Back from the hols

It’s always reassuring when you’ve been away to come back to familiar ground, and sure enough some things in Kinshasa are still the same. The army of street sweepers, whom everyone predicted would vanish after a few weeks, or months at the most, are still there, vainly trying to find something to sweep up when each has little more than a 100 metre stretch of road. The electricity is still going off with regularity, and the police are still looking hungry for something.

But other things have changed. For example there was a Christmas tree in the arrivals hall at the airport: a small one, admittedly, no more than one metre high, but a Christmas tree all the same. Well, a plastic Christmas tree.

Shoprite, a South African supermarket that opened its doors with much fanfare earlier last year, has a massive glut of mince pies and Christmas cakes – having overlooked the fact that such delicacies are not on the diet of their Congolese customers.

The Minister responsible for the sector under which we work has had a press conference to launch his new web-site. “This,” he proudly proclaimed, “will provide all the data anyone needs to know on the sectors for which my ministry is responsible.” I looked at the site. It’s very smart: most pages are headed by pull-down menus below which are pictures of the Minister at public events. But there’s not much below the pictures. On one page there are copies of two speeches he has made; on another there are the names of key staff. On a third there’s a policy statement that’s more than a year old. What is missing is, unfortunately, any link with the official web-site of one of his sections (prepared with input from us), which contains all relevant legislation, data giving the population, area and a mass of other details of all local government units in the country, training guides and much much more. But then he wouldn’t refer to that, would he?  It’s financed by foreigners.

The most important change is to see the drawn, but victorious, faces of so many Congolese people. Like most of us, of course, they knew that the world was going to end on 21^st December. As if to confirm all the predictions, the previous day started with massive rainstorms. As the streets flooded, so did the determination of the ordinary people to stop the apocalypse by going to church and praying. They prayed all that night, and all the next day. It was all worth it: as dawn broke on the 22^nd they were able to experience the thrill and relief of knowing that God had listened to their prayers and decided not to end the world this time.

Sounds absurd? It’s true - really.