Megan à la RDCongo: June 2009

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Esengo - Partie II

On Friday morning, I made a new friend. This is me with Dieu Merçi, "Thanks to God" in French, and Dieume for short. He is two. Dieume is a neighbour's little one who spends more time with the Mandefus than he does at his own home. Until Friday morning, he was so afraid of me - the first mondele he had ever seen - that he wouldn't even go near the house. This quickly became the running joke of the whole building. People kept trying to bring him into the house, but every time he saw me he'd run away screaming and crying. And then we'd all laugh.

So Friday morning, his mother had had enough. She brought him down to see me, and when he started crying and pulling away from the door she scooped him up and said "Stop! You will say hello to the maman" (have you ever tried to reckon with a Congolese woman?). This abruptly stopped his tantrum and she carried him over to me. I said bonjour, and he very poutily said BONJOUR! I said comment ça vas? He looked down and, totally unimpressed with meing forced to greet me, said CA VAS BIEN! When I held out my hand to him, the panic began to set in again and he started pulling away. One short 'eeh!' from his mother nipped that in the bud, and he let me shake his hand. Well. That was it. We were best friends from that moment on, and I became Yaya Megan (the Lingala word for big sister).

I really did become like and feel like a big sister to all of those kids; Elie, Debora, Esther, Beni, and Dieume. Even to some of the young orphaned girls and filles-mères. By the end of the weekend I had so many names flying around, from Maman Christianne to Yaya Esengo, that I could very well have forgotten my real name. Just plain old Megan. How dull (just kidding, Dad). Whenever I went out, the kids crowded around me and even sometimes on top of me the minute I returned.

After I got back from my first stay in Maluku, my mom informed me that her friend has put my name forward to speak on a panel next International Women's Day or Week about gender equality in Congo. After having told her about my weekend and experience with the young women the day I left, she and my aunt and uncle and me had a bit of a simultaneous epiphany: what better venue to give these girls and women a voice? Les Mamans agreed. So Friday night a group of eighteen young girls and women, some of the ALFEMADEC women, Papa Benjamin (to translate from Lingala to French for me) and I gathered under the tree to begin recording these women's lives. Over the course of the weekend I spoke with 28 women - not even an eighth of the women of Maluku who are living in desparity. Here are a few of them.

Fina Caidor is an orphan. She is 19 years old and has never gone to school. She is not married. Fina can sew, and makes a bit of an income as a seamstress, but doesn't own a sewing machine or have any material to work with. She is currently living with Maman Martine, as she has no means to support herself. She wants very much to go to school and learn to read and write.

Matondo is a mother. She is 19 and her father has passed away. She had to quit school when she was 14 because her family couldn't afford her school fees. Her older brothers kicked her out of the house soon after, telling her that she was useless and 'may as well just go and get pregnant.' Her husband left her a week after their son was born and she doesn't know where he is. His family refuses to speak with her. Matondo has no job and few employable skills. She wants to study so that she can raise her son and take care of her mother.

Bubala Pembe Mubaya is 36 and a mother of three (unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a picture of her). She has also taken in her younger sister's son. None of her children, between the ages of four and twelve, are in school because she has no means to pay their tuition. Her husband abandoned her only a couple of years ago. Bubala works in the fields and the forest collecting produce to sell in the market to feed and clothe her children, but this is not nearly adequate. She would very much like to be a seamstress because it pays much better, but she has no sewing machine or any of the other materials necessary.

How can I leave this place? By Monday, Matondo and Fina had also begun calling me yaya. They were so sweet. Shy as all get out, but sweet nonetheless. They begun sitting next to me, smiling at me; Matondo even began passing me her son whenever we were together. Maman Martine's daughter Natalie braided my hair. The ALFEMADEC women began giving me gifts. Maman Martine had some material of hers sewn into a Congolese outfit for me. Maman Yvete sent me home with an entire regime of plantains because I like fried makemba so much. And the afternoon I left, Maman Eugenie sent me off with money. She gave me money. 5000 Congolese francs. It was later explained to me that this is a regular practice for communities when their children who are students come home to visit. They understand that students are broke, and will generally collect a sum of money to send them off with so that they can pick up something they need; food, shoes, clothing, school supplies. These women with barely any means at all sent me, their student daughter, away with 5000 francs to buy myself something I need.

This was the point at which I lost it.

I burst into tears again! They all said stop, don't cry, this isn't a sad time (as their eyes filled with tears) and turned me around and sent me down the hill to where the driver was waiting to take me back to Kin. Loading me into the truck turned into a big sob fest. Everyone from my host family was there to send me off, as well as half of the neighbourhood who had begun to gather around to find out why the mondele was crying. Shit, I'm tearing up just thinking about it. They took me into their homes and shared their lives with me. They gave me a Congolese name. They called me their niece, their daughter, their sister, their mother. My family here in Congo.

Tell me, how can I leave this place?

I want to build them a school - free education with child care. I want to build them decent housing with plumbing and electricity. I want to publish their stories - not for resale, just for them. I want to learn from them and grow with them. I want to laugh with them. My family here in Congo.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Esengo - Partie I

In Lingala, Esengo means joy. Esengo is my newest name, given to me by my host mother in Maluku, Maman Yvete. She didn't know this, but Joy is also my mother's middle name.

I got back from my second stay in Maluku on Monday night. I had arrived Thursday morning and immediately left with Maman Yvete to see the other women of ALFEMADEC who were, as always, sitting under their tree in front of Maman Eugenie's apartment building and preparing pondu for the evening meal.

Their welcome was warm and different this time. Instead of simply lightly shaking my hand, they slapped it hard and kissed me three times, once on either cheek. This is a greeting I've only seen extended to close family and friends. There was another woman there who I had only met once briefly during my first stay whom I greeted last. After the kisses, she said in Lingala the equivalent of 'ah, yes, we accept you.' What a feeling.

Thursday afternoon we went back down to Maess, the community in which we had distributed the Vitamin A. We went to one of the homes of a group of young mothers ALFEMADEC works with, along with four other young girls from Mongengenge (the community where the ALFEM women live) to make chikwangue. Like fufu, chikwangue is a dish made with manioc flour eaten with almost every meal along with pondu. Either fufu or chikwangue comprise up to 80% of many people's daily caloric intake.

We all gathered under a tree in the yard - where so many women's activities take place - and mixed and kneaded the flour with water, rolled it into portions, then wrapped it in leaves and string to boil in a big pot over an open fire. This is me attempting to tie the string. We all had a big laugh at my expense. Good times had by all.

Thursday evening, my host father Papa Benjamin and Maman Yvete took me to a friend's home to sit with her awhile and have her explain her work to me. She is one of the ALFEM mamans and, as so many women do, serves her community by preparing food. Five to six days a week she prepares a lunch of fish, fufu or chikwangue, and pondu for a couple hundred employees at a local factory. She begins to prepare the following day's meal around six every evening - after she's fed her own family - and finishes for the night around ten or eleven. The following morning she's usually up at 3:30 to begin thawing the fish frozen the previous night and cooking the pondu and manioc dish (that's right- the previous night's four or five hours of work was simply reading the food to be cooked). She leaves the house by 6:30, drops the lunch off at the factory and returns no later than 7:30 to buy the breakfast of white bread for her family and send them off to work and school. Then she cleans the house and does the washing, and by around noon begins preparing her family's evening meal. At six that evening she starts all over again.

We sat with her a while and talked while she worked, and when she took a break we filed into the living room to sit with her husband. He bought us some beer - in Maluku people were constantly buying me beer, even at 11 in the morning; it's quite the treat at 1,500 to 2,500 francs a pop - and he impressed me with his English language skills. We laughed at most of my Lingala and they began asking me how my experience of Congo has been so far. This is a question that I'm asked often. "How do you find my country?" It's a question that I have a difficult time answering concisely.

How do I "find" Congo?

I find it fascinating, too marvelous to understand. My head is constantly spinning and my senses are always on overdrive; almost as though they are being assaulted, but not in a bad way. Congolese people are so friendly and hospitable and eager to both teach and learn from me (although I still can't imagine what I could possibly have to teach them, other than the fact that in Canada it gets colder than their freezers). Jusgt sitting in the presence of the women of Maluku, not speaking but just listening to their busy Lingala chatter and lively expressions, I've developed new understandings of the world as others experience it that will take me years to process to the point of articulation. This country's desparity and beauty is embodied in its people's every breath. It is rough, rugged, and raw. It is astoundingly honest and humble. It is mind-bogglingly complex. I love this country.

That's not what I said. Hehe.

I just tell people that I love it and it's hot and formidable. Then they laugh, and then I laugh, and they say ça vas, merçi, and I say ça vas, merçi. But people are always laughing at me, and I have nothing to do but laugh along. Have I ever learned to laugh at myself! I think my last Facebook status update was something to the tune of 'Megan has had enough embarrassing, character building moments in the past six weeks to build a whole new personality.' And that is why they named me Esengo last Thursday night. They said that my presence and my laughter have brought joy to their community. So of course I started beaming and choking back tears. Then they started laughing, and I started laughing. And then I told them that Joy is my mother's second name, and they exclaimed their surprise and said that it was meant to be, and I smiled and laughed, and they smiled and laughed.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Papa Kulungu le vieux

Papa Pascal's father passed away this past Saturday at the age of 89. Papa Pascal is in the States with his sons, as mentioned, and was unable to bury his father today with the rest of his family (as a five-week trip to the U.S. is an extremely rare occasion and not one that would likely be cut short).

Please send Papa Pascal and his family your warm thoughts and prayers.

Thanks.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Maman Christianna

Hahaha. This needs no translation.

Here in Congo I have many names. Among them are Megaa, Meganne, Mademoiselle Megan, Maman Meganne, and the latest but certainly not least: Maman Christianna.

My program here has taken a bit of a turn. Papa Pascal left two weeks ago now for a five-week trip to the States to celebrate his oldest son's graduation and spend time with his two other sons as well. As such, he, John and Charity, and I decided that it would be best if I spend the time he is away focusing on some other interesting and exciting opportunities that are available to me here. The biggest and baddest is the opportunity to spend some time in Maluku, one of Kinshasa's 24 districts, with a women's NGO called ALFEMADEC - Alliance des Femmes de Maluku pour Développement Communautaire (Alliance of the Women of Maluku for Community Development). Maluku, about 90 km outside the main city, is a small but spectacular paradise surrounded by the Congo River. For about five years, the rebel army of Jean Pierre Mbemba (now on trial in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity) terrorized the community. Mbemba was, believe it or not, also one of the candidates in the 2006 presidential elections here. After Kabila won (twice, I might add) there ended up being a showdown between the Congolese armed forces and Mbemba's army, in which the Congolese army also took part in the pillaging.

I imagine that by now, you all have heard reports of the use of rape as a tool of war in DRC. The women who founded ALFEMADEC - the mothers of ALFEMADEC - did so in an effort to try and serve the needs of the hundreds of filles-mères (young girls in their teens - children, really - who've ended up mothers) in Maluku; many of whom were raped, most of whom are orphans, and a great number of whom have been abandoned by their families or remaining family members. Most of the girls have never even set foot in a school. The mothers do everything they can for these girls, from teaching them literacy and re-literacy, to giving parenting and physical hygiene courses, to teaching them how to sew and cook in order to give them some means to support themselves. And I have been given the privilege and the honour of their time.

I have so much to learn. Twice yesterday, and in two completely different contexts, I heard two different people refer to how in the West we say 'time is money.' They were trying to illustrate the difference between the ways in which we all perceive time. In the West, we're ten steps ahead of ourselves all the time and can never believe how quickly time flies. Here, not so much. Here, people around me aren't in a terrible rush to get from one place to another because things just take time. Need to make it from one point of the city to another? Leave an hour early so that you're only half an hour late. With no landlines, everyone is on pay-as-you-go cellular. But running out of credits on your phone is no need not to call before you drop in - and with such importance placed on hospitality, not to receive a guest would be terribly disrespectful. And this goes both for homes and places of business to, of course, an extent in the public realm... although the private realm can't be defined in the same way here as in the West either... I digress. En tous cas, the clock goes full circle every 24 hours everywhere in the world, but each hour lasts a different amount of time depending on where in the world you are. Because I am here for such a short period of time, I had in mind that I would be spending a couple days per week for a couple of weeks with ALFEM and the young women they work with observing their activities, training sessions, and various conflicts that they run into both on a daily and on a long-term basis. It would be a period that they would dedicate a little bit of concentrated time to and I would kind of move on to a new project. Hah.

I headed out Wednesday morning and spent three nights in this community in which a great number of children saw a white person for the first time in their lives upon my arrival. 'Mondele! Mondele!' is still ringing in my ears. I mean, I hear it all over the city, but in Maluku it reached epic proportions. And here, there is nothing inappropriate about staring. Some people literally dropped things when they saw me. In the middle of a market on Friday, within about two minutes I was surrounded by at least thirty girls and women chattering at me in Lingala, giggling and laughing, touching my hair, skin, clothes, and asking me to give them my earrings, bracelet, and even the piercings in my face, just as a souvenier. This district is like a little town that is so isolated from the rest of the bustling city. I spent most of my time just doing relationship building with the women. I went from Mademoiselle Megan to Christianne (and eventually Christianna) within about two hours because people have such a hard time pronouncing my first name but have a much easier time with Christine, my second. The one time it was mentioned last weekend - just in passing - it caught on like wild fire and along the line ended up transformed into Christianna. We prepared food together (food preparation honestly takes up about half of these women's days) in a communal spot where we made huge batches of various dishes, and then each woman took her share home to feed her family. They taught me how to pick manioc leaves and snap them off the stems properly to prepare pondu, the dish they make by grinding them up with garlic and pili-pili (a super-spicy pepper that they eat with everything), and showed me how to prepare maboke, the best steamed fish, prepared fresh the day it is bought, you have ever tasted in your life. They soaked up every little bit of information I could think to give them every time I observed a cultural difference.

There is no way that I can swoop in there and have an organized curriculum or schedule each day. They haven't organized themselves that way. Life isn't organized that way. We just don't allot fifteen-minute slots to each activity in our daytimers. We don't have daytimers. Silly Megan.

Because helping ALFEMADEC is a 4C (John and Charity's NGO) initiative, the administrative committee made the introductions last weekend for the work to begin, and this weekend came out to pick me up and meet with the women to see how things were coming along. The mothers gathered about fifteen of the filles-mères together as well, many of whom came with their children, and we all sat together in a meeting room that I believe was something of a school room as well. The mothers sat together along one wall, the 4C members at the front of the room, and I was given the honour of sitting amongst the young women of the community. All formalities of speech taken; first my my uncle, president of 4C, then the mothers, they asked me to say a few words about how the past few days had gone and what I envisioned in the weeks to come.

Instead, I burst into tears.

I was completely overcome with such a profound gratitude and sense of awe at their strength, their beauty, their struggle... and how willing they were to take this clueless mondele under their wings and treat her as a sister, a mother, a daughter. I stammered out my thanks to them in between sobs and desperately trying to get it under control, I sat down feeling a little dizzy and sorely inadequate.

Then something incredible happened.

One by one, the young orphans and filles-mères began to get up and come to the front of the room to address the 4C committee and tell their stories. In my flood of emotion, I opened the floor to the girls to use their voices and open their hearts to us. Four girls got up and in brief and in tears explained to us their hardships and dilemmas and the injustice in their lives. It was so powerful! I just can't find the right words here to articulate to you the force in the room. One of the girls who was sitting right next to me was one of the girls who got up, and when she sat down we exchanged a look that said 'thank you.' I wanted so badly to take her hand and just hold it, but I didn't for fear it might be inappropriate. But we shared something in that brief few minutes we were all in the room together.

On the way out I was given a message for my mother. I walked out in tears, on the brink of losing it, and les Mamans followed us out and took hold of me. They asked me not to cry, because it was bringing them to tears as well, and then Maman la Présidente (of ALFEMADEC) Eugénie said to me 'nous sommes tes mères, Maman Christianna, nous sommes tes mères ici, et tu es notre fièrté. Il faut dire à ta mère là bas au Canada que nous sommes tes mères et nous te gardons et protègons' - 'we are your mothers, Maman Christianna, we are your mothers here and you are our pride. You have to tell your mother in Canada that we are your mothers and we are keeping you and protecting you.' And this is supposed to make me stop crying.

I am going back on Thursday.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Les pieds sâles

Dirty Feet

Dirty feet are good because they mean I have been out. Half of this city's streets are mud and sand. Where there is a semblance of a sidewalk, it is normally not paved. Even wearing runners, socks, and pants sometimes doesn't keep the dirt off of your feet! And the further off the beaten path you go, the dirtier your feet get.

Today, my feet were filthy! I was so far off the path that my chauffeur today, Thomas, had to park because there was no way our 4x4 was getting us down that hill. To my complete surprise, I ended up on the opposite end of town down this hill in a little school with no electricity or running water in a tiny office about the size of a full bathroom with five other people discussing when I would facilitate the Conflict and Power workshop that Jessie and I wrote last year. Thanks entirely to Jessie for the idea and the initiative, we wrote a conflict resolution workshop aimed at women who had been victims of domestic violence in Winnipeg as our final assignment for Karen Ridd's Violence and Nonviolence course. We designed and wrote it, however, with every intention of actually facilitating it after the course was over, and in June we did so for some of the women at Outreach, the Fort Garry Women's Resource Centre's satellite location on Pembina. It was great fun and a success, and such an incredible and wonderful opportunity and experience for both of us. I don't know why, but on a whim I decided to bring it with me out here. I threw it in my suitcase the day before I left Winnipeg. My aunt and uncle had a look at it about a week ago and have been strongly encouraging me and supporting the idea that I explore the possibility of facilitating it here. They have been plugging it all over town, and for the past week I've been trying to wrap my head around it. My aunt mentioned it to a friend of hers yesterday who teaches at the school I was at today, and he immediately expressed interest in getting together with me. Everyone in the room with me was really excited about it, and beginning tomorrow I will set to the enormous task of translating it into French.

When I got home, my feet were so filthy in fact that I had to use Mujinga (our housekeeper)'s scrub brush for cleaning the bathtub to get them clean. It was marvelous.