UN Humantiarian Action Plan for DRC

The United Nations launched the 2006 Humanitarian Action Plan for the Democratic Republic of the Congo in February, 2006. Read the UN's report about the statement by Jan Egeland, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coodinator.  [IRIN news is produced by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humatitarian Affairs.]

Congolese reality a harsh one

"I had never seen a child die of malnutrition, another harsh dose of Congolese reality," said Dr. Robert Bradley. Bradley was one of 17 medical personnel from the western U.S. -- all members of the United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM) team that travelled to Mulungwishi in May of 2005. He also praised the value of the weekly nutrition program that Lori Persons runs at the Seminary.

• Read the full article, "A Dose of Congolese Reality," at GBGM

Health conditions in Central Africa

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers a Travelers' Health series of pages, including this on on health in Central Africa.  You can get a feel for the conditions there by reading through their description of precautions for travelers.

Congo's problems

James Traub, in his July 3, 2005 article in the NY Times, "The Congo Case", lays out the historical and present political and social problems in the D.R. Congo. He said, "Few Congolese have access to roads, eletricity, clean water, medical care or almost any other public services". The article is very enlightening, including about the UN role in D.R. Congo. [Viewing this article requires a free registration.]

More ways to read these postings

You can always come to this blog's web page to read the posts. That's my personal preference. But if you start subscribing to a "bunch o' blogs", the number of new articles may get large. One way to manage scanning them for what you really want to read is to use a " Feed Reader", which I've mentioned in prior posts. Blog readers (a.k.a. feed readers or RSS readers) come in two basic forms -- web-based and ones installed on your PC. The web-based variety involves setting up an account at Google, Yahoo! or similar wites, then adding blogs to track. You log onto the Web site to see new headlines from the blogs in your list. The local install method gives you a program. When you run the program, many of which look similar to MS Outlook, you "subscribe" to blogs. The program then pulls down information about the blog postings and you read as you like. Here are a few recently touted feed readers (blog readers):

• SharpReader (donationware)
• RSS Bandit (donationware)