République démocratique du Congo (RDC)

Or, in English, "The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)"





Brazzaville (wikilink) on the north and Kinshasa (wikilink) on the south are across the Congo River from each other. The Congo River flow is 2nd in the world, after the Amazon; its flow is greater than that of the Mississippi River. Kinshasa is the capital of RDC/DRC and it is a French-speaking city; it is the second-biggest Francophone city in the world, after Paris, ahead of Montreal.

The city of Kinshasa is organized into Communes:




A picture of the main building at The University of Kinshasa at http://www.unikin.cd/. There are a lot of universities and research centers in the DRC/RDC, here are lists at fr:wikipedia (Éducation en République démocratique du Congo) and en:wikipedia (Education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Here is the link to the Catholic University of Bukavu, or Bukavu Catholic Univerity; in French the name is Université catholique de Bukavu.



This is a picture of Lake Kivu taken from the town of Bukavu, near the university. Lake Kivu is part of both the DRC and of Rwanda. The lake is deep, and the lake water is fresh down to 300 meters; below this depth, due to volcanic activity in the area, there is a lot of natural gas dissolved in the water, like carbon dioxide dissolves in water to form soda, or ammonia gas dissolves in water to form ammonia. There is more than enough gas to justify building an extraction facility; there is already a small extraction facility that provides enough natural gas to power a brewery that stands on the shores of the lake. Here is a link to a long, interesting science and engineering story written by some engineers from South Africa who were contracted to do some work on the extraction project; the story reads like New Yorker magazine and is more or less mildly politically correct.