Kinshasa Streets Chapter One

Kinshasa streets are often pieces of pavement between potholes. There are sometimes patches of deep sand which require four-wheel drive, low gear. Most commonly, there are deep "puddles" of water where someone throws pieces of cement as a patch (or not). Nonetheless, nothing really prepared us for the road to Maleuka. Maleuka is a community at the top of a small hill in Kinshasa. In the Western US, this would be a foothill. Here it is a mountain. Rivers of water run down the middle of this street at each major rainstorm, creating a "gully" which cars, taxi's and transports (vans) must navigate each day to move people in and out of the area.

It is hard for a picture to do justice to this ride, but we decided to try. Remember, this is a city street. In our four-wheel drive truck, we navigated this street by going in and out of the ditches in the middle, much like a skier traversing across the side of a mountain.

Up!

Down!

And at the bottom, a van was stuck in the muddy ditch. We finally inched forward. Most of the

pedestrians simply didn't stop, some didn't even look up, even though we were pretty big and dangerous. Finally, our driver inched forward past the truck -- then we slid and bang, our left rear corner hit the blue truck. Our first dent, a lot of people yelling advice --- low range four-wheel drive got us out, but pedestrians actually walked between our truck and the building on the right as we were trying to maneuver -- they had all of a foot of clearance.