Our new apartment, and my gig as a substitute

Our return to Kinshasa has thus far been a return to normalcy, at least as normal as things can be around here. Day to day life is fairly ordinary provided you’re used to things regular power outages, bathtub-sized potholes, and staggering administrative inefficiency (to name a few).

Last Friday, my wife called me while I was at work to say that our landlord called to tell her that we had to move out of our apartment the next day since they were going to begin demolishing it. As I mentioned in a previous entry, we were told we had to move out of our apartment and there was a lot of scrambling on our part and ACME’s part to find us a new place to live. On the day we started moving out of our apartment, the landlady told us that an apartment was available in the same complex as our current apartment, and we could move in after we got back from our vacation. When we returned from our trip, we were told that they had to install new windows and block up some old windows in the new apartment, so we should sit tight for a while. We both figured it would be weeks or even months until the new windows were installed. I was surprised to hear that they were ready for us to move so quickly.

As it turns out, there were no new windows installed. I guess that’s a project for later on down the road. Our new place is pretty nice. It’s a one-bedroom instead of our old two-bedroom, but I’d guess the square footage is the same as in our old place. We now have a bathtub, running hot and cold water in the bathroom sink, nicer air conditioning units, and better furniture (both apartments are furnished). The only things missing from our new place were an internet connection and a washing machine.

We had our internet installed on Saturday, and today they’re installing the hookups for our washing machine. They had installed a hookup for the water line for the washing machine last week, and it failed in a spectacular fashion on Friday. The valve was barely held together and when I went to turn the water on on Friday, the valve burst and started spraying water like a fire hose. I was soaked, the bathroom walls were soaked, and our apartment started to flood. After some confusion and a number of frantic phone calls, the maintenance guys rushed in and figured out a way to stem the flow to a drip, and we then spent a few hours on Friday cleaning up all the water. Thank goodness we have tile floors. Here’s hoping the work they’re doing today is of a much higher caliber.

Last week I had my first experience as a substitute teacher. I got a call from the secretary at TASOK, and she asked if I could sub for the computer science teacher who would be in South Africa for a week-long conference. I said sure, why not? I had three classes to teach – middle-school computer science, high-school computer science, and the publications class. The middle-school class was learning to use formulas in Excel and create a three-panel brochure in MS Word. I taught this class with another teacher. The high school class was learning the basics of Adobe Illustrator and they had to create a party invitation or a business card. The publications class was working on the yearbook and I mainly answered questions about the software they were using. In my downtime between classes I helped teachers and students with their various computer questions. The students were all very good and very motivated learners, although some of them have torrid Facebook addictions. Guess some things are the same no matter where you are in the world.