There and Back Again

   We're back!  In almost perfect timing with the elections we took a trip to New Zealand where Toni Lyn chaired a symposium at the 25th annual Society for Conservation Biology conference.  I say almost because we were encouraged to change our flight and leave earlier than expected, and then to do the same on the return (more on that later). To avoid election fraud and violence the DRC borders were to be closed the day before and the day of the election (Dec. 27 and 28) and possibly longer.  Our flight was scheduled to leave on Dec. 30th.  After a day (really, it took almost a whole day) of rapid logistical coordination and trips to the airline offices (and the ATM) to pay for the tickets in cash (of course), we managed to get a flight to Johannesburg on the 25th.  On the 26th someone was shot at the Kinshasa airport.  We are glad that flight was booked.
   After a 4 day layover in Johannesburg to connect with the previously scheduled flight to New Zealand we were back on track.  Ten time-zones later we were in Auckland having not slept for nearly 30 hours to avoid jet lag.  We were a few days early for the start of the conference so we jumped in the rental car and decided to do some "site"-seeing (it's a film pun...get it?!...wait for it...) -- what else do you do when you are sleep deprived?  One of our several stops was Hobbiton. Yes, Tolkien fans, Hobbiton is a real place in New Zealand.  We didn't tour the set (NOW you get it!) due to time constraints but confirming the reality of Middle Earth and having second breakfast at the guest shop was good enough for us.

   Near the end of our trip and the conference, we received word that we should delay the flight back to Kinshasa a few days due to political tension and civil unrest. After some more logistical gymnastics we were laid over in Johannesburg again with no flight home due to airline incompetence.  Fortunately, Toni Lyn (the lioness) prevailed in a 36-hour telethon with South African Airways and secured two tickets home for a modest transaction fee (as opposed to the ~$3500 that was their original offer).
   For better or for worse, we are home hoping the water will turn on soon so we can bath, do laundry and flush away the mysterious surprise found in one of our toilets. Oh and Toni Lyn was so tired she accidentally slept on the mosquito net and got chemical burns on her eyelids.  Home Sweet Home?!?

The Hash

Today Matt went for "a run" with a group of people who call themselves the Kinshasa Hash (No, this is not a smoking club).  If you as unfamiliar with “The Hash” as we were, it is the self proclaimed “most eccentric running club in the world”.  The link to the home page is: http://www.gthhh.com/.  There are nearly 2000 groups in nearly 1300 cities around the world. The general idea appears to be getting people together to go on some sort of organized excursion for exercise, site seeing and social entertainment, not necessarily in that order.

This weekend’s excursion was a 10 kilometer trail run through the bush about an hour and 15 minutes outside of Kinshasa.  40 to 50 people caravanned in 4x4s through the slums of Kinshasa and out into a rural area along the river where only the sturdiest vehicles attempt to go.  The views of the Congo River were amazing, the terrain was at times treacherous and we even got to mix it up with some villagers at the 5k pitstop and have a beer.

A view of the Congo River from the starting point of the run

Circling up before the main event. The man with the blue wig is our Grand Master.

This was also a good opportunity to see how people live outside of Kinshasa.  The other 72 million people who are living on less than one dollar per day.  Poor, poor people.  The conditions very nearly resemble Madagascar.  The huts are made of mud, sticks and leaves. Children are everywhere and are barely clothed and obviously barely fed.  However, there seems to be no shortage of beer for the adults to sit around drinking. Guess things can’t be too bad . . .

Typical village we went through. Mud huts with tin roofs

Heading into the bush

We attract a lot of attention from the locals.

A pit stop at the local pub. That's Irish Bob wearing the striped socks. He delivers the blessing.

After sweating out a few gallons (it was about 95 degrees) the ceremonies came to a close with the official naming of one of the long time members and a traditional Gaelic blessing in both English and Gaelic.

The naming ceremony of Madame Cigarette (in the dress). The beer was meant to be poured on her head, but the rules change for the Madame.

The blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Moving In

We finalized the deal on our new apartment (kind of like a townhouse or a rowhouse if you know what that is, tall and narrow) on November 15th and spent the following week getting the power and water turned on and functioning.  In the Congo the power and water are turned on after you pay to move in. You may thinking: "How do you check to see if the sinks, toilets, outlets, lights and AC work?". The answer is: You Don't. The reason for the reverse order has never been explained but our guess is that they want to rent the place, but have no money to fix anything, so they leave everything off.

The day we moved in two of the four toilets in the house worked. Of the 5 sinks in the house, only 2 worked (not including the kitchen sink). There was no hot water in the whole house and 3 of the 5 AC units were only blowing hot air.  If you are saying to yourself “How could you expect such luxuries in the Congo?” and “How many sinks and toilets do two people need?”, ask us in private how much we are paying per month. If you are saying to yourself, “Well obviously they didn’t check that everything worked before they signed the lease, so they deserve what they got”, you’re mean.  No, let’s just say that business transactions in the D.R.C. do not function in the same way as they do in the U.S., and we feel we actually did well despite all of the details we are sharing here. 

Here are some photos that did not come for free.  After taking these pictures the property manager showed up frowning and talking sternly. "Why are you taking pictures!?" "Don't take pictures!" "Blah, Blah, Blah . . ."

Our driver Aimee (pronounced Aymay) and furniture in front of our apartment.

Looking West toward the gates of our compound.

Looking East from our apartment.

Luckily, our landlord Jim (real Jim) is receiving our input well and is taking action.  He brought in the cleaning crew, the plumber and the electrician to have everything fixed.  In another week or so (a month more likely) . . . all of the bugs (not meant literally, but also a small problem(Toni Lyn wants to add that the Temple of Doom is not a small problem)) should be worked out. 

Matt has been in charge of inspecting the electrical, plumbing and air conditioning systems and explaining to Jim (as best he can through the language barrier and through Toni Lyn for the hard stuff) what the major problems are, how they should be fixed and who should be fixing them. He has also been buying and moving furniture from various sources and learning to find things like door sweeps, for example, to keep the bugs out(GIANT TEMPLE OF DOOM HOARDES OF COCKROACHES AND KILLER CRICKETS - as TL describes). How do you explain what a door sweep is in a language you don't know to people who may have never seen or heard of such a thing? And if they have seen or heard of a door sweep they may call it something completely different.  The short story is that he went to 8 different “hardware stores” before he finding them then had to bargain down the price from $50 per sweep to $10 per sweep (still a bit high but a more realistic price). The price of everything skyrocket when a foreigner enters the room and every transaction involves a bargaining process.  Anyway, some number of hours well spent. If only they actually fit the doors. Now to find “tin snips” . . .     

Toni Lyn is hard at work trying to respond to some pretty outrageous scheduling conflicts.  FYI to all managers, project coordinators, organizers, etc., 20 hours is insufficient notice to give to a person when asking them to prepare for and attend a 3 day workshop during which you are required to give a power point presentation, which nobody mentioned you needed to create from scratch the morning of day one.  She is trying not to tear out her hair with all of the work, making new friends, (re)learning French, etc., etc., etc.  She has also been the main translator between Matt and the Landlord.  Not an easy job. The construction industry has a lot of jargon that can be easily lost in translation. The process has involved a lot of pointing and gesturing and at times feels like a game of charades that nobody knows the answers to.

Kitchen

Living room and staircase up to 3rd floor

First meal in our dining room in our new apartment. Pasta Dinner!

In summary, we really like our new place.  Things are coming together we are starting to feel sane again. 

TLs work

Toni Lyn's job here in DRC mostly entails connecting up different experts and interested parties from different European countries (German aid agency, Canadian embassy, EU), the World Bank, foreign NGOs (WWF, WCS, CI), US AID (Agency for International Development), local NGOs, etc., with the Ministry of the Environment in DRC, and especially the Department of Forestry, to help them move forward and together on land use planning and forest inventory. This matters because the DRC has the 2nd most extensive rainforest in the world and, importantly, most of it is still here. Moreover, the people in the DRC are incredibly poor (ranked the poorest according to at least one source), despite the DRC being one of the most resource rich countries in the world. And there is a lot of money that is available to the DRC for development, biodiversity conservation, and carbon accounting (i.e., calculating how much carbon can be sucked up by the forests here to slow climate change), it just doesn't always get used as efficiently as possible (to say the least). So my job is to support the DRC Ministry of Environment, and the Forestry Department in particular, as they ramp up to make decisions and fund these processes. Since the DRC is now recovering from >10 years of civil war and strife (apparently when her "boss" from US AID came here to Kinshasa in 2003 there was "no one" here, as he put it - no American agencies but also all the DRC government buildings were empty), they have a lot of need for rebuilding the basic processes and relationships that will allow them to efficiently, effectively, and with as little waste (let's say it they way) as possible to move forward on this zoning and inventory.


Oh, and if you're wondering why the US Forest Service would be interested in supporting anything like this, there are many reasons, including that we have a sustainability and conservation mandate, but you can also think of it as we are preventing overcutting in other countries so the US logging markets aren't undercut in terms of pricing. In other words, if the forests of South America and southeast Asia and Central Africa are chopped down and exported cheaply using bad social and environmental practices, the U.S. (which uses good social and environmental practices) won't be able to sell their wood.

Apartment Hunting

After sleeping off Oktoberfest, our plan was to check out the local farmers market (except most of it is shipped in from Europe) to try to curb the unbelievably high costs of everything in Kinshasa.  The produce was similar to everything we could get back home. This includes Avocados (actually grown locally)!  However, the golden rule for produce (supported by recent digestive activity from both of us) is simply “Peel it, Boil it, Cook it or FORGET IT!”  If you plan to visit, don’t expect a garden salad to go over well internally.

Later we went to look at an apartment.  We planned to meet a guy named Jim.  After being let through the gate, we asked the guards if Jim was around to show us apartment #9.  One of the guards left to get him.  We parked and a few minutes later a guy approached us.  We asked if he was Jim.  He didn’t really answer and then asked if we wanted to see the apartment. We said yes. He took us up to his office and started telling us about the three month advance in rent, the three month security deposit, the 5% commission, and on and on.  Finally, we said “Can we go look at the place and discuss this later?”  He agreed.  We walked along the row of apartments past Unit #9, which had a Pour Louer (For Rent) sign in the window, and over to Unit #4.  “How about #9?” we asked. “Let’s go to #4” he said.  O.K.  Unit 4 was still under construction and clearly wouldn’t be ready for at least a few weeks.  “Jim” said it would be ready soon.  We finished looking at the place and “Jim” said “Let’s go back to the office”.  On our way, with “Jim” in the lead, we received a phone call from guess who? Jim! He was standing in apartment #9 wondering where we were. We quickly ditched fake Jim and met up with real Jim in #9 which was a great apartment that we hope to move into soon.  

Luckily Toni Lyn’s friend/colleague has been generous enough to show us the ropes of the real estate game here.  It is a very complicated and unpredictable game (one of our jokes/much repeated phrases in French here is “C’est compliqué!”) and I am not sure we could be doing it with confidence without him.  Finding our home for the next year has taken up a fairly large amount of our time and focus over the past couple of weeks and we will be ready to celebrate when it is over.

The Party's Over Here?!?

We signed up to be members of the club at the British Embassy.  Basically, we sit around in overstuffed chairs smoking pipes, drinking tea and reading the newspapers.  Joking, sorry British folk.  They put on a big barbeque buffet every Friday night and we now get the discount rate.  A lot of people go and the food is pretty good.  Most importantly, everyone speaks English.  We don’t have any pictures of this as security there is pretty tight. 

Other than that, we are meeting new people in the tightly knit expatriate (mostly US Embassy/US military /United Nations) community.  The nights and weekends are full of interesting characters that seem to move around en masse to the 3 or 4 places that foreigners hang out in Kinshasa.  It feels a lot like college sometimes except here everyone is in their 20s-40s. 

We even threw our own first party at our hotel room on Friday night (technically Saturday morning) to watch the Michigan State – North Carolina basketball game.  Due to the time change, the party/game didn’t start until 1:00 AM, but 8 of us stayed strong until the game ended at 4 AM.  You got to love Spartan fans.

Oktoberfest!

Though clearly not celebrated en masse around the country, the Octoberfest party put on by the Symphonie des Arts is dubbed "the biggest and best party of the year in Kinshasa".  The Symphonie des Arts is a place where children and adults are able to study and practice drawing, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. The celebration on Saturday included all you can eat/drink, 8 ballet/dance performances by the children of the studio (including a choreographed performances of  French and Belgian and African children wearing traditional German clothing and wigs and dancing to traditional ballet but also “Dynamite” and “Like a G6”...seriously), a band that played polkas and Italian and was still going when we left after 1:00 AM, hundreds of people from numerous different cultures and a peacock perched in a tree (not sure it had a ticket). 

Note the blond braided pigtailed wigs - ha!

Toni Lyn and Robert. Robert previously held Toni Lyn's position.

Good times!

KIN-day to day

We figure everyone is pretty curious about the day-to-day here, so here is some information about that.

We currently live in one of the main expat (non-Congolese) hotels in the neighborhood of Gombe in the city of Kinshasa.  Gombe is where most expats live and work.  Toni Lyn's building is just about 1 km away from the hotel.  Our hotel room is great with a large living room/dining area and full kitchen.  The hotel has an Olympic(ish) sized pool, 4 tennis courts (made of clay - like the French Open), a basketball court, and a gym (though no electronic machines like treadmills because there are constant power flickers here).  The hotel is full of professionals, both Americans and Europeans. There are also a lot of lizards.

We're still working out the car/driver situation but as of now we have a little yellow Chinese car (company called the "Great Wall") with a driver that we are renting from Budget. We have access to the car and driver from 8-5 Monday - Friday and before 1:00 on Saturday.

In terms of food and drink, there is a great variety available.   So far we've seen or eaten falafel, African greens and rice and beans (once butter beans, once more like northern beans), pizza (we got one delivered to our hotel room last night!!  It tasted great, though it had canned corn on it...), creamed mushrooms, vegetable soup, avocado salad (yay!), saag aloo (spinach potato Indian food), etc. Beer, wine and hard alcohol of all types are available.  Imported beers are 330 ml (slightly less than 12 oz). DRC domestic beers are generally 750 ml (about 2 beers). Neither size fits in an American coozy.  Due to the economics, there are a lot of big sweaty beers in need of insulation (Does anyone know how to buy and import neoprene?).

It feels pretty safe here but we're careful not to carry anything that we can't lose.  We've asked around a lot and no one has any stories about violence happening to expats (non-Africans) here, though people definitely do get robbed (nonviolently) and pick-pocketed. Prostitution is also a very big problem here and entrapment by prostitutes working with the police is apparently not uncommon. It is a sad story, but when people don't know when they will be getting paid they can get pretty desperate.  We have heard stories about not being paid by their employers (private and government) for months at a time.  The short story is that seeking out and collecting bribes is a part time job for many people here.

On the up side, there is a distinct business class of Africans here (some Congolese, some from other countries) that we're not used to seeing.  It's really neat for it not to be only Europeans doing the white-collar work and running the money here.  Most of Toni Lyn's meetings here have been with Africans, with only a very few Europeans at the table.  In general we've been very surprised at the lack of beggars and obviously poor people.  Oh, and Toni Lyn has been one of the only women in her meetings with about 50 people already here. Still trying to get a handle on that.  

The elections are starting to ramp up and apparently there is a scheduled protest every Thurs, which actually is convenient since we can work around that by avoiding a specific area at that time.  However, it is interesting to watch an election process that has no television coverage.  Most of the campaigning appears to be done with large banners strung up everywhere along the roadsides and by driving around in large caravans with people hanging out the windows and cheering and playing loud music.  No one knows yet how hectic it will be but we'll be sure to be careful and we have updates coming to me from many directions.

Geography

This is where we will be living for the next year: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 72 million people (and too many plants and animals to name) live in the DRC.

More specifically, we will be living in Kinshasa.  Kinshasa is located on the western edge of the country about 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Factoid: Kinshasa's land area is equal to the sum of the areas of all the states east of the Mississippi River.  It's big.

Kinshasa is home to 10 million people.  It's the 3rd largest city in Africa and is located on the Congo River, which is the second larges river in Africa (the Nile is the biggest).  We will be living in Gombe, a large neighborhood inside of Kinshasa where most of the commerce, city/country administration, and foreign development offices are found.