on being with "family" at Christmas

We have some great friends and colleagues in Eastern Congo. But they've known us for 14 months, max. And we've traveled away from Congo a lot during that time. Also, we're colleagues with most of them, which gives the relationship a certain level of professionalism.

We just spent Christmas with Micah and Betsy Dekorne and their two boys.

We've known Micah for 14 years. Mark lived with him for a number of those years. We met Betsy about 9 years ago. All four of us celebrated both of our weddings, and we were part of a tight-knit house church community in Denver for a couple of years. En plus, Betsy studied the conflict in Congo as part of her masters in International Development. D'ailleurs, they have two sweet boys who are around the ages of our nieces and nephews. So those things together with how easy and quick it was to travel to their town in Uganda made for a HOLLY, JOLLY CHRISTMAS!

Christmas morning. This was one cool gift we brought: a motorcycle made out of banana leaves!
Photo credit: Awesome Photographer Micah DeKorne

Mark and I were so, so blessed and thankful to get to spend Christmas with these dear friends in Uganda. We got to eat really good food, live a very different pace of life, and hang out in their lovely house and yard. Some extra-special things we got to share were the Christmas party with women in a predominantly Congolese refugee camp where Betsy has been leading a Bible study; a bicycle safari with impalas, monkeys and zebras; a Christmas hymn sing at their church; and the yard-to-table process for turning "Franky" into Christmas dinner (best pork chops Mark has ever had). Micah and Betsy also inspired us with how they celebrated Advent with their three-year-old, and we had some meaningful and encouraging conversations about life and work in this part of Africa. It was so special to be a part of it all.

Betsy and I received gifts at the Christmas party with the women in the refugee camp. (They were Bibles in Swahili.)

I also got a mani/pedi for $7 and got to put my clothes in a dryer (which does amazing things to the size of tank tops!). Mark got to throw the Frisbee (even with his terribly swollen eye) almost every day! Unfortunately, most of the pictures we took are of Mark's eye.

There were the minor disappointments of: sickness going around and Mark's eye swelling weirdly (after three days, a sty finally developed and is on its way out now). And leaving.

changing seasons (Bukavu still has perfect weather)

Phew! Just finished my fall semester online course on Restorative Justice from EMU. I've got one more course, plus my practicum/internship (which will be based on my current work) than I'll have my MA in Conflict Transformation!

The class has continued to be a good distraction from work this fall, although the material was often about as heavy as the hard stories of people's lives in Congo. I'd say 40% of my evenings and weekends, my mind was just about to blow as I wrestled with culture questions, justice questions, economy of international aid questions, questions about gender roles, etc.

We're currently in a pretty tense situation, waiting to see what's going to happen with the political situation in Congo, as the current President's term is about to expire and there haven't been elections. It's also been really busy trying to get our office and programs systematized with our new team. Plus, one of our new team members is stuck in North America waiting for documents from Congo so she can get her visa. Yee-haw.

And we found out this morning that we may be without power at our house for a couple of months because of road construction. (Uncle John, remember how we were excited for the chinese neighbors? Well, they delayed for five months and then moved next door, so now they're probably not going to share their special line with us!) But I've evaluated our main electrical needs and possible solutions. I don't feel too distraught. For lights, we've got solar powered ones. For fridges, we've got one at the office a 5 minute walk away (and we just won't make a whole lot of food at a time). For charging electronics, we can do that at the office and have a mobile "power bank" to charge phones, so I think we'll survive. But I might as well move my little Christmas tree to the office, I guess.

Our pastor's wife had her baby last week, and we went to go visit her at the hospital. It was sweet. I've only gotten to visit one of my nieces and nephews in the hospital, so I felt very much like family.

We're heading out tomorrow for a Christmas dinner with children at an IDP camp, a project initiated by some of the participants in the Seed program I help supervise. I'm so proud to see them taking initiative like this. Hard to believe the program is coming up on half-way (Feb 15th)!

I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks for reading!

I’ve been looking for this waterfall since I got here. I found it on google Earth a few weeks before we came but have never gotten the opportunity to properly find it because DRC is so insecure. But, lo and behold, when I planned to do it, and took steps during the week to make it happen (instead of just waiting around for Saturday morning and trying to throw it all together) then it did happen! I went with James, a Congolese guy who works for another NGO here in Bukavu. We decided, actually, to go try to see this waterfall from the Rwanda side, because it falls into a canyon that runs the border between the two countries, and the Rwanda side will put us directly across from it, with likely a better view. More importantly, Rwanda is generally safe to travel in the countryside and off the main roads, and DRC is generally not safe to do that. Anyway, we found this waterfall I had found on Google earth, except that it wasn’t a waterfall. It was a place where this very white rock is exposed and runs down the length of the gorge. I would bet that it actually is a waterfall when there’s rain, but yesterday it was a narrow, very tall, stretch of cliff.

 

 

 

 

Despite that fact, the trip was AWESOME. This canyon (gorge? Valley? Ravine?) was absolutely breathtaking. Probably around 1,500 feet deep, super-sharp, and GREEN GREEN GREEN everywhere, except when there was just exposed rock. The river at the bottom was full of gigantic rapids, and you could easily hear the water churning even up where we were. It was really fantastic. James and I hope to go back some time and try to hike all the way down to the bottom of the gorge. It will take 1-2 hours to get down probably, and it will be amazing. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I know is kind of all over DRC but no one can take advantage of because of the insecurity here. It’s such a shame, because this place was so beautiful. It felt like we’d come upon some hidden treasure, like the entrance to the Garden of Eden or something. 

My supposed waterfall.

Karen's highs and lows since coming back from Kenya:

I don't know where to start this blog, so I'll just dive in.

Highs
- watching thunderstorms roll in over the lake and feeling like it's almost fallishly cool.
- taking our new Program Coordinators (Clair and Beth) to church with us (and that they liked the service, too)
- eating homemade ice cream with our Bukavu MCC team
- celebrating seven years with Mark with dinner out at the nice lake-side restaurant in town and reminiscing about our previous six anniversaries and especially the first couple months of our marriage when we were settling into Denver in the coldest weather ever! (in my mind)
- feeling good about my term paper for my Restorative Justice class, that I know how to talk about challenges of applying RJ in different cultural contexts
- a really good experience journaling in a new way (cluster journaling) and feeling hopeful that I won't be stuck wrestling with feeling annoyed for the rest of my life!
- sharing a dinner of appetizers with our new French friends at their home and having great conversation from challenges of life in Congo to differences between Catholics and Protestants to Mark's encouraging (American) coaching style. (they said French coaching is only ever critical).
- chatting with our new Beth on the 2 hour drive to a site visit
- had a warm shower at our apartment! (my first in about 6 months)
- we have better internet at the office now!

Lows
- unpredictability of electricity at our house
- not getting to practice French as much in the office since our main common language is now English (and being entirely clueless when conversations are going on in Swahili, which is more common now since Clair and Beth speak Swahili and not French)
- our other new teammate hasn't arrived yet because her visa is blocked in Kinshasa (no surprise)
- rehashing hard stuff we've gone through in order to look for positive changes we could put into practice.
- realising that as a "J" on the Myers-Briggs, living here is inherently more stressful for me and not knowing how to compromise between Mark's "P" and my "J" at home, when I'm already so tired of being flexible, spur-of-the-moment.

I'm looking forward to our Thanksgiving celebration this week and to some upcoming travels, such as to see our friends the DeKornes in Uganda over Christmas! Also looking forward to being one class closer to graduating with my masters.

some videos mark took on recent trips

Elevator speech on peacebuilding (but in a car) + birthdays and stress leave

We were catching a ride from the Sunday Frisbee game toward our lodging in Nairobi, and someone asked about my master's degree in peacebuilding. "Do you actually learn anything concrete?" It's a good question, so I thought I'd share my attempt to respond with you.

I have learned valuable conflict analysis tools. When you can see conflict as a system and try to understand how it works, you can also find points of opportunity, where an intervention could create change. I like the term "leverage point" where a little bit of pressure can go a long way because of being placed in the appropriate location or context. I've learned a lot of process tools and ways of thinking about how things affect each other.

We're about to head to the airport after ten wonderful days of stress leave which followed our birthdays, so let me upload these pics for you before we leave our good, unlimited internet!

swimming on Lake Tanganyika on Marks' birthday

Lunch in the Kigali airport on my birthday

There were amazing trees in bloom all over the parcel where we stayed in Nairobi!

Jacarandas have always been my favorite, and this lovely spot was right out our back door!

We even got to go on a nice hike in the middle of Nairobi!

There were caves and a lovely waterfall

Our time here has been really good for us. Good conversations, new ways of thinking about ourselves and about challenges we're facing. Please pray that we'll implement our new learnings faithfully. It's, of course, mixed feelings to be leaving warm showers, grocery stores with lots of good stuff, and reliable internet, etc. But we're both thankful for a lot of things we're going back to in Congo, and we'll be happy to be back with our wonderful team.

Hail video from a while back

Since we have better internet here in Nairobi, I thought I'd try to load this video.

We saw them building this on the main road, and Mark asked what I hoped it would be. My response: a Chick-Fil-A...

Perfect things about Congo:
the weather
the forecast
the climate
the temperature...

Birthdays! Last year, we flew to Congo on my birthday; this year, we will fly to stress leave on my birthday. Interesting? Ironic? Needed!

I got Mark this cool hat as an early birthday present. We'll be on a field visit on the 25th (no cake), but at least we'll be together!

Mark got me these lovely plants as an early birthday present! I guess I'm officially "mature" since I'm so happy to get plants for my birthday. ;)

We'll eat a special dinner out in honor of our birthdays, but I doubt it will compare with last year's fireworks!

Phew! Big sigh

Big sigh of exhaustion for this introvert! In a good way.

Our new Eastern Congo Program Coordinators, Clair and Beth Good
Photo credit: Ben Weisbrod

Last Monday, the first day the seven MCCers sat together in our office (Mark, me, Serge, our new boss couple and our *former* boss couple), they recognized the stress we've been under and warned us that there is also such thing as positive stress, and we're likely to experience it now. And I think my state of mind when we got home from visiting Goma on Saturday shows how true that positive stress idea is. I slept all night and again for four hours this morning. I almost skipped frisbee!

On the boat ride home from Goma. Serge and Clair are passed out. I think we all slept a good portion of the 6 hour trip.

And Mark, ever the extrovert, has really enjoyed all of the time to talk and hang out! He's been an incredible support to me as we've been hosting in our home and in our town. He made a run to buy more internet credit when we ran out suddenly, he made amazing tacos one night when I was too tired to cook, got all the office keys copied and a whole lot more.

I got to put into practice some of the process design stuff I learned at EMU to lead a final circle conversation before our interim-bosses finished and went back to Kigali. It was really nice and encouraging to me to allow my gifts to be used for the good of the team, and I was thankful they let me insist that we do some relationship discussion, since the relationships often get neglected because we have so much good and pressing work stuff going on.

We've had lots of intense conversations and have a lot more ahead of us, but it's a huge blessing to have people here in the midst of the challenges with us. Mark and I will be going on stress leave sometime in the next month for a week of counseling and rest (still in Africa), and we're really looking forward to it. We're running pretty close to empty right now.

play by play of the last couple of weeks

The long-awaited for day is here, and we made it! Our new MCC Eastern Congo Program Coordinators are on the ground, so we aren’t alone anymore. We have a busy week ahead of introducing them to eastern Congo, MCC partners, and Seeders.

Mark is just back from a week in Burundi, where he attended a class at Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute. It was actually a really hard week for him, as he felt very lonely and isolated, and the class wasn’t what he was hoping it would be. We’re both so glad to be together again.

I had a cold last week, so I worked, did homework, and slept. And hosted a visitor a little bit, but I was a pretty lame host. We set up a new apartment for Seeders based in Bukavu; it was like moving – SO MUCH WORK! But I think everyone is pretty happy now. We also had a crazy hail storm here! I’m trying to upload a video to share.

Our wonderful pastor Nicolas is visiting the US and got to spend time with Mark’s family in Austin. It’s so special to us that our family got to taste our life a little bit of our life by hanging out with Nicolas. It kinda makes me more homesick but mostly just makes us really happy. Nicolas and our church are two of the best parts of life here.

Let’s see…we played Frisbee yesterday, and that was fun, except that we play right by a soccer field that doesn’t have nets in the goal. I had just thrown a really nice score and saw the receiver catch the Frisbee then got hit SO HARD by a soccer ball in the side of the face. I almost fell down, but Mark caught me. It was so romantic! ;)

We’ve both been overthinking lots of things, but I’m just going to close this post with simple reports of what we’ve been doing, with some pictures. Enjoy.

Mark playing the drum at church

Another picture of our beautiful Lake Kivu

quick laugh

Our neighbors came over for dinner last night. It took Mark and me an embarrassingly long time to understand what the wife was saying about "pisser". It sounds like the word for "spicy" and she'd just been drinking a cup of fancy tea... We were confused but they were adamant. We understood when the husband tried "faire le pee-pee". Then we wondered: how far has our French really come? ;)

Great Saturday!

Wow, last Saturday (one week ago!) was such a nice day! So nice, in fact, that I just want to tell you all about it.

First, there was the problem with the oven. Karen and I have had an electric oven since we moved into our new place in April. But electricity at our place is inconsistent, to say the best. Basically, having an electric oven is the same as not having an oven. So we requested from our bosses, and received approval, to buy a gas-powered oven (with a gas tank that sits next to the oven, not gas that is piped in to the house). On Wednesday we went down to the appliance store (which we didn’t know about because it had reflective glass on its windows and you couldn’t see inside—I always figured it was a front for some shady entity, showing people “hey, we’re rich and have this nice building, but you cannot see inside because we don’t want you to know what we’re doing”). Anyway, turns out they sell appliances! We talked with them for a while asking about the different stove/oven combos they had, and were adamant that we wanted it to have a gas oven, but with electricity on 2 of the 4 burners on top. After we chose the oven we wanted, we requested them to show us how to connect the gas to the oven. They said they would send a technician to do it that day, and got a phone number for us.

Well, Friday rolled around and they still hadn’t sent anybody. So Yosefu, our handy and skilled domestic worker, connected the gas tank to the oven while we were at the office. Come to find out that the oven was electric! Yosefu tried to tell me, but I didn’t understand on the phone, so we didn’t realize this until we got home from work, about 30 minutes before we were about to host some Congolese friends from church for dinner—lasagna. Which, if you don’t know, is something that you have to bake, so you need an oven. And, if you don’t know, having an electric oven at my place means there is no oven at my place. We made due my just “scrambling” everything on the stove-top. So it was basically the same as spaghetti, but it was edible, and that’s what counts!

All of this is the backstory for my first success on Saturday. I went down to the appliance store, along with Safari (our MCC driver/car expert guy) and the oven. They were like “oh yeah, it’s hard to find ovens that are gas if they use electricity on top”. Karen and I expected this response, so we told them we just wanted a stove/oven that is entirely gas. They had such a stove, and it was $40 less than the thing we had already bought. They told me, however, that I couldn’t get a refund on it because the money was already in the store’s safe. I also expected difficulty getting the refund, so I just waited around, and reasoned with him, and after about 10 minutes I got the $40 and a new stove/oven that is completely gas powered. Upon further examination, it’s a higher quality stove than the other one we bought (with better quality components and features, including an automatic lighter for the stove-top!). Go figure.

Oh yeah, all of this happened in French. So a serious victory to start the day!

We then had delicious cheeseburgers at a small local café (I’m not a big cheeseburger fan in the states, but these are artisan burgers, with herbs and stuff in the patties, and this sauce that reminds me of In-N-Out’s… they’re better than 99% of all the burgers I’ve ever eaten in my life). This was even more pleasant because we were catching up with Ben, a British expat worker for Tearfund, a Christian relief and development organization working in DRC. Ben is a pleasure, and it had been several months since I’d seen him, and the café has a great view, so it was just wonderful.

I then took a nap!

While getting up from the nap there was serious, dark, menacing thunder for a minute or so. This is normally cool, except when I’m getting ready to play ultimate, and it might scare everyone away from playing!

It rained for 5 minutes, but then there was clear sky, so we left filled with irrational hope that we’d be able to play. We’ve been playing on the other side of the city lately, and typically meet some people close to us to give them a ride over there. Last week there were 7 people who rode with us. This week: 0. Not a good sign.

Since some people meet us directly at the field, we drove over there anyway. Karen brought a book because she’s a “realist”.

But on the way one of the other players caught up with us on a moto-taxi, and we pulled over and he got in with us. When we got to the field we found two other guys, and, in the end, we played 5 on 5! The field was slippery from the short sprinkle, but it didn’t rain again until we’d been playing for an hour and a half, at which point we needed to quit anyway. Woohoo!!

We then rushed home, cleaned off, and then went to dinner with … les francophones! (A young French couple who are new in Bukavu). We spent 2 or so hours with them, all in French, and they were so nice and it was so pleasant. Wife is a business owner and will be advising on some church-owned businesses while here, husband is a surgeon (a orthopedic knee surgeon (!), but Karen says I shouldn’t try to get him to give me a new knee here in DRC). They have 3 kids, and are practicing Catholics down here for the next 2 years. We feel excited about them as friends! 

And then I found ten dollars!

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That was Saturday. It was great. Perhaps a bit more social time than some of us would have liked, but a very good amount for others of us. ;-) And Frisbee, and tasty food, and new and old friends, and encouragement with our French! 

Here’s some pictures:

1-       This is a video of our back porch. Pretty right? I’m also playing a ndjembe that I bought from our temporary boss. He got it in Senegal, brought it to Rwanda, where I played it, fell in love with it, and then shamelessly asked him to sell it to me. It’s a wonderful instrument and I played it at the church retreat and will probably do so again at church this Sunday. Eastern DRC, unfortunately, does not have drums like this. I believe there used to be, but in the city people just play really poorly made Chinese drum sets. 

2-     Our new stove!! Note the button on the right side -- the automatic lighter!

3-     This is our new grill. It’s an old wheel-well that was re-purposed into a grill. Pretty cool. With this, and the Montreal Steak seasoning sent us in Belgium (thanks mom!), we’ll be eating hobo-dinners soon!

BONUS blog material (!!!) : Short comedic interchange from lunch today (Thursday, Sept 22, 2016):

Lunch companion: What’s your middle name? Do you have one?

Me: Yeah, but you gotta guess. I’ll give you a hint: it’s in the Bible.

Lunch companion: Is it “God”?