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| 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!
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