On holiday

We leave tomorrow morning at 7am for the airport in Kinshasa, where we depart for Nairobi. So begins a 16-day vacation that my wife and I have both been looking forward to for quite some time. We were able to get most of the details nailed down for the trip. I need to pack my giant backpack tonight but since I didn't bring a whole lot with me to Kinshasa to begin with, I don't think it will take long to root through my possessions to find a few changes of clothes, some books, and the charger for my digital camera.

Following up from my last post, after a very frustrating Friday and Saturday we finally found a place to live. There are two apartments opening up in our apartment complex in January. This makes our life a lot easier since we didn't have to move before our trip, and when we do move in January it's only a matter of carrying our things a few hundred feet rather than driving across town.

Not much else to report for now - a lot of our friends have headed or are heading out of town for the rest of the month, so we're glad to be getting out of here as well. Otherwise it could be a very boring second half of December. I hope to be able to blog a bit while on vacation, but if I don't, merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone out there reading.

Moving to who knows where

We found out that we're moving out of our apartment by the end of the month. The place we're living isn't ours, exactly. It's an ACME apartment that they've had for some time and last month the owners of the apartment building decided that they're not renewing the lease at the end of December. I guess they're going to knock our apartment down and put a parking lot here. So, it's up to ACME to find us a new place to live. For the most part, we'll miss the place we're in. The building is safe, they usually run the generator when the power is out, and the location is close to ACME as well as the main road in town so it's easy to get around. I won't miss being alongside the trash river, though, and it will be cool to move someplace new in the city.

A word here about renting in Kinshasa. From what I've been hearing from people, it's very difficult to find a place to rent in this city. Apartments and houses go very quickly and when you do find a place that you like, you have to put down a cash deposit of at least three months' rent, if not more. With rents starting upwards of $1000, that's a lot of cash to be laying out as a deposit. You also never know what kind of place you're really getting. When you're checking out an apartment the landlord will tell you that there's a working generator and the guards never sleep on the job, but I'm sure they'd tell you that they'll wash your clothes and massage your feet every day when you come home if it means you'll take the place. Landlords seem to have an unsavory reputation in this town. I've heard horror stories about things going unrepaired for weeks at a time, or tenants paying for repairs themselves since the landlords won't do it.

The fact that ACME is finding us a new place to live makes our lives easier as we don't have to deal with all the things I just listed. However, it's a little weird to know that we're moving somewhere in a few weeks but we have no idea where we're going or what it's going to be like.

The move is a bit more stressful because in all likelihood we're headed on vacation in less than two weeks. After six months, ACME generously provides a R&R (that's rest and relaxation for you non-military types) to employees stationed in Kinshasa. We're given a week in the city of Nairobi with room and board, and we can apply the cost of a flight to Nairobi, room, and board towards a trip somewhere else. My wife and I were originally planning to take our R&R in late January, but we've moved it up to late December since she'll probably be traveling for work in late January, a lot of our friends in town will be gone for Christmas, and we could use a break from life in Kinshasa.

After some debate, we settled on a trip to Tanzania where we'll spend a week near Arusha, going on safari and doing some hiking, and then a week on the island of Zanzibar. The decision to make the trip is a little last-minute so we're scrambling to find hotels and flights and with it being the holidays it won't be any easier, but I think we'll be able to pull it off.

Otherwise, life continues on as normal, or as normal as it can possibly be for us here in Kinshasa. The rainy season continues, the potholes get bigger, and I for one would welcome a few inches of snow.

Happy Thanksgiving

A quick note to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. My wife is working today; I've pretty much taken the day off. The US embassy has today as a holiday, and TASOK is closed for Thanksgiving as well. This morning I got together with about a dozen other Americans for a game of flag football at TASOK. I haven't played football since high school, and it was a good time. There were a couple TASOK teachers, some of the Marines who are based here in Kinshasa, and a few employees from the embassy. Later tonight my wife and I are going to my boss' house for a Thankgiving feast. I was told that the turkeys she ordered arrived earlier this week, so I'm excited for a big meal.

Hope everyone back home is well - thinking of you all today and thankful for you and your emails, letters, and Skype calls.

Special guest blogger

I'd like to introduce a very special guest blogger for today's entry - my beautiful, charming, and intelligent wife. Take it away, wifey:

I feel the need to comment on the popularity of certain American presidents here in Africa. Hands down the most popular is Bill Clinton. In Senegal, where I was in Peace Corps, EVERYONE talked about Clinton. When he came to Senegal he visited their Grand Mosque and as a result there are now countless Senegalese named Bill Clinton (people name their child after someone to show honor and respect).

I was surprised to learn that he is even more popular in the DRC. Everyone knows about his trip to the Grand Mosque in Senegal but they also talk about his trip to Goree Island. Goree Island is an island off the coast of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, where slave ships picked up African prisoners. In the DRC, rumor has it that Bill Clinton actually cried when he was on the island. Another big rumor is that while visiting the Grand Mosque, Clinton said part of an Islamic prayer, which everyone interpreted as a conversion to Islam. Really, the stories go on and on.

So now, Obama has been elected and no matter how many tears Bill Clinton has shed, he isn't half-Kenyan. Many people here view America as a land of opportunity, which it is. They often think that simply being in America will lead to wealth and are sorely disappointed when they travel to the states and find out that isn't true. But Obama as president has given them a sense of pride and optimism. If a man who is one generation removed from Africa can become president of the most powerful country is the world, then maybe there's hope for Africa.

Whiling away the hours

It’s a hot and sunny Friday afternoon, and since I’m on the cusp of another weekend I figure this is as good a time as any to talk about what there is to do in Kinshasa for fun. Granted, a lot of my spare time on the weekends is spent fighting traffic to get to umpteen different supermarkets, playing dumb for the cops, or trying to sit as still as possible in my apartment when the power’s out and the AC doesn’t work so as to not make myself sweat any more than I already am, but I do find time to do other, more enjoyable, things.

There’s not much in the way of day trips out of Kinshasa. We’ve been camping already and seen the Bonobos – both were nice. Next weekend we may head a few hours outside the city to the botanical gardens, and Zongo Falls is supposed to worth a drive as well. Another popular activity among expats is to get a group together and rent a boat to float down the Congo River for a few hours.

Most weekends, though, we stay in Kinshasa. I do regular stuff with my spare time like read books and watch DVDs, or play PS2. I’ve been reading a lot during power outages at our apartment (I’m in the middle of Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle”) or surf the web when the power is up. Expats around here swap DVDs pretty regularly. I’m not playing as much PS2 as I would have thought, but it does provide me with a hockey fix that I can’t find anywhere else apart from reading about the NHL on the internet.

I miss hockey – I used to play once or twice a week in the States, so that leaves running as my primary means of exercise. Most expats run in a large loop near the ambassadors’ residences along the Congo River. The loop is around a mile and a half. It’s a nice paved road without much traffic and there are a lot of expats and guards around, so you don’t need to worry about getting hassled by anyone besides a few hearty vendors who run alongside you and try to sell you postcards and wooden carvings. Running along the river offers a nice view, especially at dusk, although the clouds of bugs that you run through get annoying after a while. I’m not enjoying running as much as I did in Denver or Chicago so I only go twice a week, if that. My wife runs and also goes to a step class once a week that’s run by a German woman. She has a dance and art studio and offers aerobics, yoga, and step classes for expats.

Our Sunday afternoon ultimate Frisbee game at TASOK has caught on and I would say that’s become a highlight of the week for my wife and me. We usually get at least a dozen people to show up and it seems to be a different crowd of expats every time. It’s been a great way to meet people and get to know them better. TASOK also offers the opportunity to go running on a trail around the campus, and there’s a pool and tennis courts there too. We tried playing tennis but it was way less fun than we thought it would be. The TASOK pool is nice to have when it’s extra hot out and we have a free afternoon, or to jump in and cool off after two hours of ultimate Frisbee.

I’d say the biggest social activity around here is just getting together with people. There are restaurants to visit, dinner parties to host/attend, or game nights. We’ve made friends with some of the teachers at TASOK and that’s offered us a few weeknights of regular entertainment. Monday night is euchre night, which I never thought I would find in the DRC, and on Tuesday a group gets together to watch old episodes of “The Office” and share a big dinner. We’ve had Indian food, pizza, chili, pasta, and this past week we had fajitas. Not bad. Not bad at all.

By the way, I was at the embassy on November 5 to see the election results. People here are excited about Obama winning and a few random people have smiled and shouted “Obama” to me. That was cool.

Some background info about what's going on in eastern DRC

Here's the text of an AP article I found on the web that explains more about the DRC and what's been going on out east. More than a few people have been emailing me with questions about what's going on out there, so hopefully this can help to answer a few questions...

Eastern Congo's brutal conflict is a result of decades-old ethnic tensions and a modern-day scramble for the region's mineral wealth. Some questions and answers on the region's complex history:

Q: Who are the Congolese?

A: Congo's population of more than 66 million is made up of more than 200 ethnic groups. About 70 percent are Christian, 10 percent Muslim and the rest adherents of indigenous beliefs. French is the official language, but dozens of African languages and dialects are widely spoken.

Q: What is Congo's economy based on?

A: Cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, silver, tin and coltan, the essential ingredient of cell phones, make Congo one of Africa's most mineral-rich countries. It is also rich in coffee, rubber and palm oil. Its wealth, however, has only partially been exploited due to poor infrastructure and years of conflict.

Q: What is the origin of the conflict in eastern Congo?

A: The roots of Congo's instability trace back to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi were slaughtered. Tutsi rebels from Rwanda then overthrew the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government in an ensuing civil war, forcing millions of Hutu to flee to Congo. Among the refugees were top Rwandan army and government officials, as well as militias who together had orchestrated the mass slaughter. They later set up bases on Congolese soil, where many remain today. Rwanda invaded Congo twice in an effort to rout the Rwandan Hutu extremists, first in a 1996-1997 war, and again in a 1998-2002 war. Many accused Rwanda of getting sidetracked, however, in pursuit of diamonds, gold and other minerals.

Q: Since 1994, Congo's civil war and tribal conflicts have left some 4 million people dead through fighting, famine or disease. Who is behind the current fighting?

A: The current fighting pits Congo's army against rebels loyal to Laurent Nkunda, an ethnic Tutsi. The former general quit the army several years ago, claiming the government of President Joseph Kabila was not doing enough to protect minority Tutsi from Hutu extremists, whose continued presence has given him a reason to fight. Nkunda has accused the army of allying itself on the battlefield with the Hutu militias. The government denies the claims. Critics say Nkunda is a proxy of Rwanda's government and has exaggerated claims there is a serious threat to Tutsi in Congo. Nkunda's army has been accused of numerous human rights abuses, including rape campaigns and attacks on villages -- as have army soldiers and militias.

Q: Why has violence escalated in recent months?

A: Nkunda's forces signed a Jan. 23 peace deal, but mistrust remains deep. The deal committed all armed groups in the region to an immediate cease-fire, followed by the pullback of fighters from key areas that would then become a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone.But the pullback was messy, with government forces routinely facing off with Nkunda's men. The rebels have since accused the Congolese army of abandoning positions to Hutu militias. Caught in the middle, villagers have fled en masse.

Q: Why the recent attacks on U.N. buildings and tanks?

A: Villagers feel the 17,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force has failed to protect them. The rebel and army pullback was supposed to create U.N.-monitored buffer zones, but few, if any, of these zones are operational. In many areas, the pullback led to an escalation of violence.

Street magic

You know, last week I was thinking to myself how I’ve settled into more of a routine here in Kinshasa and I didn’t know how many new and novel events I’d be able to blog about. My blog entries would consist of weird news stories from the web, humorous pictures, or those goofy surveys that bloggers fill out (e.g. “How well does your best friend REALLY know you?” “What kind of Smurf are you?”). Thankfully, Kinshasa does not disappoint when it comes to adding some spice to one’s life.

On Saturday, after we finished our morning’s grocery shopping, my wife and I went to the Avenue de Commerce. It’s an area we’ve previously avoided, mainly because we’ve been able to get all of our shopping taken care of without having to deal with the mobs of people and traffic on the Avenue. On Saturday, though, we went there as my wife was shopping for fabric to have a dress made. She had been told by several people that there were good fabric shops there, but was never able to get specific directions to a store. After driving up and down the streets around Avenue de Commerce once or twice and not seeing anything, we decided to park and make a go of it on foot.

The Avenue de Commerce is, well, a street of stores. There are all kinds of stores selling most anything you can imagine – appliances, electrical parts, tools, clothing, shoes, cell phones, music, etc, etc. There are storefronts and street vendors everywhere, and umpteen numbers of people walking around. I guess it’s like a commercial district anywhere else in the world, just dirtier and more vibrant. It was as we were walking down the street, looking for a fabric store, that a small group of guys brushed past me in a narrow section of the sidewalk and I felt one of them graze my left hand, which was at my side. I figured they were just being rude (not uncommon here) and didn’t think twice.

Two blocks later, a stranger came out of nowhere and handed me my driver’s license and debit card. He looked to be young, maybe eighteen, and when I looked down to see what he put in my hand I realized what had happened. I had been pickpocketed, and he was returning everything except my cash to me. Yes – I was the victim of a pickpocket, but at least he or one of his cohorts had the heart to give me back what they didn’t need. All I was carrying in my money clip was about $30 in cash, my DRC driver’s license, and my debit card.

A very strange feeling of helplessness and amazement set in. Yes, I was mad that I had been the victim of a pickpocket, but what I haven’t been able to shake since then is the thoughts of how’d-they-do-that. I had my money in a clip in my front pants pocket, with my hand practically in my pocket as I was walking down the street. My keys were in the same pocket, and my cell phone was in my other front pocket. Some master sleight-of-hand artist was able to get just what he wanted, and then was able to RETURN MY LICENSE AND DEBIT CARD. All the while I had no idea what was going on. He honestly could have pulled a canned ham from behind my ear and I wouldn’t have been more amazed. It was kind of like encountering a street magician who charged $30 to perform a trick (er, illusion) on me.

There wasn’t much to really do after I got my stuff back (sans cash, of course). We had no idea who the thief was, and I‘m one hundred percent certain that the helpful pedestrian who returned my stuff to me was not the actual thief, nor would he help us apprehend the villain. He sort of disappeared into the crowd after giving me my stuff.

The thief got roughly $30 in cash from me which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t all that much. I had much more in cash on me in a different zippered pocket. Maybe next time this talented sleight-of-hand artist can try making something from my zippered pocket disappear. I’d pay $40 to see that.

On a more serious note, I was pretty upset about it for a few hours afterwards. It’s not so much about losing the $30 as it was feeling, well, violated (is that too strong a word?). On top of that, other people had told us that the Avenue de Commerce is a big area for pickpockets and I should have been more alert and not carrying anything in unsecured pockets. There’s some phrase about vision and 20/20 and hindsight… I wish I could remember what it was.

The rest of the weekend was pretty enjoyable. We went to a Halloween party on Friday night. The theme was the Wizard of Oz, but costumes of any sort were welcome. Thanks to a friend at TASOK, my wife and I were able to raid the theater department’s costume closet. I went as a London Bobby, and my wife wore a bedsheet and went as an ancient Greek. The party was really nice. We saw lots of people we’ve met over the last few months in Kinshasa and it was good to say hello and talk for a bit with them. We enjoyed sushi, chicken wings, and Halloween candy, and stayed out till almost 1 in the morning. It was a big night.

On Saturday night my wife and I went out for dinner to Le Roi du Cossa. It’s a seafood restaurant in Kinshasa famed for its prawns and they did not disappoint. For $30, you get an enormous plate of freshwater prawns served with a garlic and chili (called pili-pili) butter sauce. The food was excellent and I left a satisfied patron.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the news on all that’s happening out east. It’s a big topic of conversation around town and no one is sure how things are going to turn out, though obviously everyone hopes for the best. Apparently the anti-UN sentiment around the DRC is growing. We haven’t noticed a change in anyone’s attitude towards us, but of course neither my wife nor I work for the UN. For all those reading at home, don’t worry – we’re being very safe and staying abreast of any news. The US Embassy does a great job of keeping us informed of what’s going on in the city.

Oh, and everyone around here is excited for the US election. At the US Embassy on Wednesday morning, there’s going to be a big event with election coverage, Congolese analysis of the results, and some panel discussions. Both locals and ex-pats have been asking us about our thoughts on the race.

I'm okay, everybody

Just a quick note to say that things are going okay for me in Kinshasa. As you may or may not have heard on the news, there's been some, ahem, "activity" (read: fighting) in the Congo. All the action is taking place out east, near the city of Goma. Goma is over 1000 miles away from Kinshasa and there's nothing but endless jungle between the two. I'm not even sure if there's a good road between here and there. I went to a town hall meeting for US citizens tonight that was scheduled well in advance of these developments and it included a briefing. There's nothing for us to worry about, and the Embassy will keep everyone abreast of the situation if there are further developments

Thanks to everyone who emailed asking about our safety - we're doing fine and haven't seen any change in the mood around town. We appreciate your prayers and concern.

Rainy Monday

It’s Monday morning and raining cats and dogs outside. Truly, this is the rainy season. It’s been extra hot and humid, and there’s been rain on and off over the past week. The roads around Kinshasa are getting worse and worse – the potholes just get bigger the more it rains. What’s tough is that when the streets flood, you can’t tell where the potholes are on the road and Kinshasa has some enormous potholes. There are many that are several feet deep and wide, or other places where the grates have been lifted off of storm drains so there’s a giant open trench along the side of the road. I’ve seen several cars with broken axles on the side of the road and it’s from these killer potholes. I heard from someone that with the rainy season these puddles are even more dangerous outside the city since the power lines around the DRC are run underground. If there’s an exposed power line that has a puddle over it, you could step into it and get electrocuted without having any clue that it was holding a fatal charge.

On Friday night we went out for goat with some friends. We drove to a part of town I’ve never been to before, east of downtown, and we sat at outdoor table. After placing an order for goat with onions and a side of fried plantains, we sat and talked and ate peanuts while taking in the nighttime crowd. Various vendors came by selling cigarettes, tissue, shoes, wooden bowls, etc. In the area we were in, there weren’t a lot of expats and it was nice to feel like we were in the “real” Kinshasa and not in some expat bubble.

After a half hour or so, our goat showed up. It was wrapped in a big piece of heavy paper and when you opened the paper, the goat meat and onions were inside in a big pile. The goat was cut into small pieces and there were bits of bone you had to look out for. They didn’t have forks at this place, so you could use a toothpick or just eat with your hands. Having never tried goat before, I have to say that it tasted good. It’s fatty, but with good flavor and the onions helped a lot as well. Wow, antelope last week and goat the other day? Maybe this is the week I try eating bugs for the first time. I feel like I’m building up to something.

We had a big ultimate frisbee game on Sunday afternoon that was a lot of fun. There was a good turnout of people and we played late enough in the day that the heat wasn't too much to bear. It looks like it will be a weekly event.

It looks to be a slow day for me here. I’m working from home on some websites and will have a meeting with someone whom I’m building a website for. Working from home isn’t too bad, although the power outages can be frustrating sometimes.

Not much else exciting to report, so I’ll sign off for now.

How I lost my hat

On Saturday my wife and I took a trip to see the Bonobo chimpanzees. There’s a reserve just outside Kinshasa called Lola Ya Bonobo that cares for orphaned Bonobos. These chimps can only be found in the DRC and are facing extinction. I remember reading a long article about the Bonobos in the New Yorker last year, and the article talked about how some researchers are questioning the Bonobo’s reputation as “hippie” chimps. They have this reputation due to their calm dispositions, peaceful ways, and proclivity for sexual relations. Not much is known about Bonobo behavior since they’re so rare, and what little published research there is was written up by a Dutch primatologist who observed captive, not wild, Bonobos in the 1980s. Current research is disputing his findings to say that wild Bonobos can be aggressive and kill each other; they don’t just lie around all day and eat bugs and have sex. The New Yorker article is a good read because it talks a little bit about Kinshasa and the rest of the DRC as well as profile the Bonobos. As a matter of fact, an article was just published yesterday reporting that Bonobos do hunt and kill other chimps – the researcher mentioned in this article is the same one who is extensively profiled in the New Yorker piece.

The reserve was pretty nice – it’s $5 per person to get in and a tour guide showed us around and talked about the Bonobos. They live on an enormous jungle reservation (30 hectares, or around 75 acres) and the reserve is split into three large sections that hold three groups of chimps of varying ages. The Bonobos like visitors and when we approached an open section of jungle, our tour guide called out and a group of seven or eight Bonobos ambled down out of the forest to the fence to see us. They were most excited about food (bananas, naturally – see, all those cartoons I watched as a kid didn’t fill my head with useless knowledge) and began to climb on the fence and stick their hands through for some food.

I went to take a picture of my wife with the Bonobos and took off my hat to get a better view through our camera. Not thinking, I set it down a foot or two away from the fence and when I finished taking the photo I noticed my hat was gone. Some thieving Bonobo had reached through and ganked my hat. Eyeing the suspects, I spied the culprit:

And so, my faded Detroit Tigers hat has become a Bonobo pacifier of some sort. The chimp spent a good twenty minutes tasting it, and would get into wrestling matches with other chimps over possession of the hat.

The tour guide was very apologetic but I told her it was okay and it wasn’t her fault. I shouldn’t have put my hat down near the fence. And hey, I can say a chimpanzee stole my hat. Wasn’t that the storyline of the book Curious George?

The rest of our tour of the reserve was nice. The last part of the tour brought us to a small section where the youngest Bonobos were kept and one was running around outside the pen under the watchful eye of a woman who worked there. The Bonobo was shy, but after a few minutes she warmed up to us.

As long as I'm posting pictures, here's a giant bug we saw later that day – it was probably about six inches long:

Oh, I should also mention that I had antelope meat last week. On Friday night we went to a restaurant not too far from our apartment and among the standard fare such as chicken, beef, salads, and sandwiches, they offered antelope. It was around the same price as a piece of beef, so I figured I would give it a shot. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t taste like anything special. It reminded me of pot roast, really, but that might be because of the way it was cooked or the sauce and vegetables served with it.

Shopping for food in Kinshasa

Grocery shopping in Kinshasa is a pain. After two and a half months, we’ve finally figured out where to go to get the best prices on food and the best day and time to make the trip but even still, at the end of a shopping trip I feel fried and need a couple hours to recover.

When we first arrived here, we were shocked at the high prices they were charging at the supermarket – $10 for a box of cereal, $12 for a small frozen chicken, $8 for a package of extra-scratchy toilet paper. Of course, these prices were all at the expensive grocery store in town where most expats shop and they don’t care how much it costs, they’re getting a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. After getting to know some other people who’ve been around Kinshasa for a while, we learned where to find the best deals on food.

First off, there’s no such thing as one-stop shopping. No single store in town has everything that you want at decent prices and keeps convenient hours of operation.
Some stores only carry a few things but have good prices, other stores have a huge selection but you have to pay through the nose for everything they stock. Some stores are open on Sundays (which is the best shopping day because there’s no traffic), others are not, and one store that’s owed by two Jewish brothers isn’t open on Saturdays.

I decided to do a transcript of our usual Saturday morning grocery shopping excursion. Some Saturdays we go to more stores and spend more money, some Saturdays it’s less. This Saturday was on the cheaper side.

7:45am – leave the apartment and get to the far side of town before traffic gets crazy. Trying to get around Kinshasa any time past 10:30am on Saturday is a nightmare.

8:00 – arrive at a store owned by some Portuguese guys. This store is a little hard to find but they have good prices and a decent selection of groceries. They don’t have meat or deli counters. It’s a good place to get flour, powdered milk, rice, etc. in bulk. Here’s what we got, with the prices in US dollars:

1 can of chopped tomatoes – $0.96
Jar of strawberry jelly – $5.50
1 liter of orange juice – $2.04 (it comes in these giant juice boxes, which is pretty cool)
package of vanilla sandwich cookies – $3.83
package of travel packs of facial tissue – $1.42
2 cans of tomato paste – $1.20 each
Package of curry powder – $1.32
Can of peas – $1.67
Large bag of baking soda – $2.23

Total was $21.37. Here they only take cash, so we paid with a $50 in order to get some change. We gave a tip of 300 francs (about $0.50) to the guy in front of the store who guarded our car.

8:25am – arrive at Express, a more expensive grocery store that has fantastic bread. We got a loaf of sliced sandwich bread and five rolls that were still warm from the oven, plus a few other things.

.1 kg of swiss cheese – $3
2 packages of cookies – $2.68 each
1 cup of Dannon yogurt – $1.62 (my wife uses this to make homemade yogurt)
5 rolls – $1.34
Loaf of bread – $1.27

The total was $12.59, and this store takes debit cards so we used that to pay for our groceries. We parked in a secured lot, so there was no need to tip anyone for guarding our car.

8:45 - it's off to the marche for vegetables. Marche is French for market, aka the big village market where the locals shop. This is a good 15 minute drive and though we’re getting better at finding our way there, it’s still a bit of an adventure.

I should add that we were stopped by the police en route. It was our first time getting stopped in a few weeks. I had stopped a little too far past the imaginary line at an intersection, so an officer came over to see if he could squeeze some cash out of me. We again employed the dumb American approach, and it worked like a charm. He didn’t know enough English to tell us what we had done wrong, let alone ask us for a bribe or sufficiently scare us into trying to bribe him. We kept saying “I don’t understand what you’re saying” over and over. Toward the end of the conversation, he was practically laughing at the absurdity of it all and he waved us on.

The marche is the best place to get vegetables in Kinshasa, bar none. It's kind of like going to a county fair, only there's no funnel cakes or corn dogs for sale, and the smells are way more intense. The prices and selection are better than what you’d find in any store in town. On the downside, you have to deal with the chaos of the market which can be overwhelming. As you approach the marche, men jump around wildly in the street in front of your car, doing their best to convince you to park in a spot they see so they can say they found you a spot and will then guard your car. Of course, when you start to pull in, six other guys gather around the car and say that they saw the spot first and they’ll guard your car instead. It’s best to just point out the guy who initially found us the spot and leave the car-guarding duties to him. As soon as you get out, a few kids gather around with old cardboard boxes or laundry baskets and offer to serve as grocery carts, carrying your purchases around for you for a little bit of money.

Once you make your way into the market, there are dozens and dozens of stands, all selling vegetables, fruits, spices, eggs, meat, live animals (chickens, goats, and insects - for consumption, mind you), and there’s an entire section of people selling odds and ends like auto parts, plumbing supplies, used clothing, brooms, etc. At the vegetable stands, the prices are written on pieces of cardboard but of course, everything is open to negotiation. We’re pretty much the only white people in the market which means they jack up the prices when they see us coming. My wife is a good negotiator so we can get a discount, though not as much as we could get if we were Congolese. Even without the discount, though, the prices are better than at the grocery stores and the vegetables seem to be of better quality. Here’s a list of what we picked up:

30 eggs – $6.14
1 mango – $0.35 cents
1 kilo of onions – $1.75
4 potatoes – $1.40
Baby food-sized jar of curry – $1.40
Pineapple – $3.15
Celery, green peppers, cabbage – $1.22
An unopened bottle of contact lens cleaner – $1.75

The total at the marche was $15.41, and you better believe it’s all straight cash, homey.

That bottle of contact lens cleaner was the find of the day. A woman was selling all kinds of beauty products and cleaning supplies and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the contact lens cleaner. I haven’t noticed it in any stores in Kinshasa, and I don’t think she knew what it was used for so she didn’t know what to ask. I wonder if most people around here even know what contact lenses are.

Going to the marche isn’t too bad as long as you can stay focused on what you need, you’re willing to haggle over prices, and you can ignore all the other people coming up to you and asking you to buy beans or worms or whatever from their stand.

On the way out, we paid the guy who found us our spot and watched our car 500 francs (a little over a dollar). He was a big help in getting traffic and people to move out of the way so we could back out. It’s like the circus there with the amount of people and cars and trucks all over the place.

9:45am – we arrive back at home, and see the traffic on the roads is already piling up. We done good.

On Sunday after church, we made two quick stops at some other stores to get meat and cheese.

Kinmart has good meat but crazy expensive prices on everything else. We bought a half-kilo of beef for $7.29 to use in a curry that my wife made that night. Kinmart has the distinction of having some of the worst guards of all the supermarkets we’ve been to. They sit in chairs by the door, don’t tell you when the lot is full, and are usually no help when it comes to trying to navigate your way around their miniscule parking lot. Yet on Sunday, the guard who was there was super-helpful and squeezed us into a spot right by the door and held up traffic so we could get out. We tipped him 500 francs (a little over a dollar) for his help.

Then it was on to one final store, Regal, to get the last few things we needed. Regal has a good selection of food, good prices, and the best cheese in the city. We go here or the Portugese place mentioned above for most of our groceries.

1.5 liters of Canada dry - $6.10 (crazy, I know, but I’ve been jonesing for ginger ale lately)
300 grams of mozzarella cheese - $4.91
Approximately two sticks of butter - $1.78

The total was $12.79, and here they accept debit cards.

The grand total for the week was $69.45, which is a little on the low side for us. We didn’t buy much meat this week or any big staples like flour, sugar, or oatmeal. From week to week, though, the shopping experience is about the same when it comes to the stores we visit and the people we encounter.

On an unrelated note, I finally uploaded a few pictures to the old blog entries for our new apartment (you can see our apartment building and the trash river it’s next to) and our camping trip.

Settling in to a routine

I don't have any exciting stories this week about getting hassled by the cops or recovering from parasites living in my body. It's been a slow(er) week which is nice and it feels a bit like I'm settling into a routine. So far I've been working from home for my job at the embassy which has been good and bad. Good, because I can sit in front of the computer in shorts and a t-shirt, I only have to shave every couple days, and can cook up lunch for myself each day. Bad, because I'm still dealing with power outages on a daily basis which makes it hard to work. The internet connection has been a little wonky, too, and some days it's at a crawl. My boss is back from her vacation and I’m headed to the Embassy tomorrow to meet with her about what all I should be working on.

On Saturday night we went out to eat with some friends to try the supposed best-chicken-in-Kinshasa-if-not-the-entire-world, Mama Colonel's. I'd been hearing a lot of hype about this place so the bar was set a little high. I was not disappointed. For $18, you get a broiled chicken and a side of french fries. The chicken was broiled whole - they pulled off the non-edible parts, streched out the bird, broiled it, and then served it up. You then pull the chicken apart with your fingers and go to town. It was really, really good. Combined with a side of fried plantains and a tall (glass) bottle of Sprite, it hit the spot. My wife and I were supposed to split one chicken but I think I ate around 75% of it myself. So, if anyone's coming to Kinshasa to visit, I've found at least one can't-miss restaurant.

Last night a huge thunderstorm rolled through, and it rained on Sunday as well so I guess this is the start of the rainy season. It's been crazy hot and humid this past week, so the rain is a welcome relief.

Coming up in this here blog, I'll document our usual Saturday shopping trip so you can get a sense of what that's like as well as post some pictures of our place. We shot a short video tour of our apartment but because our web connection has been so slow the past few days, I can't upload it.

Camping

For the first time in eight weeks, I got out of Kinshasa. My wife and I were invited to go camping with one of her coworkers and a bunch of other expats – there were about ten of us total. I dig camping so it was great to not only get out of the Kinshasa but also be able to spend some time enjoying the ol’ great outdoors.

We left Saturday around noon and, just like in the states, getting out of the city on a Saturday was a nightmare. I’m still amazed at the amount of traffic in Kinshasa and how, given current gas prices and the poverty level in the DRC, roads are still jam-packed with cars most days of the week. Owning a car here is not cheap. After about an hour we were finally out of the smog and congestion of the city and I could feel the tension in my shoulders easing. Man, I’ve been in the city too long. It took us about three hours to get to Bombo Lumene, a national park 130 kilometers outside of Kinshasa.

The campsite turned out to be very nice, set on the banks of a fast-flowing river.

There were a few thatch canopies and a big fire pit as well as some flat spots to set up our tents. Some locals, who I assume work in/through the park, carried down plastic tables and chairs to our site and collected a big pile of firewood for us to use later that night. We were the only people around which was great. I heard horror stories of a previous trip where there were a bunch of Lebanese people camping there with giant generators and they stayed up carousing late into the night.

Here's the closer shot of the river:

The big activity at this campsite was to swim in the river. Well, you didn’t actually swim – it was more like along the lines of letting the fast-moving current carry you from one point to the next. We would hike upriver for five minutes or so, jump in, and let the current carry you downriver to where you could get out again. The current was very, very strong, way too strong to swim out of if you needed to, and there was no real riverbank to swim to anyway. While in the river, I kept my feet as close to the surface as possible to avoid getting caught on anything but in the slower-moving sections where I did put my feet down, I couldn’t touch the bottom. If you could ignore the very real possibility of drowning or being swept to your death in the rapids further downstream from our campsite, though, it was pretty fun. I’d jump in, lie back, and let the current do all the work for me.

There were two dogs that came along with us on this trip. One was a greyhound/lab mix named Lola who was very friendly and loved swimming. It was kind of crazy to jump in this fast-moving river and see a big dog furiously paddling alongside you, doing her best to stay with the group. Things would get a little hairy at times as Lola took it upon herself to rescue anyone who was swimming in the river. This involved her swimming directly into you and scratching you with her nails, which made it difficult to make your way ashore when it was time to get out. Lola was bearing down on me at one point and it was just like that scene in “No Country For Old Men” where the guy’s getting chased by that swimming dog. I was laughing because it was so funny, yet also terrified because I didn’t want Lola to force me into the stronger current.

Lola:

Apart from the over-zealous river dog, though, our cares were few. It was just incredibly nice to get out of the city and see the countryside. No exotic wildlife encounters outside of a lot of large bugs, and people spent the majority of time sitting around the table and campfire, eating and drinking and talking. I had chocolate chip cookies for the first time in months (no chocolate chips to be found in Africa).

We slept well that night – no rain and the air was just cool enough that you needed a light blanket to keep warm. I was excited about having an unobstructed view of the stars and was not disappointed. It’s hard to get somewhere where there’s not a lot of light and smog from a nearby city to obscure the night sky. I guess the middle of nowhere, Africa, is an ideal spot.

We left around 11:30 on Sunday to get back home in time for my wife’s flight. She’s in the field this week and had a plane to catch on Sunday evening. I’m on my own for the week here in Kinshasa. Back to the bachelor life for me – I’ve been eating all my meals over the sink and sleeping in every morning.

At last... an update

Yes, I know it’s been a few weeks since I last had a real entry on here. It took forever to get our internet connection set up, so as I result I have lots to talk about…

We Move In

At long last, we’re in the apartment we should have been living in when we arrived here back at the end of July. The wait hasn’t been that bad, especially when we were house-sitting. Well, all those power and water outages were a bummer, but aside from that we were holed up in a pretty nice place for three weeks. We were waiting to move into our apartment since it was being rehabbed a bit and, while it’s not as grandiose or swanky as other places we’ve stayed in, we like it a lot. It’s a small two-bedroom apartment that’s about a five minute walk to Acme and we’re a stone’s throw from the main road in town, yet not so close that we have to deal with the traffic and congestion.

Here's the apartment complex:

and here's a picture slightly to the right of this, of the road in front of our complex:

Of course, moving into a freshly-rehabbed apartment doesn’t mean that everything works perfectly. The refrigerator, stove, and toilet all didn’t work properly and the bathroom sink had a leak so we woke up to a flooded bathroom and hallway after our first night here. Kudos to the building management, though, as they immediately fixed any problems we encountered. That’s way better than some of the stories I’ve heard from other people around here. As I understand it, landlords here expect you to fix any problems yourself. Your sink leaks, you call a plumber, schedule a visit, and pay for it yourself. The staff here has been super-nice and I have zero complaints.

The apartment has a foam mattress (hey, no bedbugs!) and mosquito net. It’s been surprisingly bug-free in here for the most part, and that may be because I’ve seen a couple small geckos and skinks traversing the walls and ceiling. The water pressure in the shower is great and we have plenty of hot water. Best of all, they’re pretty quick to fire up the generator when the power goes out. Where we were house-sitting, you’d have to needle the guards to turn on the generator and most of the time it wasn’t working (or so they claimed).

As an aside, all of Kinshasa has been experiencing severe power outages over the past three weeks. Rumor around town is that the big dam up the Congo River that supplies power to the city is undergoing repairs, so as a result the power goes off in the entire city for hours at a time on a daily basis.

The only bummer about this apartment is that we’re right near a small stream that flows to the Congo River. This stream smells. I mean, it really really smells. I’m trying to think of a way to describe the way it smells and the best I can do is imagine yourself being downwind from an open sewer line on a hot, sunny day. Wait, that’s exactly what it smells like because that’s exactly what it is. The stream is full of garbage (of ALL kinds, hint hint) and since it’s still the dry season, it ain’t movin’ too quick so the trash and funk just roasts in the sun. Taking the path along the stream shortens the walk to the main road from five minutes to thirty seconds, but I still debate whether I should take the shortcut or not due to the stink. Thankfully, we very rarely catch the scent in our place – only when the wind is blowing a certain direction.

A few pictures of the river, just so you know what I'm talking about:

Despite the funky river, we’re happy to be finally moved in and settled somewhere. We’ve been living out of suitcases since the end of June and to finally unpack everything is like a dream. Over the course of several weekends, we made shopping trips around the city to pick up what we needed for the apartment – things like cleaning supplies, kitchen stuff, towels, etc. We still can’t find cookie sheets anywhere, though we did finally come across some clothes hangers at one of the fancy stores in town.

Getting Sick in Africa, or Life as a Generous Host

I was also sick in the Congo. I should preface this next section by saying that I’m not someone who goes to the doctor a whole lot. I don’t want to be stupid about things, but it seems like most times when you go the doctor when you’re sick, they tell you to go home and rest and drink lots of fluids. I can usually figure that one out on my own. Don’t get me wrong – I know when I’m really sick and need antibiotics or tests or whatever, but I’d say more often than not I try to let my body take care of things itself and I tend to wait things out rather than rush to the doctor at the first hint of an illness.

A little over two weeks ago I started to notice that I would wake up in the mornings and just not feel good. My stomach would be bugging me, I didn’t have much of an appetite, and I didn’t feel like myself. After a few days, I noticed that things were getting worse and worse, so much so that by Friday morning, the time-to-go-see-a-doctor alarm was going off in my brain, and off we went at 6:30am to see what was up.

NOTE: As a courtesy to those readers with more delicate sensibilities, let’s just say the problem was digestive in nature to a degree with which I had previously been unacquainted. Yet, it wasn’t the obvious problem that most people would associate with travel to a foreign country. Perhaps I’ve said too much already, so I’ll just move on.

My wife drove me to the hospital and served as a translator to the nurses, explaining my situation. Forgive me, Kinshasa, but I was ready to be ushered into a shack somewhere, tended to by nuns with handsaws and big pots of boiling water, and I would spend most of my visit brushing away flies and making sure the medical equipment was free of dried blood. Nothing could be further from the truth. The nurses were very nice, spoke some English, took care to show me each time they opened up a fresh needle from a package, and asked if I had any single brothers in the States who would be interested in a Congolese nurse as a wife. Brian, you out there reading this? I hear she’s a good cook.

Anyway, they took a blood sample, stuck an IV in me to give me some fluids, and administered some anti-amoeba medicine intravenously as they suspected that I had an amoeba. After running a blood test, a doctor came down to tell me that they determined I had a bacterial infection in my intestine and as well as a tapeworm or amoeba, or both. Who knows where I picked it up – could be from the locally-grown vegetables, the trash that’s all over the city, or the Avenue de Tapeworm et Amoeba that I walk down each day on my way to French class. Actually, I made that last reason up. What I had was not uncommon and could be easily treated with some antibiotics. The doctor wrote out some prescriptions for me and sent us on our way.

Another interesting thing about living here is that you don’t actually need a prescription to get medicine. You can go to a pharmacy and ask for a box of Xanax or Rohypnol or whatever and they’ll give it to you. Prescriptions are on the cheap side, too, at least compared to the States.

I was still feeling weak and out of it for a few days after my visit to the doctor, but after five days or so I was right as rain. At least I know where the doctor’s office is now.

Oh, and I Got a Job

So, as I mentioned a few posts earlier, I had been offered a position at TASOK, the American school here in town. I would work in their computer lab as a tech and help out the teachers and students with computer problems. TASOK is a very nice place to work, and everyone I’ve met there is really great, but the pay wasn’t anything to write home about and since I don’t have a car, getting there each day was going to be a problem.

A few days before I’m set to start the job at TASOK, I get a phone call from someone I know here who says that they know of a possible job opening for me. They give me a name and an email address. I figure what the hey and send off my resume and a quick note saying that I’m new in town and looking for work, what do you have?

Later that afternoon I get a call from the person I emailed and they want me to come in to meet with them the next day to discuss my resume. As it turns out, this person works at the US Embassy in the Cultural Affairs office. Wow. I had contacted the Embassy a few times since arriving here and asked if they had any openings, but either my calls wouldn’t be returned or I was told to look at the website which didn’t have any positions I was remotely qualified for.

I went to the Embassy the next day to interview for a job, though I didn’t know what the job actually was. As soon as I met the woman who was interviewing me, before I even sat down, she said, “I’m not a religious person at all, but I think you were sent here by God.” This kind of blew my mind. One of my biggest worries about coming here was about finding work and it was something I had been praying a lot about for months and months.

As things turned out, the Cultural Affairs office had a need for someone with exactly my background – some tech writing, some instructional design, and few other odds and ends. Because I’ll be working on a lot of different projects, I’ll have a lot of flexibility with regard to my hours so I don’t need to come into the office every day from 8-5. This is great, since I don’t have a car. I’m still getting the details of work fleshed out, but already I’ve set up meetings with a few people about building some basic websites.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a million other things that have happened to me over the past few weeks, but it's late and this is at least an update. Once I get caught up on my email, I can post more about slice-of-life stuff here in Kinshasa. Let me know if you have questions and I'll do my best to answer them. After living here for seven and a half weeks, I'm starting to not think about how weird it is to pay some random guy on the street fifty cents to watch the car while my wife and I go shopping.

I'm still alive

Sorry (again) for the lack of updates. We've moved into our new place but they don't have the internet set up yet. Hopefully we'll be online by next week. I have lots to talk about, too. We live somewhere new, I had my first and hopefully only visit to the doctor here (nothing major and I'm feeling fine these days), and I have a job. I hate to keep you all in suspense like this, but my web access is limited right now to a very slow and unreliable computer at an internet cafe.

Stay tuned...

Slow weekend

I spent most of the weekend enjoying my last few days in domestic paradise. Our house-sitting stint ends tomorrow so I wanted to soak up as much couch-and-tv time as possible. I've been watching the HBO series Band of Brothers as well as the BBC Planet Earth series on DVD - it's quite mindblowing. The power and internet still go out on an almost daily basis so I've been doing a lot of reading as well - I'm almost done with Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

We ended up not going out on Wednesday night for pizza. My stomach was bothering me a bit that afternoon and since eating out is such a big deal here due to the cost and novelty of it, I opted to wait a few days so I knew that I would enjoy the meal. I didn't want to go out for a good meal and not be able to enjoy my food. On Friday night we went to a Portuguese restaurant called O Poeta. For $20, I got a big brick-oven pizza with ground beef, sausage, peppers, and onions. I have to say that it was one of the better pizzas I've had in a long, long time. That might be because I've been living in Kinshasa for over a month and I was living in Denver for a year and a half before that (no offense to my Denver readers, but the pizza there just ain't all that great). I left the restaurant with a full and satisfied belly.

On Saturday my wife and I made our first solo excursion to the local market. A driver had always taken us before so the first challenge was finding the market. We didn't exactly know where we were going so we followed our noses around the city for a bit and hoped we didn't have to deal with the police. I don't know how, but we eventually stumbled across it. Things went well, and on the way back we were going to stop at a supermarket to get more food when we had another minor run-in with the law. On a street congested with traffic, I turned into the center lane to make a left turn and there were two policemen there directing traffic. After noticing me waiting in the lane to make my left turn, one walked over and asked me to roll down my window and hand over my license. Following the advice of others I'd spoken to after last weekend's driving experiences, I instead rolled my window up, held my license against the inside of the window, and began to state in my loudest and most ignorant-sounding voice, "I-don't-speak-French-I-don't-know-what-you're-saying-I'm-an-American-I'm-not-giving-you-my-license-blah-blah-blah" After thirty seconds, the other police officer who was standing nearby got a frustrated look on his face and waved us along. I think they didn't want to deal with us given the heavy flow of traffic on the road and the fact that my French is nowhere near conversation-level yet, let alone negotiating-bribes-with-the-police-level. It would be a different matter if I was doing something wrong, but my wife and I knew they were just hassling us because we were foreigners in a car that was stopped right in front of them. They can't pass up a chance at free money, could they? We headed for home and decided to finish grocery shopping the next day.

Sunday was spent doing more driving and shopping. We're still getting things together for our apartment. I'd never have thunk it, but we can't find clothes hangers anywhere in town. Of all the stores we've been to, the closest thing we've found is small wooden hangers meant for children's clothes for $1 each. Well, we did find one street vendor selling cheap plastic hangers who, after some haggling, agreed to come down in price to $2. Each. Each hanger, $2. You've gotta be kidding me. Luckily, we talked to a clerk at a big store here in town and he said they're getting a shipment of hangers in this week.

Once we finally get moved in, we'll be able to spend our weekends doing more relaxing and fun things like going to the pool at TASOK on Sunday afternoons, or getting together with the church youth group for ultimate frisbee. The couch in our new apartment is nowhere near as comfortable as the one here, so I don't think we'll be too tempted to spend weekend afternoons lounging around on it.

Happy Labor Day to everyone back home...

Happy birthday to me

Today is my birthday and people have been emailing me birthday greetings - thanks, everyone. I don't know what birthdays entail here in Kinshasa in terms of local traditions. I'll have to ask around. My wife surprised me this morning with pancakes and bacon which was a huge treat. Now, they don't have Oscar Meyer bacon here so what I had instead looked to be some sort of animal fat, but that's okay. Big, big thanks to my wife. The plan for tonight is to go out to a local restaurant that supposedly has decent pizza.

In the meantime, I'm still hanging around the house. The power problems have been pretty bad here lately, and most of Monday and Tuesday there was no power. It comes back on at night, but it makes for some boring afternoons when all I have to keep me busy is reading or studying French. My classes have been going well, although we never meet for the full two hours that we're scheduled to be there. The recent power outages have been affecting most of the city, so that means no air conditioning or lights in the classroom, and we haven't been using the tapes that came with our textbook. I should also mention that I didn't get an actual textbook when I started the class - I got a photocopy of a textbook. I don't know how rigidly they enforce copyright infringement 'round these parts.

Outta the car, longhair

Man, what a weekend. The water was out from Saturday morning to late Sunday afternoon, so no toilet, shower, washing machine, or kitchen sink. The power was out from Saturday afternoon until late Sunday afternoon, so no air conditioning, internet, TV, lights, kitchen stove, or refrigerator. It was a hot weekend which made for tough sleeping on Saturday night with no AC and I was smelling rather ripe by Sunday afternoon. From what I hear, most of the city was suffering from extended power and/or water outages.

On Friday a driver from Acme took my wife and I out for a "driving lesson" in Kinshasa. I knew this was important to do - it was so we understood the way traffic flows in the city and knew how to deal with intersections, taxis, roundabouts, and of course, the cops. I heard from other expats that the cops here are something else. They hassle drivers all the time with made-up infractions in the hope of getting a little cash thrown their way for them then overlooking it. No joke, we were stopped by the cops three times in the course of driving around for four hours.

Allow me to recap our offenses:

INCIDENT #1: Boy, you know... I'm pretty sure your turn signal wasn't turned on early enough there as you approached this intersection.

INCIDENT #2: I think your stop at this intersection was a little too sudden for my liking.

INCIDENT #3: Umm... your, uh... let's see... um, your papers might not be up to date.

In each case, we were stuck on the side of the road for at least 20-30 minutes while our Acme driver argued with the cops about these bogus charges and they did their best to not come out and simply demand a bribe from us. Keep in mind that the bribes they're looking for here are very small, maybe $2, but it's the principle of the thing. They think we're rich white folk aimlessly driving around with fistfuls of cash, trying to decide how best to idly spend it. Obviously, this is not true. If we pay them this time, they'll pull us over again and expect more money. And then do it the time after that, and after that, etc. There are no hard and fast traffic laws here so the police make up whatever they want and see if they can get you to pay.

What's sad here is that the police officers don't make a decent living from their salaries. They can barely afford to pay rent each month (and I mean that quite literally - the average rent is equal to their monthly take home pay) so whatever cash they make on the side goes to feeding and providing for them and their families. I get it, but come on... I just want to drive to the grocery store to buy some oatmeal. I don't want to argue with the police for a half hour on the way there and the way back so they can come out of it $5 richer. Maybe I can just toss money out the window as I drive past each police officer so we save everyone some time.

We drove around on Sunday without any run-ins with the law. Sundays are pretty slow days in Kinshasa so it seems like the best time to be out and about. We went out for Indian food after church with some people we know and it was a tasty and not terribly expensive meal.

A couple of pictures

Here's a couple of pictures I took from the balcony of the apartment we lived in when we first arrived in Kinshasa:




We were on the fifth floor of our building. The road in both pictures is the Trente de Juin (30th 0f June) and it's the main road into and out of downtown Kinshasa. In the top picture, you can see the backup of traffic that extends all the way into the city. The yellow and blue vehicles are taxis. In the bottom picture you can see the high fences that surround every building or compound in Kinshasa.

We're now living in a quieter and less congested area of town. That said, it seems like you have to take the Trente de Juin to get to the larger supermarkets or stores in Kinshasa. I thought I was leaving traffic jams behind me for a year. Guess not.

The Road Warrior

My driver's license arrived yesterday. My wife and I don't have to take a test, per se, to get our license to drive here in Kinshasa. We had our pictures taken at Photo Guy, the local photo place, and Acme did all the paperwork to get us our licenses. After almost three weeks, they were ready so the head of transportation at Acme took us out for an impromptu driver's test yesterday.

Now, I didn't figure to be doing much driving once I got to Africa. I'd walk everywhere, take a canoe downriver, swing on vines, or ride on the back of a trained wildebeest or whatever to get where I needed to go. I certainly didn't expect to see all the traffic that Kinshasa has on its roads. The main roads in Kinshasa are in good shape; the side roads are not. Even though gas prices are higher here than in the US, cars are expensive, and you have to constantly deal with congestion and bad roads, people still drive everywhere.

From what I've seen so far, the driving experience here is comparable to picking someone up at the airport arrivals area on a holiday weekend, or trying to get around a mall parking lot on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas. Everyone is heading the same direction with the goal of getting where they're going to as quickly as possible, yet no one pays attention to staying in a particular lane and cars are randomly starting and stopping or swerving to the right and left. Here, you also have to deal with immense potholes and various beggars, street children, and vendors wading their way through the stream of cars in pursuit of a handout or sale. At least there aren't a lot of speeders around here because the roads are either so rough and/or congested that it makes speeding impossible.

For our driving test, we drove downtown and back again. Parallel parking, three point turns, and backing around a corner were not covered. I think it was just a test to see if we could drive a manual transmission (almost all cars are stick) and stay on the correct side of the road (the right side). Most of the time we were in stop and go traffic. I guess we're supposed to have one more driving "lesson" this weekend which should be interesting since I think Saturdays are the busiest driving days.

At least I'll have a driver's license soon and some ID to carry around with me.

Back online (or so I hope)

The internet connection at the house we're staying at was fixed today, so I plan on doing some more updating as time allows. Lots going on the past few days - I got a job at TASOK (it looks like I start on Thursday), my French classes are rolling along (I'm beginning to understand a bit of the conversations that are going on around me), and today my wife and I got our driver's licenses, which means we can drive ourselves around when there's an Acme car available. So that's pretty cool. I'm off to French class soon, and tonight we're supposed to have dinner with a family we met at church. The husband leads worship at church and I might start playing bass on Sunday mornings. I miss playing, and the music at church has been amazing. It would be great to be a part of it each week.

More details to come soon...

Bad Blogger... BAAAD Blogger

Bad blogger… BAAAD blogger!

Sorry for the long delay in updates. As you can see below, I just posted a big ‘un. Once I got an outlet adaptor for the laptop, I took some time to record my initial thoughts about life here so far. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to access the Internet since I got here and I kept forgetting my flash drive at home when I did get to an Internet café. Sorry, sorry…

Anyway, things are going okay here so far. The biggest bit of news is that we’ve moved from the outhouse to the penthouse in terms of our living situation. They’re still working on fixing up our permanent apartment, but in the meantime we’re house-sitting for one of my wife’s colleagues. She’s gone to France with her husband for three weeks and asked us if we would stay at her place and watch their beagle.

This place is really great – heck, it’s nicer than a lot of places I’ve been in the States. It’s very well-furnished even by American standards, they have cable TV (I got to see Friday’s White Sox-Red Sox game on ESPN), lots of DVDs, and the area is very quiet so no smog or traffic to deal with every day. Not to mention they have a washing machine, no bug problems, and an amazingly comfortable bed with no bugs in it. It will be a step down to move into our apartment in a few weeks, but I may as well enjoy this while I can. Once we move into our apartment, it will be the first time since June when I’ll be staying in one place for more than a few weeks. Weird.

We found a church to attend – it’s the International Protestant Church of Kinshasa. The service is in English and I’d say it’s a congregation of between one and two hundred. About a third are American. After the service on Sunday, some people who work at TASOK and attend the church invited us out to lunch with them and it was good to get to know them a bit. Plus they gave us a ride home which was awesome, since it was a forty-five minute walk to get to the church that morning.

I’ve started an intensive French language course. It meets five days a week for two hours at a time, and the class runs for five weeks. The class is made up of myself, an Ethiopian guy who just started work at Acme, and a Ghanaian woman named Madame Dombo (yep, sounds like Dumbo) who works at the Ghana embassy. The class seems to end at different times each day and never takes up the full two hours that it should. In every class so far, Madame Dombo makes her displeasure with our abbreviated sessions clear to our instructor so we had a makeup session on Saturday – oddly, she didn’t attend. Anyway, since I’m not working these days my big activity for the day is going to French class, and it gives me something to work on in my extensive spare time.

No news on the job front. I’ll probably hear back from TASOK later this week or next, and I’ve contacted the US Embassy but they haven’t been much help. I’ll try the British embassy this week (I’m an Irish citizen through descent, and maybe I could parlay that into something). My wife will ask around at her job to see if anyone has ideas of places where I could look for work. It’s hard to look for a job when you have no regular internet access, no car, no local language skills, and don’t really know your way around the city.

At least I have the Olympics on TV to keep me entertained.

It’s possible that I’ll soon have internet at the place I’m staying now, and we’re already working on getting it set up so it will be running when we move into our regular apartment in a few weeks. Dag, I hope so. It would make my life here a whole lot easier.

First impressions of Kinshasa

Rather than give you a chronological blow-by-blow of my first week and a half of life in Kinshasa (which would mostly be minor variations on: woke up at 6:30 when my wife’s alarm went off, saw her off to work at 8:30, napped till noon, goofed off the rest of the day, etc), I opted to jot down some highlights and thoughts I’ve had about things so far…

The Flight

Whew – it was a fifteen hour flight from DC to Rome (where we made a refueling stop) to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I’ve never been on a plane that long before. We left DC early Sunday morning and arrived in Addis on Monday around 9am or so, local time.

Cheers to Ethiopian Airlines for feeding folks well. I think I had four meals over the course of the flight.

Jeers to Ethiopian Airlines for their poor, poor movie selection. It was a Ryan Reynolds film fest. I watched all of “Chaos Theory” and most of “Definitely Maybe.” Even though I was stuck on a plane for fifteen hours, it was tough to stomach both of those cinematic masterworks. I guess it’s better than the time I saw a Spanish-dubbed version of “Men of Honor” twice in a row while riding a bus in Ecuador. That was rough. I was too burned out on bad movies to bother with whatever Eddie Murphy-less “Doctor Doolittle” sequel was also showing. “Be Kind Rewind” was the only other choice, but the sound wasn’t working for that film and I heard it wasn’t that good anyway.

In place of the movies, I read a John Grisham book that my Grandpa gave me – thanks, Grandpa.

I’ve never been able to sleep on a plane very well, so I think I only got in a couple of twenty minute naps during the flight.

Addis Ababa was surprisingly cool (low 60s, maybe, and overcast and drizzly) and the airport is bare-bones. Believe you me, it’s tough to get on another plane and face a five hour flight after you’ve just endured a fifteen hour session of leg cramps, breathing other people’s recycled air, and Ryan Reynolds movies. Thankfully, the flight from Addis to Kinshasa wasn’t too bad, probably because I was so dog-tired by that point that I was in a daze for the next five hours.

First Impressions of Kinshasa

Over the past several months, I conducted a fair amount of research on the city where I would soon reside for a year. Based on my findings, things did not look good. I heard about how dirty it was, and how the roads are terrible, and it’s incredibly expensive, the cops are crooked, etc, etc. Truth be told, at a certain point I just stopped researching because I wasn’t finding a lot of good news.

So far, Kinshasa has lived up to its billing. It is really, really dirty here. There’s not much green to see. There are trees, but they all look sort of washed-out and pale. No flowers, no grass – all you see is concrete, asphalt, dirt/dust, a few trees, and trash. Trash everywhere. It’s not in giant stinking piles, but the gutters are filled with garbage and there are all sorts of wrappers and bags blowing around the streets. I’ve seen a few street crews out cleaning up and they do a good job, though I imagine it’s pretty demoralizing to clean a block and then see it filled with trash again the next day. By the way, the workmen burn the trash they collect, so that smells nice.

Our temporary apartment is on the main road to downtown Kinshasa – Trente de Juin (30th of June). This road seems to be in pretty good shape, and obviously the rest of Kinshasa seems to think so because between 8:00am and 6:00pm, the traffic ranges from a thick flow of cars to gridlock. There are some monster potholes to keep an eye out for on the main roads, but all in all I’m impressed. I was thinking things would be way worse in terms of paved roads.

I haven’t seen too many traffic lights in Kinshasa. Intersections have roundabouts or police officers directing traffic. The main roads seem to be in decent shape, and all the side streets are dirt and stone with huge potholes and ruts. I shudder to think what they’re going to be like once the rainy season starts.

The buildings around here seem to all be at least twenty or thirty years old. The downtown area was probably pretty hip back in the day, but now it looks a bit like the set of a mid 70’s post-apocalyptic film. The buildings look dirty and run down and you wonder if they’re even inhabited.

We went grocery shopping the first night we got here and as expected, food is incredibly expensive and the selection is very limited. What’s weird is that every store I’ve been in has half an aisle filled with breakfast cereal, but no stores seem to carry milk. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough. They sell a lot of powdered milk, but to my delicate Western palate, it seems kind of gross to eat Raisin Bran with powdered milk. I’ll talk more about shopping in another post, as that’s a story in itself.

Where my wife works

In the interest of my wife’s privacy and the respect of the organization she works for, I’ll refrain from naming the organization that hired her in my blog. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll just refer to it as Acme. We stopped by Acme right after we arrived in Kinshasa on Monday afternoon and met a few of her co-workers. Most of the staff is Congolese, but there are a few expats working there as well. Everyone seemed very nice and they answered all our questions and then some. Most business seems to be conducted in French so I stood around like the non-French-speaking idiot I am while I was introduced to her various coworkers.

Acme seems like a nice place to work and the various people we’ve met around Kinshasa are familiar with it and say good things about it.

Our Apartment

Upon our arrival, we found out that our Acme-provided apartment wasn’t ready, so we were moved into another of Acme’s apartments in Kinshasa. Initially our apartment seemed pretty nice. It’s on the fifth floor of a six floor building near downtown Kinshasa. In 1982, it would have been a happening pad. There are Greek columns in the living room, recessed lighting everywhere, and almost all the floors are tiled. The apartment is spread out over two floors with a kitchen, bathroom, laundry area (no washing machine), bedroom, and large dining/living room area on the top floor. The bottom floor has two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a giant storage closet. On each floor, there are balconies that face out onto the main road, Trente de Juin, and a few clotheslines to hang your clothes to dry.

After the initial thrill of being in a new place wore off, I realized that this apartment, while spacious and located near many stores and downtown Kinshasa, had some pretty major problems. There are ants in the kitchen (as well as a few other assorted bugs) and every night we get an invasion of mosquitoes. It took me a few days to figure out they were getting in to the apartment through a window that wouldn’t shut, so I taped up some heavy paper to cover the opening. The ones that made it into the apartment have been feasting on us at night (we don’t have a mosquito net to sleep in), so when I see them the next morning they’re flying pretty slowly, all fat and sassy, and there’s an splattering of blood when I swat them. Honestly, I expect to hear a popping noise upon impact.

The apartment is furnished with a few couches, chairs, tables, etc, and in the two downstairs bedrooms one has two twin beds and the other has a queen-sized bed. For the first week or so, we slept on the queen bed and each morning were would find all these little red spots scattered over our arms and legs. Turns out, there are bedbugs in the mattress. They irritated my wife more than they did me; she claimed she could feel them at night. I didn’t notice anything till the next morning when I’d see their bites, and the bites didn’t hurt or itch. To rectify the problem, we swapped the queen mattress for the two twin mattresses, and laid them on the queen frame. The twin mattresses are made of foam, so no bedbugs. Things were fine after that.

I’m pretty sure there’s a mold problem in here as well. As far back as I can remember, I’ve never had a problem with allergies except when I stayed in the basement of my parents’ house during my later high school years. Itchy and watery eyes, runny nose, sore sinuses, the whole bit. I’ve had the same thing going on here since we moved in, and it’s worse because I really can’t leave the apartment.

The water and/or power seem to go off once a day, which, as I understand, is par for the course in Kinshasa. It’s no big deal since it’s only for a couple hours at a time and it seems to happen during the day. There’s an intermittent grinding noise coming from somewhere in the building – it sounds exactly like the grinding noise at the beginning of the U2 song “Zoo Station.” When I first moved in I thought someone in a neighboring apartment was blasting Achtung Baby.

The electric stove in the kitchen is an enigma to us. All of the markings on the dials have worn off so it was a trial and error process to figure out what knob turned on what burner, and we still don’t know what the oven settings are. I think the only oven setting we have is “scorch top of food while leaving center uncooked.”

Various lights and plumbing fixtures around the apartment don’t work, and there’s no washing machine so we’ve done a load of wash by hand. Were we to be in this place long-term, I’d look into getting that taken care of. That said, after living here for over a week, I’m running out of clean clothes again and it feels kind of creepy to bathe oneself in the dark every day (there are no lights in the bathroom with the shower/tub).

It’s not all bad, though – there’s an air conditioning unit in almost every room and they provided us with a small TV so I’ve been getting my Playstation 2 chops back up to speed, and my wife and I have been able to watch a few DVDs too. Big, BIG thanks to my sister for lending me her PS2. I think I’d have lost my mind by now if I didn’t have that to keep me busy for a few hours each day. And by “a few hours” I mean six. Unless my wife is reading this, and then I mean 45 minutes.

My Cell Phone

Acme gave my wife a pretty swank cell phone as soon as we arrived and the day after we got here, an Acme driver took us out on a trip to buy a cell phone for me. There are a fair amount of stores around the city, but there are a lot of street vendors and roadside stands and I think you can get a better deal from them. Our driver took us to a street vendor to get my cell phone and brokered the deal.

There are no land lines in Kinshasa for phones – everyone uses cell phones instead. Rather than sign a contract for a phone, I opted for a pay as you go model. On every street in the city, vendors are selling $5 phone cards so you pick up one of those when your minutes get low.

It was a trip buying the phone. Fortunately for me (at least in this instance), I don’t speak much French so I don’t know what all went down while the deal was being made. Dozens of other street vendors were offering me other phones, sunglasses, magazines, shoes, watches, food… usual street vendor stuff. It was easy to ignore them because I didn’t understand a word they were saying. The woman who sold us the phone was very nice and helped us get it set up, and she even gave us her phone number as well. No, we haven’t called her.

Getting around Kinshasa

So the big shock when we got here was that we were told by a few different people at Acme that we shouldn’t really walk around the city. Like, at all. If we need to go somewhere, we should call Acme and have a driver pick us up and drive us around. We’ll be getting driver’s licenses in a few weeks and will have access to Acme’s vehicles on the weekends, but in the meantime we should not take cabs or buses to go places, and we especially shouldn’t go out at night. It’s not because Kinshasa is a violent place where people are fighting in the streets or assaulting foreigners. It’s more that as white people, we stick out like sore thumbs and are seen as giant bags of money with legs. We might get mugged by someone on the street or be harassed by the police, who will try to extort a bribe from us. Cab drivers might drive us to who knows where, take our money, and kick us out of the car. Apparently the Congolese are not violent people but a lot of them are very poor, so they’ll commit petty crimes in the interest of money. Having seen how expensive this city is, I can see where they’re coming from. This is a bummer to hear, as I was hoping to be able to walk freely around the city to check out the sights and meet people.

That said, the more people we’ve talked to, the more we’ve found out that as long as you don’t go down empty streets in sketchy neighborhoods alone, you should be fine. Good advice for any city, I suppose, though I figure Kinshasa has more than its fair share of sketchy neighborhoods. We’ve been able to walk up and down the bigger roads to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, and in the mornings we go jogging before my wife goes to work. The worst we’ve dealt with is Congolese poking fun at us as we run, or pushy street vendors or beggars. As time goes by, we’ll get a better sense of where it’s safe to go.

In the meantime, I spend most of my days in our spacious bug sanctuary of an apartment. My French is still terrible so I don’t want to get stuck somewhere I shouldn’t be in the city, and having no car makes it hard to get around. I haven’t met a lot of people so far so nobody’s inviting me over for tea parties and the like. It’s cool, though. I’m one of those weirdoes who likes being alone and I’ve been enjoying the solitude each day.

TASOK

A few days after I arrived, I met with the superintendent of The American School of Kinshasa, or TASOK. They have a website with a phone number, so I called a day or two after we arrived in Kinshasa said I was looking for work, and they told me to stop on by. TASOK is basically an American school in the DRC – most of the teachers are American and maybe 20% of the students are as well. The rest are children of European and Asian expats, or Congolese children whose parents want them to get an education at an American school. As the superintendent described it to me, it’s a slice of America here in Kinshasa.

It seems to be one of the big hangouts for Americans in Kinshasa – people go there on the weekend to play sports or meet up, and most of the TASOK teachers and a few non-TASOK-employed Americans live on the campus. The campus is enormous – it’s a giant walled compound with lots of buildings, grass, and trees.

There might be work for me at TASOK as a substitute teacher later in the year, or as a computer tech. I’m supposed to hear back from them in a couple weeks. The only hassle might be getting to work each day, since I have no car and it’s not exactly a short walk to TASOK from where we’ll be moving to soon.

Made it

OK, I've arrived in Kinshasa in one piece. Sorry for the lack of updates, but I don't have web access, nor do I have a car to get to an internet cafe. There aren't any near our apartment and we're supposed to be moving soon, and once we get to our new place we'll get web access (hopefully). Things have been okay so far - I'm spending a lot of time in our apartment. The water and power seem to go off once a day and my almost complete lack of French language skills is killing me. Today we got an outlet adaptor so I should be able to access the French classes on our laptop.

More to come...

Fattening up

After yet another long day of walking around Baltimore, I'm still pretty awake. It's a quarter to 11 and I'm in a king-size bed in my hotel room, watching a heavily-edited-for-tv-version of Die Hard and enjoying the air conditioning. Our flight leaves at 10am tomorrow and I should be getting some sleep but I figure I have a 15 hour flight to catch up. Besides, no king size beds or Die Hard on the airplane. Might as well enjoy this kind of thing now.

For those of you interested, my last dinner in the US for a year or so was a chicken pot pie, a pint of Guinness, and a slice of chocolate chip cheesecake. My wife and I went to the Sobo cafe in the Federal Hill area of Baltimore and a bit of comfort food totally hit the spot.

That's all for now - the next time I'm online, I'll be in Kinshasa.

Core Competencies

Still in Baltimore - it's 11:30 at night and even though I spent six and a half hours walking around Washington DC today, I'm still pretty awake.

I decided to take the train down to DC since it's a fairly short trip to get there from Baltimore and I didn't have much else to do today anyway. I've never been to DC before. Like most scenic/historical places I've been, it was neat but not life-changing or anything. Upon seeing something like the White House or Washington Monument, I had the same reaction as when I saw Graceland. "Well, there it is." I dug the Lincoln Memorial - maybe it's because I'm an Illinois native - and the Wright Brothers exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum was pretty cool as well.

It was hot and crowded out there today, and I did my best to see all the big attractions. I was bummed to see that the Smithsonian American History and Arts and Industry museums were closed for renovations. That was a big part of the reason why I went to DC today. Oh well.

A few days ago, I accompanied my wife to her orientation for the day. It was a "spouses day" or whatever. They had some good info and I got to know the people she's working with a bit better. What really struck me was how boring a lot of it was. They weren't reading tax tables to us or anything, but you'd think that the training session for going to work overseas would be pretty exciting. Nope. They talked about all the minutiae of HR and better ways to communicate and what the core competencies were for the fellowship position. I almost lost it when I heard "core competencies." I had my share of those meetings in my years in corporate America. I figured that was just for boring regular cubicle jobs like I had. Jeez, I bet that police snipers and lion tamers and skydivers have training meetings where they talk about improving their core competencies at their annual reviews.

We leave in two days for the DRC. It still hasn't set in that I'm moving there yet, but it is settling in that I don't have a job. I've been so busy with us getting ready for the past month or so that I haven't noticed. As I find myself walking around Baltimore or DC during the day, I realize that most everyone else I see on the street is either on their way to or from their office, or else they're unemployed for one reason or another. It makes it harder for me to enjoy the time off that I have.

That's all for now - I'll try to get one more entry in before we leave on Sunday morning for the DRC.

Getting ready

For someone who was an English major in college, I never would have thought that starting something as simple as a blog would be so vexing. Jeez, how do you begin these things?

Well, for those not in the know, I'm off to Kinshasa, the capital city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. My wife received a one-year fellowship with an international aid organization and they're sending us both there - travel, insurance, and housing are all paid for and we have a stipend to live on for the year.

As of this entry, I'm in a hotel room in Baltimore and surrounded by 150 pounds of luggage, an unmade bed, and a complimentary copy of USAToday. My wife is at the first day of her orientation and I have a 3:00 dentist appointment to look forward to.

I may as well kick things off with an FAQ:

Why are you going?

I'm going to Kinshasa for a number of reasons. Obviously, I'm going because my wife is going. This job is a dream opportunity for her and I don't want her to miss out on it because I wasn't sure how things were going to go. I'm surprised at how many people have asked me if I was going to accompany my wife to the DRC. Well, yeah. She's my wife. Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't it be strange for married couples to spend a year apart, especially after they've only been married for a year? I guess if you're in the armed forces or some kind of celebrity, maybe not, but I didn't want to just hang out somewhere in the US for a year while she does this.

I'm also going because hey, free trip to Africa. Our housing, travel costs, insurance, and most expenses are paid for. We don't have a house to sell or responsibilities to mind back in the States. Besides our family and friends, we're not leaving a whole lot behind us. No kids, we're in good health, we're relatively young. Why not?

This is also a chance for me to possibly take a new career path (more on this below). Who knows what opportunities await me in Kinshasa? Since the pressure is off me for a year to make a certain amount of money for us to live on, I can try a new line of work should the opportunity present itself.

In no small measure, I also feel led to go to the DRC. I've been pretty serious about my faith in God for a number of years and for whatever reason (believe you me, I'm asking), I feel that the Lord wants me to go to the DRC. Maybe it's to begin a new career as a Congolese garbageman, maybe it's to experience life in a different culture, maybe it's to get me to sell most of my worldly possessions (as I've already done)... who knows? I'm interested to find out what awaits me there.

What will you do in Kinshasa for work?

The most common question I hear after "Why are you going?" is "What are you going to do there?"

I. Have. No. Idea.

Really, I don't. For the past ten years or so, I've worked as a technical writer and instructional designer in various corporate environments. I haven't found any job openings online for tech writers or instructional designers in Kinshasa and I tend to think that I won't. There aren't a lot of international companies there (too unstable for many years). So, I figure I'll start knocking on doors when I arrive, working whatever contacts I can make, and I'll do my best to scare up whatever kind of work I can. If I can find decent internet access, I may try working remotely, doing tech writing and instructional design contract work. I won't know about web access till I get to Kinshasa, though. I hear there are a lot of NGOs and aid organizations there, so that's an option as well.

What's the city like?

Kinshasa is one of the largest cities in Africa with a population of around 7 million people. The city is offically called "Kin la Belle"(Kinshasa The Beautiful) but has been renamed "Kin la Poubelle" (Kinshasa the dustbin) by the locals. Here's an interesting photoessay on the city from the BBC. As a side note, the Foreman-Ali "Rumble In The Jungle" was held there in 1974.

What language do they speak there?
French is the official language of the DRC, and Lingala is the local language that's primarily spoken in Kinshasa. I know about thirty words in French and zero words in Lingala, so I figure I'm on even ground when it comes to learning the local languages.

What's the weather like?

Hot.

What will you eat?

Dunno.

Will you travel around the country?

Doubtful, I think. There are very few roads out of the city and they're in pretty bad shape, so I don't think I'll be taking any weekend jaunts out to the bush to go rhino-hunting or anything. The primary means of travel outside of Kinshasa is via air, and since that's pretty expensive and potentially life-threatening depending on your carrier, I don't see it happening a lot.

What will you miss from the States?

I'll miss my family and my friends, of course. No ice hockey in Kinshasa, and I don't know about speedy internet access so I can't watch stupid videos of people hurting themselves on youtube or episodes of LOST. No White Castle or decent pizza, and I think my intake of high fructose corn syrup and fried foods will decrease dramatically as well. I don't think I'll be able to go hiking on the weekends like I did in Denver.

I may remember a few other things that I miss from the States and I'll be sure to post them here.

Why are you going there again?

To recap - wife, free trip, new job, God.

And how long is this for?

One year. Like I've been telling people, we're not joining the Army or anything. If we don't like it, we can go home. I think we'll be back in the States in a year regardless - if things go well, we would get reassigned to another location and (hopefully) have a month or come back to the US, and if we decide that we don't like it, we'll come back to the US to figure out what's next.

Here ends the FAQ for now. I don't know how often I'll be able to update this blog, but I would like to add to it on a fairly regular basis. For those reading, ask me any questions you like and I'll do my best to answer them.

If you'll excuse me, I think housekeeping is at the door. Be seeing you...