The roads are (were) fixed!

There has been major road work in Goma. They have a huge grader, a front end loader, and a steam roller. They truck in gravel and pour it on the roads, level it with the grader and flatten it tight with the roller. Some places they are even attacking the lava that is sticking up with hammers and metal rods. They have made tremendous progress and...

Now it's all gone. For the last week we haven't had any rain and the roads have been great. Yesterday we had a pretty good storm, lots of water, and it came fast, and the roads are already trashed. Granted the roads are still a lot better than they were, but every time it rains, they get just as bad as they were before. These large scale efforts are encouraging to see and applaudable in their ambitions, but it's hard to see what the point is. In my mind, there are really only three reasonable options.

The first option is to build new, paved roads. By not wasting resources on week (sometime hour) long fixes until the next rain, save that money and invest in GOOD road building. Use good materials and you won't have to fix it as much. Pave the road and it will last.

The second option would be to do very small scale fixes. I think every residency and business should be responsible for fixing the road in front of their house. Once a week the government could dump trucks of gravel at strategic, periodic places along the road. Then the residents are responsible for carrying a bucket of gravel to the holes in front of their property, putting the gravel in the pot holes, and tamping it down with a stick. The city has a clean-up day where everyone burns all the garbage around the streets so why can't they also have a road fix-it day? The government could even forgo the large scale, doomed projects they are doing now and fund people to go around with wheel barrels and shovels patching up the roads. This small scale would probably have to be weekly, but the money saved from the large scale projects would probably be enough and would be a longer term fix.

The final option is to do nothing. I think it's pointless to spend all this money on fixes that are good for maybe a week, and back to a previous state of car-destroying, inverted mogul hills in less than a month. The large scale efforts to provide dirt roads just don't seem to make sense to me.