Cardboard

Daniela Waldburger

Let’s call her Maman Aimée. She is in her 50ies and l was going to meet her for the second time this August. I had interviewed her for the first time last year. Maman Aimée grew up in this neighbourhood of Lubumbashi. She has lived here for nearly all her life, and experienced the rise and fall of the living and housing conditions of the workers of Gécamines, the successor of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga. As a child she benefitted from the infrastructure provided by the company her father was working for. She summarized her childhood memories as well as the memories of her early adult life by the same words everybody else uses here: c’était bien à l’époque (it was good at that time).
It was on one of these dry days in August 2018 with a pitiless heat around noon and a wind that blew the red dust through the unpaved alleys of the Cité Gécamines. Maman Aimée warmly welcomed me and we sat down in her office to get some shade and find a quiet location to talk. Continuously, assistants, friends, family members or acquaintances stopped by, curious about the visitor as I was never walking through these alleys without being noticed. A few years ago, Maman Aimée founded an NGO to take care of the most vulnerable children: those whose fathers were workers of the mine, but whose mothers were not the official wives, women who often were les petites femmes (prostitutes). These children (and of course also their mothers) suffer(ed) most from the decline of the mining sector and the resulting financial difficulties. They often lack the financial means to attend school and a stable social environment. For Maman Aimée these children are une bombe à retardement (a ticking time bomb) for society if they are not well taken care of. She fights against future vandals, thieves and rapists, as she describes the scenario, by providing what she calls “home”, a place to sleep, meals, education and, most important, affection and attention.
That Maman Aimée does run this NGO at all, that she possesses the knowledge of management and accounting, that she was able to open a bank account, etc. is far from self-evident. Only when she was already a mother of four she insisted (despite the social pressure of her husband’s family) to get her degree. She dreamt of having a good job with responsibility. The moment of her graduation was the beginning of the economic crisis of Gécamines. Her husband, a worker of Gécamines, was affected, like thousands of other workers, by irregular payments in the 1990s. Their situation became financially precarious. Maman Aimée described how they started to sell everything at least partly valuable, so that the family would have something to eat. They first sold the wall clock, the television, then furnishings, even the beds and mattresses; only some few cooking utensils remained. All of them, children including, slept on the floor, on a cardboard.
To have a bit more privacy for our discussion and to avoid the constant flow of visitors, Maman Aimée guided me out of her office into her house to show me every room of the house. Her office is an annexe towards the street in front of her house which was expanded on all possible sides and now stands in the middle. A huge room for a sewing school she opened is located between the office and her and her husband’s private rooms. Their bedroom is small and dark, every corner filled with personal belongings and clothes and the couple shares this room with five cats. There is another bedroom, the bigger one, which she provides for the children of the NGO. I was deeply touched realizing how much of their private space they were giving up for these “foreign” children. We continued to the living room, carefully decorated and well equipped with a sofa. Maman Aimée told me that normally she would have invited me to sit here for our interview, but as there was a power cut on that day it was a bit too dark. She therefore suggested that we go back to her office which she described as being nearly as appropriate as the living room to receive her guest.
In 2003, within the context of the Opération Depart Volontaire (ODV), the deal of Gécamines with the World Bank resulted in more than 10.000 workers of the Gécamines losing their jobs. As compensation, each worker received 2.500 dollars, including Maman Aimée’s husband. 2.500 dollars were only a drop in the bucket in comparison to what her husband would have earned if he had continued working. Maman Aimée depicted this moment when they finally had some money again. The sum was spent as follows: 2.000 dollars on the most important things such as furnishings; 500 dollars as an investment to start her project. While her description of their situation at that time, all sleeping on cardboard, still occupied my mind, I asked her if she could remember what kind of object they first bought with this money. To me the answer was obvious: mattresses and beds for the children, followed by mattresses and beds for the parents. Maman Aimée answered: a sofa and two armchairs. I must have unintentionally expressed my surprise as she repeated her answer and noticed my amazement. Although she felt ashamed that they were sleeping on cardboard, and she knew that many others were sharing the same experience, to my bewilderment, she explained that it was most important to have a living room to finally be able to welcome guests again.
On my way back to the guest house, walking the alleys of Cité Gécamines looking for a taxi along the main road, I thought of the many living rooms in which I was warmly welcomed in Lubumbashi, I thought about my privilege to be invited to see private spaces not only of Maman Aimée but of other families of ODV. And cardboard has suddenly taken on a critically new important meaning for me.

November, 2018