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.