One year on (by Karen)

Today marks a year since we returned to the US, and in honor of the anniversary, I'm posting my final entries about our stay in Lubumbashi. I wrote these on the flight back, knowing that as soon as we got home to Seattle, it would all fade. In fact, it's true -- we've been busy and immersed in work and life Stateside, and I haven't even taken the time to put up the posts that I wrote.

All in all, it's been a good year, but I definitely felt some reverse culture shock in the first months back. I've kept in pretty close touch with my main collaborator from the School of Public Health, and corresponded occasionally with other colleagues and students and friends. I hope to get funding to continue doing research there, and maybe even to bring students from my new job at University of Washington Tacoma.

Here are the posts I wrote a year ago:

Working Out

There are a couple of places in Lubumbashi we found to work out. First, when we were still staying in Golf, we walked over to a gym. Lots of new equipment, workout music playing, but only one or two people doing anything. The woman at the desk told us the monthly membership fee was $636. What?!?!? Yup, $636 per month. Yikes. We turned on our heels and left that place … I’ve since learned that it’s owned by Katanga’s ultra-rich governor, Moise Katumbi [2016 note: he's no longer governor, and things aren't going so well for him]. Next, I tried the Fit Barre and Zumba classes at K-Art, across from the Belgian School. At $10 a class, this was more reasonable, though still out of reach for most Congolese. Morning classes were mostly attended by foreign or upper-class Congolese women who dropped their kids at school and then came to class. I went a few times before my work picked up, but it was 10 before I could make it into the office. So I quit going and just did yoga at home in the mornings. I tried to mix things up with the assorted workout DVDs I’d picked up at Value Village before leaving, which ranged from anodyne to truly terrible (“Yoga Meltdown” — the title should’ve been a clue).

For a while, Eric and I were going to the evening Cardio class at K-Art, which was a good workout. But it was at an awkward time of the evening, too early to have eaten dinner, but too late to wait till after. Plus, we had to take the taxi there and either pay the driver to wait or count on his coming back for us; once, he left to do a quick errand, got stuck in traffic, and we were left trying to get a random taxi in our workout clothes after dark. So we slacked off on that. A few months later we heard that a couple of teachers from the Belgian School had been assaulted near there around 9 at night by armed men in uniform looking for money, so we figured it was just as well we weren’t out on foot after dark. We went a couple of times to the Monday-night badminton at the Belgian School, but the folks who played — mostly volunteers with the Salesians or other organizations — took their badminton way too seriously for us.

In the end, it was a 15-minutes-a-day Pilates DVD that we’d picked up in Nairobi in January that became the mainstay of our minimal fitness routine.

AS is

Sickle cell disease is pretty common in Lubumbashi. There’s a clinic at the hospital dedicated to patients with sickle cell disease. R, our driver, told us when he picked us up one evening that he’d just been talking with a young man from his church who’d gotten some bad news. He and his fiancée had both tested AS — that is, they were each heterozygous for the gene that causes sickle cell disease. They’d been going together for 3 years and were planning to get married. Now, with these test results, they were faced with a decision: go ahead with their plans, and with every pregnancy run a 1 in 4 risk of having a child with sickle cell disease, or call it off. A couple of days later, we learned they’d called it off. A tough blow.

A few weeks before we left, I was chatting with the night watchman at our house whom we’ve gotten to know quite well. He was telling me about his childhood in Kalemie, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and how he and his mother did good business selling fretins, small, sardine-like dried fish. He went off to check on someone at the gate, but phoned me a few minutes later. “Madame,” he said, “my mother is an albatross.” An albatross? I was sure I hadn’t heard correctly. I asked him to repeat it a few more times, but he was holding the phone close and whispering and I couldn’t make out the unfamiliar word. “Just come back and tell me,” I said, and he did. “My mother is an albino,” he said. Ah — “albinosse”, not “albatrosse”.

Having sickle cell trait — being AS — is associated with lower mortality from malaria, and provides a selective advantage in a population where malaria is common (and not commonly treated, which is no longer the case in Lubumbashi) despite the disadvantage of having sickle cell disease — being SS. I’m not aware of any selective advantage of albinism, though it also seems quite common. Our night watchman knew how albinism was transmitted and knew that, although the mother of his firstborn was not a carrier of the recessive gene, if he married a woman who was or if one of this children was a carrier and married a carrier, they might have a child with albinism.

Alliance Francaise

Soon after we arrived in Lubumbashi in October, we went to the Alliance Francaise to sign Eric up for French classes. And what the heck, I thought, I’ll sign up, too — it’ll be a good way to meet people, and good review. One of my goals in coming to the Congo was to improve my French, which I’d studied formally but never used as much as Spanish. So four evenings a week for the first couple of months, we went to class, Eric to A2 and me to C1. In both our classes, we were the only non-Congolese. The other students were an interesting cross-section of people who were well enough off to pay the course fee ($100 for foreigners, maybe $50 for Congolese?), but who hadn’t attended private schools where they would’ve learned to speak French well. French is the official language of education in the DRC, but the public school system isn’t great, and many Congolese speak French with an accent and don’t know the finer points of grammar.

Eric found his class disappointing, since it was focused almost exclusively on reading and writing French, two skills at which he was already pretty good. He really wanted to improve his speaking and oral comprehension. In my class, we would often just discuss and debate things (marriage, parenting, politics), which made it pretty interesting. We did a little grammar, too, but what I most enjoyed were the other students. Most were men, but there were a couple of other women. One was a graduate of the public health program in which I was teaching, though she hadn’t yet found a job in public health. The other was a pastor, or a pastor’s wife, it was never quite clear which. Neither of the other women spoke much, and some of the men were on the quiet side, but for the most part, it was an interesting bunch. There was the Kinshasa-born businessman, who quit halfway through to start theology studies to become a pastor; the guy who worked for REGIDESO, the national water company, and who said the water left the treatment plant clean but the pipes were in such bad condition that it got contaminated after that; the major in the armed forces, who had doubtless seen (or even committed?) terrible things, but seemed like a kind of bashful fellow; a serious schoolkid; a jokester of a young man, who when he learned I was an epidemiologist, insisted that Ebola could be cured by garlic (he really had me going, but the next class he told me he’d been pulling my leg); and a sweet guy from Kinshasa, who’d arrived in Lubumbashi about the same time as we had. The professor was an affable fellow, who spoke perfect (to my ears) French; I was surprised when he said he’d never left the country. Eric, on the other hand, found his teachers had strong Congolese-Swahili accents (saying, e.g., “day” for both des and deux).

 

Alliance Francaise final exam by candlelight

When the courses ended in December, I decided I’d had enough — and that I’d be too busy, since work should be picking up starting in January, when my main colleague would return from his two months in Belgium — and Eric decided to switch to a private tutor at the ILM, the Institut des Langues Modernes. The ILM was also focused on reading and writing, and the private tutor was often distracted and just gave Eric a worksheet to do. Finally, a couple of months before we left, we met a guy at an English club who had worked as an interpreter for MSF and the UN and who was happy to come to the house and talk with Eric several hours a week, so his French improved by leaps and bounds in those last weeks.

In early July, Eric sat for the A2 exam (the DELF, Diplome des Etudes en Langue Francaise) and I sat for the C1 exam (the DALF, Diplome Approfondi en Langue Francaise), and we both passed.

Bunnies!

Our taxi driver, R, isn’t really a taxi driver. He aspires to be a farmer — he wants to grow okra and eggplant (the tiny egg-shaped pale yellow kind that are ubiquitous here), and to raise rabbits and guinea pigs. So we fronted him some cash for the founding bunnies and guinea pigs of what will one day, we hope, be a great (and profitable) lineage!

Eric's son Isaac was visiting when we went to check out the bunnies

Cooking

Eric did almost all the cooking the whole time we were in Lubumbashi. We went out to restaurants sometimes, but not having our own car made it a pain to go out — taxis are hard to find after dark, and R generally turned in early. We could ask him to wait for us, but then we’d be paying him for that time on top of the ride and dinner, and it just seemed easier and more relaxing to eat at home. So Eric made lots of delicious Indian curries, with lentils and veggies. We learned from our hostess in Zimbabwe in April that you can microwave those pre-made poppadum instead of frying them, and those became a mainstay snack. Lots of Indian food, like poppadum and dosa mix and spicy snacks, was available at the Jambo Mart.

I would cook sometimes on the weekends — binge cooking. I’d make a whole bunch of things at once: granola for the week, yogurt, maybe lasagna and sometimes cookies. It seemed I'd lost my touch for cooking and could only bake: if I made pasta, it came out mushy, if I made anything else, I burned it.

Binge-cooking -- not sure what

Eric went barefoot in the house, and every time he touched the stovetop or set a metal pot on it, he got a shock. I wore rubber flip-flops and was insulated; he was grounded. The landlord insisted it was nothing to be concerned about.

Eric cooking at our electrifying stove

Wage Theft

The night watchman at our house appeared at first to be a carefree young sprite, skipping about his work and always smiling or laughing, especially when we struggled with French or Swahili. But after we’d been there for a couple of months, we realized he wasn’t so young after all: one day he proudly announced the birth of his first child, a son, and we did some quick mental re-shuffling to envision him as a paterfamilias rather than the carefree teen he’d seemed.

Of course, we never really thought he was carefree. We knew he worked 7 nights a week with no day off, and we knew he was paid only $80/month. We knew, because one evening shortly after we moved in, he didn’t show up; not realizing he wasn’t there, I called to ask him to open the gate, and he explained that he had not come to work because, in the 3 months he’d been working for the security agency, he hadn’t been paid. He had finally had enough, and was quitting — but was hoping our landlords would hire him privately, which they eventually did. In the meantime, he was behind on the rent for his place, which was $40/month — half his salary. We helped him out with a half-loan, half-grant, which he accepted gratefully and repaid punctually. We talked to the landlord about raising his salary — after all, $80/month did not even meet the level of the SMIG, the minimum wage for government employees, which is $3/day (“But,” said the landlord, “we have so many other expenses, and $80 is a good wage.”). We let the night watchman use the charcoal and brasero we had bought to increase our resilience to keep warm at night, and eventually (embarrassingly late!) bought him a pot and mug so he could actually cook something to eat on it.

The landlord said he was the second night watchman they’d had from this agency. Before, they used a different agency that was expensive, but really good — if there was a problem, they were right on it, very professional. But the rental market in Lubumbashi wasn’t what it had been, and with the turnover and gaps in the units, they’d had to economize by switching agencies. The first night watchman from this agency had also worked unpaid for several months, when the landlord went to advocate on the watchman’s behalf, the agency chastised (and moved? or fired?) the watchman for complaining to the landlords. Then the new guy, our guy, showed up — and he, too, worked unpaid for months. The landlord said there was nothing to be done: the owner of the security agency was a cousin of — well, let’s just say of someone very high up in the DRC government.

R, our taxi driver, has also been struggling for quite a while. Finding the taxi to drive was a lucky break when he was at a low point. It’s not altogether clear to me what he was doing before; I know at one point he was working as a driver for $100/month, but that wasn’t cutting it for him, his wife, and their kids. He had also done some camera work for a missionary group that would fly to the interior to do health and education work. Somehow, in early 2014, he was recruited to go to a 6-week training in Kinshasa for a new TV channel. He got additional training in camerawork and also learned to edit. He and his coworkers came back to Lubumbashi, and started working with the TV channel’s state-of-the-art equipment … and didn’t get paid for several months. In fact, he’s never been paid for those 4 or 5 months, and even though he left to find some way to put bread on the table, the TV channel still calls him to do jobs from time to time. But he’s never been paid. Why not claim the wages? Well, the TV channel is owned by someone very high up in the DRC government — not the same one whose cousin owns the security firm — and R is sure that this person is a person of integrity. It’s just that his agents in Lubumbashi aren’t following through properly.

Now R is driving this taxi for a guy from his church, but this isn’t such a great deal, either. He pays $20/day to the car’s owner — it used to be $25, but the owner wasn’t paying for the car maintenance, so R started paying him less — and some days goes home with nothing for himself.

We don’t know all that many people in Lubumbashi, but two of the ones we know have similar stories. They’re both working now, but barely scraping by. If we know two people who’ve been victims of wage theft, how much more common is this practice?

Social Life
Around the end of October, when we’d been here nearly a month and I was getting impatient to break onto the Lubumbashi social scene, we had a week where I felt like we missed everything. I chanced to read in an online newsletter – there’s no newspaper in Lubumbashi, only some sites that compile what appear to be mostly paid announcements – that there had been a gala to raise awareness and funds for obstetric fistula, sponsored by the governor’s wife and UNFPA. OF is a condition I am interested in, and I was disappointed that I hadn’t known about the event, which was on my birthday, no less. That same week, the friendly Polish woman who until recently managed the Italian restaurant at the zoo (wood-fired pizzas! to-die-for eggplant parmigiana!) told us about a 5k run that was to take place Saturday morning. She was iffy on the details, so I did some sleuthing online and found a number for the event organizer. Tried to reach him; no dice. Another event missed. Then, there were posters all around town for a 4-day equestrian event at the Cercle Hippique near the place we had just moved into in the Golf quarter. Saturday night we went to the Halle de l’Etoile for the monthly Jazz Café sponsored by the Institut Français, and Sunday afternoon we went over to check out the equestrian event. We got to the arena, and it was desolate – no sign of life. Posts that had been knocked off jumps lay on the ground. It was so quiet, it was eerie. Turns out that Saturday night was the big night, with fireworks and horse-jumping – we missed it.

Though I was disappointed by all these missed opportunities at the time, in retrospect, it was just as well. Better to stay away from events that involve politicians or their wives. The 5k probably didn’t even happen, for all we know. And the whole equestrian thing is tailored to expats and descendants of Belgian colonists. From Tim Butcher’s book Blood River: “One of the wealthy white mine owners is so keen on show-jumping that each winter (sic)he hosts his own event, inviting Zambian, Zimbabwean and South African show-jumpers to drive their horses all the way to the Congo. Border guards are bribed and special supplies flown into Lubumbashi. No matter that the Congo is ravaged by war, poverty and corruption, this man is wealthy and eccentric enough to convene his own Horse of the Year Show in the Congo.”

In fact, we haven’t discovered much of a social scene, expat or otherwise, in Lubumbashi. Sometimes when we’ve gone out to eat we’ve seen groups of burly white guys with South African accents who are probably mine-company employees, or less-burly aid-worker types. When we go grocery shopping at Jambo Mart, Hyper Psaro, or Nazem, we often see South Asian (Indian, most likely) or Middle Eastern (often Lebanese) families as well as Congolese. We’ve learned that there’s a monthly cocktail hour sponsored by the Belgian Circle, and we went one time, but were a bit put off by the cliques and the difficulty in communicating in French over the din of the crowd (not just Belgians, by the way – a mix of Europeans and Africans).  I was excited to go to a benefit dinner in February for a group called Kimbilio that featured a South African comedian, but was in bed with the flu and a 102-degree fever that evening. We had a couple of Cameroonian bankers as neighbors for a few months, but never exchanged more than greetings with them … they seemed to keep to themselves and be at home watching TV most evenings, but every Sunday they would head out in shorts, carrying soccer cleats, so they must have found a game to join somewhere. There are night clubs, especially in the quarter called Kamalondo, that are super-popular with the young crowd, and bars around town, including close to our current place, but we haven’t been tempted by them. Apart from the Institut Français, where the bulk of the attendees seem to be young men, and an art space called Picha that has put on some interesting shows with rotating artists in residence, there’s not much in the way of public culture that we’re aware of. There’s a cinema across from the Post Office. Our taxi driver, R, says they show “regular” films in the day and porn films at night. Once, a friend (a Haitian) who works for an NGO had heard about a recital by a Lushois (Lushois = of Lubumbashi) opera singer who was in town, and we went with her to hear him at the Casa Degli Italiani. Some of the Congolese Lushois upper crust there, mixed with Belgian residents and a smattering of white expats like us.

The people we got along best with were a French couple who were volunteering with the Salesians [2016 note: they and their 2 kids are living in France again, but currently on holiday in the US, and just spent the weekend with us!] and a few young Congolese professionals with whom we would conduct "research" about the local restaurant scene. 

Death

Death is more present in Lubumbashi than in Seattle. When someone on your street in Lubumbashi dies, you know because the family rents tents and lots of people come for the wake. The morgue for one of the hospitals is around the corner from the School of Public Health; one day, early on, I saw a crowd of people standing outside it, filling the street. They were mostly young, and lots of them wore t-shirts with the name of the deceased or a message of condolence spray-painted on them. It was a young man who had died, a student at one of the higher institutes, and he’d left behind a wife and small children. It made an impression on me, that first time; but in fact, there is a crowd outside the morgue most days.

Sometimes when I’m working in my office, I am deafened by sirens. At first, I would go to the window to see what the commotion was. Not firefighters or police rushing to someone’s aid — it’s the hearse, driving slowly along the lane between the School of Public Health and the Lycée Tuendelee that leads to the chapel.

A public health doctoral student who trained as a physician postpones our meeting because his neighbor has had a stroke and he’s helping to get him care at the hospital. The prognosis for strokes is not good; a few days later, I learn that the neighbor has died. Undiagnosed and untreated hypertension is common here.

Two students are part of the same extended family, related by marriage. They are both my age or older, and among the younger ranks of their generation. During the 10 months I was in Lubumbashi, there were four deaths in this family.

One student, from a family with political connections, reports that a relative has died. He was in his late 30s, Congolese by birth, but naturalized in a European country. He held a lucrative government post that had to do with imports and exports. He wasn’t ill; he left a pregnant wife. The family paid $500 for a private autopsy, which showed that he had been poisoned. Additional tests would have cost $1000; to take the case to justice and have the government investigate with an official autopsy would have cost $1200. What’s the point in trying to prosecute the case? It won’t bring him back.

One of the research assistants has not followed through on some work for our study. He won’t be in today, or for a while. His wife gave birth to their third child. The baby was born apparently healthy, but died a couple of days later. It turns out that the labor was long, and it was several hours between when her membranes ruptured and the infant was born — hours during which the laboring woman should have received antibiotics. Neither she nor the newborn was treated with antibiotics; it’s likely the infant died of sepsis, but who knows?

There’s a new guy who guards the gate of the School of Public Health. He’s sullen and slow, not like Papa Richard, who was all smiles and who would speak the few words of English he knew to me. Papa Richard has died; he was probably in his 60s at least, but still, one day he was at work and then he was out for a few days, saying his back hurt. Then he was back, then he was in the hospital, then he was dead. No one really knows what from.

Exams are over and in a few more days it will be the Collation de Grades, the graduation ceremony, for the students who have finished the 2nd year of the License. There’s another flyer with a color photograph on the School of Public Health door; this one shows a young man, a student in the L2 cohort who would have graduated. The secretary says he was in her office the week before; she noticed an IV port in his hand, and when she asked if he was sick, he replied, “I’ve been sick this whole time.” But he finished all his exams, only missing the defense of his final project. He died, but no one in the school administration knows what was wrong with him.

I am walking out of Jason Sendwe Hospital after meeting with a colleague. Today there are no keening women outside as there have been other days. Still, as I walk, I become aware of a rhythmic sobbing. Someone’s in pain; perhaps I’m hearing a patient through an open window? No; the sound is moving, and as I approach a young man from behind, I realize the sound is coming from him. He is walking slowly, ponderously. In his right hand are a faded blue plastic pitcher and a covered blue plastic bucket. In his left hand is a large thermos, the base of which is planted against his hipbone, the top in his hand. With every step he sobs, and the sobs are heart-rending. He reaches the gate and the guard wordlessly opens it to let him pass through; now he is outside the hospital grounds, every step taking him farther from the place where he last saw whoever it was who died. I pass him, a couple of meters to his left, and I cannot hold my head up. I don’t know him, don’t know who has died, don’t know where or to whom he’ll go home, but I feel bound to him in that moment. I wish I could put my arms around him to comfort him, but of course, that’s not possible. I walk on; soon I don’t hear him anymore, and I’m not conscious of the moment when I forget him and carry on with my day. It is only later that evening that the scene and the sound come back to me. Did he lose a parent? A child? Or a wife in childbirth, one of the thousands who die each year in the DRC?

[2016 note: We keep in touch by text with our spritely erstwhile night watchman. He quit that job and went back to school to try again to pass the national exam and pursue his hope of becoming a primary school teacher. On Christmas break, on a backpacking trip, I turn on my cell phone after climbing out of the Grand Canyon and get a text; the infant son he was so proud of and loved so much was killed in an accident on the road between Lubumbashi and Kolwezi. A couple of days later, the baby's mother died of the injuries she received in the same accident.]

Working

You wouldn’t know it from our blog posts, but most of my time here is spent working. I’ve resisted writing about work for several reasons. For one thing, when I’m not working, I’d rather be thinking about something else. For another, I feel like it’s a delicate topic on many levels. I don’t want to write about colleagues who could be easily identified by their positions even if I don’t use their names. In talking about some of the differences, challenges, and frustrations I’ve encountered here, I don’t want to appear too critical of my host institution. And in talking about some of the things that have resonated with me here, I don’t want to appear too critical of my home institution.

I guess I’ll just dive in and try to tell it like it is.

First off, I’m an epidemiologist. I took a 16-month detour after my undergrad degree in biology and before my master’s in public health to get a degree in nursing, but since then, my professional identity has been in public and global health. At my home institution, Seattle University, I teach in the College of Nursing. I have some fantastic colleagues and students there, but fundamentally, I feel out of place. I chose to spend this year at a school of public health, and it has been wonderful to have colleagues and students who speak my professional language — even if they express it in French. So this year has helped me regain my sense of expertise and professional identity.

The differences between the university in Lubumbashi and in the US are so vast that it’s hard to know how to describe them, and even after 10 months I don’t think I’ve got a handle on them. There are the formal differences, like the way what we would call the undergraduate program is divided into two “cycles”, a 3-year Graduate cycle and a 2-year License cycle. Then there are the informal differences, like the state of the classrooms or the absence of textbooks.

I was not assigned any courses to teach, so I offered to co-teach with my main collaborator. Together, we taught standard epidemiology to students in the Graduate and License cohorts. My colleague and I finally started class in late January or early February, the first week on Tuesday and Thursday, 8-12. “Great!” I said, “let’s plan out the next four weeks — which sessions will we each take?” He looked at me in utter confusion. I looked back in utter confusion. Soon, I figured the whole thing out: there is no schedule, no point in planning. We taught 3 sessions and then, the day before I was to give the 4th session, we learned there would be no classes for two weeks because it was reading period.

Good luck deciphering what's on the board if you're in the back of the class!

Big classrooms with concrete floors, rickety wooden benches, pitted chalkboards that are not even made of slate — some kind of painted wood that’s hard to write on. Dust everywhere, from outside, from the chalk. The big classroom has an outlet in the corner, so we run the extension cord and set up the laptop to project slides. If the power’s out, we cancel class, or make do as best we can, or sometimes get the generator. Class starts at 8, but by the time the class presidents are able to get the projector set up (they have to wait for the person with the key to show up) and people are somewhat settled, it’s usually closer to 8:30. Lecture for a couple of hours, take a 15-30-minute break, continue till noon, call it four hours and sign the time sheet. Each professor has a certain number of hours to teach. The hours don’t come on specific days; each week you check with the course coordinator to see what days you’re down for.

Lecturing to the big undergrad classes was kind of fun, but kind of frustrating. The classes were too big for me to get to know the students in the time I had with them. The material was already set; I couldn’t bring much that was distinctive to it, in terms of content or approach. Still, I did what I could, and I think the students appreciated it, if for no other reason than the novelty of having a professor from the US.

I spent most of my time giving workshops or seminars to graduate students, mainly on how to search for scientific articles online and how to read them critically, but also about multivariable analysis (to the public health graduate students). I met several times with graduate students at the School of Public Health, the Medical School, the Vet School, and the Allied Health Professions School. I also read and commented on drafts of lots and lots of study protocols and papers.


Mt. Kahuzi

I was slow on the hike up Mt. Kahuzi – legs still sore from Mt. Nyiragongo a couple of days before – and I hung back with one of the park rangers, a nice young guy who at 23 had been working in the park as a contractor for 4 years since his father’s death made it impossible for him to continue his agroforestry studies. At one point, I asked him whether in olden days people climbed the volcano, and he said, no, because they believed that was where the gods lived and they couldn’t go there. But he added that the Pygmies used to live in the forest on the side of the mountain, and that they still believed it was their land and would cut trees for firewood or charcoal. “The Pygmies,” he said, “they are less intelligent. We think of them as our cousins, like the gorillas, they …” I cut him off with a question. “Who told you that? Who told you they are less intelligent?” “No one, it’s just what we know, our experience. They think only of today, they don’t think of the long term. If you give them $10, they will spend it all with no thought for the future.” I countered by saying that that wasn’t lack of intelligence, it was poverty and lack of education. He didn’t contradict me, no doubt out of politeness, but I wasn’t sure he was convinced. The Pygmies have suffered a lot of oppression over the years in Congo, and I wanted to (gently) make my point. So I told him that in the US one hundred years ago, whites made the same kinds of arguments about blacks, that blacks were less intelligent … that some people still make these arguments, but that they are based on racism and oppression. This seemed to strike a chord with him, and he seemed receptive to hearing that there are Pygmies who are very educated, that we are all humans and are brothers, not cousins.

Bamboo forest on the lower slopes of Mt. Kahuzi

 
DRC2Seattle

Our long-awaited countdown started on Sunday, seven days before our scheduled departure. Around 8 PM I felt suddenly tired; I turned in early, feeling a little under the weather, and spent the night tossing and turning. I had a fever, and was convinced that despite my daily dose of Malarone I must have a case of malaria. The Congo was not going to let me go easily.

A little before 8 AM Monday morning I hobbled into the clinic shivering, wearing woolen long johns, track pants, and wrapped in a thick plush blanket. The nice Belgian doctor I’d seen there before took one look at me and my blood pressure (80/58), heard the word “dehydrated”, and told me she wanted to keep me. I said I thought I had malaria, but when she looked at my throat and saw white patches, it immediately made sense that I had strep. I didn’t have a sore throat, but the night before I’d had a bad coughing fit when some water went down the wrong pipe, and that could easily have irritated my skin and let lurking strep invade.

I didn’t really think I needed to be admitted; I was perfectly capable of drinking, and I wasn’t disturbed by my low blood pressure, since it’s always low (though not that low). I just wanted a blood test to rule out malaria, and some antibiotics to treat the strep. But I was too weak to argue, so they put an IV in and popped me in a private room that had two doors, one to the hall and one to the neighboring dispensary where babies cried off and on all day. Staff were used to using the room as a shortcut and would walk through as I lay there, nonchalantly saying “bonjour”. The bed was so comfortable – firm, unlike the mattress we had at home! – and the sheets were clean. I slept a lot, thinking vaguely how lucky I was to have a private room with a bed and sheets and bathroom in the nicest clinic in Lubumbashi. Periodically someone would come in and take my temperature and blood pressure. Eric came and went, brought me a little to eat and drink. Toward the end of the morning someone said that I had raised white cells in my blood, and that was good enough for me – I was ready to start antibiotics. But it was hours before the doctor discharged me, and I had almost nothing to eat the whole day.

I took the last dose of antibiotics the morning of the day we flew out.

We decided to take a few days in Europe before heading to Seattle. Friends of ours recently moved to Glasgow, so we headed to Scotland.

We thought a walking tour would be just the thing — time to think about and “process” our 10 months in Africa while enjoying the greenery. We’re outdoorsy and we like to walk. We’re good at it — one foot in front of the other! A walking tour along the Arran Coastal Way, not technically challenging like rock climbing, not even as demanding as backpacking. A hot meal and a cozy bed every night, and days walking along the seashore looking at wildflowers and prehistoric stone monuments and sea birds.

The ferry that carried us to Arran

The Isle of Arran is a short train and ferry ride from Glasgow, and the path around it is just about 100 kilometers, or 64 miles. We booked with a tour company that arranged our lodging and luggage transfer. Five nights, four days — sure, we hadn’t done much walking in Lubumbashi (Eric more than I; he walked 2 km back and forth to his French lesson at the Institut de Langues Modernes twice a week), but we were undaunted by the 15-to-17-mile daily distances. I mean, we hiked in Nyanga in Zimbabwe! We climbed Mt. Nyiragongo! We’re Mountaineers! How difficult could a coastal walk be?

Day 1 -- weather fine, spirits high

Heather

Haggis

Hutton's Unconformity

What the walk lacked in technical challenge, it made up for in muddiness and sheer length. We had forgotten to remember that in the British Isles, people are self-deprecating. What an American might refer to as a “hike” in a park, a Brit or a Scot would downplay as a “stroll”. The Arran Coastal Way is a lovely trail, with little elevation gain and gorgeous views, but we were wiped out after the first day. We walked 17 miles from Brodick to Lochranza in good weather; when we limped into the hotel at close to 8:30 PM with feet and joints aching, the manager told us that the kitchen had just closed (oh no!), but that it would soon reopen — “You won’t go hungry.”

Lochranza at last!

The next morning we gamely set out through bogs along the hillside, fighting a fierce headwind. It was cold and intermittently rainy.

Windy!

Around noon we had covered six miles; we came to a village and ducked into a cafe for some hot soup. And then it dawned on us: we could take the bus! The next thing I knew, Eric had ordered the lemon tart, and I had hobbled to the shop next door to buy The Guardian. The bus came an hour later, and we rode the 10 miles we would have walked. We missed ancient stone circles and dinosaur tracks, but had no regrets as we lounged in our hotel room reading the paper, our wet socks and boots drying by the radiator.

And we did the same for the next couple of days … walked 7-8 miles and took the bus the rest of the way. It was a perfect vacation!