THE MORNING PAPER RITUAL

When I’m reading the New York Times in the morning I often get worked up over some political/social situation and feel bad about what’s happening to people somewhere; but I almost never cry over the news. This morning I did. I actually dislike those television “newscasts" that focus on the grief of people who have experienced great loss. I turn off the TV when a newscaster asks a widow how she feels about her fireman husband having been killed in the burning building or a distraught mother how she feels about her soldier son or daughter having been killed in Afghanistan. So I wonder if I am doing what I recoil from seeing real journalists do on television. I've made myself believe there is a difference.

What provoked my sadness is the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Joseph Kabila is president. The country is usually called simply the “Congo” or “Congo-Kenshasa,” to distinguish it from neighboring Republic of Congo. Joseph Kabila became president of the country after his father Lauren Kabila was assassinated in 2001. Lauren Kabila’s presidency had followed the rein of the infamous Mobutu Sese Seko, who at the time of his death in exile in Switzerland was judged to be one of the richest men in the world... that after his having been born to a mother who was a hotel maid and a father who was a cook for a Belgian household. He became a dictator who eliminated anybody who opposed him. Pierre Mulele, his Minister of Education, ran afoul of Mobutu and was executed, but only after he was cruelly tortured. While Mulele was still alive, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals were ripped off, and his limbs were amputated one by one. Mobutu Sese Seko was not a nice guy.

In spite of the fact that Congo is potentially one of the richest nations in the world, the citizens of Congo today are not much better off under Joseph Kabila’s presidency than they were under his father or even under Mobutu. The country is estimated to have $24 trillion (equivalent to the combined gross domestic product of Europe and the United States) worth of untapped deposits of raw mineral ores. Congo has the world’s largest reserve of cobalt and significant quantities of the world’s diamonds, gold and copper.

So what did I learn this morning from Adam Nossiter’s piece in the New York Times? To survive, barely, families in Kinshasa cope with the critical food shortages by practicing what they call “power cut” (in French, delestage).” Ten million people in the city practice the following routine: On some days, some children eat, others do not. On other days all children eat, and the adults do not. In the Berbok family today, the big children will eat, Cynthia, 15, and Guellor, 13. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the little ones, Benedicte, Josiane and Manasse, 3, 6, and 9. Their mother, Ghislaine Berbok, a police officer who earns $50 a month said the little ones will fuss. “Yes, sure, they ask for food, but we don’t have any. There will be a little bread for them at breakfast, but nothing more. At night they will be weak,” she said. “Sure, they complain. But there is nothing we can do.”

Delestage is universally used in French-speaking Africa to describe state-decreed electric power cutoffs. It has come to represent also the rationing of food. As a survival tactic, a head of household must painfully impose it on the rest of the family. Unlike the blackouts, it is not merely a temporary unpleasantness like having the lights go out. It means that two days a week children in most households don’t eat.