‘I thought I was going to be killed’

EVEN before the recent fighting, tensions were high in villages as displaced people fleeing sporadic armed clashes jostled with locals for a roof over their heads.

Women needing healthcare fled into banana fields in desperate bids for safety for themselves and their children. Often though, the conditions for those displaced are ripe for disease, explained Alice Gilbert, project officer with the charity MERLIN.

At one makeshift health clinic supported by the British medical charity in Kalengera, a village north of the country’s eastern capital Goma, overworked medical staff were feeling the strain. By 9am, one day, more than 60 patients sat silently outside except for the sick children coughing up into the grass. Most of the illnesses are the same.

Malaria and cholera are diseases which are easily treated, but get out of control in conflict zones where there is no regular medical care and access to healthy food is severely limited. MERLIN was supplying the desperate families with essential medicines and health treatment.

The centre’s clients were nearly all internally displaced people (IDPs).

In just five days, the tiny centre had seen 465 patients. And the numbers of IDPs are increasing each day, warned the centre’s nurse Ernest Miyibiz, 42.

“People don’t want to be here, they want to go home. There’s not enough shelter, people are sleeping outside,” he warned.

IDP children were sleeping rough in school buildings at night, but in the morning they emptied onto the streets to make space for local kids to go to class.

“Children aren’t being educated and people are quite angry. They might even protest. It is a lot worse now than it was before. Then it was localised problems, but now there are a lot of armed groups,” added the clinic’s nurse.

Waiting outside, women breastfed their babies while cramped together on a long bench.

Uwimana Marceline, 31, fled the fighting with her seven children from further out in the province about three months ago as she feared some of her children could have been abducted. Her six-month-old child, Patrick, who has a high temperature from malaria, sweats in her arms as she explains her plight. “I saw soldiers fighting and many people dying there. I thought I was going to be killed.”

She says three of her seven children now have malaria including her newborn and they sleep in a school. “We will stay until the end of the war. I want peace only.”

She shook her head.

“I can’t remember last when there was peace.”

This project was funded by the Simon Cumbers' Media Challenge Fund, supported by Irish Aid.