2010. September 13.

Angelika:
The monkeys did not have chance to break loose, because it was raining for the first time, so the Sunday-trip with the orphans to the bonobos was cancelled. Instead, we had a quiet, suspenseful afternoon at home. In the evening, our guests did indeed arrive, being 3 hours late, in accordance with the African sense of time (this is completely normal here). At least one thing in this situation was favorable: as the kids were already sleeping, we had some time to talk peacefully.

The fourth week was spent by getting ready for France’s return to Hungary and the beginning of school. Monday, September 6th was the official day of the start of education in schools, so in our school as well. That was also the first day for Oliver in the kindergarten. The first day was quiet but there were already some kids coming. Every day, there were more and more kids and meanwhile, parents were constantly coming to enroll their children to school. We had about 200 children by the end of the week, most of them new students – which seems quite promising –, meaning the reputation of the school is spreading. Contrary to many other schools, our teachers already began teaching on the first day. For example, there was a physics class with only one student in the class in the beginning but the teacher was talking as if the class was full. This was a great thing to see!
Tuesday evening, we saw France off to the airport and waited for his flight to take off as well. Such a jaunt to the airport means two and a half hours of sitting in a traffic jam in tropical air filled with exhaust fumes and the same on the way back. People in minivans are shouting around us as they pass by, even in the dark, grabs and road rollers are working 20 centimeters from you at road constructions which need to be by-passed, others are in a rush and blow their horns, R&B is howling from luxury land rovers. Sometimes we pass by fires on the side of roads, where garbage is being burnt and even its smoke comes inside, sometimes the smell of roasted fish or some other food gets to our noses. Imagine this in front of you… and it is even more like that. But of course we have made this sacrifice for France. For that matter, we have done the same for all volunteers coming here so far, although sometimes I was seriously wondering if we really wanted to go to the airport? Oh, and of course Oliver comes with us as well these times, he is sleeping in my lap during the trip, I just have to carry him through the crowd at the airport and our peaceful evening “bath – story-telling – going to bed” program also gets skipped.
During France’s absence, his niece came to live with us so that we would not be alone in the house. In the daytime, there is always someone from our colleagues beside me. So I have my own body guard. To save money, most of the times we do not use the car, but the local public transport.
We have managed to buy the materials necessary for the start of school, e.g. chalk, exercise books, registers and other things that we need. The stationary we are in contact with gave us a little reduction as well, moreover, they put our poster out in their shop. We are on quite good terms with them, they always welcome the Foundation for Africa.
By Sunday evening we managed to finish registering all the enrollments into the new information system. In the beginning I was doing it alone to see the errors so that I can still change them,; then I passed it on to Toto (our IT colleague) but when I realized during the week that he cannot do it fast enough and proceeds slowly, I decided to call him in for Sunday to put in all the data together, him doing it while I dictate. So it was and in the end he got to be so good that now I can entrust it to him light-heartedly. He is just beginning to taste the logic of relational databases and its benefits. He is doing well…
Where we stand now, we can say that the IT system has made a good debut. We already have the first queries/statistics: 25 of our 169 old privilege students came back on the first week. We are still waiting for the others.

The summer holiday for Tshava, our scholarship holder medical student is coming to its end, so the duties he has had at the school in the summer will need to be passed on to a new person. We have already found his successor called Welcome, who arrived this Monday and has instantly started working.
On the whole, I think we can be content about the way we ended the first week, though the rest is yet to come.


We did not get bored at the weekend either:
Saturday afternoon Emily, a supporter of ours from Belgium, whose wedding we attended during our summer roundtrip in Europe, visited the orphanage and had a look at the school. Emily (Congolese) and his husband, Roland (Belgian) got committed to the Foundation. (France got 10 minutes during their wedding to present the Foundation in front of 250 wedding guests. They also offered to give a part of the wedding money to help one of the foundation’s projects.) This was a short, though, very important visit, because since she got back to Belgium, she now has the chance to talk about the Foundation from his own experiences.
On Sunday, I had to get along in the kitchen without water and electricity, since this is the third or fourth day that there is no water and electricity. No one had water left for Sunday so the people gathered in the streets with kettles on their heads in order to find wells where they could get water. I also started worrying about what will happen, because we barely had three-four liters of water in our water tank, but I reckoned that we can endure one more day without bathing and toilet flushing so I lit the coal for about half an hour at the furnace in the yard and I cooked the ratatouille. So we had things to do. In the afternoon, we went to the school to finish registering the data into the system with our computer specialist. When we got to the school, a large group of people were around the well to get some water, because they were in need of it. There was a huge technical problem at the Waterworks and the Electrical Power supplier that could not be fixed for several days, so half of Kinshasa was without water and electricity. They did tell what the situation was on the TV, but those affected could not watch it. The news that there would be water and electricity from Monday eventually got to those affected. We finished the work until dark, so we had to hurry to get to the main road before full dark where there is lighting. Of course, I had to carry Oliver because he barely saw something in the dark. Then we walked as everyone else did, because on Sundays there are almost no taxis on the streets. Eventually we found a taxi who took us for a while, and from there we got help from a jeep driver who took us almost to our street. Well what can I say, the ratatouille did wonders in the evening. We will continue from here…