Big City Girl

Made it to Kinshasa from Kindu relatively hassle-free. Have already eaten at several of the best restaurants, enjoying chilled white wine and lovely fish. Several of my Kindu friends also came, so the free meals and drinks have yet to stop. The $30/day per diem so far has gone for my lunches at local restaurants (usually costing about $1.50). I plan on blowing a lot of it on nice cheese from the grocery store.

Kinshasa is quite a headache. So much traffic! It's basically a ghetto with occaisonal nice places for rich people behind high walls or in the two nice hotels.

The project that I work on, which involves distributing household items and making seeds available to families that were displaced up until recently, is going to have a lot more money than we thought originally. The budget is essentially doubling to one million dollars. With other donations, it will probably be around 1.5 million. That's a lot of money to spend in a year! I am excited because there are villages tha t have been cut off from assistance because no roads go to them. I am hoping with this kind of money we can get there with planes, boats and other alternative means.

Hope the guys in Kindu are getting along okay without me!