With the United Nations Operation in Burundi (ONUB) ending its mandate on 31 December, officials from the world body today <"http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2006/pko157.doc.htm">pledged continued support to the country as it seeks to consolidate peace.
Since the mission was first deployed in 2004, the Central African country has held its first democratic elections in 12 years, installed a new national Government, and disarmed and demobilized nearly 22,000 combatants.
This is not the Africa in travel brochures with safaris and delicious wine. This is the Africa where heavy loads are carried on undernourished heads, babies on backs and rifles in the hands of teenage boys. Here in the torrential rain, barefoot children hide under banana leaves. The soil runs deep red as if the blood of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died here from civil war and starvation have drenched the earth of this small nation to its core.
Rutana
IMC is initiating health programs in Rutana for some of the most marginalized people in the country. In one community we visited, almost 70 people were living in small shelters in southern Burundi. To step into their world is like stepping back thousands of years in time. These communities do not even have mud shacks to live in, but build basic round huts made out of straw. The men hunt small game in the nearby brush and the women must trek more than six miles to find clay to make basic pots that they sell for 20 cents.
