Congo's Poor Lose Last Possessions

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"It took so long" to accumulate her things, she explained. "I go to the field and plant, and wait for reaping. Then I go to the market and sell a small quantity for money, and then wait for the next time of reaping, and then wait again. I'd say it took five years to buy the dress. Even more than five years."

Her neighbor Leonard Hangi pushed his door open.

Besides a suit and other clothes, his radio had been stolen, he said. Like Mahano's dress, it was a small luxury, a prized possession that represented a degree of simple, humanizing pleasure in a life of mostly unrewarded hard work.

"It had a cassette player, and it used batteries," Hangi said, explaining the radio's practical features. "It was just for my spare time. I liked to listen to the news and to African music."

He has worked for 24 years as a security guard at the Belgian coffee plantation, making about $1.50 a day. He was one of the few people in the village who had a radio, which had cost him $15; he saved for two years, he estimated.

But there were others, he said, who were worse off.

Among those chased away from the area were people who had already been displaced from villages farther north and were living in a vast, tented camp across the road. When the rebels came, they fled again.

Francis Huzumutima was one of them, and he returned Wednesday to assess his new position in life. Though he was now wearing an old shirt, torn pants and muddy flip-flops, things had not always been so, he said.

He had once lived a semi-glamourous life in the capital, Kinshasa, attended university in the eastern city of Bukavu and gotten a job as a primary school teacher during Mobutu's heyday, when salaries were good.

He earned $300 a month then. Even after Mobutu had cannibalized the country, he was able to manage, earning about $20 a month.

With nearly 30 years of work behind him, Huzumutima had amassed a small rural empire of goats and chickens, dishes and cooking pots, a radio, a few suits. "I even had a mattress," he said.

It was all looted when a militia group passed through his village.

But he started over.

After a few weeks living in the camp here, he had managed to build a banana-leaf shelter and had acquired some pots and pans, partly through the kindness of strangers.

It was all wiped out again when Nkunda's rebels came through. Now Huzumutima is facing retirement with nothing.

"I have no hope to recover all my properties," he said. "I had a very nice life before, but I don't hope to have that life again."