Chicken

As I prepared to leave the office at dawn on Wednesday morning, having gone in to print a couple of documents I’d worked on late the previous night before catching a flight to Lubumbashi at 9am, the parting words from the project manager were: “Remember – better a live chicken than a dead hero.” Fair advice from a man who, in an effort to regain his rapidly deteriorating sanity, has decided, a month away from the elections for which he has worked so hard, not to renew his contract and instead to splash out on centre court seats at Wimbledon. Yes, it will leave the project in a fix, but the truth is I wish I had the assurance to walk away like that, and the self-awareness to know when it’s all taking too much of a toll.

As I found myself midmorning that same day onto my fourth pack of Kleenexes and my seventy-fourth sneeze of the day; and as I realised that this was my fourth big cold in eight weeks – not to mention that the sniffling and sneezing never really go away anymore – I wondered whether maybe this was it. I have irregular blasts of insuppressible energy – notably after my aerobics class – but the truth is I have been feeling generally rundown and/or irritable for a while now.

But the other truth is, I don’t want to give up on the DRC. I want to stop minding the daily frustrations of life here (top of the list: indestructible mosquitoes, kamikaze minibuses, unfriendly waiters, interminable meetings and inflated egos) and better enjoy the small luxuries: walking to work, popping home to enjoy a lunch prepared for us by the housekeeper (yes, yes!), regular tennis, Sunday movies in a friend’s backyard, and of course the unforgettable river outings. I want to stop being ill every time I go on mission to the interior, and rekindle the exhilaration I felt during my first visits. And I definitely, definitely want to be here for the elections.

So the short version is, I won’t be in London for Wimbledon, but I may just ‘disappear’ my laptop, give up on working evenings and week-ends altogether, and get addicted to the World Cup instead. I know someone who would have no objections.