Rebuilding lives in DR Congo

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kate Adie introduces stories from DR Congo, Israel, Ecuador, Malaysia and Germany.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the ongoing conflict in the DR Congo. Amid the violence, a clinic in Goma is helping civilian casualties recover and rehabilitate. Hugh Kinsella-Cunnigham met some of the people trying to rebuild their lives.

Regional leaders in the Middle East are focusing their attention on the second stage of the ceasefire – and the continuation of the hostage and prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. Some hardliners in the Knesset are demanding a resumption of the war, which worries families still waiting for their relatives to be released, reports Wyre Davies.

Ecuador goes to the polls this weekend, in a vote which is seen by many as a referendum on President Daniel Noboa's hardline war on the country's criminal gangs, which critics say has led to innocent people arrested and detained. Ione Wells reports from the city of Guayaquil.

A recent survey in Malaysia revealed more than 70 per cent of young Malaysians are in debt. Officials says this is down to a ‘shopping addiction’ and the growth of ‘flex culture’ on social media. Hannah Gelbart went to find out more about the country's appetite to spend.

In an age of translation apps achieving fluency in a foreign language can perhaps seem a futile exercise. Undeterred, Lucy Ash recently moved to Berlin to learn German. After making little progress, she moved to the country’s Baltic coast where she volunteered as a farm hand - and could finally escape the multitude of English-speakers in the capital.

Series producer: Serena Tarling Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production coordinators: Katie Morrison & Sophie Hill

Image: Naomi at the Shirika La Umoja centre in Goma. Taken by Hugh Kinsella Cunningham

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello. Today, as the Israel Hamas ceasefire enters its fourth week, we explore the complicated process of the prisoner and hostage exchange.
0:15.0	We're in Ecuador where President Nuboa is hoping his unforgiving war on the country's drug gangs will see him re-elected this weekend.
0:25.0	In Malaysia, we learn how peer pressure and the lure of online shopping is leading many young people into debt.
0:32.8	And finally, we're mucking out stables and feeding pigs and alpacas on a farm in northeast Germany
0:39.5	in a novel approach to learning a new language.
0:43.3	But first to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group
0:49.7	recently seized the eastern city of Goma in a lightning advance that follows three years of heavy fighting.
0:57.2	The G7 nations and the European Union have condemned the offensive,
1:01.9	which is believed to have claimed nearly 3,000 lives as a flagrant violation of the DSE's sovereignty.
1:09.6	And although the rebels declared a ceasefire earlier this week, it proved to be short-lived.
1:15.3	Since the beginning of this year, more than 400,000 people have been forced from their homes in the provinces around Goma.
1:23.9	Hugh Kinsella Cunningham, who's reported on the conflict from the start, met some of those affected.
1:30.6	Dunya Pendechi struggles to hold back her tears as she recounts the day a rocket fell from the sky and killed her son.
1:38.8	She was a mother of six, but as we speak in her small shelter built on the black volcanic rock of North Kivu,
1:45.5	only five children are playing at our feet.
1:48.5	Early in May last year, a salvo of 122mm rockets fired from M23 rebel positions landed on the outskirts of Goma,
1:57.5	where camps had been built to house those displaced by fighting.
2:01.8	The munitions exploded in one of these dense, tense cities, with a death toll of at least 16 civilians,
2:07.6	one of whom was Dunya's boy, Bauma. Dunya and her family had waited until the last moment
2:14.1	to flee from their hometown of Sake, where she was a farmer, and her husband
2:18.3	spent his days fishing the lake. They believed that the fighting would never reach them.
2:23.8	The day seemed ordinary, recounts Dunya of the fateful morning. I left to go and look for some work.
	...

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