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.