Kin day 9--Getting by

Gregoire collecting from his bread sellers

I am not going to write any more about traffic jams. Traffic is just one of the bottlenecks that people of Kinshasa have to squeeze through every day. The biggest one is the bottleneck of survival.

Life away from the center city, in three-quarters of Kinshasa, is by most of my standards impossible. It is too hot, too dusty (or muddy) and polluted, too crowded, too hard to get around, no dependable electricity or running water. Food is nearly as expensive as in the US. Most important, there are no jobs. Ninety-seven percent of Kinshasa residents have no regular jobs, and the jobs that exist often pay very little.

But still, people live here. They survive. They raise their families. They make lives for themselves. How do they do it?

I do not know, frankly, how the vast majority of the people do it. Most people are incredibly, heartbreakingly poor. I have only glimpsed their lives through doorways, in the streets, on hospital beds, in faces. I have only impressions, no real information. But little by little we are getting a closer look at the struggle behind the lives of some people who seem, at first appearance, to be successful.

Yesterday we were invited to the home of Gregoire and Nanette. Gregoire is assistant pastor of the church we are visiting. Their tiny, hot living room was filled with comfortable overstuffed furniture. The best chicken and fish we have had so far was produced from behind a curtain, along with the usual rice, fufu, and fried plantains.

Gregoire explained that people would be going in and out of the home throughout our visit because of his business. The church pays its leaders very little if anything. They are essentially volunteers. Gregoire does have a regular government administrative job, but it pays only $70 a month. Rent is $50. The couple has five children, three in school. Food is not cheap. So Gregoire had to figure out another gig.

His business is running a bread distribution warehouse. Every day a Lebanese bakery delivers fresh bread to his warehouse. Bread sellers come to the warehouse, pick up the bread, and sell it on their streetside stands. There is a bread seller who has to move her table every time we come to the church in the SUV because she is stationed right on the corner of a very narrow alleyway. The men and women who were coming to Gregoire and Nanette’s house that day were bringing money they had collected for the bread and he was carefully marking accounts. He has about 100 working for him.

This is how Gregoire and his family were managing, how they were getting by on what must be an very slender margin. There is a French term for this: Ils se débrouillent.  It is untranslatable but it is the essence of what everybody does here to survive. Drivers squeeze through the tiniest openings in traffic. Bread sellers carve out their territory. University-educated professionals do side businesses. People crowd the streets, going somewhere or nowhere, looking for something that will get them through the survival bottleneck.

For more pictures of this family go here.