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, was once the owner of a thriving bottling plant. Now he is among thousands of Congolese 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 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.
City 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 asked. “Here, maybe I can find a job. Outside, it will be impossible.”
Kabanda, a 31-year-old former English teacher whose school was turned into cinders by the lava, said he got by on odd jobs now.
Some 500,000 people live in Goma, and the population will probably double in five years as more people 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 that 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 international organizations but had received nothing. As a result, no concrete steps have been taken toward moving.
Scientists say Nyiragongo is lively and a serious hazard.
Only Italy’s Mount Vesuvius is more dangerous in its threat to humans than 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,” Kasereka said. “But it could easily be worse than the last time.”
In Nyiragongo’s relatively small eruption on Jan. 18, 2002, nearly 80 percent of Goma’s economic activity was wiped out by flows of glowing lava that crept across the central markets.
Some 300,000 people fled the city, and nearly half of them lost their homes.
Most soon returned, possessing nothing more than the tattered clothes on their bodies.
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.”
