Dinner at Augustine och Yapeco’s place
The morning began with a cat visiting us. It had crept through an opening in the gauze window. He peeked out from behind the curtains in a few places with his sharp cat eyes. Both times he saw me, he looked frightened. Such a pale appearance he had probably never seen before. I must have looked dangerous. Better to flee, he thought, and quickly slipped his way out the window.
When we looked out we could conclude that it had been raining during the night. The earth and the people yearn for rain. Everybody hopes that the rainy season starts in earnest, the sooner the better. Once it starts to rain, the vegetation will start to grow very fast.
During the morning, Lennart and Lars-Ola worked with developing educational materials for this Saturday’s course with the teachers from the Baobab Church. Five prospective volunteers for MSG will also participate in the training on Saturday, and next week we will have a new round of entrepreneurs. Bernt wrote reports and evaluations.
Yapeco, Julienne and I visited two banks. We are not completely satisfied with the bank we have today. We are looking for a bank that we can establish a partnership with, where we can get a satisfactory service both for MSG and for our entrepreneurs. Commercial Bank of Congo, BCDC, seems interesting. We will have further discussions with this bank and we hope to arrive at a sensible result. A good bank contact’s important for an entrepreneur.
We have dinner every day at Augustine’s and Yapeco’s house. By now, we are seven dinner guests there every day. We are all very grateful to the family of Yapeco for being invited to have dinner in such a nice home. Today, Augustine served rice, boiled manioc, kwanga, cooked bananas, vegetables and fish, the dessert was fruit salad. After dinner Yapeco drove us back to Lisanga. The heat was oppressive and we were pretty tired so we took a long, good siesta.
During this good rest we took a refreshing cup of coffee on the patio, darkness had fallen and there was a lovely breeze which also refreshed us. We agreed that the temperature was like the kind of lovely Swedish summer night, which only occurs maybe once every summer. Then we went through the cargo that had arrived in Matadi with the container we sent from Sweden in July. It is now in Point Noire and should be here in a few weeks. Delivery time has been much too long, we need to sort that out with the freight forwarder. Bernt will take care of this. Unfortunately, it is expensive to send goods to Congo. When we added up the cost of customs and other fees we arrived at a price of 4000: – SEK per cubic square. Then take into account that half of the cargo is duty free. That is an incredible cost. We will carefully check if this activity will become profitable.
