Chances and Choice

After a chaotic trip from Lumumbashi yesterday, we landed back in DR Congo’s capital city: Kinshasa. I didn’t see much of Kinshasa on my first trip from the airport. It was dark and I was subsumed with fatigue. But this time, despite an all-night rager among Congolese men in the hotel room next to mine the night before, I was awake.

When you travel out of the Kinshasa airport, you soon hit the bustle of a typically developed African city. There are massive traffic jams, suggested traffic lights, and people who decide to make their own turn lanes in the middle of the jam. Teenage boys run around in the traffic, selling Fanta, biscuits, bottles of water. There are people everywhere and there is this explosive energy. Minibuses, the same ones I rode in South Africa, in my 20s, are everywhere.

But now I’m not allowed to ride minibuses. By our project standards, they are not safe. Our project arranges our travel from the airport with a contracted travel service. We hop off the plane and we see a man with a chalkboard listing our names. We follow him to an air conditioned office behind the airport, he grabs our bag tags, and we rest there until he brings us our belongings and we are ready to hop into his van. Here, the service is called “Jeffrey Travels.”

Here, “Jeffrey Travels” serves the elite.

The chaos eventually dissipates into a section of the city with nicer buildings—real buildings, not roadside shacks and makeshift stores. These are government buildings: the national airlines conglomerate, the ministry of health, the ministry of finance. The government buildings usher us into an even nicer part of town: the place where the expatriates rest, and where we stay. There are well-pruned gardens filled with tropical flowers and an elderly Congolese man sweeps the dirt from the street corner with a small broom.

We re-enter the hotel we entered just a week ago after arriving from the US. But it looks different now, even more extravagant. I notice the pieces of art on the walls, and the beautiful sculptures of African women, who look more like Ethiopians than Congolese, behind the reception desk. I didn’t see anything like those sculptures when I went to the market with Dr. Jacquie in Lumumbashi. I imagine those sculptures were made in Europe. Electronic music pulses from the chic bar to the right of the reception desk where well-dressed Congolese business men drink cocktails along with a few, like me, who are dressed-down and probably represent the UN and NGO crowd.

I am shown to my room and everything is so clean, cleaner than I remember. I know I will sleep well. I open my window and look down and to my right and I see the pool. It is huge and blue and inviting. Fancy Arabs smoke Hookahs around it, white people who have turned slightly pink take in the African sun even though they don’t need any more of it, a group of men, probably around my age, who seem to spend a lot of time at the gym to build their hard physiques, play around in the pool. I am still in Congo, but I am in another world.

I start to think about the kids in Mutshatsa, with their little dirty hands, their big smiles, their huge joys, their huge sorrows. They will never see a pool like this. I start to cry, just a little bit; the insanity that is the difference between the have and have-nots. I think I must be too sensitive or maybe just hungry and tired after my days in the field and few calories. But it all just seemed too sad. I don’t think this clean, developed way of life necessarily buys happiness—but it does buy chances and choice.

My life has been filled with so many chances, so much choice, since I was a little baby born in California. My parents easily chose to stop having any more children and I ended up an only child. Their choice gave me the chances to take piano lessons, dance lessons, riding lessons. It gave me my education—my key to the future: Montessori school as a small child, a scholarship to a renowned private school, acceptance at an Ivy League university, and everything else thereafter. It gave me the chance to travel and be a mzungu in Africa.

At my renowned high school, I took an African history class and Middle Eastern history class, and without voyaging, I gained some global perspective on how the world works. At a young age, I gained a keen awareness of the great global discrepancy between the have and have-nots. That African history class was my favorite class. I learned about the sordid history of the continent and how colonialism contributed to where so many African countries are today. I was fascinated, disgusted, and I wanted to help. And I guess that is what I am trying to do today.

Sitting in this hotel, I am reminded how great the problems really are. We’ll never fix them. But I’ll continue to do my part.