Shit People in DC Say

This is another one of those videos about Sh*t [Fill in the Blank] People Say".

And it's about DC.  And it's incredibly accurate.  Sad thing is, I'm probably the worst offender and use anyone of those lines about 4 or 5 times a week on average...

(Begrudgingly) A Christmas Miracle?

So we didn't make our flight. Despite our extreme tiredness, we woke up early, absolutely scrambling to complete 5 different errands to change our flights.


Weirdly enough, we all actually benefit ted from spending an extra unplanned day in Kinshasa. for my part, I had forgotten my US cell phone in my hotel room the night before and the cleaning staff was able to return it to me!  Additionally, I was able to talk to a Congolese college who had partnered with me in the field (I had rudely left without saying goodbye).


A Christmas Miracle?

We Missed our Flight

We escaped a horrible 5 and a half hour traffic jam and just got to the airport. Unsuprisingly, all 5 of us missed our respective flights...

We passed wide stretches of water that look like 3 back-to-back olympic pools in a row, with city buses stuck in the mud. Since it's the rainy season, apparently a small river had overflowed, and in combination with the wet sand and the mud, and completely un-road worthy vehicles, it kept traffic at a standstill.

It's tragic and incredibly frustrating, fortunately we're all a bit loney at this point and that makes it entertaining...

This is like a Road Trip

But with no water and no place to pee.

4 hours and 45 minutes and still in traffic.

Uh oh

Our driver just pulled out his radio to announce to his colleague "c'est bloqué mon cher, c'est vraiment bloqué" (it's all blocked my friend, it's really blocked).

We've now been in traffic for 4 hours... And we can see the airport from here.

Worser and Worser Traffic

Oh my holy god. We've been in traffic for 3 hours now.

We've considered playing the license plate game but since we are not moving and many cars don't have license plates, it's proven to be utterly unchallenging. Also thinking about playing "truth or dare" but again, since we're not keen on getting out of the car under any circumstances, it's devolved into "truth or truth" and the game was quickly abandoned.

Traffic is so bad that Kinois (local residents from Kinshasa) have left cars, taxis and buses in droves and walking home.

I think it started raining in the car.

Traffic in Kinshasa

An email to a friend:

I'm stuck in this mad traffic going to the airport back to DC, bumper-to-bumper behind a truck holding about 20 yellow jerry cans full of sloshing fuel, pedestrians running around the cars, trucks threatening to titter to the ground and spill the mob of people contained inside, beeps and horns and sideway cars trying to make a left turn. And it just started raining.

Been in the car for 1 hour 44 minutes. We are spending our time analyzing the (lack of) traffic pattern and uselessly commenting on different strategies we would use to move the cars out of our way .

You know how Jean Paul Sartre said "l'enfer c'est les autres (hell is other people)" ? Ya well.

Just kidding, I'm glad to be stuck in this car these colleagues. They're pretty entertaining (and we're all thanking our lucky stars we didn't drink alcohol beforehand 'cause trust me, you don't want to be looking for a bathroom right now).

How many days until I see you?

My Main Concern in Congo: Porch Pirating

And of course, I do take the time to do a little online shopping.  Here's the latest email to my roommate:

Hey there,

So I'm in the Command Center and people are talking about this phenomenon of Porch Pirating - essentially people stealing other people's Amazon packages from their porch.  Sooo, I've ordered tons of presents for XXX and his family, plus clothes and shoes for myself (I'm really bored here since we're essential on lockdown).

Could you kindly keep an eye out for them and bring them in the house when they arrive on our porch?  Thanks!

xoxo

Watching Laurent Gbagbo on Television

I'm watching the French news before the generator is turned off this morning.

Laurent Gbagbo (ex president of Ivory Coast) is being tried in the Hague today, for crimes his supporters committed when he refused to accept election results in 2010. I hope this is not a harbinger of things to come here in DRC.

Loud Fabric - because I couldn't resist

Also, I took a minute to buy this fabric today. Even though before I left, I promised myself I wouldn't buy any more items to bring back from Africa (I could practically start a museum at this point).

Because honestly, how can you resist a blue/white flower pattern, overlayed with baby blue and baby pink glittery design? How?

I'm going to make a suit jacket and wear it at work. Yep, I'm that girl.

A Day Before Election Day in Congo

From an email to my sister:

Yes, I will be in the Province for the announcement of the results. I'm a little nervous about it, and don't know where I should be when they are announced (at the Independent Electoral Commission? At UN Headquarters? In my "Hotel"?).

Time drags on when you have no internet or TV. Thankfully it forces me to finish books I have on my kindle - but since there's no internet, I can't download more books. I just finished a pretty good books on vampires (nothing like the Bella series - a lot more post apocalyptic), and am going through the incredibly voluminous Emperor of All Maladies (an almost complete history of the diagnosis of cancer and the search for its cure), and also Journal of a Plague Year, a fictional account by Daniel Dafoe written around 1722 based on his interviews of people who survived the devastating effects of plague in London.

From an email to my friend:

[...]

I'm also a little worried about dying of boredom during the time between election day and results. I'm planning mostly work meetings, but also a trip to a tailor, buying local DVDs and finding a library in town. I pretty much begged a EU guy to take me along with him during his jogging. Today, I worked out to a borrowed Baywatch Beach Workout DVD. A couple of additional sessions and I'll be looking like Pamela Anderson in no time. Haha!

Impressive Crowds Following Tshisekedi's Procession From the Airport into Kananga City Center

Impressive Crowds - part 2

A Small World?

My sister Vicky...

Our current Hotel Manager in Kananga, Mr. Vicky

Return to Kananga and the politics of elections there

Dear family,

I am alive and well in Kananga, which is located somewhere in the middle of the Democratic Republic of Congo as an elections observer. I've been to Kananga before but I've never seen so many foreigners here before. There are observers from the Carter Center (a reputable NGO), from the EU, SADC and us.

The hotel room has no running water or electricity (as it never does in Congo) but the generator gets turned on in the evenings.

It started to rain here and oh miracle! the AC just came on which means that someone decided to turn on the generator! OK and now 10 minutes later, it's off again.

The elections should be interesting. The country is split between the incumbent Joseph Kabila who has been president for the last 11 years, and Etienne Tshisekedi who has been trying to be president for a looooong time. Kananga city seems overwhelmingly pro-UDPS (Tshisekedi's party).

[...]

Anyways, I'm stuck here for 17 days. The food is very repetitive and there's really nothing to do so I tend to go to sleep by 8 p.m.

I hope all is well with you. Wish me luck!
007 in Africa

Observing Elections in Kananga

I’m back in the Democratic Republic of Congo after being away for close to 6 years. I am in the country for 2 months for an election monitoring mission.  Some things have changed.  But most haven’t.

President Kabila built a shiny new 6-lane highway in the center of the Kinshasa, with traffic lights (that stay on), marked lanes and zebra crossings.  In the process, magestic old trees have been chopped up, but it has managed to regulate traffic downtown.  On the other hand, side streets in the upper neighborhoods still remain sandbanks, and traffic stays completely choked inside the dilapidated neighborhoods.

I spent a week in Kananga, which is the capital of Kasai Occidental Province (there are 10 provinces in Congo).  I knew it well 6 years ago, and sadly it looks the same today.  It is said that 10 miles of roads have been built in Kabila’s 10 year tenure, and electricity is now available to selected neighborhoods for 3 or 4 hours in the evening.  The town is a dust bowl, interspersed with grandiose Belgian buildings and large avenues - there once was meticulous concern of city planning.  The Belgians hoped to make it the capital of Congo, due to its location in the middle of the country.

Fortunately this time around, I travel using UN flights instead of the crazy Congolese airline ones and as a result, don’t have to deal with the hassle of the airport there.  I also represent a larger organization so meetings with Head Officials are easy to come by.

Kananga is a quiet Province, so it seems I have been blessed with an area that will experience few population clashes at the time of elections.  Elections are November 28, 2011.  I heartily wish good luck to DRC in its nascent democratic process!

I’m back in Kinshasa now, and enjoying hot showers of running water, and vegetables, yogurts and cheese.  I’ll be back in Kananga again from November 22 – December 8, 2011.

I do miss the crisp, cool air of autumn, and the smell of decaying leaves of Washington D.C.  And I wish I could be with family on Thanksgiving.  Please have an extra spoonful of stuffing for me.

Photos of Kinshasa

View from the 11th floor of Grand Hotel Kinshasa.  According to one of my colleagues who lives in the DRC for 8 years, the large building (all encased in colored glass) in the back used to be the Central Bank.  He would exchange stacks of bills there.  According to lore, the windows did not open, and when there was an electricity shortage (as it happens often here), the interior would heat up like a greenhouse, and it would be get to an unbareable 120 degrees.  You'll notice that huge windows have been "punched" out in the building now, probably as a way to regulate the heat.  It gives it an eerie ghost-like glow...  I'm curious to know how they deal with the heavy rains during the rain season though.

 Another view from the hotel, watching the rain clouds roll in.

Turbo King, a beer made in Congo.  I particular enjoy the dramatic lion, with arms tensely resting on the logo, ready to pounce at the person drinking it.

Being part French, you may be surprised that this is one of the rare times I tried snails and frogs legs.  I don't know what I liked best about the snails: the butter and garlic sauce, or the cool 6-holed dish they came in.  The frogs legs were super yummy - too bad it's such much work for so little meat!

October 25, 2011: Going Back to Congo

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It’s been about six years since I, wearily, left the Congo.  Tired, and burnt out, it nonetheless remains a strong memory - fraught with vivid stories and half-remembered fears, stuck in frozen time.

As part of my work, I have been asked to return to the Democratic Republic of Congo for two months, to observe the climate and the processes surrounding the second-ever elections since its independence in 1960. 

It doesn’t hit me that I’m really going back to Congo until, after an 8-hour flight from Washington D.C. to Brussels, and a 7-hour flight from Brussels to Yaounde (Cameroon), we slowly descent over Cameroon.

I’ve never set foot in Cameroon, but flying over its sparse forests, punctuated here and there by thin clay roads, and with clearings giving way to metal-roofed hangars, houses and huts, I am reminded of Central Africa.  At the risk of restating trite and perhaps naïve/colonial platitudes, I love seeing the surface of the earth as it was meant to be - at its most natural, lightly touched by human habitation.  Perhaps nature here is particularly indomitable and impossible to control into ordered patches of vegetations.  Or perhaps instead, city planners in Yaounde don't have the right tools to push the forest to the far corners of the city, loosing the battle between nature and urban sprawl.

I fall in love again with the tall, slender trees that reach their trunks and branches to the sun, topped like a scalp with a thick layer of dark leaves.

Another couple of hours until we arrive in Kinshasa.  I am curious to see if it has changed.  I hear it has.

Celebrity Dentist

I have a celebrity dentist.

I know what you're thinking.  That guy that looks like Timothy Dalton, who bleaches and applies veneers on all the starlets teeth.

Nope.  I just came back from my dentist.  Every time I go there, I sit in the reception area with a number of low income folks, mostly hispanic.  The wait is not long and the staff is polite.  As happened the last time, Dr. Rahim Sharmin engages me in really interesting conversation.

I always assumed he was hispanic but I learned today that he's actually Iranian and has been in the States for 20 years.  He was a oral/facial surgeon in Iraq and Iran.  Offhandedly, I told him that he must miss the field, given that he does mostly preventative dentistry and fillings now.  He disagreed and proceeded to tell me about some of the horrors of war he saw while there.  He vividly remembered seeing a young boy of 12 come in to see him, with a large bandage on his face.  The youth scribbled a note to him asking "when do I get back to go to the battle field?".  Dr Sharmin then removed the bandage, revealing a mass of exploded flesh, from the bottom of the throat to the top of the jaw, the lower jaw being completely missing.  Dr. Sharmin, misty eyed as he recalled the event, had to tell his patient that, even if he had access to the plastic surgeon, it would take the boy years and years of surgeries and rehabilitation to even begin to be OK again.

After a long 20 minute conversation, he sends me on my way (I have good oral health, yay!) and shows me a certificate on his wall.  Vincent Gray, the current Mayor of Washington DC, honored him for taking in underserved people from Washington D.C. on Medicare and Medicaid.  Mayor Gray decreed that April 6, 2010 was "Dr Rahim Sharmin" day.  I congratulated him, and said that we would have to celebrate it next year.

Before I left, he shook my hand and said "at my age, I don't care about money, but being recognized for my efforts in the community means everything to me."

Good job Dr. Sharmin!

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If the Rains Don't Cleanse

A week ago, I received this email:


Hi there,

My name is Ben Patrick Johnson. I'm a novelist. 

In 2009, my book IF THE RAINS DON'T CLEANSE was published. It's a fictionalized retelling of my parents experiences as schoolteacher missionaries in Congo in the 1950s. I had the advantage of considerable source material to draw from -- interviews, news reports from the time, telegrams and cables, personal letters. I wrote first-person from the perspective of a young woman based on my mother.

The book has done reasonably well commercially and I'm working on a screenplay adaptation. As I was seeking additional source material dealing with rainy seasons, etc., a Google search landed me at your blog. I am struck by similarities between your real-life entries and some of the fictional letters and and journal entries I was writing for my protagonist Eva and almost the same time you were there in Africa. 

I'd like to share the book with you! I wonder if you'll find the same amusement/surprise. If you'll provide me a mailing address, I'll put a copy in the mail to you.

Sincerely,
Ben Patrick Johnson

Executive Director, The Ben Patrick Johnson Foundation
Board Member, Equality California Institute

Board Member, The Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles

Board Member, NOH8 Campaign

My response to him was equally as enthusiastic:

Hi Ben,

I'd love to receive a copy of your book - glad  you gave a voice to your mother's experiences.  Living in Congo is indeed an incredible adventure.

Incidentally, I will be going back to the DRC in mid October 2011 to do some election monitoring so my experiences will come full circle as I get ready to witness the second "real elections" since 2005.

My address is XXX.

Thank you for thinking of me.

Here's the website for the book , and some very positive feedback on Amazon.  I'm excited to read it soon!

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