A letter from Inge Sthreshley in Congo
March 22, 2011
Dear Friends,
One of the questions I’m frequently asked when in the States is “What is a typical day like for you in Congo?” My response is that about the only thing you can be sure of is that the day will probably not go as planned. Often the electricity or water goes out which can throw a monkey wrench in your day. Getting stopped by Kinshasa’s notorious traffic police will alter your day (and your mood) real quickly. The other Sunday there was an attempted coup, and we were all advised to stay home. And, then there are those good things that happen. A container arrives.
Waiting for a container is a bit like waiting for a baby to be born. You never seem to know the day or the hour it will arrive. For a week, Larry was expecting a container to be released from customs containing White Cross materials and medical materials for Presbyterian and Baptist hospitals, along with a few things for the Methodist Presbyterian Hostel (MPH), our mission guesthouse. It didn’t come, it didn’t come. Larry left on a trip to Sudan and his last instructions were, “The container should be out today or tomorrow. You’ll need to be there to get the stuff for MPH and the stuff for the Presbyterian hospitals if they don’t have room to store it at CBCO (the Baptist compound).” So, I keep my schedule open for the next two days in case the container is released. No container. The third day I make a phone call. “Yes, it was supposed to be released. It was actually out the gate on Monday morning, but the customs people called it back in and said the eyeglasses and baby clothes for newborns on the manifest where not on the list of exemptions.” False alarm! More negotiations, more money ….
By Friday, I had given up keeping my days open, and wouldn’t you know it, I get a phone call at 2:30 in the afternoon saying the container has been released. It will be at CBCO in 20 minutes. I grab a bottle of water and call Cindy and Clay Dunn at MPH to say that we’ll need some extra folks to unload our stuff, as I’m not sure how many people will be there to unload. Clay and I, Mafuta and Tshibambe get to the Baptist compound where a 40-foot container is parked outside. The truck bed can’t get through the narrow gate of the compound without taking out half the wall. That means all the boxes will have to be trucked or hand-ported another 200 meters to their storage room.
Boxes in transit at Methodist Presbyterian Hostel guesthouse.
The container door is open and this container is packed full, and it will all be unloaded one box at a time by human muscle, all 36,993 pounds. No fork lift here and some of the boxes weigh 260 pounds — boxes of sheets gived by Presbyterian Women. Clay quickly gets a system going, and before long all the boxes for each hospital are going in their respective stacks and the Presbyterian boxes are getting loaded onto my short-bed pick-up for a trip up the hill as there’s no room at CBCO storage. This means it’s all going to be stacked down the halls of our mission guest house until it can get shipped to the interior! (MPH “wears many hats”!)
It’s 5 p.m., and we aren’t even half way through unloading this container. I never knew a container held so much stuff. If the container sits here overnight, we will be charged another $1,000. There’s nothing to do but keep going. We’re unloading in front of Sim’s Chapel, the oldest building in Kinshasa, built by pioneer Baptist missionaries on the banks of the Congo River. As we’re unloading, a prayer service starts up. I hear “God is So Good” being sung in Lingala. It’s hot, we’re tired and we’re thirsty. As I see the boxes being unloaded with all these materials gived for hospitals, I am reminded by the song playing in the background that by giving of our materials, time and money, we are all given the privilege to be an extension of God’s goodness to people in need.
Loading the x-ray machine.
It is 6:40 p.m. and dark now. We are unloading by the street light. Plain clothes “police men” who have been watching us from end of the road since the middle of the afternoon approach and ask to see papers. They say we must be unloading contraband as we are unloading after dark. This starts a 20 minute discussion that ends in “There is no electricity for making photocopies of the manifest, so we’ll make you a photocopy of the manifest tomorrow.” During the discussion the area loses electrical power. Now we are unloading by flashlights and the headlights of the two pick-ups. We still haven’t unloaded the 630 pound X-ray machine for Institut Medical Chretien du Kasai (IMCK) Good Shepherd Hospital. Getting it onto the pick-up will be a challenge. Getting it off the pick-up at MPH and into the garage for temporary storage will be a major achievement. And it’s done with Congo ingenuity, with two long 2 x 4 boards, two tires and lots of muscle.
It’s 10:15 p.m. The electricity still hasn’t come on, the last of the boxes are being hauled by pick-up to the CBCO storage room and MPH Guesthouse. The truck has driven off with the container. The clearing agent asks for transport money to get home. Everyone is exhausted, thirsty and hungry. No one has had supper yet. It’s too late and too dangerous for Mafuta and Tshibambe to catch buses across the city to get home. They will spend the night at MPH. Cindy has ordered Opoeta’s pizzas for us — Kinshasa’s new take-out pizza restaurant! I ask Mafuta if he likes pizza. Fortunately he says he does. We share the pizzas and call it a day. Babies and containers, you never know the day or the hour!
Blessings,
Inge Sthreshley
