That's brisk, baby

Last night, I found myself in a basement night club called Club VIP in Bukavu, DR Congo, listening to the best DJ I’ve heard in years. The guy across the table showing some friends and me his new cell phone is bragging about the price: $650. As I lean over to make sure I heard him right (not only am I deaf, but trying to understand a foreign language with god-awful Shakira blasting in the background doesn’t help matters), he pulls out an antenna and picks up the local national television station, RTNC, on his cell phone. Two big-men politicians are talking about some development project or other for the benefit of all Congolese citizens or something like that.

This is a country the size of Western Europe with some 80 million inhabitants that counts a total of 500km of paved roads. Poor Toyota four doors bounce and creak over muddy roads with divots the size of conference tables, their mufflers smacking awkwardly against the occasional stones and broken asphalt, remnants of a colonial era I’m tired of hearing about. See, what’s so frustrating for Congolese is that Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province, and the center of Eastern Congo, used to have pristinely paved roads, that is before war niqué (fucked up) their country. Many blame colonialism and the Belgians… yeah, ok, but that was 50 years ago. What’s been going on in the past 50 years? You enter Bukavu after sunset, and what do you notice? Nothing. No lights, save for individual candles and bonfires lit amongst wooden shacks and huts.

It’s easy, too, once your Belgian argument is deflated, to blame the big, powerful big-men politicians like the ones I was watching on a 4cm screen. And I’d be your Bergis Meredith ringside in that lipton iced tea commercial. But what’s really brisk, baby, is looking down on your mud covered shoes and caked khakis just from the unpaved walk from the car to the front door and then finding yourself peering into a $650 television screen. Something’s wrong here; there’s more to it.

Ok, it’s not like $650 is going to pave the street, and I’m not saying that it’s this guy’s or Congolese people’s fault the country’s niqué… an argument some have actually made. But do they bear any responsibility?

In asking myself such a question, I found myself also asking another question. What started as: what drives a guy to buy a cell phone for the price of some folks’ annual salary? ended up as a very different question.

See, I don’t know that guy, and I won’t pretend to, but more often than not, I see that trend among people who, were I running their finances, would be keeping that $650 for a far more needed purpose. Thus the revised question: What drives a guy whose car and his stomach are on E, whose rent is barely covered, and who has no real livelihood to buy a cell phone worth his monthly or even 6-month salary?

In fact, I just finished a great book about Congo that has a theory (wow, did that sound like Levar Burton or what…). In making her point, the author (Michella Wrong) invokes an Orwellian observation about the inordinate flagrancies of the poor in spending their money (some would say frittering it away) on extravagancies, rather than necessities, as the only way they are able to deal with their stations. I found this interesting.

See, my shoes were caked with mud last night from the walk into the club, but today, as there was no overnight change in the development of Bukavu’s infrastructure, i.e. as the roads were still shit, I didn’t bother to do more than a cursory maintenance job. I mean, after all, what the hell’s the point if they’re just going to get dirty again? So this morning, as I sat in a meeting with several of my Congolese colleagues, I noticed that they all had spit-shined shoes. Sure they had mud in areas, but it was clearly mud collected from the morning commute. My beat up mud bog shoes stood in stark contrast to their pristine penny loafers. As I walked to lunch afterward, the contrast followed me all the way to the restaurant.

This got me thinking that my logic was pretty flawed this morning. I mean, naturally, things fall apart. Is there then no reason to build them up in the first place? I’m certainly willing to submit that my logic is flawed, but again, there’s more to it.

Bear with me for a second. So a friend of mine was driving me home in his beat up Toyota after the club last night, and I asked him the same question: why does he try to keep his car running on these wasted roads when he doesn’t have a regular income and isn’t saving anything, in short, when there are more needed things he could be providing for? ‘Got to keep up appearances’, he replied.

And that’s where I’m getting to. I applaud walking to work every day through mud puddles and dusty alleys with spit-shined shoes – in fact it shows a level of self-respect I might try emulating. And if blowing your salary on material possessions helps you, for even just one day, to escape the abject poverty in which you find yourself drowning, more power to you. But why does that same prideful desire to improve appearances or that desperate searching for an escape from one’s station not translate, collectively of course, to paved roads or city-wide electricity? The big men are eating away at the organism of the “Democratic” Republic of Congo, but why are so many of the 80 million people unwilling or unable (I won’t pretend to assume one or the other) to pull their hands away from the shoe polish rag or the tv-cell phone charger, grab a shovel, and start filling in the holes?

I say ‘some of’ because you see individual communities on the sides of some of the worst roads in Bukavu filling in the ditches in their own neighborhoods, and while too often they set up road blocks to demand money from the passing vehicles, usually it’s optional, or at least minimal. Not to betray my true colors, but I think Baden Powell would be proud to see these spontaneous community service projects. And if Bukavu ever returns to that lakeside tourist destination the Belgians loved so much, it will be on the backs of these real-life Eagle Scouts.

But to hear the cynical remarks or see the faces of the people stopped in their 4x4s is the core of what’s wrong. As they move aside their expensive cell phones, dig in their designer pants to grab those 100-200 francs (about 20-40 cents), I can’t help but notice their grips tighten on the bills for just a split second longer than necessary as they hand the bill through the window to the shovel carrying, shirt-stained do-gooder knee deep in muck. After all, being associated with the filth of that check point… how would it look?

I’ll tell you how it would look: in a couple of decades, it would look like a lot more paved roads and a lot fewer check points. It might even look like a lot more community service projects and a lot more tourists.

Look, maybe the guy with the tv cell phone is a minister’s son – entirely possible. But what if he’s not? What if he’s an ordinary guy keeping up appearances? Sure, he may work for an NGO doing great work for his country, or organize community volunteer Eagle-Scoutish clean-ups every weekend. Personally, I’m clinging to the optimism that allows me to think like that. But all of those shiny shoes can’t belong to ministers’ sons, and, quite honestly, not everyone has the time to re-polish their shoes every day when they’re juggling a full-time NGO job and a regular community clean-up campaign.

Perhaps that’s cynical, but from my subjective viewpoint, there’s just a little bit more collective importance put on appearances than on paved roads and a bit more personal importance put on shining your loafers than on community service. Call it colonialism; call it government corruption; call it a brief respite from abject poverty. Then call the guy filling in the pot-holes in front of his children’s school on Saturday afternoon, and ask him how much he received in donations this year from passers-by. I bet it’d be less than $650.