Congo day 5
Day 5 Congo
This morning, I was running late and had the luxury of breakfast, practically in bed.. Thanks to Josh.
We had several meetings set up today with the people who invited us to this country. The first man, was a bishop and also a member of the Senate here. He was very kind, gentle man who asked me if i was a madame or a mademoiselle. I replied,”Je ne suis pas mariee”. They all laughed. My french is starting to come back roughly at times. I have decided i’m going to study it a lot more when I get back to the states. It is such a beautiful language that is useful in many countries around the world.
Our next venture was suppose to be shooting downtown with a our own police escort, but we have decided it was best not to do that. People here do not want to be photographed in public. The best bet for good images seems to be from a car or in the privacy of homes.
We instead decided to visit a government orphanage on the outskirts of the city. We pull up to a semi-nice looking place that housed 110 children. Several of them were outside screaming ( mondelli ) which means white man. Drew sat in the office and had a meeting, while Josh and I, video recorded and photographed the kids. They were having meal time, which was some type of maiz. You could tell that the orphanage had no education on nutrients, because the children all had blown up stomachs from malnutrition. Rice is not good enough for them.. they need real food.
We have some very good friends that have been helping banding-together since they started working in this country. They made us a beautiful dinner the other night and we wanted to give back to them by making a good ole’ American Meal. They do have a nice store in this city where we found a handful of American food, but the prices are insane. A bottle of Cola cost about $6 USD a small frozen pizza cost roughly $15 USD, I think because most of it is imported. We decided on spaghetti, salad and garlic bread. I think they enjoyed our meal… or at least they smiled and said they did.
Tomorrow, we go outside of Kinshasa to a rural, poverty area to bring medical supplied to the local clinic.
-Esther