Lubumbashi Photos

Merry Christmas from Lubumbashi!

Jambo Mart is the only department store in Lubumbashi with 5 levels of goods from groceries to car batteries. English-speaking, South-Asian appearing managers walk the floor while purchases are rung up by Congolese cashiers.
They have an excellent selection of Indian spices, snacks and mixes.

Another picture of the robot traffic signals. Lubumbashi has three but Kinshasa only has two!
You can see "Made in DR Congo" below the robot.

Lubumbashi has a very nice museum which we visited on Halloween. Karen took these photos.

The lower section of the museum is a series of trilingual French, Swahili, and English photo displays from an exhibit put together several years ago that made the rounds to museums in and out of the DRC and is now housed here. The displays cover the natural history, industry, and culture of Katanga. Very interesting. 

Upstairs were artifacts from the necropolis at Sanga.
Below are close-ups, mainly for the benefit of my uncle, the archaeologist.

Note the copper crosses in the back -- these were used as money, and are on modern-day Lubumbashi's city seal.

A vessel. On the right you can see reflected the case in which a skeleton from the necropolis is laid out. On the left is the reflection of my paisley skirt.

More vessels.

This was a surprise -- in the passageway between wings of the museum was an area devoted to Laurent-Desiré Kabila, the opposition leader who overthrew the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and served as president until his assassination in 2001. His son is the current president. There were no labels or interpretive information in this section, which included a couple of other items related to the DRC's liberator.

Taxi Driver (by Karen)

The view from the passenger’s seat on my way to the office with our usual driver, R, nearing the intersection of N’Djamena and Kapenda (or maybe Kasavubu?).

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First of all, remember those lovely smoky purple flame trees I wrote about before? You may all have known this already, but they’re jacarandas! I've always wondered what jacarandas looked like (doesn't Gabriel Garcia Marquez write about them in one of his books?), and now I know. They’re just like flame trees, but their flowers are purple. In fact, in French, they are called “flamboyant bleu”, or “blue flame”. Done blooming for the moment now.

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Traffic is interesting in Lubumbashi. As Eric mentioned in an earlier post, most of the cars here are imported used from Japan and have the steering wheel on the right, but cars also drive – for the most part – on the right side of the road. This has an interesting corollary; when passing on the left, the driver cannot see around the car in front to assess the oncoming traffic before pulling out. If there’s someone riding shotgun, he or she can give the driver the thumbs-up or -down. Otherwise, the driver has to take his or her chances.

Cars drive on the right for the most part, but in fact, you can find cars coming anywhere, anyhow, any time. More so than other places I've lived or visited where traffic seems confusing or chaotic, traffic here seems anarchic. See an empty spot of road ahead? Drive into it. No matter if there’s another vehicle at the end of it – take whatever you can get. Intersections sometimes end up gridlocked, with vehicles alternating like strands of warp and weft. It’s surprising that in a city as relatively small as Lubumbashi, traffic can sometimes be so bad. It’s worse now that it rains nearly every day: even on paved roads, drivers slow down, unable to tell whether a puddle is just filling a depression or hiding a huge pothole. Existing holes get bigger; mud from the unpaved alleys and side roads coats the paved roads.

No love is lost between pedestrians and drivers. It’s not uncommon to see a driver slow or stop for a pedestrian, but it’s not the rule. There’s no room for error; drivers count on walkers to continue on their trajectories, and if ever one were to slow or stumble, it seems like there wouldn't be enough time on either side to recover or react. I've never seen a pedestrian hit, though. We have seen a few road accidents, but generally not right downtown.  I suppose the anarchy isn't surprising, given that there’s no driver’s education: all it takes to get a license is proof that you’re 18 and $50 every 5 years.

Of course, there are conventions drivers follow, and signals they exchange, which are easier to decipher now that we've been here a while. One thing that still seems odd to me is the way drivers, sometimes 2 or 3 deep, turn across traffic. It’s hard to describe, but first of all, they often make the turn right in the face of oncoming traffic, and then often end up in the middle or on the left side of the road they've turned onto. Everything works itself out, and the benefit of starting the turn immediately is that you rarely have cars piled up behind someone who’s  stopped and waiting to turn left … which is good, because if they were held up for any time, they’d likely pull out into the left lane and cut off the left-turner. Most of the roads here in town are not very wide, and most cars don’t go all that fast, except the taxibuses, which try frantically to get as many runs in a day as possible; supposedly, they’re owned by muckety-mucks in the army or government and so have carte blanche to do whatever they want, but we haven’t been able to confirm that.

In any case, we don’t have a car here, and we don’t drive ourselves. We occasionally take the taxibus, but more often I ride with our regular driver, “R”. (I don’t want to use anybody’s name here, since we haven’t asked their permission, so I’ll stick to initials.) I met R shortly after we moved to our first apartment toward the end of October. I was coming out of a morning exercise class, and I flagged R down. When I told him the driver who’d earlier agreed to pick me up was nowhere to be seen, he muttered something about “these Congolese who are never on time”, which I thought might have been calculated to convey that he was not like THOSE Congolese … of course, being a habitual “retardataire” myself, I knew lateness was not the province only of Congolese, so this did not necessarily win me over. But I was won over when he walked a block and a half from my gate to break a large bill of Congolese francs since I didn't have anything smaller, and then refused my offer of extra pay for his trouble.

My phone was already then – and still is – full of the names and numbers of taxi drivers with whom we’d ridden who urged us to take their contact information and call them whenever we had errands to run. There were a couple that Eric and I had taken to calling, but we weren't particularly fond of any of them. So I gradually started calling R more, and we settled into some routines. He picks me up in the morning  to go to work (though I’m ALWAYS later than our agreed-on time – even when I try to fool myself that he’s coming 15 minutes earlier), and often picked us up after our evening French classes at the Alliance Française before they ended in December. In between, we or I will often hire him at $10/hour while we run errands, but we’re unpredictable clients – some days it’s just to and from the office, a round trip that doesn't even break $10, and some days it’s 5 hours of errands, much of which may be down time for him as he waits for us.

In the past couple of months, we've developed a friendship, though Eric and I (and undoubtedly R) are quite aware of the imbalances between us and him. R has a gentle manner, and speaks French well; it’s harder to understand drivers who speak mainly the local dialect of Swahili. He’s calm and I feel safe riding with him, even if he shares the Lubumbashi drivers’ assumption that vehicles have right of way over pedestrians.

As is often the case when I’m traveling, it’s through talking with taxi drivers that I glimpse what life might be like for locals. R and his wife, whom we haven’t yet met, have a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 3-month-old. The older kids go to a Catholic pre-school; monthly tuition is $50 per child. Even the public schools charge $20 a month, but parents who can afford it send their kids to Catholic school, and those who can afford even more send their kids to one of the fancy international schools where the expat kids go – the Belgian school, the French school, the English school. The usual school day is from 7-12, so at midday, the streets are thronged with kids in navy skirts or pants and white collared shirts, and traffic is dense as families who have cars head to pick them up and take them home; the rest walk along the side of the road in groups of two or three, sometimes with an adult and sometimes on their own. There are few paved sidewalks in Lubumbashi, and where they exist, they are often blocked by parked vehicles or piles of construction materials or vendors, or interrupted by steps or trenches. Often there is just a dusty strip between the road and the walls of the buildings – most homes and businesses are behind walls – and now that it’s the rainy season, water and mud collect in the strip. So it’s very common to see people walking on the edge of the street, including kids as they’re walking to or from school, and very common to see bumpers and side mirrors come uncomfortably (for me) close to them.

R used to work as a driver for an executive, a job that paid $100 a month – but his rent alone is $100 a month, so he quit that job and started driving a taxi, a job at which he can make up to $100 in a week. He doesn't own the car he drives, and his goal for this year is to buy a car of his own. The owner of the car lets him take it home at night now, which is good, because before, R would get up at 4 AM to take public transport – i.e., a taxibus – to pick up the car, and drop it off again at night, a trip that took up to an hour each way. He still gets up early: at 4h30, he heats water for the kids’ bath, bathes them, makes and feeds them breakfast, and drops them at school around 6h45. If he’s not busy, he picks them up from school at noon, often leaving them with his older sister who has a shop in town. He works till 20h30 or 21h00.

On one particularly taxing day, R picked me up to take me to work in the morning. On the way, I asked how things were going, and he said OK, but his wife was having a problem – she needed an operation to remove a cyst. I asked when the operation would be, and he said that the doctor would schedule it once they paid the money -- $150 up front. R had $50 at home and was planning to work hard that day and the next to get the remaining $100. Was his wife in pain?, I asked. Yes, he said. But the operation would have to wait until the money was paid. Shortly after he dropped me at the office, R called to say he wouldn't be able to pick up Eric later in the morning as planned, because his car had been impounded at a road block. Later he explained that, although he had 5 or 6 stickers on the windshield showing that he was paid up for registration, city tax, insurance (about $150 a year for a passenger car), etc., the police stopped him because he was missing a “TAXI” sign. The sign cost $40, and getting his car out of the impoundment was another $50. So, he was out $90 and, for the better part of the day while he raised the cash from friends, he was deprived of his livelihood while the car sat in the lot. So much for his wife’s surgery.

On that occasion, Eric and I offered help, and R accepted gratefully. It’s been several weeks now since his wife had the surgery, but R told me recently that she was still bleeding from the wound (it sounds like it was a laparotomy). It turned out that her sister, who had come after the birth of their youngest, was no longer staying with them. With no help around the house, R’s wife was continuing her normal routine of carrying water and other chores. I asked if they knew anyone who could help around the house, but I stopped short of asking how much it might cost to pay someone to come and help for a few days and then offering to pay that. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that it would be too prescriptive and intrusive to suggest that. I am reluctant to adopt the role of patron, or maybe just too naïve to recognize the extent to which I already am in that role; but our relationship, despite the financial imbalance, still feels reciprocal. When we were at the DGM (Direction Générale de Migration, the immigration office) in Kinshasa and needed a document we’d left behind in Lubumbashi, he went to our house to get it and bring it to a colleague who was flying to Kin that afternoon. When we planned to be in Kenya over New Year’s and needed a place to leave our stuff so we could be out of our first apartment before moving into our next, he offered to store it at his place.

For Christmas we gave R a bonus to help buy the kids’ new Christmas outfits and shoes, and also got a gift for his kids. I've met the older two a couple of times; so far they haven’t let out even a squeak around me, but R assures me that they talk plenty at home! When our Christmas trip to Nairobi was postponed while we waited for our passports to be returned from Kinshasa with our residence visas, R invited us to have Christmas dinner at his house, and we were excited at the prospect of meeting his wife and baby (and kids, for Eric) and seeing his house (and eating bukari, aka fufu, en famille!). We’re not the only steady expat clients R has; he has a few long-term Belgian clients, and we’d seen a picture of his family with them at his house, so we know we’re not unique. In any case, it was not to be -- he called Christmas morning and regretfully cancelled, saying he had to take the bus to Kolwezi and back to bring something to someone on behalf of someone who was ill, and wouldn't return until night.

I’m starting to get some insights about the cost of medical care through our association with R. There was his wife’s surgery, and before that, the inhaler treatments for his daughter ($12 a pop), and then the kids’ vaccines. The older kids got measles vaccine and vitamin A recently as part of a campaign, and I don’t think they paid for those, but when the baby went for her routine immunizations, it was 2,500 FC ($2.77) per shot and 1,000 FC ($0.90) for a syringe.  With two shots (and one syringe?), it was 6,000 FC. R knows that the vaccines are donated by UNICEF and supposed to be free. An encouraging point is that his family has insecticide-treated bednets to reduce the risk of malaria, and they did get those free through a campaign. However, the nets need to be replaced, or at least re-treated with insecticide … and the two older kids had an illness that was probably malaria a few weeks ago, just after the start of the rainy season. He himself hasn't had malaria since about 2006 (he’s in his mid-30s, I forget exactly how old – 37, maybe?), so, like most adult inhabitants of endemic areas, he’s developed immunity. An interesting side note to this is that colleagues at the university who have traveled abroad quite a bit have probably lost some of that immunity and are more susceptible to clinical malaria than most adults. For our part, Eric and I take daily malaria prophylaxis, but we've heard other expats advise against it in the belief that taking prophylaxis only delays diagnosis and leads to more complicated cases of malaria.

The first time I met R’s kids, they were in the car when he showed up to take me to work. I thought he was late bringing them to school, but he told me that they had been sent home because he hadn't paid their school fees for the month. I didn't say it, but I was thinking about how embarrassing that must have been for the kids, to be sent home in front of all their classmates because their dad hadn't paid their fees … they’d be scarred for life. Maybe R could sense what I was thinking, because after a few minutes he broke the silence to say that nearly everyone had been sent home – it was the first of December, and lots of families weren't caught up with their fees.

One evening after French class at the Alliance, R wasn't there at 19h15. We knew he’d show up before long, and indeed, he did, a minute or two later. As his car approached, I could see someone sitting in the passenger seat. R parked quickly, jumped out, and jogged over to us. I said it looked like he had a client; he said, no, that was his father, whom he was taking home to Kalubwe -- would we mind if his father rode along while he dropped us off in Golf? Of course not! His father, not surprisingly, turned out to be a genial guy. I knew R lived in Bel Air with his wife and kids, but I wondered if he’d grown up in the house in Kalubwe. No, he hadn't. His father described how they used to rent, and over time, slowly saved up for a house of their own. They built? bought? a kiln, and sold some of the bricks, but kept many of them to build their own house. We had seen lots and lots of these brick kilns in people’s plots along the roads leading out of town, so this must be a common practice. People then build the house little by little over time; when you see Lubumbashi from the air, you can look down on partially completed houses that look from the air like little labyrinths. R’s father said that at some point, even though it wasn't finished, the house was habitable; they moved in and continued working on it till it was done.

Since we’re here for a fairly long time, our interactions with Congolese aren't limited to taxi rides. We've met others here: fellow students from our classes at the Alliance Française, colleagues and students at the School of Public Health, a returned Fulbrighter who works in mining, some IT staff and instructors at a school Eric hopes to volunteer at, the owners of the new place we’re looking forward to moving in to when we get back from our New Year’s trip to Kenya. We've also met some expats, but without kids at one of the international schools or a professional connection to a foreign-based mining company or NGO, we aren't really plugged in to that community. More about all that in another post! 

Clarification

The picture of the raft in the last post is from the movie, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" – we didn't take any pictures on the lake.

Bus to Likasi

We've been talking about visiting Likasi for about as long as we have been in Lubumbashi. Besides the Zambian border, Likasi is the only town within a couple hours of Lubumbashi, and we finally made the trip on Thanksgiving weekend. Buses leave regularly from downtown L'shi (once they are full), and we got on a bus around 11:15 in the morning.
There were a number of vendors – "independent contractors" – on the bus selling soda, water, biscuits, and other snacks. As the bus filled up, the vendors were pushed off and had to settle for selling things through the windows. The bus had a bench for 2 on the starboard side, and a bench for 3 on the port side. I was surprised to see that after all the seats were full, plastic buckets and jerrycans were put in the aisle, and people were seated there as well – one extra person per row. The one-way cost from L'shi to Likasi was 4000 FC ($4.40) each, regardless of where you were seated. We shared a 3-person bench with a young Congolaise, who sat next to the aisle. On her other side was a nicely dressed man on a bucket.
As the bus got rolling, there were only 2 people standing: the conductor and another gentleman, both standing beside the bus's side door. We thought it was odd that people were seated in the aisle instead of standing, since the bus had handles hanging from the ceiling over the aisle, and sitting in the aisle looked more uncomfortable than standing. But maybe not for 2 hours.
Once the bus left downtown, it became clear that the guy standing beside the conductor was a minister (the entertainment?) – he started preaching loud enough to be heard throughout the bus. I could only catch a few words – Karen understood more of the local Swahili dialect – but neither of us remember much of his message besides the initial request to pray to Jesus for a safe trip. The passengers were quiet and many joined in two a cappella hymns that were very beautiful. He was hoarse when he exited after about 25 minutes, just before the toll booth. We didn't take the bus on the return trip – more on that later – so we can't say how common that experience is.

The highway to Likasi is paved the whole way (the road continues to be paved to Kolwezi), but only just wide enough for 2 cars. This makes for some excitement as buses and trucks and bicycles and pedestrians are all overtaking and passing each other. Most of the way I was struck by the emptiness – mostly scrub and woods in all directions. We did pass next to some villages and through a couple of busy trading areas where the bus would slow down or stop and vendors would sell produce through the windows. Instead of the soda and biscuits the vendors sold in Lubumbashi, at these stops we saw live animals, roasted corn, tomatoes, and okra for sale.
Likasi has a busy parking lot functioning as the bus station, but I'm not sure where the buses go besides L'shi and Kolwezi. We traveled light, but still wanted to get our bags into a hotel room, so we got a room at the Greek-owned hotel listed in our guide book as having the best non-Congolese restaurants in town, one Chinese and one Italian. Another place listed in our specially ordered French guide book was Guesthouse Okapi, which was said to have a car to rent. Our goal in Likasi was to visit the nearby lake and rent a pirogue to check out birds, so we walked to the Guesthouse Okapi to ask about their car.

The okapi - a giraffe relative

The Okapi was tucked away behind the main streets. We were greeted by John, the son of "Papa Okapi", who was home on break from studying electrical engineering in South Africa. He was quiet and responsible. We talked for a little bit, but had to wait for Papa Okapi to discuss the details about the car. Papa Okapi was a character: talkative and animated. He was very interested to see the guidebook that listed the Okapi Guesthouse, and delighted to realize that the author must have stayed at his guesthouse since there was so much detail. He also wanted us to get him a copy of the book. I bought a copy today – now we'll have to figure out the hand-off.
Anyway, his driver Kit (pronounced "Keet") could take us to the lake in their 4x4, and John would come along too. But when we asked "combien ça coute?", he asked us to suggest a price. This put us in a awkward position – we don't have a good idea about what is reasonable. This standoff ended when Karen got a little annoyed and pointed out the setting the price is his job and we shouldn't be asked to do his job for him – doctors don't ask patients, "what do you think you have?" [Karen: well, sometimes doctors do ask patients what they think they have -- the example I actually used was an epidemiology example, as in, I wouldn't expect you to know the incidence of cholera -- that's my job to figure out ... ] Back at our hotel, we ate dinner in the Italian restaurant near a table full of expat miners speaking English in a variety accents. I coveted a Chinese broccoli dish that one guy brought in from next door.
The next morning, John and Kit showed up, and we drove to Lake Tshangelele. We turned off the paved road onto a rutted and narrow dirt road that passed through a fairly busy village where we turned off onto a narrower track bordered by deep gullies caused by the heavy rains. At the edge of the lake, there were a dozen people and about twice that many dugout boats pulled onto the shore. John negotiated with a couple guys in a larger pirogue made of planks – the 5 of us wouldn't have fit in a dugout. The two young fishermen sat in back and paddled. John and I sat across from each other in the middle, and Karen sat up front.
This artificial lake was formed by damming a small river, but as the water rose, it eventually opened a channel and started draining out the north end. This second channel was dammed later, but the entire lake is silting up and is pretty shallow. Much of it is covered with tall grasses, and it wasn't long before we were gliding through a well-defined passage in the vegetation. The passage was wide enough that canoes coming the other way could slip past, but we couldn't see very far in any direction as we snaked through the grass. It was a while before we reached a wide-open area full of water lilies where we turned around. They might have been joking, but fishermen said there were hippos in the lake, hidden during the middle of the day. For me, the coolest sight was the "fisherman's restaurant", a floating raft in a wide spot that reminded me of scenes from the movie "Beasts of the Southern Wild" – a raft with a tarp roof, hemmed in by canoes, with people lying on the raft and a charcoal stove cooking food.

Raft from the movie "Beasts of the Southern Wild"

We made our way back to town, with a brief pitstop at a Catholic boarding school for boys. We got back earlier than we would have liked, so we went to the site of what was once the Belgian country club-like sports complex but is now nearly abandoned: there was a soccer game and the remnants of a restaurant where we got beer and chicken and fries, but one could imagine the earlier glory of the large swimming pool with 3 diving boards and the wading pool, both now empty with weeds growing between the tiles and the playground equipment likewise weed-choked.
That night we stayed at the Okapi Guesthouse and had a great room and personal attention by John; we were the only guests. Sunday morning we got up early and walked through town to the surrounding fields. We saw okra growing, but most of the other plants were small, since growing season is just starting. We were looking for birds, and sights, and the opportunity to walk rather than riding in a car. We walked for quite a while and got a little mixed up coming back, but the temperature was comfortable and we made it back to the Guesthouse in time to shower and get breakfast before we left for the bus stop. We walked past full churches and heard a powerful male choir from one. At the bus stop, the bus was pretty full and we decided to wait rather than sit in the aisle. However, we were quickly approached by someone telling us about a shared van for the same price. We decided to do that and joined 6 other passengers sitting 4-to-a-row in addition to the driver and a front-seat passenger who talked nonstop about cannibalism and fetishes and black magic by various bandit groups in the north. Just outside Lubumbashi we were delayed by the site of a pretty spectacular car accident, and our driver stopped the van and everyone got out to look except me and Karen. Disturbing and morbid, but at least it wasn't a fatal crash.
After two months of staying in Lubumbashi, we finally got it together to make a quick trip out of town. It was easy and interesting and maybe a little more expensive than we expected, which was great practice, since a few days later we took off suddenly to Kinshasa, where we spent a week. More on that later...

More Photos - Eric (& Karen)

It's been over a month since the last post, and everything is going fine. We both have a number of topics that would be interesting to share, and we hope to get some of them written soon! I've been having too much fun with this post trying to hand-modify the HTML to create some more complex layouts...
We don't take very many photos, but these are some from two different locations: 1) our house in the upscale neighborhood of Golf (near the golf course) and 2) the animal park tour at the Ferme Futuka (more on that later).

Very large mushrooms are now for sale. We were told they appear on the termite mounds once it starts raining (Karen: we saw someone clamber up a termite mound to pick one when we were at Ferme Futuka). They are very large – portobello-sized or even much larger – but can be tough (Karen: spongy?) and don't have much flavor.

Local mushrooms

Leaf Celery

Here's a shot of our refrigerator: leaf celery, ice tea, "bitter lemon" soda, tomato, avocado, zucchini, cabbage, carrots, okra, etc.
(Karen: when we first arrived, we were mystified by the apparent absence of fresh produce, but we've since discovered  not only the little satellite produce market within walking distance of our house, but also the huge Mzee Kabila market, which is full of piles of produce and lots of meat (some of it still walking and squawking) and fish. We hope to discreetly take some pictures of our own at some point, but for now you can see one here.) 

Our Refrigerator

I bought this shelving unit the first week we were here – it is very handy for holding our sharp knives, and also all of our fruit and other non-refrigerated stuff: papaya, bananas, mangoes, tomatoes, potatoes, leeks, ginger, garlic, onions

Our Pantry Shelves

We planted some herbs and some lettuce in the planters outside our apartment. The basil (both Thai and Italian) has been growing very well, and the cilantro is looking good, too. I think it's a little hot for the lettuce plants – they are growing, but not terribly well. Two of the three "sentinels" (guards) are interested – one is doing most of the watering and thinks some soil augmentation will help the lettuce grow better. The other guard saw us thinning the basil and asked if he could plant the ones we took out at home.

Thai Basil

Italian Basil

Madame’s cat

The owner of our apartment (and the 2 other apartments in this gated compound) lives in the "big house" on the property. She has a small dog, a thin cat, and a grey parrot that likes to whistle. The dog likes to sleep in front of our door, and both the cat and dog come over when Madame isn't home, looking to be fed, I think. The grasshopper below was outside the gate. All of the yellow in this picture is pollen from the flower.

Grasshopper Covered with Pollen

The Ferme Futuka

We found out about the governor's farm (Karen: about 20 km outside Lubumbashi, an "ecotourism pilot project" and part of the governor's efforts to promote local agriculture) on the internet and it sounded like a good excursion.  (Note: the governor of Katanga is Moïse Katumbi Chapwe who has been in London, we think.) We visited the Ferme Futuka with a French couple we've become friendly with and their 2 children. On the way in, we didn't see much growing except a small field of papaya trees. Later we did see some very large fields, but since the rainy season was just beginning, they were plowed, but empty of any crops. I'm sure it will look much greener in a few months!
Upon arrival, we almost immediately boarded the large open-sided Mercedes touring vehicle and went driving around the part of the property left "au naturel" – except for the addition of a number of animals not normally seen around here.

Karen on the Futuka Safari

Kudu

Sable Antelope

Some Antelope and an Eland, maybe

These over-crowded ostriches were not running around wild; they were being raised for meat, we think. Many of the birds had backsides that looked like frozen turkey, all of their feathers being pulled out – probably due to establishing the pecking order in such a confined area.

Ostriches

Zebras

My New Zebra Shirt (Karen: we bought this in Lubumbashi at a fair at a dance school; you can see through the window behind Eric proud parents watching their kids perform on the stage (hidden by the rack of shirts). Nice to see an array of food and crafts vendors; many don't have storefronts.)

Thanksgiving

After not having met any Americans at all in the nearly 2 months we've been here, we were introduced to some last week, just in time for Thanksgiving! On Monday, we had dinner with some representatives from the US Embassy who had come down from Kinshasa, and that dinner included an American couple who has lived in Lubumbashi since the 1970s. They hooked us into a large (50-person?) Thanksgiving gathering mostly consisting of Americans with ties to the Methodist church. There was a lot of traditional Thanksgiving food including stuffing, apple and pumpkin pies with whipped cream, and mashed potatoes. We brought butternut squash with orange rind, ginger, and honey (Karen: thanks to the internet for recipes at our fingertips). A pretty heavy rain storm hit around dessert-time, chasing us inside. (Karen: it was nice to meet this crowd and learn about their work and lives in Lubumbashi; we're short-timers, having been here only 2 months and planning to stay only 8 more ... on Tuesday last week, we also met an American woman who's lived here since 2008 and has put together a little city guide with lots of helpful resources.)

Thanksgiving Dessert Table

Thanksgiving Rain Shower -- looking out at our host's beautiful and bountiful backyard garden, with veggies and fruit trees (strawberry patch around front!).  

(Karen: As Eric said, lots more to tell ... !)

Photo Interlude - Karen

Click on blue text to follow links to more info ...

The UNILU School of Public Health, founded in 2005 and housed in a former convent. The big tree on the left is over 100 years old -- given that Lubumbashi was founded just over 100 years ago, that's old! The SPH is sandwiched between the Lycee Tuendelee girls' school, which is also over 100 years old, and the Clinique Universitaire, which is a teaching hospital of UNILU and where the lab we'll be working with on our planned study of the prevalence of colonization with group B streptococcus in pregnant women is located. The nuns lived here and worked in the hospital (and also the school?), going back and forth through a gate in the back courtyard that you can't see from here. During some down time between master students' defenses last week, I saw lots of types of birds, including a pair of African-Paradise Flycatchers, in that back courtyard.

The office I share with an epidemiologist colleague -- looking across from my desk to his. He has another office at the public Jason Sendwe Hospital, which is where he spends most of his time.

Vaccination poster on the door of the cold room at the provincial Ministry of Health where the vaccines for the EPI (Expanded Programme on Immunisation) are stored. My SPH colleague and I visited the MOH and met with the Minister, who was very supportive of our proposal to conduct the GBS study among women attending hospitals in the area.

A few Ebola prevention posters from medical facilities. The West African epidemic seems pretty remote here, but at the same time, as the country where Ebola was first discovered (in the north, far, far from here) and which has a lot of experience in controlling EVD outbreaks (including one just last month), the DRC is working to train groups of experts to help in West Africa. In fact, the microbiologist who will work with us on the GBS study is currently in Kinshasa for the training. We also went to an amazingly acrobatic dance performance the other night, and one of the numbers was a solemn piece that dramatized the EVD epidemic and ended with the performers holding signs that read "Let's fight against Ebola" and "Together we can save the world" -- an earnest sort of "We Are the World" echo.

 

More of those smoky purple flame trees I love.

We wanted to adopt these kittens! They were hanging around the garden of the hotel we stayed at briefly before moving to the apartment, and we had fantasies of bringing them with us to the house we planned to rent. But a) we didn't get the house, and b) they weren't strays. But we're not ruling out the possibility, with a different house and different kittens.

One of the places we ate a few times when we had to eat every meal out. The South African fast food chain Galito's and affiliated Zimbabwean Chicken Inn, Pizza Inn, and  Creamy Inn  opened in Lubumbashi less than a year ago; they serve surprisingly good fast food. By the way, the shirt Eric is wearing here is one I got him in Ghana -- we haven't seen anything like it here, where most men wear western-style shirts or else custom-tailored shirts made of colorful patterned pagnes.

The Institut Francais sponsored a program as part of the FAO's World Food Day (this year's theme is Family Farming), which included a showcase of some local projects like this one to make efficient stoves that use less fuel and generate less smoke. Jiko means stove in Swahili. We also tasted a peanut-sweet potato loaf which was like a veggie meatloaf and bought some delicious pili-pili (the ubiquitous hot red pepper sauce that makes everything taste better -- just ask Martha Stewart). 

One of the planned World Food Day activities was a visit to a farm outside town, but it was canceled on account of the first real downpour of the rainy season, which created this huge hole on the street outside  the Belgian Megastore supermarket on Chaussee Laurent-Desire Kabila (formerly known as, and often still referred to as, Chaussee Mobutu). So far, this has been the only downpour of the rainy season -- it's been dry, dry, dry.

And that's it for now! 

Getting established

Looking down the street from a balcony.

The primary language here is Congolese French and we are both working to understand it better. We are in classes at Alliance Française. Karen is taking a class at level “C1” (fluent) and Tuesday, I was promoted out of my original “Elementary 3” class to the next level. Karen has a significant advantage, since she already knows standard French, but pronunciation can add to the language gap. Certain French pronunciation details aren’t rigorously followed. For example, my professor pronounces the difference between le (“luh”) and les (“lay”), but when the students read out loud, they both sound like “lay”. Same with que (“kuh”) sounding like “kay” and deux (“duh”) sounding like “day”, which is how the real French word des should sound.
Very few people speak English here, even though English is spoken in nearby countries. For example, we have met native English speakers from South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We also attended the “English Club of Lubumbashi” that meets every Saturday. We were brought by a contact we met through the US grant alumni network, a young man who attended Montana State University (Bozeman) for a year on a Fulbright scholarship and is now working for a mining consulting company as an engineer. The Fulbright has programs for American students and professors going abroad and for students and professors coming to the US.

Due to the lack of a robust banking system, large purchases are paid for using brand-new US $100 bills. In the US, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I used “Benjamins”, but here I have them all the time. At home, I wouldn’t take out large amounts of cash because I could pay for nearly everything with plastic, but here we often get $100 bills from the ATM. I didn’t realize how cool-looking our $100 bills are with all of their anti-counterfeiting technology.
Renting an apartment without using credit cards or checks or international wire transfers was interesting. Although normally the VISA debit cards we use are limited to $1000 per day, there was an additional restriction on the DRC, so we couldn’t take out more than $500 per day. It took us a few days to gather the $100 bills necessary to pay for the real estate agency’s commission, the deposit, and the first month’s rent, and even then we had to supplement with a few Euros left over from our day in Amsterdam.
We had rejected this apartment earlier because it was pretty small, was too far from downtown, didn’t have a yard, and didn’t have an oven. However, we decided we needed to get out of hotels so we could stop paying so much, unpack completely, and cook for ourselves. The apartment has a bedroom with attached bathroom, a connected living room - dining room, and alcove called “the kitchen.” The kitchen has a 2-burner hotplate, a microwave, a toaster, and  a sink. The bigger, more expensive, house with the bigger yard that we liked better wasn’t going to be available until mid-December. [Karen: We have this place through the end of December and hope to move either to that house or to another place then.]

The western-style grocery stores (like the Greek-owned Hyper Psaro) carry a lot of goods from South Africa and Europe. There is also a large Kroger’s-style department store called “JamboMart” that carries a lot of Indian food & spices in the grocery section in addition to 3 floors of hardware, kitchenware, and clothes. I bought a mix to make dosas (a savory, South Indian crepe) and a chocolate mousse mix from Holland in order to augment the [Karen: delicious] potato masala I made for Karen’s birthday dinner.
The produce in the grocery stores is pretty poor – both in terms of selection and appearance (freshness, fly-covered-ness). In the downtown area, you often see women selling produce from a bowl they carry on their head; we’ve seen oranges, bananas, mangoes, avocados, pineapple, cassava, and small bags of drinking water sold this way. In certain areas, there are also displays of produce or food lined up on the ground – sometimes on a piece of cardboard with the price written below. We have seen all the fruit listed above in addition to candy, fish, small, dead songbirds tied into bundles, live turkeys with their feet tied together, and caterpillars. I also saw someone selling a small deer, dead, but complete in all ways, and we’ve heard that termites are eaten here, but I haven’t seen them.
We feel lucky to have discovered a local produce market that has a good selection of nice-looking fruits and vegetables. Small by Seattle standards, it is run by about 5 women, who are competing for the sales. We bought pineapple, papaya, tomatoes, aromatic celery, carrots, cucumber, zucchini, and garlic there. Karen is eyeing the lovely looking leeks for an upcoming meal. It is about a quarter-mile from our apartment, and we walk there unless we stop in a taxi on the way to somewhere else. Most upper-class households have a driver, and, like a lot of similar places, the upper classes don’t walk. Being automatically included in that category by virtue of being American, many people we interact with would be scandalized by the way we get around town.

Driving in Lubumbashi is probably similar to any number of non-western, busy, growing, metropolises: there are loose guidelines, but the rules aren’t followed too strictly. There are traffic lights, but you’d better not trust them completely. There are aggressive lane-changes and left-turns across traffic and passing on downtown 2-lane streets. You see U-turns on busy streets and pedestrians weaving through moving traffic. One thing that is unusual is that the cars drive on the right, but most of the cars are from Japan and have the steering wheel on the right, too.
There are large buses that go to nearby towns, but there are no local public buses of the type we are familiar with, so the transportation requirements are filled by taxis (which we use a fair bit) and what Karen calls “collectives,” but the locals call “buses,” which are local, private, cheap transportation run using Toyota Noah vans. The vans are imported from Japan, and either come completely stripped to the metal, or are stripped down here. Except for the front seats, they are down to raw metal inside with benches added. They leave from particular places downtown and the “conductor” is in charge of announcing the route and collecting the money. Once the van is packed, it leaves. They hold around 25 people. The conductor often rides half-way out of the vehicle scanning for people wanting to ride. He also is responsible for opening the back of the van to let people out.

The first time I took one of these buses, I went to the stop near our apartment and paid 500 FC (60 cents) to go downtown. This was around 5 pm, and the bus had just unloaded people coming from downtown and was returning fairly empty. The driver had spent time in South Africa and was excited to talk to me in English. After a couple stops, the front seat was free and the driver insisted I come around and get in. So, I rode shotgun the rest of the way, listening to his heavily accented English. When full, there would be 2 or 3 people sitting shotgun. Karen and I both took the “bus” home from French class last night. It was very full. We learned that the actual fare is 250FC, not 500FC, because a young woman saw we had out 1000FC and told us we only needed half that for the two of us.

There are a lot of details that I hope to share in later posts, but after three weeks we are getting more comfortable and more established as we improve our communication and become more familiar with the city. We hope to visit farther outside of town soon!

Lubumbashi – Week 1

Hey there, it’s Karen again. We don’t want to overwhelm you with posts, but in these first days when everything is new, there’s a lot we want to share – so here are some of my impressions.

Flying in over Lubumbashi, I was taken aback. The city seemed in the middle of nowhere – no outlying settlements, no surrounding fields of crops or even any green at all, except in a few patches in the city itself. As Eric said, reddish dirt – though not as red as I’ve seen in other parts of Africa I’ve been to – and a fairly spacious layout. What have we done?, I thought, as the plane banked over the city to approach the airport.  I should have applied to the Fulbright in Kinshasa – how will we make it 10 months in this featureless, barren place?

Once on the ground, though, experiencing it at human scale and walking around, it seems less isolated and desolate than it did from the air. From our perspective now, there is variety and activity and topography. We got a map the very first day, and spent the entire next day walking around for hours, to and around the zoo, around downtown. This city feels manageable, unthreatening. It’s not big enough to get lost in, and the traffic’s not fast enough to be scary. People are friendly, and as a white-skinned foreigner, I don’t feel conspicuous the way I have in some places I’ve traveled. Taxi drivers will honk once and readily take a head-shake or a “non, merci” rather than ask repeatedly if we want to ride. Perhaps our preference for walking – at least so far, since it hasn’t been too hot – is one of the more conspicuous things about us as foreigners.

The reason Lubumbashi looks like it’s in the middle of nowhere is that it is in the middle of nowhere. There was no settlement here until 1910, and the city grew up around the copper mine. There are no farms or villages around it, so nearly everything is imported. We’ve seen hardly any animals, apart from in the zoo, except for a couple of chickens, some goats by the roadside, a few unhappy birds for sale in cages, and a couple of cats. Sidewalk vendors sell oranges and apples from Zambia or South Africa, or occasionally some bits of produce that look like it might have been locally grown – tomatoes, garlic, avocados. There are green mangos on trees; one of our taxi drivers, a nice young guy named Gelain, said they would ripen after it had rained three times. Lastnight was the first rain of the season, so I’m hopeful the mangos will be ready soon! But aside from the dearth of agriculture, the city’s history has shaped it in other ways. I’m finally reading David Van Reybrouck’s book Congo, which Eric wrote about in his first post, and Van Reybrouck writes quite a bit about the history of Elisabethville, as it was known until 1966.

Another result of its isolation is that prices are high. Hotels are expensive, and eating out is expensive. Even when we’ve gone to local restaurants for foufou, smoked fish, and manioc leaves, it’s cost at least $20. As Eric described, we think we may have a rental lined up, but it will be another 10 days or so until the current occupant moves out and we can move in. In the meantime, we are planning to move to a less expensive hotel (at half the price of the one we’re in, it will still be $100/night), and trying to find the best deals for food. One we’ve found is the 14-dollar wood-fired pizza at the Italian restaurant at the zoo, and just lastnight we had delicious, not-too-outrageously-priced Indian food at Maharajaa. Both these restaurants also have the advantage of being relatively fast – more than once already we’ve thought we would get a quick bite somewhere and ended up waiting an hour for our food! We’ll both be glad when we’re able to cook for ourselves and eat out only when we want to.

When we do start shopping and cooking for ourselves, we won’t be confronted by unfamiliar foods unless we seek them out. Lubumbashi is full of supermarkets stocking South African, European, and even some US brands. I had insisted on packing a suitcase full of things I didn’t think we’d be able to find here, like toiletries and baking powder (because of course, they’d only have the weird European kind), but was amazed to see most of it here! The one thing we would definitely have had a hard time finding is saline solution for our contact lenses, but otherwise – unscented laundry detergent? Check. US baking powder and baking soda? Check – Clabber Girl, Calumet, Arm & Hammer. Bob’s Red Mill steel-cut oats? Check (not that we brought that with us!). Not much in the way of fresh produce, though, so I’m glad I brought some veggie seeds along and am hoping they’ll grow well when we move into our temporary home. It turns out, though, that I needn’t have brought those, either – the HyperPsaro supermarket has veggie seeds galore, probably better suited to this region than the ones from Seattle.

Of course, we’re still decoding the culture here, as we will be for the entire 10 months (and even then we’ll only have scratched the surface). There must be a dual economy in housing and food and other goods, and we’ve seen a little of that by walking through the Mzee Kabila public market where there are stalls with bulk bags of rice, cornmeal, and soy flour, and rows and rows of used western clothing, all for much less than in the supermarkets or boutiques. Yesterday I went to the market in an outlying quarter called Kenya (in a fruitless search for a prêt-à-porter shirt of African fabric to give Eric for his birthday), and there housing is surely less expensive. But even a fairly dive-y 2-bedroom apartment in downtown L’shi that reminded me of some of the more run-down apartments I saw in NYC when I was a visiting nurse costs $1500/month!

Some of the decoding we’re doing is literal. Despite having sat through 150 hours of intensive Swahili class this summer, I can only catch a few words of the local Shaba or Kingwana dialect when I listen to people speak it to each other, though the few times I’ve tried out my halting, school-book Kiswahili, they’ve had no trouble understanding me. Most of the time, though, I speak French, which is harder than I expected. For one thing, I’ve been speaking so much Spanish recently that I’m mixing it up with French, and for another, I’m not yet used to the accent and colloquialisms here. I’ve been referring to Eric as my “mari”, but others use the words “époux” or “conjoint” – perfectly understandable terms, just not the ones I’d think of first. To work on our French, Eric and I have been trading off reading his copy of Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers, and on Wednesday, we registered at the local Alliance Française, took language placement tests, and were sent off to our respective classrooms for lessons! More about that in another post – we’ve still only been to class once because Eric stayed home sick yesterday.

Speaking of sickness, we’re far from Ebola virus here, but still reading and watching the news with great concern. We weren’t screened for fever on any of our flights coming here, but as we walked into the L’shi airport, we saw a big poster with two columns of text describing Ebola virus disease and precautions. My first thought was to snap a photo, but a uniformed soldier sternly discouraged me from doing that, and I belatedly and sheepishly remembered all the admonitions I’d read against taking photos around anything vaguely official. My public health heart, though, regretted not getting the photo and regretted even more the placement of the poster outside, where there was no time to stop to read it, rather than inside, where disembarked passengers waiting to pass through immigration control could have read it at their leisure. By the way, in other DRC-related public health news, there was an article in Science this week tracing the current HIV pandemic to Kinshasa in the 1920s, whence it spread by rail to Lubumbashi. But HIV rates here are relatively low (2-3%) compared to some countries in the region.

Several of you have asked for photos, but we don’t have many. It’s hard to take a picture unobtrusively, even when soldiers aren't around. Here are a few we have managed to take:

On Wednesday, on my way to meet the Dean and colleagues at the School of Public Health. It’s housed between a girls’ school and the University Clinic in a former convent complete with a stained-glass window and a chapel-turned-classroom. Our initial meeting went well, and next week I’ll start working with some counterparts to plan the study I’m hoping to do – more about that in another post soon!

This robot directs traffic at the intersection of Mzee L-D Kabila and Av. Sendwe. Every minute or so he swivels 90 degrees, raises his arms, and on his chest, back, and hands flashes red or green at the oncoming traffic.

The streets are lined with purple-flowered flame trees; unlike the more familiar scarlet-flowered ones, these give a somewhat hazy, smoky feel to the streets. Lubumbashi, at least at first look, at least at this season, has few bright colors men and women in bright, patterned clothing are in the minority here.

The courtyard at the lovely, pricey, Bougainvilla Guesthouse.