Household surveys and Che Guevara

It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten weeks since we started the endline survey to evaluate Dutch funding of Congolese NGOs, and six weeks since we finished. Over the four weeks of the survey we visited about 990 households in about 75 villages. We were 42 people in total; five teams of seven research assistants each (including two team leaders), six supervisors, and one all-around badass, Koen, the PhD student who organized and led the survey. Here’s a picture of Koen during our first day “in the field”, i.e. in a village where people live year-round. Normally we wouldn’t have this many people in one village, but this was a trial run in a village that was not actually part of our sample. 

Normally, one of the two team leaders from each team visits a village the day before we want to survey residents. She explains to the chief what we’d like to do, and asks permission to come back the next day with five other research assistants. She also visits each household we want to survey to give them a heads up. Each research assistant carried out 2-4 interviews per day. 

The interviews normally took place in the interviewees home. For example:

 Sometimes they took place outside. Here’s Nicaise entering responses into his tablet:

And sometimes the interviewees were only available out in their fields: 

The villages that we visited were in the southern part of the province of South Kivu, in the territories of Uvira and Fizi. If, like me, your passport was sent to Kinshasa for three months for a visa, then you can’t travel southeast from Bukavu through Rwanda, with its fancy “paved roads”, and arrive in Uvira in about an hour. Instead you have to drive over “The Escarpment”, a bumpy four hour ride on the road that you see to the right in this picture:

To the left you can see the Ruzizi river. The Ruzizi marks the border between Rwanda and DRC; and further south between Burundi and DRC. Many of the villages that we visited were in the Ruzizi Plains, a fertile area where, for at least twenty years, there has been a series of violent conflicts between people with farms and people who graze cattle.

Further south, in Fizi Territory, the Ruzizi meets Lake Tanganyika. It was in the lakeside mountains of Fizi that Che Guevara and a small group of Cubans arrived in the DRC 49 years ago. They joined some rebels led by a young Congolese man named Laurent-Désiré Kabila. After seven frustrating months, Guevara and the surviving Cubans left. In his (published!) diary about that time, Guevara wrote about Kabila: "Nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour." Thirty-two years later, Kabila would be hand-picked by the presidents of Rwanda and Uganda as the frontman for the invasion that brought an end to Mobutu’s 32-year reign in the DRC. Kabila lasted four years as head of state before he was assassinated by his body guard, a former child solder. Kabila’s son, age 29 at the time, was appointed as the new president and subsequently won the elections in 2006 and 2011, meaning that the constitution requires him to leave office by the next elections in 2016…unless he changes the constitution. That seems to me to be the main topic of conversations about politics at the moment.
 Sorry, was I writing about a survey?