{"id":2549,"date":"2022-05-07T15:55:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-07T13:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/senza-categoria\/update-from-the-mission-at-maison-de-paix-4\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T13:16:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T11:16:21","slug":"update-from-the-mission-at-maison-de-paix-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/projects-update\/update-from-the-mission-at-maison-de-paix-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Update from the mission at Maison de Paix"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gianni Nicol\u00ec from Maison de Paix – 7 May 2022<\/h2>\n\n

Saturday 7 May at Maison de Paix<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

It is understandable that Europeans are keenly interested in learning about the climate and terrain of the Congo. First of all, Africa is a vast continent, with diverse climates and landscapes, from deserts and plateaus to vast rivers and snow-capped mountains. We are in Ndunga, a flat but slightly sloping area, near a small town called Kikwit, home to about one and a half million inhabitants, in the Bandundu-Kwilu region of southwest Democratic Republic of Congo, whose capital is Kinshasa. Here the population is of Bantu ethnicity and Kikongo is spoken, one of the four indigenous languages \u200b\u200bof this large country along with Lingala, Chiluba and Suaili. The weather around here has only two seasons. For nine months of the year it is hot and humid, reaching temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius, and it rains almost every day with very intense thunderstorms. Then, from mid-May onwards, the dry season begins. It doesn’t rain, everything becomes arid and the colors change from lush, varied, and rich green to straw yellow. So what are the habits and customs of populations who live in a weather regime like this?<\/strong>Evidently, stoves are not used for heating here. The fire is lit to knead the lucu, that is, the polenta made with cassava flour, and the saca saca, that is, the boiled and seasoned leaves of the same plant. Here we eat mainly, if not almost exclusively, this every day. It’s sometimes accompanied by some local vegetables that a well-grown garden offers. So, weather means both the type of environment and the type of cultivation. For example, fruit is abundant, delicious, and varied. Some varieties were introduced during the colonial era from Latin America, which has similarly warm climates. Cassava itself was imported because it was a fast-growing plant, allowing locals to abandon their crops and meet the pressing labor demands of the foreign occupiers. Adapting to this climate is certainly not easy. Malaria is widespread and prevalent. The genetic defect of sickle cell anemia, similar to that of the Mediterranean, which weakens carriers, is a common problem in the area. Animal and vegetable protein intake is scarce, as is the lack of organic humus due to the sandy\/clayey soil. The saying that in Africa everything that moves is eaten is absolutely true and we have had the opportunity to verify this many times. Let’s not go into details… It’s understandable why the average life expectancy doesn’t reach sixty years, and this is further exacerbated by the lack of even a minimal healthcare service. So how do you live in Congo?In some ways, it’s even a good thing if we consider owning a hut, which is empty inside, if we accept sleeping on the bare ground and having no toilets, etc.Strange to say, but the Congolese teach us that you can live with little or nothing, with just enough to get through the evening, drinking water from springs of an indefinite color that certainly doesn’t reveal the feet of those who enter. They say that traveling and getting to know different people and situations is one of the best ways to learn. This is if we can think that the whole world is not like our home.<\/p>\n\n

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Gianni Nicol\u00ec from Maison de Paix – 7 May 2022 Saturday 7 May at Maison de Paix It is understandable that Europeans are keenly interested in learning about the climate and terrain of the Congo. First of all, Africa is a vast continent, with diverse climates and landscapes, from deserts and plateaus to vast rivers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2548,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-2549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-projects-update","tag-maison-de-paix"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2550,"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549\/revisions\/2550"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fondazionesfera.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}