Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Returning to Butembo May 23rd

I returned to Botembo today with the rest of the team to conduct key informant interviews- there has to be a better term to call these interviews.  We sound like spies calling the people we interview informants…. The interviews went well. I was paired up with all French speakers, so to speed up the process I asked for two of the 4 interviews to be conducted entirely in French. I didn’t understand a word but detailed notes were taken for me and it put us back on time. We interviewed a priest at the Cathedral, lawyer, farmer and professor. They basically told us that the DRC faces three main obstacles to development: lack of security, lack of paved roads, and limited access to power.

Attached is a picture of a road in Botembo. The sprawling city is comprised entirely of dirt roads with adjacent open water drainage canals.


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