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.