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  Pointe Noire, Congo
Thursday, October 30, 2008

There are things that you get used to in Africa, like your kids' skin ailments, and washing your hands a thousand times a day.  Also watching your kids play in the sand and dirt and then take a big handful of snacks and shove them in their mouths makes you shiver a little less after a while.  And French keyboards, the "q" is where the "a" should be and the "m" has disappeared, you have to hit shift for a period and numbers, but not for an exclamation point.  The internet doesn't work when it's cloudy and the streets disappear when it rains.  Summer is cool and winter is hot.  The pumpkins are long and skinny with green and orange and yellow stripes.  All the ex-pats have nannies or maids, even though we or they can't afford houses or a second car back home.  Friendships form fast and firm, because there is no family to call upon in a crisis.  And what was once a crisis is now mundane.  You become more comfortable with the smell of other's BO.  The kids are all muti-lingual and tan, and Mutzig and Primus and N'Gok flow oh so freely.  Bottled water, so vilified in the States, is a requirement, and we're all of us a little thinner.  The electricity goes from monkish to Yankee Stadium dozens of times in an evening and you don't even raise an eyebrow. 
            The one rule of the road is to roll with it:  let them cut you off, let them pass on the right, avoid the taxis and busses and wear your seatbelt at all times.  Don't give anyone an "okay" (it means asshole here), but a "thumbs-up" and I've never seen anyone, but me, give the bird.   You avert your eyes when the guys pee on the side of the road or when the folks next door are changing clothes outside, to preserve their privacy; after all, it is their home.  Women in beautiful clothes and stiletto heels making their way through sand piles and heaps of trash with aplomb and élan.  Sometimes the post works, but mostly it doesn't, there is no Fed-Ex or UPS, just $100 a letter DHL and things get opened and searched.
            As for shopping in the supermarche, a celery root is $16 dollars and much abused.  The leeks are $9 a kilo and the chicken looks like they may need an eating disorder support group.  And when you cook that box of pasta, you may get as many roaches as noodles.  The open air markets however provide a variety of veggies for a fraction of the price of the supermarkets.    Everyone hops into your line of sight, calling me maman and calling David chief.  The first price they offer is about three times what you'll end up paying.  Not because your cheap, but because that's how it's done.  Right out of Monty Python; "Ten for that, you must be mad". Everything bought is triple washed with filtered water once its home.
            The computer becomes a part of the family; when it's sick and not working, you mourn, because any little piece of home is so very precious.  The most mundane things set you reeling, the idea of an apple with the skin on, a wool sweater, hiking boots, the smell of frost, brussel sprouts.  You romanticize the cold weather and you're willing to wait 90 minutes for a new installment of "Project Runway" to download, wistfully pining away for any remnant of home. You will make cultural gaffs, in all innocence which will set off ridiculous events, and you will be mortified.  And the mountains of trash, with the millions of flies become routine, everyone, everyone, everyone wealthy or poor, throws their wrappers, bags, mango pits, apple cores, half eaten lunches, fish guts, orange peels, coke cans, everything, everything, everywhere.  And you need to train the guards not to pull your trash apart and spread it all over your road, looking for something, although I don't really know what. So you also get used to the smell, which is a combination of low tide, septic tank and garbage dump.  Not everywhere, but often enough.
            But you also get to go to the beach every weekend and swim in warm water and watch your kids get tan.  You get to eat fresh fish everyday and lobsters cost $10 in a restaurant and $5 in the market.  You can get huge calamari with NO tentacles for pennies a kilo.  You can get fresh roasted peanuts repackaged into recycled whiskey or wine bottles.  You can have an outfit tailor made with beautiful fabric for $20.  You can buy good French wine in every market and local beer for $1 for a litre bottle.  You can visit the beach and collect hundreds of mangos, and bananas grow in your front yard.  Your kids will learn French when you hear them speaking with their friends, it will make you giggle and beam with pride at the same time. 
            Getting the whole family home costs about $17,000, and even a vacation to the Middle East or Europe costs $10, 000, just for air fare, so Africa becomes home.  For the next eight months, at least.

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