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A Road Map To Modernity
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"Congo has fallen apart," said Godfrey Mayombo, the country's vice prime minister, who noted that even he cannot reach his home village by car anymore. "It's in a deep pit."
Meanwhile, thanks to the newly graded road, Boduin was selling beer the other day in Kilongo, a village of scattered mud houses and vegetable fields in a bushy pale-green landscape.
The village sprang up in the late 1970s, when people came to work on a farm nearby. The nearest road was a three-mile trek away, through the woods. About 1,600 people live there now, farmers, moonlighting miners and others who have salaried jobs with Anvil, the mining company that improved the road.
People occasionally have money to buy extra things, Boduin said, but for years, there was nothing to buy.
Before the road, he explained, it was almost impossible to bike a case of brown-bottled Simba beer to Kilongo without losing the investment. "To take even one case was very difficult," he said. "They'd fall and break."
Now he can hail a Dubai, as people call taxis imported from the Middle East, and get to Lubumbashi and back with six cases in a couple of hours. He sells each bottle for about $2.20, and he can sometimes sell 30 bottles in a day.
With some of the extra cash, he bought the television and DVD player, which draw villagers to his house for film nights and news, when the antenna is working. With the rest, he's started growing corn and potatoes, which he sells in the next village or in Lubumbashi "because of the cars," he said, sitting in the shade of a grass-roofed gazebo.
A white Toyota sedan drove through the village then in a cloud of red dust, the first of at least four taxis that came that day.
Unemployed men sat on a log, women washed clothes and Alexi Fwamba got in the taxi and zipped, relatively speaking, away.
He had come to the village with money for his parents, as he now does at least three times a week, instead of a couple times a month. For a $4 fare, he was headed back to the university in Lubumbashi, where he works.
These days, people come and people go.
Prostitutes have starting coming to Kilongo from the city, along with diseases, and recently thieves came barreling in a truck and stole Mwamba's generator.
