La Grace de Dieu, 2

Thursday, I went back to La Grace de Dieu, with three other Foreign Service Spouses, Linda, Erika and Sonia. Erika had bags of clothes she'd brought back from her trip home, and she and Sonia had bought food in bulk; we also had five bags of groceries donated by Steve, a Foreign Service Officer, and I brought a large bag of breadfruit chips, remembering seeing a breadfruit tree over the wall of the orphanage. Our cook, André, has perfected the art of making breadfruit chips: they are completely addictive. We had received 4 huge breadfruits from the British Embassy just 2 days before.

This time I had my new camera, so you get to see pictures.


This is what you see when you step in from the street. It's already improved from my first visit, when the whole yard was strewn with large broken pieces of cement.





We arrived unannounced, despite days of dialing Sr. Victorine's number, but we were greeted warmly. I had expected to find few children there, thinking they'd be in school. But instead, I found all the children, plus a teacher. It must be less expensive to pay one teacher than to pay all the expenses of schooling three dozen children. And safer. But that means the children spend most of their 24/7 on this small compound... When I remember my childhood, going to the playground, museums, parks, etc., I just can't imagine what growing up in a place like this can do to a person.

We were treated to the usual songs and poems. I have a video but after several busts at uploading, in spite of cutting the video down to half a minute, I've given up. If there's a volunteer among my readers with DSL or cable hook-ups, I could try to email you the file, and you could upload it for me...? (assuming the email uploads...)

Sr. Victorine asked us to introduce ourselves. Erika started in Lingala: "Kombo na ngai Erika" (word for word, "name of me Erika" - "na ngai" is pronounced like "none guy" without a break). When I did the same, the teacher exclaimed, "We have an Odile too!" and a little girl ran to me and gave me a big hug. Linda announced her name in French, "Je m'appelle Linda", to great acclaim, and another little girl ran up to her. (I have this on video too, with the bongo drum beating in the background.)

Everyone cheered again when Sonia also found a namesake, then Erika, who hadn't had as much luck with her name, more than made up for it by pulling several bright green tennis balls from her bag, and throwing them to the kids.

While the happy children played and fought over the balls, I told Sr. Victorine about the Embassy project to renovate their toilets. She was elated. "Dieu vous bénisse!" (God bless you!).

For more about the project, please go to http://congoorphans.pledgepage.org/. This is a webpage I've created hoping to be able to raise funds for this effort. There are two consecutive national holidays next Wednesday and Thursday, and 14 embassy employees including masons, plumbers, electricians, etc have volunteered to spend that time completely overhauling the toilet, shower and septic tank. This is very generous of them, who certainly have their own homes and families to take care of.

...ALL I HAVE TO DO IS RAISE TWO OR THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS BY WEDNESDAY! <:o

This is the latrine (hope this photo doesn't violate blogspot rules about decency. In fact, it IS indecent that children have to live in such conditions. But they're still much better off here in this orphanage than on the street. This is what happens to countries after decades of plunder, pillaging, and war. Anyone tempted by the "less government" rhetoric I hear from some American politicians, please come for a visit. I'll give you a personal tour.)

Then we went to visit the babies, who live in "girls' dorm", door all the way to the left in the first picture. I was pleased to see that new bunks with mattresses AND SHEETS had been added in this room.

The inner rooms look much the same as before: as dark as caves, no mattresses on some of the beds, no linens, no pillows, no pictures on the walls...

A nice-looking young woman was taking care of the babies. The babies are both absolutely beautiful.

This is one of the two deaf sisters. They go to a school for the deaf, but it's far from the orphanage, and Thursday (maybe most days?), they didn't have the bus money. They proudly wrote their name for me, but when I wrote back in French, "Do you like reading?" thinking I could give them some of the books that illuminated my own childhood, it drew blank stares. Either they can't read, or don't know French. They both have striking, very light blue eyes.

Sr. Victorine gave the breadfruit chips out to the children by handfuls, to everyone's delight. She asked me what they were. MY CUE!

If you've read my previous posts, you know it's my personal mission to get all of Congo to love breadfruit as much as I do.

By then I had noted that there isn't just one, but there are FOUR breadfruit trees within sight of the orphanage. I pointed to them. "Momboya?" she said. Then her face lit up. Could I show her how to make momboya chips? I could see the small-business wheels spinning in her head. Remember, we had "discovered" La Grace de Dieu when she had submitted an application for Ambassador's Special Self-Helf funds, for seed money for a fish-salting business, with which she wanted to produce income for the orphanage.

"You bet!" I said. She gave me a high-five.

Please go to my snapfish album at the link below for more pictures.

http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=557111200074894166/l=342532367/g=108896982/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

and don't forget to check out the Congo Orphans Pledgepage:

http://CongoOrphans.Pledgepage.org

Ex-CIA Residence?

Well, well. I'm told the house I live in was the abode of Larry Devlin, the ex-CIA Chief of Station at the time of independence. You may have heard of his memoirs, just published, titled "Chief of Station, Congo," where he says he did NOT kill the charismatic independence leader, Patrice Lumumba, or have him killed, for being too close to the Soviets. He did tell the nice Army Colonel, Joseph Mobutu, that the U.S. would support him should he take over in a coup. But that's really quite different from having someone killed. Right? So, I live in his house. I had assumed it was of much more recent construction, but I'm told a lot of work has been done on it recently. I hope they got rid of the ghosts... I haven't had as much time to write, because I've been helping out at the embassy, working on Special Self-Help (SSH) projects, and those of the Democracy and Human Rights Fund (DHRF). These are 2 to 3 dozen small grassroots projects that the embassy funds directly, in amounts between $500 and $25,000. The SSH/DHRF coordinator is a tale unto herself, a third-generation missionary who speaks local languages as well as English, and prefers local rural life to the big city life of Kinshasa. She's the ideal person for the job, because she can really weed out the people who submit made up projects to get free money. It's a slow learning curve for me: today I spent ALL DAY writing one page! Well, I also had to read, re-read, and re-re-read at least a hundred pages of proposals and reports to extract the material for my one page. I was doing the write-up on one of the DHRF projects, and what I wrote was so great that I know you're just dying to read it, so I'll copy it below (also, the project is really interesting). But, you know what? I think I'll wait until the guy sends me the pictures. I'll finally have some pictures on my blog! Plus, I just realized the text still needs tweaking (aarrgh! That means I'll have spent more than all day writing one measly page. Well, no matter. I'll pick up speed as I learn the trade. I don't get paid anyway). Still, I can't wait to post this story, because this is the kind of good news you never read about in the media. Hm, that reminds me, I promised you the end of the coconut story. Well, on Tuesday (yesterday) I went to see that vendor, and she had coconuts. Green coconuts. Young coconuts. Really, really young coconuts. In fact, they were tiny, about the size of a large avocado. And the water in them was bitter. So that was disappointing. But she said that she was going to try again. And she did have a rather nice-looking breadfruit! But neither she nor the driver, nor my cook when I brought the thing home, know what they call it here. And the cook, André, is waiting for me to show him how to fix it. Meanwhile, André had also found some green coconuts, but his turned out to be very ripe. So HE's going to try again! Feels good to give people goals! But seriously, there is severe malnutrition in this country, and breadfruit is dropping from the trees? What's wrong with this picture?