Circularity of time

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."

-- American Journal of Science, Vol. 276, p.53

I was just reading back to some of my first posts in which I call Kinshasa “friendly and relaxed” – HA! – and describe our “lovely ground-floor maisonette” and its “two sunny bedrooms” – double HA!

As later posts attest, Kinshasa and its daily dose of frustrations and stress – many of which, it must be said, have to do with working on a UN-managed project rather than with Kinshasa itself – came very close to bringing me down. Kinshasa is many things – stimulating, bewildering, hostile, unfortunate, electrifying, mystical, uncompromising, maddening, moving, startling – Kinshasa inspires many adjectives, but neither ‘friendly’ nor ‘relaxed’ feature. And as for our “lovely maisonette”, it may have other redeeming features, but it certainly isn’t sunny.

Still, I am pleased to say that the racket from the police station next door – not just the bugle, but also the accompanying so-called parades, where a senior police chief stridently preaches to a bored contingent standing neatly at attention about the path set for them by the Lord – are reduced to Monday mornings only. Now Monday mornings tend to be grim wherever you are, and as long as my Sunday lie-ins remain unaffected I dare not complain.

I have learned an important lesson this year: the importance of regular breaks and holidays. The double whammy of a two-day work trip to South Africa followed immediately by a three-day long week-end in Ethiopia were enough to chill me out and give me back the perspective I was so sorely missing. So when the first thing I witnessed on return from Jo’burg were three fairly vicious fights in Kinshasa’s N’djili Airport, I was able to remark from a distance that tensions in Kinshasa were rife. When after three very relaxing days in Addis our plane was delayed for a couple of hours in Brazzaville because brash a Belgian businessman thought himself above the law and smoked in the toilets, after which we were made to sit in the airport for an hour by an infuriatingly inefficient and devious driver, I was able to put up a defensive force-field, plunge into my novel and ignore it all.

Speaking of force-fields, I am reminded of a recent, very relevant post by a fellow DRC blogger (Breaking Hearts in the Heart of Darkness) whose entries never fail to amuse me. Here is the passage:

“Coming back from vacation is actually a vulnerable moment for expats living in Congo or any third world country. There is a lot of stress about living in Congo that you do not notice until you leave. Not the obvious things, like working in bush, but just a subtle shift where the world takes more energy to deal with. Yet I always forget this and come back bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which lasts for exactly three minutes - the time to exit the plane and enter Congolese immigration. As I head to baggage claim, it's like I am the Starship Enterprise and my forcefield is down, just as a big group of Klignons try to board. Only I can by them off for a dollar AND they'll carry my bags, and I think the real Klingons would have probably asked for more money and blwown up the bag. And they don't have wrinkly faces. People, it's a metaphor. By the time I exit the airport two hours later (without baggage, which is somewhere between Nairobi and Zimbabwe), I pray that Congo will stay in Klingon mode and not head to Deathstar phase. I slowly turn the forcefield back on. Congo and I generally have a truce going on, which is that we know enough about each other to not expect any major changes or surprises. For example, if I see a roach so big it looks like it could carry off my couch, I do not have the right to get angry. Congo told me about them roaches a while back. But if this roach manages to get inside my coffee cup and stare at me as I try to add Nescafe, that's stepping over the line. If people try to commit fraud to be included in our distributions, I also do not judge, because they are being resourceful and this is Congo. If its people I know, then I get upset. The irony of the whole thing is that, as much as I know that I cannot keep this up, the thought of leaving freaks me out more than the thought of staying.”

Now I’m not sure how I ended up in complaints mode, because the reason I read back to some of my earlier blogs was because I am finally really enjoying myself again, and I have recovered that feeling of excitement and purpose I felt when I first got here back in December. Maybe it’s the thrill of the impending elections. Or maybe it’s because, unlike Kinshasa, Kisangani, where I have been spending the last few days, is both friendly and relaxed. The same can be said of most places in the interior, which despite having suffered so much more than Kinshasa from conflict and poverty, don’t seem to be plagued by the same bitterness. Whatever the reason, I must say that I really, really like it out here.