17 jours avant... ?

17 days before... ?

Forgive me. This is going to be a bit of a ramble. I don't have much of a theme, as I've had in my other posts, because my head is spinning a little and I need to spit it all out at once somehow. So this is where I'm going to do that.

17 days before I leave Congo. 17 days. Ooohhhhhh boy oh baby, what a strange feeling. I feel torn. I certainly feel differently about Canada at this point in my life. I have had so many people express so much interest in Canada since my arrival. Why? Because Canada is never in the news and people don't know anything about it. The CBC is not among the list of international news stations that we get on satellite at John and Charity's, such as CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. So many people have said to me "Canada is a really quiet place. Does anything happen there?" These are Congolese people mostly. Consider their frame of reference; this is a country that's been torn for years by war. Does anything happen in Canada? Well, relative to Congo, I guess no. But I'm actually really ok with that. I feel grateful for that. I feel so fortunate to know that I am going back to a place where nothing happens. And particularly Winnipeg. I mean really. But on the other hand, I feel like there is an increasing weight on my presence here, as though I am being pulled down in place. As though something in me is trying to take root here in Congo. There is so much to do here. So much work. So much need. So much life that's begging to be lived. During the past week people have begun to ask me whether I am looking forward to returning home. I kind of waver when people ask that question. My response is something along the lines of "eeehhhhhmmm..." to which people will say "but it's your home! Won't you be glad to be home? Don't you miss it?" and I've figured out the perfect response. "Canada will always be there, but I will not always be in Congo." That pretty much sums up how I feel about going home at the moment. It's not quite an answer that indicates clearly whether I am looking forward to home, but it's all I've got right now.

I've been back at Kulungus' for just over a week now, resuming the activities and projects I had been working on when I first arrived. We finally got power back yesterday evening after eight days with no electricity. Candles for light and coals for cooking. It's a bit like camping, actually, except that we're in the middle of a city with a population of 12 million +. Back at UC Kin and at Papa Pascal's centre, things have been a little slow. The general atmosphere has felt something along the lines of "Oh, you're back. Ok, let's get organized." Lol. That's pretty much how things work around here; no one really gets a sense that things are going to happen until they are already happening. This has to do, in large part, with the fact that more often than not, things end up falling through - particularly with expats - so people have developed the habit of waiting to make preparations until there is proof that things will actually move forward. So, I spent a lot of my time in Papa's office at UC Kin while he worked on various projects and tried hard to get a group of students and teachers together to begin another Peer Mediation session. They had all been informed that we were to begin this week, but because school is out now and because there have been a whole slew of miscommunications and because there are other varying excuses coming from students as to why they are unable to attend on a given morning, I did a lot of sitting around and fiddling with Papa's laptop with an unreliable internet connection and a terrible battery that refuses to stay powered up even when it's plugged into the wall. I must share my fave excuse of the week: Thursday morning, Papa was running around looking for the students who were supposed to be in our classroom at ten o'clock. It wasn't until around noon that Jean Claude came by to let us know that he had spoken with some of the students and they said that they couldn't come to the session in the morning because it was too cold out. It was 27°C. You should have seen people, though. People were really cold. They had goosebumps and were actually wearing winter jackets. Oooohhh, Congo. En tous cas, sitting in his office gave me an opportunity to observe a number of interesting occurrences. Here are the most interesting:

Because Papa is the Financial Administrator for the university, students with issues paying their tuition often come by to explain why and ask for extensions; they're writing exams right now, and many are being chased out of the exam rooms because they haven't paid. So one student this week comes in to see Papa and explains that he can not pay his tuition in full because of varying exchange rates in different parts of the city. He had US dollars but exchanged them for Congolese Francs downtown. To his unfortunate surprise, the exchange rate in Binza Ozone (area of city where UC Kin is located) differs by two francs. So in total he was short about ten thousand francs.

That same day, two students came into Papa's office to advise him that there had been a death. A student of the university, about a year ago, got his girlfriend pregnant. The child was born albino. This student was so unhappy about his son's physical state that he poisoned the child's milk. The child died. I haven't heard any updates about this since.

The following day, students were waiting to write an exam but no one showed up with the exams for them to write. After they had waited a while, they started to get restless. The longer they waited, the more heated they became, until finally about 45 minutes after they should have begun writing their exam I heard a whole bunch of yelling somewhere close to me on campus. It went on for about twenty minutes and then began to die down. I found out later that day that what had happened was that the Dean of the faculty of Theology had not communicated with the prof of this class when and where the exam was scheduled. The students got angry and started calling all of the staff who happened to pass by them voleurs, stealers of their tuition money. !!! Someone had the sense to come and find Pascal and ask him to diffuse the situation as he is the peacemaker on campus. Ohhhh, Congo.

This is life. Keep your eyes open if you want to live it.

It turns out after all that there will be no Peer Mediation course. Couldn't manage to get a group of students to give up their vacation time to participate in a course. Go figure. I'll be spending the time I would have been following the course trying to track down publishers and get permission to translate a bunch of nonviolence literature for Pascal to use in his conflict resolution course for his centre. If I can, that could certainly take up the rest of my time. I am also babysitting two darling yellow labs during the next two weekends for a friend of John and Char's who lives at TASOK and is in the States on holidays. They're adorable. Whiny as hell, but great nonetheless. In addition, Pascal would like me to facilitate my workshop one more time here at UC Kin... oh wait a minute, I haven't even blogged about my workshops yet!! Oh man. So much has happened that I haven't blogged about. I spent almost two weeks in the middle of the bush, facilitated a conflict resolution workshop that my close friend Jessie and I wrote TWICE, made two new friends, and met Todd Howland, the Director of the Joint Office on Human Rights for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the head of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Congo (MONUC). He has offered to let me interview him before I leave. Yeesh I have a lot to catch you all up on!