Untold Stories

Protesters pelt UN compound in eastern Congo

By Michael Kavanagh

Today, Worldfocus correspondent Michael Kavanagh reported from inside a UN compound in eastern Congo, which today faced a storm of protesters. Michael is a also a journalist for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Watch Michael Kavanagh’s interview with Martin Savidge: UN commander resigns as thousands flee in Congo.

Violence in eastern Congo reached new heights today when the force led by Tutsi rebel General Laurent Nkunda captured the Congolese army’s main base in the east.

The rebels went on to capture three other towns and are now only 20km outside of Goma, where United Nations peacekeepers blocked their advance.

See the blog as it appears on World Focus

Project:Report Semi-Finalists and their Work

Ann Peters, Pulitzer Center

They tell the stories of undocumented workers and a soup kitchen manager, a former addict-turned-counselor and a homeless vet, a Native American grandmother and a North Carolina dairy farmer. Profiles of individuals of significance in their communities.

They are the 10 semi-finalists from some 100 entries in Round 1 of the joint Pulitzer Center/YouTube Project:Report. And they are embarking on Round 2 with an assignment to tell a local story with a global impact.

They shared with us a bit about themselves and their thinking on where journalism is going today. We thought we’d pass along the information so you’d get to know them and their work better. They range in age from 24 to 42. There are five graduate students, a stay-at-home mom, a production assistant, a novelist/freelancer and two graduates working a variety of jobs or involved in job searches.

Today Torrey Meeks lives in Las Cruces, NM, working from home as a novelist, video editor and freelance writer. His path to Las Cruces came by way of stints as a combat medic in the US Army, long-haul truck driver, stone mason, and a variety of jobs in restaurants. He spent time traveling across the US on his motorcycle. His honorable discharge from the Army came on the same day as the Iraq war began.

Torrey profiles Yolanda Dimas, manager of the El Caldito soup kitchen in Las Cruces. The video reaffirmed many of the things he’s learned over the years especially when his mother tried to raise three boys alone. In the video, Yolanda shares her post-divorce transition from a life of plenty to a life of little and her hectic – yet fulfilling – day job. As soup kitchen manager, she oversees production of some 5,000 meals a month, between 230-270 a day. Torrey’s imagery and Yolanda’s words mesh together to show the fast-paced nature of running a feeding station for the community.

Continue reading about the finalists

Mozambique: Paradise Lost, and found?

Tune in this Sunday to CBS “60 Minutes”
Janeen Heath, Pulitzer Center

This Sunday, October 26, the news program “60 Minutes” is airing a story on Gorongosa National Park, reported this summer by CBS journalist Scott Pelley, about American philanthropist Greg Carr’s efforts to bring the destroyed gem back to life. Tune in at 7:00 p.m. EST to CBS, and make sure to also visit the Pulitzer Center’s related reporting to explore this story’s beginning.

If you are unable to watch the show live, you should be able to see it online at the 60 Minutes website after it airs. Or you can find a podcast on their Podcast Page.

This very topic has been the focus of extensive Pulitzer Center reporting. Before the Mozambican civil war, Gorongosa National Park was among the top destinations in Africa, with a higher concentration of animals than on the famed Serengeti Plain. But during the war, soldiers and other poachers killed these vast herds, planted landmines and destroyed the park's infrastructure. By the 1990s, the park was all but abandoned. ...

Unrest in China's Wild West

Ryan Anson, for the Pulitzer Center

Like many of China’s inland waterways, the Yurungkax River in Xinjiang Province is filled with waste. Tailings from local jade and coal mines have turned this tributary into a channel of thick grey sludge that oozes out of the icy Kunlun mountains and meanders toward the desert floodplain. Closer to the Silk Road city of Hotan where security has been tight following a spate of violence in this remote northwestern region, bulldozers drained part of the river so that residents could dig for jade stones.

DRC: Aging Rebels; Twilight of Amani

Two days ago I took a helicopter to visit a town inhabited by the FDLR, the Rwandan Hutu armed group whose continued presence in Congo has prolonged this war to the point of exhaustion.  They fled to DR Congo 14 years ago to escape the Tutsi-led RPF advance that ended the Rwandan genocide (and eventually brought war to eastern Congo).  The FDLR are considered a terrorist group by the US government, and because just about every government - including Congo's - has denounced their continued presence in the Kivus, they tend to be difficult to access.  Over the years i've met dozens of FDLR, and seen hundreds move through the demobilization/reintegration process in Rwanda.  I realized for the first time on this encounter: the original soldiers in the FDLR have grown old here.

Last night I sat down for a few hours with Abbot Apollinaire Malumalu, a charismatic preacher and head of the peace process (the Amani Process) - his role is most similar to that of Desmond Tutu's during SA's TRC.  In a telling merger of form and content, after a power outage we conducted at least half the interview about the state of the peace process in total darkness.

Read more about this project

Contamination

By Sharon Schmickle, photos by Sharon Schmickle

October 13, 2008

My hotel room in Nairobi is a decontamination site right now.

I have come to Africa to cover a virulent new form of the ancient wheat crop scourge called stem rust. It surfaced a few years ago in Kenya and Uganda, spread into Ethiopia, jumped the Red Sea to Yemen, showed up this year in Iran and now threatens the security of the world’s second largest crop.

Scientists worldwide are combing wheat varieties for resistance with limited results. Meanwhile, a major worry is that travelers will transport the deadly rust spores outside Kenya which is the hotspot for the disease.

I spent several days in fields at a station of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute where scientists have deliberately exposed varieties from around the world to the stem rust fungus in hopes of identifying resistant wheat.

Maasai

By Sharon Schmickle, photos by Sharon Schmickle

October 11, 2008

Edward Kosen’s offer to slaughter a sheep in honor of my visit was a great breakthrough.

All along the road (if you can call that rutted, washboard trail a road) leading to Kosen’s farm in western Kenya’s highlands, people from Kosen’s Maasai tribe had run from my camera. Hapana . . . hapana . . . hapana  (no . . . no . . . no) they said in Swahili when I begged for photos.

To be sure, a few Maasai people stood for photos in the provincial town of Narok, adorned with their traditional beads and red blankets. It was a commercial photo-op for tourists enroute to Masai Mara National Reserve, and it didn’t count for me.

The first break in reserve of the ordinary Maasai people came because, like farmers everywhere, they welcomed a chance to gripe about their crops. With the help of a local crop scientist, I had arranged to meet Kosen and several of his neighbors at an open field on the semi-arid highlands they have called home for generations. The landscape looked like South Texas without the prickly pear and with scrub Acacia trees in place of the mesquite.

Violence in Kenya

By Sharon Schmickle, photos by Sharon Schmickle

October 8, 2008

Rift Valley, Kenya

On top of his losses to wheat stem rust, George Mukindia watched 30 acres of his wheat burn in the flames of Kenya’s recent post-election violence.

Mukindia’s fields are near Eldoret, where 30 unarmed civilians were slaughtered in a church on New Year’s Day.

The violence erupted after incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner of the Dec. 27th presidential election. Supporters of his opponent, Raila Odinga, alleged fraud, a claim supported by many international observers. Since Feb. 28th when Kibaki and Odinga signed a power sharing agreement, the killing and burning have subsided.

But tension lingers in Kenya’s lush Rift Valley where access to the nation’s most fertile farm land was one of the contentious issues building up to the violence. And the hulks of burned buildings stand as reminders of the fighting Kenyans still struggle to fathom.

From Uganda

By Sharon Schmickle, photos by Sharon Schmickle

Kampala, Uganda

October 4, 2008

At open-air farm markets, Mawe Robbins and James Ockira were the only vendors I could find selling whole kernels of wheat.

The markets offered a plentiful display of bounty from Uganda’s rich and fertile soil. There were beautiful mounds of bananas, passion fruit, tomatoes, beans and other produce. But, unlike so many other parts of the world, wheat is not a major crop here.

Even so, I’m looking for it because the first report of the wheat stem rust disease I’m in Africa to cover came from Uganda in 1999. Thus, scientists call it UG99. I’ve learned that the signs of the fungal disease were discovered in a plot at a research station in Uganda’s western highland rather than in farmers’ fields.

There are wheat growers in those highlands; Robbins and Ockira bought their two bags of wheat from that region. But the ranks of wheat growers here are very small. And scientists say the stem rust outbreak probably started in neighboring Kenya where wheat is a major crop. It just wasn’t recognized and reported there until after 1999.

DRC: Curfew in Goma; NGOs anxious

By Michael Kavanagh

11 Oct

It's becoming incredibly difficult to operate in North Kivu.  It's not just the insecurity - tensions are so high between the government and the CNDP that aid groups are having a terrible time moving across front lines. 

This means it's even worse for journalists - more than ever I need the aid groups to get around but they've become paranoid about transporting journalists for fear of jeopardizing their access and - more importantly - the safety of their staff.   Before i move with aid workers i need to agree to a series of rules about what i can and cannot report on.  This means that most of what I'm doing i can't write about here. 

I just came home from several days in the field; when i turned on my phone again, i got a text saying there was a 6pm curfew for fear that UN vehicles would be attacked - at this point, it seems anyone who's not Congolese or driving in a white 4x4 is considered UN....

Go to The Roots of Ethnic Conflict in Eastern DRC project page