7 Billion by National Geographic

toddlers in knits and aviator sunglasses and fake furs. “Look at these kids,” said Milene Chaves, a 33-year-old journalist, her voice hovering between admiration and despair. She turned the page. “And it seems you have to have a decorated room too. I don’t need a decorated room like this.”
    Chaves had a long-term boyfriend but has no children, not yet. “And when I do, I want to simplify things,” she said. The half dozen friends around her agreed, the magazines still open on the table before us: attractive objects, they said, but so excessive, so disturbingly too much. These São Paulo women were in their 20s and 30s, with two children or one or none. They followed precisely the patterns described to me by national demographers. When I asked them whether they ever felt nostalgia for the less materialistic life of their elders, two generations back—eight children here, ten there, with nobody expecting decorators to gussy up the sleeping quarters—I was able to make out, among the hooting, the word presa. Imprisoned.
    But their answers were nearly drowned out by their laughter.

Chapter 7: Rift in Paradise: Africa's Albertine Rift Valley
BY ROBERT DRAPER
    Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine who reported on Afghanistan’s opium crop in the February issue. He and photographer Pascal Maitre have collaborated on stories in Somalia and Madagascar. If we could please get the file back by COB Monday, we should be done! Fantastic work, I know this was a bit of a piecemeal project—not easy!
    T he Mwami remembers when he was a king of sorts. His judgment was sovereign, his power unassailable. Since 1954 he has been the chief of the Masisi territory, an undulating pastoral region in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the same as his father and his grandfather before him. Though his given name is Sylvestre Bashali, the other chiefs simply address him as doyen—senior-most. For all of his adult life, the Mwami would receive newcomers to Masisi. They brought him livestock or other gifts. He in turn parceled out land as he saw fit.

    Today the chief sits on a dirty couch in a squalid hovel in Goma, the Congolese city several hours south of Masisi. His domain is now the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis that has lasted for decades, yet largely eludes the world’s attention. Masisi has been overtaken—by thousands of Tutsi and Hutus refugees returning from Rwanda to what they claim is their lawful property; by tribal militias aiming to acquire land by force; by cattlemen from neighboring countries searching for less-cluttered pastures; by hordes of itinerants from all over this fertile and dangerously overpopulated region of east Africa seeking somewhere, anywhere, to eke out a living. Recently, a member of the Tutsi rebel army seized the Mwami’s 200-acre estate, forcing him, humiliated and fearing for his safety, to retreat to this shack in Goma.
    The city is a hornet’s nest. As recently as two decades ago, Goma’s population was perhaps 50,000. Now it is at least ten times that number. Armed males in uniform stalk its raggedy unlit streets with no one to answer to. Streaming out of the outlying forests and into the city market is a 24/7 procession of boys ferrying immense sacks of charcoal on bicycles or wooden scooter-like chikudus. North of the city limits seethes the Nyiragongo volcano, last heard from in 2002, when its lava roared through town and wiped out Goma’s historic Belgian district. To the east lies the silver cauldron of Lake Kivu—so choked with carbon dioxide and methane from the city’s organic discharge that some scientists predict an eruption will one day kill everyone in and around Goma.
    The Mwami, like so many others far less privileged, has run out of options. His stare is one of regal aloofness. Yet despite his cufflinks and manicured gray beard, he is not a chief here in Goma. He is only Sylvestre