Dr. Gilda Morelli

The Ituri Forest Peoples Fund - click to visit the IFPF website

promoting the health and education of Efe (pygmy) foragers and Lese farmers in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo

With tears streaming down her face, ImaNjede hands her 3 month-old daughter, Atauma to me. "Zilda , Zilda, save my baby " she pleads with a sense of desperation and faith that we can do miracles. Atauma lies in my lap shivering, even though her skin is on fire and she is covered with sweat from an acute attack of Malaria. I crush a chloroquine tablet between two spoons, add honey to try and mask its bitterness and try in vain to get Atauma to swallow the medicine. ImaNjede and I know it's hopeless, and before midnight Atauma dies.

Why does this still happen, when illnesses like Malaria are treated elsewhere in the world? How can anyone watch babies die on their lap, without wanting to change things, make things better?

In 1985, this sense of wanting to do something, drove a team of researchers -- myself, my husband David Wilkie, Robert Bailey and Bryan Curran -- who have all lived and worked with the Efe hunter-gatherers and Lese farmers in the Ituri forest for years, to look for ways to help the community to establish their own health clinic and school. For the last 20 years, the government of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) has, through intent, corruption and mismanagement, allowed clinics and schools to crumble and close for lack of support.

Creating the social and economic systems needed to ensure that families have consistent, long-term access to medical care and primary school education is extremely difficult given local community capacity and the economic and political turmoil in the country. Yet, the greatest challenge has always been achieving a balance between doing too much and not doing enough for the Lese and Efe. David and I, along with our colleagues, are less concerned about ensuring that financial gaps are filled, and more interested in helping the Efe and Lese develop the technical and political skills to provide for themselves. Since Belgian colonial times the Lese and Efe have learned to expect the state and more recently "The American Researchers" to take care of their problems; few of them saw the problems as their own. Even when they did, they lacked the technical skills, social institutions, and financial resources to solve them independently. The challenge was to set the scale of assistance at a level and a pace that the community was capable and willing to take responsibility for.

For the last 15 years, David and I have worked with the community to establish a sense of shared commitment to running the clinic and school. In 1987 we formed the Ituri Forest Peoples Fund - a special project of Cultural Survival - to help support the teachers and provide books and medical supplies not available in the forest. The community gradually developed its own institutions and opinion leaders, and took sole responsibility for managing the clinic and school; deciding how users of these social services must contribute to their upkeep. Robert Chambers (Chambers 1983) has long argued that long-term and consistent support at a scale determined by the community is the key to evolution of the capacity and willingness within a community to manage its own development. It was through this process of self-empowerment that the Lese and Efe community developed the strength to keep the schools open during the civil war even though they had been cut off from Fund resources; and it was this sense of ownership that gave the community the will to carry the clinic's precious equipment and supplies with them when they had to flee from the fighting. It is also that sense of responsibility that goes hand-in-hand with feelings of ownership that saw the clinic nurse bicycle 5 days to look for medicine, and keeps the teachers teaching even although their blackboards were stolen by ex-President Mobutu's retreating army.

Though the Efe and Lese living in a tropical forest in the center of Africa may seem very exotic, their aspirations and concerns are more similar than different to ours. Our neighbor in the Ituri, Tufiesa, married his wife because they fell madly in love with one another; they both spend time teaching their kids; they are concerned that their rowdy teenage son will never be a responsible adult; and they worry about their health and security when they get old. Moreover, just as the Lese and Efe have seen the need to take responsibility for development in their "back-yard", in hundreds of communities in the US, families are getting together to look for ways to rebuilt their neighborhoods and ensure that their children have access to quality schooling and health care. Though separated by thousands of miles, communities in the Ituri and in inner-city America are, surprisingly, not that far apart.