BrianJBecker.com

I’ve been looking for a cat for some time now. We have a mild to moderate problem with rats in our office compound. If I leave any food or anything that has ever touched food in the waste basket under my desk overnight – it will, without fail, end up shredded on the sofa in the morning. (Apparently the rat likes to chill on the sofa.) Now we all call them rats in French and we make jokes about them, but I’ve seen them running around in the lawn and they are really like brown spotted Afro-field mice. They are cute but I wouldn’t get near one. The cat would be a solution to the rat problem and also bring a little extra joy the way animals can.

In Kinshasa there are people that stand on the side of a busy street holding sad looking pets for sale. There are kittens and puppies, parrots and little monkeys. (Incidentally, there are also often large scaly fish hanging from tree branches, but I don’t think those are for sale as pets.)

We’ve all heard of the horrors of puppy farms and the pet industry’s cruel reputation. Extreme poverty exacerbates the problem. A man came to the office some weeks ago with a kitten in a box in the hopes that I would buy it. The tiny kitten had to be just a couple of weeks old and I was told that it is best to take them that young so they remain loyal to their owner. This guy wasn’t going to be eating anything but milk for awhile, he was very thin and too young to eat much solid food. One of its eyes was quite bigger than the other and it couldn’t close properly. There wasn’t much explanation offered for that issue. I refused to purchase the cat.

Since then I have been making offers on healthy looking cats wherever I see them. Some stores have cats to patrol the mice and those cats are pretty healthy and friendly. I usually ask for the standard items, “I’ll have one box of curry, two boxes of fruit juice, two onions, and the cat! It’s how much for the cat!?” They invariably chuckle and refuse to sell.

Today I was attending a Community Bank distribution that was held in someone’s home. There was a beautiful, healthy looking kitten appearing to be about eight to ten weeks old roaming around the crowd. (It’s hard to tell here because pets are generally smaller and skinnier than back home.) She seemed outgoing yet independent and both of her eyes were the same size. I made my standard offer to buy the cat and this time to my chagrin, it was accepted! As we left, they wrapped her up in a basket, put her behind the back seat of the jeep, and we bumbled down the potholed road back to the office. About halfway through the drive I noticed that there were no more faint meows. I half-jokingly suggested that maybe she’d either escaped or died of fright. When I opened the back door of the jeep, she was not in the basket! She had in fact escaped. But we quickly found her hiding under one of the seats and brought her into the office.

She ate some canned corned beef like a champ and sat in my window sill like cats worldwide seem to love to do. (Somehow canned corned beef is for sale everywhere here, one popular brand is named “Texas”. I don’t know who eats it, besides the cat.) Her heart stopped racing and she started exploring the office. She might be shredding the curtains and pushing things off of my desk until the day breaks. I fully expect that anything wacky can and will happen with the cat, but I figure it’s worth a shot. I’ll probably wait a bit to officially name her, but the name of the community bank where I found her is “Lumiere” which means light in French. I think I might call her “Lumi” for short.

When our driver went back to the community bank to pick up a couple of staff members still there, he had a flat tire. Then the jack wouldn’t support the car and the nearby mechanic wouldn’t loan his jack. During this time the skies opened up with torrential rains. I was in the office chatting online with two of my coworkers, watching the cat, and watching the power flicker off and on again. I’d been planning to do a bit of grocery shopping but I was stuck at the office.

It was about 8:00 PM by the time the car finally made it back to the office and I decided to go shopping late and in the rain. At the first store I paid about $10 for some butter, tomato paste, tea biscuits, and a can of coconut milk (the first time I’ve seen it in Kisangani). The rain really kicked up and the nice man that manages the store casually mentioned the rain. I said, “Maybe I should wait until it dies down and drink a soda.” He called out to one of his employees to bring a bottle of coke and when I reached for my wallet he told me it was on the house. We chatted while I drank the coldest bottle of soda I’ve had here so far, our conversation accompanied by the music of the rain hitting the street and dripping down from the ceiling. He told me how the owner’s wife flies to Dubai for a week to buy twenty tons of groceries and supplies in bulk. She has it loaded into a shipping container and it goes by ocean liner to Mombasa, Kenya. From there the container is trucked overland to Kampala, Uganda where it is taxed and put into smaller trucks to be driven a short distance to Entebbe and loaded into an old Russian Antonov cargo airplane that charges $12,000 to fly it to Kisangani. They pick it up at the airport with their own truck. This is definitely part of why imported groceries are so expensive. I asked him if canned might be coming in this next shipment. He said, “Tinned tomatoes? Probably not.”

Then I went over to another store with another very nice shopkeeper. She was braiding another woman’s hair in the middle of the store when I showed up. I joked that I was there to have my hair styled. A couple of sisters came into the shop to buy three eggs. I watched them open up a giant beach umbrella when they walked back out into the rain together. It’s the unpredictability and quirkiness, the odd little improbable practicalities like that keep life here amusing.