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