into the heart

banana bread as a metaphor for life

when life gives you rotten bananas, what else can you do but make banana bread?  this is currently true for me both metaphorically and literally.  luckily, i'm up at the park with a beautiful view and a newly built wood oven.

to make banana bread in the middle of nowhere:

• 4 bananas, ripe with black spots, smashed
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg, preferably from a nearby hen
• 1/3 cup butter, melted or smushed in until mushy
• 1 tsp triple sec (not necessary, which is good because you probably don't have triple sec... though i actually do)
• 1 tsp baking soda (i had to substitute with baking powder... apparently you can't really do this but some people say it's doable if you do 3 parts powder for 1 part soda... it didn't work great for me)
• dash of salt
• 1 1/2 cups flour

mix all that together, roughly in that order.  pour into a greased tin pan and put that in a hot brick oven full of burning wood.  wait 45 minutes.  check it.  probably leave it another 30 minutes or so until you can put a knife in and it comes out clean.

the lesson: don't be afraid of banana bread coming out wrong.  anything with delicious ingredients and a bit of good intention will be alright in the end.  even if it's baked in a crappy tin pot.  also, even mediocre banana bread tastes better with a view.

le gite

this is the newly finished, minimally decorated guesthouse (gite) at lusinga.  our team and the contractors did a really great job.  it still needs a bit of art on the walls and a comfy sofa in front of the fireplace for these chilly nights at over 1600 meters...

bucket shower

going on our fourth day without water in the house/office, i thought i'd talk a bit about bucket showers.  yes, bucket showers.

(to be fair, i haven't had to take one in a while.  my gym membership is really starting to pay off... thanks to good management and my $200 a month fee, they somehow keep that shower pumping every day.)

in beni, you may remember, i had running water less than 25% of the time.  but i also had a well.  and a system.  systems are important.  every morning the gardener filled 6 big buckets with water and refilled them after morning showers, laundry or whatever else needed doing during the day.

while it wasn't running out of the tap, we never ran out of water.

in this house, however, the water sometimes just stops and there is no well.  given that we've got 3 people minimum living here, and sometimes up to 6, it's easy to run out completely.  let me tell you, there is a unique type of panic that sets in when the toilets can't be flushed and hands can't be washed in a house full of men.  

to prevent nervous breakdowns and cholera, each day, the driver takes the 6 bidons (big plastic yellow jerrycans) to a public tap somewhere in town where there is water and fill them up.  we then use that water for everything from washing bodies to washing dishes to flushing toilets.  that is until its the weekend and the driver is at home and the rest of us flounder helplessly... but that's another issue.

in this context, i have had to take many bucket showers over the past few years, as have the majority of people living around the world with little or no running water.   

so in the spirit of lots of helpful how-to blog posts on everything from preparing couscous to making a french knot, i thought i'd do a how-to on the essential skill of taking a bucket shower.  bucket showers are a vital part of life and a good, hot bucket shower is nearly as satisfying as a regular shower.  (ok, that's a lie but one i like to tell myself.)  and, when you are water-limited, it's important to know how to get the most shower out of the least water.  

(and to those of you in the developed world: you just never know when the infrastruture will collapse under the strain of one more lawn sprinkler or the libertarians will cut funding for pipe maintenence, and you'll be living like the rest of us!  mwah ha ha ha!)

so without further ado...

how to take a bucket shower 

what you'll need:

• water in a jerry can or some other source
• one large plastic bucket
• a large plastic cup (e.g. a camping cup, nesquick container, large plastic water bottle with the neck cut off...)
• a large pot (optional, for hot water)
• a stove/campfire (optional, for hot water)

how to do it:

1. fill your bucket up about 2/3.  it doesn't look like a lot of water, but trust me.

2. if you want a hot bucket shower (hmm... that sounds like a band name or some sort of obscene euphemism) dip your big pot into your bucket until it fills.  this will probably be about 1/3 of the water you've got.  stick it on the stove, covered to save water, until it's just starting to boil.  pour it back in to your bucket.  (test your water to make it's not too hot.)

3. use one big cupful to just get your hair wet and splash a little water on the rest of you.  shampoo.

4. use two big cupfuls to rinse out the shampoo.  apply conditioner.

5. using the water that's on you from washing your hair, soap yourself.

6. use three big cupfuls to rinse out conditioner and rinse yourself.  remember to switch hands so you can wash both arms.

7. be amazed at how little water you actually used.  consider whether you should save the rest for a later shower or hand washing.  if you have ample supply or are feeling sorry for yourself because you hate bucket showers, even hot ones, pick up the bucket and slowly pour the rest of the water over your head with your eyes closed, pretending like it's coming from a showerhead.

you are clean!  bucket shower success.

serengeti

it's been approximately 1 million years since i posted here.  the internet's been terrible again in lubumbashi and since my vacation i've been so busy during the day that in the evenings i want to just watch dvds and zone out.  and since i pretty much commute from my bed to my desk to my bed again it's hard to think of anything interesting to say.  (the whole 5 meters between my bed and desk does make for a very very short commute.... too short one might say. sometimes i forget to put on shoes.) 

but i did head back to serengeti for an fzs workshop.  these are some photos.  it's funny... i spent 80% of my time there in meetings and 95% of my time in congo in front of my desk or asleep, but you'd think from this post i'm out frolicking in the wilderness!  

i guess it gets back to what i mentioned in my post in december... most people work to live and in my case it's not really any different... the only thing is the my work puts me a bit closer to the places i want to do my living.... and my living can be quite extraordinary.

case in point: even though we just had a couple hours to set out in the morning before meetings, it was pretty amazing to catch a glimpse of these three male lions loving on each other.  we found them making their way across a big open plain.  three bachelors.  they couldn't help but stop and cuddle every few minutes!  they'd walk apart and then get in really close, rubbing cheeks and sides against each other... and then just drop down and start wrestling.  so so cute.  

you could almost forget, just for a second, how extremely scary they are.  

i was lucky to be in seronera, the middle of the park, to catch part of the great migration.  this is when wildebeest (aka. gnu) and zebra move across serengeti in tanzania, north to the mara in kenya and then back by the thousands.  they lead the charge, but the predators that hunt them follow eagerly.  seemingly endless herds of zebra and wildebeest with their young is already pretty dramatic... and then to consider that every night they are getting picked off by lions, leopards, hyenas, wild dog, cheetahs... it's the definition of drama.  (and yes, the sky really was that color... a storm was on its way.)

but the eles... they are my favorite.  growing up in thailand we got so used to seeing elephants everywhere.  petting them, feeding them bananas, seeing them in rural towns and villages... i didn't feel any more scared walking up to an adult elephant than i did a dog!  i can still remember the feel of their wrinkley, leathery skin and thick hairs, and that they like to be scratched, the way their trunks curl around your hands or search your pockets for treats.  the way their eyes are a warm reddish brown color and seem a little too small for their bodies, but their long long lashes make up for it.  i didn't realize until recently quite how amazing and unique that experience was.  i have been so close to elephants and yet i am still drawn to and in awe of them every time.  

most expensive salad on earth

the up side of lubumbashi:

there's a very fancy hotel with a very fancy pool.  i've gone twice now to get out of the house/office and cool off on a hot sunday afternoon.  there's a congolese funk band that plays and the place fills up with an assortment of locals and hotel guests.  great for people watching and trying to forget about work for a few minutes.

the downside:

check out the bill...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

$16 for a salad, $3 for a coke (small glass bottle, this ain't no supersized unlimited refill situation) and $2 for a "small water."  yes, that's US dollars.

and that doesn't include the $20 i paid to get in to use the pool.  

now, if that isn't enough, please refer back to the salad.  i had not yet eaten a single bite.  4 pieces of lettuce, a few chunks of tuna, half a tomato and an egg.  seriously?

now, i know, i know... you have to pay to live the fancy shmancy muzungu lifestyle and i could have just eaten fufu and tomato sauce with palm oil for $5 down the street.  but still.  lettuce doesn't cost THAT much.

 

 

little pink houses

right now i'm living in the fzs office in lubumbashi.  but i have started looking for a place of my own for a couple of reasons - namely that it kind of drives me mad to live 15 feet from my desk and that we're about to bring in at least 2 new staff so will need my room as an office.  oh, and the fact that all my stuff can't possibly fit into one room.

house hunting in lubumbashi has not been any easier than house hunting in beni, but maybe even more discouraging because the prices are a lot higher.  in beni i saw plenty of crappy places but mostly with rents around $300-400.  here, even the crappy places are $700 or more. 

admittedly, my tastes are not what most congolese are looking for.  i favor small, cute and surrounded by garden.  old and charming suits me better than new and flashy.  the congolese, generally, favor something new and big enough to hold a large family.  they also like fancy... gilded columns and enormous chandeliers in the livingroom are popular, even in houses with bedrooms with no windows.

i get the sense that gardens, on the other hand, are wasted space.  i can't count the number of houses i've seen in goma, beni and now lubumbashi that have palatial living rooms, 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms and are surrounded by a quarter acre of pavement or gravel, or where the house walls are only 2 feet shy of the compound walls on each side.  what's the point of a window if it looks out onto a cement wall close enough to touch?

so, as it was in beni, i'm veering towards the slightly odd choice: 

it is a smallish house from the belgian era but it needs a lot of work.  it also needs a wall around 3 sides, as you can see in some of the photos.

it's got a veranda and a couple of bedrooms, and i think with a little work - and a little rain - the garden could be quite cute.  at least it's some space to breathe.  you can see that it's already undergoing some renovation so i'm hoping i can work out a deal to speed up the process.

my one concern is the kitchen, which i suspect might be in a sorry state.  though, after turning the entry way into a kitchen in beni i think i could adjust to just about anything.  and it wouldn't even be the first pink house i've lived in!  (shout out to the birchwoods in miami!)

so it doesn't have chandeliers or a fake second story but it has a giant yard with some trees and it's in the loveliest neighborhood in town. it's walking distance to the riding stable and a restaurant with ice coffee!

i have not yet spoken to the landlord nor have i seen the interior except through the windows.  so really, this is just a gut feeling.  but believe it or not, after seeing 10 houses this one is my favorite.  i guess i'm just a dark horse kinda girl.

driving me crazy

i have done a lot of driving lately, specifically from beni to goma will all my worldly belongings (ok, minus the storage unit full of stuff in massachusetts... and the stuff in my parents' house... and the stuff in their garage...).  but i'll post on that in a bit.  

first, i just had to share a number of photos of driving in goma. i do this because driving, cars and car repairs hold a special place in my life here.  the roads are a mess.  drc has almost no paved roads and certainly none outside of towns.  the car is always breaking.  we've gone through 5 sets of shock absorbers in a year.  getting around is slow.  my blood often boils.

case in point: it's 7pm.  i'm at the intersection between the road my office is on and the main road from one end of town to the other, where i'm staying.  there is traffic.  there is always traffic.  traffic sucks.  i hate traffic.  but i patiently wait in said traffic, as it slowly inches towards the intersection.

my neighbors, however, are not so patient.  as you can sort of see above, the road is 2 lanes either direction... "but really," they think, "why should that be?  so few people are going the other way... really, it would be much faster for me if more lanes were going my way."  and so with this logic - ignoring the fact that blocking opposite lanes may make traffic ahead worse, let alone the morality of cutting in front of others who have been waiting for 45 minutes, several cars simply drive from far behind, up the innermost lane to the left, cleverly skipping 15 car places!  wheee!  "aren't we smart!"  but the traffic still doesn't move.  there are just too many cars on the main road.  what to do.  hmm.... if we could just move into that space waaaay over there...

and who would dare be the first brave soul to take such a radical and proactive measure of occupying the 4th lane?  who would break new ground, scoffing at law, convention and politeness all at once?  would would even consider blocking the entire road for their own self interest?  a police car, that's who.  (see the far left set of rear lights on the white and blue vehicle.)

aaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggg!

recently, in goma, the powers that be decided that the best way to conduct badly road repairs would be to rip up all existing paved roads in the entire town and then slowly begin to fix each one.  of course, as one could easily predict, money has run short, delays have been extreme and months later the town is still a dusty, muddy, dirt road disaster.

no kidding, the wires hanging from the poles below have been like that for at least 4 months.

the photo below is more of an amusement shot... toyota landcruiser should come to le chalet restaurant on a wednesday night to get their marketing shots...

It’s about that time again

Why is it that I have changed jobs every year now for the past 3?  Circumstances, mostly.  Unworkable situations, grants ending and others not coming through… such is the life of field staff in conservation.  You may get a 3-year contract but chances of actually seeing it through… not that high.  Or perhaps it’s just here in DRC.  Or perhaps it’s just me.

How do I feel about yet another move?

I feel, at this very moment, a bit sentimental about leaving Beni, to be honest. 

You’d think someone who has moved and travelled as much as I have wouldn’t get that way.  I should be hopping on the plane without a second look, right?  But that’s just not me.  My heart doesn’t let things go easily.

I think it has something to do with the challenge it took to make this place feel like a real home.  To adapt to the dark nights and pulling water from the well, to let the garden grow tall and watch the chickens get fat on ants and corn, to settle into a giant house with nothing and make it feel like something. 

I grew quite content there.  I’ve got my 6 gas lamps, buckets of water, gas stove and veg from the garden.  And a cat to welcome me home and keep my lap warm in the evenings.  I have my routine: morning tea, day at the office maximizing hours of electric and minutes of internet, go home and cook dinner by lamp light while listening to podcasts, eat while watching dvds, pull down the mosquito net and read for a bit by book light, go to sleep.  

It probably sounds pretty dull, especially given I supposedly lead this exciting life in a chaotic land.  But it’s reality and it’s gotten comfortable.  And there is nothing harder than leaving a warm comfortable bed on a cold rainy morning, no matter what exciting challenges lie ahead for the day.  That’s exactly what it feels like.

But we all have to get up and go to work sometime, right?  So what exciting challenges do lie ahead for me in this new day?

Well, I’m not going too far… or at least I’m not leaving the country.  I’ve accepted a position of Programme Officer with Frankfurt Zoological Society in a different part of DRC… Katanga!  Home of oodles of copper and the uranium used in the WWII bombs.  The place of Lumumba’s tragic murder and various attempts at sesesstion.  Katanga is a province of DRC that I’ve never visited and that, I hear, is quite different from where I am now.  The first and most obvious difference, for me personally, is that the region is largely savannah rather than forest!  Au revoir okapis and gorillas... jambo zebras!

I will be working on a project in Upemba National Park, though I will be based in Lubumbashi, the regional hub and, I’m assured, the most modern city in Congo.  I don't know that much about it other than there is a golf course, a horse track and a "proper" supermarket!  And it's hot.  

You can see on the map that Lubumbashi is several hundred kilometres from the park, but only a few from Zambia!  In these maps, blue is Goma, purple is Beni and pink is Lubumbashi.

Upemba is huge.  Along with it’s adjascent neighbour, Kundulungu National Park, it’s one of the biggest protected blocks in Africa.  (This map is confusing as the two are actually attached.)

View Rainbokapi in DRC in a larger map

Unfortunately, the war years in Congo hit these parks hard.  What used to be a thriving tourist site with thousands of zebra, various antelope, rhino, lions, elephants, buffalo, cheetah and wild dog, has been reduced to largely empty grassland.  A small herd of zebra, a herd of elephant and a few antelope species remain, but the big predators and large herds they fed on are gone.  Our project is focused on reviving the park, starting with infrastructure and management.  The goal is then to reintroduce ungulates to begin to bring the ecosystem back to its original state.

(Photo of eles in Upemba by Sarel2)

My job will be varied and broad.  I'll be involved in management planning, strategy development, research coordination, financial oversight, donor cultivation and communications… among other things.  Some of the most interesting aspects will be leading arial surveys of mammals and translocating zebra from Zambia!  

We are working on a new website but for now you can like our project on Facebook.  When we start updating the blog with photos and videos I’ll post new links.  And I will, of course, post my own photos when I get there.  I also hope to catch up on some posts I’ve wanted to do for a while but didn’t have the connection or time!

back in beni. again.

it feels like i'm always coming or going from beni.  this time i'm here for just a couple weeks.  the last time i came back i snapped these on my first day.  this was my welcome home, and quite a nice one.

zeta napping on the bed.

one egg a day (after i ate 4!) from the lovely red egg-layer hen.

mama hen with her [now] nine chicks out for a daily stroll with zeta locked in the bedroom.

whoops!  hey, little buddy, steer clear of mom's feet, and don't fall off the edge!

the wrong kind of chickens

apparently i have the wrong kind of chickens.  well, they are the right kind if i wanted to eat them but the wrong kind if i want to eat their eggs.  also, the fact that my fuzzy little chicks grew into only 1 hen and 3 roosters doesn't help (see the photo above).

when i told the gardener, innocent, that i was hoping to get a couple more hens and build a nesting area for them he informed me that my hen wouldn't lay eggs.  well, ok, he conceded, she's will lay some.  but what i really need is something called a "pondais."  i had no idea what that was and took a few minutes in fractured french to confirm it wasn't a duck or a guinea hen but a different kind of chicken.

apparently the magical "pondais" produces at least one egg a day for up to a year, where as my fat little black hen could only be expected to produce a few eggs now and then.  useful mostly to make more meat chickens.

so i agreed to let him get me an $8 "pondais."  (only later did i realize that the pondre is french for "to lay," as in an egg.)  he later returned with a "layer" in a lovely light vodka sauce color.  she looks a bit like a rooster to me, with a small bright red crown, but when she's walking around you can tell she's a hen.  so now the 3 roosters and 2 hens are hanging out together and we're waiting to see if she starts doing her thing.  innocent has already fashioned her a nest.

however, in the meantime, little black hen, not to be outdone, started laying!  so far she's laid 12, yes TWELVE, eggs.  and where did she lay them?  having no nest box due to my laziness she has opted to lay them in poor innocents bedroom... right next to his bed.

luckily, innocent is particularly fond of (and clearly knowledgable about) chickens.  turns out his family has a chicken farm near goma.  so he finds the whole thing kind of hilarious but doesn't seem to mind at all.  for now she just keeps laying these eggs, which we assume are fertilized.  he tells me that when she's laid all of them (who knows how many that will be?!) she'll sit on them for 21 days. does he mind that a chicken will be his roommate for a month?  apparently not.

given the general lack of senstitivity to animals here - even those that are expected to provide meat and other products for people - i appreciate his good humor and sweetness about all of this.  he even seems a little excited to see how many eggs she ends up with.

myself, i'm a little nervous that zeta the cat will find the chicks all too tempting.  she's already taken to harassing the chickens and causing their pea brains to go into major panic, despite she's 1/3 their size.  innocent assures he he'll keep them locked away until they are big enough to get away from her.

but the problem of 3 roosters remains.  not only are they noisy, but they are starting to fight!  so i guess eventually i'll have to accept one or two of them going the way of the cookpot, though the idea makes me a little sad.  but though i hate to admit it, having now actually owned and observed chickens, i can say with some mixed feelings that i don't feel as bad about one or two of them ending up eaten.  they live quite good chicken lives in our yard... chasing bugs, crowing in the morning, picking at the small plants, and getting very fat on corn and oats.  as a vegetarian it's a bit surprising to me, and was a little upsetting at first, that i don't feel a huge attachment to them.  i like them but... they aren't pets.  and the term "bird brained" rings truer than i would have imagined.

still, though, i don't want to be there on that fateful day.