Vodafone tests a backpack that supplies instant cellphone service to disaster zones.
Mugunga is just a few miles from Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Furaha is here with her husband and two sons: “We’re in Mugunga Three”, she tells her brother on the phone, “We have no food, come and help us!”.
After her parents were murdered by militiamen in the bloody wars raging in eastern Congo for two decades, Furaha had been trying to phone home for two long years, but always in vain until now.
Mugunga is an enormous refugee camp, where around 90,000 people live in three giant camp sites. In spite of the efforts of humanitarian organisations, the camp lacks everything: the tents are pitched directly on the bare soil and, according to broadcaster France24, the little food that does arrive is often stolen by groups of armed men who attack the camp and the defenceless people living there.
Here a phone call really can make a difference: between life and death; between reuniting a family and leaving someone lost, maybe forever.
Someone like nine-year-old Nirere, for example, another refugee in the Mugunga camp who found her mother after being separated for 15 months, all thanks to a phone call.
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Mugunga is just a few miles from Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Furaha is here with her husband and two sons: “We’re in Mugunga Three”, she tells her brother on the phone, “We have no food, come and help us!”.
After her parents were murdered by militiamen in the bloody wars raging in eastern Congo for two decades, Furaha had been trying to phone home for two long years, but always in vain until now.
