A ride to remember

Lost in the end of year report card muddle as I am means I am drowning in data. I am analyzing data, comparing data, searching for norms and presenting findings as close to truth as I can arrive at. Little snapshots of where students are functioning today based on where they were yesterday and on what seems normal compared to hundreds of other students who may have a little or a lot in common with whichever student I happen to be reducing to a series of skills and character traits relevant to this time only. The world of report cards.

But also the world of Kinshasa. And in Kinshasa, determining normal can take some effort. Finding the middle ground is never very easy as one is exposed to a series of extremes that eventually make every adventure seem normal and the mundane seem downright exotic. It is a land where all stories take on mythic proportions and hover in the realm of legends as no truth can ever be denied or validated. Stories become a jumble of real life experience woven together with bits of  imagination based on cultural or linguistic misunderstandings. So much color and vitality gets added with translation- from Lingala to French and French to English; from Congolese to European and European to American (and really, Europe is not a country and so comes complete with a million nuances in how a tale might be interpreted yet again...) Each transformation adds another layer and with each layer the absolute truth gets buried deeper revealing only a more basic, universal truth about human nature.

One of my favorite stories is about a former student, though the details were shared with me by his personal tutor. His previous job was unclear though he had initially been hired by a US Embassy employee as a chauffeur. It turns out he wasn't quite competent at that position but was well liked and so the woman created some other job to keep him around. And it was in this role that he found himself accompanying her along a ride down the streets of Kinshasa. The details get fuzzy here, but supposedly she stopped a gang of street kids (or more likely, they stopped her) and somehow an offer of dinner was presented. Only one agreed- one was brave enough to hop in the car, head off to an unknown destination and eat food from a stranger (the plethora of rules and suspicions surrounding food from strangers and neighbors alike could be the subject of an entire blog itself.)

This chance encounter led the woman to finding out more about his family (apparently he had uncles in other parts of the country which she was eventually able to contact)  and arranging, with their permission, to adopt him. This teenage boy. Who now lives with her in the US. A life changing, fairy tale-ish, mythical sounding, legend-like story no matter how you approach it. I mean, who does that? Invite street kids home for dinner? Who gets in cars with strangers offering only the promise of a hot meal? And who adopts a 12 year old kid they happened to run into on the streets of Kinshasa? Both their lives were changed. Remarkably. Forever.

So, if your comparing my story to that story, it's hardly so breathtaking. It's hardly remarkable. But I still found myself feeling in awe, counting the ways I love someone, recognizing with gratitude that I am lucky to have certain people in my life. People who think like me. Our story is not that story, not that remarkable one but just this ordinary one. On a quiet May day. May 17th, in fact, a holiday in Kinshasa.

Nothing clears out the capital like a jours fériés, a public holiday when all businesses and most stores are closed. The boulevard is empty and even the street corners are devoid of the masses that can normally be seen waiting for transportation throughout the day. Its hard to imagine where 9 million people can disappear to, but public holidays inspire a certain kind of magic.

This May 17th also happened to be a Saturday and so my boys were flooded with social engagements that required a bit of chauffeuring around town, which is how I came to witness the eerie calm for myself.  I'd been watching a student dance rehearsal at a local school when I realized it was time to pick up Nabih. Happily this coincided with the end of rehearsals and so Christian offered to help me locate the exact spot of the birthday party- somewhere just off the end of the boulevard.

It was about 4 o'clock and the streets were beginning to show small signs of life, people emerging to celebrate the holiday with a beer at their favorite night spot (or early evening spot, as the case may be.) Traffic was mostly non existent and we were able to make our way downtown undeterred. Well, to a certain point. A few street kids appeared at one stop light- they really know us both by now and whether we are in a school car or Christian's car it's no use- they see us a mile away, stop to say hello, to ask for money, or to offer insults or compliments depending upon the mood of the day. Christian told them we were on our way to the Gare Central and maybe on the way back, if we found something, we'd pass it along. I looked at him incredulously.

I know by now this is the only way to refuse. Simply saying no only invites more insistent pleas for something- money, water, a piece of candy- anything to acknowledge they are there, you see them and they exist. But really, we'd jumped in the car kind of impulsively and I hadn't brought my bag along. We had no phones, no francs and no little treats. Nothing. And we weren't going to find anything at the end of the boulevard either. We would be driving back as empty handed as we were now.

Sure enough on the way back, as we stopped at a light, the gang of kids came swooping upon us. While we chatted, they multiplied. There must have been a good fifteen or twenty of them, all ages from 15 to 6, hanging on the metal divider between the road with nothing to look forward to on this jours fériés with it's empty streets and naked sidewalks. I capture enough of the conversation to hear Christian promising them $5 as long as they share it altogether. And someone had to come with us. Because, of course, we were still empty handed and lint pocketed.

I shake my head at his feeble nature. He finds it so hard to say no. The sheer numbers of those kids would have conjured resolute denial for me. There is no way I could have handed out enough francs to satisfy everyone and maintain calm and order. Sometimes handing out francs seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. It feels frustrating and useless. It feels condescending and power trippy- feeding into images of the foreign savior when really it's more like tossing pennies into a wishing fountain and expecting miracles. What I really want is a way to end the dilemma. I want everything to become a simple problem with an easy to identify solution and see it fixed. Right now. Sometimes driving down a Kinshasa street can be so emotionally exhausting.

But Christian never lets these things overwhelm him. He doesn't get bogged down with long term solutions or wage useless inner battles with himself over ultimate right and wrongs. He simply does what he can. In the moment. And right then, he could offer to take a kid for a short ride and give him $5 to share with his friends and maybe buy a few moments of happiness, or relief, or at least enough baguettes to go around. He used the time in the car to offer his version of ministering the good word- not necessarily religious conversion but moral and ethical decision making. Christian's take on how to be a better person and get along with those around you- look out for the little kids, essentially. I'm loving everything about his gentle spirit as we continue down the boulevard.

And then we stop at another light. I consider this "my" spot since I tend to see these kids more often. The first group we encountered was much further downtown and so they aren't as familiar to me. Christian "knows" them better than I do, if our brief encounters can really be considered knowing someone. But it is a lot harder to refuse the more familiar faces. As this group begins to crowd around the car, I notice our friend in the back hitting the button to slowly roll up the window. He slouches a bit in the seat and makes sure the door is locked. Turns out, it's a rival gang. Apparently one of the boys in this group assaulted our passenger sometime the week before.

As I track the conversation, again in Lingala, my understanding comes and goes. I begin to shake my head. Seriously? We're taking another one with us? I imagine a fight breaking out in the back seat. Taking one kid back to the school for a bit of cash is a good deed....but taking two? Is there a limit? Had he crossed the threshold from funny little story to legend in the making? Not quite. I guess.

But who does that? Who feels so touched by the helpless situation of these boys on the street that they invite them into the car for a ride down the road because they left home without their wallet? I guess the better question is who doesn't do that? Or why doesn't everyone do that? Not that throwing money at the situation will help in the least to solve it, but that the emotional burden and sense of responsibility is there to such a degree nothing is too much, no action is too far out of the way or inconvenient or absurd- especially when it's all essentially too little to begin with.

So we found ourselves riding down the road with two rival gang members tucked neatly in behind us- although, the boy who elected to go with us from the second group was not actually the one who did the assaulting. They were both getting the good word from Christian about how to get along, how to look out for each other and not be overcome by their circumstances. I am not sure what kind of ears these words of advice fell on, but the boys remained quiet and respectful.

We arrived at the school and Christian asked them to wait outside on a bench in front of the gates. The security guard was ready to shoo them away until he received assurances the boys were with Christian. He drove inside, recovered his bits of cash and presented them each with the promised treasure- along with more words of encouragement I am sure. A little drop in the bucket. They disappeared into the road again until next time.

And I was left with something of a story and a reminder to be grateful- not just about what I have, as in the material things, but about who I have in my life. Someone like me. Someone who gets overwhelmed by the wrongs of the world and is just trying to figure out how to  make it seem right. Even if it's only for a minute- this time. Maybe next time it will be for longer. Maybe together, we'll find a way to make something lasting, even if it's small- this time. And maybe after that we'll find a way to make it bigger, or someone else will find a way. Story after story will build until it's nothing but normal tales of little rides and big emotions and the whole thing is rather boring after all. All the rides leave nothing to remember but ordinary intersections full of people waiting for transportation, on their way home to houses full of children and none on the street corners.

The Last Story

Stories get harder and harder to recognize within the daily humdrum of life. Sometimes they happen by and I miss them, all the while pondering what to write about. Like the time just a few weeks ago when I was with a  colleague in the Kinshasa botanical gardens. We'd gone there to discuss a book we'd both read and also because we'd both never actually gone walking around the gardens. I'd wanted to check out a mural I had seen a glimpse of on-line- scoping out a potential art field trip for the students- and she on a recommendation from a fellow teacher.

We'd been walking down the paths along the wall when we found ourselves looking up at a bridge adjoining the main market downtown. It's a bit deceiving in the gardens as you can't really tell that the hectic, crowded marketplace borders the walls of the downtown oasis. There was a gang of street kids perched atop the bridge and we hesitated before continuing. It was like, in that moment, we were both envisioning them swooping down from the bridge to land in front of us Batman style and pilfer whatever paltry cash we might have had lining our pockets.

"Is it some kind of service road?" my colleague asked as images of the Bronx zoo filled my mind. However, this small path seemed lacking service littered as it was with plastic water bottles and other debris. There was a young boy who appeared to be washing his clothes at the end of the lane. I made the decision to continue walking on (not sure how I got to be the one to make the decision, but it seems I sometimes get the credit for knowing more about Kinshasa than I actually do, being less of a stranger than I actually am) so we continued.  Show no fear is what I figured. And while they continued to call out "Madame" no one actually swooped down or landed in front of us. It was a moment when a story could have happened. And it was a day that brings to mind all sorts of contemplations, from the degrees of being a stranger to the complexities of "double pricing"- one price for Congolese and one price for 'etrangers' to the police behavior when we parked the car- but it was a story that escaped me, common place as it's all become. Navigating the many levels of Kinshasa, determining which street kids are possibly on my side, which can recognize me as someone who really sees them and which are just plain hungry, how to talk to police and defuse the anger and righteousness hot sun and white skin seem to bring out- all just daily excursions through the social rankings of Kinshasa.

But what I have noticed is how it has affected the other stories. The ones I read. In my 4th grade literacy class, we just experienced a lesson on schema (by Debbie Miller to give credit) that I really loved. I wrote down one side of a paper "Zongo Falls," a local attraction most kids have been too. They were overflowing with ideas about what it's like to go there. Sensory images filled the page. Camping, bugs, forests, rainbows, waterfalls, flowers. At the top of the other column, I wrote Kalamazoo. Predictably, the class went pretty silent. They started asking questions and wondering if there were cages and animals there. At the end of the exercise, I wrote SCHEMA down the side of the paper with all their observations about Zongo. "These are the ideas we bring to reading, based on our experiences and knowledge of the world," I told them. Many authors recognize the reader brings as much to the novel as the author tries to put out. Our personal experiences and images formed by those experiences shape the way we read a novel. It had been the exact discussion my colleague and I had been having about the book we'd read, The Bone People. Interestingly enough, she'd had the experience of reading it some 15 years earlier and could compare her reactions. I was intrigued by how they differed.

Just as I have been intrigued, reading two other novels, The Dark Road and Behind the Beautiful Forevers, at how my schema has changed. Both of these books relate tales of people living unimaginable horrors and dealing with them in the best way they know how. All the while reading them, I simultaneously wonder if the people don't recognize the poisons they are surrounding themselves with and understand their inability to do anything to avoid it. But worst of all, my schema has grown to imagine real people that I see everyday living in these similar conditions. It's not necessarily the brilliancy of the author that makes these books so real to me as the conditions here in Kinshasa that I can see are nearly equal to the tragedies lived out by the characters in the books- real life characters. My schema has expanded and my ideas of the world now include people who wait for the next rain storm to erode the small hilltop on which their house resides, or the mothers and children and young men who fill water bottles at a burst pipe overflowing from cracks in the city street or, even worse, puddles that have become small lakes on dirt paved side roads.

Abdul, the garbage scavenger in Behind the Beautiful Forevers becomes akin to the kids you see walking among the rubble picking through waste and the homeless guy who wears black duct tape and ports a bag overflowing with bottles around the city streets. Abdul is the woman who sleeps on the little cement overhang just next to the UN building with her bags and bags of garbage keeping her warm. His little friend Sunil is that young kid downtown by Michaels store that I passed sleeping on the sidewalk, worn down by hunger and fatigue. He is all those gangs of street kids with fire in their eyes and empty bellies who smoke cigarettes outside the grocery stores and the night clubs, hoping for a little bit of nothing to fall their way.

When I finish reading these books, I can't even retreat to my suburban abode and pretend like it doesn't exist because they are all there on the outskirts, every time I go out my door. The Beautiful Dark Bone People trying to find their way down the Forever Road, a little bit at a time. Scavenging, brutalizing, hurling threats, guarding little moments of happiness, scraping with their neighbors, laughing in the sunlight, drinking rat poison and making the best of very little prospects. One day at a time, one moment upon one moment until the last story is told.