I love my new camera

It has a wider angle than my previous camera. It zooms. It has point-and-shoot image stabilization. It takes videos. It takes macros (close-ups). It's tiny. It's rechargeable (no batteries to buy/throw away). It took me days of research to decide on. If you ask me, and you eat all your veggies, I'll let you know which of the hundreds of models it is. It's perfect.

I woke up in the middle of the night, on Saturday morning, realizing that I needed to charge the battery before morning. We had a big day planned. We were going out in the country again! This time, we were going with one of the Marines, Sgt Aaron Beck, who's in charge of the missionwide "Toys for Tots" program. But mostly, we were going with the Sisters (Franciscan Missionaries of Mary) because I'd met someone that had something very interesting to show them, out on the Bateke Plateau, in the same area as their land with the non-functioning well (see The Sisters and the Well): a model/school farm, already in operation, teaching Kinshasa street boys how to live and work in the country. Just what the Sisters want to do with street girls. Immediately we had set up the visit, and since it was almost Christmas, it could be combined with the Toys for Tots program.

We had stocked up on food for the tots, too. Almost accidentally! Here's how it happened. A grocery store in Kinshasa circulated an ad offering gift packages of food for employers to buy for their employees. I asked my cook and two housecleaners if the prices were interesting, and not too surprisingly, they said the next to largest box was the best value for the money. So I put in an order. I also thought Sam's two drivers should be included, and the gardner, and the guards. We found out there are five guards. I put in the order for three large packages, each with a huge, 25 kg bag of rice, 10 kg bag of cornmeal, and large reusable grocery bag filled with cans, bags and bottles: oil, sugar, tomato paste, sardines, etc; and five smaller packages, including the bag of rice and some of the cans. PLUS, frozen chickens for everyone.

Well, when all this food arrived at my house, it became a problem for everyone: how to get it home? So I offered to buy it back from them all, and they were happy with the deal. And I was very happy, because grocery shopping is a major hassle here, and all this well-packaged food was ready to go to the orphanages: La Grace de Dieu, Becky's home for street boys and another orphanage in Masina, the FMM's orphanage in Kintambo, and now, Father Guido's "Boys Town". He doesn't call it that, but I have a hard time with African names.

I had met Father Guido at an International Women's Club meeting. He is an Italian priest, who was sent here by his order, alone, 13 years ago, to see what he could do, and what he found most appalling was the condition of the street children. He had very little funds, but he more than makes it up in energy and contagious enthusiasm. He now has brought three African priests into his order, mobilized funding and volunteers from all parts, mostly his Italian connections, and he has built a center for street children in Kinshasa. And 5 years ago, he bought land on a lake (or large pond) on the Bateke plateau, and built dorms, farm buildings, a meeting hall, a schoolhouse, a solar powerhouse, water tanks, all as if there hadn't been a civil war going on.

So that's how we spent our Saturday. The road was long and painful, but we were in good company. The dirt road part was just as bad as going to the Sisters' place at Menkao. But when we arrived there, what a difference! A tree-shaded avenue leads to a campus with many buildings, connected by paved paths lined with flowers and bushes. Cows graze in a well-enclosed pasture, next to the henhouse and pigsty. Every kind of fruit tree including, yes, a small breadfruit tree, a trellis heavy with passionfruit, vegetable plots, pineapples, and, he said, they've put fish in the new artificial lake. Potable water comes from a spring 500 meters away. That's a lot of plumbing, so we asked who had done the work. We were surprised to find out that it was the same company that had dug the well and built the installations at Menkao. Padre Guido recommended getting back in touch with them, that it was likely they'd fix it. Except, being nearly the only competent people in Kinshasa, they're overwhelmed with work.

You can see my photos of this trip on snapfish. Internet connection is bad, so bad that I lost my first draft of this post trying to upload a video.

P.S. Actually, it wasn't lost. So, if you want to read a different version of the same story, look at the post below, "Padre Guido." Also, it has the snapfish link to the photo album.

Padre Guido

Saturday, December 22, a group of us took a trip to the country: Sgt Aaron Beck, the MSG (Marine Security Guard) in charge of the Toys for Tots program, Sisters Anita and Georgette, Sam and Odile, and Roger, the driver. The back of the vehicle was loaded with bags of rice, cornmeal, beans and other not-too-perishable items, and a big box of toys. First, we went to pick up Padre Guido at his center in Masina, where he showed us the new buildings for his streetboys and other people thrown into misery by all that has happened here. Then we got directions to the place out in the country where he has nearly 200 hectares that he's turning into a farming training center for those boys who want to get out of the city and into farming.


The drive was very long, but familiar: Padre Guido's place is past Menkao, past the turnoff for the sisters' land, and down its own, long, rutted, bone-breaking, joint-jarring path. But when you get there! wow! In less than six years (and they were not peaceful years here), Padre Guido has created a "Paradiso", as his Italian volunteer, Angelo, called it. A long avenue shaded by tall trees on both sides leads to a group of buildings, connected by flowered paths, interspersed with orchards, plots of pineapples, vegetables, grazing land for cows. A lake mirrors the white sky in the background.

The cute round huts are for guests. Any takers?

I had met Padre Guido at the Italian Ambassador's residence eight days before, where the International Women's Club was treated to lunch and the priviledge to meet and hear Padre Guido. I was quickly recruited for interpreting for the non-French-speaking ladies of the club. Padre Guido, originally from southern Italy, moved with his family to Milano in his teens, where the jobs were. His father missed the country life, though, so the family soon acquired a small farm in the countryside, where Guido learned farming and construction. He has the contagious explosive energy and joie de vivre of southern Italians. It's hard not to like him instantly.


What caught my attention, of course, was when he mentioned a place in the country for "reinsertion" of street boys into rural life. I just had to go see it, the Sisters had to go see it, and bringing gifts was of the season. We made it a plan.





I've uploaded pictures on snapfish, where you can see a lot more of them. It took hours to upload them with the weak connection we have here. Here's one with us posing on the grounds of the farm/school.



We toured the grounds. When Guido first came here, with two educators, an agronomer and ten boys, they lived in tents. Immediately, they cleared a patch of land for cassava, the staple food here. Then, they put up the first building, not far from the lake. Next to it is a water tank. The water comes from a spring half a km away, on a farm run by Italian nuns. It's potable. Water from the lake is used only for washing clothes, floors, etc, irrigation and for the animals. Quite a plumbing project!

More pictures on Snapfish:
If the link below does not work, copy and paste the link below into your browser
http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=649271198746418764/l=341911133/g=108896982/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

TAKA Black Orchid

I had planned for Tchako to be the hit of the party, but TAKA was!





All the guests stopped in the driveway to view this marvel and take its portrait.



"Taka" is the name my gardener, Alphonse, gave for this monstrous beauty.

If it looks huge, it's not a camera trick. This beast stands face to face with me, looking like it's ready to Pounce! The flower is larger than my wide-open hand, the "whiskers" are over a foot long.





The "eyes" at the top of the "antennas" look at me fiercely. Dreadful!


Here's a full standing portrait of Her Majesty.

Here's a close-up. I tried to put the white wall in the background so you could see it better. Does it send shivers up your spine?

Funding good works

I'm working on my security clearance application. Borrrring! But everything else I'm doing is not so boring. Yesterday, Sr. Georgette asked me to come help her. She's in charge of relations with donors and international organizations for her province (Franciscans, like other orders, have their own map of the world). We looked at various applications she's made for project funding. Basically, the traditional funding, which came from the Franciscan communities in Europe, has dried up. The European sisters are now in retirement homes - an expense instead of a source of income. So the FMM's have to turn to governments and NGO's for funding, but they don't know how to do that. All they had to do in the past was write a letter to their mother house in Rome, describing ghastly conditions here and saying, send us $50K to start building a clinic. Governments and NGO's are much more demanding: they want blueprints, pro-forma invoices, spreadsheets and timetables (understandably so, of course). Any advice is most welcome!

Flat Tire

Sunday, Sam and I spent all morning and half of the afternoon at a 50th anniversary celebration of the Alumnae of schools run by the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. The open-air mass started late due to heavy rains all night, and lasted a long, long, loooong time. When the choir finished the 10th verse of the Hosanna, in Lingala, and then proceeded to start all over again from the beginning, I have to admit that instead of praising God I had to ask Him to forgive me for barely standing it... It was also getting uncomfortably hot. We finally got away around 3 p.m., leaving the celebrations, which looked like they would continue late into the night. But before we could get far, we had a flat. A complete blow-out, to-the-rim flat, about a mile from home. Luckily, there was a "quado" (kwado?) only a block away. A quado is a sidewalk tire specialist. You know where they are by the stack of three or four tires on the sidewalk. The quado himself is in the shade of the nearest tree, waiting for clients like us, chatting or playing dominoes with other street service providers of all kinds. We flapflopped up to where he was, and let him put the spare on for us. He spoke surprisingly good French, and did a good, quick job. He charged us 1500 FC, which is three dollars. Later, we returned to pick up the blown-out tire, which he had patched. Cost: $10. It's been two days, and it's still holding up. But I'm driving extra-carefully.

Gouter-Partage and other stuff going on

Our Gouter-Partage was a success. In all, 112 tickets were sold, more than planned, and some of the goods for sale disappeared really fast.

Picture: French Ambassador, his wife, Sr. Georgette, and Y.T.

I printed about 80 flyers with breadfruit recipes and gave them out. We served breadfruit chips with hummus and guacamole, and coconut water and watermelon juice to drink. It was crowded, but people enjoyed it. The sisters had baked dozens of cakes for the bake sale, and sown lots of bags and dresses. They sold eggs, orange wine (made from fermented orange juice), avocadoes and breadfruit.





Picture: Breadfruit, avocadoes, coconuts and eggs (chicken and quail) for sale.



Sr. Cecilia, who is Japanese, made sushi with a friend from the Embassy of Japan. Sr. Zofia, who is Polish, made pastries.

Sam played, the orphans sang (much better than at any of the rehearsals).

Picture: Sam watches as Sr. Seraphine (from India) leads the children in an a capella song.


We showed slides of the village with the water problem. (Scroll down to see the pictures on the post "The Sisters and the Well"- I finally got them uploaded.)


Lessons learned: have the vending period first - that's where everyone rushed when they arrived. Also, forget the sit-down part, because the tables took too much room, (and were a lot of work to set up!) and people love to mingle, look at the paintings on the walls, go back to the vending tables, etc. And perhaps, set up a tent in the garden for some of the sales.

This is a Nativity by one of the artists, Mulamba. The bluish area is due to the reflection of the flash, which I tried to patch up with Paint.

On Friday, a group of four or five people will bring some food and maybe clothes to La Grace de Dieu. I hope this is the first of many visits. One of the people will be a Marine from our Security Guard detachment. They have a Toys for Tots program every Christmas, and also like to do a construction project, so they'll see if this orphanage suits them for both activities... It certainly needs all the help it can get.

I've been trying to get a security clearance for the Office Management Specialist job at American Embassy Brazzaville, but someone input my SSN wrong so I haven't even left square one of a process of mythical length and complexity.

Meanwhile, I'm doing some translations for the CDC on avian flu and chicken raising in Congo. What I've learned is that in Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and Bukavu, people live with their chickens, especially the local breeds, which are "débrouillard" and "brave" but "malpoli". The chickens are kicked out of the house in the morning, fend for themselves all day, finding their own food and water, occasionally getting into fights, and are allowed in at night - any chicken not locked inside at night "belongs to the thief." Improved imported breeds are tame, passive and sweet, but need special feed . Some people have both local and imported chickens, and in this case, the local chickens are allowed to eat the imported chickens' feed, a sign of "African solidarity."

In Bukavu, people who were escaping from soldiers when the wars started in 1996 had to get rid of their chickens, because you can't hide while carrying a chicken. They're too noisy.

As I write, the war has started again in the east, after months of tense immobility on all military fronts, and intensive traveling, visits, conference calls and cable-writing on the diplomatic front. Let me know if there's any news coverage where you are.

Yesterday at the International Women's Club meeting we had two presentations: one by an Italian photographer, Angelo Turconi, who came to Kinshasa in 1968 as part of his wild-youth project of driving from Italy to Cape Town and back. In Kinshasa he was told he needed a special "mining permit" to travel to Lubumbashi, his next destination. The permit took three weeks to obtain and was good for four weeks... from the date of application! So he tried again, asking for a six-month permit this time. While he was waiting, he explored the hinterland of Kinshasa, taking exceptional photographs. Most expats living here at the time, he says, never left the city. They flitted from formal cocktail to formal ball, talking only about the next social event. He said it was something out of Kipling's India. In 1968. To make a long story short, he was captured by the beauty and friendliness of Congo (outside Kinshasa, he emphasized), for which his passion has evidently not lessened, though now he is retired and lives part of the year in Belgium (he met his wife, a Belgian, while waiting for the "mining" permit).

The second presentation was from a group of Dutch spouses of employees of the Bralima brewery, who got together last year and took a primary school in hand, raised funds at home in the Netherlands, fixed the building, bought school supplies, and realized that the children often came to school hungry, so they now also supply a breakfast for the teachers and children to share. This year they have added two more schools to their project.

Their website is at http://www.enclasse.org/. The photos you see here are pretty typical. In a city of 6 to 7 million inhabitants, half of whom are under age 20, schools should be an absolute priority. But they are in this state of decay and poverty, and many children don't get to go to school at all...

Tchako

Tchako talks. His favorite word is "Tchako", which he sometimes repeats endlessly and lovingly; sometimes he sings it. He always says "Bonjour" or "Bonjour ma soeur" when someone arrives, and "Ciao" when you leave. He imitates every bird call I've heard here. Tchako was fun to have. He went home today. He did not learn the first measures of Handel's Halleluja chorus, which I was trying to teach him. Part of the fun of having Tchako was hearing other people's parrot stories. One person said her uncle had a parrot in the hallway, near the phone (kids: homes used to have just one phone). The parrot could be heard saying: "Hello.... uh-huh... yeah, uh-huh... right... ok, bye!" They're among the most intelligent animals. Read about them on wikipedia. They have long lifespans, around 60 years, so they're best living in a community, because if you're 30 or over when you get one, he will probably outlive you. Here's a video of Tchako eating a piece of banana. He likes to eat peanuts, cheese, the seeds inside green peppers, bananas, and carrots. He liked the coconut water I offered him. He did not like ginger or onion. When he doesn't want something you offer him, he takes it from you with his beak and immediately drops it. If he likes it, he takes it in his beak, settles on his right foot, then grabs the food with his left foot and nibbles at it with his beak. This is a very short video of Tchako singing "wooHOO-hooooooo!" He is VERY cute. I took videos of Tchako to show you guys, since you're all so enthusiastic about Tchako, which isn't weird because he really is quite adorable, but my camera is having senior moments. And the one good video I have with Tchako chattering away is too long to upload. I let it upload all night, and in the morning the computer was frozen and the video was not uploaded. And everything I'd first written about Tchako was lost. I'm trying again, but the short (2 second) clips my camera now takes before shutting down with a "battery discharged" message, don't have much of the sounds and sayings of this cute bird. I'll try anyway. Typical. I figure out how to get stuff from my camera to this blog, and the camera dies. If anyone wants to try to upload it for me, I could try to email it to you.

And this is a verrrrry short video of Tchako saying "Tchako."