Rachel's Goma Web Log

Signing Off

2010-08-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

And signing on: http://rachel-in-erbil.blogspot.com

The Best of Us & the Power of Social Networking

2010-08-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

Years and years ago (although somehow it was really only 23 months ago) I moved to Northern Uganda for a short stretch of time. Before moving there, I read lots of books about Northern Uganda. Many books were Good Books. One of the books was wonderful. Somehow I dug through my busy schedule and found time to write an inane two-sentence review on Amazon.com.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Very informative.
I bought this book (and many others) before moving to Kitgum for four months. This was my favorite; I found this book to be interesting, informative, and unbiased.

Brilliant, right? (Ha.)

Andbutso. A few weeks later, I got a Facebook friend request from a woman, C. She wrote that she looked up my name from that tiny little blurb of a review. She wanted to ask about Northern Uganda. She’d heard about Kitgum on the news or from Invisible Children or something. Who accepts friend requests from strangers on Facebook? Not me! Andbutso for some reason – somewho, somewhy, somewhat – that day I was in a good mood. I accepted. C and I chatted a bit. Not in depth. But I did like her. From then on, sometimes C would write little comments on my Facebook wall. I would write little comments on hers. Why not? Friendships are funny. You should cultivate them wherever they spring up. C is a single mom of two lovely, beautiful boys in a southern US State. I clicked “Like” on the cutest of the photos of her kids. C looked at my photos. Sometimes she would write slightly religious comments beneath them. I’m not a believer, but if somebody looks at a photo of a sunset or a rainbow and says “Praise God” – well, hey, who can’t appreciate that sentiment?

(Story thread jump. Now I’ve traveled to Congo. I’m living in the East.)

If you have read this web log from the beginning, you’ll be familiar with A, who was my very first friend in Goma. He’s one of those geniuses of language and intercultural competencies. He’s a very young man – just 23, 24 years old. His English, which he learned in a Goma high school, is amazingly strong. When I first arrived, his ability to empathize with me was incredible, despite his never having traveled and my initial complete cluelessness. We hung out. He helped me a lot. We became Facebook friends. A is very religious. He’s very confident and self-assured in his belief. (I’ve seen another colleague take the piss out of him for praying and A has laughed along, never flinching, joyous and fervent in his faith.) Sometimes, if on Facebook I posted a particularly lovely photo of the green-blue-purple waters of the lake, A would write something religious beneath it.

(Story threads merge.)

One day both C and A wrote something vaguely religious on a photo I posted. Sitting in my bedroom next to Lake Kivu in Goma, I clicked the Facebook webpage open and read the comments, and (with my atheist feelings of faux-superiority) rolled my eyes. I thought to myself “Gosh, they should just befriend each other.” I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t have to. They apparently had the same idea.

C and A became Facebook friends. They wrote on each other’s walls. They commented on each other’s photos and links. They asked each other questions about their respective, and very different, lives, and their respective, and very strong, belief systems. They became friends on Skype. They talked every day. One day I walked into the office while they were talking aloud to each other and I heard C’s pretty, lilting voice for the first time. A talked to C’s young boys on Skype. He told them a bit about life in Goma. C learned several phrases in Swahili and talked to A’s brothers and sisters. This is nothing romantic – this is pure friendship. Mutual curiosity, reciprocated respect, shared support: The loveliest things in the world.

They talked about their desires. A talked about how he wanted to go back to his studies. C suggested he come to college in the States. What an opportunity! That’s the dream. C helped him research schools. A filled out applications. C offered a spare bedroom. A wrote her name on sponsorship forms. They chatted. They prayed. They hoped. A got accepted into school, which wasn’t a surprise, but then there was the visa process. Standing on the porch outside of our office, I took photos of A for the US government. He made me take what seemed like hundreds until he was satisfied. And then – just a few weeks ago – as I was back here in the States deep in reverse-culture-shock doldrums, A got accepted for a visa. Bada bing, bada boom. And now all of a sudden he’s in this country, too, living in C’s spare bedroom – meeting her family – meeting his new church community -- buying pens and notebooks – preparing for school.

Life is, our lives are, so funny. Sometimes people are just so wonderful you could die. What I typed above – it’s not a story. It’s a chapter. What happens now? Brilliant A, young A, has never been out of Eastern Congo before, except once, to go to Rwanda, and now he is in University in a southern US State (with all that THAT entails). Lovely C, warm, open C has just welcomed a new brother into her family – why? Why has she done that? Why would someone do that?

With the evidence I have been given, what follows is my best guess as to the “why”:

Because that is what the best human beings do. They befriend and love, and then they support, the rest of us. The best of us, the top people, don’t give assistance out of pity for their neighbors. The best of us don’t write checks to charity because some organization has mugged their emotions with photographs of naked children, flies on their eyelids.

The best of us give assistance because they respect the rest of us. They believe in our abilities. They recognize that we are all tied to each other – there is simply no Me without You – we are joined, we are one, we are in this together.

Oh gosh – the hi-jinx that will result for A and C over the next year. The intercultural miscommunications. Oh! the adventures. Oh! everything that is yet to come. The good that is yet to be born and the crimes that are not yet committed. The future – that wonderful, terrible, joyous, limitless stretch. The beauty, the death, the life, and the love and love and love and love and love and

A Couple Numbers

2010-08-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

22 hours (and 49 minutes) till the $10 million proposal I’m consulting lead writing is due.

Then resting, relaxing, writing something more than 2 sentences on here, and trying to figure out what in the hell to pack for Erbil over the following 10 days.

Then Iraq! Whee! For the YEAR!

I have a lot to write but I haven't been able to find time.

2010-08-04T05:06:00.001-07:00

But I will, soon.

Rachel in Arbil (or Irbil) (or Erbil)

2010-07-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

I can't figure out which is the best way to spell it. But it looks like I'm moving there in a couple of weeks.

Watch out, Professional Paid Aid Worker World. I'm slowly forcing my way in.

Minerals Galore

2010-07-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

Wronging Rights: Impress Your Friends and Outflank Your Enemies: The Wronging Rights Guide to the Conflict-Mineral Regulations in Section 1502 of HR 4173

Wronging Rights: Point/Counterpoint: "Conflict Minerals Law Will Have No Effect in Eastern DRC" vs "Conflict Minerals Law Will Have Little to No Effect in Eastern DRC"

Texas in Africa: minerals week

Texas in Africa: minerals week: funding & violence in the kivus

Congo Siasa: Why legislation on mineral trade is a good thing

And the debates going on in the comments are all very worth reading, too.

perks of being a consultant

2010-07-28T16:19:00.001-07:00

Being a consultant means that maybe, one day out of the week, when the air is heavy and the sun is smacking the pavement over 110 degrees hot before even 10 am, you can work from home for maybe three hours in the morning, another four hours in the evening and at night, and in between then one of your close close friends can call in sick to work and you and she can drive off to the Six Flags water park 17 miles away in Maryland and sit in innertubes that drop down rushing waterslides at 89 degree angles and scream your heads off and laugh.

This is an Unexpected Development.

2010-07-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

Erm. Um. So. I got a phone call unofficially asking if I would be interested in accepting a job in Arbil. This came yesterday morning. It came completely out of the clear blue sky. Just – poof! – my phone rang. Hello? I said.

All of my job searching has revolved around returning to the Great Lakes region.

So. I get this call. I immediately e-mail 50 million close friends begging for advice. Then I stop abruptly and shut down my computer without e-mailing any other friends at all. Hell, there are no guarantees. Shouldn’t concern/excite people unnecessarily.

So since I’m not telling other people, and I’m waiting for work e-mails to come through in regards to my consultancy, I leave the apartment, walk down to the metro, get on a train, switch trains, and ride the long escalators up at Pentagon City mall. I go into clothing shops and pick out the clothes that I think are stylish, although what do I really know anymore, I don’t live here. I try on the short high-waist skirts and the gladiator sandals and the frilly blouses and the smart-cut vests. I stare at myself in the mirror and I cock my head and I try to decide if this outfit, or this one or this one, is the outfit that a woman who might move to Arbil for a year would wear.

DC in the Summer

2010-07-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

Guess who is working for the next few weeks as a consultant writing a proposal for an NGO in Eastern Congo? THIS me!

I’m working remotely, of course, but it is so wonderful to still feel connected to life in Goma via the research and reading and writing I’m doing. In the meantime, I’m playing young urban professional, hanging out with dear dear dear friends in the evenings – visiting museums – going to darkened movie theaters – sipping martinis at rooftop bars – shopping for random overly-priced items at Whole Foods – walking everywhere until my feet bleed in my flip-flops but I don't care because I'm able to walk everywhere – and wondering where I will move to next.

If Wishes Were Dollars, I'd Be Rich

2010-07-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

I used Skype – how blessed are we to live in the pocket of time-on-Earth that has given us Skype? – to call a friend back in Goma this morning. And then other friends were with her, so I got to talk to a handful of friends. Oh I love them.

But I wish I were there.

Tonight I am driving to DC, a city I love, to sleep on the futon of two old friends whose wedding I missed last year when I was living in Northern Uganda. Tomorrow morning I am going to see two other dear friends whose wedding I missed this spring when I was in Eastern Congo.

I wish I had trillions of dollars and a private jet and the ability to be everywhere at once.

Space-Travel

2010-07-12T06:50:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid I used to like reading science fiction novels about space-travel. Little communities would climb into a ship and fly for years and end up on an entirely different planet, disconnected – deep into the Wild West(ern sky). The night of my birthday (Saturday), I was looking up at the planets from a horse field next to the Pennsylvania woods. Venus, Mars, and Saturn were all visible – Venus was even visible at dusk, shining small and bright and white through the pink gloaming. It was the same sky – it’s always the same sky – there is only one sky – but the planets were in entirely different places than when I would look up at them in Goma. Like as if I were elsewhere in the universe.

The cultural norms here are different from the norms in Goma. Instead of wearing bright colored cloths people wear costumes of khaki pants and polo shirts. Out at dinner, I have to think and think to remember which angle to rest my salad fork at on my plate so that the servers don’t grab it out from under me, imagining I’m finished. People can talk for hours about the genealogy tests they had done on their dogs, and “Oh,” I say in response. The shadows of chandeliers and fir trees on white-painted walls are gorgeous like carved wooden masks. There are deep woods and moss-covered felled and fallen logs and slippery rocks in trickling streams and trees taller than me twenty times over. There are blasts which are fireworks, not gun shots, and there are gun shots which are people shooting clay pigeons, not aiming at each other. When people ask me about Eastern Congo while I am sitting beneath a chandelier that is reflecting rainbows on intricately pattered wallpaper, and when I respond in a voice tinny to my own ears, it seems to me that I am making up stories, that I am lying – that these two worlds do no overlap, they cannot co-exist – that I never have been anywhere but here.

Space-travelers in the novels I used to read would fly for hours or years to get to their new planets, dependent on the universe created by their author. Me? I was up and down in the sky for 36 hours to get here. Miles above human habitation, I wasn’t quite closer to space than to terra firma, but I was still pretty high. I landed in an entirely different place, where people look different, talk different, dress different, and care about different things. I remind myself of those astronauts in those paperback books. I like imagining that this is a different planet entirely.

It’s not, though, a different planet entirely. On our one singular earth, everything is interconnected. The fiscal and structural architecture of our global society is one formation, and the life that I live here does impact the lives that people live there.

Back Home

2010-07-08T17:38:00.001-07:00

I had my blood drawn today – which hurt like a witch – to be tested for schistosimiasis. The doctor came into the room flipping through a diagnostic book because he had no idea what it was I was asking to be tested for. That was concerning.

4th July 2010

2010-07-04T12:04:00.001-07:00

Here in the United States on America’s 234th birthday, there are fat robins, manicured lawns, and paved sidewalks. The TV news channel headlines with “Janet Jackson Discusses Oil Spill”. I went to bright, shiny Old Navy and bought a new swimsuit because mine went missing in action three days ago when I was packing and there is a party at the city/country club pool that I am going to attend tonight with my parents and next-door neighbors, with brokers and businessmen and young pregnant wives.

Today, I’m typing this sitting on the kitchen counter of my childhood home with my feet in the sink, my laptop balanced on my lap. This is the only place I can find to grab wifi (with permission) from a neighbor.

Yesterday, I was on an airplane miles and miles and miles above the Atlantic Ocean. The airplane was crammed full of people: There were the teenage missionaries with their braids and bandanas, the hunters who didn’t want to pay $40,000 to kill an elephant so shot a leopard instead, the dozen white American couples clutching their newly adopted Ethiopian babies, and me. The kid next to me was reading a self-help book about leadership on his iPad. I’d never seen an iPad before. The yellowing pages of the book I was reading (about Robin Hood in Sherwood) kept falling out after the binding cracked when I turned a page.

Two days ago, I was also up on airplanes, one of the members of the lucky minority of this world who periodically get to look down on the clouds and chase sunshine across the sky.

Three days ago, I was in Eastern Congo.

Love love love part #2

2010-07-02T06:30:00.001-07:00

Yesterday – Thursday – was my last day in Goma – for the time being. As terrible last days and sad goodbyes go, it was pretty lovely.

Morning – I woke up and packed. That was awful. But then my sweet, darling friend C called and we decided to go get coffee. Waiting for C to pick me up, I climbed up into the guard tower and clutched the non-razor sections of the razor wire, looking out over the dusty street. Our guard P was up in the tower listening to music. She took one of the ear buds out of her ear and stuck it into my ear, so we listened to music together. It had a lovely beat with lyrics in Lingala. I pulled out a cigarette and offered one to P. Turns out, she’d never smoked before. So we shared a cigarette, one puff for me and one for you, and the whole time P giggled like a 13 year old sneaking behind the high school. Which made me giggle too. And we felt like young best friends acting silly.

C came and we drove to get coffee, whirling around the round-about with the golden chukudu statue. The golden man riding the golden chukudu was dressed in a basket ball uniform that must have been sewn on him, the colors of the Congo flag, decorated for Independence Day. We laughed at the wonderful sight and took pictures with everyone else.

We ordered Mochas at Nyira and they came with little cookies, and we sat with another friend, M, who told me how jealous she was of me for my unsurety about where my next job will take me and when the pieces will fall into place. She said that if she were me she would go to DC, sleep on her friends’ couches, and volunteer at the zoo. She said she’d watch my Facebook page for updates about playing with pandas and French classes that I could take at local libraries until the time came for me to leave the States again. She said it sounded unsure and perfect and wonderful.

C and I ate lunch together at my home, overlooking the lake, and A joined us. A was my first friend in Goma. I will always owe him a debt for his initial kindness to me when I was friendless and clueless about where I’d landed myself. My experience here would have been totally different and far less vibrant without either C or A.

After lunch, I went to K’s apartment building. K has been on vacation for the last ten days and I missed her terribly. She is one of the most hysterically funny and also one of the most pure, lovely, good people I know. It was three in the afternoon and we went to a fancy hotel and got glasses of white wine and sat by the lake watching the cranes and talked about every single thing in the whole wide world and my stomach muscles hurt from laughing. I’m so lucky to be her friend.

K’s wonderful wonderful partner J picked us up at the hotel in the evening and we went to the grocery store. They bought cheeses and grapes. A small handful of my dear friends came over to their house and we sat and watched crappy TV and ate cheese and grapes until past midnight.

Today – Friday – I woke up early and finished packing. I sobbed on H’s shoulder – sweet, supportive, darling H who I have lived with for the last 8 months – she and I had been living in our group house the longest of anyone. H gave me cookies and magazines for the airplane ride. My funny, kind housemate B made me a mixed tape. K also made me a mixed tape. I cried when I said goodbye to our chef, JB, and he gave me his phone number and made me promise to call. I hugged P goodbye and she started crying. My Cote d’Ivoirian housemate, J, called me by the Swahili name she had given me, which means “Joyous”. I rode the three hours to the Kigali airport with B and V, and V bought me a croissant and a water.

But then they left. And I was alone.

Sitting all alone in the coffee shop at the Kigali airport, crying quietly to myself, I pulled out my computer and opened up Skype. An old friend’s name popped up, a wonderful woman I haven’t talked to in months. I double-clicked on her name. And I began typing to her. I asked for stories about her life in Spain to take my mind off of my loneliness. And she told me about love, love, love. We talked about friend love, lover love, and family love. We talked about how damn DIFFICULT love is. And how impossible it is. But how difficult and impossible it is for everyone in the world – every single person. And so I stopped crying. Because I wasn’t sitting all alone in a coffee shop anymore. I looked around. I was sitting next to an old man who kept having to get up out of his chair to chase down his little granddaughter, who kept running hither and thither. I was sitting next to the waitresses, one of whom rolled her eyes and whispered something to the other, just at that moment, and laughed. I was sitting next to a young biracial couple, two tables down, and next to another woman jiggling a screaming baby on her knee. I was sitting in Rwanda beside my friend in Spain.

I do not make life easy for myself. My heart gets broken all the time. Sometimes somethings that would not hurt someone else very much will hurt me a great deal. But I think that this is okay. It is okay to be sad sometimes. I get sad because I love, I love, I love.

Love Love Love

2010-07-01T01:25:00.000-07:00

Thursday before Friday when I Fly

2010-07-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

Woke up early & got up out of bed to pack. That way I will have some time to spend with my dear friends today-my-last-day.

Took a break from packing and lay out on the hammock looking over the lake, puffing on a cigarette. I'm not a smoker, but I've allowed myself all the cigarrettes that I want this week because starting tomorrow I will be back in the land of $10 cigarettes and won't be able to afford them, anyway. So there's no worries about it becoming a habit.

A little tiny tiny little lizard crawls up next to me on the hammock, the same light green color as the hammock, with huge eyes, a tiny body, and huge toes. The songbirds are singing. The cormorants are fishing. The kingfishers are winging. The lake is the pastel green color it is in the mornings.

Lock-Down Day #2

2010-06-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

We are in lock-down yesterday and today, which means that we aren’t allowed to leave our compound. We’re locked down in it. One may conjecture that this would encourage me to have already begun packing. Ha.

We are in lock-down because this week, today, 30th June, is the 50th anniversary of independence for the State of Congo/Zaire/DRC. There are worries of insecurity but none of my friends thinks the city will be attacked. The more plausible worry is small riots by overly excited citizens.

Yesterday we got a security SMS about a protest going on in front of the Governor’s building. There was a huge lottery advertized all month, the winners to be chosen this week. Apparently the losers were marching, chanting in anger. We snorted at the ridiculousness of gambling, losing, and then protesting your loss. But a Congolese friend told us that, while the government had all month promised that 1000 tickets would be winners, they actually stopped drawing numbers after the 440th. So people were legitimately upset.

First Day in Lock-Down

2010-06-29T11:37:00.001-07:00

Goodbyes are starting. I do not like goodbyes. One of my friends came to say “See ya later” today. We sat by the lake and talked. Then she left. I started to cry, so to feel better, I curled up in bed with two housemates and we watched reruns of Top Chef on a laptop.

The problem with this job is that when your contract ends, you not only lose your work and your office and your desk and your colleagues. You also lose your bedroom and your housemates and your friends and the city you’ve been living in and your daily rituals.

I like excitement. I like some measure of uncertainty. I don’t want any other career. But it’s not easy.

One day I will actually have a salary and so when my contracts end, I will be able to afford a trip to Zanzibar or to Petra or to Thailand to relax, to bookend assignments. Until then, I will be grateful for what I do have. Which is a lot.

It’s good to be sad about losing things, because it means that you have things to lose – and to remember when they are gone.

Weekend

2010-06-28T03:02:00.000-07:00

Played poker Saturday night, tag team with a friend. We lost all twenty bucks, but then when the World Cup game went into overtime, we bought back in. It was good we did – at the end of the night we ended up even. The joy of winning (or at least not losing) money mitigated the pain of the USA defeat at the (quick and nimble) feet of the Ghanaians. The inky lake stretched out beneath the porch and the water lapped at the lava rocks.

Spent Sunday lounging around the beach in Gisenyi with friends.

Tomorrow we go into lock-down and I will have to start packing.

Photos of the Sky

2010-06-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks

2010-06-23T03:47:00.000-07:00

Ready for some initials? Here we go: My friends C and H and I went to dinner last night at IndBatt1 (a large MONUC compound) where my friend S lives and works with his friends R and P.

I met S here – I mean, here on the internet – before I met him here in Goma. He’s been a wonderful supportive friend, leaving me nice blog comments all the time, and then inviting me to dinner. It was a lovely dinner. The six of us sat in a circle on a wooden dock on the lake. A gentleman served us white wine (any drink we wanted, actually, and we chose white wine) and delicious cheesy hors d’oeurves. Kivu was flat as glass, black like ink, and the moon was bright. S and R and P told us about their homes in India, about their travels through North Kivu, about their jobs, about their daily routines.

They told us how they used to swim in the lake until they saw a lake cobra slithering along the surface one afternoon. Sceptical? So was I. Then they showed us a picture of the lake cobra. Yes. That’s a cobra all right. C screamed at the photograph.

S showed us pictures of the north of India, where the land is elevated and dry as the desert and gray as the moon. He showed us photos of his adorable dark-eyed son back home.

We talked about security. Nobody at all thinks that any proverbial shit will hit spinning fans on the 30th, which is a relief to hear over and over, again and again. We compared curfews and talked about hippopotamuses and lions and communal living and life far from home.

There are so many of us living in Goma. There are the Congolese who come to Goma from other areas of the country because it is a city of opportunities. There are the Lebanese and other businessmen who move to Goma because you can make money here. There are the wealthy from other provinces who travel to Goma to vacation on the lake. There are the MONUC soldiers who are sent to Goma for their careers. There are the aid workers who sign up for Goma because they want to put EASTERN CONGO on their resumes. And last and sometimes viewed as least, but not least, God, never least, there are the men, women, youth, boys, girls, and babies who were born to inherit this city because their ancestors settled it and built and rebuilt it, defiantly, in the face of earthquakes and wars and volcanoes. Who will still be here when the rest of us ridiculous transients leave.

All of us live in our defined groups beneath our little labels. We live in funny non-concentric circles, our lives overlapping in weird and wonderful places like Venn diagrams but rarely blending, only touching.

But the luckiest of us are invited to partake in the experiences of the others.

Thanks to S for the wonderful dinner and insight into how he lives here. Thanks to A for letting me meet and befriend his family. Thanks for JB and J for the hospitality and opening the doors of their homes. Thanks to C for letting me volunteer at his school. Thanks to N for opening his office. Thanks to etc etc etc. I’ve been lucky.

How to Break into "The Business"

2010-06-23T01:17:00.000-07:00

This is the career advice people have given me recently:

Do ANYTHING to stay in Eastern Congo right now – even taking a very low paid position. You know this context. And being in “the field”, especially in a singular place, for a protracted period of time, will look great on your resume. Don’t get stuck at home.
Do NOT take another low paid or volunteer position. Go home. Stay and hold out for something great, something that will look better on your resume.
Go to an English speaking country – even if you don’t know the context. Get a job there and become really adept at it, and then, with confidence and resume built up, you can come back to a French speaking country.
Learn even more French. Become a fluent writer in French. Nothing will be better for your resume.
Stay with the organization you are with now. Institutional knowledge etc. Resume.
Get experience with a UN agency. Build a well-rounded resume. Here’s an easy way into the biz – become a UNV.
Do anything you want, but do NOT be a UNV. You’ll get burnt out and you’ll never actually get hired because everyone will still view you as a “volunteer”.

I mean, good heavens! Damn!

Next question: What do me myself I want?

A. I want to stay here.
B. AND and and and I want to stay with this organization.

Deep down I’m a homebody who craves consistency.

I might be able to work out one or the other of those things, if I keep pestering people – but I can’t get both.

Science is Fun!

2010-06-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

On the LEFT: Rose hip tea made with steaming hot bottled water.

On the RIGHT: Rose hip tea made with boiled Goma tap water.

Hmm.

what we talk about when we talk about love

2010-06-21T08:34:00.001-07:00

You wake up yesterday morning – late, because it is Sunday – and you roll yourself out of bed. Slip beneath the mosquito netting into the pink light of the day. You pull on socks and tennies, not the 500 franc flip-flops your feet are used to wearing. A baseball cap. Shorts – shorts! A ratty gray tee-shirt that says PITTSBURGH – City of 446 Bridges. You walk out onto the crackly gravel of the driveway and find a chauffeur.

Fifteen minutes later you pull up to the local tennis courts – brown clay, dusty, beneath the brilliant sun of the dry season. Beside a water source swarming with small children clutching jerry cans. The tennis pro grins and greets you in French and you respond easily, in French, and he loans you his light, tightly strung pink racket. Beneath the brilliant hot sun, dust clings to sweat turning your skin red. You smash the ball into the net, over the ratty fence, and sometimes, once in a while, into the opposing court. You beat one of your dear good friends in THREE GAMES. Three games! Three whole games are yours, yours, yours, you WIN them. It doesn’t matter that those three games are out of a total of thirteen. You scream with glee and gloat and run to the net to laugh.

*

Nighttime Recipe: Tired tired tired from a long week, open your bedroom door. SKITTER SKITTER SKATTER! There goes a tiny black crab skirting sideways across your floor. Rush upstairs to breathlessly tell your housemates. Swing around and run back down to your bedroom clutching a broom. Sweep the silly little guy into your orange plastic trashcan. In the soft breezes beneath the stars, carry him to freedom by the lake, gently over turning the basin. Bang on the basin – it’s for his own damn benefit! – when he won’t unpinch his tiny claws. Watch him skuttle away and feel GOOD about saving his life, about your contribution to the life force, about one more small soul still attached to its earthly body because of YOU. Return to your room. Brush teeth. Brush hair. Pull on PJs. Pull down mosquito netting. Switch off light. Crawl deep beneath crisp clean sheets. Clutch your stuffed penguin. Shut your eyes and breathe deep and GURGLE GURGLE BURBLE SCRATCH!

Snap open your eyes.

Kneel on your bed. Fumble for your flashlight. Swing the light across the floor. See a tiny black claw sticking out from beneath your blue pumps.

Repeat.

*

Two of your dear wonderful friends are in Zanzibar. Barring security crises which are very unlikely to come to pass, and barring delayed flights which are much more likely, they will be home in Goma three days before you leave. They have promised – PROMISED! – to bring you a shell.

Spirals of shells can be distilled into beautifully pure mathematical formulas. Your recognition of that is the closest you come to believing in religion, and it’s enough.

*

Today the waters of Lake Kivu, filled with crabs and shells and the bones of murdered beloved people and fish and methane gases and white capped waves, are brilliant bright blue, like Renaissance paintings of heaven in the sky.

Necessity/Hope

2010-06-21T00:57:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the movie “The Stepford Wives”? Friends who live in Gisenyi tell stories of midnight police visits – knock knock knocks on their doors. “You don’t have enough flowers in your garden,” the police will say, or “Excuse me. Your gate is 13 centimeters higher than regulation.” Yeah. Just like that.

Homes and small businesses that are built too close to the road, according to the “regulations”, get a bid red X spray painted on them and get smashed in with sledgehammers.

In the last few months the mayor of Goma has undertaken a similar campaign. In a province where the average daily income is well under a buck, shacks where people scrape by meager livings, support their families by selling cigarettes and flip-flops, have been broken into and destroyed – for what? For the aesthetic improvement of not having them roadside.

A man I know, N – a lovely guy with a wife and kids and an okay job (not quite what he wants to do in life, but hey, a job) – got a frantic phone call at work last month. The mayor and his team of army men were at N’s house banging down the gate. Heart in throat, N sprinted out of work and flagged down the first boda-boda he saw. Clinging to the back of the motorcycle he urged the driver to go faster and faster over the lava flow roads but even so – when he got home, his house, his home was all but demolished. The army men had looted it. N grabbed what possessions were left and hid them in the homes of his neighbors.

N’s home wasn’t too close to the road. He has all the evidence to prove that, and he brought that evidence to the mayor. “Whoops! My bad,” said the mayor. N has taken his evidence to the courts, and the judge will rule in N’s favor – he will have to. But even when N wins – nothing, nothing at all is likely to happen. No compensation, nothing. He had a home and possessions. Now he doesn’t. He’ll scrape together what he can and he and his family, together, they’ll rebuild.

*

Yesterday, Sunday, I took advantage of the hospitality of one of my colleagues, F, and went to his home to meet his wife and children, to eat chips and fried bananas, to drink a beer and watch the World Cup on his flat screen TV (except when the kids batted their huge eyelashes at their daddy and he let them change the channel to cartoons, “Just for ten minutes, though, kids,” because he’s a pushover and loves them so). In Goma, city of devastating poverty and ghastly riches, F is one of the few members of the solidly middle class.

But. But but but. 2002. F had met a lovely woman at University – a freshman when he was a senior. He had waited four years for her to finish her studies. He had finally felt free to propose. She said “Yes”. Both sets of parents agreed. Dowries were collected. And two weeks, no more than two weeks before the wedding date there was a trembling underfoot, deep in the ground. Nyiragongo. Lava spewed up and took everything. Not their lives, and not the clothes on their backs, but absolutely everything else. Possessions, money, their homes. The banks burned down. They fled deep into Rwanda and slept outside beneath the stars. Overnight, they went from excited youths planning their wedding to homeless people living day-to-day.

But then. Slowly, slowly. Somehow, somehow. Where does that type of strength come from? From necessity and with hope and through love. They rebuilt.

But You Can't Trace Time

2010-06-19T03:38:00.000-07:00

This week four of my dear lovely friends left for vacation. They won’t be back in Goma sweet Goma until after I’m gone for good. / This includes my closest friend here and her kind quirky partner. I have basically been living on their couch for the past two weeks because they are lovely dear humans, because I am clingy by nature, and because they have a Play Station with games like SPIDERMAN and DANCING WITH THE STARS. / Oh how I’m bad at goodbyes.

*

Here in Goma, every Friday and Saturday night under the dark starry Eastern Congo sky there are house parties with Primus beer and dancing, with music blasting and blaring. Last night was Friday but I was too sad about having to leave Goma for good in only two weeks. At the party, the loud music and moving bodies on the dance floor overwhelmed me. I fled inside, helping to blow up pink balloons, hiding from the crowds. It was because I was inside that I was the first to see N all dripping blood.

N was standing there, all dripping blood, and she called my name. I rushed over and helped her sit down on the step between the hallway and the kitchen, grabbed kitchen rags, and wrapped up her wrist. There were spots of blood speckling the floor, blood footprints. I tried to say comforting things and she told me that she’d gone to lie down in one of the bedrooms when a friend’s young dog, terrified by the loud music of the party, hiding beneath the bed from the blaring bass, had leapt at her.

Other people came quickly, got her into the bathtub, washed out the wounds. Four of us piled into a truck and drove on the bumpy roads to the Level III MONUC hospital, N leaning across me, me trying to grip her so she didn’t bounce too much. Because none of us is a UN employee, we had to fight our way into the hospital – but because she was bleeding like a gutted animal, it wasn’t a very difficult fight.

She’ll be fine, she’s fine, and she was brave, attempting jokes even while she was badly shaking from shock. The Indian doctors got her all bandaged up. When she was wrapped up and shot up with drugs and went home to sleep, and when everyone went back to the party, I stayed sitting up on her couch, watching movies, waiting around, just in case. But it wasn’t necessary. She’ll be fine. A few weeks will pass and her open cuts will crust and scab and turn to scars, and a year will pass and her scars will fade back to skin.

*

Yesterday afternoon, before the party, before the loud music, before the teeth and the blood and the hospital, I was so sad about having to leave Goma. I bummed a cigarette and went out to sit on the porch off my office at work with my cell phone and called my best friend at home, my college roommate T. Before I’d even begun speaking she knew why I was upset, and she laughed at me a little. She reminded me of how heartbroken I’d been when we left college, and how I’d cried like we were dying – and when we left that summer on Nantucket, how sad I’d been – and when we’d left study-abroad in Rome, when we’d left all the places we lived together. A lot has changed in the six years since college. T told me about her lawyer husband and her golden retriever dog and her pretty green house. She talked about what it’s like to be in your second semester of pregnancy, how the nausea has stopped, how her mom still keeps accidentally offering her wine, how her little brother is convinced she has control over the sex of the baby and says he will be furious with her if it is not a boy. A lot has changed. I talked to her about Lake Kivu and Nyiragongo and the dry season and life in Eastern Congo. So much has changed.

But we are still best friends.

The Horizon

2010-06-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

It is dusty in the dry season. Yesterday the dust was so deep in the air that looking across the lake, you couldn’t see the horizon. It was blue water that faded to white that spread up out into blue sky, but there was no line, there was no border.

I haven’t seen the volcano glowing red in months.

The end of this month marks the 50th anniversary of DRC independence. Our office shuts for a week and we will be in lock-down in our house for two days. A handful of my friends will be gone to the beach or in ancient European cities, not to return until after I've left. I will be packing, packing, packing and taking my little boat out into Lake Kivu several last times.

Snap!

2010-06-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

Today, Gisenyi, the paved street off of the beach: My friend B’s phone is stealthily sneaked out of her pocket.

She doesn’t notice until too late.

B and S and I stand dumb, look hopelessly in circles, try to try to find something to do to track down the little boy thieves.

The little boy thieves: By then far far far away gripping her phone, giggling and grinning over it. And maybe feeling a little guilty deep deep deep down beneath their adrenaline. Or maybe not.

While B and S and I stand there helpless, several foreign army men (Indians? Bangladeshis?) come up to us and ask to take a photo with us.

Us in our beach gear.

As if we are all three of us Britney Spears? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

“But just one photo? Come on. Why not just one?”

Conclusion: They don’t get a posed photo of us, but they do get a photo of us sneering, shaking our heads, telling them “No”.

“Creepy,” says S.

"Yeah, creepy," I say.

*

Foreign army men like to take photos of me and my other white friends on the beach. Once I was climbing out of a kayak in my swimsuit and three foreign army men snapped my photo, and I got so mad! and then my friends F & A, who rent out the kayaks and the catamarans, saw me so mad! and they were mad, too! mad for me! and they grabbed the men’s camera & searched through it & deleted photos.

My dear heroes, they are.

*

Also today: A white man I know is swimming in Lake Kivu with his two little boys, two and four years old. Several foreign army men call and wave and ask him to get out. Ask him to bring the boys out. So that they, the army men, can take photos of themselves next to his little children.

The man does not move from the four feet of lake that he is standing in. The boys, with their blond hair and tiny white baby teeth, giggle & cling to him. They are oblivious, splashing in the water.

Creepy, right?

Or.

*

Because then, there’s also this: So many acquaintances of mine travel to so many villages and play with the dusty little lovely mischievous “African” children, pose with the children, take photos of the children, snap snap snap the children. They show the children the photos on their camera and the children scream with laughter and clap and the acquaintances take more photos of the children laughing. And then they post the photos on Facebook. New profile pictures! Cute big deep “African” child eyes! Curly soft brown “African” hair! Breastfeeding “African” mama cuddling her tiny “African” baby!

That’s not thought of as creepy. Those new profile pictures make my acquaintances look adventurous! exciting! mysterious! international! multicultural! COOL!

But how are those photos of “Africans in the village” any different from the photos of “white women and children on the beach”?

They’re so not.

(Except that the "Africans in the village" often don't have access to cameras to snap snap snap photos back.)

*

And me? I have taken photos of the foreign army men, their olive colored hands gripping their guns, their brown waves of hair crammed under blue helmets. I've done that, a little in love with the guns and the helmets and the idea of protection and danger and adrenaline and life life life. That's a little creepy.

So maybe none of us is creepy. Or maybe we all are.

Maybe we are all just curious about each other, one another.

Women/Men

2010-06-10T02:49:00.000-07:00

Way back in December (lo those many years ago), through a series of twisting happenstances, it was assigned to me out of my group of acquaintances to go search the city’s pharmacies for a pregnancy test for a Congolese woman we knew who might have malaria but who might also be carrying a child – and who needed to know about the latter before starting the fetus-damaging treatment for the former. It was all melodramatic and secret but it needed to be done.

The second pharmacy (the first had been gated & padlocked) that my driver drove me to was a small dark room, white painted crumbling concrete walls, stacks of small cardboard boxes spilling pills. I held my breath and walked in and looked up – and there! There was a woman behind the counter. I smiled with relief. I had no idea how to say “pregnancy test” in French, much less Kiswahili, and was dreading playing the charades game with a man.

I took a breath and searched deep into the reservoir of the middle frontal gyrus of my brain for French. "Mon ami, elle pense qu’il y a (peut- être) un bébé dans son estomac, mais – d’accord, elle ne sait pas. Et… elle voudrait savoir."

Blank stare. I continued. "Avez-vous un examen? Ou, je ne sais rien, avez-vous quelque chose l’aider?"

The woman fished around in a big box filled with littler pill boxes and emerged holding up a sheet of birth control pills.

"Oh! Non… il est trop tard pour ca," I said.

At which point the woman’s blank stare slowly suddenly turned cruel and she yelled and shooed me out of her shop. Maybe she was frustrated with my inability to be articulate. Maybe she thought I was asking for mifepristone or Plan B. Whatever my issues were, she wanted no part in sorting them out. I fled.

My patient driver, asking no questions except whether he couldn’t accompany me into the pharmacy to help (“Oh God, no!” I gasped) drove us to a third pharmacy.

Of course, of course, I enter the third pharmacy, and – it’s all men. Men everyone. Two men behind the counter. Three men lounging in front of it. If we were in Banjul, they’d have been drinking attaya and gossiping. In Kitgum, they’d have had waragi. In Cairo, they’d have been smoking shisha and playing backgammon with bottle caps. Outside of Pittsburgh, they’d have had beers and there'd've been sliced off heads of dead deer decorating the walls. At their gaze, and envisioning what I had to ask them, I wanted to melt into a puddle on the ground, feeling wicked like the witch of the west.

And so what happened? They couldn’t have been nicer. They played along with my game of charades, smiling kindly – until suddenly, Essai de grossesse! exclaimed one of the men like he was in a bingo parlor and had just gotten all four corners marked off. He laughed. His friends grinned. I blushed. I smiled. I purchased two pregnancy tests for two dollars and quit the shop, followed by waves and winks.

But in the car – in the car I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window (rolled up halfway as dictated by security rules) and I felt alone. I’d been so happy to see the woman in the first shop. I’d thought – French? Who cares! Swahili? No problem! English? Who needs it! – I’d thought the woman and I would naturally speak the same language of womanhood. Instead, it was the men who were generous. Generous to my broken sentences, to my made-up sign-language, to my embarrassment. Maybe that one specific woman whom I met was having one very specifically bad day, or had a terrible headache. Maybe those men, who were probably fathers, husbands, brothers, were just exceptionally nice human beings. It’s quite possible. But this wasn’t a singular circumstance. There have been many times – before then, since then – where I’ve entered a street, a government building, a coffee shop, and it is the men who help me and the women who stare.

Perhaps it is because, if you are a man, you are more used to being listened to yourself when you speak. You have more confidence in your own ability to communicate. Perhaps that gives some men a little extra patience when it comes to attempting to comprehend the communiqué of a stranger. It's more complicated than just that, I know. But maybe that is part of it.

the last 10 days & the next 3 weeks

2010-06-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

I have applied for around two hundred billion jobs in the last ten days

and

I am trying not to be fatalistic about the whole horrific process of job searching, sending my history deep into the dark black hole of cyberspace, like shutting your eyes and holding your breath and throwing a coin over your left shoulder into a wishing well – that is actually a bottomless pit that sucks in light –

while

at the same time I am attempting to actually do my full-time unpaid job

which

(frankly) I love

(First there is a terrifyingly blank Word document on my computer – blank, blank, blank – and then there is a concept note – and then there is – somehow! – a 50-page proposal – which is then approved and put into PDF – and becomes a signed contract – which then – alchemy! – is suddenly, before you know it, new colleagues and projects and program activities, success stories and schools and psychosocial care and health centers – all from that damn blank Word document. It’s a bit magical.)

but

I only have three more weeks at to finish up the unfinished and to tie up the untied

and

(to be honest) I want to stay.

BUT.

The Golden Chukadu

2010-06-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

For the first seven months I lived here, the center of one of the roundabouts of Goma was draped with flowing orange plastic tarps. I wanted so badly to sneak up at night and peek in between and see what was hidden. But you can’t be out and about like that after dusk, and you can’t screw around with the laws or the police, so. That dream was dashed. I was so worried I’d fly away from here never seeing what lay beneath.

And then last weekend I’m lying on the beach in Gisenyi and my phone bings, it’s one of my friends, she tells me that she drove by a crowd surrounding the unwrapping ceremony, and the statue is a

!!!GOLDEN CHUKADU!!!!!

A chukadu is a traditional eastern Congo wooden bicycle. Men and children are paid to transport tons and tons of goods back & forth up & down hills.

The rumor (which I suspect is more or less true) is that the owner of Hotel Ihusi paid for the statue. It symbolizes the fact that his first business was tiny tiny, he started from nothing, and now he runs the most expensive hotel in the city.

And neighbors

2010-06-03T03:38:00.000-07:00

Two nights ago I was sprawled on my bed watching “30 Rock” waiting for friends to get their eyeliner on straight for after-work cocktails at Doga when I heard this

chi-i-iii-irp
chirp scra-aaa-atch

gurgle chi-ii-irrup

sound which just kept repeating until finally I got up to check and there was a little tiny baby

in my room.

Lake Kivu has crabs swimming around in it. Who knew.

The Existence on Earth of All of My Friends

2010-06-01T01:17:00.001-07:00

One of my friends is moving from Goma to Dungu today. Dungu is in the heart of LRA territory, a true emergency, not Goma with its beaches and dance clubs. Last night I went over to his house to fill up his computer with TV shows & movies. Our other dear friend, his (ex-)housemate, was baking him chocolate chip cookies for the plane ride and I ate too much raw cookie dough while their 2 month old kitten stalked and attacked my bare feet. We talked about the funeral they attended today for their colleague who spit up blood and died over the weekend and about two lovely people we know whose house was raided by “men in uniforms” at the end of last week and about men, women, people, communications, relationships, confrontations and Glee. Some of the things we talked about were sad but nothing in this world or beyond can ever be too terribly sad when you are discussing it with people who are kind and thoughtful and supportive and brave. It was just a silly little stressful evening but it was also a reminder of how much I really truly am grateful for the existence of my friends.

My Life is Idyllic

2010-05-31T03:12:00.001-07:00

Sunday, Sunday: Hiked up smoothly paved roads on Rwandan hills with two friends. At some point along the way, after the turn off for the hydro-electric power plant but before the military base, we were latched onto by two small schoolgirls dressed in brilliant red who were walking to church. I (in my flip-flops) and the two little girls (in their plastic sandals) ran races with each other up and down the hills & we giggled a lot.

After the hike, two more friends met us on the beach. We sprawled around all day and flipped through magazines and gave up secrets. We rented a catamaran for an hour and in the middle of the lake steered the bow windward so the sail luffed and the boat stalled and I dove off into the deep lake. I climbed back on and then balancing, balancing, balancing, positioned myself to back-dive deep into the water, speeding through, I love back-dives more than anything. I climbed on again, clinging to a hull, giggling, and then gracelessly fell off backwards, and proceeded to laugh so hard underwater I swallowed a gallon of Lake Kivu and needed help getting back on board.

It was Ja's birthday and K brought candles for him and we talked to the waiters about sticking them on a slice of chocolate cake and the waiters were so excited about it, making up stories about unpaid bills to get me to secretly sneak back to the kitchen, where we could discuss their timing for beginning to sing "Happy birthday" and ultimately decide that it should be right when their shoes first touch sand.

Addendum

2010-05-27T07:51:00.001-07:00

Before lunch, I went to the MONUC hospital to bring my sick colleague her toothbrush and toothpaste. She was sitting up in bed wearing a kick-ass Metallica tee-shirt, rubbing absent-mindedly at the catheter connected to the peripheral cannula on the back of her hand. She spent the whole of our visit not talking about typhoid or herself at all – but instead asking me questions about my job search and telling me to have more confidence in myself. When she got a phone call from a friend and started chatting in fast Italian with him, I wandered around her cozy little room, out onto her porch, and into the adjoining area, which turned out to be the birthing room. I stood in the middle of the empty not-too-sterile room with the beds with stirrups and plastic glove boxes and took deep breaths, knowing that I was inhaling air that contained the first tiny exhales of new lives, and thinking that that was magical.

It would make it easier on us now if we had someone to blame.

2010-05-27T02:31:00.000-07:00

In May 2007 while I was living in The Gambia our country director’s daughter died. She was a good half-decade younger than me, a school girl, bright and chubby and cheery by accounts. Our country director was Senegalese and so we loaded into one of our pick-ups on the weekend and traversed South across the border into Casamance to his ancestral village outside of Ziguinchor. It was my first time in contested territory. It was my first time at a funeral from a culture outside my own and the wretched screaming crying singing of the women was a phenomenon I hadn’t experienced before. It was my first time to see a dead body up close. I knelt by the girl’s side in her mud-walled home. Some man unwrapped her face – her head lolled and they propped it up with cloth. B said to me in his imperfect English, “This is my daughter, Khady,” as if she were visiting us in the office and he were making an introduction. Khady’s empty shell was bone thin and in the dim light of the house her skin looked old-paper yellow and so later my friend, gripping my hand, speculated that it was yellow fever that killed her.

I was immunized against yellow fever in 2004. Then I misplaced my yellow card, and in 2006 got immunized again. Double immunity for me. None for Khady.

Here in Congo, I took a Western colleague to the hospital two days ago for the usual round of tests – malaria, typhoid, etc. – because she felt ill. In the waiting room I left her to stand in line all alone, fighting to pay her bill, while I lolled on a bench a ways away. I made sign-language small talk with the other women waiting. I cuddled this happy, happy baby named Fidel who had a unilateral complete cleft palate leading to a dark recess instead of nostrils. I thought about how if I’d been born like he was born, by the time I was his age I’d only have had a scar, not a gaping hole into my brain. My colleague, swaying on her feet, texted me to say how sorry she was that the process was taking so long. I texted back: No prob.

I haven’t been mean to her, my sick colleague. I chased pharmacies across town looking for tests. I brought her a glass for water. I sat on her bed and tried my best to look sympathetic and chastised myself for not feeling more empathy. Last night at 10 pm, after her typhoid test turned positive and she was puking up her pills, I called an Iraqi doctor friend and convinced him to drag himself out of bed and admit her into the MONUC hospital. But – I still haven’t felt the compassion I wish I could feel. I keep thinking: Other people get typhoid. Other people don’t get fluids and drips and tender medicinal care.

Khady was taken to the hospital before she died. But for two weeks prior to that, as she was retching and shitting, she was taken to local healers. By the time she was admitted into the hospital, her young body didn’t stand a change of recovering from the dehydration and trauma it had suffered. My colleague is nowhere near the brink of death. But neither was Khady, for those two weeks. If Khady had been taken to the hospital at the same point in the progression of her sickness that my colleague has reached, Khady might still be alive. Yet here I am, begrudging my colleague her ability to access doctors. It’s absolutely illogical.

The poor woman has typhoid. She is accessing the treatment we all deserve. The inequities of the world are not on her shoulders. I don't know why I have to keep reminding myself of that.

How I Live Now

2010-05-25T04:09:00.000-07:00

This is the view from our upper porch.

This display occurs pretty much nightly.

Communion

2010-05-25T03:24:00.000-07:00

Slouched up on a bench in Heal Africa this morning, I wound up a bit too far in my own head trying to dissect how I’ve gotten to be a person who curls herself on a bench in the middle of a hospital waiting room in sub-Saharan Africa.

This morning: A colleague woke up with a temperature of 102° and in this it-is-better-to-be-safe-than-sorry land we decided she should go get the usual-suspects round of tests (malaria, typhoid, and little worms in your stomach). We grabbed a car, we bounced down volcano roads to the hospital, and she was ushered off by white-coats, me left alone to wait.

A small crowd of mamas were squeezed on one bench clutching their children. My arms ached, as they do, to cuddle a baby myself, but I was too shy, so I smiled, gave a half hearted wave, and sat apart from them. Unfortunately/fortunately, it soon became apparent that the reason my chosen bench was completely empty is that there was construction going on above me and plaster crashing liberally down all around my head and so with plenty of clucking tongues and shared Oh heavens, muzungos are hopeless glances, the mamas forced their hips to shrink and found room for me amidst them. And then to complete my happiness, a baby was passed to me, a lovely roly-poly boy named Fidel with no fear of White Strangers, a cleft lip slicing up through his nose, and a contagious cackle when you counted his perfect tiny toes. One little piggy went to market… one came home.

I think it was Fidel’s cleft lip, being able to see inside his beautiful head every time he threw it back with crazy giggles, that led me to wander quite a ways inside my own. First I thought about Hannah, a little girl who also had a cleft lip who I held for an eight hour bus ride through southern Ethiopia, and who peed on me, but that’s a compliment, her mother assured me. Then I thought about the cargo train my friend and I caught from Dire Dawa to the Djibouti border and the soldiers who fired round after round of ammunition out of the wooden carriage into the dark of the desert night, scaring us. I thought about making up nonsense songs with Kewulling, my guard in Basse Santa Su, my best friend in the country, while we waited for attaya to brew. I thought about the sterile fearful feeling of Asmara. I thought about the warm dusty open arms of Kitgum. And stumbling upon a dance in the middle of town. And joining in. I thought about how much I used to think I knew and how little I really knew, and how little I know that I know now. I thought about the reasons I left DC in the first place.

When I handed Fidel back to his mama, she grabbed my arm. She struggled a bit forming her mouth around the words, in English, “Thank you”. She grinned with pride at her use of a foreign tongue.

I blinked in surprise and said “Thank you,” back since clearly it was I who should be grateful to her for her hospitality sharing the bench and her child. I tried “Asante” and grinned with pride myself at my use of Swahili.

Our eyes met in a moment of real communion. Then everything all shifted back to that other reality, the one with me the interloper in her land, she the mama of a child she can’t protect. And I left.

And when I dropped off my colleague at our house before heading to the office, JB (our chef) and Esperance (one of our housekeepers) surrounded me in the kitchen.

"That was a charitable thing you did, going with her to the hospital," said JB.

"That is how we act here, in our culture, helping each other like that," said Esperance.

"We have a saying here," said JB. He held up his hand, fingers splayed. "When this finger is injured," he folded down one finger, "the rest suffer," he wiggled his others.

What was it? It was Mom and Dad, telling me that I am GOOD.

But I think about myself too much.

Saturday morning in a rented catamaran.

2010-05-24T03:45:00.001-07:00

Come what may, go what may, there I was, just flying simply FLYING on the wind across Lake Kivu with the rolling green hills of Rwanda to my back and the volcanic mountains of Congo surrounding me, and

NOTHING

ELSE

MATTERED.

There are so many little moments of pure perfection in life. History and future line up to cancel each other out and all that counts is the now the now the now and the glory of sunshine glinting off of water and the wind brushing your skin.

And even though the perfect moments are bound in time your thoughts are not and it is enough enough enough sometimes to know that sailboats and lakes and windy mornings exist even if they only exist for you in the electric buzzing synapses of your memory in your brain.

And then when we got a bit closer to shore I stood up on tip-toes on one of the hulls, raised my arms, and dove off of the speeding sailboat into the deep fresh water and the white-capped waves.

“Border Crossing”, or “Thanks, David Smith, for all the CONTINUING fun. Heart!”

2010-05-21T00:08:00.000-07:00

It’s time to once again reference* our favorite recent satirical** writing about Goma!

Those familiar with the piece (found in full here) will recognize quickly the harrowing journey described below that our intrepid author Mr. Smith made through the no-man’s-land of the Gisenyi-Goma border.

In order to make new the old, please find a juxtaposition of his story with the plan for the journey my own friends and I will be undertaking tomorrow evening, as we follow just four months behind in the footsteps of Mr. Smith.

While our tales are sure to be very similar, for your ease in telling them apart, please find my writing in PINK. (This symbolizes the fact that I really like the color PINK).

Are you sitting down? Are you ready for a crazed tale of adventure and triumph? Ready or not... here we go!

At the Hotel Before the Crossing is Attempted

Mr. Smith: A jug of hot milk was the only drink proffered. I asked whether there was any chance of a coffee. After another wait, the coffee appeared. I took a gulp. It was, without a shadow of doubt, the most unutterably dreadful cup of coffee ever made. I quickly reached for the water.

Me: I really know how he feels with this. My friends & I are planning to spend Friday night all crowded into a room at this hotel in Gisenyi, and sometimes when you call room service and ask for an iced coffee, sometimes when it arrives the ice is a little melty. Which is totally off-putting and really destroys your adventurous mood. As we’re pulling on our prom dresses and adjusting our blue eye shadow, I’m going to have to keep telling myself that bad coffee does not a bad day make and that these are simply the little tragedies that come with living day-to-day in war-torn Africa.

Arriving at the Border

Mr. Smith: I stood on a dark patch of land, not entirely sure where to go next. A few curious locals turned to look, apparently unaccustomed to seeing someone so obviously not from around their area.

Me: Again, this sentence really hits home for me. It helps me to envision what I may be experiencing tomorrow. Despite the fact that hundreds of non-Africans do cross the border every day, I need to recognize and prepare for the fact that I may, indeed, be stared at. Me. Stared at. Anyone who knows me will grimace reading this, understanding how much I dislike being the center of attention, especially while clad in a pink satin ‘80s prom dress. Especially then.

Mr. Smith: Adjacent to this rough, unromantic clearing, I could see Lake Kivu glinting in the sunshine.

Me: Unromantic? Hmm. Here we part ways, Mr. Smith. That’s not really what we’re going for. The theme of the prom party is “Love by the Lake” and I hope that our dresses reflect that, even while we are standing amidst the barren volcanic rocks of the border crossing. My friend C’s dress probably will be "glinting in the sunshine", though. It’s, like, sewn together from gold sparkles. The fake pearls on the lace sleeves of my dress may glitter a bit, too.

Mr. Smith: I found a shabby brick office and got my passport stamped. "So," I asked, "Is Congo that way?" I pointed at an inviting piece of coastline on my right. The woman laughed and shook her head. "No, it's over there," she said. I looked to my left at the rather less appealing face of Goma – but I was grateful that she had saved me from a week of wandering around the wrong country.

Me: H’s dress is silver and HM’s dress spins out with black tulle. K’s is the hottest of all the hot pinks. KD’s dress sparkles blue with little bowties at the shoulders. J hasn’t chosen her dress yet, but she is planning a side ponytail in her hair, and JH wants to get a vest made out of Primus fabric. (Side note: Why do all my friends have the same goddam initials?) Blinded by the brilliance of our outfits, and with the bright blues and luminous yellows of our eyeshadows in our eyes, we, too, like Mr. Smith before us, may stumble a bit. We, too, may believe that the way to the border is not the area with all the guards and the gates, but instead, perhaps, straight out to sea. I can only hope that there is a woman so kind to direct us, as the lovely lady who guided our Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith: And so, as with many border posts around the world, the moment of crossing the line was rather anticlimactic. Unsteady under the weight of heavy bags, and watched by a small audience, I penetrated (really? penetrated? is that really the verb choice you want to make here?) Congo in the old-fashioned way – on foot.

Me: Oh God, yes – on foot. But here I’m afraid my friends and I must claim a bit of one-up-man-ship on the honorable Mr. Smith. Unless he took the journey through no-man’s-land (that “rutted, pot-holed, jolting terrain”) while wearing stiletto heels bought at the outdoor shoe market… then, ultimately - we win.

Who knows? Perhaps Mr. Smith will read this. And perhaps he will return to Goma. And perhaps next time he will try the trek in five-inch spiked heels.

That’s what us real adventurers do.

(...when we get ready for '80s prom parties in Gisenyi and then have to cross in full regalia to the dance floor in Goma.)

*I know. We’ve all had our fun at the expensive of this article already. It’s a bit dull of me to refer to it again. Rather old news now. But! Ha ha! I can’t help it/I don’t apologize! One last spin around the merry-go-round for me.

**I mean, yeah, it is satirical, right? Because, if it’s not, that would mean that he really thinks… and that the Guardian hires… and that no editors caught… and that… oh, god, no. The horror! The horror!

My First "Bleg".

2010-05-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Hi, internet pals. Here's the sitch: I need a job. I want to be in "the field" in a humanitarian aid setting. I'd love to work in media/communications, but mainly, I'd like to work. I have oodles of lovely former/current bosses who have happily offered me glowing letters of recommendation.

Have any advice for me? Shoot me an email.

EXPERIENCE

Very, Very Big iNGO: Grants Volunteer
•October 2009 – Present, Goma, North Kivu, DRC

Grants Writing: Collaborate with Grants team and Program, Finance, Logistics and HR departments to draft, edit and compile concept papers, proposals, donor reports and budgets.
Provide research support into donor compliance as needed.
Designed and executed media for a community relations campaign in response to localized threats.

Very, Very Big iNGO: Africa Advocacy Intern
•January 2009 – August 2009, Washington, DC

Drafted policy points and co-draft policy proposals. Covered meetings and conference calls and summarized key points.

Largish iNGO: Research Associate
•September–December 2008, Kitgum, Uganda

Research: Ran focus groups and key informant interviews and analyzed resulting data for publication.
Writing: Co-authored needs assessment of vulnerable and exploited children in Kitgum District of Northern Uganda with team of Ugandan students.
Management: Managed four Ugandan national research assistants.

•June 2008 – August 2008, Washington, DC

Research: Researched best practices for designing interventions with formerly abducted children and returned child soldiers.

*Interlude for Grad School*

Small (but cool!) iNGO: Development Intern
•March–August 2007, Basse Santa Su, The Gambia

Donor Communication: Served as lead writer and coordinator on two large UNICEF reports and small reports for individual donors.
Finance/Management: Provided financial planning support for country director of finances. Interviewed potential employees and made recommendations for hiring process.

•January–February 2007, Dakar, Senegal

Logistics: Provided logistical support for outreach meetings in several villages.

*Interlude for College*

Red Cross Emergency Response: Ground Zero Volunteer
•September–November 2001, New York City, NY

Helped family members of victims of 9/11 search hospital lists for loved ones and apply for death certificates. Cleaned boots of firemen working to recover bodies and clear Ground Zero.

San Paolo Entro le Mura: ESOL Instructor
•September 1999–June 2000, Rome, Italy

Teaching: Taught English as a Second Language to homeless refugees from Middle East and Africa of varying ages and ability levels.

Woo-hoo! Hire me!!! (I tried to make this last bit glittery but our internet it too slow for me to find nice glittery HTML codes.)

#1millionpromdresses & #1millionkittens

2010-05-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

In which I share pictures of my friends’ new Congolese kitty & our quest in the Goma used-clothing market for the perfect #SWEDOW prom dress

I heart the beach

2010-05-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

So after a Monday working, Tuesday flying, Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday working, Monday flying, Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday working, it is now Sunday again, again, and I am not working, and I am not flying, and I am grabbing friends, crossing the border into Gisenyi, going to the beach.

Volunteer

2010-05-14T03:41:00.000-07:00

The point of humanitarian aid is to do such an awesome job that we become unemployed, right? Then I must really be AMAZING. Taking that as our main criteria for success in the aid world, I’m basically one of the top workers out there – I have never ever, ever even been employed. Beat that.

My myriad of supervisors here shake their heads and tell me to not give up hope – that I’m doing a great job – that eventually something will fall into place. They say that the lack of response that anyone in HR departments gives me is embarrassing. They say not to take it personally – it’s not personal – it’s not personal. They say oh how they wish they could keep me here. And then they ask me to work Saturdays, and Sundays, too, to complete this budget narrative or that work plan, quickly, now, before the aid world throws me back out on the street at the end of the month. And I do. Because I care about the “beneficiaries”, I care about the “beneficiaries”, I care about the “beneficiaries”.

Person after person after person talks about volunteers disparagingly. Volunteers: People who aren’t real aid experts, just off to find adventure or to feel good about themselves while on holiday. Volunteers: We aren’t the doctors, we are the people who lie and introduce ourselves as doctors at cocktail parties in order to get the attention of the hot men in the room. We’re the idiots who want to make a difference in the lives of gang-raped orphans by hugging them, because we don’t understand the true complexities of the profession. No wonder I get no response, often not even cut-and-paste form letters, from job applications – I’ve been a volunteer in four different countries.

Volunteers: We shouldn’t even exist.

Innovation

2010-05-13T05:54:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up to crickets crickets dead crickets everywhere and if there is one phobia that I have, it’s dead and dying bugs. Hated them as a child, hate them still now.

We are having another 8th plague of Egypt here in Goma, just like back in November/December.

The other night people were over CHEZ NOUS watching TV and one grasshopper swooped down and smacked me in the chest and I fell over and screamed like a child.

They are green and then as they commence dying they turn brown like autumn leaves. Watching the brown ones spin around is like envisioning in your mind's eye the curtain flapping at the end of Harry Potter book 5 – like being privy to a sight of the gateway between life and death. Oh my GOD they creep me out.

So when I woke up this morning with dead crickets carpeting my floor I knew I had to act and act fast to get rid of them before I succumbed to a total panic attack. I climbed the stairs three steps at a time and burst into the kitchen. There’s JB there, our chef, going over his list of ingredients for today’s lunchtime meal.

And a light-bulb flashes above my head.

“Oh, JB,” I say. “Have I got a great idea for an appetizer…!”

No more dead bugs anywhere in our house, now. They are all in our stomachs.

(Okay, okay, not my stomach for God’s sake. I’m a vegetarian.)

Twits

2010-05-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

So this past week I got to enjoying Twitter, seeing how people there said tons of super-nice things to me. But now today all day I’ve been traveling. Since my $5 company Nokia phone does not allow Tweets-on-the-move, here’s a Twit-down of my morning:

6:04 AM Love love love golden pink light of morning. The sun is getting out of bed: That’s the literal translation of “Sunrise” from French.

6:43 AM Happiness is: Eating cold pizza, drinking piping hot NesCafe, sitting on the floor of the L’bshi airport waiting for flight to Goma <3

7:02 AM Um. Um. Um. Uh-oh. Hell. Damn it all to hell. Trapped in L’bashi airport toilet.

7:03 AM Trapped. Trying to pry door open with piece of handle. Why to these things happen to me, only to me, and always to me?

7:12 AM Really, why?

7:16 AM Baaaanging on door.

7:24 AM Banged, kicked on door. Freed by team of MONUC soldiers.

7:30 AM New MONUC slogan? “Always ready to rescue trapped ex-pats when the toilet door handle snaps off in their hands.” (How can Kabila kick them out now?!)

8:02 AM Love love love the cutting lose from gravity feel of take off. Glad I made it on the plane.

10:23 AM Kalemie is all green water and brown land from the sky. Beautiful beautiful beautiful. Hope to God I don’t get stuck here.

11:01 AM Wruuurrring engines, clunk of wheels withdrawing into body. Love the cutting lose from life feel of flying.

12:39 AM Feeeeck, I think I’m on the wrong side of the airplane to see our house. Where is the Flight Attendant??

12:40 AM She’s not looking. Get low. Sneak over.

12:44 AM There is my house. My house from the air. It looks like a Christmas village, oh.

12:45 AM I wonder if A. and everyone at the office are hearing this airplane chugging along, are running to the balcony (like I do), are looking up at ME.

1:00 PM Lunch by the still clear waters of the lake

Work/Life

2010-05-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been living in Goma for over six months, now. I will be leaving for good in another week or three. It’s unclear. At some point I will be asked to come to Kinshasa, but it’s not clear when, and then I will go to [unknown] to work/relax/apply for jobs [unknown].

When it arose that I needed to come to Lubumbashi for work in my second-to-last or third-to-last week in Congo, I was not thrilled, but I was resigned, and happy enough to be WORKING. I like being on a project. I don’t mind that I’m reading and writing on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t mind that I’ll be working all day tomorrow (Sunday). But I do mind – I DO mind – that now I am being asked to stay for another four days.

Why do they want me to stay? Because no one has had time yet for the meetings that I flew all the way down here to have with them.

It’s just four more days. I know. But. It’s four of my LAST days. I want to be in MY room, by the lake, seeing the sunset, soaking up my friends, working in my office, beside my (Goma) colleagues.

Would it be useful for me to stay in Lubumbashi? Yes, maybe, assuming (a possibly big assumption) that people make time to meet with me, work might go more smoothly if I stayed.

Could the work get done anyways? Yes. Could it get done well anyways? I’m pretty sure.

At what point can I say No? I’m a volunteer. I am not being given very much by this organization (other than the brief chance to work for it and amidst great colleagues, which I do appreciate). I want at least to be given a chance to pack up the life I’ve lived for half a year. Isn’t that fair to desire? And to request?

I know that the life of a grants person is waiting, waiting, waiting around for others, bothering them, pestering them, teasing the information we need out of them. I know that the life of a humanitarian worker is travel and change and adjusting fast to new directions. But is it also a scrapping of your personal desires? Is my life expected to be for the ease of the work of my colleagues, and their/our work expected to be my life? I WANT those four days. I WANT them next to the lake, not stuck in a fancy hotel in a dusty city that’s not my home.

***

And when The Work involves attempting to strengthen the quality of health care available to people in the region with the highest mortality rate in Congo, how do I reconcile that with my desire to skip out on meetings about it, and not feel terrible?

Lost in Lubumbashi

2010-05-08T04:12:00.000-07:00

Created a bit of a scene in the middle of a flat crowded dusty Lubumbashi road this morning. It was… lovely.

I’d headed off (randomly, in the direction the hotel doorman half-heartedly waved me) for a nice morning walk and (as is my wont) gotten completely lost amidst the busy shops, paved traffic circles, men selling chunks of quartz and old colonial coins on corners, casino, synagogue, train station, crowds of school children slurping up pink ice cream cones – there was so much to catch my eye. Huge knurly trees with orange flowers that stand upright like tulips lined every street I floated down.

It was like a vacation.

When I stopped in front of a shoe shiner to admire the flag he had flapping above his stand – it had a crocodile biting a soccer ball – he explained to me that it was for the Lubumbashi soccer team and gave me a big sticker showing the faces of all the players – a gift, he said.

I searched through a pile of used clothes in the middle of a square and found a kick-ass bright purple jean skirt, but it was too small. The other women snickered and I giggled with them when I stumbled half over, trying to squeeze it on over my pants.

When the sun spun too high overhead and I realized I’d forgotten sunscreen (and I started to think about all the work work work I really should be doing in front of my computer), I blinked my eyes and looked up and tried to figure out where the hell I’d gotten to. Good little American child that I was raised, I know that when you are hopelessly lost what you must do is look around for a policeman, tug on his sleeve, explain your predicament, and wait for him to pat you on your head, give you a lollypop, and help. So I saw this guy in a blue uniform with gold script reading POLICE on his shoulders slouching over in a plastic picnic chair in front of a bank, his machine gun slipping lazily from his fingers. I went up to him: “Excusez-moi? Monsieur? Monsieur?” The copper didn’t want to help me. He half cocked an eyebrow, shrugged, and suggested I try asking directions from the moneychangers with their huge stacks of Congolese Francs that were stalking stealthily around the bank entrance.

So I did. And they were so sweet. First they wanted to find me a taxi – a reputable taxi, the taxi of a friend, they would bargain the price down to only $1.50 – but I explained that I couldn’t take public transportation (security rules being what they are). They none of them approved of my desire to walk (mzungos are delicate flowers, after all, and need to be driven places, and to avoid the high noon sun) but they respected my decision and decided to draw me a map.

And that’s where the scene began.

Because they wanted to make the map perfect for me. And what started off as a gentle debate soon devolved into waving arms, fists shaken in faces, feet stamping, mouths spitting words. The words were in Swahili, but because some statistic that I read sometime somewhere says that 80% of understanding of language is based upon tone of voice and facial expression, I think that I can translate pretty accurately, with confidence. They were either yelling because one of them had hit the other one’s mother with his car, or they were saying this:

“But no! She shouldn’t take that street, it would be too confusing for her!” “No, no, that map is unclear. Leave it! Let me draw a better one!” “Are you absolutely kidding me with that depiction of the traffic circle?! You are an idiot from the deepest circle of hell. Give me the pen. No – no, I mean it! Give me that pen, NOW!”

I ended up leaving with two maps drawn between three men (with others periodically poking their heads in to add a comment about one corner or another). The maps weren’t beautiful, but after I shook the men’s hands thanking them, and they slapped each other on the backs, everything forgiven, and I took off walking, I found myself back at the hotel in less than fifteen minutes, walking a perfect path.

Lubumbashi. It’s not Goma. But, hey.

It’s kinda neat.

You and Me, Man

2010-05-07T03:36:00.000-07:00

So, I sit around and I write things on Facebook and on this web log about loving the crisp white sheets and the pretty soaps and the little shampoo packets in my hotel room, while I’m south in Lubumbashi for these five days. And while I write these things in one internet window, the other internet window is opened to this , and I read it, giggling hysterically– it’s brilliant, no question. And Nathan – oh Nathan. You and me, man. “Unpaid” workers. (Can we take comfort in the fact that, while our monthly stipends are less than our fellow ex-pat colleagues’ weekly per diem, they are also higher than our national colleagues’ salaries?)

But then I think – No! That isn’t me! – Dr. Alden Kurtz and Nathan are traveling to meet with quote-unquote African Experts who hail from Connecticut and Geneva. I’m here in Lubumbashi to listen and question and attempt to comprehend the technical language of our big boss in the health program, and he is a NATIONAL staff. He’s Congolese. My only job is to understand what he desires as best I can and transcribe it comprehensibly for our donors, because he is too busy running programs to write proposals. And because he’s Congolese, that makes all the difference, right, between me and the good Dr. Kurtz?

Why should it? Seriously, isn’t that weird? I have to say, it’s also something that I thought was weird in the OnemillionteeshirtGate phone conference. Amidst all the experts with their various credentials, there were two other people on the line. And they were THE AFRICANS on the line. I missed the opening of the phone call, so maybe I missed their further qualifications, but what I heard is that they were THE AFRICANS. The voice of the continent. But I mean, hell – I’m damn sure not an expert on North America despite having been born and raised there. (Canada? Mexico? California? Texas? Huh?)

In my opinion, both those persons (one woman, one man, one from Ethiopia and one from Kenya, if I remember correctly) offered unique and pertinent contributions to the OnemillionteeshirtGate conversation. But isn’t that because they are both individually intelligent and knowledgeable? And not an indication that their voices match the voices of the populations of 54 counties? That’s 1,000,010,000 people, according to Wikipedia.

Likewise, my Congolese colleague I’m meeting with here is also very qualified and smart, and when I meet with him, you can bet that I will sit back quietly and humbly and try to soak up his knowledge, asking question after question to clarify his point of view in my mind. But isn’t that based on his own personal merits, and not solely, not mainly, his nationality?

So? Are he and I both Dr. Kurtz and Nathan, in our respective hotel rooms with the paintings of rural England waterfalls on the walls? Or are he and I both just trying, with our Good Intentions (not enough) and our individual skills, to map out movements to combat these horrific mortality rates in Haute Katanga, meanwhile enjoying complimentary breakfast brunches with little packets of mixed berry jelly for our toast? I don’t know.

It reminds me of another debate I had with a colleague last week. H said he thought that, in an instance like Ugandan’s anti-homosexuality law, the “international community” should just keep silent, keep out, and if they didn’t like it, they should just leave. But wait, I said – Wasn’t it members of the international community who prodded that ridiculous and cruel law into naissance in the first place? Aren’t we all responsible for each other, by virtue of the fact that we all are trapped here together on this little mysterious rock hurtling through space, enjoying the same blink of consciousness before we disappear? Me for you and you for me. We’re in it, hopelessly entwined, forever together. I breathe in the air that you breathe out.

What would I think if a coalition of people from Zambia moved into my hometown and began dictating MY healthcare system? Honestly, I’m sure I’d be pretty put off at first, because they and I would have trouble with intercultural communication and they would make weird, offensive mistakes and probably do quite a bit of harm along with some good. But in the end – hell, I lived for a few years in the States without insurance. It’s terrifying. In the end, I probably would have been confused, sad, angry, but also RELIEVED if random Zambians had moved into fancy houses next door and fought to give me access to doctors, where my own country was failing me.

That’s just me, though. I mean it. That’s just me. I can't speak for anyone else.

- in Lubumbashi

2010-05-05T12:09:00.001-07:00

After flights down the country today in Antonov aircrafts with carpeting on their walls and wheels beneath their wings and seats that sit facing backwards around tables like in a train, I arrived at this pristine shiny hotel in Lubumbashi with MODERN ART in the center of the lobby cordoned off behind velvet ropes. The private bathroom off my bedroom has soap that is so fancy that I thought it was candy. I had to sniff it to decide I shouldn’t eat it.

I am here for five days to meet with colleagues about a ~$10 million health proposal which I am taking the lead in writing. I am scooping up information from programs, finance, operations, etc.

I miss the lake and my friends in Goma sweet Goma but the proposal is getting more and more interesting the more and more I meet with more and more people about it. I’m nervous and enthralled and excited – ten million USD! Whoa.

Pa-pa-pa-poker Face

2010-05-03T23:30:00.001-07:00

You’re a sophomore at a preppy New England college and you’ve woken up early to go run three miles with your roommates before your respective classes. (Early is relative for college students. It feels early and your eyes are blurry – but in reality, it’s already 8:46 AM.) Your third roommate is slow tying her sneakers so you and B flip on the TV as you wait. There’s a shot of downtown New York City flickering in the pixels of the screen and there’s a lot of smoke. You and B glance at each other not sure what to think as the voice of the anchorwoman jerks through her speech, taunt with nerves. Your third roommate finally appears and together, you walk to the door, jog out of the dorm, and run down the streets, your shoes crunching up the first red leaves of autumn.

*

You take the train two hours on the weekends from your college with the ivy-covered stone chapel into New York City. You register with the Red Cross. When it’s drizzling out and you can’t find the shuttle stop where the volunteers for the Family Assistance Center (FAC) are supposed to wait, you knock on the window of a cop car and ask them for directions. The cops smile. They let you into their Crown Victoria and drive you down cordoned off streets to Pier 94 and, because they think you will like it, they flip on the siren for a block or two. They are right. You like it. The FAC is wallpapered with missing person posters – and people with the same eyes, cheek bones, noses, mouths, of the missing and the dead come up to you and grip your hand and ask you how to apply for death certificates. They bring you hairbrushes with the deads’ DNA. One older woman with a thick accent won’t let go of your hand until other volunteers bring her Valium.

*

(Years later, when you shut your eyes and picture that older woman who wouldn’t let go of your hand, you see her in a Muslim headscarf. But for the life of you, you really can’t figure out if that was reality or if that’s your memory playing tricks on you, simultaneously imagining other stories from the war. You remember clearly that she told you her daughter was smashed to death when the second tower collapsed.)

*

The third weekend you leave the FAC and begin working at Ground Zero. You struggle holding huge hoses and spray down the boots of the firemen as they shuffle in from the crater. The crud on their boots turns to mud on the cracked sidewalk. You wonder how much of the mud is cement dust, how much is steel shavings, how much is crushed telephones and photo copiers and desk chairs, how much is smashed human, how much is burnt paper, how much is airplane. You get perks, as a volunteer. All the brand name snack foods you want. Twix bars and Ritz crackers. Free shoulder massages, all crammed together in one room, massage chairs arranged like school desks. One of the other volunteers starts sobbing loudly in the middle of her massage, in the middle of the room. No one says anything. When her massage is over, she stops crying and leaves. One of the other volunteers has bandages on her wrists; it’s a strange crowd. You hang out with the firemen, who sleep in a dorm-like area, having 8 hours off at a time. They teach you to play poker using Skittles (from that pile of snack foods) as chips. You slap cards onto the table and together, you laugh until your bellies hurt.

*

Yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon in Eastern DR Congo, on the deck of somebody else’s NGO house overlooking the lake, in the middle of a different war, you are taught to play poker again. Straight flush royal flush two pairs full house high card. You play with real chips and for cold hard cash. The waves smash into gray lava rock and behind your back the sun sets pink. Wine stains your lips red and you bluff and lose and laugh. Then you win. You win seven dollars and then you lose nearly twenty. By the time your driver arrives, you’ve won back most – you cash out down only five bucks. You leave with two friends and drive home to where three other friends are waiting. The generator is still broken and so by candlelight your friends cook pasta and you set the table, plate napkin knife fork spoon. Water glass. Champagne glass. Dessert plate for the tiramisu. You sit around the long table with the warm deep red tablecloth and giggle at stories of California, Iran, Hong Kong, Spain, preppy New England colleges, weird volunteers, snack foods that you miss, computers, gorillas, volcanoes, TV, hair cuts, running shoes, massages, scarves, sirens, cop cars, airplanes, dorm rooms, bluffs, communal living, thick accents, and all sort of things that are only and so very hilarious among friends.

Why I Like You (Yes, YOU!)

2010-05-02T02:54:00.000-07:00

Background:
I’m still young in The Aid World. I don’t even have a salary (yet!). I have worked in Senegal for 2 months, in The Gambia for 7 months, in Northern Uganda for 4 months, and now in Congo for 6 and a half. I’ve been bouncing.

All those positions before, in West Africa (intern) and in Kitgum (research associate/student) – I signed on for them thinking of them as non-permanent. I thought of them as A Thing To Do for A Little While. I made friends, but I never worried about making friends, because after all my real forever friends were back in America. I did my jobs, and I loved my jobs, but I didn’t think about Career Moves or The Future.

When I moved here to Congo it was different. Even though I’m still a volunteer, I don’t imagine myself that way. I imagine myself as a colleague in this organization. (Most of the time) the organization I work for treats me (more or less) as an employee. My friends back home are still my friends and still love me. They are getting married and giving birth to mortgages and babies. (Are they leaving me behind?) Me, I am getting ready to bounce to another spot on this globe. (Am I leaving them behind?)

Choosing This Life, The Things I Get:

I get to work.
I get to be part of a team.
I get to see some really bad things and thus some really good things. The really good things are often the responses and resilience and love that flares up in reaction to the really bad.
I get to meet really really neat impressive people. I get to sit around dining room tables with them and discuss Aid Work and Ideas and Fears. I get to go to parties with them and yell conversations across loud dance floors and strobe lights and feel as if I am accepted by them, One of Them, one of these really really neat impressive people.
I get to work, in theory and somewhat in practice, towards protecting children. I get to talk with fellow women about what They Need, about how I can Stand Beside Them (if they want) and help them in their fight (if they desire help) for a safer world. I get to feel Good about my Intentions and I have people beside me to help me guide my Good Intentions toward helpful action.
I get to go to people’s homes, my colleagues here, and be greeted so warmly, be the recipient of such hospitality, and learn small words in local languages and learns small pieces of customs and cultures that are not my own.
This is less important, but also: I get to buy beautiful jewelry in airport lounges and fly on tin planes chasing the Congo River to its origins.
I get to live in a breathtakingly beautiful spot on Earth. Someone makes my bed for me every morning and brews my coffee at lunchtime. I have a generator which (sometimes) works and water that (often) flows from taps and access to cars and drivers, and these things combine to mean that, in reality, I lead a softer life than the pharaohs of ancient Egypt and the emperors of ancient Rome.
I get so much.

The Things I Give Up:

Time with family. My mom has recently promised that she will get a computer camera so we can web chat. My dad reads this blog. But my college roommate lives down the street from her parents and gets to see them every week. I am jealous of her for that.
Friendships. I will leave Congo soon and go somewhere else. My friends will stay here and then they will go somewhere else. Wherever I end up, I will meet new friends to call when I need companionship or to joke around. I will keep in touch with some people from here (you can never predict who) and others I will not see again (that’s hard). But I am giving up having the same group of girlfriends to get brunch with on Sunday mornings. I am missing out on having guy friends that you get to know so well that over time they turn into brothers. It’s a whole, whole lot to give up.
I give up continuity.

Which Brings Us To YOU:
That is part of why I like all you guys out there. No matter where I will be living in one month time, you will still be here, here in the same place, inside the tubes and wires of the interwebs, writing and reading and thinking and caring and partnering and arguing and getting mad and getting snarking and rethinking and joking and theorizing and chatting.

It’s a small bit of permanence and stability for me, when I get lonely thinking about all the work to be done and all the Social Change to be made. And when I get sad thinking about what I am giving up, you faceless voiceless people out there make me feel a little less alone.

Thanks.

Fighting Child Kidnapping by Kidnapping Children

2010-05-01T02:18:00.000-07:00

So. My brilliant academic friend Gwen sent me this article yesterday:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/04/christian-vigilante-201004

And at first I thought it was pretty fantastic since it makes free use of phrases like “crazed warlord!” and “dealing death!” and “found his calling in this quest for a killer!” ALL IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH and what sort of writer has the guts to do that? and who WOULDN’T love it at first, in the same way one might love an article in The Onion?

Of course, as I kept reading, more phrases began standing out.

Like, um:

An arms depot stands at the heart of his orphanage.

and

I remember once asking Childers whether any villagers had ever declined his offer to take their children [to his orphanage], or whether he had ever taken any against their will. He erupted angrily: “You know what? I don’t have time to be distracted by this sort of interrogation.”

I mean, shit. Forgetting the ridiculous style of the article (another phrase: “Those are people who deserve to die,” Childers says. And a wide grin stretches across his face.) and the cluelessness of the author, that’s messed up and serious and called child abduction or, if it’s across borders as it sounds, couldn’t he go down for trafficking? (Recruitment for cults is defined as exploitation.)

The fact that an article like this can be printed in a widely read magazine and there aren’t immediately police circling this man’s house is f-ed up.

Telephone

2010-04-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

Listened in on the One Million Tee-Shirt Drama conference call. Joined late because our generator is broken and we have no city-power.

It does make me happy to hear so many people from diverse backgrounds being so passionate.

Do you know what I think Jason should do? I think he should drop this whole tee shirt thing (…obviously) and instead use all his marketing expertise to disseminate whatever lessons he actually has learned about aid in the last week to the general public, so the next time someone decides to do a similar Bad Aid project… um… they don’t. Or they pause and think first, at least. Or they ask questions.

It is funny to hear voices of all those people whose writings I have read. I wonder if in the future I’ll hear their voices in my head narrating as I read their writing!

Surefire Cure for Depression/Anxiety in Four Simple Steps:

2010-04-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

(1) Find Primus beer fabric (not the one with the half-naked bartenders – the one with the brilliant bold colors and foaming mugs). Draw a picture of a sun dress with thin straps, a princess neckline, and ruffles. Take the fabric and the drawing to Mama Esther. Pick up your new dress a day later.

(2) Grab a car and driver and ride to the outdoor veggie market. When the road is crowded and you hesitate shyly with your hand on the door (normally you would leap right out but it has been a long week!) let your driver in his brown cowboy hat smile kindly and offer to accompany you. Buy lettuce and crisp green apples with your friend at your elbow, watching your back.

(3) Roast walnuts in the toaster oven with butter and brown sugar. Rinse the lettuce, the water flowing smoothly from the tap (oh how wonderful it is to have water from a tap!), warming your fingers. Toss up a salad with blue cheese and apples and candied nuts.

(4) Pull on the dress. Grab the salad. Go have too much wine with girlfriends.

Damn.

2010-04-28T01:58:00.000-07:00

While I jumped around and teased and took funny photos and cartwheeled and snickered and giggled with my small street-boy neighbors last weekend, one of my Congolese friends was talking with them, individually, about how they ended up ON THE STREET.

Of the eight pre-teens he talked with, two told him they had been gang-raped by militias. Two of eight two of eight two of eight.

One boy (apparently) said it very quietly at first and my friend had to say “What? What? What?” and this kid had to repeat, repeat, repeat.

I love Goma but sometimes it lulls you into a false sense of security with its physical beauty and then the war is able to sneak up behind you and knock the air from your lungs.

*

What the hell were we doing asking them to tell their stories, anyway? I'm terrified of doing harm.

This Orphanage in Goma.

2010-04-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

I, I, I (this is my blog after all) have been going back and forth all day about posting these photos that I have. I, I, I don’t want to be one of those assholes who travels (TRAVELS!) to Africa (AFRICA!) in order to post photos of little barefoot boys on her blog.

When I, I, I first moved here to Goma, I had no idea what it would be like. (That’s not quite true. I had tons of ideas. They were mostly wrong.) So I (I, I) try on this blog (herein) to explain/document my (my, my) life here.

And part of my life in my neighbors.

And these boys are so lovely. They’ve really gotten the shit end of the stick in a lot of ways. They are not all orphans. Some have a dad or a mom who feels like s/he is too poor to take care of them properly. Some are orphans or demobilized youth. I’ve talked to quite a few of them but not that in depth. Mainly we’ve played together. Like, cartwheels and air-boxing and making funny faces at my camera.

I really, really, really want to post the photos so that I can show you (you, you) how beautiful they are, because I really swear they are beautiful, these little and big boys.

But I just can’t wrap my head around the ethics. Like, between me, me, me, and you, you, you, where do THEY fit in...?

(This man is eighteen. He used to live at the center when he was a kid.)

Your WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, DELTA ROMEO CHARLIE?! of the Day

2010-04-25T00:48:00.000-07:00

Our house is a very very very fine house but it is situated on a street that is not so much “street” as “hardened lava flow”. Your abs get a workout just riding in cars down the road as you struggle to balance upright and your seatbelt cuts into your clavicle with every jerk.

Bounce! Ouch! Bounce bounce bounce! Jerk! Ah!

Now, imagine that you are a member of the government, and you are sitting around pondering how to make this road a better road. What would you come up with?

Maybe paving it? No, too expensive.

Okay, how about smoothing in the holes? Too time consuming?

Okay, okay. How about...?

Can’t you just picture the panel that sat around, discussed, debated, and concluded that speedbumps were necessary?

...

I'm totally not even joking.

Waterspout On Lake Kivu

2010-04-23T00:14:00.000-07:00

The sight this morning at 8:10 AM out over Idjwi Island:

The waterspout is cutting right directly at the Congo border with Rwanda. That's what our Congolese colleagues noticed immediately. It's like the natural phenomenon opposite of the rainbow on Easter that bridged the two countries.

Whatever Works

2010-04-22T10:31:00.001-07:00

After lunch before heading back to work today I lay out on the hammock and rocked, staring out over the lake where the waves were CRASHING green, and blew bubbles, which is my new THING TO DO, ever since I found some for sale in Kinshasa.

For the second day in a row I saw these two birds flying together, a big brown hawk or kite or something and a little black and white crow, flying in tandem, no question, circling on the same winds, funny friends.

The bubbles spun rainbowy up to the sky and then I had to leave the lake and grab my bags and walk to the office and inside, up the stairs and sit, sit, sit at the computer for the rest of the day until the sun set and I could come home.

*

Our friend was at a meeting today where disenchanted (manipulated) youths were saying shitty things about NGOs in the region and how they are greedy and stingy and they don’t fund projects that are needed needed needed.

After the youths spoke, the local Head of the Assembly stood up. He said that he himself had tried to meet with the Vice President of Canada (who was in Goma this week) about projects that are needed needed needed in his area. But! She had NO TIME for him. Because! She had to hurry hurry hurry to go to the hospital to meet with woman survivors of rape. And that (said the Head) is where all the money goes, to GBV, it all goes to women.

So then the Head paused and frowned. He looked out over his audience. He said, “You are all MEN, you youths who are complaining. For heaven’s sake, stop raping the women! When there is no more rape, then the NGOs will put money back into Wat/San projects and we can build bridges, latrines, and wells. But! As long as you keep raping the women, they will get all the money. So cut it out.”

HA!!!

Whatever works, I guess.

Life is Tough in the Field

2010-04-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

Do you know what I love??? I LOVE cell phones. And I love Skype. And I don't AT ALL think that Zain and our Satellite Internet Provider are the WORST, the WORST THINGS IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD.

I do LOVE getting all nervous about a job interview (adrenaline! I love it!) to then spend 34 minutes yelling “Can you hear me?” into headphones and a cell phone, and getting no response. No. Response. Whatsoever. Oh! I love love love it!

It’s a SUPER fun time.

"Are we going to Hell?"

2010-04-19T02:31:00.000-07:00

This:
Last night K was multitasking. On the one hand, she was uploading photos of us grinning wearing yellow-and-red lifevests in blue kayaks underneath the orange sun beside the green water of the lake. On the other, she was reading the most recent Oxfam report on escalating cases of rape in North Kivu.

Side by side, both things on her computer, she looked at them, and then she looked at me, and she said, “Are we going to hell?”

This:
Yesterday K & J & I had decided we DESERVED a break because we had had HARD weeks and we had EARNED a trip to Gisenyi to rent kayaks and lie on the beach. We went. It was wonderful. We swam. We lay on our backs in freshly mowed grass and blew bubbles that caught in the wind and whipped into the sky. We bitched about life. We rowed. (There was an incident when we were far out in the lake on the kayaks and military police in a full camouflage motorboat zipped up to us and told us coldly to “GO BACK” but – hey – it’s Rwanda. We should have expected it.) On the whole, it was a beautiful day. Even when it started to rain, we grabbed up our junk and raced inside the fancy Serena hotel, giggling, and ordered hot chocolate and fresh French fries.

Also, this:
In South Kivu, sexual violence is pervasive, affecting women of all ages, ethnicities and marital statuses. Women are attacked everywhere, even in the privacy of their own homes. The sexual assaults are ruthless, with horrific reports of gang rape, sexual slavery, genital trauma, forced rape between victims and rape in the presence of family members. Sexual violence survivors often witness the torture and murder of their children and spouses.

...

The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others, including at least 80 children, during a previously unreported four-day rampage in the Makombo area of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2009.

This:
When I was stuck in Kinshasa last week, thanks to broke-down UNHAS airplanes & bumped MONUC flights, I was feeling very sad and sorry for myself, that I had friends quitting Goma while I was trapped out West, whom I’d not get to bid goodbye. I wrote something of the sort on Facebook whining about MONUC flights and et cetera and a good friend responded “Just be grateful that MONUC is there to protect you at all and that when you eventually travel, you’ll get to do so in an airplane and not on hot dusty roads”. And so I read that, and. I was furious. I wrote back, my fingers so fast that the clicks of the keys swarmed together and the computer was damn near smoking, that I understand that I am crazy privileged but that doesn’t mean I have to wear a hair shirt and beat myself and at the very least it sure doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to feel sad about saying goodbye to people I care about!

It was a snarky comment that she made. But I let it get so far under my skin.

Oh dear.
Because, like K, I do look around at my life here, and look at the stories I hear, and wonder how it could ever be possible to reconcile them.

LRA. FARDC. FDLR. CNDP. Mayi-Mayi. Kimia II. "Amani Leo". PARECO. RDF.

LRAFARDCFDLRCNDPMAYIMAYIKIMIAIIAMANILEOPARECORDFDRCOC.

And in this same area, I enjoy a well-rounded existence consisting of sunbathing, work-work-work, boats, champagne-and-strawberry dinners, gossiping, cappuccinos, more work and more work and more work.

But, hey!
Congolese people who live here also have rounded lives. Anyone who portrays a people as constantly-terrorized caricatures is lying. Like you, like me, also persons born and raised in North Kivu have friends and loved ones and work and fun and gossip and inside jokes and joy and sadness and.

It’s war.

It rips apart families, communities, physical bodies. But human resilience – that remains.

Right?
I’m not trying to justify my choice to spend a Sunday paying to go out into the lake on kayaks but I’m trying to figure out if it’s really despicable in this context or not, OR if it is despicable, on the ruler of despicableness, how despicable it is.

K & J & I could have pooled the money we spent to rent kayaks and paid part of the school fees for an underprivileged kid. But what would that have helped? We believe in aid delivery through systems and professionals, not through money thrown at children. Okay. We could have just sat on the money we have. We could have gone to market and bought a thousand tons of eggplant to invest the money into the local economy, thus depleting the eggplant market and and and. We could have – what?

If we start from the assumption that aid delivery as it is happening in North Kivu is saving lives (it is) and not simply shoring up a corrupt and broken government (um…) then it is justifiable that on our weekend we relax so that during the week we can work even harder alongside our fellow human beings for the greatest common good.

We have to question, always question and question and question and adjust and lobby and advocate and change. But at some point we also have to have faith in our choice to work in aid, in our organizations, and in the collaborative work being done by our colleagues and friends. And that faith allows us to take care of ourselves as well as to immerse ourselves in work.

Right?

What a Difference a Day Makes

2010-04-17T23:42:00.001-07:00

Friday I awoke at 4:45 a.m. in the muggy hot capital city of Congo, threw my junk in my backpack, was driven to the MONUC air terminal, waited hours, flew to the center of the country, waited many more hours, flew to the East, and waited in the rain for an hour for the car to show.

That night I dreamed of surprise solar eclipses and that the sun was speeding up in the sky baffling scientists.

Saturday I awoke at 11 a.m. and walked – walked! walked! walked! – free and alone to the border crossing, got my passport stamped by an older woman who patiently spoke to me in rudimentary Kiswahili, and WALKED through no-man’s-land to Rwanda, to the beach, met friends there, drank cool white wine, soaked in sun, swam in the lake, read Marie Claire, enjoyed two hot chocolates, listened to the waves, had DEEP conversations, and got a massage at the spa.

Life, o! life.

Back to the Lake

2010-04-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

Lake Kivu is beautiful:

My house is in this photo!!! That was SO EXCITING to see:

Oh, Goma, lovely little Goma:

Yup, Goma...

Glee!

2010-04-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

Stuck for a six-something hour stopover in Kisangani.

Kisangani, which, when I thought about it (not very often), I pictured in the very lower East of the country, actually turns out to be in the middle center of Congo. (That’s embarrassing. I’ve lived in this country nearly six months.) Flying over, I saw that there are lots of trees here.

One-and-a-half hours to go till my flight.

The MONUC waiting lounge is full of buzzing yellow tube lights in a ceiling full of pipes and metal vents. There are toilets in a bathroom with a broken mirror. There is a bar in a corner that sells grilled cheese sandwiches and cold Fanta.

Like at the Goma airport and at the Kinshasa airport, there is a graveyard for broken and rusty airplanes right off of the runway and outside the waiting room window. The sickened airplanes squat, dribbling metal bolts and looking forlorn.

A US government guy I am randomly acquainted with from my trek into the Virunda Gorilla Jungle turned up at my side about two hours into my wait. He’s on his way in the opposite direction, Goma-to-Kinshasa, ultimately ending his mission and heading home, then to Sudan Somalia wherever. He told me about a volcano in Iceland that has erupted sending up a dust cloud so large it forced the shutdown of airports in six European countries. He talked to me a little bit about the security situation in Kiwanja.

I have my computer and I have the most recent episode of GLEE! (yay!) that a friend somehow managed to find & get to me. I didn’t have any headphones. Luckily my random acquaintance did. So I curled up in one of the hard plastic picnic chairs and he in another and we watched Rachel & Finn & Mr. Shuster belt out showtunes on my computer and I reminded myself again & again that I was not in a context where it was acceptable to sing along, don’t sing along, don’t sing along…

Flight

2010-04-16T15:28:00.000-07:00

I’m on a super-turbulent MONUC flight cross-country, Kinshasa to Goma via Kisangani. Bounce! Bounce. Bouncity BOUNCE, bounce. Bounce!!! I would pay someone a lot of money to show up at my side right now with a PEOPLE magazine or an OK! or an IN STYLE. What IS happening to random pop culture chicks & dudes in the States, anyway??? Ergh.

And so, also: I’ve agreed to stay here in-country for another month. Four-and-change more weeks. To work on one specific Big Health Proposal. Why? Oh, why.

1. They want me to stay. That’s never not nice. And
2. I care about the programs. And
3. The lake! And living beside it! And
4. My boss, I heart her, she’s a strong manager and kind. And
5. I heart my friends. And
6. I enjoy working. I don’t enjoy not working. (Even if either way, I’m not getting paid.)

I will be missing the May Market at home in Pittsburgh, which I was dreaming about. It feels like I haven’t been to a May Market since I was a kid, with lemons&peppermintsticks, and grilled mushroom sandwiches and flowersflowersflowers. But. But, okay. By staying here, I will be STAYING in the GAME. There will be more May Markets. But there probably won’t be more Big Health Proposals in Congo.

Experience

2010-04-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

[NB: I edited my original post here for niceness. Because just because I THINK something, doesn’t mean I should always necessarily SAY it, at least not IMMEDIATELY, which is a lesson I do attempt, day after day, to learn.]

I remember this: We’re on top of active Nyiragongo. It’s barely five in the morning. We are soaked to the bone – our fingers are wrinkled from the puddles we slept in. Except we didn’t actually sleep, so our eyes are blurry, too. From exhaustion, cold, and shock, our teeth are chattering. The view stretching off to the hills of Rwanda and the wide lake of Congo is something none of us has ever seen. Our ears are filled with the sound of lava bubbles bursting in the glow of the red lake below our feet. And my colleague H pulls out a beaten up dirty plastic Kivu Maji bottle filled to the brim with Amarula. We pass that bottle around. We take big swigs. And then together, we have the courage to leap over the side of the cliff and to begin the sharp decent back to sea level.

I would love to have that bottle back now, and those people around me! Just one big swig before having to face the six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis – er, I mean, a phone job-interview – this afternoon.

Violet Kir

2010-04-14T05:55:00.000-07:00

Last night we sat out on the porch of M’s apartment and drank white wine with violet kir.

(I had never heard of this before. It is my new favorite drink ever.)

We talked about advocacy and badvocacy and debated The Kristof. We ate sharp French cheeses from France and dark chocolate with candied orange peel. There was light rain in the breeze and we got a bit misted but didn’t move inside.

(I was the harshest critic of The Kristof which always seems to be the case but what are you gonna do. The others made some good points, too.)

We talked about journalism and Big Important Letters about Policy Recommendations. It was pleasant. It was all quite interesting and nice.

And we heard acapella singing from a street along the way and we smelled the violets in the wine.

But!

2010-04-13T07:30:00.001-07:00

Our security rules in Kinshasa are stricter than our rules in Goma.

In Goma, we can walk ourselves to the office. As long as it is daylight, we can walk to the coffee shop by the first round-about or past it to the grocery stores. We can walk to the border with Rwanda and cross, and walk through Gisenyi to the beach.

In Kinshasa, we aren’t allowed to walk. Ever.

I’m here through Friday at least, now. On Friday, I will go to the airport and I will stand at the end of the runway and I will stick out my thumb, squeeze shut my eyes, and pray that the MONUC flight deigns to take me on board.

Kinshasa is nice for some things. My colleagues are nice. I like having lunch together with them. It’s nice to get face-time with my boss and to discuss work in person instead of via the crackly cell phone. I like going to my boss’s home for dinner almost every night. I like swimming in the green deep warm swimming pool at our guesthouse. It’s interesting to see this big funny hot loud rusty dusty colorful metallic city.

But.

Gah.

2010-04-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

So at the museum yesterday I saw Henry Morton Stanley’s old boat. And Stanley used this boat to go up the Congo River. And so I was thinking, “Maybe I too could use this boat to go up the Congo River!” After all, I have climbed an active volcano. I have trekked into the jungle to track gorillas. I know where the boat is kept. And I want to get home to Goma.

UNHAS is having fun canceling all my flights back east. I like my Kinshasa colleagues and there is a pool, but I love my Goma colleagues and there is the lake. And I have so little time left here. (Maybe possibly who knows.) And Kinshasa is hot and the traffic is something out of Dante’s first circle of hell.

Oh I miss the sound of the waves.

A Trip to the Museum

2010-04-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

This morning, trying to find the National Museum, J (my driver) and I were stopped at a roadblock by FARDC soldiers. They asked us for a small bribe. A small bribe of $125. Again, that’s: One. Two. Five. US dollars. I laughed. Out loud. I scolded them. We drove away. I called M and I ranted. M advised me. We drove back. I scolded more. They explained. We discussed. (This is all going on in French, thank you very much.) Eventually we all realized that, um, I was actually on the wrong road.

So that worked out in the end.

We laughed and shook hands. And I gave a long speech about the importance of museums and allowing visitors access to them. In French. O! my French cousins, you would be so proud.

The museum was very fascinating. Masks, totems, Stanley’s boat, a statue of Leopold. Also: Happy news! I am now engaged to the museum curator’s son.

I haven’t met him yet, but I’m assured by everyone (curator and accompanying guards alike) that that doesn’t matter. My new fiancé is 33. He lives in Belgium and draws comic books. His mother is despairing a bit for grandchildren. Mothers are the same all over. I liked her. She liked me. We had fun in broken-English broken-French wandering through the museum.

(Of course, this is not my first engagement. If I’d said yes to every single proposal I’ve received along the way, I’d have a whole army of men at my beck and call. I could shore-up MONUC or I could invade small countries. Honestly, it might be kind of great.

I do recognize, of course, that this desire men have to marry me has everything to do with my personality and nothing at all to do with my American passport. Nothing to do with the weird myths and legends surrounding the magic of that small blue book that I possess.)

After the museum, the curator and I took a stroll through the park surrounding Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga’s old residence. In his backyard, we saw the graves for the men who built the railroad in the late 19th century. We saw empty, rusting, vine-covered cages that once held Mobutu’s collection of exotic animals, leopards and zebras and eagles. We saw the amphitheater he had constructed and we strolled beneath his ancient trees, where he used to walk, everyday, at noon.

Mobutu, Stanley, Leopold, and the monuments to their insanity. What a world. As I walked past these artifacts of luxury and suffering, I was so lucky to have the kind company and deep historical knowledge of the matchmaking mother by my side.

Shrinking Space

2010-04-10T00:19:00.000-07:00

Crazy letters, threatening text messages, thirty-five year old “youth” group members in suits & ties and sticks – they are battering down on our humanitarian space. At least temporarily. We my colleagues and I are leaving the outskirts and coming together in the city of Goma. Probably it is not “youth” acting alone. Maybe it is “youth” being manipulated by politicians. Possibly it is not “youth” at all but CNDP. The threads to tie up the stories that we hear are hopelessly tangled and fraying.

I will get my pizza party. The pizza party I cried about missing last week when my flights changed? – It will most likely be postponed until I get home to Goma.

Thanks, CNDP!

We joke like that. But – we don’t laugh.

There are whispers of a cholera outbreak while there is this lack of access to health centers. When you focus inward on it, there is terrible fear.

Kin

2010-04-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

I have had dinner both nights with my lovely boss and her interesting partner. They have cooked and given me French cheeses and wheat breads. When you go out on the balcony in the back of their apartment with a glass of red wine in your hand, you can see the lights of the city stretching for miles, but you can also see Orion and friends winking at you from the sky. Stars and city lights meet at the horizon.

Kinshasa. Kin is HOT. The guesthouse has a swimming pool and air conditioning. (The swimming pool is green and the air conditioning is dependent on the generator working, but there you go.)

When you leave the guesthouse for the office at 7 a.m., the drive takes you 12 minutes tops. When you leave at 7:30 a.m. or later, bring a book. It will take you over an hour. Blink in the morning and the roads meld into parking lots.

In the office, I have been alternating between wearing the white loafers the worker in the airport gave me when my flip-flops snapped and hot pink flowered shoes my boss loaned me. (Oh yes. I've been looking cool.)

I still can’t believe the generosity of that random woman giving me her shoes. As if I were her neighbor, her kin.

(Obviously, it was especially kind since we all know that there is a dire drought of shoes, shoes, shoes in developing countries.)

Soak in strength from the milk of human kindness.

Congo from the Sky

2010-04-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

Journeying to Kinshasa

2010-04-06T11:06:00.001-07:00

I’ve told you before about my absolute and utter inability to say GOODBYE to people. It is a weird choice for a profession that I have made for myself, given that. I am going to Kinshasa for a week and am coming back Monday. I was supposed to come back Sunday. We were all going to have a pizza dinner down on the lake front. Now I will not be home for the pizza dinner. There will be wine and candles and tasty toppings. I will miss it. By the time I get home to Goma, E will be gone. H will be leaving on vacation. K won’t be there. Nothing will be the same. Sometimes I hate love.

In my next life, I will live in a tiny village on a green rolling hill, where people are born, stay, die, and never leave.

I am in the MONUC air terminal waiting for my UNHAS flight. My face is all splotchy and I long for the anonymity of a big crowded Western airport where I could just sit down by myself and have a nice self-indulgent cry and nobody would care. Goma’s a small town. These people around me all know people who know people whom I know.

Oh well.

There’s the rusting remnants of a crashed airplane over to my right behind razor wire curling like a fern frond. O! Goma. You’re such a weird place.

*

Well, damn.

Just when I’m totally content wallowing in my own complete misery, stupid strangers come along with their stupid beautiful kindnesses and they get me – every time. Every time! My flip flop broke as I walked through security and a woman who works here ran after me, stopped me, and gave me – GAVE ME – her shoes. Asked nothing in return. I hugged her and she laughed. Should I have gifted her with something too? Oh, I don’t know. I will try to find a small and lovely item in Kin to bring back for her, hoping I can find her again. THANK YOU. And the shoes? They fit PERFECTLY.

Okay, FINE, humanity. You’ve won me over again.

I’m excited to see Kinshasa.

Monday After Easter

2010-04-05T18:18:00.000-07:00

Went out in my boat and saw king fishers, cormorants, and one tiny yellow butterfly winging across the water. Turned around and then around again, and then there’s the beautiful delicate yellow butterfly, lying face down in the water. I tried to save it, but it was clearly dead.

There’s this dead tree atop which a hawk always sits, looking out over his kingdom that includes the lake and our house. Staring down at the dead butterfly on the end of my oar (with which I had tried to rescue it), I heard loud loud cawing. I looked up; a crow had perched in the hawk’s spot and was bragging loudly in celebration, showing off, swaggering gleefully.

Decided I wanted a treat. Rowed into shore and found a chauffeur, W, and we went to the grocery store to get ingredients to make coffee-can ice cream. I paid for my cream, sugar, vanilla flavoring & rock salt, and then the woman with no nose just a cavernous hole in the center of her face followed me to my car begging for food money whatever.

She wouldn’t leave until W hit the gas and we sped away.

P/Easter HERE

2010-04-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

I took Ndege-Samaki (my boat) out on Lake Kivu and there spanning from our house all the way over to the green mountains of Rwanda was a brilliant Technicolor rainbow – the first I have seen HERE, despite all the sun and all the rain. A peace bridge, hey? An Easter present.

I tried to dye eggs but the only eggs HERE are brown and the only food coloring I could find was yellow so it wasn’t perfect, but I tried, anyway. I made a little Easter basket for the brown-yellow eggs and added chocolate and cut out paper rabbits for decoration.

Four of my colleaguehousematefriends and I shared dinner and candy and watched Glee projected onto our living room wall. Our two French colleaguehousematefriends, E and V, made crepes. I tried to make a traditional apple-walnut-wine dish (except with pear and almonds, oh well) for H, who celebrates Passover. H made a mushroom onion dish which was delicious. We ate Masisi cheese and sang along to the showtune choir and I fell asleep on our red living room couch, listening to the music, stomach full, HERE beside the lake & beneath the volcano & below the rainbow.

Another Brief Note About GORILLAS

2010-04-04T23:12:00.000-07:00

It was completely worth it. The money, the ant bites, the wet shoes, the scratches from tripping over cloud forest vines, the deep purple bruises on my back and arms from gripping onto a Hilux on a terrible road. It was COMPLETELY. Worth. It. All.

Seeing the gorillas is everything that They say it is, when They wax most poetically about it.

I had a thought, just as we were hiking up to the volcano-rock wall separating farms from the entrance to the park. Here I am, climbing to visit mountain gorillas in Eastern Congo. Maybe, instead of making millions of mistakes along the way, I have actually made every choice in my life perfectly absolutely right, because, after all: Here I am.

"Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must've done something good."

2010-04-04T01:37:00.000-07:00

GORILLAS.

2010-04-01T07:07:00.001-07:00

GORILLAS are the largest living primates.

The DNA of GORILLAS is 98-99% identical to that of humans.

I read an essay by Michael Crichton about going to see GORILLAS in Rwanda. It was a very good essay.

Mountain GORILLAS (Gorilla beringei beringei) live in the Albertine Rift montane cloud forests of the Virunga volcanos. Mountain GORILLAS are the darkest colored GORILLAS of all the types of GORILLAS. They also have the thickest hair. Researchers discovered that some 800,000 years ago Mountain GORILLAS evolved from Eastern GORILLAS. No Mountain GORILLA has ever survived captivity.

The word GORILLA is derived from the Greek Gorillai which means "a tribe of hairy women" (unless Wikipedia is lying to me).

GORILLAS move around by knuckle-walking. GORILLAS all have individual fingerprints. (Like us!)

GORILLAS live to be between 30 and 50 years old.

GORILLAS use tools in the wild. GORILLAS are Hominidae.

Threats to GORILLAS include habitat destruction and bushmeat trade. Other threats include disease and war.

I am celebrating Easter by going to see GORILLAS.

I am going to love the GORILLAS that I get to meet. I already love them, just thinking about them. LOVE them. Love.

It's a fucking charmed life I lead.

Maybe, Probably

2010-04-01T02:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe I will go see the gorillas this weekend. I hope it doesn't hail on me in the jungle again.

Maybe I will go to the beach in Rwanda.

Next Tuesday, probably (pending ticket acquisition) I will go to Kinshasa for the first time ever. Of the expatriates I know who have been there, 95% hate-hate-hate it and 5% love-love-love it and there is NO in-between. There are no expatriate lukewarm feelings about Kinshasa that I have ever heard. I can't wait to make my own judgment.

It is raining now. For a couple of days after the volcano, whenever we heard rain smacking the earth, my volcano-hiking friends and I got all twitchy with rain-PTSD. But now. We're healing. Pole-pole. It gets better. I'm kind of enjoying the sound of the rain right now, although only a little bit.

Last night was weekly drinks on the terrace. Fresh squeezed strawberry juice, mojitos, rum. Starlight swimmers splashing in the lake.

Oh the lovely life I lead:

2010-03-30T10:13:00.001-07:00

Culturally Catholic, going to Passover dinner in Eastern DRC.

One More...

2010-03-30T09:29:00.001-07:00

Volcano Photo Album

2010-03-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

The waves are crashing tonight and yesterday morning we climbed down from the summit of Nyiragongo.

Shit, it was incredible.

My God, but we’re in pain today. Our legs! Our arms! The sunburns on the backs of our necks!

There aren’t photos of the hail. I wish I could have gotten photos of the hail that started when we were half way up. But it was pretty violent and could have broken my camera.

With all the rain, the steep path turned into a waterfall. We hiked up a thin waterfall.

There aren’t photos of the last leg of the climb. It was 7 pm and pitch black. The smell of sulfur was intense. The slope was 45°. Pure terror and sweet adrenaline got me to the summit, where it wasn’t pitch black – the red glow from the lava pool lasted all night.

There aren’t photos from inside our tent. It wasn’t terrible. It was small and wet and cold, but we all spooned together for warmth. It was like a sleepover party as a little kid. I thought about all the families that live in one room homes and sleep in the same bed together every night, and sometimes their roofs leak. Our tent leaked. I thought of the banana leaf shelters of the North Kivu IDP camps. Those are barely bigger than our tent. Those leak when it rains. People live in those for two, three, ten years. We only had to spend one night in the elements. We cuddled with each other. We stayed warm.

It was really crazy and incredible.

There aren’t photos of the wind at night that made us think the tent might blow off the edge of the cliff and we might all tumble down the steep slope all the way back to Goma.

But there are photos of the glorious terrible power of our Earth.

I spent last night...

2010-03-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

(cuddling for warmth with five other people, in a leaky three-person tent, in a wind-and-rain storm, on the side of a sheer cliff, next to a ROILING bright red lava lake, atop Mt Nyiragongo, on a fault line in the Rift Valley of the Great Lakes region of Africa, on Earth, in our solar system, in the Milky Way galaxy)

...in the sky.

Gone (Active) Volcano Climbin'

2010-03-26T12:39:00.001-07:00

Be back Sunday...!

Bird on the Roof Next Door

2010-03-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

Goma Dichotomy, Example #459

2010-03-24T01:46:00.001-07:00

And so this morning Lake Kivu was still as sleep, smooth as obsidian, stretching out for miles and miles until the sudden rise of deep blue mountains stabbing up into the bleak white sky.

Already, I stare out over the lake with such nostalgia. It will be hard to not live beside, alongside, amidst this immense beauty. The cormorants diving deep towards the methane pooled in the lake basin. The kingfishers beating their wings faster than the human eye can see. The fish swimming dizzy circles beneath the black.

And so last night we went out to dinner, some colleagues and me. Depending on you, dear reader, and your generosity for hyperbole, depending on your leniency with the sliding scale to define a happenstance as a disaster, I may or may not refer to last night’s dinner as an unmitigated disaster.

The food didn’t come. Our blood-sugar levels crashed. The food finally came. The bill didn’t come. We got pissed off. The bill finally came and we paid it. The change didn’t come. We fought and yelled and groaned and smashed our heads into the wall. The change came. We walked outside in the rain. There was our car; we climbed in. We drove thirty, forty feet, exhausted, complaining, and suddenly everyone in the car with me strangled-gasped and half-screamed.

I look up: There’s a motorcycle with two men on it swerving towards, away from, towards, away from our car. I whip around: There’s a woman lying prostrate on the ground, in the middle of the street. Face forward again: The men on the motorcycle are grinning, the one riding bitch waving his arms, a sick gleeful dance. Back to the woman: She is dragging her body up. Dazed confused.

We aren’t sure exactly what happened. Our driver didn’t see the woman, he only saw the motorcycle, and did his best to steer away, get us away, as fast as possible. My three colleagues saw the mugging/GBV, saw the woman grabbed and smashed into the concrete of the singular paved street in this whole city. I saw the woman slowly stumble back up and stop, still, in the middle of the road, in the rain. I saw the motorcyclists grin and I saw them dance. The assholes. The assholes.

We drove away from her and we drove away from them. We drove back to our razor-wired gate and our strong guards and our warm house beside the lake where our colleagues were watching an old episode of “So You Think You Can Dance” projected up onto our living room wall. We curled up on our comfy red couches, joining them. When we blinked, when we shut our eyes, we saw the woman still standing in the middle of the street, alone. In the rain. Where we left her. We wished that our car had hit the motorcyclists. Not really. But kind of. We don’t believe in an eye for an eye but the base vile depths of us wished that they’d been hurt.

Outside of our doors, the lake stretches calm and sweet. The cormorants dive deep towards the methane pooled in the lake basin. The kingfishers beat their wings faster than the human eye can see. And we people here, we try to do what we can to live together peacefully beside them. And we try. And we do try. And we try.

Goma Joy

2010-03-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

Goma is also:

2010-03-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

Draping yourself in the back seat of J's car, A riding shotgun. Tape deck turned up full volume blaring Tupac*. Bounce bounce bouncing down the hardened lava flows that are referred to as roads. Darkness of the evening.

*J is a lovely blond woman from Siberia whose entire cassette tape collection consists of various albums from Tupac Shakur and Simon&Garfunkel.

Friday

2010-03-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

Just now I began to type something light and pretty about the rain, something pretty and light like a dandelion seed, about the rain, and how sweet and soft it is today, and how the lake is green and navy blue, and the sky is gray.

Then I got distracted and did some work and checked my mail and clicked on my bloglines account and read this.

This morning there was a teenage girl sleeping on the grass in front of our razor-wired gates. Our guards smiled and waved off our concerns: “She’s just a maibobo* resting.”

My friend JH turned 24 years old so there is a birthday party for him tonight at the dance club Coco Jambos: Pizza & wine.

Yesterday my dear colleague who works on GBV issues was trying to figure out which statistic about the number of women & girls raped in the last year in North Kivu is the most accurate because they all seem rather off and anyway in this context of insecurity and displacement and returns, how could anyone ever know?! We joked about it hahaha stupid statistic makers.

Walking home for lunch today I got wet in the sweet cool rain and so I exchanged my flip flops for striped wool knee socks & tennies and I pulled on my sweater with the sea turtle on the front. How cozy I am now!

how terribly terribly cozy

*Street kid

Hellooooo!

2010-03-18T12:49:00.001-07:00

I just walked over to my computer and it was weird because while I was walking, chairs and tables and my computer got closer to me.

That was weird because I spent the last hour on the treadmill and no matter how fast I ran, nothing came closer.

It makes your brain a little bewildered when you exercise at 9 pm at night (down the street at the gym in MONUC headquarters).

I’ve gone to the gym five out of the last six nights. That’s probably partially why I haven’t written on here much this week. I’ve been running and biking out my roiling thoughts instead of tap-tap-tapping them onto a keyboard.

Expression/Art

2010-03-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

On Thursday (before Friday’s pseudo-non-evacuation) we traveled North from Kiwanja up to Shinda in Rutshuru Territory.

In Shinda most of the houses look like this:

and like this:

You might see these houses and you might feel pity for the people who live inside them because the houses are small and because they must be dark inside and because they are made of dirt.

Poverty doesn’t mean a lack of individuality. It doesn’t mean you have nothing. It doesn’t mean you don’t love your home.

Proof of this: Look closer at the houses in Shinda and you see: Dirt walls, yes. Metal roofs, yes. But the doors.

No two doors are the same.

I spent this morning

2010-03-13T07:01:00.001-08:00

Watching the cormorants dive beneath the green water and guessing where they would come up, fish in beak –

You can never guess. They are simply too fast.

A Non-Incident

2010-03-13T00:22:00.003-08:00

We had a bit of a non-incident yesterday by which I mean we were pseudo-non-evacuated from Kiwanja – a careful precaution.

Nothing actually happened. A little tiny part of a marginal section of a minority of the nearby community made several crazy accusations against our NGO. (Truly crazy stuff, e.g. that a hospital we support doesn’t even have sutures in stock and so once after an emergency caesarean section doctors just bound up the new mama’s stomach with scotch tape and she died. Horrible. Terrible. Completely false and not at all true.) Anyway, this little tiny part of the marginal section of the minority of the community declared things like this on the radio and in a threatening letter dropped in our mailbox, cold copied to the local government.

The entire non-incident? Kinda boring. First I sat around thinking about all the work I should be doing. Then I walked here and there following orders. Then I sat in the car. Nothing happened. We were driven back to Goma. La di da, that was that.

Even our national colleagues were just given money and asked to blend in on buses going back to Goma, and to stay there for the weekend. It was thought public transportation would be a better option than having tons & tons of our cars on the road with our big bright NGO stickers on them.

MONUC told us in a meeting that, hey, if we wanted, instead of leaving Kiwanja, we could just come hang out on their base for the weekend. That was very nice. But we demurred.

Love

2010-03-11T06:39:00.000-08:00

On our drive up, A was talking about the “amazing power of love” (or however the hell he phrased that) because we had just passed an FARDC base, and he'd seen a woman there, and he was thinking about what it must be like to be a wife of a soldier.

“Imagine leaving your home, your family, the city or your village, to go live with your husband in an army camp in the bush,” he said. “Love has amazing power.”

To which I said: “Do you really think that women here have a choice in who they marry?”

“Usually,” said A.

To which I said: “Do you really think they marry for love? Or do they marry to escape their lives and to seek out something better?”

“Nothing could be worse than to be a woman living in an army base in the bush. If they were fleeing a hard life, they wouldn’t flee to there,” said A.

To which I (who have probably been reading too much Kristof) said: “But don’t you think they are just coerced or forced or assaulted into it?”

A, ever calm and patient, allowed that some girls/women may be forced into marriage. Maybe even a lot. But some, maybe even a lot, actually chose their own husbands, and truly love them, and follow them to army bases because of that love. And that even if it is only a handful of women who leave their homes and live on army bases in the bush because of LOVE, then it is still worth commenting on, because it is still beautiful.

Yeah, okay.

Kiwanja

2010-03-10T22:55:00.000-08:00

I'm up North in our Kiwanja office for two days. Oh I'm in love. It's so much nicer than Goma. Oh sometimes I don't like Goma, Goma with its dirty sterility, its tall walls, its suspicion. Kiwanja is a town. People greet each other like neighbors should.

Driving up we skirt the park, Virunga, and you can see for miles out over green blue brown grasslands to the sudden rise of Mt Nyiragongo.

"It's like the ocean," I say to mon petit frère A.

"I've never seen the ocean," says A.

"It's like this," I say. And then I add, "But you'll still be totally psyched when you see the real thing," because he will, I know it, and sooner rather than later.

We drive in silence for a while, and then A says musingly, "Rachel, do you ever think about how absolutely powerful love is?"

To which I roll my eyes, snort, and respond, "Oh, for God's sake. What?!"

A is such a dreamer.

Good & Bad

2010-03-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

My mood (I am sure you are thrilled to hear reported) is lovely cheerful happy today! Really I don’t know entirely why: I’m still sick.

Maybe it is the fact that at breakfast this morning, when I could barely speak, JB made me a concoction of ginger, Ugandan honey, and hot-HOT-hot water which was delicious. Or maybe it’s that my cold is partially a badge of honor from marching side-by-side step-for-step with colleagues yesterday beneath rainclouds spitting freezing drops while we cheered for women’s rights. Hell, maybe it is the fact that between my painful throat and fluid-filled lungs, not enough oxygen is reaching my brain so I am a bit woozy and giggly. Who cares!

I am coughing up a storm and wheezing for breath and singing in the office and dancing with my colleagues in the hallways and life today for me in Goma, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, is good.

There is more to be said about the women’s day march and pictures to show you, but I haven’t had a chance to think it through/download them yet.

However, to end this gleeful blog post on a terrible horrible sour note, let me quickly report this: While us women were stomping and cheering in our matching outfits with our signs proclaiming our RIGHTS, a handful of policemen were beating the shit out of some guy by the side of the road. You know when you watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and she does a roundhouse kick to destroy an evil baddy? It was like that, I saw an actual ROUNDHOUSE KICK, before the crowd around the spectacle got too thick and I couldn’t see anything more. Only, of course, and this is THE KEY POINT of the matter: It wasn’t an evil vampire. It was a human person a young man, brown eyes and a blue shirt and a personality, a being. With, I presume, a mom, and brothers, and a family. And with his hands BOUND BEHIND HIS BACK.

And this is right, right, right beside our march for women’s rights.

As if it’s too much work to concentrate on both article 2 and article 5 at the same time. O! Goma policemen. Please. PLEADINGLY: Please. Can’t we learn to multitask?

Hot & Cold

2010-03-07T10:01:00.001-08:00

Have a cold. A terrible horrible no good very bad cold. But today was pretty okay anyway.

Woke up and six of the housemates and I had brunch sitting down by the lake, our French colleague making us crepes thin as tissues spread thick with Nutella.

Went to the tailors to pick up my outfit for the International Day of the Woman march tomorrow. Me & the cashier & the cleaner & the laundress, we all have matching fabrics and we will walk together and I can’t wait.

J came over and we sat in front of the lake (which was blue and white today) and we talked about how beautiful it is, which never gets old. And then we decided we wanted to fly kites, so we looked up on Google how to make kites & we cut up plastic bags & sliced green twigs off a tree & taped & tied and then had beautiful kites.

Unfortunately there was no wind.

Next time.

Today:

2010-03-06T07:17:00.001-08:00

Went to teach English at the little school. We talked about Uganda and my vacation there and big wild animals and reconstruction in post-violence Kitgum and comparative and superlative phrases like “Peace is STRONGER than war” and “People united are STRONGEST of all”.

Love love love those lovely kids.

Went to the tailors to drop of fabric for my outfit for the International Day of the Woman march on Monday. Fun fun fun stuff.