Immunizations Saga

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.