Missive from the Congo 23



Canada House Goma



This week’s missive is about Canada House. The Canadian contingent moved into the current house in December. They moved out of the previous house after a dispute with the owner. Our current house is a large bungalow on Avenue du Lac. The house originally had five bedrooms but a sixth bedroom was created by enclosing a large veranda. As it turns out, this new room is my room. Compared to the house in Kisangani, this house is quite luxurious. I’m not sure how old it is but it certainly wasn’t built by the Belgians’. The house sits on a fairly large lot with a big front yard and room for four cars in the driveway. The backyard has a large garden with tomatoes, potatoes, onions, and a few other veggies. As with most houses in the Congo there is a wall around the entire property. Portions of the wall are topped with razor wire and parts are topped with broken glass. The windows and doors all have steel bar grating.

The house is quite large. As mentioned there are six

Canada House Goma

 bedrooms, five full bathrooms, a powder room. My room has a vestibule that I use as a work area, an on-suite full bath and a large bedroom, of course. There is a huge living room and large dining room. The kitchen is quite small but that is not too surprising. Large kitchens to be used by the home owners to entertain is a North American concept, or at least not an African one. If you can afford this house, you can afford to have a cook. You are not going to lavish a large, well appointed kitchen on the hired help. That’s just the way it is. The floors are all tile. There is an indoor garage though we don’t use it and a small room adjacent to the garage which we use as the gym. Both of these are in the “basement” of the house, at street level.

Living Room

However, as beautiful as the house appears on the surface, it is built in typical Congolese style. The roof leaks so the ceiling tiles are stained and small puddles form in the house. Fortunately none of them form on someone’s bed. The finish is always just a little off. Nothing major, just little things like wooden curtain rods that sag and lock faceplates that aren’t quite strait. The absolute worst though, are the stairs leading to the basement. Stairs are a tricky thing to make. People will notice even very small variations in the rise of a set of steps. People will trip because of a quarter inch variation. The stairs in this house must have been made by drunken lemurs. The rise is different for every step. The shallowest step is 7 ½ inches while the tallest is 12 ½ inches. The runs are not any better. We approach these steps with great care, going up and down very slowly and deliberately.

Dining Room

Naturally the house is connected to the city grid. However electrical service is somewhat variable and apparently not equal for all. I gather they had significant problem when the Canadian contingent moved in in December. A partial solution to this problem was to convince the local authorities, including the Governor, that Canada House was the equivalent of a consular office and should be connected to the same portion of the grid as the Governor’s office. That went a long way to solving the supply problem. Naturally we have a generator as a backup. However, the generator cannot supply the entire demand of the house. So whenever we need to switch to the generator, we need to disconnect the four electrical water heaters. So if we’re out of electricity for a while we also run out of hot water.

Bedroom

The water supply is somewhat more reliable though for a while we had problems with water pressure in the morning. Naturally the problem was that there was no pressure. After several days, and a little serendipity, we noticed that the water pressure problems occurred primarily when the guards were filling the buckets with water to wash the cars, which they did every morning after dawn, or at about the same time as we want to shower. It seems that if the outside tap is on, the all of the water pressure goes out that tap. Fortunately that was a fairly easy problem to solve.

Bedroom

All things considered the house is a pretty good place to be. It’s spacious and reasonably well appointed. Most importantly my fellow residents are a good bunch with whom I get along quite well. And that is something worth its weight in gold.

Kitchen

Missive from the Congo 22

Keeping fit in the Congo. Staying fit while deployed is not just a good thing to do; it’s an operational necessity. People who are fit cope better with stressors such as changes in diet, sleep patterns, etc. Exercise itself is a good stress and tension reliever. Fitness is essential to operational effectiveness.

 

That’s the why of soldier fitness. The how is a little trickier. In a place like Kandahar, you’ll find a huge fitness center with just about every piece of fitness kit you can imagine. With a couple thousand Canadian soldiers alone, it makes sense to have a purpose build facility. However, in the Congo things are little different.

 

As I mentioned in a previous missive, there are a number of private gyms in Kinshasa one can belong to. I don’t know how much it costs but we can get reimbursed for reasonable expenses. To my knowledge there are no private gyms in Goma. There is a small gym at the headquarters which costs $50 a month if I recall correctly. However, apparently it’s locked during the day. After all the UN brought you here to work not workout.

 

In any event, we don’t use that gym. We’ve been provided with a reasonable amount of fitness equipment at public expense. The gym has been set up in a small room in the basement. In it we’ve got a spinning bike, a rowing machine, a weight bench, an assortment of weights, and an exercise ball. There used to be a multi-function workout machine in Kisangani. Not sure what happened to it. The probably figured it would be too difficult take apart and reassemble correctly to bother moving it.

 

Canada House Goma gym

Of course, you can go running if you can find a suitably smooth surface. The streets here are horrible for cars, let alone runners. One guy working at the headquarters goes running on the airfield early in the morning, before air operations start up. The airport is much too far for me but luckily there is a small hotel about 500 metres up the road. It has a sort of ring road which circles the property. I go run there. One lap is approximately one kilometre so it’s a reasonable distance and it has a hill as an added bonus. A word of caution, do not think about the upcoming meeting or you might not notice the rock jutting up on the path and go down hard, giving yourself a very thorough exfoliation of leg, arm and palm. Just saying.

 

Canada House Goma gym

Having the facilities is only half the battle though. Those weights don’t lift themselves. Our secret weapon is Royal Navy Lieutenant-Commander Nick Reed. Nick has spent a lot of time at sea, including quite a bit of time on submarines. He is also a small unit fitness instructor. So he has lots of knowledge and experience with fitness regimes in environments where equipment and space are limited. And he’s a great motivator. So us guys head to the basement three to four times a week to workout. We were four last night. Nick has created a training circuit with weight, abs, leg and arm stations.

  

Here is what the the weights and abs portion of the program looks like:

 

 Depending on how many people are there we’ll do three or four stations. The person doing the weights drives the timing. When they’re done with their 10 repetitions, we go to the next station. We normally do this three times with a minute break between each complete circuit. Takes about one hour, give or take. The room is relatively small and there is no air circulation so we come out of there drenched in sweat. But it’s well worth it. In fact it’s necessary given the diet high in fries, pop and beer. I, for one, don’t intend to gain weight like last time.

 

So that’s the low down on fitness here in Goma. One last point. Goma is almost a mile above sea level. About the same altitude as Denver. In any event, at this altitude the air is somewhat thinner and your body has to compensate by producing more red blood cells. This a significant though somewhat short-lived advance when exercising at lower altitudes. So my personal goal during this tour is to take my extra red blood cells for my first marathon upon my return to Canada. We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else the training will help keep the middle section from becoming too mushy.

 

 

 

Missive from the Congo 021

Feeding Canada House – A tale of two cities. Preparing meals and eating generally is something we take for granted. We all have our different routines at home but generally we shop, we cook, we eat. Pretty straightforward. However all of that is much more difficult here in the Congo. The first thing is to establish the division of labour. The people living in Canada House never lived with each other before. They are thrust together for a few months and have to sort themselves out. Who cooks? Who shops? And for what? All of these things need to be decided in a much more explicit fashion than back in Canada.

Shopping is a real chore. One reason is availability of ingredients. Although you can get quite a bit more stuff in Goma and Kinshasa than you could in Kisangani, it is still limited as compared to Loblaws, for example. Time and space is often an issue as well. Shopping is much more time consuming because you need to go to more places to get what you need and getting from A to B is generally a much slower process than it would be in Canada for similar distances.

Cooking is also a different process. Back home I know that my role is that of sous-chef and BBQ master. Here these roles have to be re-negotiated based on a new situation. The approach to this task is very different in Kinshasa and Goma.

In Kinshasa they have decided to cook supper for themselves (ie. no local cook). And because they are a large group (currently 9 but sometimes up to 12 with visitors) they have a posted duty schedule. The duty cook gets to choose what meal they want to prepare but they have to try and please most of the dinners with their selection. No really off the wall stuff (as far as I know). The cook has to identify the necessary ingredients and pass the list on to the clerk whose duties include grocery shopping. The cook then cooks the meal. This is generally the most challenging part. The kitchens in Kinshasa are small. I say kitchens because the residents are in two adjoining town houses. One of the houses seems to have become the de facto supper house though sometimes the cooks needs assets from both kitchens. The stoves are not the most powerful cooking appliances going. And you need to cook for a relatively large group. Hopefully you have good power when you’re the cook. Otherwise things go pear shape pretty quick. During my stay in Kinshasa I got tagged for one meal. I chose Indian butter chicken. We managed to get all of the ingredients. The meal turned out quite well but cooking it took considerably longer than I had expected because of quantity and equipment limitations. I’d say we ate about 40 minutes later than I had originally planned but I guess the others had a more realistic time appreciation because there was no complaining. The upside of being the cook is that you are excused from clean up duty. And of course you get to eat something you like.

Kitchen in Goma

The folks in Goma opted to get a cook. Our kitchen is somewhat bigger than the ones I Kinshasa. We have two butane powered burners and a small (24”) stove. Apparently the oven works now. And I purchased a microwave oven last weekend. We used to have one in Kisangani, which was purchased while I was there four years ago but I guess it gave up the ghost because it’s lying in pieces in the backyard. At least I think it’s the same one. Charlotte’s daughter Carmeli cooks supper for us. We check off on a sheet whether we will be there or not and she prepares a meal accordingly from a fairly finite set of meal ideas. I’d say there are about 10 meals on a rotation. Generally good but pretty basic. She and Charlotte do most of the shopping. On the weekends were on our own. In those cases we either go out or someone volunteers to cook something. It’s a much more informal arrangement but with a smaller group, we’re 5 in the house, it works.

Butane stove

One last thing about suppers. Meals in Goma are rarely a collective activity. The meal is prepared before Carmeli leaves and sits in the Kitchen. People go in and serve themselves. Some of us workout before supper. Others eat right away. I don’t think we all sit down for a meal at the same time more than three times a week. Again, a much more informal approach. In Kinshasa, they make an effort to all eat at the same time. They also always toast the cook at supper. Everybody has to acknowledge the toast of everybody else at the table, and you have to look everybody in the eyes. Eye contact is essential apparently. Nothing wrong with that I guess, it was just a bit weird. Those Kinshasa folks are eccentric.

As for the other meals, ie breakfast and lunch, the approach is the same in Kinshasa and Goma. You’re on your own for breakfast. Go to the kitchen. Find something and eat it. The maid does the dishes. For lunch people generally go out to a local restaurant. In Goma, the text messages start flying at about noon to see who’s going to be part of the group and where we are going to eat. There is a lovely patio with a fabulous view of the lake at the headquarters. We often eat there because it’s easy, relatively inexpensive, and generally good. There are a handful of other places we go to. The menus are generally similar and they are all uniformly slow. It took an hour and a half to get and eat a cheeseburger last Friday. There is no such thing as fast food in the Congo.