the office
looked and smelled like a print shop.
We were out of the
office during much of May with our trips to Congo-Brazzaville and Johannesburg
and with the wheelchair project, but from time to time I would receive frantic
calls from Brother Kassa, or emails from the Christensens, often during the
middle of another meeting or project, advising me that I needed to get banners
delivered to PEV, or megaphones ordered and delivered to PEV, or to print off
multiple thousands of pages of training materials, or to pay for the materials
to be printed at his office, or to attend and film and provide refreshments for
his training session for all of the stake and ward representatives at the S
& I building, or to help him get a telephone or to purchase telephone time
or to buy fuel for his car. No matter how often he attempted to explain to me
the Congolese system of buying “unités” in order to make phone calls on a cell
phone, I never was able to understand it.
On June 3 I got a
frantic call from Brother Kassa advising me that PEV had decided, with all of
the refugees streaming into Kinshasa from Brazzaville, to move up the campaign
in Kinshasa from the end of July to June 24.
I protested mightily to PEV, since we had not yet put in an order to
print the materials needed for the Kinshasa campaign, and I knew how long it
could take to get the job done. Fortunately
I was able to get Thierry in the Service Center to absorb some of the time and
cost of these interventions, such as dealing directly with the printer, and
fortunately the materials were printed promptly and delivered to the
office.
However, on June 12 I
got yet another frantic call from Brother Kassa telling me that we had to
immediately get in the truck and deliver all of the printed materials to the
stake centers (except for Kinshasa and Masina Stakes whose presidents work with
us at the Service Center). During the
course of this 6-hour delivery run I got stopped by the traffic police and had
to spend an hour in the local police station dealing with an accusation that
Brother Kassa hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. I rejected the police commander’s suggestion
that I agree to pay a 35,000 FC ($40) fine, arguing that they should let us go
about our work of trying to keep their children from dying of measles and polio. Finally they gave up and let us resume our
journey.
On June 19 the crisis
was that Brother Kassa needed me to deliver to him at the S & I building all
of the remaining training materials so he could conduct his final training
session. Incredibly, five days before
the campaign was to begin, some of the ward trainers hadn’t yet given the
training session to the ward volunteers.
Then at 9:30 a.m. on
June 23 Brother Kassa again called telling me that he needed me to take him out
to a meeting near the airport at 11:00 a.m. for the official launch of the
Kinshasa vaccination campaign. I had to
tell him that I was in a meeting and that it would be impossible. Fortunately he was able to drive his car to
the meeting. Later in the afternoon he
called again to tell me that he needed me to give him $50 for his
transportation costs, to produce 2,000 certificates for the ward and stake
volunteers to honor their participation in the campaign, and to take him to the
seven Kinshasa stake centers on June 26 to deliver the printed certificates. I agreed, but then later told him that I
would hire Felix to take them to the stake centers on his motor bike to save my
time and expense.
On June 24 we were out
in one of the quartiers with our friend Bonaventure of the Kinshasa Stake High
Council to visit his proposed humanitarian project. It was very gratifying to see ward volunteers
with their badges in action and to see the clinics open and literature in
evidence encouraging the families to get their children vaccinated. So finally we were able to begin to see the
fruits of our labors on the campaign. We
began getting reports from the bishops in Kinshasa that they had many more
campaign volunteers than projected, and that a much higher percentage of
children were getting vaccinated than projected by PEV.
Of course I wrote this
report to convey how much unexpected work I was called upon to perform to
support Brother Kassa. But when I think
how much more work I would have had to do if he hadn’t been so diligent in his
calling, or if no local coordinator had been called and everything he had to do
had fallen into my lap, I am very grateful for him. Over the course of the last few months he and
I had become good friends, even though I cringed every time I saw his name come
up on my phone, and we had many good conversations and interesting experiences
together. I certainly will never forget
the hour we spent together in the police station in the Binza district.
