The other night we were talking about what it's like to live in Kinshasa, how you meet people, who are they, and I asked my co-worker about the NGO scene. Surely it’s easy to meet people in that circle? What about UN parties, medecins sans frontiers etc…?
well he let’s out this huge laugh and described that in the hierarchy of coolness of expats, WWF is apparently the bottom rung of the ladder. this was a total shock to me.
At that point a little musical interlude blooper reel cycles through my head, with images of the guys at the office loading stuff onto the roofs of vehicles, where they push more stuff from the back, the load ends up sliding down the windshield. Or the overweight quebecois guy with long hair and bulgy eyes whom you barely understand when he speaks French (it seems he only talks about mangwain, whatever that is), how there's never any toilet paper, and the we managed to destroy 2 boats in 2 days...etc...etc...
So i guess at the very top level of coolness you have diplomats, but you don’t really mingle with them unless you have a connection. Neither do you with the UN. They are overpaid, act like their shit don’t stink and if they are guys they spend half their salaries on prostitutes and if they are girls they are 22 years old and get their hair braided African style and just loooove Africa, omg it’s so great!
If there was still a peace corps here, they would probably come next, and then the NGOs. Though the ones building latrines walk some moral high ground over us, and since the rest of the conservation NGOs are apparently all run like they are on rails, and by prettier people, at the very bottom, well I guess that leaves us!
i was pretty bummed to find that out, but he ended it with, Aurelgrooves, don’t you know? “ils nous prennent tous pour des gros cons!”
