movie night

This is Darlene.  While I was in DRC, I wrote most of a blog post one sleepless night.  I'm finally coming back to it because it was something I want to remember.

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Today was Parent's Day in DRC, which meant an official holiday and a day off work.  I ended up working anyway, but at a slower pace involving a long, rambling meeting and working on my computer while watching the Olympics off and on.  Good thing my day was relatively relaxed, because I ended staying out late--and then staying up late pondering what I had just experienced.

My colleague arrived back in Kinshasa today and invited me to movie night with his kids, saying that he was certain that the kids would want him to have a movie night as soon as he returned.  I accepted the invitation heartily for the opportunity to get to know my colleague and his family better and to get out of the hotel.  He promised to steer the movie selection in my favor (i.e. away from Texas Chainsaw Massacre).  I was thankful, never ever really having cultivated a taste for horror flicks.

It is hard for me to sum up the feeling of being out-of-place, safe, happy, sad, and confused that mingled together during the evening.  You see, his "family" is a large collection of children and young adults with physical disabilities.  My limited French was enough to catch many of them calling him "ma pere" -- Dad.  They were extremely happy to see him back and in good health.  Several chided him for smoking a cigarette ("all of them are now doctors," he said).  

Nearly all of them (and there were at least 50) presented themselves to him and to me, a few carried, most using braces, crutches, or other aids to walk towards us, and shook our hands in greeting.  Some are resident in the house/office--undergoing rehabilitation, awaiting surgery, and/or learning to use their new equipment.  Others were formerly the recipients of such work and are now working to help others through designing braces or guiding the new ones in their walking.  We sat, talking and drinking sodas in an open-air courtyard while we waited for someone to fetch gas for the generator so that we could watch the movie.  We sat along one wall of the compound/courtyard, while most everyone else sat along the opposite wall.  One boy, deaf/mute, cried a good deal of the time, others paced back and forth practicing with their crutches, several of the young ones were sitting, watching us or keeping themselves occupied with each other or their mothers.  Without being able to speak much of a language any of them could understand, I felt a bit useless at times.  At one point I remember thinking to myself how silly it was for me to wear cropped pants for this venture; this I believe came to mind as dusk approached and the mosquitoes began swarming.  Useless or no, I'd smile, try to cheer on those pacing, intermittently talk with my colleague, and listen as he spoke in Lingala with the older fellows.  Lingala, as a matter of fact, as a Bantu language, has some similar words to Swahili, so there were some few words I could at least understand.  

Have you ever been in a situation that is surreal--in which you wonder how you got to that place right there and how you could ever explain it to another person?  And I don't mean surreal in a bad way.  Just in a--I would have never expected or predicted that my life would bring me here to this moment--way.  That's how I felt when we gradually piled into the room were the movie was being set up.  Of course, as the guest of honor and the boss/dad, we had individual chairs in the back with a good view and a table for our beverages.  Several benches surrounded us, and then in front were dozens of smaller children on the floor, all eagerly awaiting the movie.  The room vaguely smelled of urine, but the odor didn't linger all that long.  I smiled at the young fellow next to me and wished him a good evening au Francais.  A giant smile and "bon soir" was returned to me. 

I never expected to watch a South African-adapted opera with 50+ kids, 3 and up.  I never expected that Carmen, an opera written in the mid-1800s, would be so translatable to a current-day township.  I never thought so many of the kids would pay such close attention throughout the opera, not stirring, not losing attention or making noise, most of them not sleeping.  (And I've never been more nervous that I would get bitten by mosquitoes.)

We watched another movie with Sean Connery in it before his James Bond days (something about leprechauns--look it up; it's a classic).  Another stranger than fiction moment.  I am very thankful to have been a welcomed intruder on this family movie night.

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I have a lot of thoughts about that night.  It was capped off by a flat tire and a brief walk home through the streets of Kinshasa to my hotel (accompanied to the lobby, of course).  But I think my overarching emotion, with the entire swirl that I experienced that night, was thankfulness.  One of the "kids" that walked with me from the flat tire incident toward the hotel stood outside the lobby when we arrived.  I had to coax the young fellow into the lobby while my colleague and I talked about logistics for the next day.  I wanted to tell him that I had done nothing to deserve the privileges in which I live and breathe every day.  And at the same time, that he should hold his head high, even in (and especially in) that crazy, high society place.  Accomplishments are not all measured in dollars and fancy clothes, but in fact in many cases, in putting one foot in front of the other.