Since I stepped foot in M’banza- Congo¹ a little over a year ago, my daily experience of life has become more tangible. On arrival, I found myself in a state of hyperstimulation, responding to the simple wonders of normal life in MBC that capture the attention of an outsider: like taking a step on the dirt road in front of one’s house during dry season to set in motion a plume of red earth that rises to one’s hip; passing a mama on the street who is carrying a stack of firewood on her head, using one hand to breastfeed a baby half strapped to her back while holding the hand of a toddler with the other; or finding a neighbor’s chicken on one’s bed. Things that to me, with time, also became normal.

My journey back to MBC began in the office of the National Malaria Control Program. One day, while waiting for a meeting, I picked up the paper on the chair next to me. I was immediately compelled by the headline ‘Forced expulsion of Angolans from Congo.’ It told the story of Angolans, who had fled Angola during the nation’s civil war and settled in the Congo as legal refugees. Now they were being forced to leave the Congo without any warning and without their property. I immediately looked for the resettlement areas where the Angolans coming back from the Congo would be placed, and staring me in the face was a great disaster in my MBC. The reasons behind the expulsion were not well elaborated, but with further investigation, there seemed to be a retaliation of forced expulsions of undocumented Congolese working in Angolan diamond mines. Consequently these people became pawns in an unclear political stand-off.

I spent the next several days trying to contact humanitarian aid organizations and governmental agencies to see what interventions were planned. Our team, working in malaria control in MBC, assessed the camps where people had started resettling and found that it was in fact a dire situation. The responses I received from other organizations were not very helpful nor hopeful for immediate action.

Everyday repatriated people continued crossing the Angola- DRC border. “Not refugees,” one UN agency reminded me. “They’re people being repatriated to their own country.” People forced to go back to an ethnic point of origin, regardless of whether or not they still know or ever knew anyone there. People forced to return to a land that they, or their parents, once had to flee. People who had decided to make a new life where they landed, now returning ‘home’ to temporary settlements, which the same UN agency assured me “is nothing like a refugee camp. These are regular people moving to a new location, not refugees.”

After disappointing attempts at advocacy in Luanda, the capital city, I set off to return to MBC. On the journey, I stopped to buy the first batch of mangos of the season. A pregnant woman asked for a ride and hopped in the car. We chatted a bit and I casually asked her how many children she already had. The response I expected would have been any random number, but she said “I have already buried 3.” Then after a prolonged pause she said, “and there are 4 living, this will be the fifth.” Angola has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world and even though we would not note it on a daily basis, this woman’s reality is normal.

Displaced persons camps, however, have not been normal in Angola in many years. Walking uphill to enter the camp, I noticed children walking downhill with their shirts covering their faces. I didn’t have time to wonder why, because with my first step, the stench of raw sewage hit my nose. There were 5 latrines in a camp of 11,000 people. Even if people had the energy to walk to these latrines, they would find them completely unusable after three weeks of extreme overuse. The field in front of the camp had become a site for what was politely referred to as “necessities.” Access to drinking water was difficult, let alone water for hand washing. The predominant disease which developed in the camps was diarrhea, and there was little wonder why.

If someone did not pay much attention, they might enter the camp and simply think that it was an over-crowded market. Upon further inspection, they would realize that the clothes stretched out in front of the rows of makeshift grass lean-tos were actually the belongings of those living in the same structure - a structure incapable of protecting one from sunshine, let alone the heavy rains which had already begun. I walked through the maze of lean-tos and rarely found a person who could say ‘good morning’ in Portuguese. I tried a few phrases in the local language, and even then they looked at me with blank faces. These Angolans spoke Lingala and French, the languages of southern DRC; few had ever really known Angola.

I reached the largest camp to find the Vice Governor of the province being briefed by the camp administrator. When it was my turn to speak, the Vice Governor was very gracious. He informed me that about 40,000 people had already come across the border and there was still a slow but steady flux of Angolans returning from the Congo. Though the forced expulsion had been suspended, there was still sufficient fear amongst Angolans-living-in-Congo to foster a significant voluntary repatriation. We were standing in the middle of the temporary tented clinic established by the armed forces – perhaps the most organized group in the midst of chaos. The Vice Governor was pleased with the situation of health in the camps – “There have been no deaths,” he commented. “We are doing quite well.”

I bit my tongue, still standing in front of him. I wanted to ask if he realized that his government nurses regularly stationed in this region had been working non-stop without rest just to attend the population here. Extra nurses had been enlisted to support this small health center, working as volunteers. I wanted to ask whether he had actually walked through the in-patient tents and seen the babies who were so malnourished that their feet were completely swollen because they don’t have enough protein to keep the fluid in their veins? Had he heard about the woman who gave birth in the middle of a grassy field on the journey, to a stillborn baby? Did he care about the child who had diarrhea and had become so dehydrated that he would be the first death amongst the camp population? My real question was whether or not he needed to see a new death toll in order to be reminded that an extremely vulnerable population, made more vulnerable by this situation would in fact have even worse health outcomes than what is normal in Angola, which we unfortunately already know is one of the worst in the world.

During my journey up to MBC, I had noticed several trucks with new military tanks in their beds. I had seen plenty of burned out, broken down tanks on the side of the road in Angola, remnants of the just recently ended war, but military movement had been a buried remnant of the past. No one could give a straight answer as to the real level of tension. The tanks were elusively “reinforcing the border”. Fear began to rise amongst the population that they would soon be facing a problem even more serious than displaced persons camp if tensions were to escalate.

They can no longer flee to Congo. The rural areas in the province haven’t been demined from the last war. These people haven’t had time to heal from the life of fear and running, of chaos and violence. As a dear friend and very wise elder in the community told me, they are a traumatized people. They are so numb to the disruption of life, yet each disruption enters their soul cutting deeper and deeper.

1. Abbreviated MBC, a city in the north of Angola, near the border with DRC.