Congo River
“Destination Kinshasa: After 21 ½ hours in the air and 8 take-offs and landings, it’s hard to imagine that the world is “getting smaller”, as everyone says. If you look at a map, Rio de Janeiro and Kinshasa are just a skip across the Atlantic Ocean from each other—almost as straight as the proverbial crow flies. But to actually getting from one place to another is a different story. This is my second trip to Africa in four months. It feels familiar—the drama of getting a visa and finding my misplaced yellow fever vaccination card, compulsively measuring shampoo, conditioner and vitamins to last the precise number of days I’ll be gone, and choosing the right clothes for being “professional” in Africa… It’s time to turn off the computer in preparation for landing. I think I’ll close my eyes and try to think in French. Bienvenu a Kinshasa…”
“Three days in Kinshasa, in Africa, and I only know two supermarkets, a Lebanese restaurant, the UN compound, my room in the “five-star” Memling Hotel and the road in-between…The hotel is fine—not the best in town, but at $115 a night, it’s acceptable. Except for the short, old Congolese men who roam the hallways in-between cleaning guest rooms, the $20 not-included breakfast buffet that I haven’t tried, and cats chasing scurrying creatures around the pool. If I crane my neck out the window kept tightly shut to avoid a mosquito invasion, I can see a sliver of the great Congo River. Congo-Brazzaville is just on the other side. Steps outside the hotel I face the all-too-common barrage of young men selling everything imaginable and crippled, mutilated persons begging for money, anything, whatever…”
“On first look, Kinshasa seems much less dilapidated than Luanda. It has a lively commercial feel without the intensity, traffic, smell, and trash of Luanda. The downtown is not very residential and the buildings are spread apart along wide streets. MONUC, the UN peacekeeping mission, is in the center of what is called the downtown area. Since the premises were attacked in June, several layers of barbed wire and a couple of parked tanks have been added for security. It’s actually hard to understand what all those SUVs and white and blue painted buildings really represent—a military force to maintain a peace that in many respects does not exist. As refugee massacres, displacement, disease and hunger continue to permeate the eastern part of the country, ruthless officials continue to carve up access to riches and power in the west. How can you process information when your colleague tells you that it’s hard to distribute food because the starving people are naked and too ashamed to come out of the forest to collect it? Or when you hear about the sexual violence commited against innocent victims by the Congolese and the sexual abuse and exploitation commited by the UN blue helmets? You don’t. It’s all too horrendous, which, I suppose, is why you stop looking directly at the beggars in the street. You eventually don’t twitch an eye when the man without legs comes crawling after you. And then you wonder if you are the one that doesn’t belong in the picture. And then you try to sleep but can’t…”
(September 9) End of journal because less than a week after arriving in Kinshasa, “reclimatizing” to Africa, and buying a gold fertility amulet for good luck, I got sick. I also began to suspect that something more than a cold or flu might be causing me to have trouble focusing on work and collapse at the end of the day. My first pregnancy test was the do-it-at-home type purchased in the first-class Belgian pharmacy and the lines definitely matched up. HURRAY!
But I still didn't confide in that little pregnancy dip stick and was afraid that there was more to the suspicious “cold”—in other words, some nasty tropical illness—so I went to the UN doctor at the MONUC compound (the logistical center of the peacekeeping mission). Dr. Regodic from Croatia, in his army gear and broken English, took a look at my throat with what looked like a camping flashlight and uttered the oft-heard phrase—“you have malaria, no?” I actually hadn’t been in DRC long enough to catch malaria, but I agreed to a blood test and requested a second pregnancy test just in case I needed to take any kind of medication. To my good fortune the malaria test was negative and pregnancy test was positive. Of course, Roque was the first to know and we exchanged quick words of joy, disbelief, excitement and regret that we were so far apart and would have to postpone the real celebration for a couple of weeks.
The next two weeks were spent trying to focus on work and not worry about being pregnant in Congo. Got sick again and spent three horrible days under the covers watching French TV in the hotel room, but I think it may have been food poisoning from the $35 pizza I ate. Before the onset of whatever it was, I was lucky enough to take a small tour of Kinshasa with our driver, bargain for handicrafts in the local market, eat huge, delicious shrimp from Congo-Brazzaville, hang out at the Belgian restaurant with my friend Beatrice, go to an African dance class, attend a party for children with new prosthetic limbs, have lunch at a really kitsch Greek bakery in the suburbs, and dance with Alex into the wee hours of the morning at a Congolese disco.
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