Dirty Jobs: Kinshasa

crosstown traffic (Photo credit: FredR)

People in Kinshasa make their living in varied and resourceful ways. By far one of the toughest jobs I see people doing on a daily basis is the job of the pus pus. If Mike Rowe came to Kinshasa to film an episode of “Dirty Jobs,” he might very well spend a day with a pus pus. In Lingala, “kopusa” means, “to push”, and a “pus pus” (poos poos) is a cart with two wheels and handles on both ends. For a fee, a man with a pus pus will come and transport items for you from one place to another. If it fits in the cart or can be tied to it, they will haul it. It’s a hot, hard, dirty, and dangerous job. Nine months out of the year the temperature averages upper nineties by midday. There are a lot of hills in Kinshasa, and very few sidewalks, so these guys are forced to push their carts in the streets. They can’t go very quickly and traffic is terrible. I have seen one get hit by a car and the driver just kept on going.

What sorts of things ride around town in a pus pus? Some cargo we have seen:

Garbage
Scrap iron
Pieces of a car
Tires
Lumber
Firewood
Bags of cement
Gravel
Furniture
Plants/flowers
Jugs of water
Sheets of tin
Live chickens and goats
A live adult cow (our favorite thus far)

The pus pus is a vital service in a city with a poor infrastructure. I have never seen a U-Haul or a moving van here. You can pay a neighborhood company for basic trash service. The company in our new neighborhood is called VDT or Vie Décente pour Tous (Decent Life for All). For ten dollars, they will give me eight flimsy garbage sacks. If your trash won’t fit into their bags, they won’t take it. Each week they send a tiny flat bed truck which is kind of like a modified three wheeler to collect everyone’s full bags. Where it goes, nobody knows, but if you can't burn it or bury it, that's your only option for trash removal. There are city trash receptacles, but they are few and far between and when the trash gets hauled from them in the big trucks, no one I have asked knows where it goes. There is a small river near my house, lined on both sides with garbage. There are mounds of garbage at the bottom of my hill. Mounds of garbage line the river banks we pass as we drive through the city. I am always hoping that none of that garbage is mine.

Remember this? That was our back porch the day we moved in. There was also stuff about the yard like shower stalls, plumbing parts, and old garbage from the previous tenants. I remember being tired and overwhelmed already with the unpacking, not having water pumped into the house yet, not being able to use a stove, and the work on the house we still had to do and then I saw this and just wanted to cry.

As of this week, my porch looks like this!
(Kudos to my amazing husband who came home exhausted every day and then worked on the big plumbing leak, the outlet with 400 volts, and ran new plumbing and wiring so I could have my washer and dryer close at hand!)

Where did all our garbage go? 

I would bet that even this gentleman doesn't know its final destination. We had to hire him to bring his pus pus cart and haul the big stuff away. I’m sure he thought I was crazy when I went out to shake his hand and say hello, and crazier still when I asked if I could take his picture. It was probably a good thing that I stopped myself short of calling him my hero. 

We paid someone to take the yuck from our home and make it clean. Today I am thankful for a Savior who takes my sin as far as the east is from the west and cleanses my heart. Please say a prayer for all the men and boys in Congo who push the pus pus carts, for their safety and for them to come to know the One who can take their “garbage” and sin away and give them clean hearts.