Vice: Guide to Congo (interesting read on the lives in Congo)

I will quote a few chapters and provide you the link for the entire article if interested.

A week earlier, our team landed at N’Djili International Airport in the capital of Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville. The place looks like it hasn’t had a scrub since Muhammad Ali dropped by for the Rumble in the Jungle in the early 1970s. After having our yellow-fever cards checked for the first time in our well-traveled lives, we ran a gauntlet of sweaty police officers and other officials—each with his own laundry list of infractions that we had apparently already committed. In an amazing stroke of luck, they were willing to overlook all these violations for a small fine, payable in person, to them.

Having bee to Tijuana. Mexico- the only place I can personally compare too- (nowhere near a bad as here) Cops always threaten to arrest you if you don't give them a fine. It is sometimes really scary walking around

We’d come to Congo to try to find out more about the developed world’s thirst for coltan, cassiterite, and the other colorfully named minerals that make the electronics industry go round. These are part of a group of natural resources that have been dubbed “conflict minerals” because of the alphabet soup of armed groups (FARDC, CNDP, FDLR, PARECO, etc.) who have found them a very portable and highly profitable way to fund their activities—which mostly consist of killing people. Since 1996, these guerrilla insurgencies have led to the deaths of more than 5 million people, and in one particularly horrific year—2006—the rape of approximately 400,000 women.

So, if I read right- the electronics the better developed countries get (some) parts from comes from a dead poor area like this, whose people receive little to no benefit but death?

After giving up on ever seeing our luggage again, we stepped out onto the streets of Kinshasa. The city is probably the closest real-world equivalent of a zombie apocalypse—an oppressively hot, dusty, and decrepit landscape where somewhere between 7 and 10 million people try to eke out a living any way they can, whether that’s selling knotted plastic bags of water to the thousands of people caught in the never-ending snarl of traffic on the city’s crumbling roads, or the occasional late-night ambush of out-of-towners dumb enough to go walking around on their own.

How many out-of-towners even want to come here? Imagine this place in ten, twenty year. Can't see it improving much.

Well the whole article is here if you would like to read it.
www.vice.com...