How can I not feel guilty – on visiting the beautiful waterfalls at Zongo – August 21, 2012

The price of rooms for a night can be as high as $500US. Seems astronomical in a place where the value of a Franc Congolese to a US dollar is 930FC to 1$. One cannot mistake the beauty of the place they call Zongo. ‘Nous avons visité les chutes de Zongo. C’était très beaux.’

The trip to Zongo was well worth the four hours and one pit stop along first paved and then dusty, bumpy roads. The view of the falls was well worth the arduous and treacherous climb up and down steep rocky places and slippery rock faces. As I heafted myself up large steps over huge rocks and wondered if they knew that people older than 20 visited this place. There is an expectation that you be somewhat fit to manage the hike to see the spectacular falls and bathe in the natural shower, ‘le douche naturelle’.

I managed somehow even though I keep reminding myself that my 36th birthday is next week. Sometimes I feel old surrounded by the teenaged girls at Café Mozart and the 20-somethings Austrians. But then I see Sr. Hildegard taking the same steps and hiking herself up and down the same treacherous steps with a smile. I have only a little grey hair in comparison to Sr. Hildegard so I feel better and more motivated to continue along.

It was more than beautiful. It was stupendous. We climbed first down and down to see the
caverns at the bottom, then up and up and up to see the top of the falls against a beautiful blue sky. We climbed down a little lower to take more pictures and see the falls from a different angle. Then up again a bit to stand in the mist and be drenched. It was a gentle shower, hundreds of tiny droplets cool against skin warmed by the sun. I was smart and wore my contacts instead of glasses or as in any rain shower I wouldn’t be able to see through speckled glasses.

It was an amazing experience and I’m so glad I got the see the natural beauty of Africa. Being in the city of Kinshasa is very different from experiencing life in a small African village. We had a marvellous time with our packed lunches of sandwiches and drinks at the side of the river before it becomes the falls.

I can’t help but feel a little guilty how much this trip can cost. Knowing that some people, from NGOs or the UN or the government or other tourists, can spend $100 to $500US to stay beside the falls for a night at the resort at Zongo, when the trip here takes you through what looks like poor villages where the children put out their hands and shout ‘l’argent’ or ‘moneee’, puts the reality of the DRC at the forefront where you realize the divide between the rich and the poor
is as vast as this country. It is still hard to realize and accept that there are street children, children living on the street, while this countries riches include diamonds, gold and other precious metals. Such is life?

The beauty of this land and realizing this is where my people came from – August 20, 2012

Beautiful voices singing hymns filled the breezy African air as we stepped out of the truck. The
church was behind us, away from the main road, not visible from where we stood but the voices were clear. The sound of music and children playing greeted us as we stopped in a small village along the way from Zongo to Kisantu to buy some pineapples.

The journey to Zongo and Kisantu in itself was an adventure besides the waterfalls at Zongo and the Botanical Garden at Kisantu. It is the dry season, the end of the “saison seche” in Congo in the southest west part just four hours outside Kinshasa. The red dirt covers the leaves, bushes and trees lining the road. It covers the jeep and our shoes whenever we leap out of the jeep.

The dirt sometimes yellow, sometimes red, covers everything. The children in the village play barefooted, some with a ring and a stick, some with each other, some with a deflated ball. They play, I watch. I marvel at the significance of this for me. This simple existence is the beginning of everything, where it all started. This is the village in the country side of Congo, one of if not the largest countries in Africa, it is vast and I can’t possibly visit it all. This village is just one example of how people are living with the basics. One would think they live simply without basic amenities and modern conveniences. Yet, when we passed by other villages and the children wave and stretch out their hands to our jeep giving us the universal sign for money by rubbing the tips of their fingers together along with the universal sign for hunger by rubbing their
bellies, I also see men waving to us with one hand and the other clutching a cell phone close to their ear. Yes, even out here, four hours from Kinshasa, everyone has a cellphone.

The houses are small according to North American standards, no bigger than a trailer. But the home includes the land outside as the kitchen and the fire for cooking is outside under the sky for a roof and the sun for warmth. No walls are needed for some of the living as there is no winter to contend with, only the ‘saison seche’ and the ‘saison de pluie’. The children play outside and they have lots of room to run around. The clothes lines string from one small hut to another or to a tree. Women wash out in the open, not inside, no room inside for that, again under a warm sun and clear blue sky.

The houses are made of mud bricks, formed from the same yellow or redish earth the house stands on. Some are made of thatch and mud, with either thatch roofs or galvanized sheeting. I recall my mother showing me the mud houses just outside the village where we lived in Trinidad, West Indies, a Spanish-French-and finally-English colony. We have visited these same houses in another part of the world where another group of what could be the same people now live. It is
eery for me how much this scene resembles others I’ve witnessed growing up in Trinidad. When I visit Trinidad now I can see the same scenes now. Thought Trinidad is developed as is Congo, there are parts where people live in one or two-roomed mud huts, where the children run around on dirt floors with no shoes. That is a beginning.

In the city, one can see the evolution of that life but the differences are judgements. I have seen apartment buildings in Kinshasa with some large, some small rooms and I remember the size of condominiums in Toronto, a western city. How is it that people have traded one or two room small mud huts with endless spaces and the clear blue sky for a ceiling and the sun for warmth and the rain for water for small one or two bedroom condominiums with neighbours for a ceiling and no space to run around outside because it is either cold or dangerous? For most it is a choice, the way of the world I suppose.

Standing in that village watching the children play and recognizing the similarities, not only with this village but with other elements of Africa, of Congo that I see in the African Diaspora, fills me with a revelation. My connection to this place is strong. Even though I don’t know what country my African ancestors came from, I can feel that they were here or someplace like it. We have fu-fu in Trinidad but we call it co-co, it is the same thing but with ochroes, I have eaten the original fu-fu that the Africans brought with them when they were transplanted to the Caribbean and other lands. This is Africa, where it all started, where it began.

In some ways, it is a bad as you think but let me live through rose-coloured glasses – July 9, 2012

I have been misled by my senses. I had started to imagine that Congo was not as bad as imagined, (see first blog). It is better than I expected, the infrastructure, the opportunity for business, the money being made; and Kinshasa is a good example of these things. But what I haven’t seen or experienced directly is the Congo that you think of. Today, a young girl said to me in her broken English with a heavy Congolese accent, “Things are not so good in Congo”.

I have only experienced the ‘not so good’ vicariously through others. I have seen some of it, but I have been spared most of the squalor and poverty in my insulated existence at Café Mozart. I am thankful for that. I am content to experience and understand Congo little by little, or as Soeur Yolande has said to me, “petite a petite”. Soeur Yolande once told me this when I had eaten outside of the Café Mozart. I tried bbq-d goat meat “chevre” at a local hangout while out with some new friends. I was a bit sick the next day, surely from the chevre and the beer. Soeur Yolande said to me many things in French, after only one week here this is what I understood: “Marie-Lauren you are too delicate to eat food outside, you can drink things outside, anything in a bottle, soda, pop, beer, not water, but do not eat outside, only here in the community. You do not know who is preparing the food, here you know who and what they are doing. Try to experience Congo, little by little.” As far as the ‘not so good’, Lord let it be little by little.

I have seen the hospital run by the Sisters at Maleuka, I have seen the community that houses four schools run by the Sisters at Sanga Mamba, I have seen what I think of as a boarding school for girls run by the Sisters at Café Mozart in Gombe. I have talked to volunteer from France who was passing through after her vacation home and who is spending two years at Bugemyi doing agriculture, I have conversed with a Jesuit priest who also lives in the bush. I have even seen people living on the side of the room between a tree and a concrete wall just opposite the church I go to on Sundays, Sacre Coeur, where there is a convent of Sisters also. After the second Sunday mass I went to, I saw a child washing her hands by the side of the road, the rest of her body was covered in dust, it is very dusty in Kinshasa during the winter/dry season. Her family was lounging at the base of the wall just along it, with their clothes, drying, strewn over the wall. There was some bits of food, cooking utensils and more clothes lying around.

At the hospital I saw a reality different from where I am. On the tour I saw lots of sick people, but the thing I saw that stuck with me and worried me the worst was the sick children. This is what I was fundraising for. The malnourished kids here need food, especially peanut butter. The Sister
Superior giving me the tour explained when I asked that their parents were very poor and could not afford food to feed the children. Other family members, like grandmothers, had stepped up to help but they also have no money and no job. There were quite a few in the paediatric unit, sick, malnourished kids, they looked just like the kids in the TV commercials for World Vision and Plan, except cuter. One was so hungry, he wouldn’t stop crying. He was fine and quiet when he was listless on the bed, lying on his stomach, legs akimbo, hands sprawled whichever way, face smushed into the mattress, he looked like a ragdoll someone just plopped down on the mattress with no concern for positioning. Very sad. Then when he was sat upright by his grandmother, the
person who is left to look after him, perhaps the realization that his belly hurts or his whole being is unwell, but he just started bawling and was inconsolable.

Little by litte, this is how I am experiencing Congo. Petite a petite.