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!