Weather II
The opposite of the rainy season is not the dry season. It’s
the dusty season. Fine dust everywhere, on the computer screen, keyboard, the
chairs you just wiped down yesterday, on your clothes, in your nose. Sneezing,
snuffling – and cold anywhere (the apartment, my office, under a tree) that’s
not in direct sun.
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| Dust. |
Sleeping not only with the blanket, but also thick wool
socks, one night even wool long johns. Shivering in the bath though the water’s
warm. The upside is that walking in the sun is pleasant, you don’t break a
sweat. Reminds me of Indian Summer in the east coast autumn – clear, crisp, dry
mornings and dry, sunny days. Like Nairobi in January, or Phoenix at
Christmastime.
Resilience II
Remember all my crowing in an earlier post about how
“resilient” we were to the vagaries of power outages because we’d bought a brasero and some charcoal? We got our
comeuppance on the Kundelungu Plateau. Eric described some of our struggles to
light the charcoal, but he didn’t go into the half of it. Lots and lots of
candle wax, blowing on the coals until we were light-headed, soaking the
charcoal in some of our reserve gasoline – I even stooped to trying a plastic
bag.
I’d first seen someone use a plastic bag to light a fire on
our Nyanga hike in Zimbabwe. I was scandalized – all those toxins! But of
course, plastic, being a petroleum product (as I am fond of pointing out in my
crusade to reduce, reuse, and recycle it), burns very well. Every time we’ve
used the brasero at home in
Lubumbashi, the guard has lit the fire for us, and he, too, sometimes uses a
plastic bag. On balance, I suppose it’s better to use a plastic bag to start a
cooking fire than to let it sit in a ditch for a few millennia, or to burn it
in a pile of trash that generates no useful heat energy and emits lots of toxic
smoke.
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| First night -- dry charcoal, lots of candle wax. Dinner was served a couple of hours later ... |
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| Next morning -- I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down! |
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| Where there's smoke, there's fire -- or?? |
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| Pine cones to the rescue. |
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| A wisp of a flame! |
These days, at home in Lubumbashi, the power is out every
morning from about 6 to 9 or 9:30. This is nice, because it’s predictable; on
the other hand, it means no hot breakfast or coffee if we leave before the
power comes on. Usually we have a hot bucket bath because the hot
water heater has been on overnight. So, on balance, we’re still pretty
dependent on our creature comforts, hovering near the lower end of the
resilience spectrum.
Kundelungu II – Night
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| The park is supported through a Congo-German cooperation. |
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| Crossing the Lofoï above the falls on a thick, spongy carpet of green, red, and black ferns and algae. (Photo by Mama Bear; Tween Bear and Papa Bear in front of Eric, Baby Bear clinging to the park guard/guide.) |
The night sky at Kundelungu was breathtaking: the Southern
Cross, the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, and a striking straight vertical line of three
points – Jupiter, Venus, and Regulus – shone bright. There was no light
pollution whatsoever; the six of us were alone up on that plateau, kilometers
away from the nearest town, cozy in the gite,
our only company the spiders and wasps.
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| The night sky at Kundelungu, as snapped with my phone. The amazing thing is that, if you look very closely, you can actually see a couple of planets! |
After our long drive back from the Lofoï Falls, we sat
around the low coffee table, talking by candlelight, eating the dinner we’d cooked
over the brasero, drinking wine,
melting squares of chocolate in the candle flames. The 4-year-old had gone to
sleep, too tired to wait for dinner, and her 11-year-old sister had had her
fill of marshmallows toasted over the brasero
coals. We were all feeling mellow, well-fed and sleepy …
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| As the sun was setting ... |
Suddenly, through the darkness, we heard the sound of a
vehicle, and voices of men – drunk? – singing, chanting. The gite no longer seemed cozy, the candlelight
no longer warm. We blew out the candles, closed the curtains, made sure that
the flimsy locks on the glass doors were closed. Then we sat in the dark,
straining to hear. They were still out there, more distant now.
We had no phone service, no radio. Of course, we weren’t
totally alone on the plateau – the park staff, including the guard who had been
with us that day, were somewhere, but we had no idea where. We thought of
stories of nearby Upemba Park, which is effectively off-limits to tourists (and
dangerous to rangers) because of rebel activity. When I was in Kilwa the week
before, there had been reports of activity of the Maï-Maï Kata Katanga, and the
guard had said that their traces had been seen near the Lofoï Falls. But thus
far, he said, they had never caused problems in the Kundelungu Park.
But there’s always a first time, I thought. I tried to
reassure myself and others that they only came looking for food and money, that
they wouldn’t cause us harm, but I was painfully aware of the two girls and of
stories of kidnapping and rape.
Quiet returned. Had they gone, or were they lurking
silently, surrounding the gite,
waiting to make their move? We went to bed, slept fitfully.
In the morning, as we were trying to light the charcoal yet
again, three park staff came walking along the road. As they struggled in their
turn to light the charcoal – they said it was damp, exposed to the dew because
we hadn’t closed it up well enough – we asked them about the noise we’d heard
the night before. It was they and their colleagues, returning from watching the
European Cup finals, happy that their team, Barça, had won.
Of course, we hadn’t been alone the night before – that was an
illusion. And the Maï Maï weren’t out to get us – that was a delusion, born in
part of reality (there are rebel groups and they do do bad things
sometimes), in part of a paranoia with shameful roots in tropes based on class,
colonialism, and race.
Moral of the story: always check the football (soccer)
schedule before heading for the hills.
Robot II
The traffic robots in one of our early posts were a big hit.
Unfortunately, the robots have not fared well. The one I pass most often on the way to work is often ailing, unable to raise one or both arms or failing to rotate in sequence. Actually, for a time, it appeared to be completely dead; after a few days, we realized it was only in a coma, because the green light on one of its hands started blinking. A few days later, it woke up, but it's never been the same.
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| Go west, young man! The robot at the intersection of Kilela Balanda and 30 Juin out of commission, replaced by a flesh-and-blood traffic cop in a reflective yellow vest. |
Of course, whether they're functioning or not, drivers interpret the pattern of lights in idiosyncratic ways, which don't always involve correlating red with 'stop'.
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| The robots have been diminished. They now have patches (only red and green, no warning yellow) on their knees, their heads don't swivel, and it doesn't look like the red-light cameras in their chests are working anymore. |
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/mar/05/robocops-being-used-as-traffic-police-in-democratic-republic-of-congo
http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/03/the-case-against-giant-traffic-robots/387358/
http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/7229/Traffic-Robots-in-the-Democratic-Republic-of-Congo.aspx
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/24/tech/robot-cops-rule-kinshasa/
This one's from L'shi! http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-26820565
An interview with the inventor:
Nice to see DRC getting some positive press, though given how the ones in L'shi have fared, I'm not sure these robots are going to turn into a big source of export income anytime soon ...
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