The Sisters and the Well

Saturday, October 13, we went for a ride in the countryside with three Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. We had met them at their chapel on the previous Sunday – we’d been told the mass there always lasted just one hour!
I had met another nun who lives there, Sr. Marie-Bernard, when she applied for a Democracy and Human Rights Fund for a civic participation project involving the youth of this country, who have never experienced the least bit of democracy in their lives (she will receive the funding next Tuesday). Soeur Marie-Bernard introduced us to Srs. Georgette and Anita, who showed us around their vegetable garden and orchard. We spotted a dwarf coconut tree bearing cute little golden coconuts. They gave us a bunch to try, which were the best we’ve had in a long time! Even André, our cook, was excited: “Can you ask them for one for me to plant?”

Soeur Georgette is Congolese from the Kasai Oriental province, and spent three years in Colombia, and Soeur Anita is from Peru. So we got to practice our Spanish!

We visited the convent and, over coffee, they told us about all the works they are responsible for here, which were amazing for a few dozen people. They have convents in several cities, from which they run clinics, orphanages, schools, training centers, etc. They own several plots of land which they want to put to better use, and said, why don’t we go see the Menkao mission on Saturday?

We picked up Soeurs Georgette, Anita, and another Congolese sister, Sr. Jacinthe, and then another Spanish speaker, Maruja, wife of a USAID employee, who hangs out with the sisters. Poor Sr. Jacinthe was the only non-Spanish speaker apart from Hokins, our driver. We talked, prayed, and sang songs in Spanish. The sisters were amazed that I knew all the words, but after years of going to Mass at the Agrupacion, something has to stick! The sisters always have interesting stories, and they laugh a lot - it was a great ride.

It was a three-hour ride – the first hour is spent getting out of Kinshasa, the next hour is on the road to Kikwit, not a bad one by Congolese standards, and the third on a dirt track, which crosses the savanna. The savanna is covered with short brushy or grassy green plants (pls note how I refrain from showing off my knowledge of botany), dotted with occasional yellow, lavender and very bright red flowers. A few trees here and there, except where there’s a village, with its customary fruit trees (didn’t see a lot of breadfruit): mango, “safoutiller”, avocado, papaya, banana, etc. Near the villages there are usually fields of manioc (cassava), and then it’s back to the brushy plants and wildflowers. The road is two tracks divided by shorter plants. The tracks often turn into deep trenches and ruts, and dip into ponds, some surprisingly deep - the rainy season had just dumped its first skyfull of rain that night.

Picture: Safoutiller fruit. They're cooked and eaten as a vegetable. Haven't tried it yet.

Our very able chauffeur handled it all perfectly, but I did hang on to the armrest quite a few times!

After having been shaken, twisted and rolled for about an hour, we crossed Menkao-Ville and then after 15 minutes more, finally arrived at the village (Swalempo) where the sisters have their mission and their plot of land. We saw the small building they’ve built there, basically out of mud bricks, but with a concrete floor and corrugated tin roof. The picture shows this building and the makeshift rainwater collection system.

The toilet is a palms-woven-on-sticks hut several yards away, with a metal Turkish thing-hole covering the ground, and the shower is a slightly wider and taller palms-on-sticks enclosure, not connected to water. You take your own bucket. Somehow neither was smelly or fly-ridden. The contrast with the place I'd seen two days before was striking. Something about being in open countryside instead of a crowded slum…?

Around the building, the sisters years ago planted avocado trees, mango trees, and they even have a breadfruit tree! Score one more point, Sisters! They also had papaya and banana trees, and a field of beautiful pineapples…

Picture: the Breadfruit tree on the Sisters' land.

They have a water tank, elevated about one story high, but no water. This is the problem: they paid for a company to dig a well in the marshy area about 1 km away, across the village. Near the well they installed a pretty little windmill, which turns gaily at the least pretense of a breeze. The nuns also paid for another water tank for the villagers. Everything was connected by pipes and worked ok for about a year, and then the pipes clogged up with mud. They run underground so it’s hard to clean them up. The windmill turns but nothing comes up. :( There's no river. So the villagers now send buckets down the well. Bucket water is not as clean as water that's piped up from a covered well. The cover is a yard-diameter concrete slab, so of course it's been left uncovered since the pipes choked up; so insects fly in, frogs fall in and die, etc.

We walked to the well, declining the driver’s offer to take us there ("bottom line": sore) though the sun was high, bright and hot - don't worry, we wore our hats!

On our way, we passed the pineapple field.

Picture: Sr. Georgette and yours truly in the pineapple field.

We crossed the village – all the kids ran to us and wanted their picture taken, of course, and we practiced our few Lingala phrases. One older boy spoke excellent French.

Picture: Sam, Sr. Georgette and the village kids.

Taking a look, we thought those pipes looked really narrow, no larger than a garden hose. Seems to me the pump should be right above the well, it should pump the water into some kind of decanting tank where the mud can accumulate on the bottom, water should be piped out above the mud line, and some kind of system should exist to let the sludge out, which is probably good for enriching the garden soil. Non? Will a real water engineer please stand up?

Another thing I couldn’t quite understand is why the company placed the village water tank at the very end of the village opposite the well. More pipe length = more $$ for the job, I suppose. And cheap, narrow pipe = more $$ in their pockets, too. Grrr…

That’s when we decided to look for someone who knows what they’re doing and Sam thought of Paul Mateta, whose farm I described to my dear readers a few blogs back (“Madame Brock goes out of town”). Paul is obviously a guy who not only has great ideas, but gets them done. If he doesn’t know much about wells and pumps, he’ll know someone who does.

So that’s why today, we had the Sisters over for lunch, with Paul and his brother Emile. Three guesses on what we ate! Yes, breadfruit chips for appetizers and breadfruit purée with the Colombo de poulet. We also had acras de crevettes and féroce as a first course. Emile, who as you may recall is a pastry chef and caterer in Brussels, just loved the chips. He kept coming up with ideas of ways to serve them. And he’s right: they don’t break easily like potato chips, so you can use them instead of mini-toasts for little bouchées: a little slice of avocado, a bit of fresh ginger and a small crevette… I’ll remember that for our next reception! Score one for Emile!

Sr. Georgette couldn’t make it, so another sister, Sr. Zofia, from Poland, came to lunch.

We scored a few points on this lunch, because it turns out the sisters have another plot of land very close to Paul’s farm which has been a big problem to them, as the local chief, the “chef coutumier”, keeps selling pieces of their land to various people. They have all the titles and legal docs needed, have brought surveyors to mark out the land, have even built fences or put posts around it, only to have them torn out by the chief’s minions. Now their lives have even been threatened, so they’ve decided to sell. It’s a mess. But Paul knows the chief – one of the chief’s wives is one of the people Paul gives electricity to! So maybe something good will come out of this, even if it’s just the sisters getting a fair deal on the sale…

More points: The sisters have an orphanage which has capacity for 70 children but only has a dozen, because they can’t pay enough personnel to care for more. Hmm… are you thinking what I’m thinking? Perhaps some La Grace de Dieu kids can be transferred there, if a little funding can be found. First I have to do some homework on La Grace de Dieu to see what’s really going on there, with the local authorities. Meaning the parish priest. I’ve got his name already.

The sisters also run a home for young single mothers, who are usually thrown out on the street by their families when they get pregnant, dooming them to a short life with more kids, AIDS, etc. (And finally, more orphans.) The sisters have a day care for the babies and a school for the girls. They teach them crafts. I’ve agreed to host a December craft sale + tea & pastries – Soeur Zofia is a consummate pastry chef – for all the ladies I can muster.

Of course, these few kids and few young mothers are a drop in the ocean. But what these sisters do is the yeast that makes the whole loaf rise. Anyway that's how I see it. They can't save them all. But for the ones that are saved, or at least helped, the difference is tremendous.

So, there you are. My plate is certainly filling up. What do you think? Do I have time for a job, too? I interviewed for a 20-hour job on Wednesday. Maybe that's just the right number of hours. Plus money for the sisters. Hmmm...

Oh, and Paul M. also wants one (actually he'd like thirty) of the dwarf coconuts from the sisters' garden. The sisters think that tree was planted by a sister who came from Mauritius! So it is quite unique around here. I don't think we'll be drinking much more of that delicious water. All the nuts must be planted!

La Grace de Dieu

Today Becky and I went to check out a Special Self-Help Fund applicant. Their application said they wanted $1,123 to start a wine-making and fish-salting microbusiness to help finance an orphanage. The Self-Help committee had been impressed by the modest sum. Stapled on the application, there was a photo of thirtysome children in front of a clean white wall, with the name of the orphanage, "La Grace de Dieu," brightly painted in blue. Ok, let's see if these people are for real. Sometimes people send in fake projects using fake orphans' photos, to get easy money from their favorite uncle ("Sam"). On our way there we called the number on the application, and found out that the applicant, Victorine, was out trying to buy some roofing material, but we were passing close by the store, and could pick her up and take her back to the orphanage. So that's what we did. In the thirty minute, four-mile trip on the potholed roads, avoiding man-drawn carriages and swerving, overloaded minibus taxis, she told us someone had sold her the application! Fifteen dollars! This confirmed a nagging feeling about some of the applications we've been getting, that look like photocopies of photocopies. People sure know how to make a dishonest buck here... We left the "paved" road and got on car-width-plus-five-inches sand roads through a maze of shacks, some made of cement blocks, some of sundry materials. After a while we arrived at the brightly painted wall and entered. Picture a wall-enclosed yard about 20' x 20', half of it strewn with large blocks of rubble, and what looked at first like a lean-to building against the back wall. No white and blue paint inside. The corrugated tin roof extends to shade part of the yard. Children wearing dirty clothes greeted us with great curiosity: it’s not every day they get to see two “mundele” (white) women! Victorine took us inside to see the boys’ “dorm.” Now picture three consecutive 6’x6’ rooms. The first had no beds, just some blankets on the floor, on which a woman was sitting against the wall feeding a baby. Next to her under a mosquito net in a tiny crib was what I first mistook for a doll, because it was too small to be a baby, until it stretched its tiny arm! We were told the infant had been found in a rubbish heap just a few days ago, part of the placenta still sticking to it... The next room was furnished only with three very basic bunk beds, some leaning precariously, some without mattresses, if you can call the dirty sponge foam full of gashes and holes a mattress. No linens, no pillows. No paint on the walls, bright or otherwise. The walls are very dark and patchy. At the back end of the room a doorway led into another room, presumably similarly furnished, but I could not see anything because it was totally dark. We reversed our steps and went into the second set of rooms, the girls’ dorm, which was similar to the boys’, except the ceiling of the back room had one translucent yellow corrugated sheet that let in some light. Victorine explained that she had gone to the roofing tile store to try to buy one more like that, to put in the roof of the boys’ back room, but she hadn’t enough money to buy it (it probably costs about $5). Becky said, good idea, and also you should put some air holes for ventilation… the urine stench was very bad, and burned my eyes. Next she took us to see the toilets and shower. Everything was dirty and smelly. These outhouses are four feet away from the rooms. When we had finished this short tour, we found the children lined up in three rows under the tin roof, and bright blue plastic chairs had appeared out of nowhere so we could sit and listen to their concert. Everywhere I’ve been in Congo, it’s the tradition: children give you a welcoming concert, always accompanied by a bongo drum. They sang in French, in unison, with occasional impromptu harmonies, and you could tell they had been well taught. “Bienvenue!” intoned the leader, immediately answered by the group, “bienvenue!” They sang, Welcome, our friends, our mothers, we love you, you will bring us a bright day, we will be good children, etc. Three children took turns to step forward, say a poem, and bow. Some of the children just stared at us, some clapped, and one banged rhythmically on the bongo. The older girls in the back held babies. Their own? They didn’t sing or smile. One incredibly small boy sat perched on a bench and clapped. He looked like a ten-month baby but acted like a three-year-old. Unfortunately, whatever was stinging my eyes began to do it with a vengeance and I had to swipe away at tears. There would, of course, have been plenty of cause for real tears here, but I had resolved to be cheerful with these children and actually was doing quite well (I did have a cry later). Nothing in that wretched place looked like it could be the site of a functional wine-making or fish-salting project. There was no room for anything like that. Becky asked a few questions about how much profit could be made per month on the fish. Victorine said $50. Our driver raised his eyebrows. More like fifteen, he said. If any. We probably won’t fund this project. Not that they can’t use money! It’s just not a viable “Self-Help” project. What they need is pure and simple charity. As we were leaving, I asked Victorine about her order (she’s actually “Soeur Victorine”), where was their convent, etc. She told me it’s an Italian order, but she’s the only one left here. All the Italian nuns went back to Italy after the "pillages." She gets help from the "Sainte Famille" Catholic parish, she said. Or used to. It's hard to understand their use of verb tenses here. I don’t want to doubt this person’s good intentions, but I do doubt her capacity to pull off such a huge task, raising twenty to thirty children by herself in these conditions. I don’t think one person without funds can run an orphanage. These kids were fed, and maybe loved, but they didn’t look happy. The strength of religious orders is in having a community pull their efforts together and offer mutual advice and comfort. Victorine seems to be working alone. I’m going to have to find out more.