Sadly logic or logically sad?

Yesterday Didier and I were asked to participate in a selection panel to evaluate six candidates for an internship at the Kisantu Botanical Gardens. The profile of the candidates constitutes a good example of the educational and economical crisis that this country has been going through for...ever...

The six candidates were close to, or in their thirties. Only one of them had any paid professional experience. All had completed their university education in 8 to 10 years instead of 4. All tried their best to convince us they were the best candidate using the most "logical" arguments possible.

Most people here take a long time to complete their studies because they face all sorts of financial problems, including having often to support a family while going to school. Also, sometimes they have to wait 1 or 2 years until a certain course is offered. Professors are paid so little that they often have other jobs to complement their salary. Material and academic resources are very limited. And so on.

Many of these problems are similar to what Guatemalans face. Still, I often get the feeling that things are even more desperate here. After working in the Congo for two years the limitations of the candidates shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but still they shock me. It still makes me sad.

While the technical adviser and the Garden's director asked very specific questions about trees and stuff, D and I asked more general ones, such as the classic "how do you think you can apply your field experience to this internship?" and "what do you expect to learn from this experience?". Part of the reason why we asked more general questions was because we know nothing about plants, but also because these more general questions sometimes help see if a certain candidate has potential, despite his or her academic shortcomings.

The question about applying past experience to the internship resulted in answers that would be funny if they weren't desperate. We're no angels, so I'm not going to say that we didn't chuckle at a few of these answers. Still, the overall feeling elicited by these "logical connections" was sadness. They showed how desperate people are to get a paid job or internship.

It appears as if one of the more active professors in the Biology department at the UNIKIN is very involved in research on rats. Three out of the six candidates had worked with rats. Urban rats. So how does catching rats in the shanty towns relates to training as a field guide in a botanical garden 120 km from Kinshasa?

I tried my best to send the candidates telepathic messages with the PC-interview-proof-get-an-internship answers: "My experience relates to this internship because collecting rats requires the ability to adapt to difficult field conditions, pay attention to detail, etc. etc." It didn't work. I obviously don't have supernatural powers. These are some of the answers we got:

"I worked with rats. Rats are omnivores, therefore they also eat plants. The work at the Gardens involves plants. Logically, my past work relates to this internship."

"I worked with rats. Rats are part of the Animal Kingdom. The Animal and the Plant Kingdoms complement each other. I now want to work with the Plant Kingdom. Logically, my past work relates to this internship."

I think we thought we'd be helping them by asking more general questions, but apparently these "classic" interview questions are only classic on the other side of the Atlantic. Their answers were somewhat sadly logic. Applying for your first internship at 35 seems to me logically sad.

Vanilla Hearts

Mandarina, sorry it took me almost a month to update you on the yogurt quest. We have been saving a few $ every week but I must admit that we're eating less yogurt now than before. I need to spend more time at home to diversify the flavors. I have been using part-skim milk and Canderel sugar substitute in crystals. I'm not yet sure if it is good or bad to use artificial sweetener. The difference in calories is not that significant. I'm using less that 1 teaspoon per jar, so maybe I'll switch back to regular sugar, don't know yet.

That said, the vanilla yogurt turned out very well. I have been freezing it to make mini-yogurt bites and that, at least, has been a hit with Didier (at least I think so). I takes one jar of yogurt to make one tray, but somehow having it in bite sizes makes it feel like there is more. Also, you can have one or two as mini-snack. The hearts come out prettier but the one in the pic below was already melting by the time I took the picture. The red stuff behind the heart is gazpacho. I'm addicted to it.

Croquet day

On Saturday we were invited to David and Sonia's.


Some of the guys played ping-pong, but the game of the day was really croquet. Didier and I aren't really croquet people (I'm more of a foosball person, specially at David and Sonia's, where the foosball table is set up for lefties), so we observed and commented during the first game.



We ended up playing. I last played when I was 8 or 9 I think. My brother's got a croquet set, but in Antigua I always have excuses not to play. Here are some pictures Sonia took while we played.



I was certainly dressed for the occasion. I picked the yellow ball so it would match my skirt. Didier was wearing his SDSU t-shirt to match my skirt. We were very color-coordinated last Sat!

William and Adso

I have been thinking about the principal characters of "The Name of the Rose" lately. We bought the DVD on our last visit to Belgium, and watched it a couple of weeks ago. I loved the film when it first came out, and loved the book, too.

When the abbey's library burned, I identified with William of Baskerville. I would have done the same thing and tried to save as many books as possible. I would have mourned for the lost books. Even though the story is fictional, I still felt sad when I watched the film.

I often think about all the knowledge that has been lost to accidents, ignorance, war, and intolerance. I miss the books I'll never get to read. I crave the smell of libraries and to think of the possibilities, of the things you can discover in forgotten shelves in far-off libraries. I love books.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday at the Botanical Garden of Kis@ntu. I went there to discuss a small participatory research project with the director and Francesca, who is the technical adviser to the garden's rehabilitation project. I was sitting outside the Garden's tiny library when I heard some commotion inside. Francesca came out a few seconds later carrying some old documents. She was furious.

Termites had gotten into one of the oldest collection of plant books the garden has. We took the books out and started killing the bugs immediately. The new garden intern helped us, too.




I felt sad and angry. The collection includes drawings for the flora of every province of the Congo, and the drawings are delicate and detailed. They come from a time before digital cameras and GPS, they're over 100 years old.

I could understand if the library held thousands of tomes, but there aren't even 1000 books in that library. Where was the librarian while the termites feasted away a few meters from his desk? The collection still has the original receipts, so we know they were delivered to the priest who founded the garden from the editorial house in Belgium. The books survived dictators and wars, only to be destroyed by bugs. I took special pleasure in decapitating and squishing as many termites as possible.



After our termite killing spree, we left the gardens for the cité where we were to lodge. The Catholic sisters that run the local hospital make ends meet by lodging visitors at their house. Having gone to Catholic school all my life, and after interacting with nuns on a relatively regular basis, I felt right at home in the simple but comfortable house.

At dinner, conversation turned around the upcoming project, which will focus on improving some of the living conditions of the cité, or village that neighbors the gardens. The sisters agreed that having a market next to the hospital wasn't ideal, and that in general the living conditions in the village weren't the most salubrious ones.

I thought about Adso and how he confronts what he sees and lives in the abbey with the poverty he saw outside. It was the XIV century, things were pretty bad. Listening to the sisters say how people couldn't pay for their surgeries, how different government divisions owed the hospital thousands of dollars in medical fees for their employees, and how they struggled to keep the hospital running, made me think of the termite-ridden books again, and of the library. And of the story of the abbey.

Do those books matter when thirteen year-old girls are coming in for C-sections because they're too young to deliver naturally? Is it normal to feel sad and angry about the loss of beautiful books AND about the dire conditions around the garden? What do you say to a librarian that struggles to feed his family? does it make sense AT ALL to point out the value of the books, the fact that they're part of the Congolese heritage, of the garden's heritage, of you-name-it heritage? Can he still be asked to do his job?

I left the gardens yesterday with all these questions in my head. I thought that I was William and I was Adso and that it was hard to make sense of it at all. The little participatory project is supposed to find a few doable solutions to improve the living conditions outside the gardens. The goal of the director is to deter encroachment on the garden. He fears that when the last tree outside is turned to charcoal for a few francs congolaises, the end of the garden will begin, and then there'll be nothing left. If the garden starts making sense to the people, perhaps the abbey won't need to burn.

Sometimes things seem not to change.


Kids from an orphanage leaving the Garden after a school visit.

Friday chicken and massage

On Friday I stayed home. My shoulder was hurting badly and I thought I'd feel better if I worked at home and combined computer work with watering the plants and having the fridge near by. I wasn't feeling very well when my friend Sonia called saying that she would come by to return the yogurt container (she came over last week to use the yogurt maker). Sonia talked me into going with her and use her massage machine to make my shoulder better. I was really feeling like cr@p because on top of that I had m. cramps, so Sonia also offered to make one of her herbal concoctions to help with that, too.

I'm glad I listened, because Sonia saved the day. Turns out she learned massage techniques back in Equator (the country, not the DRC province), so she did a great job on my shoulder and I felt much much better. I felt well enough to go out that evening for Friday chicken at the French Cultural Center, where we met Sonia, David, Lisa and Paya.




Friday Chicken at the FCC is the best deal in town. For $10 you get a whole chicken, plus fries and plantains. It's so much cheaper than the average Kinshasa restaurant that the first few times we ate there we didn't know how to handle such a small bill. We normally pay over $10 per person when we eat out, so dividing $30 between 8 or 9 people feels so improbable that it takes a long time to divide the tab.

Thank you Sonia for insisting on taking me under your wing last Friday.
I managed to take some unauthorized pics of Didier before he noticed.

Random views

We're not allowed to take pictures of public places in Kinshasa. If you're seen walking around with a camera, you will be stopped. When it comes to pictures, random individuals will approach you and tell you that you are breaking the law. This is why we can't take pics of the street where we live, and that is why I'm not posting any forbidden views. I just wanted to share some views OF our balcony (not FROM).

The first one is of my avocado plant that I started growing from seed.



This one is of the iron bars that protect our balcony. We live in a third floor, but you never know. Apologies for the baobab in the back.



Another detail of our wonderful bars. Apologies for the building and the lumberyard in the back. I almost had to apologize for the river but it was too hazy so, phew.



I wish I could post a picture of our view of the river. We've got only a partial view, but still, it is the Congo. Unfortunately the Congo is also an international border, so nope.

Mini-Ale and Marthe stopped by today and Ale helped me upload the pics. She tried my vanilla yogurt today and loved it!!



She checked the views and pondered for a while and then she let me know it was ok to post the pics. She's still a very serious little girl so I trust her opinion.





Marthe and Mini-Ale will be flying back to Mbandaka on the 16th. We'll meet once more before they leave, then it won't be until I go to Mbandaka next time that I'll see Marthe, Tinda and Alejandra.

This is my favorite pic because they have the same expression.



Marthe also loved the yogurt. She wouldn't touch the black beans, though. This is in the country where people eat grasshoppers, caterpillars and most members of the animal kingdom...Marthe eats beans, I know, because she prepared them for me once in Mbandaka. She just thought the color was weird or something. Oh well.

When in doubt..."do"

Didier was at a meeting all day yesterday. I stayed home, away from temptation #1 (blogging), so I could get more work done. I had planned to crash the meeting in the afternoon to hear Didier's first presentation, which was supposed to be at around 3:30. There was a cocktail afterwards, well, after his second presentation (the one that regular folks like myself could attend), so I dressed up a bit. I arrived at the hotel where the meeting was held just in time to sneak into the meeting room, but then I chickened out.

Yes, chickened out.

It was a small meeting and when I peeked into the room several people turned around to look who was coming in, so I quickly closed the door. Then Jef, a friend, came out to talk a phone call, and I asked him if he thought it was ok to go in. He said "of course" but he was smirking, plus, I know Jef's standards for "ok" (his quite fearless of the ridicule) and so thought twice and stayed outside.

Cold feet twice within 10 minutes. I usually don't care and I don't know what I was up to yesterday. I felt very self-conscious and out of place. I thought I had dressed inadequately, and worried I would disrupt the meeting and then Didier would get mad because I had walked in right before his turn. You name the fear, I felt it. I freaked out.

So, I was stuck in the hotel with two hours to kill, no laptop (I feel so naked without my laptop!!), no chance of walking around the neighborhood (a notorious hot spot for petty crime), and nothing to read.

I went down to get a coffee and managed to kill about 15 minutes sipping my tiny 5 bucks expresso and writing about the incident on my pocket notebook. I didn't want to pay for another overpriced coffee. I was starting to get bored out of my mind and tired of feeling silly for not having walked into the meeting. I started wandering around the hotel (very, very slowly, to make the most out of the place). It was mid-afternoon so not many people were in the lobby. I wondered if the hotel had a hair salon.

I'm pretty sure that all hotels that receive a fair number of business and official visitors have hair salons. It may be a universal requirement to get a star or something. I decided to check. The shop area at the Memling isn't very large. There's a pharmacy, a flower shop, a cellphone store, Air France's in-town desk, and a souvenir shop.

I passed by all these shops wondering if the Memling was going to be the first unfortunate exception to the hotel and salon rule, but Memling delivered. A small sign announcing "hair salon such and such, upstairs", and the best news of the day: "ouvert" saved the day.

I spent the next hour and a half getting my hair washed and dried, and observing the fascinating world of Congolese Hair Science. I was the only mundele there. Five other women were getting five different treatments/cuts/extensions done. Next to me, a young stylist was weaving wavy human hair to a lady's tresses (the package read "100% human hair" and I immediately thought of Tess Monaghan of Laura Lippman's novels). The stylist was dressed in full Congolese hip hop attire including the mandatory diamond stud on one ear and the baseball cap. He did his art while singing along the radio and stopping from time to time to do some moves when a particularly popular Congolese song was playing.

Another stylist was busy reading the apparently very complicated instructions for the application of a product another client brought in a silver tube. After consulting with his colleagues he proceeded to apply the cream only to the ends of a few strands of hair of his client.

Next to the works of engineering the stylists were doing, my own straight brushing must have seemed very boring. Still, the guy dedicated a lot of time to my hair. He even tried three or four times (unsuccessfully) to keep my bangs in a sort of wave and laughed when the "wave" collapsed under his very eyes.

By the time I was done it was almost 5:30. Everybody was friendly and I think a bit surprised to see a mundele in a hair salon that obviously specializes in African hairdos. Time flew. By the time I paid for my $15 do I was in a great mood, complimenting stylists on their skills, women on their new hair looks, and the cashier on the good service. I was complimented back, invited to return soon, told I was a very friendly mundele. I left the place in a true hair high.

I went back to the floor where the meeting was taking place in time to steal some spicy olives and two mini-sandwiches before the important guys arrived. The rest of the evening went very well. Didier's main presentation went great, and the cocktail included some mini-samosas that my friend Sonia and I devoured while hiding under a strategically located potted palm tree.

Yesterday I confirmed the transcultural power of the blow drier.

Below: Didier, Ale, Jef (the picture doesn't do justice to George's work, btw.)