Weather II/Resilience II/Kundelungu II/Robot II (by Karen)

Weather II

The opposite of the rainy season is not the dry season. It’s the dusty season. Fine dust everywhere, on the computer screen, keyboard, the chairs you just wiped down yesterday, on your clothes, in your nose. Sneezing, snuffling – and cold anywhere (the apartment, my office, under a tree) that’s not in direct sun. 

Dust.

Sleeping not only with the blanket, but also thick wool socks, one night even wool long johns. Shivering in the bath though the water’s warm. The upside is that walking in the sun is pleasant, you don’t break a sweat. Reminds me of Indian Summer in the east coast autumn – clear, crisp, dry mornings and dry, sunny days. Like Nairobi in January, or Phoenix at Christmastime.

Resilience II

Remember all my crowing in an earlier post about how “resilient” we were to the vagaries of power outages because we’d bought a brasero and some charcoal? We got our comeuppance on the Kundelungu Plateau. Eric described some of our struggles to light the charcoal, but he didn’t go into the half of it. Lots and lots of candle wax, blowing on the coals until we were light-headed, soaking the charcoal in some of our reserve gasoline – I even stooped to trying a plastic bag.

I’d first seen someone use a plastic bag to light a fire on our Nyanga hike in Zimbabwe. I was scandalized – all those toxins! But of course, plastic, being a petroleum product (as I am fond of pointing out in my crusade to reduce, reuse, and recycle it), burns very well. Every time we’ve used the brasero at home in Lubumbashi, the guard has lit the fire for us, and he, too, sometimes uses a plastic bag. On balance, I suppose it’s better to use a plastic bag to start a cooking fire than to let it sit in a ditch for a few millennia, or to burn it in a pile of trash that generates no useful heat energy and emits lots of toxic smoke.

First night -- dry charcoal, lots of candle wax. Dinner was served a couple of hours later ...

Next morning -- I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!

Where there's smoke, there's fire -- or??

Pine cones to the rescue.

A wisp of a flame!

These days, at home in Lubumbashi, the power is out every morning from about 6 to 9 or 9:30. This is nice, because it’s predictable; on the other hand, it means no hot breakfast or coffee if we leave before the power comes on. Usually we have a hot bucket bath because the hot water heater has been on overnight. So, on balance, we’re still pretty dependent on our creature comforts, hovering near the lower end of the resilience spectrum.

Kundelungu II – Night

The park is supported through a Congo-German cooperation.

Crossing the Lofoï above the falls on a thick, spongy carpet of green, red, and black ferns and algae.
(Photo by Mama Bear; Tween Bear and Papa Bear in front of Eric, Baby Bear clinging to the park guard/guide.)

The night sky at Kundelungu was breathtaking: the Southern Cross, the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, and a striking straight vertical line of three points – Jupiter, Venus, and Regulus – shone bright. There was no light pollution whatsoever; the six of us were alone up on that plateau, kilometers away from the nearest town, cozy in the gite, our only company the spiders and wasps.

The night sky at Kundelungu, as snapped with my phone.
The amazing thing is that, if you look very closely, you can actually see a couple of planets!

After our long drive back from the Lofoï Falls, we sat around the low coffee table, talking by candlelight, eating the dinner we’d cooked over the brasero, drinking wine, melting squares of chocolate in the candle flames. The 4-year-old had gone to sleep, too tired to wait for dinner, and her 11-year-old sister had had her fill of marshmallows toasted over the brasero coals. We were all feeling mellow, well-fed and sleepy …

As the sun was setting ...

Suddenly, through the darkness, we heard the sound of a vehicle, and voices of men – drunk? – singing, chanting. The gite no longer seemed cozy, the candlelight no longer warm. We blew out the candles, closed the curtains, made sure that the flimsy locks on the glass doors were closed. Then we sat in the dark, straining to hear. They were still out there, more distant now.

We had no phone service, no radio. Of course, we weren’t totally alone on the plateau – the park staff, including the guard who had been with us that day, were somewhere, but we had no idea where. We thought of stories of nearby Upemba Park, which is effectively off-limits to tourists (and dangerous to rangers) because of rebel activity. When I was in Kilwa the week before, there had been reports of activity of the Maï-Maï Kata Katanga, and the guard had said that their traces had been seen near the Lofoï Falls. But thus far, he said, they had never caused problems in the Kundelungu Park.

But there’s always a first time, I thought. I tried to reassure myself and others that they only came looking for food and money, that they wouldn’t cause us harm, but I was painfully aware of the two girls and of stories of kidnapping and rape.

Quiet returned. Had they gone, or were they lurking silently, surrounding the gite, waiting to make their move? We went to bed, slept fitfully.

In the morning, as we were trying to light the charcoal yet again, three park staff came walking along the road. As they struggled in their turn to light the charcoal – they said it was damp, exposed to the dew because we hadn’t closed it up well enough – we asked them about the noise we’d heard the night before. It was they and their colleagues, returning from watching the European Cup finals, happy that their team, Barça, had won.

Of course, we hadn’t been alone the night before – that was an illusion. And the Maï Maï weren’t out to get us – that was a delusion, born in part of reality (there are rebel groups and they do do bad things sometimes), in part of a paranoia with shameful roots in tropes based on class, colonialism, and race. 

Moral of the story: always check the football (soccer) schedule before heading for the hills.

Robot II

The traffic robots in one of our early posts were a big hit.

Unfortunately, the robots have not fared well. The one I pass most often on the way to work is often ailing, unable to raise one or both arms or failing to rotate in sequence. Actually, for a time, it appeared to be completely dead; after a few days, we realized it was only in a coma, because the green light on one of its hands started blinking. A few days later, it woke up, but it's never been the same.

Go west, young man!
The robot at the intersection of Kilela Balanda and 30 Juin out of commission, replaced by a flesh-and-blood traffic cop in a reflective yellow vest.

Of course, whether they're functioning or not, drivers interpret the pattern of lights in idiosyncratic ways, which don't always involve correlating red with 'stop'.

The robots have been diminished. They now have patches (only red and green, no warning yellow) on their knees, their heads don't swivel, and it doesn't look like the red-light cameras in their chests are working anymore.

A few months ago, there was a spate of news stories about DRC's woman-engineered robot cops, mostly from the capital, Kinshasa. Click through the links to read some of the stories:

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/mar/05/robocops-being-used-as-traffic-police-in-democratic-republic-of-congo

http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/03/the-case-against-giant-traffic-robots/387358/

http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/7229/Traffic-Robots-in-the-Democratic-Republic-of-Congo.aspx

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/24/tech/robot-cops-rule-kinshasa/

This one's from L'shi! http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-26820565

An interview with the inventor: 

Nice to see DRC getting some positive press, though given how the ones in L'shi have fared, I'm not sure these robots are going to turn into a big source of export income anytime soon ...

Gorillas

Here's the first in my posts about our vacation with Isaac in Goma, Virunga Park, Bukavu, and Kahuzi-Biéga Park, all in the eastern part of the DRC. I'm posting some of our more interesting gorilla pictures. We visited two different families of mountain gorillas in Virunga, one family of eastern lowland gorillas in Kahuzi-Biéga, and we visited the gorilla orphanage at the Mikeno Lodge in Virunga Park. Mountain gorillas and eastern lowland gorillas are both sub-species of eastern gorillas and very endangered by poaching and habitat destruction.

Big daddy silverback watching over his family.

Perfect silverback posture.

This map gives a general idea about the location of the parks.

Mountain gorilla visits are available in the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. I really wanted to support eco-tourism in the Congo, and when we heard that the security situation had improved, I worked with a guide company to plan a wonderful trip. Visiting a gorilla family works like this: mountain gorillas are herbivores and live in families headed by a dominant male (silverback). Besides the adult females and the juveniles, larger families may also have one or two subordinate silverbacks and possibly other blackback males, but the male : female ratio for adults is always heavily skewed – 4 or 5 times as many adult females as males, for example.
Certain mountain gorilla families have been "habituated" by park rangers over time so they are not threatened by human visitors. About 6 families are habituated in Virunga out of 20 or so. The park leaves many families alone; during the war the habituated families were more readily victims of poaching.
The park guides visit the gorilla families every day, either with or without tourists. Before our park vehicle arrives at the closest access point to the forest, the guides have located the nesting site from the night before and we hike into the bush following the guides as they track the gorilla family. Once the family is located, humans are required to stay 7 meters away and wear masks to try and reduce human-to-gorilla disease transfer. At that point, the rangers start the timer and you get an hour to watch the gorillas.

This doesn't look like 7 meters!

For our first visit, an excellent park driver picked us up in the morning at our hotel in Goma and drove us into the park, where we started hiking with a ranger. When we reached the large family (we think it was the Bageni family), the adults were mostly resting, but the juveniles were playing.

I didn't realize Ewoks looked like gorillas.

There were 1000s of flies around and you can see them in every picture, but they didn't seem to be interested in either the gorillas or the humans. Perhaps they feasted on the bruised leaves.

Flies

Long arms scratch better

Our second visit was to the smaller Humba family. The families are named after the dominant silverback, and even this smaller family had a subordinant silverback. We walked directly from the Bukima tented camp in Virunga into the forest, following the guides. The guides knew where the gorillas had slept the night before, but it took some tracking to find them again. The family was actively feeding on leaves and bamboo and was moving around a lot more than the Bageni family because we found them earlier in the day. We followed after them and the guides tried to get us better views of Silverback Humba, but he wasn't too happy about it. We ended up having a close encounter with the subordinate silverback who seemed very big, but very gentle, when he walked close enough to brush against Isaac. [Karen: We were actually a little disturbed at the guides' insistence on following the silverbacks; we didn't want to harass them, and thought the others were just as interesting.]

Silverback approaching Isaac

We also visited the gorilla orphanage at Mikeno Lodge in the Virunga Park. They had about six young mountain gorillas, and a single eastern lowland gorilla in a separate enclosure. Only one of hte mountain gorillas was still bottle feeding.

At the orphanage.

The Kahuzi-Biéga Park is outside of Bukavu, and Isaac and I visited a family of eastern lowland gorillas. Karen was incapacitated after hiking the Nyiragongo volcano. [Karen: "incapacitated" in quotation marks ... my legs were sore, but I was also grateful for a day to catch up on work and to use the hotel's fast internet connection.] We reached their forest after crossing a tea plantation.

I want a world where fascinating, magnificent animals like these thrive. I am so lucky to have been able to see them in their natural habitat. I really want to see the Virunga documentary (nominated for an Oscar this year) when I return to the States.

Eye contact.

What do you think?

Parc National De Kundelungu

The Kundelungu National Park is the closest national park to Lubumbashi and is well known for waterfalls, including the Lofoi falls – one of the tallest in Africa at 540 feet in a single drop. There are reports that it is the highest in Africa, but that seems to be based some erroneous information stating the height at 1100ft. We've been wanting to visit ever since we arrived, but our lack of information made the trip seem insurmountable.
However, friends of friends had successfully visited; that gave our friends, a French volunteer couple with two young girls, the confidence to attempt a visit, and we invited ourselves along. We had to find a 4WD vehicle to rent and get things together fairly quickly, but the visit turned out wonderfully. Karen drove the big 2000 Toyota Prado, following our French friends out of town Friday morning. The SUV was imported from Japan with the steering wheel on the right, but beggars can't be choosers.

The park is north of L'shi. You can also see Kilwa, where Karen went a couple weeks ago.

We arrived at the park's gite (guesthouse) before lunch. The gite was very rustic by Western standards: no power, no running water, no kitchen, no dining room. But it had 3 bedrooms, each with a bathroom where one could bucket-flush and bucket-bathe. The gazebo shown below on the right was designated the kitchen.

Our gite for 2 nights. No running water or electricity.

After lunch we drove both cars to the first set of falls – Masansa.

Turning off the road for the track to the first set of falls.

The southern part of Kundelungu park, where we were, is a plateau and the waterfalls tumble off the plateau on to the plains below.

Above the Masansa falls, looking off the edge of the plateau.

Masansa falls

That night we struggled to get the charcoal lit, succeeding with the help of a lot of candle wax. We all played Blisters, a dice game, snacked a lot, and had rather burnt chicken around 8:30 or 9:00. Oh yeah, and toasted some marshmallows, too. A positive thing that could be said about the gite, though, was that the beds were firm, but comfortable, and clean towels, linens, and blankets were provided.

The next day we left around 9:30 for the 3-hour, 65-km drive to the Lofoi falls. We might have left earlier, but we struggled again to light the charcoal. The plan was to heat water for coffee, for dishes, for bathing, etc. However, we spent a couple hours failing to light the charcoal until we used the pine cones that the 4-year-old picked up the day before. We only had time to heat water for coffee. Not worth it ... almost.

Parts of the drive were through grassland like that shown below, and parts were through dry scrub forest. It looked like a perfect environment for elephants, antelope, zebra, and other animals. We heard there used to be a lot of animals before the war in the 90s, and it sounds like the lower parts of the park may still have a few left.

Crossing the grassland savanna to the Chutes Lofoy.

After parking and having lunch next to the river, we followed our guide across it and hiked around to the overlook of Lofoi falls.

Another lunch by a river before viewing the falls.

A view of the Chutes Lofoi and the edge of the plateau.

Another view of the falls.

We hurriedly left the overlook of the falls when we realized it was 3:20 -- the day had gotten away from us, and we knew we wouldn't make it back to the gite before dark [Karen: but we had a nice drive back, listening to ABBA and Dire Straits [Eric: Too much ABBA]]. When we arrived about an hour after nightfall, the park rangers were planning a rescue for the next day because our guide had no radio and no way to let the know we were OK.

Having learned our lesson, this time we asked our guide to light our charcoal, which he did using lots of dry grass. We heated water for pasta and grilled some thick slabs of bacon. Yum.

The next day, Sunday, we visited a third set of falls – Luchipuka – had lunch at the river, and hiked around to see the falls.

Luchipuka Falls.

Another part of Luchipuka farther downstream.

After the falls we returned to the gite, quickly packed up and headed for home.

Sign for home

We didn't see much wildlife of any size on the whole trip. Not a lot of bird life, not a lot of insect life (and I include spiders in that category), no mammals except some baboons on the last morning. There were a lot of interesting and unusual plants, not flowers generally, but plants: vines, trees, bushes, grasses. We did see one amazing large spider, but it was too high to photograph well; we also saw a variety of butterflies.

A large blue-winged wasp with a long ovipositor.

A wild iris. Much smaller than our domestics.

I really liked the Kundelungu plateau, but can't help but compare it to the Turaco trail that we hiked in the Nyanga National Park in Zimbabwe. Nyanga has developed trails and self-guided and guided backpacking options. In contrast, there is a little camping on the Kundelungu plateau, but self-guided hiking isn't an option, and what is available must be reached by car.  I dream of a developed set of wilderness trails used by backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts to explore the plateau and the waterfalls. Unfortunately, the whole idea of wandering around the bush in the Congo is out of the question at this time – not due to wildlife, not much of that left – but due to a rebel presence. We were accompanied by an armed guide at all times. He has worked for the park for fifteen years and hasn't actually seen rebels, but said his colleagues recently ran across their traces near the Lofoi.

Kundelungu is tremendously beautiful and, due to its elevation, it is pretty comfortable during the dry season. The entire park is 7,600 km² compared to Nyanga's 472 km². I look forward to regional stability opening up more of this beautiful landscape.

Putting the ‘D’ in ‘DRC’ (by Karen)

It didn’t get much, if any, coverage in the English-language or even, as far as we could tell, the French-language press, but in January of this year, the DRC had an interesting episode. Of course, it was just one of a series, and so hardly worth mentioning, I guess – but we’ll mention it here.

A little context: The current president of the DRC is Joseph Kabila, who came to office in 2001 after his father, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, was assassinated. L-D, or Kabila père, had overthrown Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, at which point Kabila fils went from driving a tourist taxi in Tanzania (whence Kabila père  had spent several decades waging  guerrilla war against Mobutu – though Che Guevara came over in 1965 to help the cause and was unimpressed) to being a Very Important Person. L-D was shot in 2001 by one of his own bodyguards, but who was actually behind the plot has not yet been determined, and no one has been brought to justice. In any case, Kabila fils – Joseph Kabila; we can call him JoKa for short – was hastily put into the presidency (according to Tim Butcher in Blood River, with the help of a US mining company). JoKa was only 29 at the time.

In 2006, a new constitution was passed, which stipulated that the president could have only two 5-year terms. Elections were held that year, and JoKa won, though not as handily as he would have liked. He got 45% of the vote in the initial election, and in the run-off, 58%, though there were large regional differences. In 2009, he “set up a commission to determine whether the term of presidential office should not be extended from five years to seven and whether the constitutional limit of two mandates should not be scrapped” (David van Reybrouck in Congo: An Epic History of a People). Those efforts were thwarted. In 2011, JoKa won again, in an election widely criticized as fraudulent.

So, JoKa’s term should be up at the end of 2016 (the first five years he was in power, before the advent of the Third Republic in 2006, don’t enter the official count). Elections are slated for next year. But there are those who still sense a certain reluctance on the part of the head of state to step down as mandated. So, back to January of this year: the government proposed a law that would condition elections on completion of a census.

Now, it’s true that DRC badly needs a census. The last one was in, I believe, 1984, and it’s hard to run a country when you don’t know how many people are in it and how they’re distributed. From a public health standpoint, having an updated census (or, better yet, a functioning civil and vital registration system) would be a huge plus. And, of course, to run elections, it’s helpful to know how many people are living in which political districts. But to conduct a census in a country this big, with infrastructure that’s so poor, could take three or four years, easy. So opposition leaders smelled something fishy and called for a protest in the capital Kinshasa when the law was up for a vote.

Protests began on Monday, January 19^th in Kinshasa and Goma, with confrontations between police and protesters. The opposition was using social media and SMS messaging to show the state’s repressive response and to call on people to join in the protests. Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Tuesday, all internet and SMS across the country was cut off. No email, no Facebook ... no PubMed for my students or online ethics training for my research team. No text messages, no WhatsApp, for anyone, anywhere.

After a few days, the government realized that industry was paralyzed – nothing could get in at the ports, banks couldn’t do any transactions, business couldn’t go on – and that it couldn’t pay its employees their (meager) salaries. Investors were scared off. So internet access was restored on fixed connections – but the vast majority of the small minority of Congolese who use the internet access it on mobile devices, either phones or portable modems, and these remained out of commission for 19 days. Likewise, all SMS communication was suspended for 19 days – only voice calls (which burn more phone credit than text messages) could get through. When internet access was finally restored on mobile devices, social media sites were still blocked for several weeks. Opposition members said their phones were blocked as well.

This response to the protests was strikingly disproportionate.  Government forces killed protesters, with the government putting the death toll at 12, but human rights organizations putting it at 42. The controversial conditioning of elections on completion of a census was removed from the bill before it was passed, but the opposition is still on the lookout for other tricks; the recent debacle in Burundi sets a bad precedent. Some people anticipate more trouble in 2016.

And that, my friends, is how they put the 'D' in 'DRC'!

Zanzibar

My son Isaac came to Africa to visit us and we started with a grand vacation in Eastern Congo: both Virunga park outside of Goma and Kahuzi-Biéga park outside of Bukavu. However, that trip will require a long blog post and so I wrote up our trip to Zanzibar first!

After a few days of downtime in Lubumbashi, Isaac and I left Karen behind and flew to Zanzibar. Zanzibar is made up of 2 large islands, Unguja and Pemba, and is a “semi-autonomous” part of Tanzania. I’m not sure what that means, exactly. The southern island, Unguja is usually called Zanzibar Island and has most of the people, industry, etc. It appears small here, but is 85km by 39km.

Zanzibar between Mombasa, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Zanzibar always had a real exotic sound to me, even before I knew anything about it. But a few months ago I researched Zanzibar and it sounded like an interesting combination of Arabic and African cultures, and I was also impressed by the visible architectural history. I considered visiting during the Zanzibar International Film Festival that includes music and other arts from the “Swahili Coast” (also called the Dhow festival), but July was very poor timing for us and I read that it was packed with European tourists, which didn’t seem too interesting. We had the opposite experience: we arrived at the end of the rainy season, and everything was very quiet. Some restaurants were still closed for the off-season.

We stayed at the Mizingani Seafront Hotel right in Stone Town. It was a fully renovated older building with great architecture and details, like the famed hand-carved wooden doors, arches, and courtyards. The hotel was located just across the road from the beach at Stone Town, and just farther along was the ferry terminal and the shipping port. This was not a sun-bathing beach, but a working beach.

Where we had breakfast and afternoon tea at the Mizingani Seafront.

We spent many hours our first day walking around Stone Town, much of it with a self-recruited guide, Rashid, who took us to the many markets in Stone Town – meat, fish, produce, spices, clothing, etc., and we ended at a cheap, local restaurant with so-so food. We also visited the old slave market and saw the exhibits about slavery. Zanzibar was one of the largest ports for the Indian Ocean slave trade with slavery occurring as early as the ninth century. The slave trade was halted in 1873 under the threat of a British naval bombardment. I noticed that the exhibit focused on the trade to the Americas and minimized the longer-lasting trade to the Middle East.

Zanzibar definitely has an Arabic feel – the architecture is much different than all of the places we have visited so far in Africa. The dress, too, was different: probably 90% of the women we saw wore head scarves (and a good proportion of girls, too), and it seemed that just as many women went without scarves as those who went fully encapsulated, with only the eyes showing. Men, too, frequently wore a small cylindrical hat – kofia – and occasionally wore the traditional long robe – thawb or jalabiyyah. The old, whitewashed stone buildings, the mosques, and the different styles of dress definitely gave Stone Town an Arabic feel. In my experience, this was not true outside of Stone Town.

The next day we hired a boat to take us to Changuu, also called Prison Island because the British bought the island and had a prison built on it with the plan to house criminals from the mainland. However, before it was used as a prison it was converted to a quarantine hospital, primarily for yellow fever. We visited Changuu for the snorkeling, which was good, but discovered that the island also shelters a couple hundred giant tortoises. In 1919 the British governor of Seychelles sent a gift of four Aldabra giant tortoises to Changuu from the island of Aldabra. They multiplied rapidly but became victims of poachers until about 20 years ago when the enclosure was built. The small, young tortoises are especially protected because they are easy to carry. The adults weigh 500 lbs. The males had their age painted on their shells (the oldest was 151 years old), but the females' shells were blank because the males rubbed the paint off during mating. At least that's what we were told.
     The snorkeling was good – colorful coral & fish – but the water seemed a bit dirty and the bright sun, which really highlights the color of the sea life, was frequently obscured by clouds. The most interesting thing we saw was probably the large, active sea slugs.
     After snorkeling, we went back to the hotel, showered, and drank spiced tea and played cards for a bit.

The next day we visited a spice farm and the Jozani Forest Reserve, home of the Zanzibar Red Colobus monkey, which is endangered, and only found in Zanzibar.

A good shot of the red pelt and the 4-finger hand. Photo by Isaac.

Zanzibar has been known for spice plantations for over 200 years. In particular, the islands produce cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and black pepper. Besides these, the farm we visited also had vanilla beans, ginger, turmeric, cardamon, and lemon grass, but I'm not sure how many of these were produced for export. The farm had larger fields a little ways away from the demonstration plants that we inspected. Although most of these weren't in season, it was pretty cool to see the actual plants and smell the leaves, bark, or roots.

We visited Jazani forest mostly to see the monkeys – both the Red Colobus and the Sykes monkey. The visit included a tour guide and a walk along a path to see the larger trees, and then through the smaller trees where the monkeys are found, and then, after a short drive, a boardwalk through a mangrove swamp. The mangrove swamp was interesting because the tide was coming in and we could see the water gradually cover all of the ground in the swamp.

The last day we decided to see a renowned beach of Zanzibar. There are too many spectacular beaches to see them all, so we chose to visit the eastern side of the island at the town of Paje. A coral reef protects much of the eastern coast of Zanzibar, so the waves reaching the island are quite tame and the water is shallow. We heard that it is possible to learn kite-surfing in Zanzibar ("Zero to Hero in 10 Days") because the warm, calm water and the consistent wind makes it more predictable. I was tempted, but we didn't have 10 days, so... next time!

We walked a bit on the beach and saw some interesting shells. I only took some cowrie shells home, though. The beaches were a fine, white, coral sand and we saw almost no garbage of any type, which was unexpected and appreciated. We developed an appreciation for the previous days' cloud cover and learned that near the equator, at sea level, the sun is very hot.

At the end of the trip, Isaac and I both flew to Nairobi, at which point we split up and he returned to Seattle via Abu Dhabi and Amsterdam.  It was great hanging out with Isaac in Zanzibar, drinking spiced tea, playing cards, hearing about his year at college, and seeing the sights. I returned "home" to Lubumbashi.

We've visited 5 African countries south of the Equator (DRC, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa) but Zanzibar had a different, Arabic identity. It was also somewhat more developed than the Congo. I joked that there were more miles of paved roads on the island of Zanzibar than in the entire DRC. This is probably an exaggeration. I wonder if Tanzania's socialist government can take credit for the development or just for the nasty cement apartment blocks built with East Germany in the 1970s.

Kilwa (by Karen)

The first place we rented here, from mid-October through December, was on Boulevard de Kilwa. We didn’t much care for the owner, and didn’t much trust the staff (housekeeper, gardener, guards).

It was easy to find, since there were ostriches painted on the gate.

Villa Kilwa

At the time, the name “Kilwa” didn’t mean anything to us, but eventually we realized that, like most of the street names in Lubumbashi, it was the name of a town in the province of Katanga.

My first (and, given that I’ll be leaving before long, perhaps only) major foray from Lubumbashi for work was to Kilwa. I rode there from Lubumbashi in the back of an NGO jeep with a doctoral student from the School of Public Health. Our mission: to conduct a vaccine coverage survey on the heels of the NGO’s mass vaccination campaign, which it carried out in response to a large and continuing measles outbreak.

I was surprised that the road from Lubumbashi all the way to Kasomeno was paved and pothole-free. According to my student, who grew up in Kilwa, it’s been paved since 2007 (though news articles suggest it was 2009). The road from Kasomeno to Kilwa is a well-graded dirt road, wide enough for two passenger cars, but a little tight if there’s a truck or bus coming your way. It even has occasional signage – names of villages, speed limits, curve ahead, and a sign signaling a storage depot for China Jianxi, the company apparently responsible for the construction and upkeep of the road. It took us only five hours, at speeds on the paved road of up to 110 kph (66 mph), and we arrived covered in red dust – it’s the dry season. My student normally travels between Lubumbashi and Kilwa in a modern bus for 12,500 FC (about $14).

Most buildings along the way were made of local brick; we passed lots of termite mounds and brick kilns (the bricks are made of the clay from the termite mounds), and almost all were roofed with straw, save a few stores and schools with tin roofs. The villages we passed looked relatively prosperous, but as I write that, I ask myself, relative to what? I suppose to the villages we saw last month in North and South Kivu. I saw neat houses, many painted with abstract designs in ochre and black, and families dressed in mostly clean, hole-free clothes, as well as many goats and chickens. Sacks of charcoal for sale by the road in some places. In Kasomeno I got out to buy some food – things that are sold on the street in Lubumbashi, but which I haven’t ever bought there. To share among the 4 of us (me, student, NGO staff, driver) I bought:

5 handful-sized bags of roasted, salted peanuts @ 100 FC apiece

3 hardboiled eggs with salt for 500 FC

4 beignets @ 100 FC apiece

1 hotdog bun-sized loaf of bread @ 100 FC

Total: 1500 FC, or about $1.67.

On the way I saw for the first time a few women riding bicycles loaded with sacks of charcoal or produce. Around Lubumbashi, it’s common to see men with heavily laden bikes. When we were in Bukavu, South Kivu, there were virtually no bikes, presumably because it’s so hilly. Instead, women carried heavy loads that were easily between 100 and 200 pounds – they carry them on their backs, supported by a cloth band that goes around their foreheads. Some of them walk with their hands clasped behind their heads to take some of the strain off their necks.

My digs for the two nights I was in Kilwa were at the church dormitory beside the beautiful blue waters of Lake Moëro (aka Mweru), just across from an island I saw from the plane when we flew back from Bukavu a couple of weeks ago. 

Our Lady of Lake Moëro?

Sunrise over Lake Moëro 

Looking west, the full moon was in the morning sky as the first rays of sun lit the road.

The sunlight also lit this small (shale?) quarry, just in front of the dry-docked boat in the picture above ...

... from which this woman was carrying bucketloads of rocks on her head (here she's going back with empty bucket to get another load).

Lake Moëro divides DRC from northern Zambia. A few months ago, a group from Johns Hopkins stopped in Lubumbashi before flying to Kilwa to set up a malaria study site. Malaria is pretty well controlled in southern Zambia, but not in the north, and the Hopkins group thinks parasites may be hitching rides in people who cross the lake in pirogues, or in mosquitoes that make their way across. There is also a Columbia University-run HIV/AIDS program in Kilwa, which I heard anecdotally is finding 10-15% of pregnant women HIV positive, as opposed to the official figure of 4% (but don't quote that ...). Several other NGOs, including Caritas and a Belgian group with the cheeky name of Médecins sans Vacances (Doctors without Vacation), a clear send-up of Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), were around, too.

We visited one of the vaccination sites to the north of Kilwa on the road toward Kalemie (a dirt road, national #5, reportedly in good condition as far as Pweto) on the last day of the mass campaign. The little girl in this photo took the vaccination OK, but after her was a 3-year-old who cried all the way through! 

We also did a brief field test of the questionnaire, and the homes we visited for that made me re-think the impression of relative prosperity I’d had from the car. The homes looked square and solid, with well-kept yards and thatch roofs – not as prized as tin roofs, but cooler – but the children looked years younger than their stated ages, their parents had only a few years of primary schooling, and there was very little in the way of material wealth to be seen.

A home in Lusalala, north of Kilwa on the lake.

What would development look like for these communities? Drinking water, electricity, sanitation, for starters. Better roads and transport; I saw a few bicycles and a couple of motorcycles, but no other vehicles along the road except long-distance trucks. Communication – between Kilwa and Lubumbashi I saw at least one cell tower, and in Kilwa itself (population 64,000), there’s (intermittent) cell signal, but elsewhere, there’s none. There are two local radio stations in Kilwa, but I don’t think their range is far, or that many people in the villages outside Kilwa have radios to listen to them. I doubt many have TVs, though I did see one or two dust-covered satellite dishes. A handful of homes, like the one in this picture, which belongs to a village chief, had solar panels powering some small appliances.

The frame in the yard supports a solar panel that's facing away from us ... if you look closely, you can see a thin wire running from it into the house through a window.

Health care, of course, and good education would be other boons for these communities. Books, films, internet … . I think about our parents’ generation, especially my father, who grew up in rural Idaho, or Eric’s father, who grew up in rural Iowa (those are not the same states, as my father was constantly clarifying to geography-challenged easterners). Both were born at home, in houses without indoor plumbing, on roads that weren’t paved, and in communities that didn’t have electricity. Both were raised on farms and ended up university professors.

The last century has brought a lot of changes to the infrastructure in rural parts of the US, but I believe it will take more than improvements to infrastructure to create a society here in the DRC that enables more people to realize their potential.

In any case, in Kilwa, I stayed just long enough to set my student on track. The NGO is optimistic that coverage in this campaign was high, and I hope that’s what our survey will show. Stay tuned for results!