ESTHER N'SAPU
the forgotten of Lwiro (Les Oubliés de Lwiro)

The original text is in French
For many years my childhood memories of Lwiro have haunted me. It was the village of my maternal grandparents and I spent some of the best moments of my life there. Lwiro is a village in the province of South Kivu, located about 40 kilometers northeast of the city of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is also the village that houses the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles (CRSN) built in 1947 at the initiative of the Belgian colonists. A place that shaped my grandfather, but that my grandfather also shaped, by building the library and various furniture. A place that saw me grow up, in this timeless setting in the company of young people from different backgrounds: Goma-Bukavu-Bujumbura-Lwiro... This center, like my childhood memories, seems frozen in the past, a happy and peaceful past, without wars or worries.
As the Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ liked to say, "when an old man dies, it is a library that burns". So, to help me bette

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