I didn’t plan to retrace my mother’s travels. But my footsteps followed hers around the world

‘We were dogged in our pursuit of reaching the peak of the volcano our mother had climbed decades earlier’: Petrina Darrah on the edge of the crater of Nyiragongo. Photograph: Petrina Darrah

When I told my mum I was taking my younger sister to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she could barely contain her excitement.

Thirty years before we set foot in Goma, our mother arrived in the same city on a dusty Bedford truck that had carted a swag of lanky youths all the way from London. Back then, the DRC was called Zaire and civil war had yet to tear the region apart. Mum remembers Goma as being quite cosmopolitan.