Trinto Blog
Abbé Gilbert, left, and Trinto Mugangu before a mud hut and Mount Nidunga.
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21 July 2007:
Regularly Dr. Trinto Mugangu will provide news, issues, progress and philosophical commentaries on FONDAMU activities. You are welcome to e-mail your comments to trinto@fondamu.org. Summaries might be published in this blog, with excerpts quoted.
A looted dispensary in Kakono
My blog starts in the foothills of the 7000-foot high Mount Nidunga, the highest mountain in the Ngweshe Chiefdom, Walungu Territory, and Upland Kivu of Eastern Congo. On a sunny Sunday in July 2006, I was looking for my roots and my inner strength from the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, our Lord, to help the needy poor, who live with less than US $2 a day in Kivu. I was visiting Ciherano, one of the 16 locality counties of the Ngweshe chiefdom. I was accompanied by my friend, the Priest Gilbert of the Catholic Parish of Ciherano, when we ventured toward Kakono, a borough, which is famous for its colonial tea plantations and a market for dairy products, along the route to climb Mount Nidunga. We did not venture to make the climb.
Nuns of the Congregation of Resurrection stand before their convent of Kakono. They were robbed at night by armed militiamen in July 2006. The next day, Trinto Mugangu, wearing a blue shirt, and Abbé Gilbert, on the right side of the picture, sought to console the nuns. |
 The nuns run a dispensary in Kakono that was looted in July 2006, and it needs US $25,000 to replace its medical equipment and medicine to serve the poor villagers there. Contributions to FONDAMU can be specified for this mission. |
Unfortunately, we found that the night before the nuns of Kakono had been visited by unfriendly armed militiamen, who had stolen several of their sacred belongings and looted their dispensary. The nuns had locked themselves up in a safe room; the militiamen could not harm them. After our tour of the Convent of the Sisters of Resurrection in Kakono, we visited the looted dispensary. Then Sister Claudine, the nurse nun, who runs the medical facility, told us: “I was trained to practice medicine, soothe wounds, bring hope to patients, and heal suffering people from diseases with modern medicine and appropriate tools. All my medical tools have now been stolen”. She asked us: “Am I to heal patients with my bare hands and just watch them suffer from their ailments? How many of them will die in my useless arms?” She implored the Lord, “Please Jesus, provide me with the strength to go through this ordeal and supply the means to help others by doing my job.” My eyes got wet as well, and in a rattled throat I promised to look for the means to replace her looted equipment and medicine worth US $25,000.
On 31 October 2006, I wrote to the government of DR Congo, with her list of needed equipment. No response so far, and personally I brought the request to an advisor of the Minister of Health to no avail, until their cabinet was reshuffled in February 2007 to put in place a new elected government in DR Congo, after several decades of dictatorship and public mismanagement. Up to now I have failed the nurse nun of Kakono, and she often asks how far I have gone to find the means to replace her looted equipment and medical supplies. I am ashamed by myself, and despite my will I have had no right answer to her and her patients. Please donate as much as you can to help FONDAMU assist the nurse and her dispensary of Kakono so that she and the other nuns can get back to work.
Please DONATE for the needed medical tools, medicine and equipment for the Dispensary of Kakono.
In the search of my roots and Daniel Mugangu Memorial Trust Fund
After that sorrowful moment, I continued with my friend Gilbert, the priest, to search for my roots. My youngest sibling, Desire Mugangu, accompanied us and took the pictures. We were shown the villages of Nyabangere and Mukumba on the south-west side and foothills of Mount Nidunga. Nyabangere is the place where my father, Daniel Mugangu, was born on 21 July 1921. He was born from Elizabeth M’Kalinzi and Kahuku, who was the village welder in Mukumba. He used to dig iron ore from the flanks of Mount Nidunga to make agricultural tools for the villagers; and he collected copper in the mountain to make “birhale”, the locally reknowned necklaces and other jewelry worn by women. Daniel Mugangu, went to school, and got baptized as a Christian catholic, whose faith he passed on to us his offspring. Daniel became a school teacher for the Catholic Parish of Burhale, especially in remote villages and mining company worker camps. He started at Ntabunge, Mushinga, in 1948. Then he was appointed as school teacher at Karhala, Burhinyi (with his old friend Bikoro), in the Mwenga Territory in 1950. It was around this time that he married my mother, Maria Consolata M’Katu. I was born there as their first offspring in 1951. Around 1952 our family moved to Mufa, in another mining company camp, so that he could teach there. There I started elementary school in 1957.
Nyabangere and Mukumba villages, where our role model, the late Daniel Mugangu, was born and raised. |
 A classroom of the Elementary School of Ntabunge, where Daniel Mugangu started his teaching duties in 1948. The picture shows Trinto Mugangu, on the right, visiting the classroom whose teacher is incidentally a colleague, Mr. Eugene Bagalane, from the class of 1971 in the Kabare. |
Later in 1958, my father taught in Lukumbo, which is now our residential village, where FONDAMU is constructing its Walungu Territory office. I remember that move from Mufa to Lukumbo in late August 1958. My father would follow us later, but meanwhile we – my pregnant mother, I, and two of my siblings, Deogratias and Damas (deceased in 1990) -- rode in the back of an MGL (Mines des Grands Lacs) lorry, full of our household belongings. My mother was seated on our dining room table, which had been loaded up side down. When we were half way along the escarpments overlooking Tubimbi near Bwahungu, the table slipped out of the lorry, and my pregnant mother was dropped with the table. She lost consciousness, and she was left behind on the dirty road. When we loudly cried for help, the truck driver stopped the lorry in a hurry, and in his excitement he got out of the truck without first engaging the gears and setting the brakes properly. So the lorry rolled toward my mother, and in the back of the lorry we then shouted in chorus, the driver went back to the cab and stopped the lorry less than one foot from my mother, who lay unconscious on the befallen table. It was an anxious moment, but she was revived and took a few sips of water. We then continued our trip to Lukumbo, where my father rejoined us in a week’s time with the remainder of our then household belongings.
From what I could witness at my young age, Daniel Mugangu started his community works in Lukumbo, and he led the villagers to open up a new road, 2 miles long, to the village from Butuza, that connected to the DRC national road number 2. Then he conducted the works of arranging the springs – which were the water sources in the village, and the construction of a better school building in Lukumbo. The original school building in Lukumbo was a roof thatched banda with mud filled walls and rustic banks for pupils. It is in that old building that I attended up to the 3rd grade, and in the fourth grade I was moved to a better built school in the Parish of Burhale, where I completed the elementary school in 1964. Meanwhile Daniel Mugangu initiated and conducted the construction by Lukumbo villagers of a six classroom school with tin roof and walls in planks that was completed in 1965, when Mobutu took over by coup the leadership of the country.
Deogratias and Desire Mugangu, who conducted the construction of a new red brick and tin roofed six classrooms building, attended the 50th anniversary celebration of the Lukumbo Elementary School and inaugurated the new school building there. Deogratias, in a 3 piece suit, at the inauguration of the new school in Lukumbo in May 2006 converses with aquaintances. |
 This is the beginning section of the unpaved escarpment road going upland, toward the left side, from Tubimbi to Lukumbo, where the pregnant mother Consolata M’Katu fell off the back of a lorry in 1958. She is now widowed and acts as a foster mother to 8 orphans in Lukumbo, in FONDAMU’s newly built home and office. |
Daniel Mugangu completed his teaching duties in 1983, when he retired. He died on 21 July 1987. I made a trip to Lukumbo from Kinshasa, before going to Maine in the USA to complete my PhD program in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. I made many friends in Maine, and I consider Maine as my second homeland. I had lived in the USA before 1987 with my spouse, Meri and my three children, especially in Tucson, Arizona, and Moscow, Idaho in the Palouse area of the Rocky Mountains, for successively my English lessons and a Master’s program in Wildlife and National Park Management. I visited so many places in the modern and wilderness world of the USA, such as the Puget Sound, Yosemite, the Sequoia Monument and its giant sequoia trees, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons National Park, Glaciers National Park. I went rafting in the Snake River and Hells Canyon. (You may read if you wish my account of the experience with my spouse there in an article I published in Ecological Economics Journal 1994. 10(2):93-95, about culture as a missing nexus. Of all these places, I confess that I especially liked Maine, with its wild blueberries and lobster. It is there that I climbed Mount Kathadin, where I hugged boulders, with Professor George Jacobson’s plant ecology class. That class also brought me and our classmates such as Alison Dibble to Chick Hill, near Blue Hill. I also enjoyed several trips and visits to the Maine coastline, downeast, with Mac Hunter and Aram Calhoun, where we saw Acadia National Park. I stayed with the Longcores, Joyce and Jerry, in Orono, and I remember several friends and neighbours there, such as the Johnsons and the Owens. I recall that we made several trips to the homes of elderly people during the Christmas season to sing Christmas carols, and this was so delightful. And Maine gave me the inner strength to make myself available to helping others in DR Congo. Let’s move together the Maine and USA helping spirit to reach out and touch someone needy in DR Congo.
So please help FONDAMU to make a trust fund to the memory and accomplishments of Daniel Mugangu to ensure our planned and ongoing activities.
In the footsteps of Daniel Mugangu, FONDAMU is now here to provide a way to help. And under a partner organisation, CERADE, Daniel Mugangu’s offspring were glad to complete, with DRC government funds, a six classroom school at Lukumbo. Now the poor younger generation there can attend a modern school to acquire skills for a brighter future. Deogratias and Desire Mugangu, who conducted the construction of a new red brick and tin roofed six classrooms building, attended the 50th anniversary celebration of the Lukumbo Elementary School and inaugurated the new school building there.
Yours faithfully, Dieudonné Trinto Mugangu, PhD