Goma Refugee Camps Project

Tens of thousands of people in eastern Congo are living in camps just outside Goma. Life in the camps is grim. CWC and our partners are doing all we can to provide basic humanitarian assistance including trucking in clean fresh drinking water, building latrines and showers and helping people buy food.

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Why Act Today

From the town of Mugunga, to the West of Goma, to Kanyaruchinya (or Kibati), to the North – both host displaced people who have recently fled violence in their home communities:

Out of fear of the take-over of their area by M23 rebels in Rutshuru, an estimated 55,000 people fled to Kanyaruchinya at the foot of the Nyaragongo Volcano.
The majority of the people in Mugunga 1, some 20,000 people, have fled clashes between FDLR and Raia Mutomboki rebels in southern Masisi, where their villages are targeted by one of these armed groups. Many people in this site say they have witnessed shocking scenes of violence with people being burned in their homes and decapitated.

A closer Look

Goma, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Since last year, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people have arrived at the foot of the Mount Nyiragongo volcano, on the shores of Lake Kivu, fleeing the fighting that broke out in Masisi and Rutshuru Territories with the new M23 offensive. Amidst the tall grass and lush hills, the camps they occupy offer heartbreakingly little. Shelters that would give anyone nightmares, one meal a day at best, and long treks through the forest in search of wood to sell or build huts or cook with, risking violence and rape by armed groups or civilians.

These people have been there several weeks, or two, four, sometimes six months. They have nothing, and judging by how they live, you might think they arrived just a week ago. On the bright side, with the region entering the dry season there should be less and less rain causing less wind and rain damage to the shelters, fewer mosquitos, and so less malaria. These people must be brought to life, one by one – each of their stories, the individuals behind the statistics, their tales of violence, their villages bombed, their spouses gone, their families destroyed: the grandmother who takes care of her five grandchildren whose parents were killed in the attack on their village; the young mother of eight who must leave her youngest, still breastfeeding, all day while she goes searching for wood, recounting how she was whipped by the forest wardens.

The Catastrophe

To qualify the catastrophe there is an indicator that, while of course not sufficient, is rarely misleading: do the children play? There are places here where the children smile and run, despite the disorder around them. And other places where their sadness is crushing, their eyes filled with bottomless melancholy, and they are visibly malnourished. They do nothing but wait, stomachs empty, for parents or older siblings who have gone to look for something to feed the household. Most of the adults and older children are away from the camps during the daytime, making it even harder to monitor the children medically.

But as striking as the hardship is the solidarity – between the displaced and from the surrounding villages – in the form of lodging and food and non-food donations, which helps keep the situation from turning into a large-scale health catastrophe. Here, an old lady on the street who has received a bit of rice, which a church was giving out to the most vulnerable households. There, it’s a former MP who made a food donation. Somewhere else, a youth organisation from Goma made another. Local assistance, often by individuals, is thus significant – which is a good thing, because if they had to count on outside help the displaced would long have been dying in large numbers. The Congolese government, on the other hand, is doing pretty much nothing.

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CWC’s response to support refugees

With the help of many people like you,  CWC partners with local organizations to help refugees and other displaced people with their immediate basic needs for clean water, shelter, food, and work as well as advocate for their long-term wellbeing—both in their own nations, and in the countries that host them. We engage with allies and government officials at all levels to focus on peace and find sustainable solutions to the conflict and violence that ruin so many lives.

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Not Even Close

The vast majority of displaced people, from the Masisi region, are not even close to going home, so unsafe are the places from which they have come and so high are the risks to their villages, the risk of forced recruitment, the risk of reprisals, and – always – the risk of rape. Didn’t one female patient tell us, “I get raped in every war”?

While war- and insecurity-related constraints may impact the deployment of aid in the province, they do not exist in the city of Goma, and in any case cannot explain why the displaced are getting little or no assistance. Aid actors have a huge responsibility: helping these people at a particularly difficult time in their lives and helping them get through it. I have been doing this job for a long time, among displaced populations in particular; never have I encountered anything like this combination of a concentrated population, violent experiences, and inadequate humanitarian response.

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Clean the World with Compassion

God has created human being to be in the center of their lives, their development by ensuring their own economic self-sufficiency in a responsible social and cultural environment which engenders recognition of the inherent dignity, equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family and bringing about lasting (durable) peace in order to build on the unity which is not uniformity but diversity in this wonderful planet.

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