Toy Story, Burundi-Style (1)

On bike rides in the hills outside of Bujumbura, I get a fun look at what kids in a developing country come up with for toys.

Ain't no Toys R Us here, no hobby shops.  There's no Radio Shacks selling remote controlled this and Nintendo that.  'Bout the only toy-type stuff available is Chinese-made, plastic, and cheap.  But most kids can't afford even that.

Which is where imagination, and a little ingenuity, comes in handy.

In Burundi, all a kid needs to have fun is a discarded wheel or some rubbish.  The wheel gets simply rolled down the road, the kid pushing it along adeptly with a stick; think those line drawings of girls in frilly dresses rolling hoops around in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century American novels.  The rubbish - some wire, perhaps, along with a few bottle caps and a bit of old styrofoam - gets turned into a small toy car or truck.

Recently, though, a saw a couple kids who went even simpler than that.  They made their fun out of nature.

I was riding a dirt road I hadn't set tires on before.  About an hour up from Bujumbura's university-on-the-hill, I took a left heading down toward a large school complex atop a valley knoll.  After dropping in past the school, I reached a river and decided to turn around.  

(The road continues, I think, to the mountain town of Bugarama, a back-country hill route that avoids the busy paved highway.  Can't wait to ride it...)

By that time there were, as often happens, a few kids running along behind me.  I was in a hurry to make my U-turn and get back home, so I didn't pay them much attention.  That is, until I saw something that made my camera appear lickety-split.

Attracting the attention of my lens was a rather unusual toy: a live beetle on a stick!

Who needs radio controlled cars and personal video consoles?  In Burundi, if you got a beetle, you happy.  Flapping wings included, no batteries necessary.

(Stay tuned for more Toy Story installments.)

I Heart (My View Of) Congo

Now that the rains have been around awhile and cleared the air, I have a view of the Democratic Republic of Congo from my porch.  Where before there was only Bujumbura town, then lake-edge, then an impenetrable screen of haze, now I can watch miles of Lake Tanganyika shimmer blue and green as puffy-white clouds build and dissipate above it.

And, on the far side of the lake, majestic mountains.  The Congo.

When I came to Burundi I knew little about the Congo, the neighboring state to the west.  Inside I held a vague sense of equatorial mystery and dread, perhaps a vestige of emotional memory from reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

These days, I'm learning a few facts.  I'm reading a book, Blood River, by Tim Butcher.  The author is a veteran journalist who, around 2004, decided to follow the explorer Stanley's route across the African continent from east to west, back when the intrepid adventurer 'discovered' the Congo River.

Entering eastern Congo after crossing Lake Tanganyika, Mr. Butcher found a lawless country developing backwards, a result of decades of dictatorship and conflict.  Where the Belgian colonizers had at least maintained thousands of kilometers of roads, an extensive railway, and regular ferry service on the mighty Congo River, now he found little except jungle, narrow footpaths, ruined towns, and fear of marauding rebel groups.

Apparently, life over in those hills that I now delight to see is a mess, or at least it was a few years back when Mr. Butcher wrote his book.

It all looks so peaceful from here, and beautiful.  It's hard to reconcile the chaos and fear from the book with the lovely view that I have out my windows.

But I guess that's life: sometimes beauty hides a terror.

Still, I enjoy my view, and love to watch the play of clouds and sun and rain and lake and hills.  A glance westward from the porch makes my day.