Arrival
After two days of travel, I arrived at the hotel in Kinshasa just before midnight. The next day I slept in until noon, missing multiple emails from my team lead. I scrambled to get dressed and get to the emergency operations center, where I was hastily introduced to the country team, which was in the middle of a working meeting. I sat off to the side, trying to follow the conversation on an empty stomach. Someone brought shwarma for lunch around 2 p.m. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a fried chicken place. I tried to stay focused on my team lead, with many years of experience working on deployments and multi-year global health assignments, as my mind reeled from the juxtaposition of chaotic city streets with a Western-style fast food restaurant.
My in-country security briefing with the embassy Regional Security Officer was the following week. Until then, I had been operating under the assumption that most capital cities in the world had a baseline level of infrastructure and emergency services. My top question walking into the briefing was what the DRC version of 911 was, to call in case of an emergency. I learned immediately that there was no 911. We were strongly discouraged from driving and explicitly told NOT to exit the vehicle in case of a car accident. If the police arrived, we were instructed to drive away. I was given a laminated card to show through the car window explaining that I was a diplomat going to the embassy. The hospitals were poorly equipped to handle health emergencies; “Health conditions that are manageable in other places can be fatal in the DRC,” one slide warned. The UN handled fire response but often took several hours to arrive. We were explicitly prohibited from going anywhere outside the green zone. “If you have any kind of problem at all,” the RSO warned, “call Post One.” The embassy was our only emergency response.
I was in Kinshasa for two weeks. I worked six days per week, and the days were long: response work during business hours plus emails and calls in the evening with stateside colleagues on Eastern time. All communication was done through WhatsApp. The schedule was always fluid: meetings started late and ran long, and we often had last-minute invites to other meetings we had not even been aware of the previous day. I quickly realized that the work would not look anything like how I imagined, but that somehow all those years on the periphery of the global health profession had not been wasted. Let the local professionals take the lead. Listen more than you talk. Practice cultural humility. I kept a running list of technical terms and their French translations in a Notepad document: file, folder, update, sample, collection. I was relieved to see an Albanian colleague from WHO with a Google translate tab open in her browser. I learned that you can use WhatsApp in a browser, that DRC does not have its own government web domain, and that it is considered rude to bring your own food to eat without sharing. I reached out to colleagues who had deployed before me to learn about the response history, and to my father-in-law, who had worked as a doctor in Zimbabwe, to learn about cultural norms.
I stayed at the Hilton, a five-star hotel by the Congo River. I figured out after a few days that the alarm clock was not reliable, because frequent power outages reset the time several times per day. On weekdays, I ate breakfast at the hotel buffet and brought Ziplock bags down to store food for my lunch as well, per advice from a previous deployer. Dinner was usually room service, though half the items on the menu were unavailable. Sundays were off days. I wandered the hotel to check out the amenities and journaled while sitting by the rooftop pool. I boiled water in my hotel room, let it cool, and stored it in my Nalgenes and used plastic water bottles that I hoarded like a lemur. I washed my laundry in the shower with shampoo and hung it up all over the room to dry. After I had the “Do Not Disturb” doorknob tag on for several days, I got a call from the manager of guest services. Was my stay satisfactory? Did I need anything from the hotel? Was I alright? He explained that the hotel had a policy of checking on guests who asked not to be disturbed for more than three consecutive days – to verify that they were not being held hostage. There had been incidents in other hotels, he explained. “We take security very seriously.”
But still, despite the newness and the strangeness and the loneliness, I started to gain my footing. I found myself able to follow the conversations between my colleagues more easily. I scribbled notes about the history and evolution of the response, the structure and schedule, who was in charge, who knew what was actually going on, who understood the data and could answer questions. I came to understand that my primary responsibility was to serve as the eyes and ears of the agency. I got to know people and contributed where I could. A future in which I might do this work began to take shape. I could do this.
This is the second installment of a multi-part series on a Section member’s deployment to, and evacuation from, the Democratic Republic of the Congo while on an emergency response assignment with the CDC. All views expressed here are the author’s own personal perspective and do not reflect the position of their employer or the U.S. government.
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