I don't like where this is heading. Woke up this morning and realized what will happen in 2 years. Where did all that time go?!? (At least I had this view out the window - not a bad way to wake up, right?)How's being in Goma as far as celebrating a birthday goes? Well, it's a Monday, but it's also a holiday (the rest of the world celebrates International Workers' Day on May 1. Remnant of a time when socialism was taken seriously.). Had lunch with some friends at Zebra, an outdoor restaurant that's pretty cool. Tonight we're having dinner at Le Chalet, which is the nicest restaurant in Goma. All in all it's a pretty low key day, which isn't a bad thing.
The weekend was a pretty good way to celebrate, too. I went dancing at Coco Jambo with a bunch of friends on Saturday night. To understand that evening, you need to know that several of my friends work for an Irish aid agency that had to evacuate its program in a small village in South Kivu, due to the fact that the Mai-Mai militia fired mortar rounds into their compound last Thursday. They're all here now. So Saturday night I met a bunch of new people. They're mostly Irish and wanted me to "speak Texan" and answer lots of questions (questions I actually answered this weekend: "Do you know anyone who owns a ranch?", "Is the house like South Fork?", and "Can you shoot a gun?" (answers: yes, no, obviously.)). I got ragged on a LOT for the difference between American English and British English, but redeemed us a bit by being able to quote William Butler Yeats (Thank-you Ann Miller for making us memorize poetry. I now have lifelong friends thanks to "The Lake Isle of Innisfree").
Then someone got the idea that everyone should demonstrate their national dances (My friend Anna's depiction Finnish dancing definitely topped the Riverdance from the Irish kids. We're not even going to talk about how difficult it was to teach an Irishman to two-step to Lingala pop (Him: "It's a waltz." Me: "Close enough.").
Somewhere in the midst of all this it comes up that several people are climbing the volcano on Sunday morning, and that there's an extra space, so I decided to go along. I was so excited to get to see the volcano - you climb up one day, spend the night at the rim, and come down the next morning. This mean that I could wake up on the rim of an active volcano on my birthday. HOW COOL IS THAT?
So we left Goma about 10am, drove out to Virunga National Park, hired some porters (who turned out to be 9-year-old boys. We were sick about that, but what do you do?), and started up the trail. It wasn't very steep, but "trail" is not the most accurate word. Faint track through the jungle might be more appropriate. Things grow so quickly here that you couldn't see the trail in a lot of places. Anyway, it wasn't a hard climb, but about an hour into the hike, I started feeling really, really sick at my stomach, and like I was about to faint at the same time. I tried to keep going but was getting sicker and sicker and finally had to turn back. Patrick, one of the guys from the aid agency, had been to the volcano before so he volunteered to go back with me. I felt so bad for causing them trouble, but these are good friends. They used a sat phone to call a car back out and took me back into town. Turned out I was dehydrated. I felt terrible about it, but we got back to the base and my friend Mike just says, "So I heard you had to carry Patrick out of the forest." I am really disappointed, but Patrick says we will go again one of these days. It's good to have friends. (And the two-hour trek through a tropical jungle was fun, too. Until I got sick.)
(And Patrick is very interesting - he's worked in Southern Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Congo, and Rwanda. In 1994. As part of the French military. Which means that he was part of one of the most controversial military actions in Africa ever. Not to mention every other nightmarish place on the planet. Craziness.)
I hear that today's an unofficial holiday of sorts in the states. That's interesting. It's definitely better than the day I turned 25. That day I had 24 hours to complete an IR take-home final, during which time somebody decided to land on an aircraft carrier and declare "Mission Accomplished." What a difference three years makes.