Madame Brock goes out of town

This week I took three trips! finally! We've been here six weeks and I hadn't left Gombé, our sector of Kinshasa, where are located the embassy offices and our house (nearly an hour's walk apart - neighborhoods are rather large in this city of six million plus). Sam has already traveled twice to the east of the country with MONUC, the UN peace-keeping force, and to various places in other parts of town, but I wasn't invited to tag along...

Trip 1: Rebecca Ward, the Special Self-Help Fund and Democracy and Human Rights Fund Coordinator, needed to see a site where they want to install a pump to get the water up from a valley bottom.

The women and children who live on the hillside walk down and back up several times a day with 20-liter containers (44 lbs of weight) (I didn't see any men doing it). The water comes from a natural spring which has been captured into a concrete water tank at the bottom of which it continuously gushes out of the wall from several pipes onto a concrete floor, making it easy to fill up the containers. The water then makes it merry way down the valley, irrigating dozens of horticulture rectangles. We probably will not choose to fund this project for several reasons: the system they have (which was built last year by FAO) gives plenty of clean water; the hill is high and steep, so a relatively powerful pump would be needed, meaning one that runs on fuel; and who would pay for the fuel? And the houses are precariously built on ledges dug into the hillside; last year a family was buried in a landslide during the rainy season; bringing water up would only encourage more people to settle there; and finally, it looks like city water is about to reach that neighborhood from the plateau.

Still, the visit was extremely interesting; the valley is very green and beautiful - a nice change from Kinshasa - with its patchwork quilt of garden plots broken by the occasional palm tree or banana grove, and the silvery stream running in the bottom or resting in little pools; and all the little kids were thrilled to see white people. "Mundele, mundele!" they shouted as we passed by.

Trip 2: The next day Becky and I visited a school (3 rooms) that was rebuilt with Self-Help Fund financing, and we took some pictures of the old school and the new school, and of the teachers, who were all there, sitting under a tree (there's a strike throughout the country). The old school's corrugated tin roof was full of holes and the walls had deep cracks. The concrete floor was cracking and sinking. Part of the reason the old school is falling apart is that someone cleared out a parcel just downhill from it, and erosion is undermining the foundation. People do n'importe quoi here and destroy each other's properties that way, without knowing it or even realizing it afterward.

Both of these sites were to the east of Kinshasa, on a hilly plateau where small rivers or springs run in steep valleys with a wide flat bottom. The ground is a mixture of clay and sand with some very sandy areas that erode very fast if the vegetation is removed. People like clean empty spaces around their houses, sometimes putting a hedge around their parcel, but they get around to planting the hedge after the house is built, which sometimes takes years. Most of the houses we saw were not finished, just half-built walls around two or three rooms; few of the houses had roofs. Most were not yet inhabited; it looks like everyone ran out of money. I took some pictures (no police around) which I'll post as soon as my computer gets here - could be early next week.

Trip 3: Today we went to a farm in the other direction - downriver. The road was parallel to the river and we finally saw the rapids we had heard from the Gombé River Walk. They're not very steep or strong, but the river is such a huge volume of water that it's very impressive, though we could only see it from afar. The river is still nearly horizontal but runs against rocks, and definitely seems to pick up speed compared to the lake-like expanse we see from Kinshasa. Nothing like the waterfall photo in the last post, which may be a photo of the Zongo falls.

The farm is the creation of an embassy employee, who works in the Public Diplomacy section (old USIS) but is actually an electronics engineer. A little creek runs through it, on which he has built a small dam, enough to divert water to a wheel which will furnish electricity as soon as he finds a generator that can use the 400 rpm that the waterwheel produces. He also has solar panels that recharge a bunch of batteries (looked like automobile batteries), and a fuel generator that he only turns on in the evening to give his children light to do their homework. He also gives light to a bunch of neighbors. He has hens and pigs, and nine fish ponds also watered by the little dam, where he raises Tilapia and Congo river fish. After showing us around, he took us to a little patch of green grass between the fish ponds where he had set up umbrellas and chairs and a table, and we were served cold beers and then a huge lunch. Finally we got to taste Congolese food. There was a hors-d'oeuvre of boiled eggs (from the hens), tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden, with lemon from the tree, grilled fish from the Congo river, bitekuteku (green leafy stuff) with peanut sauce, cassava "bread"(more like raw dough), and yellow rice. And of course, pili-pili, the hot sauce made with the peppers that have exactly the same flavor as the Martinique "piment."

Our host and his brother, who lives in Belgium, ate with us but none of the women or children. We talked about their wonderful farm, its history, our host's life in Charlotte, NC, Brussels, and South Africa, and his brother's life in Brussels. Emile, the brother, is a nutritionist and baker, and wants to "retire" here, that is, embark on a new adventure setting up a bakery and catering business, specializing in nutritious and organic foods (a guy after my own heart). Paul, our host, told us about how he finally came back to Congo, got a job with Mobil Oil and bought a farm, after studying in Belgium and getting an engineering B.A. from UNC - Charlotte, thanks to an American who helped him obtain a scholarship. By 1997 he had quite a setup, run mostly by his wife, with hundreds of laying hens, dozens of pigs, and he was doing well. Then the "pillages" happened (looting). The military, who were no longer paid (under the last years of the Mobutu regime), stole and destroyed everything. Paul and his family took off for South Africa, though they had family in the United States who wanted him to join them there. He got a Master's degree, then came back, and has restarted farming on a larger plot. He has taken in all the orphans in his extended family, and gives work to an entire community.

He and thousands of other good people here have great hopes that their country can finally live in peace and overcome the lawlessness and corruption that have done so much harm here.