Welcome prize

I’ve moved around a lot, and have come to expect a period of feeling lost: knowing no one, and not knowing where to go to buy things, not knowing the restaurants, etc etc.

In the end matters sort themselves out, and before long you have completely lost the helpless feeling which characterised the first few months.

Kinshasa, that strange place that has been hit by human and economic disasters, presents an even more difficult face. Traditional signs of economic prosperity and decay are intermingled in a way that makes it impossible to interpret. Many of the roads are not signed, and the maps use names which were changed several years ago. It is not, in brief, easy.

But never in my life have we had such a welcome as we have received from the people of Kinshasa. A friend of a friend has given us a contact for the International Women’s Club. The voice at the other end exudes warmth and friendship, and urges us to join them for a charity dinner in two days. She sends an email with the directions and more friendly, chatty, comments about what to expect.

It’s Saturday evening. The dinner is held at a smart Lebanese restaurant – we arrive early to allow our hostess to greet us and introduce us to some other people. To our surprise the evening is sponsored by a bank a friend has recommended for its arts programme, another sponsor is our landlord, a third is South African Airways, and there’s Nando’s, as well. (If you don’t know South Africa, Nando’s will mean nothing – but it has become a symbol of SA enterprise for its chicken peri-peri).

I’m pleasantly surprised to find four people there that I’ve met before, but the welcome we got from total strangers was totally amazing. I’ve been to many new places before and never before have I come across people so genuinely friendly. Some are expatriates, so are locals, some are diplomats and some are business people. Before long, we have met a wonderfully varied assortment of new people.

In some places, especially ones which can be difficult to live in, expatriate talk is a boring list of moans about how difficult things are. There’s none of that here – yes, of course everyone knows that things are difficult, but they are discussed more in a spirit of making the most of a difficult situation. Life is discussed more in terms of jokes than gloom and doom.

After the dinner there is a raffle, for which we have bought two tickets. The second winning number is ours – the first time ever to win a prize. It is an original Congolese painting, in black and white and an interesting, almost picassoesque mixture of symbols and people. If ever we were looking for a propitious sign for our life in Kinshasa, this must be it.

Music starts, the lights go off, and brilliant red blue and green laser disco beams fill the room. We dance until the music becomes heavy techno duff-duff stuff. It is after midnight and we decide it’s time to leave.

An Indonesian woman from the Dutch embassy asks us for a lift home. She’s one of the organising committee, and throughout the evening has exuded enthusiasm and joie de vivre. It comes as a shock that she’s leaving because she her back is giving her excruciating pain. We welcome the chance to talk to her, and give something back in return.

We have met only a few of the people attending, but we really feel among friends. And just to confirm our lucky day, as we leave we receive bottles of Nando’s delicious sauce and beautifully leather bound pocket diaries from the bank.