A memory day

We spent Memorial Day with our son, Jesse, and his wife, Linnea. They have been living in Oak Park, lllinois, for the past year, the first suburb west of Chicago where we lived for more than 25 years and where our children grew up. We moved away from Oak Park several years ago but visiting Jesse and Linnea there has been like going back to a home that we never really left.

They will move to Burlington, Vermont, next month. Their leaving Oak Park is like another, more definitive departure for us. This weekend it seemed like we were saying goodbye to our family’s days in the western suburbs of Chicago. We ended up visiting three old favorites on Memorial Day: Brookfield Zoo, Emilio’s Tapas Restaurant in Hillside, and Peterson’s Ice Cream parlor in Oak Park.

It was full-summer hot, in the 90s, but nevertheless a day at the zoo seemed more appealing than fighting the crowds at a museum. Brookfield Zoo has room for everybody and it was a short, traffic-free drive away.

At the ticket booth my instinct was to order tickets for “two adults and two children” but I had to remember to kick it up a generation and ask for “two seniors and two adults.” We had no children along as an excuse for this visit—that would have been fun, but we just had to trot out our own inner kids. It was not hard to do.

We ordered the tickets that gave entry to four special exhibits. We started with those and worked in the more standard displays and creatures as we went.We strolled for a long time in the Butterfly House, gathering delight, then found Stingray Bay. This turned out to be a large, shallow pool where you can pet stingrays. You wash your hands and arms and then lean over the edge of the pool and stroke the slimy creatures as they cruise by. A few touches was enough for me but Vic was really into stroking their fins and cheeks, even ticking their bellies. They seemed to like it.

We made our way toward the dolphin show, picking up lemon ices to eat while we waited. It was good to observe that these dolphins had either been brought in decades ago—some were pushing thirty--or had been born in captivity. If you’ve watched The Cove, you don’t want to go to any shows that use recently captured dolphins. They did good tricks. We clapped and cheered.

The Extreme Insects were extremely disappointing. No insects! Only giant insect sculptures, some of them moving, and an indoor exhibit with videos and activities that were designed to make you squirm. It was sponsored by the supermarket chain Dominicks and Terminix. One of the squirmy videos was of cockroaches multiplying and devouring a sandwich.

We strolled through the air-conditioned Desert House (I loved the meercats) and the un-air-conditioned Swamp House and many more. We were hot and tired by the time we made our way past the rhinos, kangaroos, and bison, and back to the car.

We had time back in the apartment for showers and naps before we headed out west again to Emilio’s, where we ordered old favorite tapas (garlic potato salad, marinated octopus, goat cheese–stuffed eggplant) and discovered new ones (grilled scallops, calamari with lemon and garlic). We were about to order a final dish when Linnea reminded us that earlier I had expressed a desire for Peterson’s ice cream.

So we left room and drove back to the ice cream shop that our family used to visit on the hottest summer days. We ordered remembered favorites. I used to waver between black walnut and peach but this time I chose peach. There is something about the flavor, texture, and color of the peaches that makes this sinfully rich, full-cream ice cream even creamier. I would never order any other flavor at Peterson’s from now on.

But perhaps I will never go to Peterson’s again, and if so, that is okay. Certain things must come to an end, but the fact of their ending makes them precious. They become memories. This was a memory day.

Finding Jesus in Congo

I thought I had one more brief Kinshasa post to write, about religion. But my dreams tell me that what I have to say about that may take more than 500–600 words and be more personal than I thought, so we’ll see. Warning: this post may be extra long.

I wake with dreams about various church groups meeting in the same space and about moving from one to the other with some regret and difficulty because it involves breaking ties. My husband moves ahead of me by joining a “rival” choir belonging to another church group. A wedding is involved.

As far as I can tell, most of my recent dreams have been set in Africa although that is all I can remember of them. This one was not, but it had an African feel to it, lively groups crowded together in small, hot spaces. I don’t know exactly what the dream means but it triggered these thoughts.

Yesterday, missing our conversations, my traveling companion Nina and I met at a halfway point between our homes (wish you’d been there, June). Among other things we talked about being reconverted to simple Christianity, about passing through the deconstructing, postmodernist rejection of the original faith we were taught (a stage where many of our friends and fellow church members find themselves) and finding the living Jesus. We talked about how, in my case at least, the Congo experience was contributing to that.

For years I have been finding and experiencing my own spirituality, but it has not been all that closely tied to Christianity. Only in the last months—a year perhaps—have I been thinking of myself (once again? for the first time?) as a Christian, not just one who is part of the Christian tradition. If anything, I have considered myself more Mennonite—with all its cultural implications and baggage—than Christian. Christianity seemed limiting. OK, so maybe I was a Holy Spirit Christian, not so much a Jesus Christian.

For most of my adult life I had been putting Christianity on hold, not rejecting it but not fully embracing it, either. It was the background, the setting, the impetus for what I felt was my real spiritual experience, which began evolving in my early 30s, triggered not by church but by yoga. I treasure every bit of my own unique experience of the Divine, which has many connecting points with Christianity but not always with the Christian community. Does this make sense? Probably not. It’s hard to explain. I’m not sure I understand it myself. In short, my spirituality has been anything but simple.

There is something, however, about the combination of worshiping at a somewhat traditional Mennonite church, witnessing conversions and baptisms of people close to me, and the Congo stories and experience that is drawing me back? across? into a less encumbered, less skeptical, less complicated faith.

I come back from Kinshasa with a deeper respect for old-fashioned religion, hallelujah Jesus-love, simple faith. I was getting that already by working with the story project (The Jesus Tribe: Grace Stories from Congo’s Mennonites, 1912–2012, to be published later this summer). I have to say the stories influenced me, even though I don’t take all of them at face value. I think there are some self-serving aspects to many of the testimonies but even those do not ring false. People met Jesus. They were saved. They were changed. God makes things possible that humans cannot achieve. Yes, the Congolese church has many problems, what church doesn’t, but something real shines through in the stories, something real happened despite all the mistakes the missionaries must have made and despite the corrupting influences in a society where the church can serve as a fragile ladder to survival, education, and even power.

I am still suspicious of religiosity. I can’t even write simply about simple faith and yet I was moved by it. I was moved by the Congolese Mennonite Christians’ practice of praying aloud at every gathering and before every meal, even in restaurants, once I got beyond the uncomfortable reminders of my own childhood (we kids eventually persuaded our parents to stop praying in public places). Perhaps there is no such thing as silent prayer for Congolese Christians because even when people were asked to pray their own prayers they did so in a full-voice chorus that rose like a Pentecostal cloud to heaven.

I saw how unembarrassed Congolese people are in general about declaring their allegiance to Jesus. The signs are literally everywhere. You can’t look to the right or the left without seeing a shop or taxibus with some sort of Christian-reference name. “Christian Coiffure.” “Christ the King Pharmacy.” “Rehoboth Express.” “House of Faith Mini-Supermarket.” A van emblazoned with the slogan, “Everything is under the authority of God.” You can dismiss this as superstition or take the forthright declarations at face value. Who are we to judge?

I was moved by the church services, the gospel-jazzy harmony singing and freedom to dance. It’s not so different from African-American church in that regard. But I felt freer to respond to it there than here. I never even go to black church services here. It’s as if my own culture and my own country are too complicated for me to handle. I have the sense, delusional no doubt, that I can relate more simply, at an open human level, to people who live in a place that is totally foreign. I lose my self-consciousness.

Above all, a real faith kinship shone through the conversations we had with many individual Congolese Mennonite Christians. Congo was a revelation of the truly global nature of the Jesus Tribe—where any two or three of its members are gathered together. I was able to participate in church and the Christian community there without any trace of discomfort or condescension. It offered me something I needed—joyful fellowship, music, dance, forthright prayer. I’m still thinking about what all of this means.

An environmentalist in Kinshasa

“This is not sustainable,” I kept thinking during the two weeks I spent recently in the largest city in the poorest country in the world. Nothing about life in Kinshasa, DR Congo, fit any reasonable definition of sustainable.

The food I ate came either from another country or from the surrounding countryside, hauled in by overloaded, crumbling, fuel-consuming vehicles over crumbling roads. Every sip of water I swallowed was from a plastic bottle. Every excursion—to visit new friends, attend a church service, check in on a job-training workshop, attend a funeral, go out to dinner—required getting in a vehicle and crossing varying lengths and breadths of this sprawling city over roads that ranged from dangerous to impossible and, more likely than not, encountering horrendous traffic jams. People, people, everywhere, were busily walking, riding, finding a hustle through the day—only 3 percent have regular employment. The population is exploding. Six or seven children per family is still the norm.

The heat at the coolest time of year was tolerable (for me, a Northerner) only if the electricity was on, powering a fan or air conditioner. My requirement for natural beauty was met only on a sunset walk by the Congo River and a day trip outside the city into the gorgeous countryside. Little remained of the tree-lined grace I remembered in parts of this city that I had known in the 1970s. No wonder my eyes turned hungrily to the stunning fashion parade—Congolese women create their own beauty—which you can see on any ride through this dirty, trash-strewn, polluted city.

I could not live in Kinshasa for long. And yet I still love this impossible country, perhaps even more than I did when my husband and I lived and worked here (in other cities) for three years when we were very young. And, after this belated return visit, I find myself wanting to go back. Why?

As an environmentalist, I see the bad news and the worse news to come. I see, even, a snapshot of our own future—if not ours personally, for future generations of widening swaths of the world. But I also see something else. I see that people are, nevertheless, living in Kinshasa and will live there for some time to come. And many manage to do so with an enviable vigor and grace.

I see that in focusing on the unsustainability, the wars, the suffering, and all the bad news so readily visible in Congo—as we environmentalists and the international media can’t help doing—we miss something. I am trying to define what it is that we miss, without romanticizing what I observed about the human spirit that still operates among the poorest of the world’s poor. I must qualify that. My conversations were not really with the poorest. They were mostly with people whom I would consider peers—well-educated professionals (with or without employment) and fellow members of my faith community.

What struck me was that they were all doing their absolute best. They were operating at the edge of their capabilities and the opportunities available to them. They were doing what they could, both to provide for their own families and to take care of others and the greater society. They were scraping together all available resources—monetary, spiritual, human connections—to survive, to do well, and to do good. And they did so with the extraordinary grace that comes with their culture’s appreciation of joy, affection, and hospitality. Can we say the same about ourselves, with all our advantages?

Life in Kinshasa is not sustainable, but it will continue for a long time. And it may hold lessons for all of us about how to live in difficult times.

Kinshasa--the day after

Angelique, Bea, Marie-Jeanne and Felly at the botanical garden

I stopped the day to day writing but that doesn’t mean things stopped happening. At a certain point there was just too much. Also, our trip was coming to an end and I thought I should be thinking about summing up. That seemed a much bigger task than observing what was happening day to day so I put it off till after the trip, hoping I could make better sense of things after I came home.

In the final days there was:

1) A much-needed excursion to the beautiful countryside, to remind us that Congo, outside of Kinshasa, is gorgeous. Fresh air, botanical gardens, smooth road. It was trafficked by vehicles chugging into the city burdened with produce and charcoal (one top-heavy truck had overturned). We ate goat and stopped at a market but I was too tired to get out of the car. I did not visit a single market during our visit—something I had been looking forward to. Our hosts stocked up, wedging produce between knees.

2) A big church service that tested my endurance because it was long, I got very hot, and that day I was having the only tummy problems I experienced on the whole trip. A few degrees of temperature and crawlies in the tummy can turn the tolerable into the unbearable. This trip required fortitude, with which I was blessed most days but not that one.

3) More beautiful people. Both the Linds (MCC directors) and Pastor François Tshidimu have the gift of identifying talented people of great integrity and commitment and putting them to work or mustering support for their work. Church agencies would do well to rely on such on-the-ground judgments.

Tatiana, who runs peace camps

4) Money shuffling and borrowing. None of us had brought enough cash or budgeted for things like church offerings and other generous or shopping impulses. I am used to credit cards, and being forced to deal in cash only was a new experience.

5) A parade of gift-givers and request-makers, none of which we were fully prepared to deal with, especially as we were zipping our suitcases shut. Perhaps the best gift of the whole trip was given by Mama Swana, national president of Protestant women, to Pastor Nina. Nina had admired the clerical collars ordained women (and men) wear, and so Mama Swana came to visit on the last day with gifts for all of us and a purple shirt with clerical collar for Nina.

I can’t sum up yet. I am tired, catching the cold that passed among us like the Holy Spirit, and swamped with work and laundry.

All I can say now is that I have been bitten by something besides mosquitoes. I want to go back.

Kin day 10--food

What have we eaten? I have starting eating whole balls of fufu at main meals. Fufu is growing on me. And in me. I am convinced it expands through the hours following a meal. Fufu is a mixture of manioc and corn flours, cooked unseasoned in water and stirred to the consistency of Play-doh. It is served in portion-sized balls, but they are usually very large and we visitors have been slicing off tiny portions. It is the staple, the basis for the rest of the meal. You pinch off a bit, knead it in your hand and punch it with your thumb into a flap for grabbing a bite of seasoned food.

For us--family meals must be much sparer--there is always fufu and rice, sometimes also potatoes or pasta with a little something in it. There is some kind of green vegetable, pondu (manioc leaves) or lenga-lenga (spinach-like). Usually also plantains fried in palm oil. Once we had tiny little eggplants. There is almost always fish, fresh or salted or both, fried crisp, as well as chicken or sometimes beef. Juiciness is not a prized characteristic of the meat and fish that is served but they are tasty. Dessert is fruit, oranges, tangerines, papayas or, a strange one several nights ago about the size of a small plum. You pop the hard shell open and eat the seedy, pulpy center, which looks like a tiny, oblong brain. It is sour-sweet with overtones of rot. I can’t remember the name, even in French. I’d never heard of it.

The sameness of the diet has not bored me so far. Why? At home I am used to eating something different every night. Perhaps in our quest for variety we are acknowledging that we have not yet found the right foods, the ones that will carry us through our life, the kind of foods, like pondu and fufu, that you can eat day after day after day, and that you sorely miss when you are away from home. When Nina asked Marie-Jeanne what she wants to do when she visits the US again next October she said she wants to cook fufu. I am missing nothing of my home food. What is my home food? It is something different every night. I am a good cook but I do not like anything I cook well enough to cook and eat it day after day.

The staple foods here are not easily made. No canned or frozen pondu can imitate the real thing, and there is not yet an instant fufu mix, or if there is, no one would use it so long as they had the time to make the real thing. The other day, chez Mama Chantal, the fufu was light and almost fluffy. How was it done? It requires real skill, and time. And there are many steps to making pondu, including pounding in a mortar. These are labor-intensive foods.

We have been having bread, fruit, and tea for breakfast, plus things like scrambled eggs, French fries, or fresh-roasted peanuts. The main meal is sometime in the afternoon. There may be just two meals or a light evening supper of something like spaghetti or oatmeal. I thought I might lose a little weight here but I don’t think so, especially since we are driven everywhere. Maybe I should help pound the pondu.

Kin day 9--Getting by

Gregoire collecting from his bread sellers

I am not going to write any more about traffic jams. Traffic is just one of the bottlenecks that people of Kinshasa have to squeeze through every day. The biggest one is the bottleneck of survival.

Life away from the center city, in three-quarters of Kinshasa, is by most of my standards impossible. It is too hot, too dusty (or muddy) and polluted, too crowded, too hard to get around, no dependable electricity or running water. Food is nearly as expensive as in the US. Most important, there are no jobs. Ninety-seven percent of Kinshasa residents have no regular jobs, and the jobs that exist often pay very little.

But still, people live here. They survive. They raise their families. They make lives for themselves. How do they do it?

I do not know, frankly, how the vast majority of the people do it. Most people are incredibly, heartbreakingly poor. I have only glimpsed their lives through doorways, in the streets, on hospital beds, in faces. I have only impressions, no real information. But little by little we are getting a closer look at the struggle behind the lives of some people who seem, at first appearance, to be successful.

Yesterday we were invited to the home of Gregoire and Nanette. Gregoire is assistant pastor of the church we are visiting. Their tiny, hot living room was filled with comfortable overstuffed furniture. The best chicken and fish we have had so far was produced from behind a curtain, along with the usual rice, fufu, and fried plantains.

Gregoire explained that people would be going in and out of the home throughout our visit because of his business. The church pays its leaders very little if anything. They are essentially volunteers. Gregoire does have a regular government administrative job, but it pays only $70 a month. Rent is $50. The couple has five children, three in school. Food is not cheap. So Gregoire had to figure out another gig.

His business is running a bread distribution warehouse. Every day a Lebanese bakery delivers fresh bread to his warehouse. Bread sellers come to the warehouse, pick up the bread, and sell it on their streetside stands. There is a bread seller who has to move her table every time we come to the church in the SUV because she is stationed right on the corner of a very narrow alleyway. The men and women who were coming to Gregoire and Nanette’s house that day were bringing money they had collected for the bread and he was carefully marking accounts. He has about 100 working for him.

This is how Gregoire and his family were managing, how they were getting by on what must be an very slender margin. There is a French term for this: Ils se débrouillent.  It is untranslatable but it is the essence of what everybody does here to survive. Drivers squeeze through the tiniest openings in traffic. Bread sellers carve out their territory. University-educated professionals do side businesses. People crowd the streets, going somewhere or nowhere, looking for something that will get them through the survival bottleneck.

For more pictures of this family go here.

Kin day 5—a church service

It took us two hours to get to church. We were an hour late but it didn’t start without us because we were the special guests of the day and Nina was preaching.

After we had been stopped for a long time on the Airport Road, Pastor François jumped out of the back of the SUV. I thought he was going to check on the bottleneck ahead but he never came back. He walked the rest of the way to church and was waiting for us when we finally arrived. The situation on the Airport Road is getting to the place where you’re better off walking a couple of miles than driving through the construction zone.

I could write only about the traffic jam, how we finally took a detour through a muddy market area and how we once again had to leave the navigable streets and, like the day before, negotiate a maze of rutted, crowded alleyways in a close-packed, poor neighborhood to get to our destination, only this day, since it had rained hard the day before and was still raining off and on, the streets were muddy instead of dusty. That would be enough recordable experience for one day. Except I must add that I am coming to think of the maze as a labyrinth. We do not go in to look for the exit but for the sacred center.

The sacred center is hidden but those who need to find it will eventually arrive. We arrived at the half-built space carved out in the dingy quarter by the Bondeko parish of the Mennonite Church of Congo after the rain had stopped. It was a good thing because the only shelter from the rain was a slice of tin roofing raised high above the unfinished cement block walls. Fifty people were gathered and waiting.

The vision of the completed church was evident only in the finished platform, a smooth, two-step semicircle raised high above the dirt floor. Eventually there will be a cement floor raising the congregation up to equality with their leaders but meanwhile the narrow, high space, with the congregation unnaturally low, has the feel of a very rough, tiny cathedral, a holy place in the slums that looks no different from its surroundings, where children and chickens walk by the doorless doorways and look in. Tall Pastor François looked truly imposing standing up on the elevated platform. Pastor Nina did not stay up there. She came down to the dirt to speak to the people.

But before the preaching there was a lot of singing and praying, including by us four American visitors. We were introduced and introduced ourselves up front. Then we were welcomed in song. The whole church sang but a woman stood in front of each of us and sang, looking into our eyes. All the singing was invigorating, including ours. The congregation joined in when we sang Come Thou Fount but we sang three other songs to which they also clapped, drummed, whistled, and ululated. They would have eventually learned and joined in on all of them but we didn’t know how to prolong a song for more than three verses. Nina prayed for the children, who came up front. This is a regular part of the service.

The service was mostly in Lingala with some French and Tshiluba. Nina preached about what it means to be “people of God’s peace,” in the words of the Menno Simons hymn, which was the tamest of the songs we visitors had sung, and Azir translated into Lingala. The two of them got a good rhythm going and Azir followed Nina’s gestures, as she had told him to.

There was a recognition of recent graduates from university and graduate school. More singing. An offering and then a special competitive offering for the church building. The emcee-cheerleader urged everybody on, the singing and drumming got going, and people danced up to the front to put their offerings in plastic baskets, a pink one for the women and a blue one for the men. The money was counted--the women were ahead--and then they did it again, urged on by the emcee, a man named Patient. The women danced forward with their handbags on their heads. The men edged closer in the second tally but lost to the women, as they apparently always do. Later, Patient, who had really tried to get the men going, pointed out that some important men of the parish were absent that day.

This sounds like a lot of church and it was. It went on for three hours, after starting an hour late because of the embouteillage (my word of the day, traffic jam). But although I nearly dozed off during the last prayer, it did not seem long. Time left my awareness as soon as we stepped over that high, rough threshold at the center of the labyrinth.

Kin day 4—a funeral

We were supposed to visit a hospital on Saturday. We went to a funeral instead. In Kinshasa I would rather go to a funeral than a hospital.

It was our first day with our Congolese hosts, who would have charge of us for the next 8 days. Pastor François gave us the news of the change in plans when he came to pick us up at 10. Well, he was not picking us up but waiting for Marie-Jeanne to come with her Toyota SUV and driver but Marie-Jeanne was running errands and running late. For overnights we would be passed back and forth, in various combinations, between François’s household and Marie-Jeanne’s household since neither could accommodate three American ladies at the same time. But we would be spending most of our days together.

The funeral was for the mother of the pastor who is president of a local Mennonite church district. It was important for François to show up and he thought we ought to see this, too. Funerals take precedence over just about anything, certainly over a hospital visit (Amen!). So when Marie-Jeanne and her driver finally showed up at Suzanne’s around noon we all piled into the SUV with our luggage—7 of us including the driver and an interpreter Francois thoughtfully brought along. He and the interpreter, Azir, rode in the back with the luggage.

Nobody in the car knew exactly how to get to the funeral. They knew which neighborhood and had the name of a street but nobody in that neighborhood knew exactly where the street was. Although everybody who was asked gave directions, they tended to contradict each other.

“Street” is an exaggeration for the kind of passages in which we soon found ourselves in this large residential quarter. We’re talking about a maze of narrow dirt alleys rutted with rocks and washouts and remnants of ancient pavement and in places literally paved with garbage. People live here, in rows of low cement buildings with connected rooms and shared compounds, which we could glimpse only through openings in the cement block walls that lined the alleys. People stream through these alleyways and sell their wares along them, especially at corners. Children dart around. They are not appropriate for vehicles, not even a rugged SUV. Nevertheless, some vehicles were back there, blocking the way, and had to move to make way for us.

After many inquiries, meanderings, and turnarounds, we came upon the funeral, tucked away in a small open area fully set up with tents, chairs for several hundred people, and a canopy for the casket and mourners. There must have been 200 people crammed into the little open space but you couldn’t see or hear them from half a block away.

The funeral was well underway as we all traipsed through and were seated first on a far edge and then moved to a front-row view. One has to get used to being a disruption. The leader of proceedings was calling people to a mike to eulogize the deceased grandmother. The eulogies that I could understand sounded familiar, like you would hear at one of our funerals. A granddaughter spoke, an old woman who had been the grandmother’s friend, and a number of friends of the church leader, her son.

We were led in a lively Lingala version of What a Friend We Have in Jesus, with Allelujas and many refrains thrown in, and another hymn I didn’t know but could soon hum along with in harmony. Gorgeous, energizing singing. There was a prayer for the immediate family. Boy and Girl Scouts were summoned to surround the casket and give a salute. Then the master of ceremonies called upon a succession of family groups to lay flowers in front of the casket. All the wreaths were made of artificial flowers and covered in plastic. Many family members wore outfits of matching cloth, shirts for men and dresses for women. The cloth was of two patterns: one blue with flowers and another black with chickens and eggs. Marie-Jeanne, who has a sewing training workshop, sewed most of the special outfits in the last few days. Black was not predominant at this funeral. Women were dressed in their colorful best but young people were there in tight jeans, too.

Then people were summoned in groups, according to protocol, to pass by the casket. Family, leaders and officials, pastors, women leaders—including some of our théologienne friends from Day 1. I lost track of the protocol but we followed François and passed by the glass-covered open casket. The tiny Granny, covered up to her face with silky cloths and scarves, looked as imperious as any Egyptian mummy queen and almost as shriveled.

We left after we had paid our respects, as we might have at an American funeral. What followed would be burial at a rather distant cemetery and maybe some soft drinks. Instead we made our way back to more navigable streets, descending from the high Ngaliema neighborhood to late lunch at an Italian restaurant run by Lebanese and then to first one host house and then the other. They were not close and it was hot.

Earlier, as we were driving up the Ngaliema hill toward the district, we passed by a striking white mansion that looked familiar to me from the 1970s. Nina asked what it was and I asked Marie-Jeanne. “That’s the Marble Palace,” she said.

Ah. The palace Mobutu built, a place where official functions used to be held. Are they still? Yes, President Kabila still uses it, Marie-Jeanne said. But I wonder how much. It is where his father, the first President Kabila, was assassinated. And it is so close to the crowded, dusty neighborhood, so close to the places of hard life and death and singing.

Kin Day 2--Shopping

Don’t these things look clean and pretty? They are like Congolese women, who come out of sardine-packed, fume-spewing taxibuses and traipse down muddy, garbage-strewn streets looking like a million dollars.

That’s Nina’s Curious, our fourth traveling companion, with my loot. Like Congolese women, he has good taste.

See, I bought some cloth, hoping the glamour would rub off on me. But although I looked pretty spiffy this morning in my blue dress and Congo cloth jacket, I was soon hot and bedraggled. All four of us looked good at the outset. We should have taken a picture of our outfits for the day. I will not take pictures now because we are getting some well-earned rest and we do not look good.

Nina and I did a fair piece of work this morning. I interviewed three people who, like me, have had a role in the Congolese Mennonite centennial story project. One was a writer-researcher who conducted dozens of interviews and wrote 35 of the 100 stories being included in the French version. One was a young woman who was the subject of one of my favorite stories. One was the coordinator of the centennial celebration. It was a lively conversation, which Nina recorded on video. It will become part of the publicity for the English version of the book, of which I was the text editor. The news that came out in the conversation is that Mimi, the pretty young seminary graduate, will be the first woman ordained in her branch of the church. Go, théologiennes! As June says, putting women who look like Mimi in the pulpit will be another good evangelism tool.

The soon-to-be-Reverend Mimi Kanku

Over an hour and a half I exhausted the French-speaking part of my brain but we got to go shopping after that. We stopped for food for lunch which turned out to be luscious avocados, bread and cheese, and a tomato salad with basil, which the fruit and vegetable vendor, a cultivated woman named Lucrèce who was educated as a geographer but couldn’t make a living that way, insisted was the cure for whatever was ailing June. June was happy to try it. 

Lucrèce and her wares

We’re not sure it worked, however, because after that we made a harrowing trek to the fabric store and back to the car. It was pretty hot, dirty, crowded, noisy, everything you might expect from shopping in Kinshasa, including guys moving in for possibly nefarious purposes. Suzanne has a good “Get out of here!” shriek, which the guys echoed, laughing. By the end of the day, after a stop at a quieter artisanat, June was laid low again. I’m pretty pooped myself but not ready to call it a day. What's for dinner tonight?

Kin Day 1--Les Théologiennes

It is hard to write in a room with three other women even if they are on their computers, too. We don’t just ignore each other like men do. But here goes. Nina is posting pictures on FB. I’m doing the words.

Today we met with Mennonite women theologians at the Christian University of Kinshasa---women who have studied or are studying theology. A few are ordained and are pastors of churches. Many of them hope to convince their church leaders that women, indeed, can and should be ordained. Only one of the three Mennonite groups in Congo allows women to be ordained. Ironically, it’s the Mennonite Brethren who have respected the Sisters enough to accept them as leaders.

Let me tell you, these women theologians can preach, pray, study, sing, and cook—we feasted on chicken, fish, pondu (manioc greens, which I still call sombe from my earlier years here, yum!), fufu (manioc/corn glob), rice, etc. etc.--plus everything else Congolese women do, including raising large families. And they look good while they are doing it. 

note the little bowl of pure pili pili in the center (habaneros)

I gave a little very impromptu speech in French. Difficile! Nina wowed them but she could speak in English while Suzanne translated. Pastor Nina is their new heroine. Role model. Big Sister to the young ones. This was a very very good afternoon.

Well, it was good for Nina and me and our host Suzanne. June was laid low already on this, our first day, with tummy troubles. We all hope she will soon be able to eat something besides Pepto Bismol tablets. Can we blame airplane food, perhaps? Or perhaps the screaming babies on both legs of the flight—8 hours Chicago to Brussels and 7 and a half hours Brussels to Kinshasa. Or perhaps the chaos and heat of the airport and the dust and diesel fumes on the ride to Suzanne’s quiet, clean, comfortable apartment. Maybe all of the above.

Traffic jams last night and tonight definitely raise my mental bar for traffic jams. Cars creating lanes where they will, sneaking into any available opening even if it totally stops other cars. Tonight, after everybody had been stalled for 15 minutes, Suzanne faced down two drivers who had stationed themselves, turning right and heading our direction, in what was supposed to be our right-turn lane. She got us home without a scratch.