Almost Home

- My sincere apologies for no updates the last two days of the trip. One of the endearing things about Congo is the "inconsistency" of such luxury items as electricity and internet - and we had almost none of either our last two days. We are in JFK now after a very long and occaisionally harrowing (got in a fight with the Director of migration in Congo on departure; almost werent allowed on the plane in LHR - meaning we would have been deported back to congo) trip.

Briefly - Joceline is now a US resident, and we are safely back in the land of the free (one thing you learn traveling is that while you may not be proud to be an American, as Catherine puts it, you are certainly grateful).

I only have 10 minutes before we have to catch our fourth and final flight home to Atlanta, so I will do the final trip update and photo/video links tomorrow. The teaser is escalators and moving sidewalks are hilarious to watch your Congolaise daughter on for the first time!

Til tomorrow...

Kinshasa Part 6 - a hard morning

We have had a pretty rough morning so far today (itis 2 pm as I write this). Joceline is completely non-comunicative with anyone in the group of us - and particularly me. How much is teenage behavior and how much is leaving home - or somehting else is unknown for now. It rained quite hard all morning and has just abated - insuring lots of time together inside :-).

I seem to remember some melancholy from Nicole prior to leaveing - and our last day here is thursday. I sometimes wonder if all of the work with One Small Step that we have been doing here - and we have been going non-stop - is making her feel left out somehow, or less special in terms of being in the family. There is an overwhelming sense of not wanting to let her down (she has been through enough) and also not lettingdown the people here that One Small Step is helping. They are all personal contacts of Catherine's and others associated with the organization, and I am basically the messenger this trip.

On a side note - I have given up trying to upload video here. The internet is simply too slow. I will link in all the video snips after I return to a faster connection.

More tonight - with photos.

Kinshasa part 5

Mbote from Congo. Today we had to go to the dreaded DGM - the Director General of Migration. This was the last department that could stall our departure - and I suppose they still could (they have another office at the airport just to make you nervous). So far so good...

Yesterday we went to meet the mayor of the commune ( the region ofthe city of Kinshasa where Joceline is from) and it was exciting to say the least. This was a visit orchestrated by the foster mother of Joceline who happens to work for the mayor - whose title is straight out of a kids xmas movie - Bourgmiester - to help stave off rumors she has beennselling children (she isn't). Julia and I had to go to this meeting alone as Teetee (the foster mom) was nervous about having her there.

So we arrive and after getting past the guard goat (no kidding here) we went to a waiting room filled with people. THe chairs were like school yard chairs (small), and suddenly a huge man walked and everyone leaped to attention...not one to buck the crowd, I and Julia joined the group...with both of our chairs stuck to our assess. Great start :-).

The Mayor was HUGE - a black Jabba the Hutt comes to mind - with a voice to match! He promptly dismissed everyone but Julia and I...then after saying hello told us he had three children for adoption?!?!? THere are days in this country where you really want to hit the reset button... When I asked him who and how old, etc, he said under 14, and we need to speak thursday???

So my visit to the Bonobo Chimps is off for the second time so I can go and hear about the orphans the Congo Jabba has:-)

We closed out the afternoon with another visit to Our Lady Of Joyful - and we brought the new members of the group - Molly and her brother Tom (Molly is considering adoption here and wants to get a sense first). This place could lift up a dead man's soul! We visited some more and brought them a soccer ball (something they have never had) - and I think it beats the bag of plasic garbage tied up with string!

I write this at the close of the evening - in the mosquito laden Procure - sipping a Primus...the only product I know of made here (by heineken). So, Off to bed for now!

Kinshasa - 4th post

It is Monday evening and the mosquitos are going nutz here. I wish the day would end, but work calls :-)

The mosquitos are a fact of life here - one that mandates taking anti-malarials and dealing with 100% deet (almost against the law in the US due to toxicity). Malaria is an ugly problem - and I dont want it.

Above is a shot of our visist to our lady of Joyful yesterday - an orphanage that Catherine vetted and works with now. The children danced and sang for us - video tomorrow hopefully - and we so enjoyed the time. I was to set up the computer for them, but without internet, it was impossible. I brought it back to St. Anne's (the monastery where I stay) to set-up tonight - and I write this blog from said CPU.



Ok - the bugs are ridiculous - I am off to bed tonight - more in the morning.

Kinshasa - post number 2

SO - here is the "gotcha" photo of Joceline and I when I went to get her at Madame TeeTee's House. What a day! One of the things about adoption is the constant tension of wondering - wondering if they will want you - it is a choice with older kids, wondering if they are ok while you are waiting, wondering if it will workout, and of course wondering if they will change their mind. Gotcha day is about the end of wonder as much as the beginning of new things together.

Congo is a strange mix of depressing poverty, amazing possibility, incredible inneficiency, and, well...it's Africa - real Africa. On the one hand I love this country very much, on the other I hate it - and I do mean hate. My Daughter will bring the very best of this place to us - and she is already doing just that.

The first three days here have been filled with many work trips to various orphanages to investigate their work - with Joceline in tow. Long days in a car (without airconditioning) in the 98 degree heat (99%humidity also) make for happy travelers... All kidding aside - the orphanages are an uplifiting experience that elevates everyone who encounters them. I think Joceline was worried we might be trying to leave her at Sister's of Charity...but all was made right and even she was feeling good.

I keep coming back to this, but Adoption, and more to the point international adoption (to say nothing of the unique issues of the DRC) is such a complicated and fulfilling process. Congo adds many elements of complexity to this to say the least. So - next update, to keep things discrete, will be today but only about what we did today.

Final picture:



The above is the courtyard and woman with two of the children who live with her where Joceline has lived for the last year. It isfor cooking, play, laundry, and everything else!

In Congo

Hi Everyone -

I am now in Congo - I got in two days ago in the evening and this is the first day I have had internet, so a slight delay in posts. It is really good to be back here - Congo captured my heart in August, and I just confirmed today that it owns it. Joceline is awesome - she launched herself at me when we saw each other and almost tackled me! She looks great, and we are practicing english and spending quality time together (in Congo, you get to spend long hours together with literally nothing interviening) talking about he new family and the one she is leaving behind. Her new favorite pastime is playing my psp (pac-man is a shared love now...).

We returned to the Sisters of Charity (Mother Theresa's order) to evaluate it for working together as a One Small Step project. This place is simply amazing - they care for over 125 people who would have no place to go otherwise - all with grace that inspires and amazes. I hope very much we get to work with them in the future.

We are all having a beer (fanta for Joceline ) after the end of a very long day of visits and dealing with the heat - It is somewhere between hell and the surface of teh sun hot here...we have all changed clothese 3 times and taken 4 showers to try and cool off. I am happy to tell you there is no hot water here, so the showers are very refreshing

I will post several photos and some video of the orphanages and the congo in general, and some of the group overnight so everyone can view! I just cant wait to get to meet everyone!

So, while I was cussing anyone and everyone who I was carying items for as I marched from my arrival gate in Heathrow to my departure gate - apparently somewhere in Scottland - I decided a break was necessary. After clearing security again (third time this airport...) I was directed to the British Airways Concorde Room. The lounge itself is beyond luxurious - butlers, wai staff, Bar, dining room, etc, etc, but I was offered a private cabanna on arrival, probably to keep me away from the deserving patrons more than anything :-). Photo is the "room". As Ferris Bueler said in the film - "if you have the means, I highly recommend you try this" (OK, I know he said pick one up, but it doesn't apply here).

Alrighty - on to Johanesburg and Africa. I have started my anti-malarials and I am so ready to see my daughter again! Next update from Kinshasa I suspect.

Leaving Atlanta

For those of you on Facebook, you can see my daughter from yesterday - I can hardly stand the wait! For those of you I don't now on facebook, here is a photo - and many more will be coming along the way.

...so I am at the atlanta airport now waiting onthe late night flight to London. I need to rearrange all my business travel to Wednesday night at this hour - the airport is dead! I love the feeling before a long journey to places where they dont speak our language - and knowing I will get to see Joceline in a longgggg day makes this trip's feeling more acute.

Next update from Heathrow - where I have a 6 hour layover. Sleep tight!

Heading to Kinshasa Pt. 3

So Roughly 48 hours to departure to West Africa...

Given the daily level of chaos life brings our way, this trip has really not been front and center on my plate until today when my wife announced "anything I need to get for your trip, because I am not available tomorrow and you leave Wednesday". Holy crap - of course there are about 50 things I need...though I can't think of any was my summarized reply - and then I remembered: Peanut butter, the universal food for a picky traveler. This was met with a face that can only be interpreted as a "you are traveling to africa to get our daughter, visit several orphanages, assit with charitable work...and all you are concerned about is peanut butter?!?!!?" look. What is interesting, is she was exactly right :-)

On a more serious note - Kinshasa has one of the highest costs of living in the world...a harsh juxtaposition to the crushing poverty there - because literally everything but beer is imported. By way of example, eating out at the equivelent of Pizza Hutt is about $25/per person (without the beer). Second, the food is, well, interesting on balance when eating "local" - one of the favorites is monkey, so I do like to travel with some type of "you want me to eat what?" alternative. Peanut butter lives up to the task nicely :-)

Days to departure: 2
Number of bags to carry: 5
Number of changes since last post: 1 - by the airline

Next update on the way....

Job training

Periodically my wife gives me the opportunity to "try" her job, albeit in bite-sized samples. This weekend, out of necessity, my wife took the older girls to a wedding while I remained home with los tres diabolitos...I mean little ones. To make the experience more rewarding for me, she ordered up some nasty weather to insure lots of quality indoor time together.

Having enjoyed many such opportunities to learn my wife's job, I am under no illusions that it is easy, and those of you who read this surely have the sense that I am a little goofy...but today has been a bit out of the ordinary.

To set the stage, you need to know that by mutual decision, and with advise and counsel of the children (ok so we are also lazy, but humor me) we have left the arificial Christmas tree in place in the living room and plan to leave it there semi-permanently. The answer to why we chose to do this probably requires professional help to ascertain :-), but we did remove the decorations with the intent of decorating it for different holidays throughout the year.

So Gresham comes running into the bathroom - which I was using at the time - to tell me there was a bear in the tree. Now, we do live in the woods...sort of...and there have been occaisional little brown bears in the area, so my ears perked up a little. I said "which tree?", while trying to think through why a bear would not be hibernating right now. At this point Shaun joins us in the bathroom along with his sister, and all of them are chirping about the bear in the tree...in the living room! Now I was pretty certain we didn't have a bear in the house, but there was a hell of a lot of racket comming from the other room and when I entered, the Christmas tree was shaking. A loud shrill cry let me know the cat was caught in the light cords.

Now it is here I should tell you that I got a little bit of private enjoyment out of seeing the cat like this...she and I exist in a kind of "don't bother me, I wont bother you" way around the house, but I decided I should free her to spare the tree for another holiday season. Following her release the cat dissapeared and life got back to normal.

About an hour later after lunch, I managed to get 10 minutes to shower while the boys napped. As I was looking up to check for spiders (a different blog post - trust me), I stepped on something hard in the shower at almost the same time that shampoo began to run down my face making me close my eyes. As I was rinsing my hair it became clear that there were several small hard items in the shower...and when my eyes were rinsed the cat poop came into view.

While I can't prove it, I would swear that damn cat was sitting on the bathroom counter watching me have a conniption fit in the shower, and I do know for certain that all three children learned several new words to share with Mom on her return because on my wet soapy exit from the shower I was greeted by all three. Now I am off to the store for candy to buy their silence...anyone want a cat?

Traveling to Congo

I think we forget that there are many places in this world that are so very much worse off than where we sleep tonight - or maybe the reference frame is simply not there for most Americans. It is thankfully almost impossible to imagine the reality of many people who live in DRC - particularly women in the eastern parts of the country.

http://twitter.com/thousandsisters

This is the twitter address of a woman who runs an organization supporting women in DRC and she is there right now - tweeting about a situation going seriously wrong as I write this. I can assure you many people in this region will lose their life and for some possibly worse (and I can assure you there is worse) tonight...and tomorrow, and the next day - over and over like a twisted version of deja vous. This is the region of the country where the daughter I am going to get next week is from - and where both of her parents were murdered in this same conflict.

And no, the city of kinshasa (where I travel next week) is nothing like this region - I have never felt unsafe in the city. It suffers from crushing poverty, but almost no one has any weapons - they are all in the east on the front lines. In fact on the streets of Kinshasa, less than 50% of the police have a gun, and of the ones that do, only half have bullets - A testament to the incredible lack of resources necessary to fund basic civil services.

If you can steel yourself enough to read the tweets, please do. DRC doesn't have Bono and Bill Clinton lobbying for them - and while the 2-400,000 killed in Darfur is a scar on humanity, between 4 and 6 million have been killed in this region over the same time period. The numbers create a numbness that lends itself to a false sense of security and I encourage you to resist that.

I will travel with video and photo equipment next week - though there are STRONG cultural taboos associated with pictures - to try and convey a sens of the city and the country that has so captivated me over the last year.

Seat Warmers

So, I have this pretty cool car. It not only has seat warmers, but seat coolers - handy in the GA summers, trust me! I have recently discvoered a whole new use for these gadgets - and it has to date provided me with many hours of car fun and story fodder, and I have only known about it for a week.

As most of you know I have a teenage girl adopted from Congo who has been here only 5 months. Given the current socio-economic conditions in Congo, no children there have been in a car like mine (a nice lexus) - in fact my daughter tells me it is the same car the President of DRC drives - seat warmers/coolers are foreign to immigrants like my daughter.

So the other morning after another protracted silence and breakfast filled with "fine" or "whatever" (those with teenagers will immediately understand), I was enlisted to drive the girls to middle school on a very cold morning. Since there was no communication from my shivering daughter, I decided to do the good dad deed and turn on her seat warmer...something she did not notice me doing. Ninety seconds later, amid screams of "Daddy...my butt is on fire!!! Why my bottom...owwww...Daddy this make me have to go to bathroom..." and wild gesticulations in the seatbelt, I had to pull the car over - lest I kill us all in my fit of hysterical laughter.

I of course did the proper thing by telling her that cars like this - particularly Dad's car - could tell if someone had a bad attitude, and would punish the offender by burning their butt!

Car rides have taken on a whole new meaning over the last two weeks, though I suspect my fun is coming to an end - a byproduct of her more technologically savvy sisters educating her on Dad's car...and more importantly his 12 year old sense of humor :-)

Traveling Movie

...OK, its not exactly a movie about traveling in the sense I engage in most of the time, but the HBO movie Taking Chance is something very special indeed.

The movie is based on a real life story written by a Marine Colnel escorting the body of a young soldier named Chance Phelps home to his family after he was killed in action in Iraq. Let me be clear to action junkies - this movie is subtle and quietly in your face as opposed to non-stop, and it makes no statements outright with regards to US involvement in any war; rather this is a film designed to make you think...and feel, and that is an almost unheard of rarity in modern Hollywood. There are litterally dozens of slightly variant storylines moving along through the film and all of them intersect around this real life young man taken so very early.

This is not a mutli-million dollar big screen event - it was however well produced by HBO for direct to cable viewing. Those looking for a strong anti-war message will be as dissapointed as those looking for a "gung-ho" mantra - Taking Chance is neither. It will perhaps best speak to the hundreds of thousands of people who grew up in families with military ties, though I imagine everyone who sees it will come away touched.

So this will be on my IPOD for the trip to DRC next week - I hope you get a chance to see it.

Please sell crazy someplace else....

Without pointing too many fingers at people who are going to read this one day....

With any collection of 8 people (soon to be 9) living under one roof, politcs and cliques develop. When you add the respective families of origin to the mix, the show becomes the stuff of wonder - a very long running telenovela. According to the lastest episode - as narated by my mother, my wife has a drinking problem, I am embezeling money, and our children are delinquents. Now one of these is of course true, but the bail policy on jeuveniles is very generous in GA, so I am able to handle that on most days.

To truly appreciate the story, you need to understand that my mother rarely if ever leaves her house, and my father is rarely home. This gives her at least 16 waking hours to ruminate over - well - anything. So when my wife doesn't call her back within a day, or finishes an email for 10 minutes after she arrives for a visit, the clear conclusion is a drinking problem. When the children are non-comunicative as teenagers...delinquents; and when I am taking a trip to some exotic locale - embezelment.

With six children, a job, and minimal help, it makes complete sense to me why my wife might need to hide from all visitors for a few years...my children, well, I told you part of the comments were true; and well, lets just say I get paid well.

Fairness dictates that I mention this is only half of the crazy pills - we get it from all sides, but here is the kicker: we do a GREAT job of creating crazy as hell - all on our own, so, like extra ice cream and cookies for my fat belly, sell it down the street...lol.

SO...the real family crime blotter should read - Husband with a drinking problem from dealing with extended family and teenagers; a wife guilty of hiding from, well, whoever the hell she wants; and well there are still those jeuvenile delinquents...

Damn, maybe she is right, we are a lost cause :-)

Heading to Kinshasa, part 2

...so another departure change and I now leave on Wed night the third of Feb.

I have an additional bag I have been asked to carry TO Kinshasa and now I have been asked to bring an additional one home - a first for me :-)

All of these bags should prove fun as I get to retrieve them and re-check them on each leg of the journey...a side effect of my frugality and use of FF tickets on several different airlines.

Passport is back with a new Congo Visa, and I am thinking about packing for a week in West Africa. The hardest thing about this part of the world for me is that there is not a target or a wal-mart to buy what you forget!

Counters for today are:

Days to departure: 11
# of bags I have been asked to carry: 4 (and one extra on the way home)
#of times dates have changed: 5

'til next week

Travel planning

For old readers, welcome to the new location of my travel blog and for new readers...well enjoy. My next trip is the first week of February to Congo (DRC) to pick up our 7th child - Joceline. I am also traveling on behalf of my wife's non-profit agency One Small Step (www.onesmallstepfund.org ) and visiting several orphanages and agency contacts along the way.

Being the industrious traveler, I chose to use FF miles to try and get to and from Africa - being old and fat, I chose to try and do this in Business class. 450,000 miles later; 8 flights on 3 different airlines; 27 hours of travel one way...perhaps some money on a coach ticket would have been a bit easier.

So as all trips of this nature have three counters (days to departure, number of bags to take, and number of times dates have changed) here they are for fun:

Days to departure: 16
# of bags I have been asked to carry: 3 (note to readers: I have ONE personal bag - a backpack)
# of times dates have changed: 4

Keep an eye on the counters until departure on Feb 2!