I’m about 27000 feet above Congo’s Equatorial Rainforest in a svelte United Nations CRJ-200. Below, it’s a lush forest of variegated green. From up here today though, the whole thing is a sea of deep blue. It is a million shades of blue above in this sky. Every form of cloud is making its appearance. The sun-baked cumulus tries to steal my heart, but I save my eye for the demure swaths of white foam.
It’s been three months since I came back from my home leave and where I am, three uninterrupted months starts to feel a little long. It’s a feeling that creeps up on you and sits on your shoulders before you hear it coming. It’s not because I’m lacking for tremendous company. Kisangani is just an isolated city. It’s hard to explain. Getting up here today feels good. Maybe I can find a pilot who will take me up and fly me in circles over this place from time to time. Today the sky seems a fine remedy.
These last two weeks my digestive system has been in rebellion. It’s brought me to my knees and tested my mettle. I’m thankful for a few prior experiences with good old food poisoning stateside that have taught me the rhythms of these things –otherwise I might’ve thought it was truly dire. I’ve been reading the crafty Mma Ramotswe, No.1 Ladies’ Detective books by Alexander McCall Smith lately and she’s got me thinking like a good detective.
I eat the same things Chase does and the water at home is all boiled and filtered. Some of the days that I got sick I didn’t eat anything from outside the house. Everything was peeled or poached. Finally, I started to get a hunch on some bottled water at the office. It seemed to be a constant over these weeks and something that only I’d been consuming. I swilled a good bit of what was left yesterday to put the theory to test. Sure enough, last night I went to sleep feeling like a pot of rot.
Now any responsible citizen of the planet sees bottled water for the $2.99 crime it is. Safe drinking water from the tap seems like it should be a basic human right. When I was a kid, anyone who drank bottled water was 100% world class snob. Now people in the rich countries drink it for convenience, for the taste, for the pretty bottle, whatever. Here I buy it when I haven’t managed my personal water treatment plant (boiling and filtering) well. It’s supposed to fill the gap and keep me from getting sick. Now it appears that the stuff is making me sick!
Raised in a family that kept consumer reports on hand, I lay in bed feeling miserable and thinking of how little recourse I have. There’s no association of drinking water standards and measures, no better business bureau, nobody at that company who would care to hear my complaint, no newspaper or investigative reporter to attack the case. All I have is an empty bottle and a sore gut. Time to boil some water.
Friday has a nice new rhythm in our office. Last month we inaugurated a Friday midday communal meal. The office pays for rice, I pay a nice woman named Elysee who comes and cooks under the big mango tree, and the rest of the staff contributes the rest. There’s a committee of three that decides the budget for the ‘rest’ and announces the menu the day before. It’s simple but plentiful food. Some are even suggesting we cut back on the quantities so people aren’t so sleepy after lunch (that’s music to a manager’s ears). The food is great, traditional Congolese fare. Even better is the banter, the jokes, the ‘bon appetit!’ and ‘bonne digestion!’. Eating together weekly is great for bonding as a staff and celebrating another week of good work.
Friday night I went with Chase, the summer intern, to the UN base across the road from my building where they have a small social club. There’s an upstairs terrace that was closed for some time because the rising river waters were eroding the pilings. The river’s been pushed back and the deck is reopened. There’s a nice chilled breeze sweeping off the river, good conversation with friends from around the world, the lights from my building up above and the night fishermen passing in canoes and working their nets below. There’s not much on the menu, but they do have a chicken that is world-class. It’s a bit much for me after that noon meal and after becoming accustomed to tiny birds. They have one billiards table and I played a doubles game. I’m not highly competitive but I admit I was pretty discouraged early on hitting the balls so poorly they might as well have been hard-boiled eggs. But then I found my groove half way through the game and sunk them all.
Saturday a whole troupe of friends came over to the apartment. I met the HOPE driver’s kids at our Christmas party and I’d heard that Nambil made excellent marks in school so I wanted to have them over to celebrate and congratulate him. He came with his older brother and two year old sister. She was VERY WELL behaved. I’ll say that kids here on average are better behaved than most back home. She soiled her only diaper and then managed to soil most of the bathroom (not sure how that happened), but her ever-loving teenage brother took good care of her and tended to her mess(es).
Sunday I was invited to preach at the Church of the Nazarene Kabondo 2. They’re in a beautiful far-reaching corner of the city. Unfortunately they’ve had a tough time lately and the structure itself is in bad shape. They’ve built a good house for Pastor Gaspard, but the church lacks walls and its grass roof is coming apart. Now that the house is done, they say that they’re going to put a lot of effort into the church. They’ve got the brick making machine but I’m sure it’s hard to hold onto bricks when selling them brings bread. I told the church that they were an exceptionally good-looking group and that maybe it was because the lack of walls brought in a beautiful light under that awning.
I spoke about being forgiven and learning to forgive and I took some photos to share with you here.
After church I picked up Chase and we went to visit with Jerome and Christilla. They are volunteers from France with Jesuit Refugee Service and they’ve become great friends to me over these months. They’re headed home to France next week and I will miss them. They are very generous with me, sharing their kindness, hospitality and humor. There’s a lot of coming and going, hello and goodbye, in the small community of expatriates in Congo. It can be fatiguing but here in Kisangani we are so few. In this case, I can’t be too upset about a sad goodbye because the friendship has been so wonderful.
It has been a busy time. I’ve got more tasks than time and I was home from work sick one day this week. It’s rare for me to stay home even when I don’t feel well. The big tasks, loan fund growth projections, human resources, etc, etc, may not be critical every day. But the minor daily reasons for me to be around the office include: opening and closing the safe, signing checks and documents, making lots of little and medium-sized decisions, and generally managing the show. I felt funny on Monday and I didn’t know why. I told the staff in our management meeting that I was feeling off and I was grumpy, in other words: feel free to steer a bit clear of me today. Then Monday night I was up half the night with some significant stomach ailment. I’d have gone to work in the morning but I felt so weak in the morning, I was worried getting back up the 130 stairs in the evening would be misery. Plus, we have an energetic intern here for a couple of months and he wasn’t sick. I gave him the keys and he skipped out the door. Various staff members brought by papers for me to sign sitting on my sofa in my pajamas and my sour sick-face.
I watched a French comedy film and finished reading two books and gradually regained strength. I’ve been sick twice now in a few months and the funny part is that there are illnesses here that feel completely different from the ones I am used to in the USA. There was the one recently that made one side of my neck swell up and my joints hurt for three days and I doubt I’ll ever know what that was. But the best part of any flavor of illness is the getting better. It’s like coming out of a tunnel into the sunshine again. When I am sick I can’t help but think about the people who are sick and without much hope for getting better. Just like the pain of hunger is more bearable with the knowledge that food is stocked in the cupboard, brief illness is very tolerable with the promise of rapid recovery. May God’s peace be with all of us, and especially those who are not so fortunate. I believe there are things we must learn from them.
Today in the heart of Kisangani preparations continue for the tomorrow’s Congolese Independence Day celebrations. In comparison to recent years there is considerably more hubbub leading up to the festivities. Last year participation in the parade was limited to compulsory appearances by the police and bureaucrats. Some said all the others were frightened by the potential for unrest. Others said that the parade just wasn’t very well organized. In any case, we were coming out of the postwar transition period where a tenuous power sharing government was focused more on getting their faction elected than celebrating much.
This year the President is coming to Kisangani and there has already been a lot of noise. A viewing platform has been built, torn down, and rebuilt again to accommodate the VIPs. (I think they moved it closer to the street for better TV angles.) Soldiers have been drilling in front of that platform all week. There’s a man just now sound checking the loudspeakers, “ok, ok, un, deux, trois, OK OK OK!” I’m not sure how OK has entered into every language in the world and I don’t even know it’s origins in English. Nobody knows who will be in the parade, other than a copious amount of soldiers in green fatigues. I was watching a well made documentary about Mobutu and it is thought provoking. My mind moves to the Congo I’ve known and the enormous Zairean legacy that remains interwoven. In his day, the soldiers dressed to the nines, now they wear new and pressed fatigues. Maybe the dress uniforms will come out for the big day.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch the parade from my apartment or asked to stay off the balcony or to leave my home for the morning. I don’t know whether there will be spot security inspections by the government. Most of these things, if they are planned, aren’t communicated to me. So I go with the flow. I’ll call the UN security people today to find out if I should expect to go visit a friend tomorrow rather than stay in my apartment and have friends over to watch the festivities.
In any case, it’s a change from the usual. It’s a prime time for watching documentaries and reading journalists’ accounts of the last 57 tumultuous years through the inescapably noisy preparations for a newly elected government’s pomp and circumstance in the Congo of the 21st century.
– And now Saturday has come and gone… and not without it’s share of drama…
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