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.