About driving, life, and death

I've talked about how everybody here drives like a madman. I have since reviewed that and have to amend my earlier statement. Half of the people here drive like madmen, and the other half drive in a way that makes even me cry out loud „Really? Do we REALLY have to drive this slow? In the bloody middle of the road?!” And this is quite something, considering that I don't exactly drive fast anywhere, and here I barely shift to fourth gear. And yes, that means I barely drive faster than 30 an hour. You can imagine the type of driver that irritates even me. My other favourite is that by sunset and after, half of my fellow drivers just go on without any headlights whatsoever, may there be a dust cloud or not. Now the other half, they make up for it. With their beamers on full blast, so if I by accident would be able to see the people walking next to (!!) the sidewalk, I can still be blinded by their lights.

For a while I thought it was funny to say that people here are either not afraid of dying, or thy downright want to, but the thing is, their approach to life and death really is different. It is very much of a cliché to say that they have so many children so that some of them can reach adulthood, but when I hear that the woman in the next office has been on maternity leave for the majority of this year, because her first baby (the first this year, otherwise the third) has died at the age of two months, and then another two months later she was expecting the next one, then I start thinking that the cliché is very real. Somebody said that they value death differently, because they've seen so much of it. And that a funeral lasts three days (except if it's for a priest, then it's longer), and that's three days of party, but then it's over. They cut the music, bury the dead and move on with their lives. What else are they supposed to do?  

You get used to it

So, despite all other rumours, I live in an actual house. There are doors, windows, tv, wifi, fridge, corcksrew, that kinda things. They didn't manage to create all stairs to be the same height, and rain flows into the room under the balcony door, but the dining table is nice wood work and there is a full size mirror on the closet door. There isn't always electricity, but I've mentioned that before. There is a generator though, and sometimes they even switch it on, especially after dark. One can get used to not keeping anything too fragile in the fridge, and that a 90 minute movie can only be wathced in three takes. It gets a little annoying if power cuts of in the middle of cooking, or when you're in the shower, covered with shower gel from head to toe.
Not that the latter has happened often recently. Water running out in the middle of the shower. There hasn't been any to begin with. The only water we had in the house was what came in under the balcony door.
Ok, I may be exagerating a bit. The is a problem with the city's water reserve, and it won't get fixed before my nephew goes to school. So there is no running water in my neighbourhood. There is a solution to that, namely to buy water that gets brought here with a tanker. In theory. Because in practice, the first time water ran out, we told the guards, who were very surprised, and said they will talk to the owner in the morning, and really, we had water by the afternoon again. Except that the owner apparently hasn't read the memo about the problems with the city reserve and so he didn't expect it to run out again. So two days later there was no water left, we told the guards, they were very surprised, called the landlord, water was back by the afternoon. You guess, it ran out in two days, we told the guards, they were surprised, etc. What got on my nerves wasn't that time and again (every two days) water runs out, but rather that we have to call, they get surprised, and it takes another two days before the tanker gets around.
No need to worry though, I'm not much dirtier than on average. Humans are creative, and after the second dry spell we learned that we have to make reserves, so we fill all the buckets and plastic bottles and we can go on for another day. Three times a liter and half is comfortably enoguh for a „shower”. And there are shower facilities at work, or in the so-called gym, and at my colleagues' where I feed the cats while they are on holidays.

Of course, it would be nice to live in a place where „Do we have water?” is not the new way of saing hello.

What to eat?

That's an important question. And now that we know I still don't eat bat meat, the question is even more pressing: what DO I eat then?
Good news is, avocados grow here to the size of a smaller melon. Or a bigger grapefruit. Pineapple is at home here as well, and there are aubergines (eggplants), tomatos, bell peppers, cucumbers, and in the fruit department (avocado is not a fruit in my world) there are bananas, maracujas (passion fruit) and apples. Those are available on the local market, fresh, cheap.
In the store we can buy pasta, rice, lentils, chick peas, local cheese, sometimes foreign cheese, tuna, and then totally randomly sometimes spinach, other times cooking cream, oats, pesto, mustard.
I heard that there are two butchers, but I never visit them. I don't want to imagine what the frequent power cuts can do to the quality of cooling, and I don't want to risk. Controversially, I trust restaurants to know where to find reliable meat, so I sometimes eat it there.
So good news is that the veggie are fresh. I personally love ratatouille and aubergine, and could live for weeks on avocado. I would just get a tad bit bored.
And this is exactly what happens here: what we eat is rather good, it's just always the same. Most probably the cook at the canteen shops at the same market as everybody else, and as a result the canteen offers the same food as you can have at home. Except they peel and slice the pineapple, which is rather convenient.

Probably due to this not too diverse diet I always feel hungry, or at least I always dream about food. Which is strange, especially if I also tell you that for reasons yet to be discovered (either the climate, the water, or the canteen) I constantly feel like I've swallowed a balloon and it's all in my tummy now.

About the ebola

Yes, there is ebola also in DRC. It is a different strain than the one in West-Africa, and thus independent from it. It would have happened in DRC even if it hadn't in West Africa. And sadly here it's more or less common to have an outbreak every three or for years. Which also means that they know what to do: isolate, stop spreading. And this is exactly what is being done in the Équateur province, which is about as far from here as Luxembourg is from Hungary. Except that traffic is a lot worse. By which I mean there are not many roads.
The other thing you need to know is that ebola is not airborne. It can be contracted by eating infected meat or by direct contact with infected people. So I still don't eat bat meat and keep body fluid exchange at a record low.

I know that it's a serious thing and I'm not trying to joke it off. I'm also trying to not create any panic, and I know, that from afar all that can be seen is that thousands of people die of ebola in Africa. And it's all true, except Africa is huge, and the thousands are dying on the other side. I could throw in a few statistics showing how many more die in a year of malaria, typhoid fever and other tropical diseases, but it doesn't make the whole epidemic any less tragic, and then you would just start worrying about malaria (I'm taking preventinve drugs) and typhoid fever (I'm vaccinated).