It is 3 in the morning, and I am awake listening to the sound of my generator, which is like the hum of a small compact car with some sort of deficiency in the muffler. I have my door open inviting malaria-carrying mosquitoes to enter, and I wonder what in the heck I am doing here in the heart of darkness. If I want water to run in my tap, I must plug in my le suppressor. Sorry, I don’t know the name of the small water pump in English or know if I spelled it correctly in French, but that is what it sounds like to my ear when I ask my security guard for water. He was nowhere to be found tonight, so I used my flashlight to locate the outlet and became the water-maker myself. I suppose I should learn the intricacies of le group (the generator-can’t find the local word for it – le group- in the dictionary either), but I will save that learning opportunity for another day.
I have insomnia and plan to clean my kitchen. Using soap that is poudre main express for hand washable clothes and my broom, I swab the kitchen’s deck raising the scent of the washer and dryer, which of course I don’t have. The roach on my trash seems to be in slow motion, too lethargic to run if I chose to squash it, which I don’t. I’m blasting U2, It’s a Beautiful Day, on my computer, (but of course it’s not because there is a full moon outside) but my guard- who is supposed to protect me- is nowhere to be found. I can’t really blame him. He’s painfully thin, and I think he has some sort of stomach bug. Last night when my friend Tom was leaving in his overly grandiose Land Cruiser, Armand poked his head out of the toilet in the back of the house to let us know why he wasn’t opening the gate. Hell, I am American. I am not going to wait around for a sick man on the toilet to open my security gate. I did it myself and watched the back end of Tom’s Land Cruiser disappear down a street devoid of electricity feeling jealous of the car’s huge tires and powerful ego worthy of a round of pomp and circumstance.
I can’t run my air conditioner and le suppressor at the same time, so the decaying morbid humidity is enveloping my body as U2 plays on. I am Africating as Matt would say- perspiring uncontrollably down my back and underarms.
Nearly 4 a.m. now. I am looking around my kitchen thinking, “What wouldn’t I do for two sets of industrial strength plastic shelving units available at Walmart. Then, my mind strays to Walmart in general, something I don’t think an average Congolese person is capable of imagining because it does not exist in this country. To have so much merchandise in one location seems almost impossible to me to after being here for only two months. Small shops are the heart of commerce here. Alimentation shacks (translation nutrition shops), petit hardware stores, miniature stalls selling fruits and vegetables, hole in the wall bars and grills and such- that’s commercial life here.
It is now 6 a.m. and time to move toward the working world. The church bells of the grand Catholic edifice on the corner tell me morning is banging into existence. I wonder if the doughnut lady on the corner is boiling oil and scenting the air with fried bread and fat- such a plump and pleasing combination.
Two common brown birds are peering into my window asking for bread. Preening feathers and parading the morning light on their wings, they chirp a chorus of forgiveness and light, two things lacking in my life.
Let me tell you about the hood- otherwise known as Plateau de Quinze Ans (field of 15 years). In order to establish cell phone service today in my old neighborhood, which I ditched after one week of misery, I had to leave my housing compound and walk down the alley to a place where a neighbor had discarded a decaying bag of garbage that smelled like stink-puke rot. I tried not to stand too close and sent text messages as rapidly as possible or composed them in advance of the despised bag or odor. That’s one reason I disliked the hood.
Another reason I disliked the hood was because many of the homes surrounding mine did not have water, so the inhabitants were forced to use large orange plastic cans of drinking water. My home didn’t have drinking water either, but it did have city water stored underground in a large cistern that I used for showers and cooking. When I walked through the potholes and dirt of my former neighborhood, people would toss their used water into the street and remnants of spinach or toothpaste foam then coated my shoes. I had my neighbors’ very personal lives sticking to my to the belly of my Crocs and Keen sandals, and this happened each morning.
In addition, my neighbors in the house next door looked unemployed and frustrated, mingling around the dirt courtyard with nothing to do and a whole lot of frustration on their hands. I caught the grandmother beating her three or four year-old grandson with a long thin switch that would leave an unforgettable sting. She slapped at the boy’s hand and upper arm while he cringed, trying to disappear into the doorframe of the house. Hearing a child sobbing a cry for help was my alarm clock for the workday.
The short Muslim Senegalese shopkeeper who sold lovely woman’s clothing wanted to marry me, but I had to decline his offer.
When I woke up on day seven of my stay in Plateau de Quinze Ans, a church choir from the Catholic Church of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ blasted me into the living world with their songs. I crawled out of bed to pee to discover my water reservoir was empty and there would be no toilet flushing. Later I learned the water pump itself was broken. No gas for the generator meant no electricity, and that's when I decided to move.
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