All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [189]
This massive, lumbering, seemingly ungovernable nation, once known as the Belgian Congo and more recently Zaire, has not really known peace and stability since the first bloodsucking European colonists arrived in the nineteenth century. The insane and diabolical King Leopold II of Belgium looted the country for its vast natural resources—timber, copper, ivory gold, and other minerals—murdering ten million Congolese in the process. By the end of the colonial era, the country had been raped and pillaged, ancient cultures and social systems were destroyed, and the people were utterly lost. The Belgians gave nothing back in terms of education or infrastructure. At independence in 1960, there were only seventeen college graduates and less than a thousand miles of paved roads (down to a pitiful three hundred miles today), making transportation impossible in vast areas of this country, equal in acreage to everything east of the Mississippi. Mobutu Sese Seko, as corrupt as he was brutal, picked up where the Belgians left off, plundering the Congo for three decades, propped up by the CIA in exchange for his cooperation in fighting communism. What was left in his aftermath was a chaotic cauldron of warring armies and special business interests. As a result, a population of more than sixty million was left struggling to survive on almost nothing.
On our first morning in Kinshasa, Theresa Guber Tapsoba, our country rep, took us to meet Victor and Therese, a couple whose lack of knowledge about family planning ravaged their lives until PSI intervened. Victor is thin and wiry and has a bum eye. Therese has orange-tinged hair, enormous cheekbones, and sweet, soft eyes, especially when her husband is looking at her, which he does often. They have been together since they were children. They live in a little cement house in a run-down neighborhood, with a ten-square-foot main room, and a tiny little room on either side where they and their six children sleep on dirty, ragged pieces of foam on the floor. Altogether, Therese told me she has had nine pregnancies, three of which, out of mad desperation, she aborted with herbs obtained from friends. Each time, this caused protracted agony lasting five days. But it was that or have more babies, whom she and Victor could not offer adequate care, given that they were already barely surviving.
Unregulated fertility is a catastrophe in this country. Congo has the highest maternal mortality in the world, and six hundred thousand babies a year are born for no other reason than to suffer and die. Achieving universal access to family planning, which is Millennium Development Goal 5B, is considered the best way to reduce maternal mortality and is wildly unattainable under current funding levels and conditions in the DRC and throughout the global South, although the subject has recently been given more attention. The demographic household survey in 2008 found that 24 percent of women of reproductive age in Congo have an unmet need for modern family planning. Clearly, PSI and its partners have their work cut out for them in the DRC. Luckily, Therese was one of the few who could be reached and helped.
One day, a community outreach worker knocked on the door, full of information about family planning. The couple was interested enough to visit a local clinic, and since then Therese had been using an injectable contraceptive every three months. At last, the unintended pregnancies stopped. It is very likely Therese would be dead without family planning. But the rest of their lives remained such a struggle. Their one tattered mosquito net, dating to Therese’s last pregnancy, was out of date. Their water was not safe, and they experienced recurrent episodes of diarrheal disease. Both did what they could to feed the family, but neither had a job. They ate one meal a day, close to bedtime, and sometimes nothing at all. There was violence in the