Chapters 2 and 3 form the ethnographic heart of the book, exploring the economic niches that form an informal welfare system largely reserved for disabled people. Chapter 2 considers brokering at the Kinshasa-Brazzaville border, an activity viewed by some as ‘given’ by the state as a form of compensation for the lack of social welfare. Examining in detail the dynamics of community and the activities performed at the border, the chapter shows how the social values underpinning personal relationships were tested in the moral dilemmas over a common rhetoric of individualism: ‘fending-for-yourself’ rather than caring for mutually dependent relationships. A moral emphasis on the value and nature of professional relationships was shaped by the knowledge that life and work at the border might only ever be a temporary arrangement, as the most dramatic incarnations of ’crisis’ (mpiaka) drew attention to the temporal frame in which these value debates took place.