Photo Interlude - Karen

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The UNILU School of Public Health, founded in 2005 and housed in a former convent. The big tree on the left is over 100 years old -- given that Lubumbashi was founded just over 100 years ago, that's old! The SPH is sandwiched between the Lycee Tuendelee girls' school, which is also over 100 years old, and the Clinique Universitaire, which is a teaching hospital of UNILU and where the lab we'll be working with on our planned study of the prevalence of colonization with group B streptococcus in pregnant women is located. The nuns lived here and worked in the hospital (and also the school?), going back and forth through a gate in the back courtyard that you can't see from here. During some down time between master students' defenses last week, I saw lots of types of birds, including a pair of African-Paradise Flycatchers, in that back courtyard.

The office I share with an epidemiologist colleague -- looking across from my desk to his. He has another office at the public Jason Sendwe Hospital, which is where he spends most of his time.

Vaccination poster on the door of the cold room at the provincial Ministry of Health where the vaccines for the EPI (Expanded Programme on Immunisation) are stored. My SPH colleague and I visited the MOH and met with the Minister, who was very supportive of our proposal to conduct the GBS study among women attending hospitals in the area.

A few Ebola prevention posters from medical facilities. The West African epidemic seems pretty remote here, but at the same time, as the country where Ebola was first discovered (in the north, far, far from here) and which has a lot of experience in controlling EVD outbreaks (including one just last month), the DRC is working to train groups of experts to help in West Africa. In fact, the microbiologist who will work with us on the GBS study is currently in Kinshasa for the training. We also went to an amazingly acrobatic dance performance the other night, and one of the numbers was a solemn piece that dramatized the EVD epidemic and ended with the performers holding signs that read "Let's fight against Ebola" and "Together we can save the world" -- an earnest sort of "We Are the World" echo.

 

More of those smoky purple flame trees I love.

We wanted to adopt these kittens! They were hanging around the garden of the hotel we stayed at briefly before moving to the apartment, and we had fantasies of bringing them with us to the house we planned to rent. But a) we didn't get the house, and b) they weren't strays. But we're not ruling out the possibility, with a different house and different kittens.

One of the places we ate a few times when we had to eat every meal out. The South African fast food chain Galito's and affiliated Zimbabwean Chicken Inn, Pizza Inn, and  Creamy Inn  opened in Lubumbashi less than a year ago; they serve surprisingly good fast food. By the way, the shirt Eric is wearing here is one I got him in Ghana -- we haven't seen anything like it here, where most men wear western-style shirts or else custom-tailored shirts made of colorful patterned pagnes.

The Institut Francais sponsored a program as part of the FAO's World Food Day (this year's theme is Family Farming), which included a showcase of some local projects like this one to make efficient stoves that use less fuel and generate less smoke. Jiko means stove in Swahili. We also tasted a peanut-sweet potato loaf which was like a veggie meatloaf and bought some delicious pili-pili (the ubiquitous hot red pepper sauce that makes everything taste better -- just ask Martha Stewart). 

One of the planned World Food Day activities was a visit to a farm outside town, but it was canceled on account of the first real downpour of the rainy season, which created this huge hole on the street outside  the Belgian Megastore supermarket on Chaussee Laurent-Desire Kabila (formerly known as, and often still referred to as, Chaussee Mobutu). So far, this has been the only downpour of the rainy season -- it's been dry, dry, dry.

And that's it for now! 

Getting established

Looking down the street from a balcony.

The primary language here is Congolese French and we are both working to understand it better. We are in classes at Alliance Française. Karen is taking a class at level “C1” (fluent) and Tuesday, I was promoted out of my original “Elementary 3” class to the next level. Karen has a significant advantage, since she already knows standard French, but pronunciation can add to the language gap. Certain French pronunciation details aren’t rigorously followed. For example, my professor pronounces the difference between le (“luh”) and les (“lay”), but when the students read out loud, they both sound like “lay”. Same with que (“kuh”) sounding like “kay” and deux (“duh”) sounding like “day”, which is how the real French word des should sound.
Very few people speak English here, even though English is spoken in nearby countries. For example, we have met native English speakers from South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We also attended the “English Club of Lubumbashi” that meets every Saturday. We were brought by a contact we met through the US grant alumni network, a young man who attended Montana State University (Bozeman) for a year on a Fulbright scholarship and is now working for a mining consulting company as an engineer. The Fulbright has programs for American students and professors going abroad and for students and professors coming to the US.

Due to the lack of a robust banking system, large purchases are paid for using brand-new US $100 bills. In the US, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I used “Benjamins”, but here I have them all the time. At home, I wouldn’t take out large amounts of cash because I could pay for nearly everything with plastic, but here we often get $100 bills from the ATM. I didn’t realize how cool-looking our $100 bills are with all of their anti-counterfeiting technology.
Renting an apartment without using credit cards or checks or international wire transfers was interesting. Although normally the VISA debit cards we use are limited to $1000 per day, there was an additional restriction on the DRC, so we couldn’t take out more than $500 per day. It took us a few days to gather the $100 bills necessary to pay for the real estate agency’s commission, the deposit, and the first month’s rent, and even then we had to supplement with a few Euros left over from our day in Amsterdam.
We had rejected this apartment earlier because it was pretty small, was too far from downtown, didn’t have a yard, and didn’t have an oven. However, we decided we needed to get out of hotels so we could stop paying so much, unpack completely, and cook for ourselves. The apartment has a bedroom with attached bathroom, a connected living room - dining room, and alcove called “the kitchen.” The kitchen has a 2-burner hotplate, a microwave, a toaster, and  a sink. The bigger, more expensive, house with the bigger yard that we liked better wasn’t going to be available until mid-December. [Karen: We have this place through the end of December and hope to move either to that house or to another place then.]

The western-style grocery stores (like the Greek-owned Hyper Psaro) carry a lot of goods from South Africa and Europe. There is also a large Kroger’s-style department store called “JamboMart” that carries a lot of Indian food & spices in the grocery section in addition to 3 floors of hardware, kitchenware, and clothes. I bought a mix to make dosas (a savory, South Indian crepe) and a chocolate mousse mix from Holland in order to augment the [Karen: delicious] potato masala I made for Karen’s birthday dinner.
The produce in the grocery stores is pretty poor – both in terms of selection and appearance (freshness, fly-covered-ness). In the downtown area, you often see women selling produce from a bowl they carry on their head; we’ve seen oranges, bananas, mangoes, avocados, pineapple, cassava, and small bags of drinking water sold this way. In certain areas, there are also displays of produce or food lined up on the ground – sometimes on a piece of cardboard with the price written below. We have seen all the fruit listed above in addition to candy, fish, small, dead songbirds tied into bundles, live turkeys with their feet tied together, and caterpillars. I also saw someone selling a small deer, dead, but complete in all ways, and we’ve heard that termites are eaten here, but I haven’t seen them.
We feel lucky to have discovered a local produce market that has a good selection of nice-looking fruits and vegetables. Small by Seattle standards, it is run by about 5 women, who are competing for the sales. We bought pineapple, papaya, tomatoes, aromatic celery, carrots, cucumber, zucchini, and garlic there. Karen is eyeing the lovely looking leeks for an upcoming meal. It is about a quarter-mile from our apartment, and we walk there unless we stop in a taxi on the way to somewhere else. Most upper-class households have a driver, and, like a lot of similar places, the upper classes don’t walk. Being automatically included in that category by virtue of being American, many people we interact with would be scandalized by the way we get around town.

Driving in Lubumbashi is probably similar to any number of non-western, busy, growing, metropolises: there are loose guidelines, but the rules aren’t followed too strictly. There are traffic lights, but you’d better not trust them completely. There are aggressive lane-changes and left-turns across traffic and passing on downtown 2-lane streets. You see U-turns on busy streets and pedestrians weaving through moving traffic. One thing that is unusual is that the cars drive on the right, but most of the cars are from Japan and have the steering wheel on the right, too.
There are large buses that go to nearby towns, but there are no local public buses of the type we are familiar with, so the transportation requirements are filled by taxis (which we use a fair bit) and what Karen calls “collectives,” but the locals call “buses,” which are local, private, cheap transportation run using Toyota Noah vans. The vans are imported from Japan, and either come completely stripped to the metal, or are stripped down here. Except for the front seats, they are down to raw metal inside with benches added. They leave from particular places downtown and the “conductor” is in charge of announcing the route and collecting the money. Once the van is packed, it leaves. They hold around 25 people. The conductor often rides half-way out of the vehicle scanning for people wanting to ride. He also is responsible for opening the back of the van to let people out.

The first time I took one of these buses, I went to the stop near our apartment and paid 500 FC (60 cents) to go downtown. This was around 5 pm, and the bus had just unloaded people coming from downtown and was returning fairly empty. The driver had spent time in South Africa and was excited to talk to me in English. After a couple stops, the front seat was free and the driver insisted I come around and get in. So, I rode shotgun the rest of the way, listening to his heavily accented English. When full, there would be 2 or 3 people sitting shotgun. Karen and I both took the “bus” home from French class last night. It was very full. We learned that the actual fare is 250FC, not 500FC, because a young woman saw we had out 1000FC and told us we only needed half that for the two of us.

There are a lot of details that I hope to share in later posts, but after three weeks we are getting more comfortable and more established as we improve our communication and become more familiar with the city. We hope to visit farther outside of town soon!

Lubumbashi – Week 1

Hey there, it’s Karen again. We don’t want to overwhelm you with posts, but in these first days when everything is new, there’s a lot we want to share – so here are some of my impressions.

Flying in over Lubumbashi, I was taken aback. The city seemed in the middle of nowhere – no outlying settlements, no surrounding fields of crops or even any green at all, except in a few patches in the city itself. As Eric said, reddish dirt – though not as red as I’ve seen in other parts of Africa I’ve been to – and a fairly spacious layout. What have we done?, I thought, as the plane banked over the city to approach the airport.  I should have applied to the Fulbright in Kinshasa – how will we make it 10 months in this featureless, barren place?

Once on the ground, though, experiencing it at human scale and walking around, it seems less isolated and desolate than it did from the air. From our perspective now, there is variety and activity and topography. We got a map the very first day, and spent the entire next day walking around for hours, to and around the zoo, around downtown. This city feels manageable, unthreatening. It’s not big enough to get lost in, and the traffic’s not fast enough to be scary. People are friendly, and as a white-skinned foreigner, I don’t feel conspicuous the way I have in some places I’ve traveled. Taxi drivers will honk once and readily take a head-shake or a “non, merci” rather than ask repeatedly if we want to ride. Perhaps our preference for walking – at least so far, since it hasn’t been too hot – is one of the more conspicuous things about us as foreigners.

The reason Lubumbashi looks like it’s in the middle of nowhere is that it is in the middle of nowhere. There was no settlement here until 1910, and the city grew up around the copper mine. There are no farms or villages around it, so nearly everything is imported. We’ve seen hardly any animals, apart from in the zoo, except for a couple of chickens, some goats by the roadside, a few unhappy birds for sale in cages, and a couple of cats. Sidewalk vendors sell oranges and apples from Zambia or South Africa, or occasionally some bits of produce that look like it might have been locally grown – tomatoes, garlic, avocados. There are green mangos on trees; one of our taxi drivers, a nice young guy named Gelain, said they would ripen after it had rained three times. Lastnight was the first rain of the season, so I’m hopeful the mangos will be ready soon! But aside from the dearth of agriculture, the city’s history has shaped it in other ways. I’m finally reading David Van Reybrouck’s book Congo, which Eric wrote about in his first post, and Van Reybrouck writes quite a bit about the history of Elisabethville, as it was known until 1966.

Another result of its isolation is that prices are high. Hotels are expensive, and eating out is expensive. Even when we’ve gone to local restaurants for foufou, smoked fish, and manioc leaves, it’s cost at least $20. As Eric described, we think we may have a rental lined up, but it will be another 10 days or so until the current occupant moves out and we can move in. In the meantime, we are planning to move to a less expensive hotel (at half the price of the one we’re in, it will still be $100/night), and trying to find the best deals for food. One we’ve found is the 14-dollar wood-fired pizza at the Italian restaurant at the zoo, and just lastnight we had delicious, not-too-outrageously-priced Indian food at Maharajaa. Both these restaurants also have the advantage of being relatively fast – more than once already we’ve thought we would get a quick bite somewhere and ended up waiting an hour for our food! We’ll both be glad when we’re able to cook for ourselves and eat out only when we want to.

When we do start shopping and cooking for ourselves, we won’t be confronted by unfamiliar foods unless we seek them out. Lubumbashi is full of supermarkets stocking South African, European, and even some US brands. I had insisted on packing a suitcase full of things I didn’t think we’d be able to find here, like toiletries and baking powder (because of course, they’d only have the weird European kind), but was amazed to see most of it here! The one thing we would definitely have had a hard time finding is saline solution for our contact lenses, but otherwise – unscented laundry detergent? Check. US baking powder and baking soda? Check – Clabber Girl, Calumet, Arm & Hammer. Bob’s Red Mill steel-cut oats? Check (not that we brought that with us!). Not much in the way of fresh produce, though, so I’m glad I brought some veggie seeds along and am hoping they’ll grow well when we move into our temporary home. It turns out, though, that I needn’t have brought those, either – the HyperPsaro supermarket has veggie seeds galore, probably better suited to this region than the ones from Seattle.

Of course, we’re still decoding the culture here, as we will be for the entire 10 months (and even then we’ll only have scratched the surface). There must be a dual economy in housing and food and other goods, and we’ve seen a little of that by walking through the Mzee Kabila public market where there are stalls with bulk bags of rice, cornmeal, and soy flour, and rows and rows of used western clothing, all for much less than in the supermarkets or boutiques. Yesterday I went to the market in an outlying quarter called Kenya (in a fruitless search for a prêt-à-porter shirt of African fabric to give Eric for his birthday), and there housing is surely less expensive. But even a fairly dive-y 2-bedroom apartment in downtown L’shi that reminded me of some of the more run-down apartments I saw in NYC when I was a visiting nurse costs $1500/month!

Some of the decoding we’re doing is literal. Despite having sat through 150 hours of intensive Swahili class this summer, I can only catch a few words of the local Shaba or Kingwana dialect when I listen to people speak it to each other, though the few times I’ve tried out my halting, school-book Kiswahili, they’ve had no trouble understanding me. Most of the time, though, I speak French, which is harder than I expected. For one thing, I’ve been speaking so much Spanish recently that I’m mixing it up with French, and for another, I’m not yet used to the accent and colloquialisms here. I’ve been referring to Eric as my “mari”, but others use the words “époux” or “conjoint” – perfectly understandable terms, just not the ones I’d think of first. To work on our French, Eric and I have been trading off reading his copy of Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers, and on Wednesday, we registered at the local Alliance Française, took language placement tests, and were sent off to our respective classrooms for lessons! More about that in another post – we’ve still only been to class once because Eric stayed home sick yesterday.

Speaking of sickness, we’re far from Ebola virus here, but still reading and watching the news with great concern. We weren’t screened for fever on any of our flights coming here, but as we walked into the L’shi airport, we saw a big poster with two columns of text describing Ebola virus disease and precautions. My first thought was to snap a photo, but a uniformed soldier sternly discouraged me from doing that, and I belatedly and sheepishly remembered all the admonitions I’d read against taking photos around anything vaguely official. My public health heart, though, regretted not getting the photo and regretted even more the placement of the poster outside, where there was no time to stop to read it, rather than inside, where disembarked passengers waiting to pass through immigration control could have read it at their leisure. By the way, in other DRC-related public health news, there was an article in Science this week tracing the current HIV pandemic to Kinshasa in the 1920s, whence it spread by rail to Lubumbashi. But HIV rates here are relatively low (2-3%) compared to some countries in the region.

Several of you have asked for photos, but we don’t have many. It’s hard to take a picture unobtrusively, even when soldiers aren't around. Here are a few we have managed to take:

On Wednesday, on my way to meet the Dean and colleagues at the School of Public Health. It’s housed between a girls’ school and the University Clinic in a former convent complete with a stained-glass window and a chapel-turned-classroom. Our initial meeting went well, and next week I’ll start working with some counterparts to plan the study I’m hoping to do – more about that in another post soon!

This robot directs traffic at the intersection of Mzee L-D Kabila and Av. Sendwe. Every minute or so he swivels 90 degrees, raises his arms, and on his chest, back, and hands flashes red or green at the oncoming traffic.

The streets are lined with purple-flowered flame trees; unlike the more familiar scarlet-flowered ones, these give a somewhat hazy, smoky feel to the streets. Lubumbashi, at least at first look, at least at this season, has few bright colors men and women in bright, patterned clothing are in the minority here.

The courtyard at the lovely, pricey, Bougainvilla Guesthouse.

Arrival

Our trip to Lubumbashi had 3 segments: Seattle–Amsterdam, Amsterdam–Nairobi, and Nairobi–Lubumbashi. As we descended into Nairobi at 6:30am last Friday, we could see the sun rising orange over the flat landscape, but we didn’t see much of the city, just a few lights. The next flight, to Lubumbashi on Kenyan Airways, was on a smaller plane, but it was still a jet. We flew out of the airport and away from the city, so we looked down over a flat, scrubby landscape that was marked with animal tracks we could see from the air. Much of the flight was over clouds, but when the ground was visible it was uniformly brown, scrubby, and flat.
Approaching Lubumbashi around 10 AM, we flew directly over the city and could see the dusty, reddish dirt roads, the single story houses, and the spaciousness. Although there are over a million people in the area, Lubumbashi is not a tightly packed, dense city. New houses were being built, the unroofed walls of the brick houses appearing like small mazes from the air.
At the Lubumbashi airport we had no problems with passport control or baggage claim, although the driver we were expecting was not in the terminal—it turned out that the arrival of some Nigerian pop stars made the terminal more restricted than usual, but we easily found the driver waiting outside. Our first home is the Bougain Villa, an small hotel and a restaurant that is owned by South Africans (note: that’s Bougain, NOT Bargain, Villa) They had a “black and white” party on Friday night, and we didn’t realize until we got there that it wasn’t formal—those were the rugby team’s colors. Good thing I didn’t bring a tuxedo. They played a lot of rugby on the television over the weekend. Much of the staff is South African and don’t speak French. The clientele is almost exclusively middle-aged, white South Africans mining managers and engineers.
After checking in and getting lunch we got a car to bring us to downtown. We started at the tourist office, hoping to find a map of L’shi, but found a nondescript handful of rooms containing desks and agents. For the map, we were directed to a bookstore and headed out. The bookstore was a religious one doing a brisk business selling school books for the coming year. They did have a map, but didn’t take dollars (many places take US bills, as long as they are in excellent condition. Large purchases are often done using new $100 bills. We haven’t used a credit card yet.) We headed back out to find a money changer. There are money changers everywhere, usually sitting on a chair with stacks of bills displayed on their laps or a small table. These are stacks of 500 Congolese Franc bills (each worth about $0.55). So, when we changed a $100 bill, we received about 905,000 FC, around 100–150 bills, which is an unpocketably large stack. We bought 2 identical maps for 1,500 FC each.
On Saturday, we spent most of the day walking: we walked to the zoo, then paid to go into the zoo. The lions and tigers were taking a siesta, but they did have nice enclosures. There was also a variety of monkeys and we could get quite close to them—close enough for one to grab the map from Karen’s hand and try to pull it into the cage. A zookeeper quickly grabbed it back, and the 4 monkeys in that cage were pretty upset to lose their map! I liked seeing the monkeys up close because you could really see their coloring, the details of their hands and feet, their eyes, fur, etc. The zoo was partnered with a zoo in Germany and also has a termite museum because the area is known for the very large termite mounds. I guess you can buy them by weight at the market, but we haven’t seen that yet. The display of dogs was a little disconcerting—they were barking and sounded very dog-like.
After the zoo, we continued walking to downtown, where we discovered the Institut Français where a dramatic monologue based on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was about to start. We stayed and watched the performance and the audience commentary afterwards. The audience was mostly actors and so the comments were not about the play, but about the performance: pronunciation, body language, dialect, etc. I was curious to hear a more socio-political response, but that didn’t happen despite Karen’s direct question about that.
We took Sunday off and hung around the outdoor pool at the posh Hotel Karavia, where we watched people and read. There was a large contingent of Middle Easterners there—mostly clean-shaven young men and some children.
We are staying at the Bougain Villa for about a week, and also looking for a place to rent. The way it works here is that if someone helps you find a property to rent, you pay them one month’s rent as a finder’s fee. This is an incentive for everyone you meet to want to help you find a place to live, since furnished places start around $1500/month for something that would be considered pretty (c)rudimentary in the States. We have had the most luck with a real estate agency (ImmoKatanga), but that doesn’t stop everyone we talk to from wanting to show us the property some friend of theirs has available. There are many complications involved in renting an unfurnished house: the generator for when the power goes out, the water tank, the guard, the deposit (sometimes 3 months’ rent), the finder’s fee, taxes, furnishings, etc. After looking at a nice unfurnished place ($2500/month, 3-BR, swimming pool out back), we decided to restrict our search to fully furnished places where all the “complications” are included in the price. We have looked at a few newer apartments, but have our eye on a 2-bedroom house with high ceilings, a yard, and character that should be available in about 10 days.
It is getting warmer, with highs of 97 degrees predicted for the next week. Rainy season should start in a couple weeks, which will be just as hot, but wet. It is currently hot and dry. Fortunately, it was somewhat cooler when we spent our first full day walking.
Tonight (Friday) there is lightning but no rain yet—the next post may describe what it is like in the rainy season!

Blog Post #2 – in transit (it’s a long one!)

Murphy’s Law of Travel: preparations will expand to take up all available time

Hi there, it’s Karen.  I’m starting this post in the Amsterdam airport, waiting for our overnight flight to Nairobi to board, but when it’s online and you’re reading it, we’ll be in Lubumbashi already!

It was a rather traumatic final 24 hours before getting to the airport in Seattle, but – with the help of family – we managed to get everything done. We had a bit of magical thinking about how much stuff we had to move from the apartment into storage and how much time and truck space it would take to pack it up and move it to our storage unit. Our flight was scheduled to leave around 1:30 PM Wednesday. I was methodically packing and weighing my bags Tuesday morning, congratulating myself on how far in advance I was getting it done. We had various errands to do, too – Eric’s final rabies shot, picking up glasses, getting an international driver’s license (do those things count for anything anyway?). At 6 PM, when we made our way up to Shoreline to borrow Eric’s brother-in-law’s  big pickup truck, it was already clear that we wouldn’t make our scheduled 7:30 dinner in West Seattle.

When we loaded the first piece of furniture into the pickup at the loading dock at the apartment, panic set in. There was no way we’d fit even the pared-down belongings we’d had in the apartment these past couple of months in the bed of this truck. Not to mention that the kitchen still wasn’t packed up, and, oh, by the way, the storage unit closed at 10. In a well-timed phone call from her home in Texas, my friend/guardian angel Christine (who has been party to more than one of my skin-of-the-teeth international departures) suggested we call in reinforcements, and we did – our would-be dinner hosts, my cousin and her partner, dropped everything and came with their pickup truck, Subaru wagon, and calm competence to help us out.

We got the two trucks and two cars loaded by 9:10 PM and were set to go to the storage unit on the east side. Magical thinking was still in force; Eric said, “We can do this! Half an hour to get there, half an hour to unload, we’ll be out by 10.” It didn’t quite compute, but at that point, what else could we do? Eric’s son Aiden, who had spent the afternoon helping us, hopped into the big rig with me and navigated as we drove into the wilds of the eastside. We were making pretty good time until we got to the exit and discovered there were construction delays on the road to the storage unit. I was way past panic, in the zone of preternatural existential calm: what would be, would be.

We got to the storage unit at 9:37 – I know because just then, a friend texted with the name of a restaurant to try in Amsterdam, information which at that moment it seemed only remotely possible we would use. There was a U-Haul backed up to the door of the storage building and three crazed-looking young guys frantically unloading it, trying to beat the 10:00 deadline. We joined them – the five of us unloaded the two cars and the little pickup, but at 9:53 we had no hope of getting the big pickup unloaded. Eric and I were readjusting the pile of tied-down furniture when Aiden pointed out that we had to be out not just of the storage building, but of the parking lot, by 10. So we high-tailed it out of the gate with seconds to spare.

Eric and I had planned a relaxing goodbye to people and places in Seattle Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Our notions of conversation over a dinner of tacos and a tasty breakfast Wednesday morning before catching a taxi to the airport had evaporated; now it was a question of if, and how, we could deal with our stuff and get to the airport at all.

Eric drove Aiden home and on the way they had a last dinner together of cold sandwiches,  dried seaweed snacks, and potato chips from the QFC. I drove the fully loaded big pickup to West Seattle – to top things off, it rained briefly on our uncovered load along the way – and belatedly sat down to dinner with my cousin and her partner around 10:30. I joked that they’d think twice before ever inviting us to dinner again! Eric arrived there around 11:30.

Eric in the back seat of the taxi with the bags

Wednesday morning, far from our vision of hash browns, omelets, and espresso drinks, was a carefully timed and executed sequence of events: up at 6, to the storage building by 7:30, unload the truck, get everything into the units, then back to the apartment by 9:00. Load Goodwill items in pickup, clean and vacuum apartment, turn in keys by 10:30. Drive loaded pickup and Prius with our luggage back up to Shoreline, drop off keys, paperwork, bags of things we’d saved out for Aiden and his brother Isaac, change clothes, then into the waiting taxi by 11:00. In the end, we left for the airport with the two of us, the driver, and our bags just fitting in the taxi at 11:15.

It was smooth sailing from there. Each of our 4 checked bags was exactly at or one pound under the weight limit, and all were checked straight through to Lubumbashi. We had an uneventful, if uncomfortable, flight to the Netherlands, where we stored our carry-ons at the airport and spent the better part of the day in Amsterdam. At Bijenkorf we were excited to find 240-volt versions of small appliances we’d not brought from home -- a stick blender (with a food processor attachment!) and a beard trimmer (with vacuum action! though we passed up the one that was laser-guided). After a short nap, a shower, and an early dinner, we caught the train back to Schiphol, and are now on our way to Nairobi, thence to Lubumbashi, where we expect to be met and shepherded through customs by a helper very kindly arranged by a Florida-based Lubumbashi native, of whom I’m sure you’ll read more in later posts on this blog.

What have we learned from all this? Well, for one thing, to triple our estimates of the time it takes to pack or move, and to more realistically estimate the resources we need! We also learned, however belatedly, to recognize our limits, to ask for help, and that people responded generously when we did. On a deeper level, as I was sorting and packing and hauling all that stuff – the stuff we wanted to store, the stuff we were giving to Goodwill, the stuff we were bringing to DRC – I was struck once again by the way we’ve burdened ourselves with material goods. On the one hand, I want to have things that are useful, well-designed and well-made, and to keep them until they no longer serve a purpose. I want to be conscious of the resources that go into things, and the money they cost, and avoid being wasteful. On the other hand, because I move so much, is packing, moving, storing, and unpacking worth the resources? It’s not a simple equation – it involves not only time and material resources (gas, space, money), but also emotional ones. As I get older, or perhaps just wiser, holding on to even treasured possessions feels oppressive at times.

A book I would have packed if I’d known I had two extra pounds of luggage allowance (but of course, even without knowing that I could have packed it and left behind a pair of shoes or bottle of saline solution) is Free, by Mark Scandrette. I met him when he presented at Seattle University’s Search for Meaning book festival last February. The book and his website describe how he and his family have gotten rid of nearly all their possessions, and how freeing it is to live outside the consumer economy. I’m not there yet, but it’s an appealing destination. For now, though, we’re headed to Lubumbashi! More about that in our next post.

On board flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi

A little worse for wear -- in Nairobi, boarding flight to Lubumbashi