Payday in the Congo

If you put everything that we do together I think we did 90% of it in the last 7 days. The quick rundown. We delivered supplies and money. We had a huge transfer with 35 changes in elders' assignments and housing. We went to Likasi. We held two zone conferences. We had the Mission Pres. and his wife staying with us for 5 days. We rented two new apartments. We got approval from the missionary department for the new Lubumbashi mission home. We made four trips to the airport taking and picking up missionaries and visitors. We changed all the records, taking off the missionaries who have left us and adding the 12 who came. We recorded baptisms, did financial reports, took pictures of all the elders for the missionary board, made lunches, cakes and banana bread and birthday cares for zone conference, and cooked lots of meals, wrote and gave talks and had a nervous breakdown. What a week!

The week began with payday planning. It's always a challenge. Remember rule #1 from an earlier post. Banking is not easy in the Congo. It goes like this. All the missionaries are given cash each month for all their expenses. So, we go to the bank to get the money for them and cash to run the mission in Lubumbashi. This is not like going to the bank at home. Remember rule #1? Payday is not easy in the Congo. We begin by writing a check to ourselves. Then we go to the bank, sit down and wait until they call us to come to the window. At the first window we can get a bank statement for the month to make sure that the money really got sent from Kinshasa. You can only do this in the first week of the month without a charge. No calling to get your bank balance and since we don't know when or how much they will deposit into our account we just have to hope it's there. This month it wasn't. So, we went home and arranged to get the deposit made from Kinshasa. Then we waited and then went back to the bank, hoping the money was now there. This time we go to a different window and get the money. It's all in crisp $100 bills that you must count at the window and verify that each bill is dated 2003 or later. US Dollars made before then are not accepted here. They say that in 2003 there was a huge problem with counterfeit US dollars. So now only 2003 or newer are usable.

Then we go home and call a money changer to come and change the $100 bills into Congolese francs. That means that they bring us roughly 7,000,000 cf. Remember that each Congolese bill is only worth $.50, so that's a lot of counting. We count it all out and package it into 32 bundles of between 83,000-125,000 fc each, depending on what expenses each elder has. We wrap each bundle with rubber bands and fill up the briefcase with all these bundles of money. By now our minds are almost totally fried from the madness of counting and bundling all those bills. It makes us crazy!

At 6:30 AM on Thursday we load cleaning supplies and the brief case full of money and anything else the elders need into our car. As we go, we check their apartments to make sure they are clean and neat and to see what needs they have.

This time, since we had a transfer starting on Fri., we picked up elders as we went. They piled into the truck all their earthly possessions. We were helping them get to new apartments and to the apartment for elders who would be leaving the city. Since we only have a five passenger truck, we had to make a route that caused us to make as few stops as possible while allowing us to get people where they needed to be. It took us almost an hour to plan the route and then they called from Kinshasa to say that the plane reservations had changed. So, we started all over with route planning. We had 35 elders who were affected by the transfer. Several times we stuffed 5 elders in the back seat of the truck. We drove for over 5 hours picking up and dropping off elders with their luggage, water, blankets, coats, pillows, charcoal, even pots of fufu.

When we get home, we are thankful that it will be another month until payday comes again.