“Goma City”

After having such a short night and yet having paid the full Hotel charge, I was left wondering as to whether I had really got value for money. Spending less than 4 hours in the room and yet others had spent a cool 8 to 10 hours in theirs! In any case, did I have anyone to blame except myself? As the English saying goes, “you cannot have your cake and eat it at the same time”! I had to leave the room and surrender it by 10:00am lest they began charging me for another day. For having got to bed early, we got up late, for getting up late, we found the breakfast table almost empty, for that, we had to contend with half fool… oops…I mean half full stomachs and the vicious cycle went on and on! This reminded me of the vicious cycle of poverty as taught in the Secondary school Economics classes. We had an Economics Teacher that got nicknamed “Vicious” because of his extravagant usage of the word! Having left the Hotel so early, where were we gona go so early? Not the beaches I suppose. We decided to take an unguided tour of Rubavu a.k.a. Gisenyi. The road network in this town has greatly been improved as compared to a year or two ago. The equivalent of “Dix Neuf Trente” has been relocated far away from the town centre; a new stadium has been built at the foot of the Rubavu Mountain just overlooking the airport! The road to the Petite Barrier (small border) has also been well surfaced so well that, it takes a blink of an eye to get there. I could go on and on and on! As for the main border crossing, the place is a beehive of activities, people keep crisscrossing the border from both divided of the same. We arrived at the border point at around mid-day and decided to take a stroll across to the DRC city of Goma, after all, there was no harm in visiting a neighbour’s place. Taking a vehicle across the border proved to be an impossible task, the bureaucracy and the entry fee was a deterrent and so, we decided to leave the vehicle and take a stroll across. Unfortunately for some of our colleagues, they had forgotten to carry their passports and hence, they could not get the chance to cross over. We managed to find our way through the immigrations offices of both countries and onto the DR Congolese soils. The last time I had set my feet on DR Congo is about a year or so ago when I visited their capital city Kin Malebo a.k.a. Kinshasa. Since we wanted to feel the Congo and see it, we decided to walk all the way to town. The road from the border to Goma centre is no match to that on this side; the whole road network has gone caput, thanks to Nyiragongo! We saw a ray of hope because; so many roads have been opened up for repair. Sincerely speaking, when compared, Goma is a very huge but disorganised City whereas Gisenyi is a small but well organised town! We reached the city centre and were amazed by the huge number of people that had gathered on the main Rond point (round about) to have their photographs taken. This took me back to the days of the likes of Babinyaga and John (major photographers), who used to visit us every Sunday at St. Leo’s, Nyakasura and Kyebambe, to have our photos taken using the Cameras that consumed the TUDOR Films. The guys were busy loading the films, winding on their cameras, snapping and then re-winding and so on and so forth. I was left wondering as to what Century these guys belonged! mfashumwana@fastmail.fm