If you fly over a neighborhood and see lots of swimming pools, then you can safely guess the residents are affluent. When I flew overthe village of Bulape, I noticed a lot of empty swimming pools, too. Actually, they were not swimming pools but they were empty cistern.
Bulape was once an American Presbyterian mission station. The missionaries built many cisterns to provide water for their households. Today, the cisterns are empty. They were made from concrete which broke down over time. The price of concrete needed to maintain the cisterns was too high for the average poor Congolese to afford.
Cisterns are a integral part of a safe water system for rural Congo. Modern cisterns are being replaced with plastic tanks.
