Welcome to my home!

I would much rather have you over for dinner to show you my new place, but this will have to do. I’m settling in quite well, although missing the company of my roommate who got married a couple of weeks ago and moved out. I was really fun to experience my first Congolese wedding though! Now it’s just me, and the lizards, cockroaches and termites. The lizards can stay, the cockroaches I’m doing everything I can to get rid of, and the termites I have no control over. Nothing to do sometimes but to come to terms w/ their presence =).

Living room

Dining room

Kitchen

1/2 bedroom

Other 1/2 bedroom - where you sleep when you come visit me! (if you're a girl. guys you get your own room =)).

Un mois deja!?

Hard to believe I’m coming up on the one-month mark here already this week. Since I last wrote:

I got my guitar! It only took 3 trips to the airport, about 10 hours combined of waiting scrunched in between a lot of pushy sweaty people watching the baggage carousel go round, a couple of trips to the Air France office, and then the search for a new high E string as mine broke en route.

I’ve played Settlers, gone running, watched several episodes of Gilmore Girls… these things remind me of home and are good for my soul =).

I’ve found a (different) living arrangement! At the guest house I’m staying at there’s a room from my guest room into another girl’s apartment. Another girl (her name’s Jessica) who turns out to be really great, and has become a good friend (!). So, we opened the door between my room and her apt., and voila, two-bedroom apartment and I have a roommate. Until… two weeks from yesterday when she gets married and moves off the center and then I move into her apartment. This means several things for me: I get to pay a lot less than I had otherwise planned for housing, I have internet at home, more security, English speaking friends around if I need a break from thinking in and speaking French, a generator that runs several hours a day when the power’s out, and an English worship service Sunday nights that’s right outside my front door.

I’ve been going to a great church Sunday mornings that’s really excited to have Hope here! They called us all (the Hope staff) up 2 Sundays ago to pray over us. You should pray for us too, we STILL don’t have registration to operate here. There is lots to be done in the meantime, but the delays are discouraging and also an example of the corrupt system and the difficulties we’re going to have doing business here moving forward.

We’ve gotten our office ALMOST to the place where we can move in! Just getting some final grills up on the windows, and we’re there. Bring on the purchasing of furniture, printers, really everything to equip an office.We’ve met several times as a staff, had productive and unifying meetings in which we talked about our mission and vision, did some team building things, prayed over the office together. Pray we can learn to work together as a team though. We are coming from a lot of different cultures, backgrounds, and all have pretty different leadership styles. God can make all those things work together for His good, so pray we will be malleable in His hands.

And… a final area of concern… the city power’s been out where I’m at for a couple of weeks (other areas of the city still have intermittent power at least). The generator runs certain hours each day, but nights are HOT with no fans, so we sweat a lot and wake up tired =P. PLUS, our fridge doesn’t handle generator power very well, so after so many days of the generator being turned on and off, our fridge broke. Bummer. Not sure how that fits in but… mourn with those who mourn, right?

Miss you all lots. But I am thankful… God has provided me with a couple of new friends here, a great place to stay, internet to keep me connected, a couple of great groups of people to worship with, books from which to learn, and food to eat (even if a good portion of that has gone bad in the last couple days, I know where to get more). Keep in touch, would love to know what’s going on in your life!!!

The other Congo…

I’m back! On the blogging scene, and on the continent…

I stepped off the plane last Wednesday night to find myself in the same sticky hot air that I remember oh so well from just a few months ago. Except that now I’m in Brazzaville, which may be within eyesight of Kinshasa at some points, but it’s still quite a world away. The streets are less crowded, people are hired to clean up garbage (!), life moves at a bit of a slower pace, and I think there’s a bit more bounce in people’s steps.

Despite that, I’ve found myself already a surprising number of times missing Kinshasa — thinking that there I KNEW where to run, I knew where to get my veggies from and had a place to cook them, I knew which restaurants were good, the names of different areas of town, had an established office and home… and I had friends to enjoy those things with (those things took time, of course, patience is just not my strong-suit =) reminder to self: *wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD* Ps.27:14).

The last few days have been full of learning, as everything is new to me… I’ve spent 2 nights at one guest house and 1 at another, been to the airport twice (my guitar is still missing — it would be sure to come on Friday’s plane, they said… mm not so much), taken many many taxis, bought a cell phone, discussed and done a good bit of work stuff, and… a very exciting-to-me piece… found an apartment! God is good — that was my biggest concern coming in, that I would not have a home base… a place to feel settled and call my own. Eastern people, I think I scored pretty high on Gary’s “capacity to handle ambiguity” test, but it helps me so much to have one area of settled-ness in the midst of a lot of other unknowns. So, that was a big prayer of mine before coming as I’d heard apartments were extremely difficult to find. That is TRUE, but there are agencies (which you really have to go through, the fee you pay them will be requested from the owner anyway if you don’t use an agency) that have connections… their places tend to get snatched up w/in a few days though, so you have to act fast. Which, we did! I found a reasonably-priced place with a good view in an area right between Centre Ville and the area our office is in. It’s a new apartment building, just being finished — so it’ll be a few weeks, but I WILL have a place! Thank you LORD!

Living on this verse these days *So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand* Isaiah 41:10.

Ten “happiest” countries?

I found this really interesting…

January Update

Hello dear friends,

Thanks so much for your prayers as of late. I had a safe (though eventful) and fun trip to South Africa and Mozambique, and welcomed the new year with a great friend from high school who is now living in Mozambique. Flying back into Kinshasa, I realized strangely how much it felt like coming home. I’m thankful for the ways I’ve come to know and feel a sense of belonging in this place in the last 4 months.

As the financial projections I was working on from Oct-Dec were completed for the strategic planning conference in December, I am now working on an entirely new project. I’m traveling to different community banks throughout the city with several of our loan officers and updating our process maps to reflect what is actually taking place in the field. I will then hold small focus group sessions with loan officers to determine their information needs, bottlenecks in the loan disbursal and repayment process, and suggestions for improving efficiency. I’ll make suggestions for how our new loan tracking and accounting software can better serve the needs of loan officers, put together “to be” process maps, and write up several loan officer profiles for Hope International in the states. It’s been really great to visit these loan groups, see the social guarantee at work, hear about the ways clients lives have been changed by having access to credit through Hope, and see loan officers and group members praying over money before it is disbursed that it would be used faithfully to grow businesses, provide for families, serve God’s purposes, and bring glory to His name.

Thank you for your support on this journey. I will stop here as my praises and prayer requests this month are lengthy. I miss you all, and as always would love to hear from you and know how I can pray and remain involved in your lives even from far away.

Much love,
mikhal

Praises:
• While I have done very little since arriving in Congo to actively continue raising financial support (outside of prayer), the Lord has shown me yet again that He provides. I received an update this month stating I was very close to meeting my budget, and almost immediately thereafter received a pledge for the remainder of what I needed to raise! Thank you so much to all who have given. I pray I will be a good steward of these faithful offerings during my time here.
• God’s provided me with some great fellowship here – in the form of several coworkers that I have the pleasure of working, playing, cooking, running, studying, and processing with. I’ve also enjoyed playing ultimate on Sunday afternoons with a fabulous group of people, and have made some good friends in the choir at church (which I joined this month!).

Prayer requests:
• The economic and security situation in this country
• Peace in the Eastern DRC

Staff retreat fun

A little collage I made after our staff retreat back in November… our staff didn’t really seem to understand why it was so hard for the mundelis to balance things on their heads =).

everybody’s got a super-gene

Since I’ve written here before about car adventures in the Congo, I figure it’s only appropriate to share the latest. Peter, Kathy, and I were returning from a rousing game of ultimate frisbee one Sunday afternoon (I’m telling this a good deal after the fact, but we’ve had fairly good car-fortune since this incident). The sun was particularly beady that day and from the moment we (my team I’m sure it was) scored the last point I had visions of tall cool glasses of water and refreshing showers dancing in my eyes.

Driving down the (large) main road through the city, not too far from home, we heard that familiar clacking of loose rubber against concrete. We pulled to an open space in the center, and Peter set to work changing the tire. Three sweaty mundelis on a busy road changing a tire is cause for quite a stir in Kinshasa, and we were quickly set upon by curious onlookers, those desiring to help, those who would rather stand back and yell “mundeli” to alert the rest of the city to the fact that there were indeed 3 white people hanging out on the Trente Juin, and my favorite… a guy with beer on his breath who kept insisting we should get together sometime and “share ideas” (I have to admit that was one I hadn’t heard before… three points for creativity at least).

But the story’s not about them, the exciting part was that on this particular stretch of road, the pavement was a bit too close to the bottom of Kathy’s little car to fit the jack underneath. As Peter was already occupied trying to squeeze the jack under the car, it was somehow decided that Kathy and I should be the ones to LIFT the car, onto the jack. Yes, with our bare hands. Perhaps to others more familiar with changing tires this is a common occurrence but for me, for the day, I felt like a superhero.

A few more picts…

Feeling a little aggressive…

a little curious…

and well, these guys are dangerous… we didn’t stick around too long to find out what he was feeling.

South Africa vaca… part 3 of 3

Mozambique… suffice it for now to say that nothing seemed to go quite right, but that’s all a part of the character of the journey. When we returned to South Africa from Mozambique we spent some time near Nelspruit/White River, which is an incredibly beautiful area. We were awed by mountains, waterfalls, sunsets, and then… animals. Believing it simply not proper to leave Africa without having seen elephants and giraffes in the wild… we spent our last several days of vacation at Kruger game park, and it really was incredible. We planned to inventory how many of each animal we saw, but there were so many we just lost count after a while. Many of them were also very close (as evidenced by the video I have of an elephant charging our car!). Among the animals sighted were… impala, kudu, eland, wildebeest, turtles, a chameleon, owls, eagles, hippos, warthogs, rhinos, zebras, giraffes, buffalo, elephants, monkeys, baboons, hyenas, and… lions! Despite the wonders of soaring eagles, towering giraffes, charging elephants, menacing hippos, rhinos, and lions… I really have to give my honorable mention to the warthogs… the two little ones below managed to make quite the impression on my little heart. They strutted their chin hair as if in utter confidence that they were the cutest thing we would see that day, and if it was in any way feasible (and not totally against all game park laws as well as common sense about preservation, environmentalism, etc.) I do believe I would have packed them up and taken them home. Perhaps in another life they would have been great friends to Kenji… you know, equally proud, ugly, and insanely adorable =).

(more) bad news for congo…

It’s raining so hard outside I can barely hear myself think, but I’m going to attempt to write coherently nonetheless. I walked home for lunch today and noticed no signs of the impending storm. 25 minutes later or so I was sitting at the table reading peacefully, enjoying the moment of repose, when the door off our kitched slammed, and I heard the gust of wind wrap all the way around the side of the apartment building to rattle the windows on our front balcony. I looked out the windows into a dark gray, very menacing sky. Realizing I’d left my umbrella at the office, I grabbed a plastic grocery bag (to at least keep the contents of my purse dry should the rest of me happen to arrive back at the office dripping wet) and without hesitation jetted off for the office. Dirt and sand from the road were whipping around violently, a banner on a nearby building flapping precariously, and I ran squinting past many figures behaving similarly, all trying to get somewhere safe and dry before another Congo rainstorm… because they can be rough. I made it a few minutes before this raging inundation began.

Each heavy rainstorm is bad news for many people here, as flooding is common. But I was referring in the title of this post to the exchange rate. Between the beginning of October and the middle of December when I left for South Africa, the Congolese franc fluctuated between 560 and 600 francs to the dollar. The day I returned to Kinshasa and bought groceries, the rate was at 670 and I knew something was up. Then yesterday when Kathy went to the store the rate was 740!

When I arrived I was a bit confused by the pricing system in stores… instead of putting a set amount on each item, they assign it a number and then you have to look at an index posted in various places around the store to determine the actual cost associated with that number. I realize now the utility of such a system as the stores can simply increase the prices associated with each number on the items and replace the indexes, as opposed to repricing each item individually in the event of massive inflation.

(As a big of an aside, the Congo is almost entirely a cash-based economy and has a dual currency system, using both the Congolese franc and the American dollar. Congolese francs come only in paper money, in denominations of 50, 100, 200, and 500. Meaning… the largest bill is now worth about 66 cents. Now imagine the stacks of cash our loan officers have to carry to community bank meetings when they’re dispersing 55 loans the equivalent of 50-450 American dollars each, in Congolese francs. The big “blocks” of francs people carry around with them here is quite the sight.)

Here’s the story…

9 Jan 2009 KINSHASA (Reuters) – Democratic Republic of Congo has raised key interest rates to 40 percent from 28 percent to halt a slide in its Congolese franc currency, the government said.

Citing a drop in demand for mineral, oil, timber and diamond exports, the government said it would also accelerate efforts to secure a $200 million loan from the International Monetary Fund’s Exogenous Shock Facility.

The Congolese franc had slipped from a September exchange rate of 560 FC to the dollar to 800 FC to the dollar on Thursday.

In a statement released late on Thursday, the government blamed the currency devaluation on a recent slide in exports due to falling demand caused by the global economic downturn.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund cut its 2009 growth forecast for Democratic Republic of Congo by more than half to 4.4 percent, citing weak demand for commodity exports from Africa’s third biggest country.

The IMF also slashed its projection for direct foreign investment in Congo in 2009 to $800 million from a previous forecast of $2.5 billion.

(http://af.reuters.com/article/investingNews/idAFJOE5080BY20090109)