Preparing to Depart

Welcome to the “Seattle to DRC” blog. My name is Eric, and my wife Karen and I are going to live in Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from October 2014 – July 2015. Karen was awarded a Fulbright to work at the School of Public Health at the University of Lubumbashi. Although Karen has been to 3 sub-Saharan countries for work before, and lived for nearly two years in Egypt, I have never set foot on the African continent.Fortunately, I have survival French and I’ve now read some books to learn about the history of the DRC:

Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck (Mar 2014)
This is a good, comprehensive history that covers a lot of time. He really does a good job finding interesting first-person sources, including personal interviews from participants. Highly recommended. However, I didn’t get a clear picture about the current situation in the DRC.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert (Oct 2013)
This book is pretty depressing and detailed. Most of the book is set over the last 20 years. The subtitle says “between hope and despair,” but it seemed to have little hope and a lot of despair. It has detailed timelines of the problems: the who, what, where, when, how, and how many of murders, rapes, militia attacks, etc. It described a lot of trees, but I missed the forest.

Currently, I’m working on:
Radio Congo: Signals of Hope from Africa's Deadliest War Paperback by Ben Rawlence (Apr 2012)
This book is not a comprehensive history, but a personal narrative told about Rawlence’s travels in the DRC (and some neighboring countries) in 2007.


The DRC is in the middle of the African continent and Lubumbashi is in the south of the DRC, close to Zambia:

Although the city appears small, it has around 1.5 million inhabitants and the country itself is about as large as the United States east of the Mississippi:

Lubumbashi is in the “copper belt” and the Katanga province has significant quantities of copper, cobalt, zinc, tin, etc. The graphic below (from the BBC) shows the locations of significant minerals in the DRC. This map also shows the resource wealth (of gold & coltan, primarily) of the northeastern region, including the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu which, not coincidentally, have had major conflict in the past 25 years. The coltan link above has some good descriptions of the problems created by this resource wealth in the DRC.

Although we fly out in 9 days, we have been getting ready for the past 4 months (although I expect the packing frenzy to hit us in about a week!). We both have carried around to-do lists all summer, and Karen took an intensive Swahili course. There have been other big changes this summer: I sold the house I lived in for 12 years, Isaac (my youngest) started college, and Karen and I officially tied the knot.

I frequently get asked what I’m going to do in the DRC, and although my flippant response is always “find the ex-pat bar”, I am curious what opportunities I will discover. I want to take advantage of my time there and document what I can in this Blog. I plan to spend time tutoring, writing, improving my French, and meeting people. It looks like I will be quitting my job at Amazon next week because an extended leave isn’t an option. I may return next August.

Postscript
People keep asking me if I am worried about the Ebola outbreaks, especially since there have been some reported cases in the DRC. I’m not especially. Both the West African strain and the DRC outbreak (occurring in some villages a little southeast of Mbandaka above) would require air travel to reach Lubumbashi. It seems less likely that an infected person would find their way to Lubumbashi than many other locations.


Post-postscript
We don’t know where we will be living yet. I’ll keep you posted!