I've cried in a lot of airports around the world. Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Amsterdam and especially Johannesburg, but nothing prepared me to be holding back tears at the Goma airport. If you had told me a week before I left that it was going to happen, I'm not sure that I would have believed you.
I was in the DRC participating in a review of humanitarian assistance between 2006 and 2016. The review was undertaken at the request of a UN body and I was hired to work as a public health expert for the review. Methodological lead was later added as my second title later in the contract after the team leave left and I narrowly skirted becoming fully responsible for the project a week before we were set to arrive. Being the methodological lead often left me in the difficult role of the intermediary between the firm who wanted the project undertaken in a specific way, and the team on the ground who knew that it would never go exactly as planned.
Interestingly, this is the exact intermediary role that I've documented among local civil society organisations and other actors who need to negotiate between the needs of the local population and the desires of international donors who want to address those specific needs. Let me tell you, this isn't an easy spot to be in.
Yet, as I've been sharing stories with my friends and family since I've arrived back in Ottawa it has become clear to me that I realistically lived two stories during this trip. One where I was pushed to the brink, wondering whether I should stay or walk away from a poorly designed project with a lack of institutional support that was unlikely to yield robust academic results The second where I got to travel across a region that I've studied extensively working on an important, if ill-conceived project, making new friends and learning to disregard the hurt feelings and pangs of regret prompted by the first.
In the end I was holding back tears at the Goma airport because I was saying goodbye to even more friends than I arrived with. I was saying goodbye to a team who I fought with and for who, despite everything we had been through, genuinely cared for each other. I was also saying goodbye to new friends who I shared drinks, stories, runs and tears with in three provinces. Lastly, I was also saying goodbye to friends from Bukavu for a second time who I so relished having the opportunity to meet again. Indeed, there was something almost joyful about having something to cry about on my departure.
So over the next few weeks I'm going to share four more blog posts: one about each of the three provinces I visited and a final post exploring some of the things I learned on this trip. These posts will be divided between the story of the firm and the story of what it actually meant for me to be there.
Names will be changed to protect myself and the unwitting participants in these stories.
