A Tale of Two Kinshasas

Finally yesterday I felt for the first time this summer like I'm really living in Africa. The past two weeks I've felt like I'm living in some weird alternate America where I'm rich enough to live in a huge and very nice house in the nicest part of town, and important enough to be driven around in armored vehicles and invited to fancy cocktail receptions and dinner parties.

There really are two distinct worlds here - the expat/embassy world, where the water that comes out of our kitchen tap is potable and we don't even notice power outages because our house has its own generator, we play tennis and swim and eat western foods and shop in grocery stores and eat in nice restaurants and drive nice cars. And this Kinshasa rarely interacts with the other Kinshasa, the one without running water or electricity or a functioning government. We see bits of this other Kinshasa from the car windows but the embassy is extremely protective and insists that we not walk around the city on our own. This is by far the largest income gap I've ever seen, and though there are certainly things about Kinshasa that remind me of Senegal or other developing countries I've seen, this is the first time I've lived in a war-torn, actual failed state.

Yesterday we felt a little stir-crazy from being cooped up in our compound all the time, so we (all the interns) found a car and driver and took a little road trip out to what used to be Mobutu's vacation/country home. It was built by the Chinese as a gift to Mobutu and looked like a smaller version of the Summer Palace in Beijing, with the covered walkways and elaborate Chinese paintings on the walls and ceilings. The palace was surrounded by thousands of acres of what used to be a thriving cattle ranch and pineapple plantation, but in the last decade or so of civil war and state collapse the palace, grounds and plantation had been abandoned, and the whole place was overgrown with weeds and in ruins that made it look a thousand years old instead of the forty or so that it actually was. I think a couple of families were squatting in the palace, and there were ducks wandering around through the empty rooms. Civil war is really devastating to an economy.

So hopefully we'll take more weekend trips that get us out of our little American bubble, and I think I'll be sent on at least one, maybe two site visits to USAID projects in other parts of the country, which should be pretty eye-opening.

A few random facts that I think are interesting:
Kinshasa is the biggest French-speaking city in the world, and by some estimates, as big as the next two (Paris and Montreal) combined
Photography is illegal. So I'm sorry I can't send pictures - I haven't taken a single picture and might not be able to the entire summer.
Everyone uses US Dollars - the largest Congolese franc note is worth less than $1, so people use USD for just about everything
Prices for everything are ridiculously high - it's really shocking, but I guess that's what happens when neither the agriculture nor the manufacturing sectors really function and absolutely everything has to be imported.

I've created a Google Map of Kinshasa that I add to every time I discover something new around town. If you're interested in seeing what the city and the roof of my house look like, here's the link: (look at the satellite view).
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=105585629350532448728.00044f79f58c997c7578d
One other exciting thing is that the embassy is officially part of the United States, so we have a US post office. This means you can send me letters or packages just like you would to someone in the US, with normal US postage, for the same price as a domestic letter or package. Likewise, I can mail letters and postcards from here with a normal stamp, so send me your address if you want a postcard! My address:
Cynthia Berning
Unit 2220, Box 188
DPO AE
09828-0188