Monday 26 March - Thursday 5
April 2012
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| Making wall filler |
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| Cutting in |
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| Painting low |
Hallway,
vestibule, lounge (living room) and dining room are all done. We worked really hard with reasonably
frequent breaks for water replenishment.
Painting up high on the walls was especially hot for Jim. Down on the ground, handing up a roller full
of paint, or painting low, was a little cooler for Sue. We have a bit of paint left, some latex
white, oil white and Broken White.
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| Painting high |
So… we
also painted the ceiling and walls in Sue’s bathroom and finished up with the
Broken White on the kitchen walls. Not
enough paint for the kitchen ceiling. The
house looks really nice. Valentine said she is thinking of moving back in as it
looks so clean and refreshing. She would
not really do that as the house holds a lot of unpleasant memories of when she
was shot and we do not think she would ever really consider living there again.
We think it will look nice for the first
VIM team to use it in August 2012.
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| Tunes |
While
painting we are really enjoying ‘50’s, 60’s and 70’s music collected and
cataloged by Jim’s recently deceased brother-in-law. Jim thinks
of him often as he listens and tells me a bit about him. We connect Jim’s backup drive and Sue’s
speakers to Sue’s laptop. We play the tunes as long as Sue’s two batteries
last.
We’re still way
behind on the blog, but hope to make some progress soon on catching up… there
are several periods of time where we should be able to cover many days
activities with only a couple of separate posts. We have the ideas, Sue
has lots of pictures and we’ll use Jim’s emails to get a rough outline of what
was important at the time. These will
form the basis of the blog postings. With
long days of painting and only an hour or so at night for electricity and
internet, it has been difficult to get to blogging.
Wednesday 28
March 2012
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| Meat from Kamina |
Jacques
is back home in Kananga from his unexpectedly long stay in Lubumbashi. He will have three days here and then he and
Valentine head to Kinshasa for their interview at the Embassy for their
upcoming stateside trip. The small part that the safety inspectors said
he needed before he could fly again finally came and he installed it yesterday. Luckily, Simon will be here and he speaks
passable French so we will still have a translator available for the simplest
tasks and everyday activities. On the return trip, Jacques stopped in
Kamina, a cattle producing area. Meat
was delivered to him at the airport.
Georgette and Victor cut up the carcass.
The meat will go into the kerosene freezer. Tonight we had a delicious meat soup.
 |
| DRC frosty Cokes |
Jacques
brought back a surprise for us from Lubumbashi.
He brought some Coke Zeros and we had an ice cold one last night before
bed. Ice cold, you ask in a place with
no electricity to count on or maybe for a couple of hours every couple of
days... they have a kerosene powered freezer, which can actually freeze stuff,
but they keep putting in filtered water for a cool drink at dinner and also the
occasional Coke or Zero, when available.
They do have the occasional Coke Light in one of the two "big"
stores in town, but with the vehicle still broken, there is no feasible way for
a couple of old folks to get into and back from town. It was a real treat to have a cold Coke Zero
last night before bed.
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| Law student cooks |
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| Simon |
Simon
is leaving the Wings of Hope program he is with on 12 May, but will be here,
probably most of the time between now and then as he does not have any money
for fuel and now needs two new tires for his plane before it is safe to take
back out into the bush.
 |
| Cistern building |
The digging
and block laying on the cistern has been done by locals. They need the work and Jacques is getting a
good price for the hard labor. Jim has
been watching, and helping to carry stuff and might get more involved when they
actually start to construct the top. We
will be hanging the guttering used to collect the rain water that will be
stored in the cistern and helping with the plumbing hook ups to get the water
from the tower mounted tank. We bought a
pump to get the water from the cistern to the tower tank so that the water
could be distributed by gravity, but the issue of electrical hook ups is still
to be worked out. Jacques will probably
run a wire from his house to the guest house so that he can control when the
water is pumped into the tank. There is
talk of actually getting the guest house re-hooked up to the power grid, so
that some power would be available when the city has it's every other evening,
two hour service, but that would require a monthly fee after a big hook up fee
and we’re not sure Jacques has worked all of this out yet. Flexibility is the watch word when it comes
to everything here.
Friday 30
March 2012
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| Jim and Simon on gutter detail |
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| Jacques and Simon |
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| Testing water flow |
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| Victor & Emmanuel opening a drum for a rain barrel |
Jim, with Simon’s
and Sue’s help, worked on a gutter water collection system on Jacques house today. Jim spent the morning on the makeshift
scaffolding atop a trailer to reach the gutters. A
broken gutter piece was repaired and the entire system was cleaned out so more
water flows into the cistern. It was a
real high wire act, with Jim, Simon and Francois’s son, Jacques, up high, Sue
supporting, fetching, steadying barrels and boards and taking pictures. We got temporary repairs done safely. We’ll have to take down the whole system on
one side of the house to completely correct the problems, but that will only be
doable if more brackets can be found.
Jacques is not hopeful that we will find them in Kananga, so he will look
for them in Kinshasa and bring them back when he comes. IF we are able to find the two urgently
needed brackets in Kananga, then any extra ones he finds will be used on the
new system to be installed on the guest house when that cistern is completed. We are not sure that that will happen before
we depart, but progress is slowly being made.
Saturday 31
March 2012
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| Valentine & Jacques |
Tuesday 3 April 2012
If Jacques gets his visa and
his passport returned on Wednesday, he will try to return to Kananga on Thursday. That
will give him a week before he has to turn around and head back to Kinshasa to
depart with the delegation to the General Conference from the DRC on 19 April.
He is still trying to locate all the stuff we bought the second day in Kinshasa
which still has not been delivered to Kananga. He thinks he has found it
and that the air freight company could not haul it sooner because their big
plane was in for some kind of inspection and the smaller planes could not take
the weight and size of our items. This has been immensely
frustrating to all concerned, but again, is a great example of how hard it is
to do something on a time schedule or even if you have all the time in the
world, processes and procedures just are not in place to make things happen.
Wednesday 4 April 2012
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| Rehanging the red door |
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| Improvised scraper |
Thursday 5 April 2012
Jacques returned from
Kinshasa today. He will be here until next Saturday and then we will say
good bye to him for the last time. We still have not been told if
Valentine will be coming back here or not, but we suspect she will not and that
is one of the reasons that it was suggested that we leave on Sat vice
Monday. The flight is a little more predictable and we would be getting
into Kinshasa on a day when there is less traffic in the capitol city.
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| Cistern, next step, the cover |
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