Why is the Chocolate Always Gone

This day marks the beginning of the end of my chocolate stash. 

Very well - the end of the end of my chocolate stash.  Three months was a good run, and it will be cheap Nutella and natural peanut butter from here on out. 

This, my friends, is what we in the bush call ‘roughing it.’

Before you ask – of course there’s chocolate here.  However, scooping it out of a jar makes me marginally ashamed and controls the sweet tooth I received from my grandfather, who used to take two tablespoons of sugar after every meal in his 90s – Apacha, your memory lives on (in the form of my future diabetes).

I’m not sure if it’s the decreased chocolate in my system, but I have been finding locals more and more incomprehensible instead of less.  Sometimes they make jokes which, if I understand, I count as a success.

I get to be a part of training or knowledge-sharing meetings now – discussing psychological tools and the future of psychology here, its relation with the justice system, etc. - which is a great learning experience.  Not wanting to scream in frustration during meetings is, in itself, a great learning experience for me.  Of course, there are the usual suspects: the one who needs to repeat everything very slowly for t-o-t-a-l understanding, the one who has more questions than brains, the one with a case of verbal diarrhea…  But for the most part, the meetings have been fast-paced and informative.  As a foreigner, I usually have to introduce myself, at which time I also explain that I don’t speak French very well and that I’m only there to observe.  To which one woman responded with a wicked grin, “Ah, so you’re like MONUSCO.”

As the Mission de l'Organization Nations Unies pour la Stabilization en RD Congo is the peacekeeping force charged to protect 'civilians, humanitarian personnel, and human rights defenders under imminent threat of physical violence and to support the Government of the RDC in its stabilization and peace consolidation efforts' (apparently not very successfully), this was a 2^nd degree burn.

Over the weekend, we made one last presentation on sexual violence prevention for two schools in a village some ways out of town.   Everything went well, aside from the fact that roughly two hundred packets of peanuts (part of the extravagant lunch package – each student received peanuts, a hot dog bun, and a bottle of pop) went missing.  A quarter of the students received peanuts, and the rest went into someone’s bag for later.  That disappointed me, though I’m not sure why – as a student, I’d probably have tried to make off with a carton of notebooks and pens under my shirt.        

But it did disappoint.  Because it reminded me that life means taking what you can, when you can.  Which is the motto of nearly every politician here.  As a matter of fact, I’ve possibly met a future president.  He was smart, earnest, adorable, and wanted to know if I was a young girl or if I was married.  I tried to explain that I was neither and he pretended to understand.

I sincerely hope he didn’t take the peanuts.

Another disappointment was the firm, patriarchal belief that fashion is a leading cause of rape.  While I do believe that women should dress modestly, I think it should be because we respect ourselves and our bodies, not because we’re terrified that our cleavage is so lovely that men are unable to stop themselves from forcing us to have sex.  I find some men presumably as attractive as they find me; I have never been tempted to force my attentions on them.  This idea that God created men with some sort of OCD with relation to sex is incredibly pervasive and stupid - there, I’ve said it.  It is even more ridiculous in a country where rape is a weapon in (near-constant) war, children are equally at risk, and women are raped in rural areas on their way to and from farming (which is probably not when they’re at their sexiest – especially as the significant population that lives at or below the poverty line isn’t purposefully shopping for clothes with holes in and probably can’t ask a shop clerk for the next size off the rack).  In fact, I think most women dress very provocatively here – many have amazing figures and some of their dresses look like they’ve been poured on; by the above criteria, they should expect to be raped because they’re too pretty and well-dressed for their own good.  (Um, whereas in reality, they should expect to be raped because it is relatively common for women in entire villages in this country to be raped by competing armed groups.)

Get ready for the biggest disappointment, especially with relation to the nonsensical belief above:  this area was known in 2014 for the rape of many, many little girls by ‘bandits,’ who literally just went house-to-house and ordered families to provide their baby girls.  No perpetrators were brought to justice.  Very few (if any) children received psychological care; physical care might have been a long shot.

So. 

That hurt too. 

At the end of the session, some of the girls wanted my bread, my bracelets, my rings, and a pound of flesh.  Most of the boys just wanted to speak English, bless their little hearts.  Some students had been asked not to come because there wasn’t room in the church, so they showed up after for a chat.  They taught me Swahili, took my email, and might ask me for money, phones, etc. in the future. 

A few very small, very dusty boys who likely didn’t go to school followed us around and with professional-level collections of bottle caps and bags.  They asked me for pens afterwards, which I provided even though our logistician may demand that I sell my body to replace them. 

The entire bumpy ride back was filled with talks of armed groups, how more of the youth milling about the streets could use guns to affect change, the killings in Beni, and the attack on a presidential candidate in Lubumbashi.

All of which made me want to scour the inside of my head with Clorox. 

I was not given this option - not even after a rodent skittered into my office and there was screaming the likes of which had never been heard.

But I stopped as soon as he left the room, and it was mostly mental screaming and croaking “Shoo!  Git!  Go on!  Hello.  Nonono.  Where. Are. You.” in fascinated horror. 

Less easy to evade was the crowning glory of bizarre conversations.  I was talking to a proud grandfather about his apparently gloriously intelligent grandson and, feeling indulgent, asked why he thought so.  Having some experience with doting grandparents, I smiled benignly like paintings of the Madonna, expecting to hear that the child burped at three months or farted at four or some such rose-tinted nonsense.  Instead:

“He was peeing one day…”

[I feel a deep sense of foreboding at the direction of this conversation.]

“…and he asked me what that body part was for.”

[My Madonna smile becomes more of a rictus.]

“I said it was for peeing, and when he got older, I would tell him what else it was for.”

[Why am I alive.  Why this.  Why now]

“He is very smart.  Asking me about that.  We need to use that intelligence.”

[Do we really, though.]

“I want to teach him the Bible and educate him and bring him into the church.”

[Country roads / take me home / to a place / I belong…]

Between conversations like this, the karaoke of the Chinese force (partyin' it up Gangnam Style), and the reproachfully nasal invitation of the Egyptian troops to prayer, I'm thankful the peanut butter is never more than a spoon's distance away.