“Cheers to the Unresults announcement”, we toasted on Tuesday night with a couple of vodka bottles and tequila shots. Like the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland, there was nothing to celebrate that day since the results announcement had been postponed for 48 hours, but with nothing to expect the day after, there was little reason to hold back on the tonic. Like we need an excuse anyway.
I have felt like Alice in Wonderland for weeks now actually. Nonsense and fake realities, unelections for all I know. So I wake up on Wednesday morning to work on a radio report about something that did not happen, follow Twitter updates on the situation by people who are mostly not in Congo and have unconversations with sources who can’t talk openly to the media. Thursday was a lot of the same, with the extra twist that results were postponed again, which by then wasn’t a twist anymore.
On Friday morning, a little bored, I decided to go to a mine with a freelance journalist friend I’ll call C, thinking that the results would probably be announced late that evening and -anyway- would probably be postponed again. We got up at 6.30 to leave around 7.30, except this being DRC we in fact left at 9.00 after a lot of drama involving the driver asking for a lot more money than we agreed on. Why not.
I’ll pass you the rant on how bad the road was, at this point I think I’ve lost a few centimeters from spine compression, but anyway, we made it to Karuba, a small town in the hills of Masisi. There, a few people warned us that “there is no road” to where we’re going. C, who is Spanish and speaks excellent French but gets a little confused sometimes with Congolese French, is shocked. “What do you mean there is no road?”, he said before turning to the driver who had already hinted that he did not know the way to the mine THAT well. “Are we on the wrong road?”, he asked him, annoyed.
“No, no we’re on the right road, there was no other road on the way”, the driver replied.
“But how can we be on the right road if there is no road to where we are going”, replied C.
“We are on the right road, but the road is not there anymore”, explained the driver, which only confused the hell out of C.
Vanishing roads in the land of vanishing ballots, that started to make absolute sense to me, but I kind of guessed that what these people really meant was that the road’s in extremely bad conditions and it was not going to be possible for us to reach our destination. A little clarification of French vocabulary later, we forged on, convinced that our own determination to visit the mine would magically make the vanished road reappear. Wishful thinking gets you a long way sometimes, but roads here are possibly the only thing that do not belong to a Lewis Carroll world and surely enough we stumbled upon a massive hole in the mud.
Vexed but with no other option than going back, we made our way to Goma, stopping at a market on the way so that our driver could buy potatoes (Earlier he claimed not having a single dollar to pay for the fuel, but since roads vanish here, dollars can very well appear, non?).
Back home in Goma, the driver (who has only worked half the time he was supposed to, thanks to the vanished road, and who we were paying more than we initially agreed on) doesn’t like my 10$ note. It’s not pretty enough, no no no, there is a small tear. I offer to pay him in Congolese francs instead, the local currency. The notes I hand him over are brown with dirt and lacerated, but with unyielding logic, he accepts them.
Exhausted I go to bed, the results announcement long forgotten. It’s 2pm and I’m looking at a long nap before getting back to work.
I wake up at 4pm, get dressed and walk over to the terrace after hearing my friends screaming my name from the top of their voice for 10 minutes. So its official, everyone has gone mad. Mad mad mad, I think.
As I reach the terrace I can hear Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, the president of the Independent National Electoral Commission, on the radio delivering a speech and I realized that I have ALMOST just missed the elections results! I sat down, tell my friends I had completely forgot and thanks for waking me up, try to turn the volume up, mess up, the radio squeaks and dies.
Thanks god we had butter to repair it and not jam to-morrow like the Congolese.
