For Congolese, Just Another Disaster

GOMA, Congo, Jan. 24 -- Peter Karube hoisted a slab of his corrugated tin roof onto his back. He stumbled a bit and two young men dropped the wheelbarrow they were pushing and rushed to his aid.

Within a few moments, the three men had loaded all that was salvageable from Karube's flattened home into a borrowed minivan. "I cannot tell you how we are going to live now," Karube, 66, said as he tied the vehicle's doors closed with a piece of twine. "But I know this: We will make it. We survived the Belgians," Congo's colonial rulers. "We survived our dictators, and our wars and poverty on top of poverty. We'll get through this somehow."

A week after Mount Nyiragongo spit tons of lava onto this central African border town, Goma is beginning to rebuild slowly but surely. Nearly half the town is buried under sheets of molten rock, so normality is a long way off.

"We are suffering now," said Boniface Nwenga, 28, a journalism student here. "People are hungry and depressed and angry because they believe that the West is not doing enough to help, the way they would if we were Europeans and had such a natural disaster occur. But if you're an African, and especially if you're a Congolese, you know that a life of comfort is not in the cards.

"Survival is hard work," he said. "You must work for your children's future and to repay the debt you owe your ancestors who were made slaves and amputees [by the colonial regime] and never gave up. We complain here, but we keep struggling."

International relief agencies today distributed food rations for a second day to hundreds of residents who have nothing to eat. Hundreds more returned to what was left of their homes, and traffic officers clad in bright yellow uniforms directed trucks and vans plowing through roads cleared by bulldozers in the past two days.

Stores have reopened, street vendors have resurfaced and the stone-faced women who roam the streets in head scarves exchanging Congolese francs for foreign currency have reappeared. "We have to make up for time lost," said Veronica Membede, a 30-year-old money changer. "I no longer have a home but I still have three children to feed."

The murderous kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko, the former Congo dictator, put Goma's development largely on the back burner for nearly 30 years. When Mobutu was toppled by Laurent Kabila's rebels in 1997, the rot continued, even as Goma was occupied by anti-Kabila rebel forces who have been fighting to topple the central government for four years.

Since Kabila's assassination a year ago, his son and successor, Joseph Kabila, has negotiated with the rebels, who are backed by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. He is trying to secure a halt to the fighting, and diplomats say there are signs of progress.

Though Kabila's government is widely unpopular, the rebel group that controls Goma, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), does not stack up much better and is just as indifferent to providing public services. The volcanic eruption last week laid bare the glaring shortage of emergency aid, shelters and vehicles.

A local volcanologist said he repeatedly warned RCD leaders of an imminent eruption but was ignored. Rebel leaders publicly deny that they ever received any warning but privately acknowledge that they were unprepared to respond to such a crisis anyway.

"The rebels are just here for their own benefit," said one man, who asked that his name not be used. "People are not for them or against them, really. They just want the fighting to stop and for someone to start providing jobs. It really doesn't matter to most people who's in charge."

For Karube, the big concern is gathering his few remaining possessions from the rubble that was his home only a week ago.

A reporter asked him if he believed that the country was "snakebit," and he pondered for a few moments before answering. "Is there another word for it when the snake bites you and just never lets go?"