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!