In the past couple of days I’ve learned a couple of little lessons the hard way:
My kind Malawian military friends give me extra provisions from their camp. Included are a few bags of pudding mix and the chocolate one had a small hole in it. I transferred it to another container and there was some that wouldn’t fit. Perfect opportunity to whip up some pudding, no? The instructions were for making enough pudding for a platoon, so rather than crunching the numbers I just eyeballed it. It was all going fine until the mixture hit the temperature where the agent that congeals the stuff kicked in. I went right past pudding to something like rubber.
Lesson: Don’t play around with pudding, do the math. Or at least remember that there’s never very much powder in the little boxes that Bill Cosby sells.
Last night I remembered that the notebook computer I recently received for work came with a small surge protector. This is a good thing for those of us who don’t enjoy the idea of our computers burning down. I went and got the protector from my desk and tried plugging it into a new powerstrip I bought in Kinshasa. There was a loud SNAP! simultaneous with some impressive sparks. I drew back, but what next? I tried again to the same result. Before Congo there’s no WAY I would give something like that a second attempt, but stuff pops, sparks, and smokes here all the time. I recently saw the AC adapter for a friend’s external hard drive burn out and leave a puddle of juice on the floor. Also, most computer accessories are dual voltage. Awhile back, my computer guy bought a wireless router from me that had stopped working for the fifth time. He was tired of fixing some minor configuration problem in it for me so I sold it to him so he could promptly fix it and sell it. He told me later that when showing it to a possible customer, he plugged it in and POW blew out the adapter. That sale wasn’t accomplished.
Lesson: Check the voltage before plugging ANYTHING in for the first time. You might just ruin two or three things at once.
The electricity just flickered back on as the sun sank into the depths of the Congo River. This is a good because it means I can read tonight. The electricity has been less stable than usual these days. Candlelight doesn’t cut it for reading. The other option is my halogen headlamp. That lights up a book bright as day and simultaneously functions as a homing beacon for every living flying insect in the house. Yep, draws every one right onto my forehead. There’s not room for all of them between me and my book.
In the spirit of elementary school show and tell, here are the books on my reading stack in no particular order than bottom to top:
- Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith – Anne Lamott
- A Severe Mercy – Sheldon Vanauken
- Let Your Life Speak – Parker J. Palmer
- Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving From Affluence to Generosity – Ronald J. Sider
- A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Social Imagination – Emmanuel M. Katongole
- Paris: The Biography of a City – Colin Jones
Time for a delicious dinner of spinach porridge and bread followed up with some reading, both courtesy of the electric company.
Among the best things about being away for a few weeks is coming home. After another air tour of Central Africa (at least the Congo part) I landed in Kisangani. Stepping down the tail steps of the 727 into the heat and sun, it felt good to be home. As I made my way into the terminal several of the guards waved or nodded and some called me by name. “You’ve been gone awhile! Welcome home Mr. John!” Again, more good feelings.
By the way, I don’t know if I’ve ever explained here that the name Brian often doesn’t roll off of Congolese tongues too easily. I’m told it’s fairly common in France now and they have an anglicized pronunciation. In Congo rather, I’ve gotten a lot of quizzical looks when I introduce myself as Brian. Even some good friends call me “Brown” or my favorite “Brahmps”. The most common iteration of my name is pronounced Breeante, which in French is “Brilliant”. This works here since many people are named after positive characteristics. I’ve never looked in the mirror and thought “Brilliant!”, but I will take it wherever I can get it. To make a long aside longer and effectively get to the point… in some cases I cut the confusion by using my middle name: John. I always wanted to get more use out of it and now I am fully accustomed to responding to either one. People here have and use lots of names so nobody thinks it the slightest bit odd.
There were only three or so of us who got off the plane in Kisangani and the UN bus driver very kindly told us that he’d prefer to wait for another flight coming in from Bunia in another 45 minutes but he worked it out for two of us to ride with the guy who had a car waiting. I had a nice conversation in the back of the Handicap International Landcruiser with a new UN transportation agent from Cameroon via the mission in Haiti.
Meanwhile the staff back at the office was waiting for me to call from the usual bus terminus in town. Instead the guys from Handicap dropped me off right in front of our gate. I pushed the door open, stuck my head in and yelled, “Hodi!”, Swahili for “Hey, can I come in?!” The guards welcomed me with great big smiles, handshakes, hands on shoulders, and tapping of temples: right, left, right. The sounds of our greetings then sent ripples through the office building. The entire credit field staff was there as usual on a late Friday afternoon. I heard the insides of the building erupt in shouts of joy and the whole staff poured out on the porch. There were about 20 handshakes and smiles and 90 taps to my temples. We all gathered in a big circle in the reception and I said a few words thanking them for their good work and the jubilant welcome. A few minutes later I found myself in my office, my temples still stinging. I sat for a moment to savor that feeling. As life goes, there will undoubtedly be days to come when I will need to draw from that overflowing cup.
My seven day planned visit to Kinshasa became twenty-two days. I went for some work meetings, for some dirty Kinshasa air, and most importantly to arrange a visa issue. The visa wasn’t resolved at the Congo immigration office as quickly as we’d been told it would be and it wasn’t wise to return home to Kisangani undocumented. I always have to consider the extremely remote possibilities of political insecurity or appendicitis or some other tragedy which could require me to leave the country quickly.
Congo has taught me volumes about patience, this episode included. The staff here in Kisangani did a great job minding the store. I was working from Kin, in touch with them every day. About halfway through my absence, they started letting me know it was time to come home. I felt the same way but anyone who has been through this kind of thing knows that visas are a part of your life where nations have much more power than individual citizens of the earth.
The upshot is that I got to work closer for a time with my colleagues Peter, Nate, Pascal and other great people on the Kinshasa staff. I got to work with some interns learning about rural microfinance in village savings and loan associations. I got to swim and play several games of volleyball at the American school there. I enjoyed a sliced salami and cheese sandwich most workdays with Peter. I ate yogurt. There were ups and downs just like life out here, but it was a massive change of pace, unplanned and not asked for in such length- but I am very grateful nonetheless. I’m thankful to Nate and Peter for their hospitality.
Sometimes when we came home on the weekend a whole troupe of neighbor children would stream into the yard running and jumping, singing and playing games. These are some of the cutest kids on the planet. Right in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities - choked by dirty air, widespread poverty, and failing infrastructure of all kinds, these kids hold court and joy abounds.
This is a post from awhile ago, I’m just now getting it uploaded…
This morning I undertook an ambitious project. The idea for it wafted into my mind late last week. It wafted in on memories of steaming, juicy, delicious vegetable quiche served by a friend in Kinshasa some months back. I searched out recipes for quiche and crust online, seeking the simplest ones that don’t require sun dried tomatoes or asparagus or other flashy gourmet ingredients. I studied the crusts without shortening since I can’t get it here. I knew that it could be possible that a sudden egg or cheese or vegetable shortage could steal this project away.
Chase, the summer intern here from the USA, contacted his Southern mama to get her recipe for crust and he took on that part of the dish.
Yesterday the ingredients were finally all assembled, even nutmeg. I woke early this morning to wash all the dishes, clean the kitchen, and start cooking. I wish I could tell you that the quiche is now baking in my tiny oven, filling the apartment with the sweet smelling anticipation, but the mission was aborted. I made the fatal mistake of not cracking the eggs into a separate dish before putting them into the mix.
There was an odd ‘garbage dump’ odor about the eggs to begin with and it appeared that one was cracked in the bag of eggs. This seemed to me to be fairly normal. Odd odors are not uncommon here and I hadn’t yet bathed, so I figured maybe it was me. It turned out to be the last egg to crack that was rotten and I managed to drop some of its gray poison into the bowl. I’ve never smelled such a thing. This egg outdid every stink-bomb I ever smelled in elementary school, and I think those are made with rotten egg. One bad egg took our quiche down.
While I stood in the farthest corner of the kitchen actively suppressing my gag reflex, Chase tried to fish out the bad egg but it was impossible to achieve success to our satisfaction. I added up the total investment of time and money in this grand culinary splurge of a quiche and realized that we’d be better off losing these eggs for the risk of turning out a sour quiche that would make us both sicker than sick. So I dumped the eggs into a bag and Chase went out to buy more and salvage the effort. Most everything is closed on Sunday, even street kiosks, but he went around asking people and found a place to restock. Now we’re cracking them one by one into a separate bowl. The dream of quiche is alive and well...
Here’s a picture of the delicious quiche, from crumbly crust to cheesy crown:
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…
Before I went to the USA for my home leave I had detailed plans for items to buy in the land of (more than) plenty. I knew that shopping would be time consuming and fairly overwhelming if I didn’t have a well vetted list. I’d end up coming back with an electric toothbrush or a lava lamp or something else that has no right coming back to Congo in my suitcase.
For the most part, it went well. I had some of the standard returned expatriate paralysis standing in the middle of an acre of Target Store. I enjoyed meeting some of the kind and quirky working-poor at Wal-Mart in Lancaster, PA. (I had a hard time convincing them that I really don’t know my way around the various and sundry departments under that roof and then they gave me tours.) Mostly I wanted to invite some of those guys over and hear the stories they’d have to tell. Maybe it’s because shopping here in Kisangani is always such a small-time, small-town barter game with a joke and a smile.
Between the online shopping and the driving to the store shopping I ended up with two decks of Uno Cards. I brought both back to Congo, figuring that you can’t really ever have too much Uno. Last weekend John and Dieu came over to hang out after church and we broke out one of the decks. We had a blast playing and I saw the true silver lining to having two decks. They took one home and taught it to their friends and family.
Yesterday when I swung by their house they were all sitting out front and they jumped in the car to go play some Uno at my apartment. We played for several hours and I didn’t win a single round. I said Uno! once. In one week they’ve all become world-class Uno champs. It’s a good thing I don’t mind losing.
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