Andrew had some great experiences going through the DRC in South Kivu last week, great smiles, lots of hand waving, positive impacts, and a minor incident with a stolen–but returned–passport. This is in contrast to a rainy, rather annoying, and now rather disturbed week since I’ve landed in South Africa. I won’t bore you with rainy annoying details now, but I will say that the disturbed part is best described by significant other, Angela, blog post today.
The suspicion is not unwarranted–as you often hear here, it’s not a question of IF you will be mugged or otherwise attacked, it is only a question of WHEN.
When, for Rich and I, was last night–we were fortunate that no one was hurt and nothing was taken. Rich was able to fight the guy off and chase him away, but what struck him the most was the anger in the boys eyes and his willingness to use violence–which caused Rich to question why that was the case.
Truthfully, I think Angela has managed to talk about lots of what I’ve been thinking about in the last 24 hours. I encourage you to read her post in it’s entirety. I have been thinking about more stuff, but much of it right now is unrefined and rather a blob of stuff that isn’t entirely coherent enough for a blog.
In all I have to say this is rather ironic. In during and after the moment of being assaulted with a deadly weapon, I was fine. As a man in a storm, I survived decently. The real shock didn’t set in until much later… realizing much later that we were ridiculously lucky to have a calm head, good reactions, decent preparations, and lady luck on our side and to stupidly paranoid and panicky later.
Needless to say my first impressions of things here in Cape Town aren’t all that great right now. I do hope they improve.
