We live in a city (by Karen)

It’s strange, because we live in a city. We’re not out in the bush in grass-thatched mud houses – we’re in the second-largest city of the DRC, the seat of the mining industry, economic motor of the country, with a population of about 2 million. We live in a modern-style apartment, with tiled floors, indoor plumbing, and electricity. Yet the infrastructure is so poor and services so unreliable that sometimes our dependence on these amenities is a disadvantage; the system does not have resilience built in.

At our old place, the power would be out almost every day for several hours, which meant no running water and no way to cook food unless the compound’s generator was turned on. The lack of water was easy to compensate for after we were caught short a couple of times: there, as here in our new place, we kept large buckets and basins of water on hand. If the power went out mid-shower, we could switch to a bucket bath. The first scoopful was always breathtakingly cold, but it wasn't so bad after that. For the last several weeks that we were in our old apartment, we had hot water to the kitchen, but not to the bathroom, so we routinely took bucket baths – but at least they were warm! I liked it, but Eric got tired of it fast, and was happy to have “real” showers when we went to Kenya for vacation.

On the other hand, with the power out, it wasn’t so easy to compensate for the lack of hotplate and microwave to cook with. Most locals cook with charcoal fires that are immune to the vagaries of SNEL, the Société Nationale d’Électricité. The charcoal fires are an important source of air pollution that contributes to high rates of respiratory disease – one of the graduate students I work with at the UNILU School of Public Health is fine-tuning a protocol to study this issue here in Lubumbashi – and the harvesting of wood to make charcoal contributes to deforestation. In any case, not having a charcoal brazier at our old place, we were out of luck if the power went out, especially if we were the only residents home in the middle of the day. We'd eat cheese sandwiches or cold leftovers while we watched the staff (guard, driver, gardener, housekeeper) cook up their bukary (fufu) and sombe (manioc leaves) over hot coals. Sometimes we asked them to turn on the generator for a little while, long enough to boil water or nuke the previous night’s lentils. Extravagant.

Our old place was in the Golf subdivision, so named for its proximity to the golf course. That’s the part of town in which many ex-pats and upper-class Lushois (the adjective for people who live in Lubumbashi) live, with lots of fancy, big houses with swimming pools and manicured gardens behind high walls. Being somewhat on the periphery, though, it is notorious for unstable electricity, and every compound has a large diesel generator. Down the side streets off the paved road are homes of less-affluent Lushois, who presumably just make do when the power is out, assuming their homes are even wired for electricity.

I've made only a few forays into the farther-flung districts where the bulk of Lubumbashi’s population lives – the “communes” of Kenya, Kamalondo, Kalubwe, and others – but from the little I've seen, it’s clear that the overall standard of living there is very poor. Only the downtown roads and a few of the main routes heading out of town are paved, and that only in the past 6-8 years, we’re told. My impression is that many people live on barely passable dirt roads in mud-brick houses with tin roofs that may have electricity wires jerry-rigged to them, but that don’t have running water. I've heard that the government has a goal of getting running water to the city’s residents, and we have seen places where the road has been dug up and it looks like water pipes are being put in. Whether the water is potable or not is another question; one of my classmates at the Alliance Française works for REGIDESO , the water authority, and he said that the water leaving the plants is potable, but that there are so many cracks in the pipes, in some cases from the pipes having been laid too close to the surface and being subject to too much pressure from passing traffic, that the water quality at the point of use can’t be guaranteed.  There are periodic cholera outbreaks in some of the communes. The water here is very hard. Most ex-pats drink only bottled water, but we drink tap water, disinfected either with a UV gadget we brought from the States, or by boiling it in an electric kettle. Lots of scale on the kettle, or even after boiling water to cook pasta. We know the soil is contaminated with heavy metals from the mining activity, so the water may be, too.

The main hospital doesn't have running water. It’s the tertiary referral hospital for the province, named for Jason Sendwe, who opposed the secession of Katanga after Congo’s independence and was assassinated in 1964. Actually, just last year, the hospital did get running water to the OR, though I’m not sure how consistent it is. In the rest of the hospital, any water has to be carried in from a pipe outside and up the stairs in buckets. I haven’t seen the patient wards, but can imagine how difficult basic hygiene, not to mention infection control, must be (article from 2006 here; things have improved since then).

School of Public Health Faculty/Staff bathroom

There is no running water at the School of Public Health, either. My office is on the second floor. There’s a bathroom at the end of the hall with a big blue plastic drum that the cleaning woman fills by filling the green bucket on the floor in the photo above from the hose outside and carrying it up the stairs on her head. Smaller buckets are on the floor to use for flushing the toilets, and a bucket fitted with a spigot with a basin underneath it is set up on a stand with soap for handwashing. The toilet stalls in this bathroom, by the way, are locked. I don’t have a key of my own and if the folks in the office where the key is kept are out or gone for the day, I’m out of luck – one reason why I haven’t been putting in long hours at the office. The TP situation is also unpredictable: occasionally, there is some, but otherwise, it's BYO. Judging from the contents of the wastebasket beside the toilet (no seat or lid on the toilet, by the way), what most people bring is printer paper.

At our old place, we were thrilled to have near-continuous electricity from a couple of days before Christmas up to the time we left for our delayed Kenyan holiday on the 28^th of December.  It wasn't clear whether the power was up in honor of the return of the governor, Moïse Katumbi, after a 3-month absence, or because of relatively lower demand by mining companies, other businesses, and absent ex-pats, but it felt like quite a luxury.

Our new place is closer to the city center and in a more established neighborhood. The power is more consistent; it goes off for only short periods a few times a day. We have access to a shared brazier if we should need to cook when the power is out, and there is a generator on the property, though it hasn't been run since we moved in. The apartment is bigger than and not as streamlined as our old one: there are uneven spots in the floor, the TV cabinet is warped from past flooding, and the heavy wooden furniture with brown plaid cushions is reminiscent of a basement rec room circa 1970 (per Eric). There’s no hot water in the kitchen, and no cold water in the bathroom sink. But we have a 4-burner stove with an oven, and a washing machine!

Sunday-morning pancakes

Yum!

It’s surprisingly gratifying to be able to wash our clothes ourselves again. At the old place, we'd hand over our laundry hamper to the housekeeper, and it might be several days or a week before we’d get our clothes back clean. The delays were mostly linked to the lack of power or water, but it was frustrating not to know when they’d be back … Of course, most families here wash their clothes by hand. We could hand-wash small things, but had no place to hang them unless we borrowed a drying rack from the housekeeper. She wasn't there on Sundays, so if we’d forgotten to ask, we’d have to wait. Small things, but for we who are accustomed to having control over all the details of our lives, a lesson in patience.

The washing machine in our new place had some lessons for us, too. It’s a nice machine – a Samsung with a “fuzzy logic” setting, high-tech. It’s designed to drain from the bottom, but the drainpipe is about 2 feet up. There isn’t a water pump, so there is a gravitational challenge when it comes time to drain the drum: some user participation is required. That is, after the wash cycle, the first rinse cycle, and the second rinse cycle, when we hear the machine stop running because it’s full of water, we have to take the end of the drain hose out of the drainpipe and run the water into a bucket. When the bucket’s full, we hook the hose back in the pipe, carry the bucket to the tub, dump it out, and start over again. The last bits of water are at pressure so low they won’t drain into the bucket, so we have to coax them into a basin until the machine is satisfied and moves on to its next cycle. The first time we did this, we left the hose in the bucket after the first rinse cycle, confident that we’d hear the water running when it was time for the next rinse cycle -- we ended up with water all over the floor! We were quite the sight, the two of us still with sore quads from climbing Mt. Longonot in Kenya a couple of days before, gingerly lowering down to our hands and knees and mopping up the water with every towel or rag we could spare.

Eric on washer-draining duty. Note the similarity of the plastic buckets at home and at work -- brightly colored, cheap, imported plastic is everywhere!

First-world problems? In a way. We can observe things with detachment, even amusement, knowing that whatever happens, we have the resources to recover and will only be here a short time. As I haul buckets of water from the washing machine to the tub, I fatuously think, “exercise! strengthening my core!”.  But I remember all the women – the cleaner at the School of Public Health, R’s wife regardless of her abdominal surgery – who heft these buckets from the ground up to their heads and walk distances over rough ground several times each day, and my perspective shifts. We live in a city, but it’s one rife with inequalities at every scale.  We may think of the challenges we encounter as amusing anecdotes, but they are tiny eddies at the edges of the huge river of challenges that washes hopes and agency and potential away, eroding the human and physical capital of this country. There are brave souls who paddle upstream*, and signs that the current is slowing in places, but there is a long way to go.

* we invite you to support some of them: AFDC, Espoir PourTous, Kimbilio

BONUS PHOTOS ...

Update! R found a carpenter who built a table so we could set the machine up high enough to drain on its own. We were pretty pleased with ourselves, until we realized  it's a top-loader -- duh. Here I am standing on a night table fishing out clean clothes after running our first self-draining load.

Little frog I found in the bathroom (which has running water and TP) at the Italian Restaurant at the zoo. 

Women selling red mushrooms like chanterelles. Pretty tasty, but hard to wash the fine dirt out completely. 

These guys are trying to rock the van out of the hole it drove into. This is near the new HyperPsaro, a huge supermarket that just opened. This isn't the only car we've seen stuck in this hole .. it's finally been cordoned off and it looks like the city may fix it.

Eric trying out his new shirt with a couple of the staff from the tailoring/seamstress shop. We bought this pagne (fabric) back in November, but have only just now had it made up into clothes. The shirt, to our surprise, was finished off with big silver snaps.

Me, modeling the jacket and skirt I had made from the same fabric. Three visits later, the skirt is finally big enough that I can wriggle into it, and the buttonholes on the jacket finally fit around the buttons. The woman in the white shirt is the owner (she and her staff gave us the OK to post their photos).