Predictable disappointment

“There’s something particularly crushing about predictable disappointment,” said Fred the other day, making me laugh at this particular nugget of dark – but spot on – cynicism. This came after a phone call Saturday last week from the company that was meant to deliver our belongings, to say that they were no longer coming. The fact that we had turned down an offer to go camping, then woken up at 8am on a Saturday, then sat twiddling our thumbs for 5 hours before finally being told the news was of no avail to them. Nor was the fact that by then the stuff had been sitting in the customs office of Kinshasa’s N’djili Airport – not, you will understand, the most reassuring of places – for 7 weeks while we were going through hell and high waters to try to get it out. Not to mention the fact that we'd been living with our 20kgs luggage each for two months.

I will spare you the full rendition of the mind-boggling bureaucratic rigmarole – not to mention the dispensation of quite substantial sums of money for such obscure things as ‘parking taxes’ – we had to go through to actually get hold of our things; let it just be said that by the end of it all there were a few dents in the wall where I had bashed my head in frustration every time I received an e-mail from the shipping company in London.

Nonetheless, by Monday we had three quarters of our stuff and were eagerly setting about putting books on shelves, frames on the wall, replacing frilly white pillow cases with their multi-coloured Iranian and Sri Lankan equivalents, and generally making this flat our home. On Tuesday the rest of the boxes finally arrived... all but one. The long-acclaimed projector, which we had been talking about excitedly for weeks, was 'disappeared' at some point in the process. The Congolese swear the container was sealed shut and the box was never put in the plane in London, and the British shipping company quite simply doesn't have a clue. My father's advice is to go to the local market and let it be known that we are interested in buying a projector to the same specifications, and see how long it takes for ours to make it back out of the woodwork...



One week later, I find myself sitting here, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for someone to bring me a car I wish to test drive. He is only 4 hours late. Finally there is a knock at the door. It is our guard, come to tell me that the gentleman just drove by to say that he hadn't managed to get the paperwork done in time and couldn't get the car out of the garage - a car that as far as I knew belonged to him already! A dodgy story under the best of light, but just so commonplace here that already I forget to be amused.

It's time for a break, methinks, time to start organising a long week-end somewhere. Anyone have any tips on Pointe Noire? A paradise for surfers and petroleum exporters, I believe.