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.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, August 22, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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...
More details to come soon...
Monday, August 11, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
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...
More to come...
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