Notes - Empty Hands, Open Arms - page 181

27 Known as kulunas Alex Engwete offers a good description of kulunas: “Kuluna and Kuluneurs
in Kinshasa: A Low-Intensity Urban Insurgency?” Alex Engwete Blogspot, February 2, 2010, ht-
tp://alexengwete.blogspot.in/2010/02/kuluna-and-kuluneurs-in-kinshasa-low.html .
Also, as Michael Hurley wrote to me, the problems with kulunas are precisely the sort of detail
donors don't take into consideration when making grants:
While they do often have sections about possible constraints and assumptions, this is rarely
given much weight and deliverables are still based on Western standards. Consideration of the
difficulties of the daily life of local implementers is rarely given much weight. The Paris De-
claration hints at this when it talks about time frames established in grants for deliverables that
are based on Western schedules without considering problems on the ground. It is often con-
sidered easier to fund expatriates to do a lot of the work. This can assure timely and profession-
al reporting on grants, etc. In this way, many of these local issues are avoided because step 1
is to assure that Western expats are provided with a base of operations comparable to Western
standards . . . Yet it is hard for us to allocate a few extra dollars for safe transport for our staff
to avoid kulunas .
In a later email, Michael described his own encounter with kulunas . He wrote that he didn't fully
understand what the BCI staff were dealing with when they told him that they had to leave work
early because of traffic and their fear of arriving home late, when the kulunas were out. He didn't
take their concerns too seriously until he attended the wedding of Mwanza's daughter in Messina,
a poor neighborhood in Kinshasa. Michael wrote:
When you turn off the main road to go to Mwanza's place, you drive along roads as bad as
at Yetee, but without the ambiance. Crummy shacks and beat-up walls, concrete, cinder-block
houses with rusted iron bars in the windows. These are like little village enclaves, and you get
the feeling that many folks never even make it to the main road. . . . We headed home around
2:30 a.m. We wove through little roads without much room to maneuver and hit an intersec-
tion. There was a kind of concrete block in its center and someone sitting on it with his back
to us. As we tried to figure how to turn, I noticed about ten other shadowy figures moving in
from all corners, kind of furtively hovering. Then the guy in the center turned slowly while still
sitting—very dramatically. He stared at me as he stood (I was in the front seat). He was naked
from the waist up and his face was covered with white powder giving a skull-like appearance.
The powder extended down his torso. He started toward the car as he pulled out a machete. We
turned and squeezed into another road, drove over trash and piles of broken stones and headed
away as fast as we could.
Hurley references “The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness,” March 2, 2005, ht-
tp://www.oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/34428351.pdf .
28 Two days before we were to leave The names of rivers in the DRC can be confusing, given that
they often change after each major confluence. For instance, at Basankusu, the Maringa and Lop-
ori Rivers become the Lulonga River.
Équateur
29-30 Relative to North America and Europe The World Factbook , Central Intelligence Agency web-
site, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cg.html .
30 As of 2005 “Congo Deforestation Statistics,” Mongabay.com , http://rainforests.mongabay.com/
congo/stats.html .
30 Though little of it was logged Hampton Smith, Tim Merrill, and Sandra W. Meditz, “The
Economy,” in Zaire: A Country Study , ed. Meditz and Merrill (Washington, DC: Government