Now we are at the tenth, and last (for now) Snapshot. I hope it has helped give you word images to better understand our daily life in Congo.

Snapshot 10: 4 x 4

    Man & Machine v. Road & Elements

The contest: 
Driver and vehicle travel as fast as possible while the road and the elements of the natural world struggle against all travel.

Disqualifications:
Bodily injury or harm of pedestrians or passengers

Venue:
Main street, driveways, highways in Congo

The contestants:

Road & Elements
Rock, paper and scissors are nothing to water.
When it rains, it pours.
If water wins over rock, then it certainly conquers dirt.
Water picks up dirt and carries it away in victory
To create unexpected new potholes, new drainage ruts.
For any opponent who dare try to travel.

Man & Machine
Armed with the most ingenuity and perseverance in the known world,
the Congolese driver knows his machine well and pushes it
to it’s outer limits.
This unstoppable pair overcomes constant obstacles
with ease and agility, prepared to fix almost anything
with only a plastic bag.

And everday the contest begins!
The obstacles have moved.
Riding with some drivers is slow and bumpy like a horseback ride.
Riding with others makes your insides feel like hamburger.
It can take constant effort to hold your organs in their right places.
The shocks take the brunt of it and call it quits.
You don’t play music in the car.
You wouldn’t hear it.
Each rock or bump sounds like a crash.
The driver must focus on the contest.
For the stakes are high.

Results:
Man & Machine give it their all.
Many times they fall by the wayside, tip over or breakdown.
In the absence of industrial-sized road graders,

P.S.
We are Dr. Seuss fans. Just in case you’ve ever read Hop on Pop… We usually drive our bumpy. lumpy roads shouting:

Bump, Bump, Bump!
Did you ever ride a Wump?
We have a Wump with just one hump!
We know a man named Mr. Gump.
Mr. Gump has a seven-hump-wump.
If you like to go Bump! Bump!
Just jump on the hump of the Wump of Gump!

I don’t know that American English deserves to have this word in our language: Hospitality. I have known Americans who practice hospitality, some more than others. I am positive I have not usually been among them.

I don’t think we know half what it means.

Congolese Hospitality (and African Hospitality in general), on the other hand, is rich with depth.
(All these things I have seen or experienced recently.)

Congolese Hospitality welcomes you to eat at the table any time, any day. No reservations desired.

Congolese Hospitality sees that you may have cold feet and lends you slippers so you can go to the cold tiled floor of the toilet without getting too cold.

Congolese Hospitality lends you matching clothes, so you will look good at that choir performance.

Congolese Hospitality takes in that widowed cousin with her two fatherless children to make sure they belong to a family, have a roof over their heads and can pay for a decent education. They may stay 1 year, they may stay 10. They are family.

Congolese Hospitality loves it when you arrive unannounced at the back door.

Congolese Hospitality is not offended when you need a favor.

Congolese Hospitality walks you halfway home.

Oh that we would learn the depth, the breadth, the importance of

Make room for those in your midst.

Seek to meet needs.

(Self-sufficiency is a lie.)

Share life,

not just the pretty parts.

True Hospitality.

Walking along our muddy street last week,
I noticed a few kids throwing rocks at my house.
Band of ruffians doing harm?
Nope.

You see, we have mango trees.
It’s mango season.
Any fruit falling over the edge of a wall is fair game.
It’s practically a law.
But sometimes the mangoes need convincing.
They chuck rocks up into the air trying to knock down a snack on their way home from school.
You see, fruit is for kids!

Remember those commercials for Trix cereal?
The rabbit always wants to taste it
and the kids always stick it to him:
“No Silly Rabbit! Trix are for kids!”

One sweltering day on which we happened to have huge luscious papayas,
I decided dinner would be fruit.
And I was the rabbit.
No Silly Rabbit! Fruit is for kids!
Guavas, papayas, passion fruit, mangoes.
Not considered dignified ‘food’ for adult consumption.
Trees brimming with packaged snack foods.
Free for the taking.
Perfect for hungry kids between meals.
Just climb up and pick.
Stick them with a pole.
Hit them with a rock.
They don’t even have to be ripe.

You say you like mango?
No Silly Rabbit! Fruit is for kids!

In case you missed it, the Snapshot series began here.

My Mom used to tell me stories about her mother.
The grandmother I never knew.
She would go every few days to the local Beauty Parlor.
To have her hair set.
It became an idyllic 50’s scene in my head.

Ladies sitting under driers in curlers.
Tiled floors, chrome and bright vinyl.
Chatting.
Gossiping.
In front of huge mirrors.
Laughing about the latest news.
Heads full of curlers.
Local community sharing the mundane.
Doing hair.


I just never in a million years expected to find the same thing in Congo.


We were preparing for a big university women’s event.
We had planned to dress up over at her house before arriving.
Could I just follow her to the hairdresser’s for a few minutes?

Unexpectedly, I was transported to that idyllic 50’s Beauty Parlor
in Congolese veneer.

Three women in shiny chairs.
Heads full of curlers,
(one under a drier!)
Discussing women’s issues.
Local gossip.
Should women really be allowed certain freedoms?
Real questions were argued.
Laughter over the latest news.
In front of huge mirrors with a few cracks.
Plastic chairs, peeling linoleum, wooden shack on a dirt road with a generator and extension cord coming in through the boards in the wall to make things work.
Local community sharing the mundane.
Doing hair.


The decade, the country and the language may be different. 

In case you missed it, the Snapshot series began here.

Over tear-streaked cheeks, wails of sorrow ring out.
Our family attends the funeral of an employee.
The crowds mourn a beloved provider.
Father.
Grandfather.
Husband.
Son.
In his late sixties, Obedi had the national life expectancy rate beat by 17 years.
But his Mom is still around to mourn him at almost 90.

As the rich foreigners, his employers, we are viewed as Guests of Honor.
Fancy wooden chairs are placed in the dust.
Tied up tarps provide some shade in the heat.
For us.
Other mourners file in around us on benches.

The wooden casket is carried out with a wake of wailing women.
His mother.
His sisters.
His wife.
His daughters.
They sit in the dirt.
Reminds me of those who mourn in Israel in dust and ashes.

But there is also not much room anywhere.
How could his wife be in the dirt, while I am on a fancy chair?
Ancient truths ring in my ears:

Honor can be difficult.
It was painful to me to stay in that seat.
It was wrong to sit in the dirt – the family section.
But it felt wrong to stay in the chair.

There are only a handful of foreign families in residence.
Wherever we go, people stare.
White people! Mzungu!
                                   Look! It's his wife! 
              And children!
They check out our shoes.
They critique our clothes.
The children touch our skin cautiously.
Once, someone I've never met or seen called me by name on the street.
This must be how Paris Hilton feels.
For someone who loves to sit in the back row and 
work behind the scenes, it gets old.

During a big ceremony, we were seated with the guests of honor.
We didn't flinch at the many cameras and camcorders in our faces.

Par for the course.

The shock came 2 days later.
A stranger in the market shouted, 
                “Hey! Aren't you that guy I saw on TV last night?!”
 

Guess so.

We had our television debut, and didn't even know about it. 

Main street never rests in the daylight hours.
It is a constant bustle of activity.
Traffic can stop you.
But not like any traffic you’ve ever seen.
Anywhere.

Women carry heavy loads of firewood on their heads 8 feet long.
Young ladies chat in groups about the latest fashion, crossing the road ever so slowly.
Porters try to keep control of heavy carts loaded with stones or re-bar.
Couches line up in fancy velvet advertising themselves.
Vendors use cement steps to display their wares.
Pedestrians gather around shops with TV or music videos blasting into the street.

Motorcycle taxis zoom past at dangerous speeds.
They make things happen affordably here.
You might see them carry a pile of plastic chairs to a party.
Goat squealing his way to slaughter.
A basket of chickens to market.
10 foam mattresses for a friend hosting relatives.
A family of 5 to a wedding.
Businessmen in suits running late for an important meeting.
Middle-class housewives shopping for dinner.
A subwoofer needed 30 minutes ago in a church service.
All of these fit on a motorcycle.

The stray dog runs across your path.
And that woman learning to drive for the first time can’t seem to let you pass.
Kids running home from school play frogger in groups,
their blue and white uniforms getting brown in the clouds of dust.
The wealthy new cars are mostly foreign organizations who ignore their shocks and drive over potholes at twice the posted speed limit.

There is no pavement.
Just clouds of dust.
The potholes change with each rain.
There are no crosswalks or traffic signals.
You’re lucky if drivers stay on the correct side of the road.
You’re driving English-system cars on French-system roads.
And socially, it’s important to stop and shake hands with people you know.
And yet I like it.
You are never alone here.
I begin to take on the African fear of solitude.

It’s been said, “People drive here like they’re riding a horse in the Wild West.”
I wouldn’t know.
But maybe.
Maybe that helps explain this bustling chaos.
Daytime quiet?
Not here!

Two of the hours I normally would have spent sleeping last night were instead spent confirming myself as a bona fide Congo resident (or so I hear), as well as confirming a few things I’ve learned recently about rodents:

1. They will stay where they are hidden until at least 90% of their cover is blown (which is usually about the time you start to conclude that maybe they aren’t there after all).
2. They aren’t particularly smart (given that #1 may make their whereabouts clear, even if they think they are hidden).
3. They are quite quick enough to make up for #2, and are almost impossible to hit when they are running.

This makes the third time in the last couple weeks that I have spent 1-2 hrs clearing out an area with an alleged rodent, and I hope the end of the Rodent Wars saga. If you haven’t done this yourself, Episode I went like this:

1. Find evidence of rodentry where it shouldn’t be, e.g., droppings in your (outside) pantry.
2. Decide to “do this right” and clear out everything from the porch which provides access to the pantry.
3. Start removing items from the pantry piece by piece, checking for anything living, and sorting as trashed, to clean, or ready to restock.
4. Continue until the pantry is almost empty.
5. Sweep out the pantry.
6. Notice, while sweeping out the pantry, that there is actually a bit of garbage in the corner that has lots of chewed buts of stuff it in.
7. Start dissecting the pile, and sweeping bits away.
8. About half-way through the pile, see an actual rodent, who just afterwards sees you, and runs.
9. Chase it around the pantry with something you grabbed, alternately stabbing and slashing at it.
10. Realize that what you grabbed was an old umbrella that, in place of a handle, has sharp edges — and that you’re bleeding profusely.
11. Close the pantry door, and go into the house and bandage your right hand with your left hand.
12. With the bleeding stopped, and an impressively large bandage on your hand, return to the pantry.
13. Finally chase the big rodent out of the pantry, into the one part of the porch you didn’t clear (the far side).
14. poke through the nest and set scurrying two younger specimens.
15. Watch your children spasm through the motions of trapping them under a couple canisters, then refuse to kill or remove them.
16. Decide on a compromise of feeding them to the neighborhood cat.
17. Finish cleaning out the depot and securing a number of possible entry points, all while wondering what happened to that one that got away…

Episode II was basically the same story, only it was the woodpile outside, instead of the depot. A week or so after the conclusion of Episode I, we continued to see rodent sign, and heard occasional scurrying around some wood we bought some time ago and stacked to dry (since it is sold pretty green around here). We moved 10+ madriers (8cm x 25cm x 5m) and three planks (3cm x 30cm x 5m) –none of which were light, of course– and again just as I was giving up on there being any rodents in the vicinity, we moved the last madrier, and out they ran. This was probably where the other ones had come from, since this group had four adults, as well as a few younger ones, and they had been tunneling (I forgot to mention that there is somehow a hole tunneled up through the cement floor of our pantry…). So, after a bit of ditching for cover, chasing, beating and flushing out, only one adult got away –but into our house and through the first door on the right, into the kitchen.
I took some rather long implements and a flashlight to poke/look around behind the range and fridge, as well as the cabinets that I cobbled together, but no further activity. Given the 90% rule that I was formulating, this made sense, so we asked everyone to keep an ear out, left the back door open, and hoped that it would just leave.
But it didn’t…
It had been a couple weeks since the tenuous conclusion to Episode II (in which no one lost a hand), and I was feeling rather satisfied that the rodent had decided that it had had enough, and had simply left our house for greener pastures. We heard nothing anywhere, and saw no droppings. Until last night.
Episode III took place in our bedroom, where evidently this pest had found it’s way (I’ll thankfully say that even afterwards we found no droppings, so I still don’t know where he had been the last two weeks). It made some noises around 2am, at which point the half of us that is more skeptical of night noises was awoken. I poked around where the noise was thought to come from, but didn’t find anything, so skepticism and the hour took over. But few minutes after returning to bed (reminiscent of the weeks following childbirth now), I heard the noise myself.
So the entire room was cleared and picked through (we have some crafty and camping things there, as well as the usual clothes). Again at the last minute, this guy jumped out of no cover, to hide behind a bag in an otherwise empty nook of a cabinet.  If I had had my wits about me (it was 2:40 by now?) I’d have just considered the bag a loss, and pierced it through with some (sensibly) sharp object. But no, I grabbed a bucket to trap it, and removed the bag.
That one mistake gained me the “quite quick” insight above, but lost me over an hour off chasing it around our bedroom and bathroom. I eventually gave up on the 2 ft. length of pipe I keep handy for security purposes, and went for what I now call “Goliath’s Spear”, a somewhat ornate but thick (and 5ft long) piece of wood we had removed from the foot of our bed.
He and I were in and out of the bathroom twice, and around the bed (skirting, but never actually entering the mosquito net!) about five times. Once it was hiding behind Kim’s cookbooks, and it’s last best hiding spot (where I hit the 90% rule again) was under some tile we hope to lay in our bathroom some day… Needless to say, on about 4am, the thing was finally no longer moving, and it was removed from the house to our back porch.
Where I left it, because I didn’t want our dogs eating it (someone else’s cat is another thing…), and I didn’t want to go out into the rain (praise God, after weeks with almost no water!) to throw it in the trash pile. I could easily wait to deal with it in the morning.

Only, in the morning, it wasn’t there…