Ok. Remember when I said I loved my stuff and I didn’t think I had too much of it?
I was wrong.
I (and let’s be honest here, it really is me and not B & C) have WAY too much stuff.
How did I discover this truth? I received the last of our shipments. Our HHE from Arlington, and our consumables. Four more crates full of sh…stuff.
You might recall the 1,600 lbs of food I sent – it’s now here. A crate full of yumminess. I was excited about that, but I (for some unexplained reason) thought that the rest of the HHE from Arlington would be maybe one more crate. Nope – it was three. It did contain a queen sized mattress and three bikes, which obviously took up a lot of room, but how did our tiny little apartment fill three crates!?
My living room on boxes…
But don’t be fooled into thinking that this means I not going to be buying anything else. Nope. I’ve got an Amazon Prime Pantry box in the works and I’ll be heading to the grocery store this morning to look for, of all things, chili powder. Seriously, how could I forget plain chili powder? I have a cupboard full of spices, about 6 different kinds of curry, and coriander, cardamom, cumin and cinnamon in all their various forms, but good old add-to-your-chili chili powder? Somehow that did not get included. So last night, as I’m making B’s top secret chili recipe for the Chili Contest on Saturday I had to go to my neighbors and beg for chili powder and now I’m headed out to buy a jar of my own. [Wait! News flash! Did you guys know that chili powder is actually a blend of spices? Of course you did, but I did not – until now – so hooray – I made my own chili powder and it has made my chili DELICIOUS!]
It is baffling that even with all this stuff I could still need more, but there it is.
C didn’t worry about there being too much stuff. She only had eyes for one thing – her bike. She has been asking us when the bike would arrive since we set foot in our house over two months ago.
She marched straight up to the supervisor and said “Did you bring me my bike?”
Catching my eye, he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It is in one of these boxes.”
“Can you please get it for me now?” C asked.
And bless him, he bypassed the boxes with the consumables and the mattresses and went straight to the crate with the bikes.
C is not always comfortable with strangers, but apparently the promise of delivering her bike made her fast friends with John. She walked up and put her arms out for him to pick her up, which he did.
“How come your truck is so slow,” she said to him.
“My truck isn’t slow,” he answered, looking puzzled.
“But it took a LONG time to get from our house in Washington,” C responded. “So it must be slow.”
We, the adults, looked at each other for a minute and then I realized what C meant.
“She thinks this is the same truck that picked up our things in Arlington,” I told him, laughing. “She saw them load a truck with boxes and crates, and now a truck with boxes and crates has arrived in Kinshasa, so to her it must be the same truck.”
Leave it to a four year old to make sure everyone has a good laugh in 95 degree heat while unloading heavy boxes.
This has been an ongoing struggle for B and me – trying to explain to C that the four inches between Africa and North America on our map are not literal. As far as she is concerned we can swim to Canada from here, so why shouldn’t a truck drive from Arlington?
C didn’t think it was funny at all, and was not impressed by the delay in finding her bike while John told all the workers in Lingala what C had said in English. But, eventually the bike was found, peddles were added and, from a four year old perspective, all was right with the world.
Our gardner asked during the unloading if he and our housekeeper could each keep a crate. “Of course,” I said. “What do you do with the crates?”
It’s an innocent enough question, right? I should have anticipated the response, but somehow I had not.
“We use it for our roofs, Madame,” my gardner told me. “They are not very strong and with the rains coming, this good wood helps keep the rain out.”
This “good” wood is plywood.
And so my stuff became to me, quite literally, an embarrassment of riches. I could feel my cheeks getting red as I stood there watching them unpack the crates. Box after box after box. A bed that no one will sleep in 90% of the time. Pillows for decoration. Dozens of wine, martini, champagne, cocktail glasses that will sit in the china cabinet. China that will only be used at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Four boxes of Christmas ornaments and decorations. And the plywood crates it all came out of that will be the roof over the heads of two people who come to my house every day to my life easier.
I was standing there watching this, feeling horrified, when our neighbor’s driver, Pappy, who I turn to with lots of questions, asked me what was wrong.
“It is just so much, when so many people have so little,” I said.
“Oui Madame,” he replied. “Mais c’est comme ça partout dans le monde. Certaines personnes ont plus, d’aucuns ont moins. Vous assurez que vous appréciez ce que vous avez.”
“It is like that that over the world. Some people have more, some people have less. You make sure that you appreciate what you have.”
This truth is not lost on me. There are plenty of people in the world who have a lot more stuff than we do. And people whose sole goal is to get more stuff. Make more money, get more stuff, on and on until they die and there is no more stuff to get. And it is as true in the U.S. in many ways as it is in Kinshasa, but somehow it is just not as obvious. Maybe because I don’t know anyone sleeping under a plywood roof – and appreciating it – in the U.S.
It doesn’t make me like my stuff less, but it certainly makes me look at it differently.
Boxes, boxes, boxes and paper, paper, paper…
And I appreciate having our tools back, and my desktop to write at, and the spare bedroom arranged.
The question I’m asking myself is whether I appreciate it enough.
a B, C, D Adventure 