Score!

Well, almost anyway.

I've been trying to find maps with sufficient resolution to plan my kayaking adventures. There's plenty of time since my kayaks and I will not be united in Congo until early 2014, but it may take that long....

Yesterday, Saturday, I set off to see if the Institute Geographique was still where I remembered from so long ago. Walked from the hotel to Blvd 30 Juin and guessed at a left hand turn. Just as I was about to accept failure, there it was, seemingly unchanged from the 1980's.

The old man at the gate selling air for tires from a compressor older than he said they were closed, but what did I want? Turned out there was someone there who might help me out. We limped over to the veranda and he called slightly less old gentleman out. Yes, he said, he could help me with a hydrology map, please come.

He escorted me down the hall that hadn't seen paint since independence (the first one) - nor a good dusting for that matter. Opened a door into a closet sized room, while he entered through another door. My side of the desk that separated the 2 doors was full of stacked plastic chairs, paper, cobwebs and yet more dust. There were 2 clean plastic chairs set hard up on the desk and he welcomed me to one. On the other side of the desk, intertwined electric wires crawled up walls and hung down in random intervals, intended perhaps to sport light bulbs. But now illumination came from florescent bulbs behind me. A small television with twisting images fading between color and black and white was on. I looked to see if his bed was set up there, but apparently he slept sitting up in the chair.

He opened an armoir and started pulling out rolled up maps, peering down the roll or opening it slightly to find what he was looking for. Each was discarded into a new random pile in its turn, until he found mine. I didn't have my reading glasses with me, but he lent me his to inspect a detailed map of navigable tributaries of the Congo river, edition 2005!

While it is not so very detailed (the key includes rapids, but that symbol doesn't appear on the map) and no roads or villages are indicated to help figure out put-in/take-out options, I had to have it. $50 if I came on the weekday and bought from the store, $40 today's price. Maybe some of that could go for soap for the floor or walls, or desk, or chairs.

More on the congitation side - on language

The national languages of Congo are French, Lingala, Kinkongo, Kiswahili and Tshiluba. An increasing number of peoople speak some amount of English, including members of the administration, but it is not widespread or especially useful.

I remember back when I was in Peace Corps training. I was going to be teaching biology and chemistry in French. Other colleagues were math teachers and more still were "english as a second language" teachers. An significant amount of the training was dedicated to teaching us French. I had taken French classes in high school and college, but we had a wide variety of talents as volunteers.

One day, the trainers annouced at dinner "from this moment forward, total immersion. We want to hear no pockets of resistance speaking English". One of the math teachers immediately stood up and enthusiastically started greeting everyone around him in French. I assumed he was one of the advanced classes. Imagine my surprize when I - one of the worst pockets of resistance - walked past the class of rank novices and there he was. He went on to enjoy 2 years of teachning math and his French never got beyond the most rudimentary if enthusiastic level.

I'm reminded of this by 3 people I have had the recent pleasure of with in Congo. One has thrown herself into the work, going far and wide within the country, never hesitating to volunteer for a mission here or in other francophone countries. Imagine my surprize when I heard her speak. She could barely put a sentence together and her vocabulary was more spanish than french. Everyone we met and owkred with understood her, waited patiently for her to finish and provided appropriate answers to her questions. They even seemed to prefer to be interviewed by her than by me with my intermediate french.

The other 2 colleagues speak at least as well as me, but are much, much more worried about the proper grammer, gender, conjugation. They constantly beat themselves up and study to speak more perfectly. They are probably harder to understand than the first as they search for just the right word, repeat the verb until it is the correct conjugation and apologize repeatedly during the shortest conversation.

So, firm in the belief that language is about communication and not the mechanics of sentence construction, I hereby commit to never learning to speak better French.