I’ve been reengaging my international brain lately, with an eye toward Burundi and surrounding countries. A few favorite reads:
Texas in Africa: Thoughtful analysis and useful links to other news.
Aid Watch: NYU Development Economist William Easterly’s blog. He and other writers have a definite angle but lay out their arguments well.
Wronging Rights: What might happen if the bloggers at Jezebel wrote a blog about human rights. Not frequent postings but well written and refreshingly funny when they do.
Sustainable Peace by Piece: A Burundi specific blog from a staff member at the Friends Women Association in Bujumbura.
Very interesting article out of the Lancet this month.
Full disclosure, I haven’t finished it, but this sentence in the abstract made my stomach turn a bit.
More than 50% of all maternal deaths were in only six countries in 2008 (India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
With a total of 1.6 billion people shared among them, these six countries make up about 24% of the global population; still, although I don’t have stats at hand about percentage of live births, that burden of suffering seems grotesquely disproportionate.
Filed under: DR Congo
Kinshasa [the capital of the DR Congo] is officially nicknamed “Kin la Belle” (Kinshasa the Beautiful), but some of its residents have ironically changed the nickname into “Kin la Poubelle” (Kinshasa the Trash Can).
Via a 2004 BBC article on the city clean-up.
Filed under: DR Congo
DR Congo is BIG. At 2.34 million square kilometers (rough the size of the US east of the Mississippi), it’s the 12th largest country in the world, and the the third largest African country (after Sudan and Algeria). It borders nine other countries and has only 37 km of coastline.
DR Congo has only 2,794 km of paved roads, with another 150, 703 km unpaved. DR Congo has just 1,241 more km of roadways than it’s former colonizing power, Belgium. Belgium has 5 km of roadway for every square kilometer of land, while DR Congo has 0.6 km (for paved roadways, Belgium has 4 km/sq km and DR Congo has one one-thousandth of one km/sq km – or one meter of paved road for every sq km of land).
In the absence of roads, the the Congo river provides one source of transport – the second longest river in Africa (after the Nile), it borders both DR Congo and the Republic of the Congo and is navigable along most parts, although not accessible by the sea.
DR Congo straddles the equator, with one-third to the north and two-thirds to the south. The country includes the vast basin of the Congo River, dense rainforest (77% of the land is woodlands or forest), and mountains in the extreme east.
3% of land is used for agriculture, but only 110 sq km is irrigated. 55% of the national GDP comes from agriculture as of 2000.
Sources: CIA World Factbook and US Dept of State
Kristof wrote another editorial about the ongoing violence in the DR Congo. It’s graphic, and horrifying, which is fine, because we should be horrified.
He wrote one a week or so ago that I didn’t publicize, because the theme (why are we talking so much about Haiti and not about the Congo?) is a frustrating one to me – we SHOULD be paying attention to Haiti. But I share his absolute frustration that something so evil has been happening for so long without intervention or even much concern on the part of the global community (including myself in that).
