decolonization through peregrination

The Passport-odyssey continues. My passport is still stuck with Immigration (DJM), and apparently without a visa that would allow me to leave this country easily and smoothly on Sunday. So yesterday Melaine and I embarked on the trip to Kinshasa to ‘clarify things,’ or see who else we have to sweet talk in the administration to make sure our paperwork is processed and handed-back.  My bigger concern was less administrative and more emotional, as my life has been more on the latter side recently anyways, but especially as leaving Mbandaka meant leaving Ima and Dawa (the cat and dog). One could look back at the overly quick decision to take on a dog and a cat as foolish, but they were amazing companions and most likely had it much better with us than on the streets of Congolese cities.   I grew into a cat lover – who would have thought – and absolutely adored my first dog I ever owned. My German-planning genes were activated in the past weeks, trying my best to ensure the animals

I have been mesmerized by Fritz Schumacher's "Small is beautiful". Here a particularly potent part about traditional economics (and its quest to reduce work load), in what he calls Buddhist Economics:  "The most potent method [to get rid of work], short of automation, is the so-called ‘division of labour’ and the classical example is the pin factory eulogized in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nation. Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialization, which mankind has practiced from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produces at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs.                 The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: - to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties;  - to enable him to overcome

It’s been nine months since I arrived in the DRC. A bit less for Mbanaka, the capital of the region called ‘Equateur’, right on it (the equator), by the mighty Congo river and surrounded by ‘rain and swamp forest’ – the second largest on the planet.  Some might have ‘seen’ this sooner than others, but Mbandak and I are not a particularly good match. Initially the environment was a harsh one. What felt like ‘being dropped off’ in a place that has no direct or reliable way in or out to ‘civilization’ (whatever that means), no running water or electricity, and the highest population living below the poverty line in all of the Congo. Things were not exactly easy, also because the ‘middle range hotel’ we stayed in for two months had flees that loved me, a generator that would make all conversations impossible from 6 to 10 pm, and a ‘born-again’ church going most nights from midnight to 4 or 5 in the morning. On a positive note, the crazy Christians, screaming in to a powered microphone

“One sticks one’s fingers into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is:  I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I?  How came I here?  What is this thing called the world?  What does this world mean?  Who is it that has lured me into this thing and now leaves me there? … How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?  … but thrust into the ranks as though as I had been bought of a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality?  Why should I have an interest in it?  Is it not a voluntary concern?  And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?  … Whither shall I turn with my complaint?” Kierkegaard