First sleep in the Congo

Our first night in Bukavu we felt as if we were on vacation. We arrived to our new residence to find we have our own room with a bathroom – a far cry from tent and latrine life in Haiti. We explored the old Belgian maisonette that we would call home for the time being. Though it was dark, we could still make out the vibrant colors of the flowers outside our windows. We fell asleep under our mosquito net with the barred windows opened in hopes of siphoning la vent into our room. All was well.

At 7:30 the following morning we awoke to double prop UN helicopters flying overhead. We were awoken again by UN helicopters flying overhead at 8:30 and then again around 10am. The illusion of vacation passed away like a fleeting vapor.

We met different members of our Tearfund team on Friday night and throughout the day on Saturday. We spent time in the office, another Belgian maisonette about a ten-minute walk from our residence, and found that many of our colleagues are from other African nations – mainly Kenya and Ethiopia.

Our Program Director, a lovely Scottish lady with a great sense of humor, gave us a security briefing for our area of Bukavu. She gave us two documents, one being the security brief for the entire country of DR Congo, which was roughly a 15-page document, and a document for Bukavu, quite a bit shorter. For those of you reading this, you’ll be happy to know that we are relatively safe in Bukavu. Unlike the other Tearfund base in Goma, in North Kivu, Bukavu does not have a contingency plan if a volcano erupts – which happened not long ago in Goma. We are a 3-hour boat road south of Goma on Lake Kivu and will be traveling there over the next month or so.

We ventured out with our Program Director to the ‘PX’ shop, a shop run by the UN here in Bukavu. Basically it is a duty free shop for UN workers and Chefs de Mission (Senior NGO workers). Though the name confounds us, it is like a smaller version of a Wal-Mart (for our American readers) or ASDA (for our UK readers) where one can by everything ranging from canned goods, spices, curries, produce, frozen meats (including Halal meats) to flat-screen televisions, underwear, luggage, ‘executive’ button down shirts, trousers (perhaps we didn’t need to haul that 50 lbs sack of American goodies to the DR Congo after all). There is even a whole isle dedicated to the nominal aid worker’s coping mechanisms. In an effort to mitigate the effects of these coping mechanisms, the UN even have their own gym attached to the PX shop, equipped with free weights, treadmills, bench presses and the like. We bought some chocolates and pastis from PX, dropped them off at our house and walked to some of the more local markets further down the road, near the centre of town.

The fromage du Goma, or ‘Goma cheese’ is the only cheese that we know of that is actually produced regularly in Africa. There must be others, but in this case the Goma cheese’s reputation precedes our first taste. Just a week ago in London a French friend of ours who has spent time working in Congo-Brazzaville/ aka Republic of the Congo told us about a cheese produced in North Kivu, in the DR Congo. During his time in Congo-Brazzaville, he had heard rave reviews about it, though he had never tasted it himself. To us this cheese had an heir of mystery; something never seen or tried, something mentioned by a third-party who, for all intents and purposes, might not have even tasted it themselves. We are here to say that Goma cheese is real. It is delicious. It is a Gouda. We began our shopping excursion at high noon – a time I would not have expected considering the foretold heat and humidity. Au contraire. Even at high noon in May – and perhaps for much of the summer, Bukavu and Goma are pleasantly warm, perhaps hovering in the mid-to-upper 80’s for most of the year, with cool nights often worthy of a jumper. Today there is the faintest breeze, the air is unexpectedly light and the streets are alive with people walking the streets. I think we broke a little bit of a sweat, not much considering that we must have walked for about 2 hours. One of the items on our shopping list was this Goma cheese. We found one cylinder of it – old and frozen, placed into an empty freezer in a random shop. It displayed the beginnings of mold. Our program director insisted we could ‘do better than that!’ A little further on foot and we came to another local shop, in the basement of a tall building right off the street, adjacent to a buzzing roundabout. Past the smiles of the shop owners and their warm greetings of ‘bonjour et bienvenue’, we came to a fridge full of fresh Goma cheese. No mold in sight. Having had lunch and now dinner where the main ingredient was this cheese, we are wishing we had bought more than one.

Front of our house



Belgian style interior


Yay...we have a garden!


Garden flowers over our wall


Living Room

La foret qui parles (the forest that speaks)

To some of you, this may come as a bit of surprise - for others, perhaps not. We arrived in Bukavu, South Kivu, in eastern DR Congo last night after a couple of flights and a long drive through 'Nyungwe National Park' - or, in other words, the jungle.

It is our second day here and we have just finished a short security briefing for our area, and things are relatively safe. We are here in the DR Congo living and working with an ngo (non-governmental organization) called Tearfund (click here). Monica has taken up a 1 year post as the Public Health Promotion Advisor - working with local staff and communities on the subject of hygiene, sanitation, HIV/AIDS, and facilitating trainings on specific on health needs. Ian has taken up a 1 year post as a Grants and Information officer - meeting with donors, writing grants and working to secure funding, so that really important programs can continue to run. We will be traveling between Bukavu in South Kivu, Goma in the North Kivu and various project sites. This is such a beautiful country.

Anyways, the longest part of our journey which ended in crossing the Rwandan border into the Congo after dark was the long overland voyage from Kigali, Rwanda to Bukavu. On the way we took a rest in a town called 'Butare' - which, according to our driver was the site of Rwanda's 'first school', under the former colonizers. He also informed us that Butare was Rwanda's first city. It was a really lovely town, with boulevards (tree lined streets) lots of hotels, restaurants and shops, local fast food-type places - Butare even boasts national museums of culture and art. Brilliant.

Our drive through Rwanda was beautiful. Unlike Port-au-Prince, the overcrowded and polluted capital of Haiti, Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) is extremely clean and well-maintained. Sadly, it doesn't have a view of the ocean which is one of the many things Port-au-Prince has going for it, but the terraced nature of the city, the lush gardens, people walking and others riding pedal bikes, gave us the feeling that we had arrived in a sort of East African Shangri-la. And we weren't even in the Embassy district.

Some more prevalent things we saw during our drive through Rwanda:
- Tilapia stocked fish hatcheries with little chicken coops above the water to shower the fish with some organic fertilizer (if you know what we mean).

- Gridded rice patties with people dressed in orange working among the crops. The combination of orange and rice reminded us more of Nepal than anywhere else.

- Eucalyptus trees, evergreens, terraced hillside tea and coffee plantations - 'plantations' being used in the NOT south-eastern United States sense.

- Amazing roadside villages with lovely homes, power lines, maintained infrastructure.

One of the most memorable parts of our overland from Kigali to Bukavu was our trip through the national park, previously mentioned above. It took us something like 3 hours to drive through one end and come out the other, closer to the Congo border. As the sun began to set and the temperature dropped outside, along with the cool air came a distinct sound - like the squeal of trains breaking on railroad tracks. It was like a blue, metallic sound, not ear splitting, but peaceful. I figured it was the soft jabber of insects or some other thing. Perplexed, we asked our driver, a jolly guy called Justice, what the sound was. And, taking his eyes off the road for a short second to look at us directly, he said 'It is the trees themselves, who are speaking'.

Colobus Monkey


Tea Plantation through the trees