eyeballs on the wall

We love our love boxes.. Memere send loads of fun Halloween stuff..

including sticky eyeballs to get us in the Halloween mood!!

ES2 Kisangani - EAGLE school

About a month ago, we had a visit from one of the State Department's Deputy Assistant Secretaries and I was asked to escort her to one of our beneficiary schools just out near the airport here in Kinshasa.  Her schedule was tight, as she had a meeting with president Kabila at 10, so I had to be at her hotel at 6:30.  We then had a police escort the whole way across Kinshasa (holy crap, they go FAST through traffic.. it’s crazy) to the school where a whole pile of kids were singing a welcome song.  This is one of the schools where we do a lot of things to empower adolescent girls.. mentoring, tutoring, support groups, community awareness.. and with boys and men too so they support their girls and women.  When we got there, these lovey girls were singing a welcome song about how their home was our home.. it was lovely, and I almost cried! 

 

 

 

Then the school director, the woman in pink, gave her welcome speech.

We did a tour of the classrooms, then saw a skit that one of the girls wrote about a dying father who didn't want his daughter to go to school because the brothers needed to go and she should just get ready to be married.  And how the girl herself and her friends convinced him otherwise. Yippeee!!

Then we did focus groups with students and parents.  It was good.. we talked with five kids (3 girls, 2 boys) in 5th and 6th grades.  They are hopeful and know that girls have rights and potential like boys.  When it was their turn to ask questions, they asked for a latrine and that we please build a wall around the school so that the street boys would stop threatening to rape them. These girls were probably 10 or 11, but Jaffa’s size.  It's really hard to be confronted with the horrible things that you read about.  Certainly helps you feel committed to doing allllll of the paperwork that needs to happen to make these things work.

And here we are, all together and feeling optimistic about what we can do together!

 

Pieds en l'air

Art exhibit at school, with the theme up "upside down". 

Here is Eben's picture holding a ball with a friend in his class on a scooter. 

They did a nice job, and had fun taking pictures for it.

Welcome Agatha and Owen

Jaffa and Eben have been waiting for their new pets since the day they brought Geckie and Sophia to the Australian school in Jakarta.  We thought they would be hamsters, but after consulting some experts, we learned that guinea pigs are more fun and interactive.  As soon as we got into our house, we headed to the pet store (don't get me started) and got the last two remaining guinea pigs.  A couple (yippee).  [Tell me if you want me to send you a guinea pig, as I'm sure we'll have more soon.]  They each claimed one, keeping with their own sex, and named them after the main characters in the books they are reading: so, Owen and Agatha.

 

 

 

Blu is VERY interested in getting to know Agatha and Owen.

 

Owen is the one with lots of white fur, and back feet that are different colors.  Agatha is mostly black.

 

They LOVE lettuce and hay and their pellets, and they drink a lot of water. 

Cage cleaning daily!!

see Blu and his eyes here too!

17 rue Lemera, Gombe (with additions)

This is what we have been waiting for!  We have moved into our house after two months in two other apartments.  You'll see that we have two balconies, and here is our view of Brazzaville (the capital of the Republic of Congo).  Did you know that Kinshasa and Brazzaville are the two geographically closest capital cities in the world?  It is also our first evacuation point.. as we would take boats across the Congo River.  But not right now given that their political situation is worse than ours.

Inside the house, we have four bedrooms, four full baths, and one half bath.  We have living room, dining room and reading corner downstairs.  And.. here is our kitchen:

and from the other direction.. you'll see more countertops, and a pantry.  It works!!  Now we just need our stuff.

 

The back story on the table is that I ordered it just before I thought we were moving in, so it arrived before we did.  The thing is, neither the carpenter or I thought to make sure that the thing could get through the door (any door!).  Nope.. so it lived in the garage for a week or so and the electricians used it.

 

I am not ready to give you the tour of the house yet, but there is this nice one of our reading corner.. it will get super stocked and spiffy, but for now, it's already appreciated!

 

I did also want to show you some of the very special things here.  First, there are several beautiful mirrors in the bathrooms..

 

And we found this very practical thing in our bathroom

Not even kidding.  It was actually hanging like that. 

Guess how long it took me to pull it out of the wall. 

There's a shower in the other corner, and who needs a curtain for the bathtub anyway?

 

There are also FOUR fantastic light fixtures in our living and dining rooms. 

Let me know if you would like me to send you one.

The furniture is the same as what we had in Jakarta, so we feel quite at home.  That said, we do have a few of these beautiful lamps that I haven't had the pleasure of living with before.  I'm happy to send you one or both of these too.

 

As we wait for all of our stuff to clear customs, Zeric has been working with Maker (our gardener, great name, right?) to get planting underway.  We are also planning the chicken coop, designing the swing set/fort, and checking into materials needed for the pizza oven.

As far as the dogs go, Mercy has her spot in the front corner of the garden so she can guard.

Blu has also assumed guard duties when he is not helping Maker by digging holes in the yard.  We have 24-hour guard service at our house, and so far, all of the guards love having Blu as their #2 guy.

So, this is home for now!  Will keep you posted on our settling in.. 

I feel a dark red wall coming on in the living room.

Buying fabric at The Beach

Now that I am back in the office five days a week (it's been awhile since this last happened), I gotta get myself some more work clothes.  I'm going to venture into tailored skirts made with African fabric, as I once did a lot of years ago in Ghana.  Mind you, these are not things that white girls can wear outside of Africa.  At least not white girls like me.  We'll see if I can even make it happen here.  Stay tuned, I will post pictures.  Even if my skirt is a bust, surely Jaffa's dress will turn out great.  [Note: All of the fabric is sold in six-yard lengths, so you'd better really like it!]

 

Zeric, on the other hand, wears all kinds of memorable things everywhere, all the time.  After much bargaining with the ladies at The Beach--which is a line of about 40 stands selling fabric on the road to the port--he now has plans to add two more shirts to his repertoire.  Both will include two patterned fabrics: one orange-and-black themed, and one pink-and-gray themed.  We'll see if Eben can get on board and agree to matching shirts with one or both of those. 

 

Thanks to Zeric's commendable observation and research skills, we learned that Dutch wax fabric originated as something that the Dutch intended to export to Indonesia, to offer a less expensive alternative to batik.  It wasn't refined enough for Indonesians, so the Dutch looked for alternative markets, and found them in Africa.  That explains why many of the designs that you see all over Africa look very much like batik designs (and my tattoo).  Nothing like a good colonial connection!

[Check out this article!!  http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/10/30/made-in-holland-the-chanel-of-africa/]

When we had bought enough fabric and Zeric had saved about $13 bargaining with the ladies, we went for a drink at the drink place just behind the fabric sellers.  The baobab tree was enormous.. and it has a corrugated metal 'skirt' under which there is a restaurant.  There were the requisite very cold beer, 45 flies on our table cloth, five semi-stray dogs running around, and the one crazy guy who wouldn't let go of my hand. Overall, a pretty tame day at the market.

Driving in Kin

I think I'm going to have a series on driving in Kinshasa.. this is #2.

 

It should be #3 but I couldn't get to my phone fast enough to take a picture of the dump truck driving down the main road in rush hour traffic with its bed fully tipped. 

 

Here, you will see one truck pulling a car using some kind of cloth through traffic and then trying to take a left turn.  We didn't stick around long enough to see how it went.  My favorite part was the look on the woman's face who was in the passenger's seat.  She was completely made up with her hair done, looking fantastic but none too impressed with the whole situation.