A Congolese New Year

New Year's Eve passed rather uneventfully for me. All of the young people went to a party at the Ole Cultural Center, but I stayed back. It would have been cool except I'm not a huge party person where I don't know the language and the party is going to last all night and I was already tired when they left at 9. I spent my New Year's Eve e-mailing Megan while she was at work doing nothing.

New Year's day came and was a pretty relaxed morning. I started playing Age of Empires III on my computer and then Charles came to pick me up. Charles is the teacher for the school at HEAL Africa. He deserves a post just for him and his school some day. We drove to his house and it was pretty cool. We drive off the main road and into a compound after maybe 3 or 4 minutes. The compound is fairly large with a nice house in the middle. At the back of the nice house are "normal" houses made of wood almost put together tightly (the wood is warped and not cut even so the boards don't line up well) and covered with simple tin roofs. We hung out first though in the shade of some trees in front of the main house. Charles had a bunch of his friends there who knew varying degrees of English and it was really cool. We talked about all sorts of things about getting married and living in the Congo and US as well as what I liked about the Congo and some of the problems of the people gathered there. It was really cool. Oh, and this was all done over Primus beer. It's not bad at all, but it's also usually not cold, so that works against it.

After maybe an hour and a half the food was ready. We sat around a table with a pagoda set up over it and the food was brought out. There was cabbage with mayonnaise and onions (a simple cole slaw), fries, goat meat, corn fufu (basically a mass of cooked starch - cassava, maize, wheat), and the specialty. When the plate was brought to the table I knew it wasn't normal stuff. There were two goat hearts cut in half and maybe 8 pieces of lung wrapped in intestine. I tried asking Charles' friends to see which one was the best and each person had a different answer and finally they said I had to choose. I opted for the intestine wrapped lung. The lung itself was a cylinder shaped piece maybe 4 inches long and 3/4 thick. It was grayish in appearance and had a texture similar to a sponge, but after biting into it, was more chewy and rubbery than a sponge might be. The intestine was a beige colored hose wrapped around the lung and had a texture similar to a balloon. It didn't taste that bad. It had a slight aftertaste like liver, but not nearly as strong. I ate it with a lot of fufu and it was fine. It added something to the plain corn flavor and didn't overpower it too much. I also just ate pieces of it too. The first bite I just picked it up and had at it. I'll leave it at it wasn't bad, but I'm going to stick to regular vs. organ meats if I'm cooking.

After eating (with our hands - they had forks but hands are so much more fun and economical) I saw Charles' room. It was pretty small, but he was the only person staying there. It was actually two rooms, a sitting room and a bed room, and it was nice. He had the wall covered in posters and pieces of cloth and it really didn't look bad. Maybe my standards are completely falling, but I could see myself living in a place like that and being fine with it.

We tried going to a club to take another drink, but they were really crowded, so we just went to a simple bar. A bar might be a strong classification, but it was a place where you came and got drinks. There really wasn't a bar though, so that's where the classification problem lies. Unfortunately I forgot to get my camera from Harper (she was borrowing it) so I don't have any pictures, but I plan on going back to his house, so I'll have some of them some time.

Happy New Year!