weekend travels to bandundu

So i’m sitting here in the breezy second home of the president of Sogenac, a beligan family-owned industrial cattle farm in the middle of what will be the new Mai Ndombe province – the epicenter of REDD projects in DRC. We had a meeting with Sogenac just yesterday to discuss possible emissions reductions projects and the kind president invited us to his headquarters. in his rented missionary plane. Don’t mind if we do! we needed a vehicle though, and for this reason we flew to Nioki, to pick up a WWF land cruiser and driver. We were also asked to bring all our own food and water. Our travel group had grown to an almost unwieldy size of 10, including our driver, logistician, 3 german consultants, my 2 press guys, WWF staff, of which myself and mina were the only girls.

We arrive to nioki airfield, a dusty piece of dirt amidst random huts and houses. We were significantly delayed at the migration (note that it’s not called immigration) office (oh, my old friends, the DGM!) who sat in their hut with our passport literally spent 57 minutes copying our the numbers into old notebooks. The bathrooms consisted of 3.5 pieces of zinc leaning shabbily together – but padlocked? So I peed behind a termite hill, upon which our truck was awkwardly parked on a slant. I realize later it’s because the battery is dead and it doesn’t start on its own, it needs a push. Which is tons of fun when you’re in a middle of a village with every kid for miles screaming mondele! Mondele! 

Anyway, it’s time to shop for food. My logistics guy doesn’t really seem to comprehend the conundrum of buying overpriced food for 10 people for 3 days in a place where they have never seen 100$ bills. He buys a few bottles of water, some crackers and is all, let’s go! Um, no. I’m in this weird store that could have been something on H street in DC, where you order fried chicken from the asians behind the bullet proof glass? Well here i am sticking my bills into the holes of a chainlink fence with indians on the other side. You point to things on the wall, or the faded, dusty packages in display cases. I am doing calculations, sweating profusely while all these people are staring at me, and the town drunk starts doing an amusing dance and attracts a crowd. The only bottles of potable water are little 300ml things and according to my calculation we need like, 200 of them. Moving on tot he next place…i finally find a place with 1.5L bottles but the price is outrageous so i send my congolese guy in to order for me, and a boy to carry everything on his head back to the car.

On this main street is mostly flip flops, matches, plastic items like buckets and salt for sale, it’s behind this where all the real fresh action is. we head through a dank dingy walkway to the meat and vegetable market. Here i am greeted with cheers and shouts – come buy my crocodile! Whaaaaa? This woman proudly shows me her croc head, chopped up boa, antilope, you name it.

croc for sale

She doesn’t mind my photographer, who has to constantly swat flies from his lens. This one woman keeps pointing to a baby and saying mondele! Mondele! And hands me the baby. So now i am bargaining for rice, with this adorable baby in my arms. We wander around some more for onions, spices, peppes and manioc. The boy is back and piling all the things onto his head.

We get back tot he vehicle, where the driver is replaced the oil filters and other things with some supplies we brought from Kinshasa.  we start tossing everything on the roof of the truck like a train in india. And we’re off on our 6 hour drive. the women get to ride up front while 8 guys are unhappily crammed in the back. They complain the ENTIRE time. I remind them that the gear shift is between my legs and everytime we shift it’s rather uncomfortable but no. They say it’s too bumpy, too hot, too this too that. The press guys are not ready for this. We are in congo! you can’t get anywhere without at least 6 hours of mind-numbing spine crunching 4x4 ing!

me and my peeps

normally, when you take a picture like this the organizers stand in the middle, flanked by the most important ministers...in this case, all my german colleagues vanished to go take a smoke, and as i stood next to head of the department of sustainable development, our major partner in the project, the pesky civil aviation guys (who have assured me repeatedly that my permits will be approved quickly and easily - i'll be checking in on ) edged themselves in for the photo. anyway, does this look like a miss congo pageant...?

i am NOT sorry

so this week has been mostly around the official launch of our project. to officially launch a project you need to have a workshop where you invite all the important people, especially some ministers to make comments and get paid perdiems, then you give people free lunch and a chance for them to complain at length about the project. and this is what we did. and we even gave out free t-shirts. people go nuts over t-shirts. there was actually a small mob scene and i told my assistant several times to order xxxl. sigh. though of course, this being a workshop, the same photographer guy shows up and takes pictures 2 inches from your face, with a flash and then goes and prints them and then displays them and sells them for outrageous prices. people love the photos too. the thing to do is buy the photo of someone and then give it to them. though people always buy up the photos of me (cuz of my awesome congolese threads, for sure) and then when i go their office it's like, oh that's me! this photographer never really catches the best moment tho, you always have your eyes half open, or you're picking your ear with your pen. so you get these low quality prints that look something like this:

thrilled to be here!

anyway, at one point i see the photographer quickly packing up and running off and even though i have my fancy press team with professional photos, everyone loves bad photoguy. so i ask my project manager, mina, this wonderfully organized and productive korean woman we hired to run our project in kinshasa. and she is all outraged, he was taking photos and selling them! really expensive!
yes, mina, i know, but this is what they do, it's a congolese thing, people love the pictures.
oh.
so i manage to call the photographer back before he is hastily, angrily deleting all the photos and even better, i negotiate to have everything put on a cd and delivered to the office for 10 bucks.
mina comes to me later "so i called the photographer and asked him to let me copy his memory stick for 100$." oh mina, you have not been in kinshasa long enough... 
the funniest though, was a few days before the workshop mina sent around the updated agenda and participants list to all the 120 or so people we invited. well somewhere in there, we had a very important guy listed in the speakers list, but not in the list of participants and so he replied-all (everyone replies all, especially the people who reply-all "your message has been received, thank you") complaining that he was forgotten, and his organization is so important and blah blah blah. so my project manager, who does not have the most fluent french, but does ok sends around a response, but jumbles the words and write "sincerement, je m'excuse pas de vous avoir mis dans la liste" essentially saying "i would like to sincerely say, that i am NOT sorry." this goes to everyone, EVERYONE! even the secretary general of the ministry of environment. so then it's 100 rounds of message received, messaged received, message received until someone is all "wait, i think she meant to say she WAS sorry" message received message received message received and there are hundreds of messages, and whenever you get something that is more than 5KB your email is essentially jammed for the entire day. gah. so finally i send a SINCERE apology and tell them they won't be sorry to have attended our workshop heheh! and we have all been giving her a hard time and laughing about it, because i'm sure more embarassing things have happened.
but ending on a touching note, i since received several, simple, reply-to's! just to me! is it even possible? from someone like a cabinet minister telling me things like, we are all working here together in congo towards the same goal, and we are connected in our hearts and understand eachother, we do not need words to express that. nawwwww.   

omba vs. papi

so i think i've told you about omba, he is our go-to man for flight permits and stuff. he is very calm, sounds like barry white, drives a prado and has a bluetooth thing in his ear. the way he drives (like 10km/hr and never uses his horn) is sortof like the way he negotiates. very passive. he needs a little papi in him, don't back down!
so low and behold our plane is finally in range. we're launching our project at a big workshop with all the ministers, i'm shaking hands, posing for photos in my awesome congolese outfit to which everyone says with a kind of sleezy tone "you need a congolese man to go with that."  
omba's man at the airport says a cessna has just landed at n'dolo.
but i can't go, i need to stay here! so i send my photographer edouard who is only really here to get footage and photos of the plane (not sapeurs and wrestlers, those are side projects). so i send edouard to go without me. we do a quick check of what he needs, copy of passport, spare batteries, photo/video permit...and bribe money. as they get into the prado i call out "receipts for everything!"
6 hours later, i see a visibly distraught omba, the sweaty pilot and engineer in their blue overalls with south african flags on it, edouard was dropped off at home. the plane was supposed to be back in Brazzaville tonight, why is the pilot here, what happened?
ohhhh juste des petit soucis...
so, as it turns out, upon arrival at the airport, they paid their respects to the airport chief, or whatever it is called, who scrutinized the photo/video permit, which i should add was officially solicited months earlier from the DRC government to the tune of 400$. "apparently" we failed to "activate" said permit, kindof like i didn't activate wi-fi on my phone and ran up my roaming bill? this comes at a cost..200$. 
i ask Omba, why 200$? 
"well it is 160$ but they did not have change." 
This is where i shake my head, papi would have never let this happen. 
but at least you have a receipt? 
yes.
the receipt is for 160$. 
someone is eating that 40$ and it's not me.
anyway, the airport chief guy then waved towards the runway, giving his green light. a cessna sits near a hangar
edouard and his much lighter wallet go enthusiastically onto the runway and started taking pictures - not of the plane just yet, just the scenery, when he was immediately siezed by police, miliary. because that cessna is not our cessna, that is the president's cessna! your cessna has not landed yet, it is up there in the sky!
but edouard shows the photos, he was first taking the runway, the scene, he happens to have a piece of the propellor of the president's plane.
that's too much. drats. 
edouard deletes the photos. it's not enough. 
the airport chief arrives, in a huff, and says, this is your problem you will have to pay a fee.
100$....80$....ok 50$ , smallest bill he has and they have no small change - did papi teach you nothing??
this time no receipt.  


there she is!

 

i'm a pretty good kinshasa tour guide

when the conservation thing doesn't work out, i am going to start a tour guide business in kinshasa (if  just only i had darker skin....).
so for this trip i am brought some help down to kinshasa to do some press for our project (stay tuned for killer photos and video, and maybe even a guest blogger). and though my donor is accusing me of nepotism, i selected some good friends for this task. i don't care what the donor rules are, i am not going into potentially hairy situations with people i don't know or trust, and i am not a babysitter. besides, my friends will do this for half the price, and they'll let me put them in said hairy situaitons and probably smile about it. AND, everyone loves them and wants to invite them back.
so eric and edouard arrived a few days after me (and broke every airport rule i gave them), and i set them up with 2 cheap bedrooms in some apartment i found. it turns out to be a UN flophouse/frathouse on the 26th floor penthouse of the building with the giant samsung billboard on it. the view is insane. the elevator is crazier. you go up with blue helmet UN guys, or ladies with big bowls on their heads full of fruit, selling door to door. some of the floors are totally run down and abandoned. the elevator doesn't go all the way up so the last few floors you have to hoof it but then, you feel this breeze: from brazzaville to the airport, from gombe to kitambo, the entire upper layer of kinshasa is yours and yours alone. it's a total man-house with cable tv and cold beer kinda thing and my guys couldn't be happier. but what's better? papi the taximan lives downstairs! it's probably one of the most absolute shadiest corners of town but papi can drive right into the garage: perfect! 

view from above

the first week has been the accustomization phase, where i bring eric and edouard simoultaneously to the most fanciest, and the most crappiest places in kin. so they get their bearings. i think it's working. we had 40$ scrimps one night, followed by eating goat bits in the dark with toothpicks, sitting in broken plastic chairs the next. where are the bathrooms? uhhhhhh everywhere (i don't drink liquids so i don't have to go) eric, who is an exact replica of disco stu asks "is this my introduction to bushmeat?" 
ever since he has been rather pale and complaining of stomach cramps. he falls asleep a lot too. we met the head of the parks department, he says to a wincing eric, on whom you can see the waves of stomach pains rippling in his smile "first order of business, is never come to my office in flip flops." and so we left and went to look for a pharmacy. 

on friday night i brought them to the hottest new club in town: the kwilu bar. every other place is now empty, pretty much every UN car in the fleet is parked outside kwilu. this is the place to be. you can actually sit outside on couches and listen to music that goes beyond crappy congolese disco - you can hear the macarena and jay z hip hop too. all my colleagues were calling me "where should we go tonight carbon girl?" and so here we all were. sadly, we shared a table with some gentlemen from an oil company who were all jazzed about digging for oil in virungas national park - that was not a fun discussion, and around 1 am and too many cocktails later (kwilu is awful congolese rhum) my eyelids were getting droopy and i was thinking about my bed. edouard says, look, there's papi! great, my taxi is here, time to go. i bid my farewells and go over to papi when i realize, oh, he is not here to take me home he is here to party! so, party with the taxi driver, let's do shots and then you can drive me home. this is kinshasa! 

fabrics, fabrics

so as of yet, i have not found a single, relaxed, normal way to buy african fabrics. ok, unless i want to go to vlisco where they are 80$ each but that doesn't count.

the whole reason i am in congo is to fly with this little plane we are bringing in from south africa, but it has nothing but problems like crashing in malawi or needing a new o-ring in namibia so, i'm basically waiting for it to show up. which means i have some down time to visit the fabric store.

i asked and asked and asked around for the mother of all fabric stores and was told avenue du commerce, which is really long, and really insane.

so i call papi and ask him if we can just swing by to buy fabrics before lunchtime.

i can already tell that papi is not too jazzed about the idea but as usual he's very accommodating, no problem no problem. we get to the market neighborhood and slowly creep through streets just filled to the gills with buses, people, animals, potholes, dirt, everything. this is it.

i see the store and right in front there are, as usual, all these guys helping you to park, eager to get their commission. so we pick a spot and the guy is like, here here here and he just tosses aside some poor lady's mango stand and waves us in to his special parking spot. 

we get out and i'm in this crazy fabric store, with the loudest music (as usual, so loud you can barely even hear or understand it because it is blowing the speakers) and this guy with a microphone is screaming "super quality! best price!" and some stuff in lingala. it's chaos. there's a bargain corner, with all the fabric pieces on the floor and all the mamans are fighting over the bits and one of the store employees is up on a box, his head and body all wrapped up in fabric and dancing very suggestively. 

the employees are helpful, even though they have this sortof half shut eyelid please kill me now attitude. it's extremely hot. 

i find what i want and papi comes running in, aurelgrooves! aurelgrooves! i need some small bills! the police! and i see his car has a recently installed (man they are quick!) boot (they have boots here?) on the front wheel. this is not good. there are three angry police officers with weapons sitting on the hood. this is so not good. but papi, he is laughing, oh it's just a little negotiation, but it is implied that i must stay in the store - the police cannot, under any circumstances see me or the whole game changes. 10x the bribe, or they might even arrest me - they always find a reason. also, i can't just walk away, this is not at all a safe place to be wandering.  

so i just hang out in the store. the owners are all, what are you doing here? leave! and i say! i can't! so i just start dancing with the employees up on the box with my bag of fabric until papi has finished his business some 20 minuntes later. then, he peels out onto the sidewalk, let's go! go go go! and i hug all my new friends goodbye and jump into the front seat, just as the policemen are slowly counting their loot (papi is so smart, small bills are always best for bribes) and they realize they could have gotten much more than 10$ from this mondele, but we are too quick! thanks for the parking, seeya suckers! and wait until you see my new dresses...

end of the month in kinshasa

so this was the first time i have been to the airport to pick someone up. being on the other side. so thankfully, i was with papi, who suped up his mercedes or something because he drives crazy fast and it only took us 20 minutes to get to the airport. ask anyone, they will tell you it takes an hour.

papi has a military police buddy or something because he makes a call when we're close and then they just wave us in, as opposed to price gouge us for parking (the hourly rate is whatever you can negotiate, sometimes the passenger and the driver negotiate different prices with different dudes and then you have problems..). once in the parking lot we huddle and figure out our strategy. we need to find the best guy we can bribe to get in, or close to the door. papi's buddy only runs the entrance, he has no authority over the little waiting zone. we have a number of suitable candidates eager to do their duty. papi wants to pick the guy with the highest rank, but i can barely see their little badge stripes, i think the guy with the biggest gun is the way to go. we agree on the most angrily tilted beret guy and start walking. 

it's like a kung fu movie where different waves of people come at you and you need to fend them off with smiles, bribes, illogical debate. like the one guy who said "you can't cross this (invisible) line" without paying 2,000 francs per person.

me: why?

"because if we let everyone close to the airport who wanted to be close to the airport, there would be disorder."

me: what if i pay you, and THEN go cause disorder, because i am so outraged at this bribe?

he looks like he's doing a calculation in his head.

our beret dude is only so-so at helping, he basically steps in when he occasionally remembers that he'll get paid the most when we finally get to the door.

we get to the door, i pay him...but then he goes away! which makes our whole effort moot!

the next guy comes along to ask me for a "coffee" and as i pull out bill after bill i'm saying, "guy, this is the most expensive coffee ever! i am not a bank machine!"

my favorite is when you give them money, and they refuse to accept it because my 5$ is a pitiful amount. that's when i say ok, your problem and put my money away and they get suuuuuper mad.
step on it papi! and we peeled out into the street leaving a trail of beggars, and i don't think i'm welcome there anymore but i don't care. oh, unless the plane i am bringing in from south africa has to land here. woops.

which reminds me - never come to kinshasa at the end of the month! i have a line of people at my office door asking me for money...but i am broke i tell them!
white people are never poor.
don't go there buddy...

there are no gifts, sigh

i'm not even 5 minutes here and everyone, even the guys who play checkers and open the gates at the office are asking me what i brought them, what i brought them. i'm not santa claus, people. it's bad enough i had one 20kg checked bag filled solely with pruning shears and test tubes for our field office. 
on the other hand, i have quickly found out that if a merchant gives you a gift after buying something, in the guise of you being a valued customer who will surely return - well it's only because they just ripped you off and feel kinda bad about it.
i bought avocados from the lady with the big bowl of avocados on her head. she bats your hand away if you touch them (the people at my market in berlin do that too) and asks you when you plan on eating it, now, later, tomorrow and selects one appropriately. i was tired from haggling with my taxi driver, so only half-assed bargained (i tend to go off coffee on these trips and stick to tea) so was also kinda hazy. when she was giving me my bag she takes my hand and says "gift for you my dear" and gives me a avocado so ripe it's almost melting in my hands. (it was delicious, btw).
i wasn't so easy on the taxi driver, because most of these guys are assholes. i mean, they just dreeeeam of picking up a white girl to charge 100 times (literally) more than a congolese. as i paid him the outrageous fare he has the nerve to say ok, that's great, i threw in the security for free. security? what security? you put your driver seat all the way back and slept while i shopped in a store whose parking lot is guarded by UN soldiers!! grrrrr. 

you'd think they...

so when you leave kinshasa, you have to pay this 50$ fee at the airport, called the go-pass. it's mandatory. so, as i was sitting there today on the runway in front of my plane, indian style on the warm asphalt, leaning against my backpack, only 50m away from this decrepit building with its flickering lights, i started to think. if there are let's say, on average 6 planes leaving a day, and each of them has, ok 200 people in it? on average? then that's at least 60,000 USD a day revenue. For an airport with basically one gate, ok, wait, no gates, just a building, really, that's kindof a lot, dontcha think? enough to buy toilet paper? or more than 4 plastic chairs at the bar? how about one, maybe two of those buses, like they have in other cities that transport you from the plane to the terminal? that would be great. because even though our plane is practically touching the airport terminal you need to be transported allllll the way around the back of it and basicallly in a figure 8 to end up right where you started, but closer to the door.  besides the one actual airport bus which is parked on cinder blocks over there, they have limited transport options. there is one small school bus, which is a total death trap, you can either fall through the gaping hole in the floor, or out of any of the doors that open whenever it careens. because it careens. it's like a last lap nascar dash and there is nothing to hold on to but some congolese lady's hair extensions when that thing gets going. 
so now they have evolved a series of mini-vans, like from off the street or something. sooo you walk down from the plane and there's a line of minivans waiting for you. and yes it's just like in the street, you push your way into one until they are filled to 5 times the standard capacity, though here, people are all fancy and they go and put their luggage in the trunk, like we're going on a road trip? and so i'm just letting you picture what this whole scene looks like for the 250-or so people who have just exited this plane and how many minivan trips this requires. and once inside the van people are all, wow, (whistling and tongue clicking) this is pretty nice, what an improvement! a mercedes! as they tenderly rub the upholstery. let it just be said that congolese will always let needless luxury blind mindless inefficiency.

once i exited the airport there was a giant party, flags, singing, madness, uggggghhhh. the president's wife was on the plane and they were welcoming her. that's really great and all but having to barge through 200 people to get to your car, and then having to wait in that car for another hour before making it to the exit just wasn't my idea of funtime. 

finally on the road (there's a new paved road which is made by the japanese, which is 100 times better than the chinese road, btw) we were in the usual stop and go traffic. in front, a huge 18 wheeler, which about half of its wheels missing, and a bunch of dudes sitting on top of piles of stuff. every time the traffic slowed to a stop, a guy would jump out and put a small log behind the wheel to keep the truck from moving backwards. i don't need to tell you that the log was quite round and large couldn't logically by my geometry prevent any dangerous incidents. when the truck would start moving the guy would toss up the log to his friends and run and jump on. as this happened over and over again i ask my driver if he wouldn't mind changing lanes, and he's like, what are you so worried about? that's not the only log you know, they put one under every row of tires, and even in front, duh.  

lozère update: not much has changed

the end of a whirlwind tour through my personal history, via new york, paris and finally: Lozère.

it's been years since i skiddadled through the narrow streets of la salle prunet, a village of less than 100 souls on the edge of la mimente.

lozère tu aères

the old people were still on their bench where i left them and pointed their rickety fingers at me: you're that american girl!
they were loading wood into the communal stone oven, heating it up for next night's bread. they still fete les prunes - where everyone brings a plum pie to eat in comraderie.
in the adjacent valley, Cocurès was having its annual fete. Delighted were we to be able to walk there, beer in hand like old times, though upon seeing the entertainment, we were more paralyzed by fear and imcomprehension. english tourists from the nearby campsites were overheard saying:
"i told you dude, french people are weird." 
the buvette had lines as far as the village square, people lined up to buy bulk red wine and rosé, poured into 1.5L bottles of quezac for 4€. kids who were out way past their bedtime were having their eardrums torn and shredded by a sound system that was echoing within the valley. it was well past 1 am, yet, Pilou et ses danseurs were in full effect. the no good adolescent crowd, which i was once part of was milling in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and mixing their own drinks. at one point they started throwing eggs at Pilou who stopped mid-song to scream, in his southern drawl "putain de emrde mais vous arretez oui les gros cons??" but back to Pilou.
France has a legend known as Patrick Sebastien, who has classy songs such as LMLeQ and c'est bien fait pour ta gueule with sexy dancers in their various costumes. every single song has a refrain that goes la la la la la la laaa la la la la la la la la laaa la la la la la la la la laaa la la.
Cocurès, has Pilou, is his official look-alike whom quite honestly, was undiscernable from the real thing. and this went on, until 3 am. long live la lozère.

a little bit of rio in a little bit of france

krankenhaus

so i recently switched to private insurance in germany, which does not pay kind homage to my socialist heritage, but saves me a ton of money. yes, it's messed up and also sad that you can get better coverage for less - i'm just not rich enough to pay for all the poor folks. so i'm on a fancy plan, where you get choices like only being treated by the chief doctor and a private room. i'm cheap and chose the double-bed room.

on my first night in the hospital for my double malaria i was awoken at 2 am by my new roommate, an energetic 400 lb bearded lady brought in for untreated diabetes. she's been here before, knows everyone by their first name, and speaks rather bruskly to all who manhandle her. they respond with a cool "ja frau ssssssshsspeckmann." her name literally translates to baconperson. after she finally settled down she woke me up with her raspoy smoker's voice "you can't sleep either, eh?" and shared all her problems. her kids have names like maurice marcel and daniella antonella. she doesn't like facebook, she is on yappi. 

the next morning she was entirely half (there is no good half) naked (they don't believe in separator curtains) and i think it made my visitors, including my boss a little uncomfortable. at one point he stopped midsentence and just nodded his head and said "this is sooo east berlin right now."

what started with fighting over tv channels has developed an interesting relationship where we scream at eachother in german. i tell her to stop eating chocolate and smoking and she tells me to stop drinking, which is funny, because i am not drinking! why does everyone think i am drinking?? ...and will i share some of my chocolate pretty please? also, she has recently taken to tickling and poking me. i'll be totally sleeping and wake up to have a giant monster giving me a charlie horse and squeezing my ribs and laughing with her smoker's cough. it's a little scary. 

frau speckmann showed me the joy of the nurse call button, which i feel bad abusing, but not her. you press the thing and what sounds like a submarine horn beeps a few moments later. but because we're right across from the nurse station, she can hear who's there and knows precisely when to press in order to get the cute nurse guy to come in. joey will arrive, all angry, alright who buzzed AGAIN, and frau speckmann goes, she did! she did! and points to me. me? it wasn't me! frau speckmann: frau shapiro has a fever! take her temperature! and lo and behold there is a 90% chance i am sweating and way over 103, which means they then they hold me down and stick me with a painful iv and i can't move for 2 hours. i got her back though, with a huge insulin shot brought by the mean tattooed lady with the pink hair (we may be in a military hospital, where everyone is in uniform, but we are still in berlin), and when the mean lady asked "thigh or stomach?! thigh or stomach?!" i got to answer, "thigh! thigh!"

   

sunday is funeral day

not because i'm having thoughts of death or anything but...in kinshasa, sunday is funeral day. let's just say there's a lot of people in kinshasa, and there are a lot of people dying. loooots of funerals. there are funeral neighborhoods, like, a square where there might be 8 funerals at a time, and you can basically forget driving through in a car. or, just beyond the airport, a whole cemetary neighborhood backed up with lines of hurses and people flooding into the streets from the dusty fields nearby. leave it to the congolese to turn a sad day into a wicked party though. people are snazzily dressed, screaming, holding up huge adorned ribboned guilded coffins and running through the streets like they just won a soccer game. then there's the party, eat some goat, drink some beer. i bet people have funerals to go to every week, it's just how it is. but it's soooo expensive. i heard it's a minimum 600$. then, there are the pimped out hurses with the lights and sirens, or just having the car alarm sound, that's gotta cost more. and the huge imported rose bouquets that say reposez en paix. and if you have 200 people showing up.... someone please explain to me then, how people who can barely feed their families spend half a year's salary on their dead. 

back to bombo lumene (for malaria)

it's my last weekend in congo. we are at the delicate boundary between wet and dry season which means sunny days and cool nights. doesn't get any better. good days for flying, too, which means i have spent all week working on flight permits, contracts, inspections and approaching burnout. 

so on thursday evening, a few colleagues and friends decided we would cut out early friday and head to bombo lumene, the little protected area a few hours away. friday morning my colleagues and i were in our respective meetings, ministers/bureaucrats blabbing on and on and on and we're texting eachother "arrrrggggh almost ready! you?" finally, around 3pm we were all in the land cruiser, i'm on a conference call and can't hear anything over the honking, the buying of 15 liters of water through my passenger window transaction, so i just hung up - we're going to bombo. 

to my delight we are picking up uwe, my favorite little half algerian kid, best friend of my colleague's son. uwe is this adorable egghead who does math for fun and throws disses like "tu es comme le c cedille de surf - t'existe pas!" follwed by a "casssséeee" disssss. on our haste we didn't exactly plan our weekend meals too well, the cooler seems ful of chips and meat and peanut butter (what happens when the men go shopping) and given my prowess for logistics, i'm designated food focal point. an hour an a half outside of kinshasa i ask to stop at a little village market. my jaded kin regulars want nothing to do with this so i offer to go buy the veggies. i fill my pockets with cash and wander non-chalantly over and immediately it's pointing, mondele! mondele! and instantly the women flip the little cardboard price cards over, an indication that prices have instantly doubled. i manage to talk down a few tiny brown eggplants to a ridiculously hefty 3$ - but me negotiating vs. these hardened village women, and it isn't working. i need to play an atout. i go back to the truck and get the 2 nine year olds. i am now a maman, too! and so now the market ladies, they are letting us pet the dead goat fur, poke the eyes of the fish and play with the caterpillars. like melting butter the prices and outer shells dissolve and we are in some sort of feel good disney movie.

arriving at dark at bombo, bats swirling around the flashlights (and so many mosquitoes) peculiar glowing eyes coming from the woods, i have no motivation or courage to cook rice and plantains in a messy smoky charcoal pit. while the adults are serving up their campari i grab a kid and we sneak over to the village and find a few mamans who are more than delighted to cook for us for the leftover market change in my pocket. everyone is setting up their tents, looking at the stars and hey guys dinner is ready! and my little kinshasa family sits down to eat. wow, this is delicious, aurelgrooves! 

i still got it!

leaving bombo lumene, the park warden asks for a ride (they always do, probably only chance to go somewhere and not have to ride an awful crowded bus). this is a new park warden though, the kick ass lady from last time got sent away somewhere else. so sad, she was really happy there and was going a good job - but this is congo, women do NOT get promoted, only demoted. 

so we leave the park and we were unknowingly on a policing run. every so often we would find an overloaded charcoal truck with an park ranger escorting it with his ak 47. pretty obivous where that charcoal is coming from. park warden would get out, ranger would tidy his green beret, do a litte salute and accept his pay from the warden. at first sight this would seem totally mesed up and corrupt, but no, the park warden was paying the ranger for a good job well done and then giving instructions on where to take the prisoners and the soon to be confiscated loot. go find out though, if the ranger doesn't just pocket the change, and take a cut from the charcoal sellers (i hear 1 truck can carry $4,000 worth).

  

roland garros kinshasa edition

i went back to my tennis place tonight at the grand hotel de kinshasa. it was like running out onto the soccer field from the locker room. aurelgrooves is back! high fiives! ok, so i did give them all wwf t-shirts, 4 cans of tennis balls and 500m of tennis racket string, but still, they like me for me.

tanya and i teamed up in our brand new matching red skirts i brought to play our usual opponents, the persian and italian UN guys, who, pretty much make a ghastly scene just about every time we play. i might have to find some other members to mooch free court time off of (oh, except that visitors now have to pay 20$?? for an hour?? i'm going to make a scene too!).
so, ok, it's the dry season and so they haven't watered the clay courts and it's like playing on sand. half the lights aren't working. at one point i go to pick up a ball in the "danger corner" (you'll soon know why it's called that) and everyone, even the lebanese guys two lumpy courts over are like no no no don't go there with your racket! danger! danger! the danger corner is a disgusting opaque puddle with live wires sparking all over the place. it emanates sounds like someone is welding. my ball had actually landed on the wires, and the lights on all the courts were flickering...ballboy comes over with a big wooden stick "je ne veux pas vous voir electrocuté, madame" and pokes the ball out. the ball is now covered in slime and picks up all the clay/sand and we might as well play with rolled up wet socks. so, outrage, outrage from the UN guys. my racket, strung less than 2 hours ago by tanya breaks a string (for which i brought a 12€ package or primo strings argh). she feels bad and makes us switch, and kicks ass with a halfly strung racket and we clean up 3 sets. my backhand is wicked - nice babolat, tanya.

the usually unbribeable completely impartial ballboy/umpire guy was actually rooting for me. normally there is nothing you can do, no arguing, screaming or paying, it's either in or out and he calls it and that's the end. but this time, i was at the net and he was murmuring in this really lowwww slllooowwww voice "il faut gagner, madammme...tu ne peux pas rentrer en allemagne une perdante....si vous perdez je pllleeeeur...." but i would end up laughing and hitting the ball into the danger corner. maybe he was working for other team - well, probably not, since everyone hates these angry UN guys.  

i tried to sneak out without paying but i was caught, and so the UN guys come with me to the sports desk to fill out a formal written complaint about the courts, everything. i guess they pay like, 300$ a month, so i would be pissed too. the guy behind the counter is all you again! hellooo! i loooooove your complaints! here, write another one! and he pulls out a folder and it's 22 pages of letters, all written by the italian. the sportsdeskman promises us that he faxes eeeeevery one of the complaints to the head of customer services. as if there's such a think as congolese customer service. and where is this office? just over there, down the hall. why do you send a fax? hand to forehead. has anyone ever even received a fax in kinshasa? seriously? that thing isn't even plugged in. i offered to take back my 20$ to invest in 4 giant street light bulbs for my next trip back. they are considering it.

who needs gas? not me

so i took a taxi the other day - he ironically picked me up at a gas station, where my previous taxi had lumbered into, full empty. i didn't feel like waiting for the other guy to fill up so i picked someone else. a few meters down the road he starts saying something, which i can't hear over the loud music but we are quickly losing velocity, and then violently jerking back and forward i nearly broke my nose on the headrest. his technique is to just keep turning the ignition and creep along, like that's going to miraculously make gas appear. so we stop. in the middle of the road, he doesn't even try to go to the side. people are really angry and i'm wearing a towel over my bathing suit, with a wet t-shirt shirt, i'm not exactly eager to start walking about centreville.

he turns around and asks me if i want to push, he'll lower my fare. we had already argued about his egregious overpricing, no papa. this white girl is not going to push your car you should have filled it up when you had the chance.

but you can't leave me here madame!

which is sortof true, given the state of my attire, and that i had just changed 500€ into dollars...ok, how about white girl drives and you push?!

deal.

and so here we go, for at least a kilometer, every time i found a suitable place to pull off he would say, no, just a little further! so we rolled right to my house. guy is super sweaty, pushing us over the giant potholes and everything. at one point it was a little downhill and i even got ahead of him. it was an english right side drive thing, so i was confusing the clutch a bit and ok, just once i braked to see what would happen and he plowed onto the trunk and was pretty angry. i was waving to people, honking, saying stuff like "can't this thing go any faster?" of course, no one, not a soul offered to help but the weirdest part? not a single person even smiled or thought this was funny. they were nonplussed, like it was more, pfffff there goes another mondele, they're even too lazy and cheap to buy gas!

"33" km de Kinshasa

you know when you are beyond 33 km from the Kinshasa boundary, because there's a big red 33 Export beer sign with bullet holes in it that tells you so. there are no buildings, no open sewers, just a lot of deforested shrubby landscape the occasional wildfire and periodic clusters of mud houses and cementblock structures where people convene to buy, sell, get on/off of those trucks with jugs and goats on top and create the usual roadside chaos.

the weirdest thing though, is that besides the crooked teetering 18 wheeler or recycled army vehicle, the car of choice is the totally beat-up rusted peugeot 504. just like the one we saw not get stuck in the mud - the only car on the road is this:

my ride is pimped

it's a funny, trippy time warp and you wonder why these things are still running and so beloved more than anything else with 4 wheels?

if a 504 is driving in the direction away from kinshasa, it will have a bunch of dudes on the back, on top of the trunk, holding onto a makeshift roofrack. i guess the angle or something makes it comfortable, and even though they are cruising upwards of 80km/hr, they enjoy the air and happily wave with one free arm, rather than be troubled by near death experiences.

if the car is traveling back towards kinshasa, it will inevitably be piled with 20m makala, or charcoal sacks on the roof and back. this is the major driver of deforestation around here, actually, if not the only reason DRC's forest are disappearing - the entire city of Kinshasa cooks with charcoal.
these cars are stacked so high it almost looks geometrically impossible. their towering loads peer over a regular 18 wheelers, the bumper riding low near the road, dudes hanging off the backsacks, it's a wonder they don't topple over. good thing there are no bridges anywhere, so clearance isn't an issue.
i couldn't take pictures because the windows were covered in mud, and bruno, the quebecois who was driving kept screaming at me "mais esti si tu ouvres tu faye rentrer l'ayre show!"
once in a while, some guy on the side of the road will be holding up a dead antilope or something and we'll all turn our heads, woah! there are still antilope this close to kinshasa? that's a good sign!
there's a tollbooth. big signs that say péage and are a bunch of guys sitting in plastic chairs outside their booths in the shade of a delapidated overhang thing. for us we just wave and a guy jumps onto the counterweight of a big metal bar and raises it. most drivers are confused and don't understand that each lane can only be one way, and so it's not unusual for a truck to take the lane at their far left, and therefore coming directly at you, with a load of like, 18 giant tree trunks and then everyone has to back up, and people are honking and then you just say "tabernac quels grow cowns!" and you engage the 4WD and just hop the curb and drive around the whole mess.

Zongo time

i was invited to a workshop in Zongo falls. They say it's 90km from Kinshasa, which sounds pretty close, but it's pretty much 4 hours of slippery red mud and huge deep ditches camouflaged with more mud.
and unlike other places i've been the local people are just...angry. like they really expect you not to drive and wave, but to get out of your car and help them push an 18 wheeler truck lugging giant barrels of gasoline out of a mud pit. and i mean REALLY angry. sorry folks, i'm a tiny white girl, wearing flip flops and white pants? shrug, put up hands and smile! my colleagues thought it was funny to keep rolling down the window and offering my burly services, upon which the people would throw mud at the car. 
or some angry guy wants you to give him, his 2 wives, their 10 kids and a goat a ride in your car but you're like, sorry, we're full, and besides, i don't hear what you're saying through the window, which i won't roll down if you keep throwing mud at me!
at one point there was quite a backup. someone from our convoy was stuck (oh, germans, when will you learn? land cruiser. not suzuki sidekick), so the whole village is out to help - not before collecting money with their machetes of course.


this thing is pretty much held together by rubber bands

i bet you're thinking, this peugeot here (which has diplomatic license plates, wtf?) and tires balder than a baby's behind doesn't have any better a chance of getting through 3 feet of mud on an incline than a suzuki sidekick, right?

top gear - congo edition



this is the part where everyone climbs on and in and they just gun it

i don't have pictures during the actual muddy party because i was 12 inches off of my seat and smashing my face against the window. take that, nissan pathfinder!

and you have just been proven wrong.

new kinshasa digs #3





So I have some new Kinshasa digs...not too bad, I have my own private mezzanine overlooking the living room with a full view of the city, balcony with tomato plants, a pool down below, and as many stray skinny hungry cats as i care to snuggle...

roommates are out of town and the cleaning lady comes every day. sounds like a perfect time to have a party...

view from above..

i brought back a ton of fabrics from congo

so if you are looking for something to re-upholster your couch or a new snazzy dress, look no further than aurelgrooves new etsy shop! lots of fabrics from my recent congo market expedition, more soon...

http://www.etsy.com/shop/aurelgrooves

dubai is pretty nuts

so take just about everything in kinshasa, turn it inside out and backwards and you have dubai.
over the sound of the prayers you have non-stop consumerism (during Eid the malls are open 24 hours), flashy, clean, bright, connected, everything.
a colleague took me all around and all

i could think of was being in that board room, where the idea guy presents to a prince or whatever looking bored, his convoy of bentleys idling outside.
and the presenter, nervous, hands shaking as he controls the powerpoint presentation is all, how about we have a lagoon with these fountains, and every 30 minutes we blast a song, maybe michael jackson's thriller, or o sole mio, or never say goodbye, and these water jets, well they spray and shoot water along with the music. 
and the prince is all, whatever, ok, sounds good, you have my blessing go do it and leaves. 
and that's the fountain you have in front of tha tallest building thing, and it's just ridiculous. 
there are all these crazy aquariums in malls and hotels, and i seriously wonder if there isn't a secret genetic lab somewhere underground where they are engineering real live mermaids. because that's just about the only thing missing in dubai. real. live. mermaids.

just add bad music..

taking a bunch of kinshasa with me...

Ok, so Ethiopian airlines to Addis. 

Interesting.

The cabin was somehow segregated...white people in the front, Ethiopians in the middle and Congolese in the back. Except for me, I'm in the back.

First interesting thing is how they don't tell you that you stop in Brazzaville. So the plane takes off from Kinshasa, hangs out weird and low in the sky and doesn't go higher, it sort of floats over the city, people glued to the windows and then about 4 minutes after take off "cabin crew prepare for landing" I'm freaking out, omg an emergency?! But people seem pretty relaxed and we gently land in Brazza less then 10 minutes after takeoff. Probably the softest international flight ever.

We pick up some more people in Brazza and we're on our way. Meanwhile, the back of the plane is pretty much like my little hood in Kinshasa. All thats missing is a slaughtered goat. There's music playing out of crappy cell phone speakers (even during take-off and landing), dudes sitting on armrests with their big red Ethiopian airlines headphones around their necks and heads like they are djs. There are card games, texting, secret hand shakes. do they think this is a bus? I walk through to go the bathroom and I had to squeeze through a bunch of guys, just like in a club or cafe, where they purposefully block your way so you have to push them aside, like they want you to touch them...and it's all, hmmmmm kissss hey sexy baby where you flying to

-ughhhh addis, we're on the same plane

And then lip smacking and hmmmm hmm yummy mondele sounds. Really, guys? the plane is full of white people, i think the whole mondele thing ends at the gate...

Later, some Syrian diamond smuggler or whatever comes by and leans over my seat with his "haven't I've seen you before routine" and gives me his card and wants to take me to dinner in Dubai. This is not the dreamliner i was expecting..

The duty free woman gets practically overrun by this mob and now there is a Johnny walker black label party. I have another bottle of wine and am floating in and out of sleep and I hallucinate one of the street walker vendors in Kinshasa. Did I tell you how they have signature sounds to sell their wares? The shoe polishers bang their brushes together. The bread person bangs a flat knife against the large metal bowl on his head and the bag o water guy makes a long kissy sucking noise. So when you're on the street, you just follow your ears. my ears are saying gah! make this stop!

My logistics guy serge is a big airport time underestimator. He sets up your ride to the airport at the last possible minute, my last kinshasa visitor called me at 5 am Easter Sunday, freaking out- my flight leaves in less than 1.5 hours and I'm still waiting at the hotel!!"

Relax, serge will be there. 

And somehow, yeah, he'll sneak you into the customs line with minutes to spare.
on my way out of town, I notice the airport fly by to my left and we keep driving....where are we going?

You can't leave Kinshasa without liboke in your stomach (recall my first ever meal in kin in 2007 was a thanks giving dinner liboke at the grand hotel. haven't really had a memorable one since...)

Ummm, ok, but I'm kind of checking luggage and don't have my boarding pass...

"It's ok, Ethiopians are never on time."

So 20 minutes further, we're in a little bustling town of kinkole and down by the river, tons of Mamans are waving us over, pointing to their drum barrel BBQs with banana leaf wrapped goodies.

Serge orders and even though its only 930 am, ok, I'll have some grilled stew fish...and...it was delicious, spicy, even though I don't like spicy, with onions, fish heads fins and all, floating in this tasty oily broth. 

pre-check-in meal

spicy fishy goodness

i'm nervously checking the time and Serge goes to pay and then disappears in what he calls "market reconnaissance" and goes to all these different vendors, comparing prices of manioc leaves. He loves manioc leaves. Staple of his diet he says, even through its super bland he can't go a day without his manioc. He comes back with a little kid carrying heaps of leaves on his head. We load up the car and he presents me with a dried gourd, which has a tiny bottle of amarula plugging the top.

This is what we keep the booze in, he says. it's naturally thermal - keeps it cool.

It's excellent.

At the airport everyone is all high giving me, hoot and hollering-can I get a sip mondele?? 

In the plane I am gourd girl.

Come bring your gourd girlfriend we'll fill it up with our friend Johnny! Says a man with his toothless grin, nah it's ok, I'm good, but how about a 400franc tip for the DJ? 

Right on sister, nice shirt! I'm wearing one of my African creations.

So long Kinshasa, ride with me until addis and i'll see you again in may!

expat dinner party!

tonight i was invited to an expat dinner party. it's not very often that you, as a visitor can get asked for dinner at someone's house on a weekend, because it's a bit of a downer if they have to pick you up and drive you home after. driving home at 11pm is not annoying just because your host is probably drunk, it's that everyone else is drunk, and the angry drunk homeless people angry drunk police officers and who knows a van full of people that doesn't have brakes might just happen along or a rock comes through your window. but me, i'm "autonomme." i didn't have the guts to drive myself around - i just have a lot more taxi numbers, including justin, who only works nights and has a voice like barry white. so now i'm everyone's favorite guest because i'm not the same boring people they have out with every weekend. oh, also, there's apparently some UN guy with a penthouse apartment with a giant rooftop somewhere downtown and throws a killer monthly party with hundreds of people. i need to find out when the next one is.  
anyway, expat party. basically a bunch of sexy house wives whose husbands are on a mission in Goma or something and they try and make gourmet food with kinshasa ingredients. lots of white wine. though there's apparently a new supermarket called the "extra super" market. best prosciutto in town. things are changing. 
at one point they started talking about all the congolese with funny names. the tennis pro yannick noah look-alike who teaches all these ladies is called "pavé" (cobblestone). another one works for a minister whose name is "baveau" which has the root word for "drool." another has a cleaning woman named "culotte." and on and on. 
so then i put on some music, which they like, and they complain that in kinshasa bars you never heard any european dance music for a change, it's always, always african style grinding stuff. so we start talking about neighborhoods we should go to for a change, and one time i went to bandal, and it's all outdoor patios and pretty fun and maybe there some more interesting clubs. but a bunch of white girls can't just roll into bandal. we need someone to take us. how about pavé?!! screeches and screams we are totally calling pavé and going to bandal!! i think pavé just won the lottery. 

commander gardener

so the landlord sent his gardener over while marie was away. once again - stay away from the basil!
basil? those are weeds, madame.
it's basil! taste!
ooohhhhhh.
the gardener calls himself "le comandant." (the commander?). and speaks of himself in the 3rd person:
if i give you my keys, commander, how will i get in later?
the commander never leaves his post.
ok, so i can call you or whatever?
the commander always answers his phone.
but the conversation was weird because the commander was all, don't you remember? we talked about this last month? and then i realized he thinks i'm marie, because we all look the same (and more often, they all think we are chinese).
the commander brought over some new trees to plant and they are...pine trees? like the ones you line fences in more appropriately temperate climates.
why aren't you planting palm trees or something, are you sure these things grow here?
the commander wants you to feel at home, madame.
why would we fly all the way here just to be in a place that looks like home?!
turns out marie is allergic to juniper, that's what they are and she has them removed almost as soon as they are planted. we both cae out of the house to supervise and the gardener helper guy hid beind a rock screaming oh my god, there are two of them!!"

celine is the iron lady

today i arranged some more meetings with ministers and brought my colleagues didier and serge along. mostly because i am trying to stop serge from disappearing from the office like he usually doesn, and because didier wears real snazzy shirts and suits, and has a car. the office has run out of cash, and no cash means no gas, and so the drivers are all up in arms so you can't get driven anywhere in the office land cruiser.
i don't know how the conversation started but it was about margaret thatcher, and serge is a little older and he was deadpan serious when he said she changed his life. i seriously think a tear welled up in his eyes. i was totally making fun of him for it when didier said "but the real iron lady is celine dion!" and turned up the stereo. all of us, including some lady we picked up who needed a ride were suddenly screaming the lyrics of the titanic song, windows open, all wearing our sunglasses, mine of the jackie-o variety and the boys with their tom cruise aviators.
it must have been an odd sight because even the scrubby kids who beg at your window and snatch whatever they can from inside your car stayed far far away. good to know.
the meeting was in the fabulous oldest building in kinshasa, which formerly had the titanic-style indian restaurant up top with the super scary elevator. well the indians are gone, it's all ministry of environment, and the elevator is out of service :(

use at your own risk?