Dafia

You really have to go into aid work knowing you may never be thanked, acknowledged or perhaps you will even disliked for your long hard days filled to the brim with ridiculous stress (and, by that, I also mean things that stress you out would be absolutely ridiculous and absurd in the “real world” back home). Why? Well, for more reasons than knowing giving without expectation of return. Mostly for reasons of sanity. 

Then, on Tuesday this week when we were settling in for our weekly coordination meeting, we were interrupted by a man bringing us three chickens, 6 eggs, a large sack of rice and a larger sack of peanuts along with a letter from the community of Dafia (15km from Ango) thanking Medair for the work we have done there. Later, we would all admit we were fighting tears the whole time. What an incredible gift, and that the community would all decide to give of what little they already had to thank us for the work we had done in their community. It was too much to take in, really. Photos were taken, words of gratitude exchanged and we dove back into coordinating more health centers, latrines, wells and the logistics that string it all together and make it happen. 

The next day, our maman’s prepared a meal for the whole team from the gifts we had been given, as it is really everyone’s work who has contributed to the projects there. I asked one of our base guards (kind of the lowest ranking position around) how his work had contributed to this gratitude of the community of Dafia. He sat a little straighter and with a smile on his face explained all of the links between the small projects he does around the base, the security provided, the checking of kilometers on motorbikes and Land Cruisers, loading cargo and other daily tasks were vital to the work that is done there. It was encouraging to hear his thoughts on this, because, as a base manager, I am rarely outside of my base. I see lots of emails, spreadsheets, meetings and cargo, but not often do I get to see the end product.

Yes, I know these 3 tones of medicines I am maneuvering into Ango will save thousands of lives and that these pipes I am counting for a stock report will keep people from getting some of the awful waterborne diseases available in and around Ango, but its not like I am there watching it happen daily, you know? So, hearing someone who is even more indirectly involved talk about all the ways his work helps people really touched me. How incredible to work for an organization where even the lowest man on the totem pole feels important and that his/her work is valued? 

So, thank you to you, people of Dafia.

Thank you for helping me regain perspective that gets lost in the paper trails all too often.

Why go into this work on a daily basis not expecting to be noticed?

Because when your work evokes the most earnest expressions of gratitude, it is awe inspiring and overwhelming joy and gratitude that floods your heart. 

Live Simpler

There is no such thing as a simple life. There never has been. Yes, there is a way to live with less complication, less technical things to break down and cause more bills. But simple? Not possible. It is nostalgia for our idea of what the past might have been our nostalgia for what has never actually been.

Jon Stewart proved this with one of his classic montages a few years ago – I am sure I posted it somewhere. 

So, I have a t-shirt with a whale on it soliciting readers of my chest to “live simply”. I like it, I wear it, I am pretty sure I want to live by it. But the thing is, the act of life and the nature of simplicity are mutually exclusive. People are complicated and even if you live the life of a recluse, you are still a people. 

I have long strove for the ideal of living simply and the closer I feel I get to it, the more complicated things become. This is not true only because I live in a remote village in the middle of Africa (really, look up Ango, DRC on the satellite view), but it was true even when I was living in an alleyway compartment or on a small sailboat, or a studio downtown, or my mom's house. I have managed to stay free of mortgage, car payments, blah, blah, blah, but I have never felt I did not have a complicated life. People are not simple and I live and work with people. I am a people. Not simple. You get the picture. 

I am pretty sure I am not the first to come to this realization. I am also pretty sure this is not the first time I have realized it - it is the first time I am admitting it to myself. Perhaps the answer is to just live more simply. 
There is always excess, even in the “simplest” of lives. 

Live simpler, there is beauty in complexity.

Pedigrees and Paradigms

Laurel used to marvel at what she referred to as my "pedigree".

The immediate preceding branches of my family tree could not be more different.

East Coast, white collar, well educated, mimosa drinking, thimble thin, tightly wound Irish Catholics on one side...

West Coast, blue collar, live off the land in Alaska, beer drinking, quick to laugh, husky Germans on the other...

I could not love one side more than the other. They are equally as wonderful, loving, supportive, eccentric, world wise, street wise, Godly, faith filled, full of love and family as the other. My family is amazing and I would not change them or our history for the world. I am so blessed.

My sisters and I, aptly dubbed “The Brandt Girls”, have grown into this balance with as much grace as a bull in a china store could hope for. In that I mean to say, that we are two seemingly opposites forced into one body that must now manage to find peace in who we are and where we come from…

We are like bulls in a china shop... but at
least we manage it, though, we do not own it – yet. For many years, well, most of them in my adult life, I have found each of these sides advantageous in one way or  another. It can, though, at times be a bit disorientating

Fall in love with a guy who lives in his VW bus? 

But, of course.

Graduate from an esteemed university?

Check.

Accompany a friend to med school graduation?                                                                      With pleasure.

Navigate the back allies of Tijuana handing out freshly made burritos to prostitutes and heroin addicts?
Okie dokie.

Work as a PA to an NGO director in Hong Kong? Distribute vegetables from a local farm while living in a laundry closet? Move to the DRC? Drive a sports car? Drive a 4x4? Drink espresso? Try pastiche? What country have I woken up in? What do I wear? Will I be cold? Will I be over dressed? Wait, where am I again? What the hell am I doing here???

This week I feel the equatorial straddling of these polarized mores.This week I will go from mud huts and 4x4s to crowds of symphony goers in the Swiss Alps. 

How, you might ask? A magician never reveals her secrets – especially when she has no idea either. As a matter of fact, I am just going on a whim of faith that I will not freak out. It might be just fine and I will not skip a beat or it might be a revisitation of the post-Haiti bread isle in Alberston’s reverse culture shock freak out of 2003.  

But heck, I won’t know until I try, right? 

Plus, I have a real hankering for good wine and being outside at night without fearing for my life. So, here I am, mid-transformation. Do you know how much work it is to shave your legs when it is only worth shaving them every 8 weeks? If not, count yourself lucky. The ridiculous implications my daily life has on my personal hygiene habits is enough for a whole other blog post. No, really, I have already given it much thought long before this.

But for now, do not dwell on the nastiness of man leg hair  – Instead, marvel, along with Laurel and I, at just how good a strategist God is, at how such an odd coupling of gene pools could yield offspring that is perfectly fit for the ridiculously polarized life of a humanitarian aid worker.

I laugh at it – or rather, myself – on a daily basis.

I could be being dramatic, quite honestly, I could be.

However, I started writing this in Entebbe and now, sitting in Dubai I honestly feel like I am living someone else’s life – or perhaps that life I just left behind was someone else’s and this one is me?

Side effects from too little sleep? Perhaps.

I cried like a baby watching Soul Surfer on the plane, it made me so homesick I swear I could taste ocean water on my lips and feel the salt drying on my eyebrows. Strange teary effect often felt in airplanes? 

(It is real, TAL validated my suspicious of its existence) 

I sure hope so, or I have more things to worry about than another sleepless night in another airport.

I need to go find a corner out of these halogen lights.

Far too many of these sentences have begun with "I".

Time to find some other subjects before I bore you...
... or myself.

Oh, and P.S.

Has anyone else ever notice how flipping difficult it is to format blogspot with photos? I spent over an hour trying to let my OCD be OK with how this looks and it is still driving me crazy.

Be Anxious for Nothing – except when on Larium

Hello blogosphere, I write to you from an empty dining room in an Entebbe guesthouse.

I would like to say, that I am no longer taking Larium. 

At first, it seemed that the side effects were not, in fact, affecting me. I have always had nutty dreams, most notably, my dreams have a bad habit of picking up where my day left me off. This is cause for some genuine confusion come morning time. Some of my coworkers who are prone to depression stay away from it, as it can make you more depressed. However, I have not felt more depressed than the expected dose of depression when living in an isolated, impoverished, conflict-ridden village in the dead center of Africa. 

I did notice, however, on my last R&R, there was little of both. I could not fall asleep without my passport, money, Swiss Army Knife and headlamp on the pillow beside me. That way, if anything happened, I would know where the important things were and I could run quickly. 

Now, before you think I sound out of my mind, please, bear in mind my daily life style and the places I have been for recent R&Rs… are they in your mind? Alright then. 

  

So, with that in mind, you may understand that my heightened sense of paranoia is not necessarily unhealthy, but a mere necessity of environmental adaptation. I have assumed thus,blaming all my anxiety on Ango. The thing is, this enlightened level of anxiety 

has been instrumental in getting me through
my day to days at the Ango base. 

Yes, I love my job… but it might be out to kill me. And if not my job, then Ango in and of itself. 

Take last week alone: 6 foot viper in my generator, giant spider watching a movie with me by my head on the wall, giant spider bites all over my legs that are still bleeding 6 days later, 5 days in a row of 14 hour work days, mosquito and fly bites that make me wonder if I have leprosy, lightning strikes, bumpy airplanes, dodgy roads, over exuberant military… I could go on, but I am getting more stressed out just typing this. 

Either way, you get the point. 

So, needless to say, my daily needs of adrenaline, anxiety and paranoia have been perfectly on par with my level of activity. However, like I said, my last R&R I was really struggling with feeling very unbalanced and uneasy. My levels of these usually much required pheromones (Are those pheromones? I don’t think so, but it sounded good.) did not drop as my level of activity and responsibility did. So, I had made it up in my mind that if I could not calm down in Europe this September, it was time for a change in my malaria prophylaxis. 

The other day, though, when I got to Bunia, one of my coworkers was talking about how calm she was after going off of Larium, then another chimed in on how it was making her crazy and another how she was still paranoid even as she was staying at her cousin’s house (an ambassador, who lives in one of the most fortified places you can find in these parts)… So, yeah, that to say, I have quit cold turkey. Now, fellow hostel stayers do not have to endure my talking in my sleep and I do not have to endure waking up to hitting walls with my fist thinking I am defending myself from a carjacker in Nairobi. I guess it is a win-win situation. 

However, with the switch always comes a bit of exposure risk. In my cosmetic bag for my Europe R&R (where I hope to soak in as many Rs as possible), I have a thermometer, two rapid result malaria tests and malaria treatment, just in case. So, yeah, if needed, I will be giving myself a blood test… because I don’t already do enough ridiculous things in my life. 

Ango-Bunia-Goma

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Reading the news while flying my plane... awesome.

So, from Ango to Bunia, you need to be an aid worker to fly with Avions Sans Frontiers, so, yeah, not much you can do there. But if you ever make it, I run the best (and only) guesthouse in town! From Bunia to Goma I took CAA, a super sketchy Congolese airline. Rough turbulence, an open cockpit, lots of people puking and a solid 1-second drop (that is a long time when your plane is freefalling) which I can only assume happens when you cross the equator. Sat next to a nice guy who works with one of our partner orgs, so that was cool.

I found the Bungwe Guest House in an online list and their phone number was the first that worked, so, I made a reservation. The hotel manager was great and very flexible picking me up from my 2 hour late flight. He called when he saw that CAA had landed and asked me what I was wearing. I told him I was the only white person on the flight, so that might be the easiest way to spot me, but I was also wearing a red shirt. He took me to the hotel for free, which is rare, and we drove from the volcanic rocky deep red dusty roads into a compound that was clean and so white I was actually comforted to see that it was in the middle of being painted. My room, fittingly enough, was named “Washington”.

My White House

The room was not a room at all; it was basically a suite/bungalow that was clean and insect free (consequently smelling of a cocktail of disinfectant and insecticide). Decent wireless Internet reached from the lobby to my front room with a couch and dining area that looked out onto my balcony. The bed was most likely made out of cardboard, but I have grown tired from sinking into my memory-free-foam mattress in Ango. The hot water got to lukewarm, at best and did not yield anymore pressure than my bucket showers, so that was disappointing.

The food, well, lets just say I ordered the vegetarian pizza and hour later it came with peas, chicken and some sort of thick beef based sauce where the tomato sauce should have been. But breakfast is included. The downstairs TV was blaring upstairs and fighting with the upstairs TV volume, which was tough to sit between.


That said, the service was great, the manager and front desk guy were happy to speak English when I couldn't find the French word. The garden was nice, the staff more than happy to accommodate and it was quiet and clean. Honestly, if you are the not-so-needy type, it is a pretty great place.

Meet Miss Charlotte

I have been told, "You do good work, like a man." This is the greatest compliment you can get as a woman from a rural Congolese man, and as much as it was nice and validated my ability to manage the base, it reminds me of the disheartened state of women in many developing nations.

At the risk of sounding stereotypically sentimental, I bring you this post. Please enjoy.

I have spent many of my life's hours writing, reading, debating and theorizing development strategies, womens' empowerment, community involvement, grassroots initiatives, signing petitions... blah, blah, blah... you get the picture. Being in Ango is a remarkable culmination of all my ideals fleshed out, tested and challenged.

Here in Ango, I get to actually do what I have talked about for years. 

When we were recruiting staff for Ango's base, most of our technical positions had to be filled by Congolese staff from Bunia, as Ango has few to no skilled workers. The highest education level available here is about the US equivalent of high school, and as much as you can learn without sufficient books, facilities and no electricity. The staff I have from Ango all work as guards and kitchen staff. 

Charlotte is changing that. 

Last month, our kitchen staff was over stretched with a full base to feed and look after, so we took on Charlotte as a temporary worker. Her work cooking, cleaning and moping floors was so good, so detailed and so consistent that it stood out - not only to me, but to the others who stay in the base. 

When I first came to Ango, I knew we had to hire an office assistant. I wanted to wait until I got into the swing of things and our team here gelled a bit before finding someone. I knew I wanted to hire a local young woman who had finished school. You see, if a family here can afford to send a child to school, they will most likely send a son. 

NGOs, such as ours, spend a lot of time telling people to send their daughters to school. Reports have shown that when the mother of the household is educated, her children are healthier (this is for too many reasons to go into here, so just trust me on it for now), however, from the perspective of a population like the one found in Ango, there is no use in educating your girls if they are just going to get married and take care of the family. Educated boys, on the other hand, could get a job and support not only their immediate family, but extended as well. 

So, when I saw Charlotte's work and learned that she had finished school, I knew exactly who our new office assistant would be. I also knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. 

You see, Charlotte has never had electricity in her house, much less touched a computer. 

I had a hard time knowing where to start... 

"This is how you turn it on."

"This is the plug that gives it current to work."

"This is a mouse." - That one got a big smile out of her. 

"This is a desk top."

"These are icons."

"This is google. Do you know what the internet is? No? Have you heard of it? No? OK. That's OK."

"Double click this. Oh, no, you only need to single click that. Why? I actually don't know why."

All things considered, she is doing brilliantly. 

When I asked her if she knew what Medair was doing here, or what we did in general, she answered, "No." Other that being a clear sign we need to work on our community sensitizing, I realized it was time she read our ever-exciting project proposals. 

I asked her thoughts after she read them. She said she thought what Medair was doing was good, that the heath, water, sanitation and hygiene projects were very much needed and that her family lived in the "vulnerable population". It must be strange to read such a report on your home, family, friends and neighbors. To see labels put on you, your way of life analyzed and broken down into NGO jargon...

Charlotte is now a part of the change that is happening in her community. She is now working along side Alphonse, Didier and I in project support with our fingers in every bit of the work that is done here. 

I don't know. This just got me really excited. Seeing her every day in the office (she is actually currently sharing my desk), watching as each day she learns more, noticing that she is already changing the way other locals see her and themselves... it is amazing. I feel so humbled to be a part of it all.

I do not want to change the culture here. I think it is pretty great how it is. I do, though, want to change how women are perceived. That they can give more than children to society, that they can get a good job if they work hard and well, that they can and do work just as well as any man... and sometimes even better.

A Quickening Light

In the spirit of human kind’s joy in significant dates and nice round numbers, I write this entry.

From the soft carpet between my toes and Veggie Booty in my tummy to warm Southern Californian sun in my eyes and the Pacific within reach - it is hard to imagine that a month from today I’ll be moving to the DR Congo. But that’s just what I’ve been doing, imagining and visualizing what it will be like to live in Africa again. I'm remembering past trips with similar circumstances but with a long-term mentality. I can prepare as much as I want, but there are always surprises to be had, growth to grow, lessons to learn.

In that, I am savoring my time here.
It has been beautiful and much needed.

With my one-month mark upon me, I am turning from resting to preparing with more intensity. Daily life is visa applications, vaccinations, medical exams, new boxes for storage, more clothes to Goodwill and many lists.
I love lists.