It is sad to say that so far, the most significant change that I’ve experienced in my daily routine up to this point, is Internet withdrawal. The connection to the Internet here is sparse at best, and nonexistent much of the time. It’s extremely frustrating, given that I have grown so accustomed to looking things up on the Internet when I need a piece of information, or being able hop over to Facebook, or e-mail, to make connections with the significant people in my life. It seems like I spend a significant chunk of my time here, just trying to see if the Internet connection works. It has varying degrees of not working -- the worst of which, is right now.I have recorded a podcast, am completely unable to upload it. I might have to end up compressing my shows down so that the audio quality sucks, just to get the file size down, so that uploading it can be a reasonable proposition. It’s very frustrating to be sitting on a show, and unable to set it free.       

   My colleagues that are in the building with me are watching a movie, but I opted to compose a blog entry instead.

    My permanent place of residence has yet to be set, which is fine with me -- given the fact that at least for tonight, I get to stay in a palatial house that has a great big pool to float around in late at night, before I go to bed. I spent about 15 or 20 minutes doing just that last night, marveling at the fact that I am on a chunk of land that has connections to humanity much older than any other piece of land that I have stood on (or floated above) before.

    My visits to the third world have been few and far between, but I do believe that I would have to say that Kinshasa is my favorite so far. I am glad that I lived in the Mission District in San Francisco for as long as I did, because it helped me to build up more of a callus, which is needed in places where there is a lot of desperation and suffering. Everybody’s got a hustle. Everybody seems to have a hard knock weight around their neck in one form or another. In my old neighborhood in San Francisco, I saw three separate people who were shot (one of them was dead), and one very drunk man, who had a deep gash that was stapled together from one corner of his forehead, down across one eye (which had been obviously lost, due to the injury), ending at the lower corner of his jaw on the opposite side of his face. That was sort of training wheels for Kinshasa. Another similarity, is that in the Mission, there’s always some homeless guy there to “help” you park your car, by waving you into an empty space that you already saw with an empty cup for you to place money and after he’s done waving it around (or at least he hopes so...). That hustle is small beans, compared to the variations here. Not only will you have someone waiting you in, but you’ll also have somebody putting a “parking ticket” on your car after you leave it, and then rushing out to you once you get to your car, claiming that you owe them money. That is only one of about 20 hustles that you will have lobbed in your direction every time you leave the house. There is also no shortage of hungry street kids, who look like they are messed up on some sort of inhalant or another, begging at your car window every time you are stopped for some reason. There are guys by the side of the road, holding out puppies who are undoubtedly too young to be taken away from their mothers, in the hopes that somebody will buy them. V and I watch the show “Animal Cops” pretty routinely, and the way that people in the United States treat their animals can be pretty horrific, and I can only imagine what sort of horrors lie all around me -- both with people, as well as animals. It’s a pretty intense place, to put it mildly

    Tonight, I exercised my giant brain towards the execution of a task that I like to call “breaking the giant water filter that everybody in Smallpower relies upon for their clean water”, which I did quite handily. I have to figure out how to fix it before I go back to my place, so that we can have water to drink tomorrow that will not give us dysentery. Can you say “super genius”?

    From what I understand, there are generally two tiers of consumer goods here: The first of which, is available to most people, and is generally pretty reasonably priced—and can actually be pretty cheap. A lot of this stuff comes from China. Then, there is everything that you and I generally are accustomed to In our daily existences. If you want a bicycle, you’re going to pay twice what you would pay in the United States (and possibly much more). Same thing goes for power tools, and most electronics, and much, much more. There is so much corruption here that it is hard to get decent consumer goods into the country without paying off a ton of people. Combine that with difficulties in transporting things here, and you have a recipe for very expensive stuff -- especially if you are Caucasian (which automatically jacks the price way up, given that there are not any marked prices on anything in any store).

    Well, it’s getting pretty late, and I must be off. Not exactly sure what I’m going to get another blog entry composed, but I will have another podcast finished before too long, I am fairly sure.

    Peace the hell out...

grizzly ghostly spec