BrianJBecker.com

I’ve been blessed to make some great Congolese friends in the past 14 months and I’ve gotten to know some very nice fellow expatriates. When I first arrived in Kisangani I spent a week learning from my predecessor, Peter. Then he went to Kinshasa for a week to start stepping into his new position there. Finally, he came back for a week to see how I was doing and answer my newbie questions.

We share the common experience of working as the manager of this microfinance institution in a city that is quite isolated from the rest of the world. While we haven’t experienced life here in exactly the same way, it’s been an intense and rich time for each of us respectively. Peter was here from the start and I got to pick it up one year in - but I’m the one person who can best relate to his experience here and vice versa.

Peter is taking a five-day break out here. It’s been a great time. A great friend can make a long, warm Saturday zip by almost too fast. A good friend will sit through my stumbling preaching in French in a little church and not even complain. Sunday night we had French expatriate friends Jerome and Christilla over for dinner and games. We played alternating rounds of Boggle in English and French and had more than a few laughs. They have been a ton of fun to get to know.

I expected that I’d get to work on my French here. I expected that I’d really taste the challenge of living in a foreign culture and learn to accept it, love it, move in its rhythms. I expected that I’d experience the joy of working where I felt called, among the poor. I expected that I’d make some friends from Congo. I didn’t expect that I’d make a very good friend from North Carolina.

There have been some ‘Congo challenges’ recently for a few weeks and my awareness of these tremendous blessings in my life has been partly obscured by a stressed-out fog. It’s amazing how the simple fellowship and extraordinary mutual encouragement of friendship can clear the air.