A Week of Delay

Week 6

Work for me begins in earnest the next day with a visit to a academic secretary to explore the local university’s library. We have already met with Father Vyankuno Emmanuel twice and been introduced to 5 researchers working in the political science and economics department. On our third trip, Father Emmanuel has a secretary photocopy relevant articles and helps me get a university library subscription. I check out Franny and Zooey.

 

We eat lunch with the priests and I am barely able to hold back tears of pain. I go to the internet café in the afternoon and realize that I have medication induced esophagitis from my doxycyline pill. Jean-baptiste advises me to wait until monday. At night, I have stabbing chest pains every 3 minutes and wake up gasping for relief as my muscles overwork themselves. I sit in the living from 6 am until Jean-baptiste walks downstairs to tell him I’d prefer to see a doctor that day. We go at 9 and they confirm the doxycylcline induced ulcer[1].

 

Once diagnosed, my anxiety subsides, but the pain is so severe for the following 4 days that I wish they would invite other children to the dining table. On the day it finally subsides completely, we make funnel cakes, a welcome new introduction after pancakes, latkes, quiche and apple pie.

 

I have made little progress against my initial goals in the office my first week by myself, other than conducting 29 baseline interviews with clients and two meetings with partners. I still have another training to organize, at least 71 interviews to go, an export business to start, a program evaluation to complete, and very little time left on the ground.

 

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[1] By not swallowing my antimalarial tetracycline (doxycycline) with enough water, the gel-coated capsule stuck to the soft lining of my esophagus and eventually burst open, irritating the inside of the esophagus and causing the odynophagia (pain swallowing) and heartburn I was experiencing

Getting Started

 

Its the night before John is supposed to leave, Earlier in the evening, I’ve given my boyfriend my mother’s cellphone number and corrected 2497 to 2487, before reaching out for the tiny water I have left in my water bottle next to my bed and taking my anti-malarial.  I wake up in the middle of a dream where the numbers 2….4….8…7… are spilling out of my mouth, and realize I have to vomit.  In the bathroom I vomit painfully and still feel the upwelling of solid matter in my throat. I try to lay down again but it is unbearable. I trigger my gag reflex and vomit again, lie down and have the same problem. I repeat a final time before drifting off to sleep.  In the morning the mood is festive, with donuts and chocolate spread as the family packs into a private car for Kasindi.

 

I’m at the office for the first time by myself, and have no idea what I can start on without French. Fortunately, the staff have never had the chance to chitchat before, and realize I spoke much better French than they thought. At lunch, the same fish is served as the night before, and the stabbing chest pains are a ominous reminder of the risk of a fishbone infecting and swelling the esophagal lining.

 

Denises brother sees me at the internet café and apologizes for not taking me out yet. After sending perfunctory emails, I browse web m.d. until I am sure I will need to transfer to a hospital in Kampala for a fishbone removal under general anesthesia. Jean-Baptiste tells me to wait a day.

 

Gestation

Week 3

 

John is with us for the first three weeks, taking charge and translating English to French, Swahili, Kinande, and vice versa[1].

 

He is overwhelmingly nice to me, making me feel guilty for any sign of impatience or frustration. I met his wife an oldest daughter 5 years ago in Washington DC and am worried I won’t recognize them. But as soon as she enters the courtyard, the two tiny girls in matching dresses run to and cling their mother.

 

Mama Raziki is also gracious and accommodating, having given me one of her kids bedrooms to myself and making her eldest bring me half-full buckets of boiling water for the first few mornings, until Denise shows me where in the kitchen its heated[2].

 

But then, the whole town is graciously accommodating, making me a guest of honor at a 1,200 person wedding and presenting the delegation “from America” the gift of an entire roasted goat. In fact, delegations from Tanzania, Uganda, and China are all called to the podium to receive ceremoniously skinned and roasted goats in cloth covered baskets, sprigs of parsley and spring onions stuck in their peeling, shining mouths[3].

 

The first few days at the office are revealing. I’ve worked on the periodic reports for almost three years without having closely examined the accounts, ever since I stopped having time to. I don’t understand the transition the office has made to a financial cooperative. And I don’t approve of how the credit commission works. But it is early days.

 

Week 4

 

We meet with wholesalers, retailers, go-buy-chop sellers, industry owners, service providers, and academics[4]. We start planning a permaculture training, a handicrafts exporting business, and visit the beneficiaries of our first institutional funder. I’m told that Nande are known to be businesspeople. They hate politics and would rather work in business. Except that some of them have realized that politics affects business, so they have recently started getting into politics.

 

Week 5

 

I realize there is no one in Butembo with John’s level of English, so we organize a hurried training in public information with the staff. I continue to try to find and meet, in total, with 4 potential interpreters.  The one I choose starts with me on the first day of John’s last week. On Thursday, John’s last day before he leaves, John is pulled to his in-laws for a series of visits that takes him all day to return from. The PMI office is next door to a clinic called “Fight Against Mental Illness” with crowds of men in odd choices of clothing constantly lounging outside, ready to kung-fu fight with the white girl and other unintelligible requests.

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[1] According to the family I’m staying with, 99.9% of the people residing in and around Butembo are Kinande. This will be an important distinction for the research I proposed to do with my PhD, which intended to look at ethnic tensions as a driver of conflict, both economic and political. It calls for correction, then, and probably revisiting and redesigning the original research proposal to either drop the inter-ethnic aspect or increase the geographic scope of the research.

[2] The family uses a combination of heating sources in the two rooms of their outside kitchen, including compressed gas cylinders in one room of the kitchen, and a variety of charcoal brassieres in the other room. It’s a luxury at all to have a bath with heated water every morning, but in a mountainous region, with temperatures ranging from 17-22, easy to get used to.

[3] This is in line with Gerard Pruniers observations on Rwandans adopting “synthetic “tribes of exile,”, that is, the countries where they had spent their years away…there were “Zairians,” “Burundians”, “Tanzanians,” and “Ugandans”…If these distinctions did not matter too much in daily life, they mattered a lot as soon as politics, business, or the military was involved”(4:1). I also observe that it highlights the family’s international ties and influence, as does the presentation of a member of parliament based in Kinshasa.

[4] Some of PMI’s clients are teachers who use us for income smoothing purposes. We also work with a couple of schools to do automatic salary payments, which helps schoolteachers save their earnings.

Getting There

Week 2

 

I’ve fallen asleep on the couch while waiting for John. John calls me to ask if I’m sleeping or waiting for him. I’m doing both. He tells me to go back to bed.

 

John and his brother, Jean Baptiste, arrive at the house at half past 3. Purveying the cloth sacks Charlene has stuffed with all her belongings, they cut down her luggage by half.  Scrambling to drag the bags back into John’s mother-in-law’s bedroom, Charlene still manages to add an additional 3 bag of uneaten vegetables, doughnuts, fried meat, and chips from the night before. John stops by Vanki’s house to settle bills and pass on the key.

 

Five hours later, we pull into the sleepy border town[1]. Jean-baptise yells something to a motorcycle driver, and gives 2,000 UGX to Charlene, who rolls out of the car onto the bike. We proceed with all her bags, to my utter confusion for a minute[2]. We pass through Ugandan immigration one by one and inch forward towards Congolese immigration. I’m pulled, unsurprisingly, into a backroom of the border crossing post, and told:

 

The embassy shouldn’t have taken my money and given me a visa.

Congolese visas should be issued by the person’s country of residence. Nevermind that I live in Jordan where there is no embassy. He doesn’t know what I should have done. I should return to Kampala and ask the embassy for my money back.

 

2 hours of arguing with the officer in French and I walk out to give john another turn[3]. Charlene and I take turns falling asleep at a cafeteria table and walking around Kasindi to stay awake. John buys us grilled fish, cassava leaf sauce, and ugali since we aren’t carrying any local currency[4].

 

Each time Charlene and I walk down the dusty, unpaved road, I’m irritated that Charlene wants to walk at all, given the attention given to us by truck drivers and a general sense of overstepping an invisible demarcation. 4 hours later, we find Jean-Baptiste has refused to leave our bags, eating the meat and chips in the tupperware. 6 hours later, connections from Goma and Kinshasa have intervened on my behalf. The officers stamp my passport. We take a taxi to beni as night falls. The drive to Butembo is almost entirely in the dark.

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[1] Congolese travelling from Uganda say that its better to travel through Uganda at night, meaning your journey through Congo will be during the daytime, in order to avoid any possible trouble on the road.

[2] The biker takes Charlene, who has no passport, on a dirt path through nearby fields to the other side of the border, where she waits patiently in the rental car. As John said, “She has no papers, so she has to leave Uganda the way she entered”. The mountainous Kivus in the east’s physical and human geography is usually categorized as part of the Great Lakes highlands, whereas almost 60% of the rest of the 905,000 sqaure miles of the country is covered with a thick tropical forest, making cross border monitoring nearly impossible.

[3] At this point, we think that the officer is trying to get a bribe from us. A common method to avoid or reduce paying bribes at checkpoints is talking about the alleged offense until the requisitioner is tired of explaining themselves.

[4] Its worth noting that we eventually realized that the new regulation requiring foreigners to apply for Congolese visas in their country of residence or citizenship were actual requirements, and that there is an online service for those residing in countries without embassies, which hadn’t shown up when I was searching for Congolese visa application instructions online. But a positive indicator, nonetheless, since the officer talking to us perservered in re-explaining himself patiently without asking us for a bribe in the end.

On Uganda

Week 1

 

Vanki and I walk from the bus stop to the Congolese embassy. I walk quickly to keep up with his pace, even though he’s almost a meter shorter than me. It’s the second day. My head is pounding from missing caffeine, and my pulse is a constant, ticking reminder.

 

The woman behind the counter doesn’t care to see a notarized invitation letter, a yellow fever vaccination, an airline ticket reservation. But she remarks “don’t mess it up” about the visa payment form in triplicate. Vanki takes it and 5,000 shillings from me to take a motorcycle to the bank to do it quicker. I invite him to leave his briefcase on the chair, but he prefers to port the battered thing close to him the whole time. By the time he returns, it’s lunchtime and the window attendant is long gone. When she comes back, it’s long past a late entrance to work for Vanki. He says farewell to me at the bus stop with specific directions to the mate on where the house is[1].

 

Liliane, Charlene and I take Liliane’s driver back to the embassy the next day, as we’ve been instructed. The embassy is swarming with Congolese university students. The hill next to the embassy is covered in sitting people, mostly men. We wait for the visa and Liliane’s temporary visiting papers (so she can travel without a passport), while Charlene peeks through the lace curtains at the commotion in the embassy courtyard[2]. One tall, bearded man seems particularly agitated, running from TV presenter to bystander and occasionally shouting. Charlene points to him and explains that she has a crush on him from school.

 

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[1] Vanki, being the brother in-law of my colleague John, was in fact directing me to the house of John’s mother-in-law, which was empty at the time other than a 22 year old Congolese girl named Charlene who was occupying the house and learning English at the local, free school.

[2] During the time the week that I was in Uganda, the Congolese diaspora in Uganda voted for a representative of the diaspora by simple paper ballots. The scene I witnessed was during the counting of the ballots, where several observers noted down tallies as the results of ballots were called one by one, and a TV crew filmed the official whiteboard where the tally was being completed with dry-erase markers. None of the Congolese I knew in Uganda had registered as living in Uganda, however, and could only watch the voting process.