Rest at last

Day Six
Location: Luiza
Date: 05/01/05
Hours of Driving: 0

Today we stay in Luiza to get some work done. To use our laptop, we have to power the office with electricity: we pour gasoline in the little power box to get it going. The electricity comes on for a couple of hours and we rush to finish writing our reports.

It’s raining and it’s cold. I am still taking showers with frozen cold water, which makes washing my hair torture.

The lady’s house where we eat the majority of our meals is swamped with kids excited to see a car and curious to look at me. I sense that they are intrigued and take the time to shake each and every little hand. When I leave, they wave to me energetically.

I have been eating fufuh, manioc leaves and small pieces of unidentifiable meat for five days. Today, we have bananas and mandarins that we picked up from Luambo. It’s really hard to find diversity of foods in the villages so we rush to buy tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples and mandarins whenever we happen to see them on our trips to other villages. The average child here mostly eats fufuh and manioc leaves, with a little bit of meat if there’s any left over.

Congolese soil, when it’s not clay, is very rich: it’s a deep, dense, humid earth where everything can grow. People like to joke that if you spit out a seed, the next minutes it will have spouted a plant. There are mines of diamonds and gold close to the Angola border.

There is so much potential for this country, why isn’t more done to exploit that?