This Global Walk Outside | Day 26: DR Congo
Emilee lives with her husband, four little girls (ages 1-6, with baby due in Dec), and her parents (yes, the grandparents are close by!) in the crazy but beautiful mountains of rural eastern D.R. Congo. After making a few short trips to the area since 2012, they moved full time in 2018. Due to conflict, childbirth and C19, they've been stuck in Burundi/US for a large portion of the time. Emilee is a TCK herself, who grew up in the Middle East, and is excited to be raising her own TCKs. She's a classic ENFP with a never ending cycle of interests: travel, medical/birthing, coffee, cooking, journalism, photography, audiobooks of every genre, psychology, brainstorming/problem solving any topic, etc. She's extremely grateful to be a part of online communities for expats like Taking Route.
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From the front door out towards the front gate. Gates/fences are crucial to keep out the cows, which usually roam free without supervision, just like the local toddlers/children most of the day.
Turn left, our “Gazebo” under reconstruction.
Looking back toward the house from the gate.
Culturally, you invite visitors into a covered area to have meetings/visits. For us, it provides much needed privacy so that the house isn’t under the constant siege of people that flow through daily. The house is technically the volunteer house and our organization’s “headquarters”.
I love the fact we have so much property. Due to security, the majority of the time the girls and I really can’t go anywhere, and it’s wonderful to have the back yard for them to run around.
Garden 1: Mainly an experimental/personal vegetable garden.
Garden 2: Mainly just pineapples at the moment. They can take up to two years to grow due to the cooler climate.
Outside our gate is a main thoroughfare. The whole region lacks any real form of infrastructure, so no paved roads or essential grids, but we do have a dirt airstrip, which is our only way in and out of the region.
Culturally, you greet EVERYONE who calls to you while passing by or you are an extremely rude human being. People must think I’m super unfriendly when I just say hello, wave and go right back to work. It’s one of those strangely hard things to adjust to.
Most homes just have packed dirt areas around the house and a little yard, so ours is quite luxurious. Our area for work/laundry only had a small cement strip at first and was completely impractical. Putting in the large pad was our first priority.
Chores consume life here. One of my favorite parts of the culture is that women and girls do everything as a community, helping each other out, different generations taking on different chores.
We brought back an old fashioned clothes-wringer (yay Amazon.com!), which immediately improved life and the mamas love it. Daily, full on torrential storms in the wet season can make laundry take days to dry, so the wringer dramatically speeds up drying time.
On weekends, the girls love to use chalk on the cement pad. If you are our youngest, maybe take a nap right in the middle of your sisters’ art project and get covered head to toe in chalk.
Almost full circle to the front of the house. Behind the girls is our outdoor spigot with water from the local spring. Our partners at the university received a grant to develop the spring for the whole community and it is the only one like it in the region. What a huge blessing to have running water onto the property and now in the house for sinks and toilets!