Today I was moving from my hotel out to the project house with the rest of the team. They put us in a hotel to start with as a bit of a buffer to find our feet with all amenities on site, and not having to fend for yourself, but now I’m in the house it feels like this is much more long term. Like I am actually living in Kinshasa not just passing through.
Packing up my stuff and slugging it the mile and a half across town,
The house is lovely, old Belgian almost art deco house with a pool and tonnes of entertaining space – 'which has been nicknamed 'the castle' you can imagine the fun the original owners had in here. It’s now in a little complex of houses in a populated area. But in the garden are trees that are jungle tress 100’s of years old. With the way the city is now it’s easy to forget that is place was all dense jungle, and I wish I could have seen this place in it’s heyday. It would have be utterly spectacular.
Sadly my room is under renovation so had to borrow K’s room while she is on a trip out to one of the pilot sites back east. The room is so large we call it the bowling alley. Unfortunately there is one small step which prohibits the actual use of the room as a bowling alley but I foresee it double up as an exercise study once K gets back. We’ve been using 5L water bottles as kettle bells. (Full of course).
When driving over from the hotel, and driving up the long private road to the complex where the house sits, we came across a couple who were screaming at each other, picking up rocks and hurling them at each other literally looking like they were trying to kill each other. The woman was bleeding, although giving as good as she was getting. But the look in their eyes was just awful. My boss was driving at the time and manovered the car in between them to try and give the girl a moments rest. (Mummy you will be happy to know that I was safely locked inside the car.)
Apparently, the woman was known to him a lady with mental illness who occasionally walked down our road to build fires and sleep. The attitude towards mental illness in this country is like in the middle ages, to be laughed at and then told to bugger off. It was horrifying to watch, but there was literally nothing we could do. My boss tried to calm the man down it it quite quickly became clear that he too was not sound of mind, and by this time the local security guards had heard the racket going on and were trying to intervene. So that was it we drove off back into the safely of our little fortress, in our beautiful castle. It didn’t feel good.
When you think about what sort of people they could be if they received with the help that we have at home, and the fact that these clearly unstable people have to fend for themselves, outcast, it’s terrible. And yet, out here worse things happen and are happening every day. The people out on the streets, trying to scrape together a living, and all the terrible things I with my sheltered upbringing am yet to comprehend. One of my colleagues put it like this, ‘when you think of each of these people as an individual, it breaks your heart, so you think of them as society so that you don’t become depressed’. It’s something that we do all the time you can feel bad for a nation in despair but when you times that by the individual pain of the millions of people, it’s so hard not to be consumed by it. So you divide it by the lowest common denominator, a survival mechanism perhaps.
It made my think twice about not spending that $5 on whatever the person is trying to sell me and getting more involved in volunteering while I am here.
Followed swiftly by my second survival instinct- Ice cream. H who is one of the guys in the house and I were shattered from our night out on Friday so went to get ice cream and have an early night.
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