Catching Up

There have been so many events over the past few weeks and I have been so behind in posts that I can’t remember them all.

One salient memory I have is a several-hour parade on International Women’s Day.  I’m impressed that this city’s main road slowed to a standstill as hundreds of women in new pagnes walked with banners to counter this country’s history of sexual violence against women.  One of my teammates was disparaging of it – saying that the women in the parade would fight to get new clothes, dump their children with their husbands for the day with no thought for their care, and go out and drink after.  Somehow, I doubt that the women reach such excesses as they do have to go home the next day, but I was had this strange sense of deja-vu of myself explaining my disagreement with The Slutwalk back home.

Another image seared into my mind is a chicken curry we had for dinner one night.  The sauce was delicious, but chicken here is prepared with skin on, legs in, all out, so the serving platter came out with one clawed foot reaching for a salvation it would never attain.  When the house worker here makes Western food, however, those who love foufou are bitterly disappointed and eat a sliver of delicious lasagne like it’s… well, like it’s a bland, gelatinous mass inflicted upon them by another culture...

There is a great belief in sorcery and superstition here, as well as a fairly common practice of poisoning those you… don’t like?  Hate?  I’m really not sure, but I’m endeavouring to smile at everyone in the small, mad hope that they simply avoid me instead of poisoning me.  Most of my days so far, however, are spent with my teammates who (thank God) tend to share French videos with me, cook with me, and teach me Swahili and guitar rather than plan murder (or intestinal distress).

Walking through the city is always an adventure – the stares are normal, but sometimes you see things you wish you hadn’t.  Like the time I saw a woman with a load of large, pancake-shaped dried fish perched on her head – after some sort of loud altercation with a man on the street, she lost her bucket and the fish were pitched into the gutter.  She picked them back up, stacked them, and went on her merry way, leaving me gibbering vague things about salmonella and Lysol.

Sometimes you have to literally run through the street to avoid the rain, while children reach out and touch your hair screaming, “Your hair!”  On the same day, when I was too tired to run, after having picked up a tonnage of clay, sticks, and assorted rocks on my flip-flops and feet, a moto-driver stopped beside me (while my teammates laughed from the ‘sidewalk’ and I squirmed) and said, “Let me help you!”

Luckily, that was just the sort of encouragement my stubbornness needed and I forged onward like an elephant seeking its burial grounds.

Home life is filled with hilarious misunderstandings; I can’t even begin to explain how atrocious my French is.  I generally know conjugations, have a basic vocabulary, and understand simple sentence structure.  I can even understand most of our lectures on peacebuilding, non-violence, the history of the Great Lakes Region, etc.  But I have a short circuit somewhere between my brain and my mouth and I end up sounding like a drunk DJ with Tourettes.  But the mistakes in English provide me with some amusement as well. 

My partner, trying to force me to follow his demands during our turn to prepare dinner:

“I am a beeg cheeken!”

Amidst my hysterical laughter, he clarified, “No!  I am a chief keetchen!”

Another teammate’s usual contribution to my questions and worries is a delightfully accented, “Zat is a beeg prob-LEM!” and “Welcome to DRC.”