Petrol, planes and more

Tuesday 28 February 2012



Petrol containers to fill



Today we headed in to town with Francois, the staff member for Methodist Aviation Ministries and Jacques’ partner (Jacques does not call him one of his employees, but more of a partner in the total efforts.)  Francois does not speak English so the trip was going to be an adventure since we were looking for petrol to run the generator.  We went to one of the three filling stations in town.  They did have petrol.  There were maybe 100 plus people lined up with every imaginable container, from one liter (one liter!) jars to 20 liter (five gallon) containers.  There were no cars at the station… just a long line of people with containers and maybe 25 motorcycles.  No cars – it was just hard to believe as this station clearly had a precious commodity to sell.  We did not realize how precious until Francois made multiple attempts to tell us that the 20 liters or 5 gallons we wanted to purchase was going to cost FC 49,000 or just over $53 dollars!!!  That’s over $10 per gallon or about $2.85 per liter.  We simply could not believe the cost, not to mention the sparseness of the fuel.  We had paid almost $1.40 per liter in Zimbabwe and thought that was outrageous.  I can now better understand why there are so few cars in this major city and why you see so many motorbikes and people walking.



Simon's Wings of Hope plane



Jacque's Wings of Caring plane







We then went out to the airfield with Jacques, Simon, and Francois to look at Simon’s plane’s electrical problem and fix a brake problem.  Sue took a lot of pictures and Jim observed all the repair efforts that Jacques was doing.  Francois washed the UMC plane.  We found that Jacques’ plane battery was dead so that had to be changed out.  We did not get back to the house until after 1400 and had a late lunch – fried plantains and two small pieces of beef (less than 2 ozs) for each person eating.

The UN has a large presence in Kananga, with a helicopter and planes at the airport and a headquarters in the city.  We see the helicopter and planes taking off from the airport.  They fly low over the compound as it is near the end of the runway.  The white UN Toyota SUVs are frequently seen about town.



Rewards after hard digging



We got back to the compound to find that three young men contracted by Jacques in the morning had completed almost ¾ of the digging of the cistern.  If we had tried to do this we would have been knackered within a half hour in the heat and humidity.  It starts out fairly cool in the mornings with a good breeze, then turns very hot and muggy around 1000, gets even hotter by mid afternoon and finally starts to cool off again before sunset.  We had rain again this afternoon and that’s why the young men stopped digging or I suspect they would have finished.  The cistern is a BIG hole and was not easy to dig. 

Victor with a rain barrel

Rain is really important here as that is the source of the drinking, cooking and flushing water.  The water is caught by gutters and piped into the current cistern which is at Jacques house.  We haul water in buckets to the guest house and use it for flushing.  We have also gotten some rain water collected before it goes into the cistern and this I have been filtering for our drinking water at the house.  Jacques’ cook, Georgette, boils water for their house and then they filter it to take out some of the taste of the gutters and then put it in the freezer which provides really cool water for the meals.  What a pleasure.

Not sure what tomorrow will bring, but the pace is set by Jacques priorities, the weather and the availability of whatever we might need for the project at hand.  There is a lot of down time, but have been reading the book Sue brought called King Leopold’s Ghost.  It tells the horror story of how Belgium, particularly the King, simply used and abused the Congolese peoples and conservatively committed a holocaust of over 10 million deaths from all causes, or about half the population of the Congo at the turn of the 19^th/20^th Century.  When the Belgian government took over from the King’s private companies, things did not get better and Belgium probably has the worst track record of turning over former colonies which were equipped to govern themselves.  All that background, added to the numerous wars and conflict since independence in 1960 have set the stage for the existence of the poorest country in the world.  Amazing.