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A Road Map To Modernity
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"So these are bad things," he said, walking through the village.
On the other hand, Mwamba counted perhaps a dozen people who are alive because the road brought the taxis, and the taxis were able to drive people stricken with cholera to the city for treatment.
Those people included his son, Teddy, 2, and his daughter, Vianie, 4. "They are going to help me when I'm old," Mwamba said.
They also included Veronique Yav, cooking lunch for relatives, and a man working in Lubumbashi to make money that he would soon bring back to the village and perhaps use to buy something at Mwamba's pharmacy.
Its shelves were once fairly barren, but because Mwamba has made money selling Simba to the Anvil employees and taking vegetables to the city, the shelves are stocked with Paluxin for malaria, Coldrin for flu, Koflyn for coughs and Domi to stop vomiting.
"Before, you would see someone who has money, but there was no medicine," Mwamba said.
He's making several hundred dollars a month now and has bought a plot in Lubumbashi, where he's built a house that he rents out for another $50 a month. He helped a cousin pay for nursing school last year, and the cousin recently built a small health clinic in Kilongo.
It was afternoon, and Mwamba walked across the village to the clinic, Chez Johnny Phar, but Johnny was not there. He had taken a taxi to the city to buy medical test kits.
At the edge of the village, a new restaurant -- an orange tent with a few tables and a dozen or so plastic chairs -- was almost bustling with aid workers, Anvil employees and others who'd driven there for a rare lunch of roasted chicken that one of the owners, Guilainne Ngoiemwilambwe, had bought in the city that morning.
She has a generator now, Ngoiemwilambwe said, an item she didn't buy before because it was too difficult to transport.
"Imagine walking with a generator on your head," she said. "It was very difficult before. . . . You would load things on your head and walk from Lubumbashi to here. It was very hard. When you got here at night, you were so tired."
In addition to the tangible benefits of the road, she and others said, are the less tangible benefits of a soft mattress instead of sack-covered grass, or a new Nike warm-up suit.
"Now people know what it means to go to town," Mwamba said.
He had an e-mail account in Lubumbashi before the road was improved, but it was canceled because he could get there to check it only once or twice a year. Now he goes regularly, checks for news from relatives and generally sees how things are going in the city that was once so distant.
He sees that unemployment is high there, he said, and that most people have no running water or electricity.
He sees wealthy Congolese and foreign businesspeople driving shiny sport-utility vehicles through town, and planes landing at the airport.
Then he comes back to Kilongo, and life looks different.
"There is a change in mentality because of the road," Mwamba said. "Now I'm thinking about the future."
