Driving to Mawe Hai

The drive from the Hospital to Mawe His is about a half hour or 40 minutes, and the only disappointing thing is you almost drive right past Maji Matulivu, so you just wasted 20 minutes. I actually really enjoy the drive. People always ask and apologize if they have to stop somewhere and I always tell them not to worry. It’s actually my favorite part, getting out somewhere and experiencing part of life in Goma. It is so easy to ignore everything, and not pay attention to anything in the car except how uncomfortable and bumpy it is, but I never do that. I’m always looking, always trying to understand.

Here stores clump together. I saw it in the Philippines too, and it works the same way. Someone has a good business idea. Maybe it’s a hardware store. His neighbor sees him doing well, or maybe even he’s not doing well; the neighbor just thinks it is a good idea to start a hardware store too. Soon there are 6 on one side of the road and 3 on the other, and they all sell the exact same stuff (give or take maybe 10% of the merchandise). One part of the ride has 4 pharmacies in a row. How can each one make it if they are all the same? Some of them look fairly nice, indicating that maybe they do make it. They have nice signs that you don’t see in other places, but they are all the same.

There are a lot of places that do carpentry on the side of the road. All the boards are pretty much the same when they are bought and sold, and from there they plane and shape them into beds, benches, and tables. Beds are by far the most popular thing on the side of the road, and given that everyone uses the same boards, they all end up looking somewhat the same. Watching them work driving past I don’t think does them justice. One of these days once I’ve polished up my Swahili a bit (or even acquired enough to maybe start thinking about trying it out) I want to stop and talk to some of the workers. I think it would be cool, and it would be a great opportunity to learn about what an average person in Goma does.

There is a lot of sugar cane here. The kids especially chew it and it’s really sweet. After all, it is called “sugar” cane and they make sugar from it. It is pure sugar in juicy, plant form and isn’t good for them, but it is cheap and available. They bring in huge semi-like trucks filled with sugar cane and toss them off the back. They look kind of like bamboo staves, maybe like 5 or 6 feet long, and people crowd around to buy the sugar cane, not to eat usually, but to resell for others to eat. They take it from the truck and carry it on their heads somewhere, and cut pieces of it to sell. Some people sell sugar cane all day, and it is so cheap, I can’t imagine its all that profitable of a job.

We also pass a refugee camp on the way to Mawe. Huts made of sticks and branches house thousands of people as relief organizations try and register people and take care of their basic needs. From afar it almost looks like muskrat houses before a big winter. They are big for muskrats, but really small for people. Some are bigger than others, so I don’t know what dictates the size, but there are just so many people there, and they are always sitting around the camp because they have nothing else to do.

I like driving in Goma. It takes a fair bit of concentration, but there are times when you can see some really cool stuff. Granted, I could see really, really cool stuff if I walked to Mawe Hai, but that would hinge on me getting there in one piece.