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.