Sunday, July 17, 2011
Since Blake and I have moved to Africa, while most of our time was in Rwanda, we have now traveled throughout DR Congo enough to realize that anything can happen in Congo. Now I am not talking about problems with security, but only saying, really anything can happen in Congo! We take everyday living here as an adventure, not sure what the day will hold. Blake has story after story of his travels throughout Congo. My favorite being, when he went to visit Kindu, DRC and he was flying home, the plane decided they were no longer going to take the passengers back to Goma, instead they decided to stop in Bukavu, DRC. They dropped all of the passengers off on the run way loaded up the plane with new passengers and told Blake’s flight another plane would come to get them. By the time a plane came, Blake realized it was only going to fit half of the passengers, so it would have to make 2 trips back to Goma. A number of hours later, Blake finally arrived back to Goma. Just an example of “anything can happen in Congo”. How many times (unless for a weather delay or a mechanical problem) has your flights just decided to “drop” you off somewhere else, and have another plane take you there later?
I wanted to give you this brief picture of Congo, so that I can transition into our time visiting the Lubumbashi Zoo. We had an opportunity to visit the zoo when a group of students from Point Loma Nazarene University were here in early June. If you think about a zoo, what animals do you expect to find? Elephants, zebra’s, kangaroo’s, lots of birds, you get the idea. Well if you ever visit the Lubumbashi zoo, right away you will get to see rabbits and guinea pigs; yes I said it, guinea pigs! This was the first funny thing that stuck out to me. The next? Well, as we are walking along the path, here comes a donkey¸ out of the cage, just roaming the zoo. My favorite part about the loose donkey was the fact that there was a dad with 3 young children. Of course the children were afraid of the donkey, if you were like 4 and you see this strange animal, wouldn’t you try and run from it too? A young boy took off running in the direction of the dad, trying to escape the donkey, dad picked up the boy, who was still running (legs kicking in the air) as dad was lifting him up. Most of us thought it was the funniest thing! Now it wasn’t that we were laughing at the kid, but seriously, the situation was unbelievable! Welcome to the Lubumbashi Zoo, in the middle of Congo.
We saw some animals that you would expect to see, monkeys, chimpanzees, baboons, gorillas – that decided it would be fun to spit at us! Lots of birds, including a parrot that speaks Swahili, yes we asked if he talks and what language he speaks. Well what else would there be? Why of course porcupines and beavers. When it came to the fish section, what would we expect to find? Why yes, tilapia, why not? There was nothing strange about this fish, not a “cool to look at if you visit a zoo” fish, just tilapia. Now we definitely enjoyed our time visiting the zoo, getting to spend some additional time in the city, getting to spend some time outdoors, but the visit to the zoo was another story added to our, “anything can happen in Congo” stories, like you may come face to face with a loose donkey!