Images from the week

Beans and rice: my favorite lunch

How is it that another week has passed? The days press into each other. Each one intense, filled with noise, quiet, conversations, prayer, singing, work, beans and rice, motos, hard-packed dirt roads and slippery red mud. A few images: ...

• Yesterday as we drove to school, the road was busy with people going to work, to school, to market, to their fields. As we pulled onto the main road from our neighborhood motos flew past. Men in clean shirts and pants heading for work. moto/taxi drivers with their day-glo orange vests ferrying children to school, women to work and the market, and men to their destinations. Families that have their own motos manage to pack two, three, even four children, between adults on a motorbike seat built for two. But the scene that made me smile yesterday was a father with three school-aged children. The children were dressed in the standard school uniform of white shirt and royal blue skirt (girls) and shorts (young boy). And hanging off the right handlebar of the moto was a pink, Hello Kitty backpack. 

• Earlier in the week, while flying through the back roads coming into Ndoni on the back of a moto, I saw a young boy, maybe 5 or 6 years old, coming home from school with his backpack. But in good, Congolese fashion, he was carrying it balanced on top of his head.

Kid goes to English

• Goats here appear to have free reign through the streets and neighborhoods of Beni. I suspect the have free reign throughout Congo. They munch grass along the roads, in fields, in ditches beside the main road, under trees throughout the villages and in schoolyards. Here at UCBC they come into the community center (under construction) and take shade from the sun and cover from the rain. Come evening, when people are heading home, carrying bags and balancing loads of cassava or field greens on their heads, the goats trot home, too. No one comes to claim them. No one calls or whistles for the family goat. Young or old, they just seem to know the day is done.

• For the past two weeks, workmen have been building and finishing tables for the study room and the computer lab. The study tables are wide tables of plywood pinned to steel legs. Eight or more students will be able to study at these. The tables for the computer lab are huge slabs of mahogany, glued and clamped, supported by mahogany legs 4 inches square. The workmen use broken pieces of glass to plane the surface. They drag and push on the glass, skimming off wide feathers of mahogany that pile then drift to the ground. Then the workmen sand and brush a coat of varnish on the tables, completing the tables for their purpose.