Mfuti!

So…I swam in the Congo River!!!! It was amazing…really breathtaking! We went on Sunday!

It was the birthday of the administrative director of the school—Esses who is a Nigerian doctor and came here about two years ago. She was so nice to invite all the different people that work in ISSI and Carolina and I got to go.

We went to a place called Mfuti. It’s about 1 hour and a half-ish from where I live, and they came and picked us up in a large 4-wheeler jeep. If the roads were actually in good condition it would probably only take half the time, but there was a reason we got driven in a jeep.

About 45min into the trip we turned into dirt roads that were very 4-wheeling worthy. At one point the car was at about a 30-degree angle towards the left and I thanked God we made it through that stretch—unfortunately the worst was not over. We had many similar, even worse stretches where the road was so narrow and tilted that the mud-dirt walls on the sides of the road actually helped us not tip over.

But it was all worth it when we started descending from the hills and we saw the majestic Congo River!! On the other side of it was Congo-Brazaville, as it’s called here, or the Republic of the Congo. We got to a very pleasant flat area where a stream came to join the river and made a bay and the sand was almost white—it was like paradise!

Carolina and I decided to swim to the other side of the bay since some of the people that had been there before mentioned that it would be ok. (Picture of the water with the white beach on the other side is the distance we swam.) When we got to the other side a flock of people that lived in the village near by came to greet us. They barely spoke any French and started speaking in Lingala—the language of that region. We were able to make some conversation—they were amazed that we had made it there. Normally, people here don’t know how to swim very well.

We made our way back to our friends on the other side and some of the girls that we had spoken to followed us over in a pirogue. (The picture with the little girls and Carolina is one where we are sitting in a pirogue.) After some negotiations one of my colleagues got us to go on a tour in the pirogue as part of Esse’s birthday present.

Once we came back a “papa”—what everyone here refers to as a man, its so cute!—came in his pirogue and started telling us that we had to be careful “faire attentions!” there were crocodiles in the water!! When I heard that my heart skipped a beat and Carolina’s face showed it all—we had been sooooo lucky and our inexperience was the only reason why we had crossed the bay—no wonder they were soo amazed! And on top of that when we got back in the water the current really picked up, we would have floated away had it been that strong when we were swimming back---oh what a day full of adventure!

(The last pictures are of all the boys and girls that would come to our cars as we drove back through the villages shouting mundele, mundele and demanding something. We ended up giving them the left over treats we had from the birthday.)