Where Did You Go?

I should start out by apologizing for not updating my blog since September and I should probably start by telling you why. The last blog was about celebrating my 1 year anniversary in Africa. It wasn’t the worst year ever by far, but it also had a lot of ups and downs. The months after my last year are ones that I would love to have back. They weren’t happy months; they were dark and dreary and depressing months (And not in the weather sense!)

In September several things happened. I finally caught on that we were majorly overspending on a large USAID grant that was going into it’s final months. As I brought that into the open, there were major consequences to our programming and ultimately to the job of our Country Director. That was a stressful time for me. In some respects I was the golden child who was here to “fix” years of problems; that is something that can’t be done overnight. I felt unspoken pressure to work as long and hard as I could to fix the problems. Then came time to get our upcoming Fiscal Year 2009 budgets uploaded into our accounting system. Three days before they were due, I was told that I would be doing them. And with that piece of news my Finance Director went on holidays. WHAT??????? Talk about more stress than I could handle. Add to that the major culture stress I was going through living in Congo. Then October rolled around and so did the resumption of war in North Kivu. While we were distanced from the fighting, the repercussions spread to Bukavu and resulted in a female colleague and I being evacuated to Rwanda for a 24 hour period. This did little to relieve the overwhelming amount of stress my mind was fighting.

The result of all this…I pulled away. I isolated myself from friends and reality. I spent a lot of time on my own watching TV on my laptop or on the TV. I stopped going to church, refused to go to Sunday Bible Study and even stopped wanting to attend Tuesday night women’s group. And worst of all, there was absolutely nothing positive I could say about Congo or the Congolese. And that was definitely not who I am. But the more I felt that way the worst I felt; and the farther away I felt from God. It was like I was drowning, could see the hand reaching towards me but refused to grab hold. And as I sank deeper and deeper the less I felt like doing simple things…like updating my blog. Depression…maybe. But I think it was more major culture stress, language stress, work stress all taking a big bite out of my psyche. By the beginning of November I knew that if I didn’t get out of Congo and Africa for a break, I would be packing up my bags and leaving for good.

Now the good news…I went home. I will tell you all about that and what it means to be back in DRC later. But now I need to go back and tell you about some of the things that happened between September and December…..