It’s been a long day. Sometimes I wonder what I’m here for,
why I bother when everything is so hard, things crawl, and not only sometimes,
they just come to a stop completely. You can’t rely on things to work, and you
always have to have a backup plan-you can’t only be so set on doing your one
thing that you then freak out when it doesn’t happen, when things just don’t
work. You just have to wait awhile, you have to be patient, and only do what
you can. With persistence things do and can pay off, but they won’t happen
immediately.
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| Kinshasa, view from our yard |
We never seem to appreciate what we really have. In other
countries, the food is nicer, there’s usually more of it…its easier to make and
prepare…Woolworths is known for its ready meals. Result: people get fat, we eat
too much of what is actually not good for us, full of chemicals and
preservatives….it tastes good yes, but that’s what happens.
Life is easier there. It’s not so difficult to do little
things, the power won’t suddenly shut off on you (although in south Africa it’s
happened to us quite a few times…it’s still Africa I guess), you won’t be
forced to go haul stored water when you need it-- running water is a commodity
that you truly appreciate when you have it here.
But result: in those countries, we take too much for
granted…we become lost when even the littlest thing goes wrong…while here you
learn to deal with the problems as best you can.
It makes people lethargic in its own way there…people don’t
do anything that takes too much effort or will take too long, or do something
they’ve never tried or aren’t used to… because they are too used to having
things come easy…and after awhile you then don’t want to do anything that isn’t
easy.
Here it’s a challenge. Things don’t just come to you, you
have to fight to keep working and running what you have.
The result of the easy life is that you get bored, when
there is no effort involved, there is nothing to keep you interested, to give
you a sense of full accomplishment.
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| City train |
There is no beauty in the little things there, because there
they are just that, little things—and so we don’t take notice of them. But when
every little thing is hard earned….and you know what it is like, in a very real
and present sense to do without them—suddenly everything becomes more precious,
you take more joy and pride in the smallest things done because you understand
how easily they could just as have not been done. You learn to appreciate what
you have in the very real realization that you could have a lot less, more so
than someone who spends their time looking always in the shop window, seeing
better things than what you own, and how much better you’d like your things to
be.
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| Little bird in our garden |
Appreciate life—you do more when you hear of death, than
when you just hear about the problems others face and how tiresome their lives
can be.
Beaux-Arts
I went with Mom to the sculpture department at the Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa and worked it out with one of the students there to teach me a few times a week. So I'm learning modelage! Unfortunately, after working on my first little statue, learning how to make a plaster of it, and setting it on the windowsill to dry... someone stole it, can you believe it? It broke my little heart. But everyone was so sweet and felt so sorry for me, gave me some more clay to start again.
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