Eating poulet à la moambe – one of Congo's famous dishes – at the weekend, it occurred to me that I tend to spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about and enjoying food. So I really welcome the chance …
I'm back in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and on Sunday morning I took a little time out to visit the gorillas in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park. I wrote about these gorillas in a recent blog. In fact, I …
Well, also to get to the other side. The challenges of building roads that spring to mind tend to be things like the topography of the area in which you’re trying to build, the density of the population, and the …
One early July day, I made my first flight to Africa, was delivered with my blue rucksack to a guest house on Ngong Road in Nairobi, and enjoyed my first encounter with a noisy Mynah bird, singing loudly outside my …
What’s this then? A whole day dedicated to humanitarian workers? Don’t they get enough air time as the face of disasters, recounting tales of untold suffering on our TVs? Well, no, actually. The sad fact is that regardless of how …
One of my roles working for DFID is to explore ways in which the UK and China can work together to promote development in Africa. We discuss these issues in big international meetings. We have started to do this in …
My colleagues and I went to Mbuji Mayi (capital of Kasai-Oriental Province) for three days to attend the opening ceremony for the first water network out of eleven that will be constructed in Mbuji Mayi using DFID funds. The day started …
Coming from Khartoum, inevitably, the first thing you notice about Kinshasa is the weather. While similarly humid (I left at the end of the Khartoum rainy season), Kinshasa was a good ten to fifteen degrees cooler than Khartoum. And so …
That was the reaction I got from friends and family from my generation when I told people I was going to work in Kinshasa for two months with DFID DRC. People from older generations asked me, ‘Is that the country …
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