mortars and all things wild and wonderful

Calgary Sucks and a pictographic of how one can get out of a bad date…the two best T-shirts so far this new year…

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year to you all. My most sincerest apologies for keeping from y’all, all the wildly absurd stories I’ve collected these last few weeks. But things have been crazy busy, unhealthily busy for much of the end of the year, and then, as if being blown out of a canon, I boarded a plane and wandered Europe for a whopping 3 weeks! I’m rested, restored, a few kilos heavier, and I may have even gained a bit of perspective on life and profession—I even got my very first “headhunting” email from a large INGO that will for the time being remain nameless.



So, all that to say, I’m feeling great, feeling strong…ate more pate and Roquefort than anyone ought to eat, especially after a week of stilton. I leave you then with my most heartfelt best wishes for the year, a few photos, an belated vignette on Gustav of Ruzizi (I hope I haven’t mentioned this previously) and two wildly absurd anecdotes from my last field trip before the holiday…

Right, so before I left for holidays, I took a quick tour through the south south with a photojournalist/consultant from UNICEF, a lovely and VERY good at what she does (www.juliepudlowski.com )…we stopped off at all the usual stops, swung by the Cholera treatment centre in Uvira, visited the nutritional centre on the hospital grounds, ran into the ACF nutritionist responsible (quite the surprise, we were in ‘fur together), she mentioned that the chief doctor was giving them problems…I looked into it and found out that they were pushing to move the centre to the old CTC, which was more than reasonable given that they had just built a brand new CTC with world bank funds—see some earlier entry—well, I asked the guy about it, noting that even though the CTC was built and beautiful, they were still admitting patients to the old CTC, which is effectively a big plastic bag full of crap…you know what he said? There was no way they could possible admit patients to the new structure and thereby liberate the old CTC for more important matters, because they had a serious problem—that hadn’t any DRAPES! I turned to this consultant, who confirmed that he said that aloud…maybe it was poor form, but I laughed in his face…the thought that, after probably close to a 100,000$ new structure being built for just this problem, it was not functional because it lacked curtains…and to take this discussion one step over the line of the absurd, he said he couldn’t use the tarps from the old structure because it wasn’t “proper”.Anecdote #2…after 8 hours bombing around in our jeep we stopped at an emergency school my team built, which will remain hither to nameless, a lovely school, a super community effort, everything was done, and I was going to show off our work…you know what I found? Half a school! And an carcass of a 2nd structure…no desks, no students…and though I had already been there on a previous occasion to lambaste the carpenters, and sent a team to finish it themselves, I found it undone!
Now, again, la coup de grace that took this particular instance across the threshold of the unbelievable…I found an artillery position in the structure that was complete!


Gustav and the lake
Today I learnt of Gustav, the giant gator, a lonely monster who lives somewere in the ruzizi plain, near the edge of lake Tanganyika, or by some accounts, further up river near the escarpment . Either way, this prehistoric beast eats the occasional Congolese—apparently only once every two years or so—has outlived the elephants and other wildlife that used to live in the plain, wars, mines, and hungry militia-men. And unlike the more amphibious lake monsters of Tanganyika, there are photos of this guy…but I haven’t found them yet. Jaws a metre across, a body 12m long…huge, no?
Here’s the web site for his fan club… http://membres.lycos.fr/supercroco/

The pics:
1. where’s waldo? The dummy is outside the frame of this shot, getting the scolding of his life from one very angry muzungu
2. a sweet little girl from the nutritional centre
3. perhaps the most strikingly strong image of a women from gety idp camp, ituri
(thanks Julie)