"It's the war that has caused these problems"

For Congo's Mothers, Unceasing Loss
War, Though Ended, Still Claiming Children

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 12, 2005; Page A01

SHABUNDA, Congo -- Nsimenya Kinyama carried her 3-day-old baby outside bundled in rags and gingerly placed his tiny, jaundiced body in a rusty blue crib. As the first healing rays of the morning sun reached him, he fussed and wriggled and stretched his arms up.

Kinyama, 36, stared at her new son with a flat, empty look in her eyes. She was wondering if this child, like the six who had come before him, would die.

"God help me," she prayed, "so that this child can live."

It is a common prayer in Shabunda, a former trading center in eastern Congo that was ravaged by war, then left poor and isolated by the destruction of roadways that had long given it life. A recent survey by the International Rescue Committee found that Shabunda's children were dying in such numbers that more than half would not see their fifth birthdays.

Such is the nature of death in modern African conflicts. For every soldier felled by a bullet, countless children die quietly of preventable and treatable maladies while fleeing to safety, waiting for care at an understaffed clinic or huddling terrified and hungry in a jungle hideout.

"It's the war that has caused these problems," said Kinyama, who has a gentle voice and hair woven into braids. "It has made us poor. It has brought hunger, and it has given us a hard life."
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