Pastor loses 9 children in war

Associated Press

MWESO, Congo

First, the rebels killed four of Joseph Munyaneza’s children in 1997. The family fled to another village.

The next year, that village came under siege. Another four children died of gunshot wounds. Then the baby, from malnutrition.

Today, Munyaneza, a 52-year-old Protestant pastor, tenderly cares for his 17-year-old daughter, who is in hospital after being kidnapped by rebels a month ago.

“She is the only child left out of 10 I had with my first wife,” Munyaneza says, holding the moaning teenager’s hand and clucking sounds of comfort as one would to calm a baby.

In the east of this vast country of nearly 63 million people, ongoing rebel attacks and poor health care have produced a generation of mourning mothers and fathers, many of whom have lost more children than they are raising.

More than half a million children die each year in Congo, one out of every five before they reach the age of 5, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund. Of those who survive, 40 percent are stunted, according to the World Health Organization. There is only one doctor and five nurses or midwives for every 10,000 people in the country.

And that’s before factoring in deaths from war fueled by massive mineral resources that have brought misery instead of development. UNICEF estimates that children account for half of the more than 4 million deaths blamed on conflicts in east Congo that have raged for more than a decade.

Millions of people have been forced from their homes in recent years by fighting between the government and rebel groups, including those from Uganda and Rwanda. The United Nations in April counted nearly 2 million displaced people. In areas where fighting continues, roughly 10 percent of the population is dying each year, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“It’s the extent of the violence here that hits me most,” says Joelle Depeyrot, a mental-health officer from MSF-USA working at Mweso Hospital, where Munyaneza told his story. “Every single patient we see is directly or indirectly a victim.”

Many of her adult patients have lost children as well as lived through trauma. Depeyrot says it’s easier to treat those who have surviving children.

“Someone once told me that children are the ‘wealth’ of the family,” she says. “Those who are left without children are very alone and isolated ... They often report feeling useless and end up ‘waiting for death,’ as they often say.”

“We have many pregnancies, but children? The mortality rate is exceptionally high,” says Esperance Habjumimana, a maternity nurse at a clinic run by Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, at Kashuga. Among her patients was a pregnant woman who has had 12 children, of whom only three are living.

Pastor Munyaneza now gets by renting a patch of land to grow vegetables for meals and making palm oil for sale. He says his first wife died of dehydration and diarrhea while they were fleeing fighting in 1994. He remarried and now has 12 children with his second wife.