Living in the Shadow of a Volcano

Nicolas Muhamiriza remembers sitting atop a small hill as red rivers of molten lava crept over the city and swallowed his sprawling villa.

Muhamiriza, 47, once owned a thriving bottling plant. Now he is among thousands in the eastern city of Goma who struggle to pay rent for wooden shacks, their livelihoods destroyed nearly four years ago when lava submerged schools, hospitals and houses.

Scientists and officials fear Goma will one day be incinerated by Mt. Nyiragongo, the volcano that looms over the city. But Goma’s fertile soil and its location at the tip of Lake Kivu means people still swarm to its lively markets, for trading with nearby Uganda and Rwanda.

Officials would like to move Goma’s residents 30 miles west, to the towns of Sake and Kirotshe. Few, however, can afford to leave, and the government doesn’t have the resources to help.

“If I had the money I would move tomorrow, but where would I go?” Caleb Kabanda said with a shrug. “Here, maybe I can find a job. Outside, it will be impossible.”

Kabanda, 31, a former English teacher whose school was turned into cinders by the lava, said he got by on odd jobs.

Some 500,000 people live in Goma, and the population will probably double in five years as more move in despite the risks, Deputy Mayor Deo Katindi said.

“I believe that Goma will disappear from the map,” he said, sitting in an office about 200 yards from an expanse of black stones and ash where one stream of lava flowed through the city.

Katindi, who lost his house, car and all his belongings, sits on a planning committee which concluded last year that the best idea was to try to lure people away from Goma by investing in Sake and Kirotshe.

He said Goma had appealed for financial help from the international community, but received nothing. As a result, no concrete steps have been taken toward moving.

Scientists say Mt. Nyiragongo is lively and a serious hazard.

Only Italy’s Mt. Vesuvius is more dangerous in its threat to humans than Mt. Nyiragongo, which has erupted five times since 1902, said Celestin Kasereka, a volcanologist at Goma’s Volcano Observatory.

“We don’t know when the volcano will erupt,” he said. “But it could easily be worse than the last time.”

During Nyiragongo’s relatively small eruption on Jan. 18, 2002, nearly 80% of Goma’s economic activity was wiped out by flows of glowing lava that crept across the central markets.

About 300,000 people fled the city, nearly half of whom lost their homes. Most soon returned, with nothing more than the tattered clothes on their backs.

“We have no choice, we must forget,” said Bijou Bernabe.

She sat on the roof of her former house, filled with hardened lava and buried between charred carcasses of cars whose frames jut from the black volcanic rocks.

“If there is an eruption we will run away again,” said Bernabe, 29, wet dough dripping from her fingers while frying dumplings to sell. “But two days later all of us will return. The volcano is a part of our lives.”

Some in Goma, where the rotten smell of sulfur regularly wafts down from the volcano’s crater, believe that the next eruption may very well be their last.

“That smell is a warning,” said Pierre Muhindo, 46, father of three and a longtime security guard. “Stone after stone will fall on the earth before we all go to heaven.”

Muhamiriza, the former bottling plant owner, is scared too, but says he can’t afford to leave.

He continues to bottle drinks, but on a smaller scale after losing his equipment. His “factory” is now a small room with a few machines, and he worries about being able to pay the school fees for his son, Gad.

Muhamiriza sat in front of his house, his feet resting on black swirls of solid lava, a constant reminder of the day he fled with his wife and seven children.

“Everything that I work for could be eaten by the volcano again,” he said.