Run for Congo Women

This morning I participated in the Run for Congo Women on the TASOK campus. Run for Congo Women is a fundraiser, the proceeds going to Women for Women International, specifically to help women who are war victims here in the DRC. A group of us from the neighborhood all went together. In the photo are Bethany (an MK from our neighborhood), Suzanne and Sandy Francis (MAF missionary family), Valerie Hochstetler (MAF missionary), Josh and me. Just to clarify and ensure that no one is unduly impressed, I did not run. My hip and feet can’t handle that, so I walked it. Josh ran, though, so if you want to you can be impressed with him. I was explaining the whole fundraiser idea to our guard, Jacques, and told him that Josh was running but I was walking. He asked me why and I told him that we were paying the same amount of money to participate, regardless of whether we ran or walked, therefore I was walking. I thought that was just being sensible, not wasting energy, but he thought it was funny.

I arrived home to discover my husband had repaired our toilet. Hooray! No more bucket flushing. Except for when there’s no power or no city water. Oh. Never mind. The power problems here actually had improved for about a week, but now it seems we are back to only having electricity between midnight and 8am.

Tonight our whole family went out for supper to celebrate our first six months in Kinshasa. The custom here is to eat late, around 8pm, so we like to go at around 6pm and enjoy having the whole restaurant to ourselves. We had a very nice time, talking and laughing in the air-conditioned restaurant. We ordered dessert just because we didn’t want to leave the A/C yet. At one point, it struck all of us as very odd that we were sitting in a Chinese restaurant, in Africa, eating ice cream to background music that sounded an awful lot like the theme to Starsky & Hutch.

"No Electricity Cookies"

Cover via Amazon

Our ladies' Bible study group has been working through a Beth Moore study, Beloved Disciple. At the beginning of our ten week study we drew names for "secret sisters" and enjoyed several weeks of praying for our sisters, giving them small gifts, and writing encouraging notes to them. I drew Christine's name, my same friend who helped me with the burned electric cable and invited me to her Bible study with the ladies from her church. Last Tuesday, we had a potluck dinner to celebrate finishing the study and we all planned to reveal our identities to our secret sisters. It turns out Christine had drawn my name also, and neither of us ever suspected the other. She gave me a really cool sewing basket made of rafia here in Congo, and she sewed a skirt for me out of local material. Talk about being spoiled! I will get lots of use out of both. During our ten weeks, most of the ladies in our group were without electricity about 18 out of every 24 hours. One week I was searching the internet for a dessert that I could make without electricity and without dirtying a ton of dishes. I found the one below and shared some with Christine, telling her that I was delivering it in behalf of her secret sister. It was the truth, I WAS delivering it in behalf of myself - I mean her secret sister.

"NO ELECTRICITY COOKIES"

1/2 cup softened butter
2/3 cup white sugar
3 TBS unsweetened cocoa
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 TBS brewed coffee (or water)
1 3/4 cups oats
powdered sugar

Cream butter, sugar, cocoa, coffee, and vanilla. If your butter is soft, you won't need a mixer. Stir in oats. Roll into one inch balls. Roll in powdered sugar. If you do have electricity, the dough is easier to work with if you chill it for a little while, but it isn't necessary. On days when you are really desperate for a chocolate fix you can just eat the dough out of the bowl and save the expense of the powdered sugar. Don't ask me how I know this. Just trust me.

Adventures in Cableland

The photo was taken just yesterday, in the lot behind our church. Friday night Josh's choir had a performance, which we all enjoyed very much. Their performance was part of a fundraiser for a local orphanage, so the admission fee was a donation of food or cash. From the looks of things, they had a very good response. Josh got news from one of the colleges he applied to that he has been accepted. Please pray for a really good financial aid offer!

On Tuesday, Christine was hosting a Bible study for the ladies in her church and invited me. There were several ladies, maybe 15 or 20. Some of them spoke French with me, but the study was in Lingala, and so were the songs. I got to sing "Holy, Holy, Holy" in Lingala. I had no idea what I was actually singing, but because I know the hymn, I knew the heart meaning of the song and was still able to worship with them. I enjoyed meeting the ladies and they invited us to visit their church. Since Josh plays guitar for our church, I'm not sure when I'll get the chance, but I would like to visit one Sunday. Since I don't know Lingala, I'm sure it would be a bit out of my comfort zone, but I'm the world's biggest chicken, so everything is.

One day last week I woke up to a strange noise. Our voltage regulator was going crazy. The electricity comes to our house in three phases. When I checked them, the first two phases were dead and the third phase was getting 343 volts and climbing. I shut the breaker switches off to the house, but not in time. Our a/c got fried. Thanks to some help from a friend here, we discovered that the cable down the road had burned up and about three meters of it needed replacing. I use French every single day here, and get along fairly well most of the time, but these guys from the electric company were using a lot of vocabulary that I didn't know yet and speaking plenty fast, so I was very grateful for my friend, Christine. She speaks Lingala and spoke with them in my behalf. We learned that here in Congo, when a cable burns, the electric company does not pay for it. Nor do they pay their workers to repair it. The affected neighborhood has to pool together and share the expense, and the labor costs. We were told up front that on our street, there is only one other person who is ever willing to pitch in toward these types of repairs, and he is out of the country right now. Our other neighbors had bigger generators and more money for fuel, so they were willing to wait until we caved in and paid for the whole thing. Which we did, because we wanted electricity. The good news is that our power is better now than it was before all this happened. We actually have all three phases when the power is on, and the voltage is better. The power situation over all is improving also. For a long time, we only had power for a few hours in the middle of the night. Now we are having power almost every night and every other day. When I lived in the U.S., having electricity only every second day would not thrill me, but here it makes me very happy! I wish I could take a photo of the "new" cable for you. You wouldn't believe it! It doesn't look anything like what the utility companies do in the states.