Welcome to the Heart of Africa

I’d missed Africa. After I landed in Kinshasa yesterday and left the air conditioned airport, I stepped out into the thick, humid air.  It was almost as if I carried a cloud down from the sky with me. Following a recently departed winter back home, that humid air felt like a gift.

After my colleague who is traveling with me left one of his bags mistakenly inside and ran like a bolt of lightning back into the airport, I waited there on the sidewalk with the throngs of Congolese. They wore Western dress and African dress and many held signs with Western names on them—Congolese there to safely transport foreigners within what are notoriously known as unsafe borders.

To my left was a raucous gathering of people my age or slightly younger. When they saw their friends and family members arrive from inside, they let out cries of pure joy—a kind of joy that seeps into you and rests there for a while: another gift. They embraced their loved ones with such force that couples of them almost of fell to the ground. It was unbridled emotion, not something you see often in the US. Or, even if you see something akin, you certainly aren’t gifted the same feeling very often: that feeling of not really being all alone this world, of communion, of solace with other human beings. It is something we search for all of the time, but rarely find.

So, my first thank you to DRC came at that very moment. 

The warm, fuzzy feeling, of course, comes along with quite the opposite. After all, it is Africa’s heart, my love, my continent of paradox.

I’m reading a book while I’m here, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, which is bound to pepper my blog posts from here forward. As the title suggests, the book chronicles la catastrophe that is Congo’s history and politics. “The Congo has always defied the idealists,” writes the author.

My idealism, my captured joy, took a strong hit the next morning when we returned to the airport to take an in-country flight to Lumumbashi, one of the largest cities in DRC outside of Kinshasa, far to the East and known for the province in which it is located—Katanga—one of the most mineral-rich places on the planet. I returned with my colleague, a Nigerian doctor, to the airport and it didn’t take long for DRC‘s politics to start to seep in. Because he is Nigerian, the immigration officials said he could not travel outside of the capital due to a sour political relationship between West African countries and DRC. 

I was quickly ushered into the immigration office (because my colleague does not speak French), where I had to argue, in my very mediocre French, for 45 minutes about how he is a respectable doctor, how we have visas for the travel, how our work is important to people in the rural provinces of Katanga, how we are supported by their friend, the US Government. It was only after I softened my tone with the two men (one who was asleep for the first half of my arguments) that they softened as well. I stopped trying to strong-arm them and instead smiled politely, maybe even slightly flirtatiously, to win the favor. The only thing left to do after winning my argument was to have a lady security guard make some photocopies of our documents for us. I followed her through the airport to the photocopy machine, where she paused, stood with her arms folded, stared at me for a good 15 seconds with a disapproving face, and rubbed her two fingers together.

“L’argent!” Bien sur, l’argent.

I handed her 5 $1 bills out of the stack of 200 singles I was told to bring for just such situations. She held out for more, but when I stood my ground, transforming from soft to hard again, she slowly moved toward the window where the photocopies were made.

In my two weeks here, I have no doubt that I will capture at least a few more palpable joys, and, at the same time, I will lose just a little more faith in humanity.