Don't call it Zaire

I told Yat that I was traveling to Congo. He IM'd back: "what u covering in congo? genocide or dictatorship?" I hate to be predictable. But actually, the reason for my Congo trip is an election - the runoff from July's historic vote, the first free elections in 46 years. (Of course, Yat wasn't entirely off-base - Congo until 1997 had one of the world's most notorious dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko, he of the leopard-print clothing, and fugitives from the Rwandan genocide are currently hiding in the forests of eastern Congo.)

I'm in Kinshasa, the capital, which has to be one of the most expensive cities on the continent. The U.S. $100 bill seems to be the basic unit of currency - today I sheepishly pulled one out to pay for $3 in newspapers, and the newspaper guy counted out the change in dollars without batting an eye. (I'm reminded, naturally, of the Seinfeld where George tries to change a $100 at a newsstand and the guy forces him to buy like $10 worth of merchandise, including a Penthouse Forum.)

There's a local currency, the franc, but it's been killed by inflation - something like 20 percent in the last three months alone, one banker told me. I went into a supermarket when I got here to stock up on the essentials - water, mostly, but also Diet Coke for late-night writing sessions, should there be any. Instead of pricetags, the store had stuck a code number on every item to correspond to the price - A04 is 1,000 francs, B06 is 3,500, etc. - and posted the key throughout the store. So when the value of the franc drops, they just change the key.

The other thing I've noted here is that people have a great variety of ways of asking for money. It started when I landed at Kinshasa airport, a Danteesque realm of heat and low-level chaos. At the immigration counter - this is literally the first Congolese person I meet - the man stamps my passport and starts to engage me in a conversation. This while dozens of people are gathering behind me in line. He asked how I was, I said fine and you, and he came back with, "It's hot and I could use something to drink." I realized that he'd handed me back my passport already, so I just walked away.

Later that day I had a couple of guards at a government ministry tell me they wanted "quelque chose de sucré" - something sweet. Only I thought they said "quelque chose de secret" - a secret, which didn't make much sense. But lack of comprehension made it easier to say no. It wasn't until five minutes later, when the guy working the elevator asked me the same thing, that I understood. Finally the woman inside the ministry who was taking care of my accreditation offered to do it immediately "si tu t'occupes de moi" - if I took care of her.

The thing is, with the exception of the woman in the ministry, these people weren't asking for bribes. They just wanted money. And they weren't street children or beggars - they had jobs, which in this country actually makes them privileged.

Going postal

Due to a billing dispute, the people at the Kenya postal authority have revoked the mailbox that our Nairobi office has used for several years, dating back to my predecessor. (There's no door-to-door mail delivery in Kenya; everything goes to post-office boxes. Side note: One thing I miss about America is the satisfying daily creak of the mailbox being opened by the mailman, or the thwack of a fat magazine sliding through the mail slot. Side note No. 2: Isn't that a very Depression-survivor grandpa thing to say for a 27-year-old? Perhaps.)

Anyway, the postal authority took away our mailbox and reassigned it to another company because they said we didn't pay our yearly bill. This turned out to have been true, only because they never sent us our yearly bill. (I'd say it got lost in the mail, but this situation is even less funny than that joke.) When we told them this, the postal people, to their credit, acknowledged their error. So we don't have a billing dispute per se - what we have is my bank statements, cell phone bills and TV guides going to someone else's mailbox, not to mention our new business cards that just arrived from Washington now list an incorrect address.

The postal people spoke with the new owner of our mailbox, who said he couldn't switch because he'd already printed up office stationary at a cost of about $1,000. This figure seems unlikely unless each letterhead was hand-stenciled by President Kibaki, but I digress. The bottom line is we aren't getting our mailbox back.

Tuesday is a national holiday here, but on Wednesday, office manager Eric is going back to the post office to demand some form of compensation. In the meantime, the postal people have promised to forward our mail to our new mailbox, and if you believe that's going to happen with anything approaching reliability, then I've got some stationary to sell you.

How does it feel?

Man, I am wired today. I'm in Uganda, and my hotel didn't serve regular coffee, only espresso, which I haven't yet figured out how to drink properly - I just drink it like regular coffee, with milk - so I started my day with about 5 shots. As Kaduk's dad might say, I'm flying right now.

 

This coffee thing is really annoying, actually. Uganda, like Kenya, grows great coffee. But very little of it is roasted locally - most of it is shipped off to be processed in Europe, which captures all of the markup, just like in colonial times. So you go to the coffee growing regions of central Kenya and southern Uganda and you're more often than not served Nescafe. I guess you could call me a coffee snob, but I can't drink that crap. (I can't. I won't.) When you're traveling for work and you don't get a good night's sleep because the bed is like concrete and the eggs look like mucus and you're about to do five hours on a road with bathtub-sized potholes, you need some help waking up. I might start packing ground coffee and a french press on my trips. Too poncey? Perhaps. But I'll be awake.

 

I was in northern Uganda over the weekend reporting on the peace process, which after 20 years is finally making some - some - headway. I've been there twice now, and I find it to be the most compelling story I've come across in Africa. It's probably because of the children - 30,000 of them have been abducted by the LRA rebels over the years, and their stories are incredible. The people of the north are unfailingly gentle and welcoming. And the fact that this is now the longest running civil war in Africa lends the place a tragic quality.

 

I actually think northern Uganda is one of the easiest places in Africa to report from. It requires a short flight (50 min. from Nairobi) and a 4-hour drive on a generally decent road to the town of Gulu. (Usually you also stop in the government offices in Kampala to get military permission to travel north - a formality.) Once in Gulu, you are in the thick of the shit. Tens of thousands of victims of the war live in and around Gulu, and they've been suffering so long that they no longer have any qualms discussing it.

 

Some NGO types I was talking with yesterday were saying that this is one of the most underreported crises in the world - and I had to dispute that. Maybe compared to Darfur, which is a special case. But not compared with Congo, which is a far huger crisis in terms of the human toll - 4 million and counting - and certainly not compared with the all-but-unknown crises in places like the Central African Republic (which hardly anyone ever visits, me sadly included).

 

In Gulu I met up with 12-year-old Dennis, the boy I profiled in the spring, an LRA abductee who had lost his family and was living on his own in a shelter. That story generated an incredible response - several readers back home wrote in asking how to adopt him, including the wife of the publisher of one of our papers. Seeing Dennis again was bittersweet, and I'll write more about that later.

 

Last night in Kampala I went with a journalist I know to a big group dinner. One of the people there was the new BBC correspondent in Uganda. BBCers in Africa, especially smaller countries, are often treated as celebrities because of the huge reach of the network and its radio programming - when I tell anyone I'm a journalist, they automatically I assume I'm with the Beeb. (I have never used this to upgrade my hotel room. At least not recently.)

 

Their new Uganda person has a tough act to follow - the previous correspondent, Will Ross, was famously ejected from the country this year for reporting on the president's family (the capstone of several years of excellent work). The correspondent before him was a minor celebrity in town and was written up regularly in the hilarious Red Pepper, Kampala's version of a British tabloid, only more profane. (Last month the Pepper published the names of several alleged homosexuals - read criminals. Human Rights Watch went crazy.)

 

Apparently the Pepper has wasted no time with the new person. She'd not been in town a week before it ran the headline, "BBC Posts Hot Mzungu Babe," (mzungu means white person) above a picture of her looking bored at a press conference. The brief text below went on to explain that she was single and had come here in search of a Ugandan man, and might have used the word "desperate." Nairobi doesn't have a Pepper equivalent, otherwise we'd all be falling over ourselves to get in there.

 

At the end of the night - after the obligatory African discussion at my end of the table of Iraq, Bush, Hillary and the coming of the apocalypse - we wound up at Al's Bar. It was my first time there. Al's is a Kampala institution - it's been around for about 13 years, which is an eternity the way the city's been growing. They play the classics - Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, stuff you don't hear in Africa outside your iPod. Some nights, I was told, you used to be able to see the president's brother, the head of the army, get head-down drunk at the bar. Every night, you see a world-class collection of prostitutes. Last night I saw one playing the drums to Bob Dylan's "How Does it Feel?" on her breasts. And then it was time to go home.