Dear Family & Friends,
We wish all of you a wonderful festive season. As always, it is a time to reflect upon and appreciate the year that has passed and to explore our hopes and expectations for the year to come.
In our case, it is time to reflect on 3 years of marriage on this, our 3rd wedding anniversary. We feel amazingly blessed each day to enjoy each other’s friendship, love and support as we continue to learn and grow together. Two thousand and ten, for us, was a full year, replete with a varied complement of work, life planning, recreation and transition. In February, we finalized the purchase of a plot of land in Noetzie, near Knysna, South Africa, situated on the Garden Route, a famous road that follows the path along the Indian Ocean between the major urban centers of Cape Town where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet and Port Elizabeth. Our property is ideally perched above the Indian Ocean and the secluded Noetzie Beach that also faces a pristine nature reserve. It is there where we plan to build what will initially serve as a get-away from frantic Kinshasa and eventually become a more permanent base as we wind down the work part of our lives.
Big time sporting events also took center stage in our lives this year. With Lawrence (and two of his friends), Christopher and Richard, we spent several weeks in June and July in South Africa where we were part of what is often billed as the “greatest sporting spectacle on Earth,” made that much more special by the fact that it was being hosted in Africa for the first time ever and in our new adopted home. Most of us were fortunate to witness in person three World Cup matches (Lawrence and his buddies saw two more, Eve saw one less). The matches were thrilling while the entire tournament represented a puffing moment of pride for Africa and South Africa, in particular, which spectacularly pulled off a 1994 rainbow-type moment of goodwill, rising to the occasion of hosting a world class event of the highest standard.
Africa’s ascendency was also in evidence on the field at the Cup when Ghana became the first-ever African team to make it to the quarter-finals. They must have inspired Congo’s own TP Mazembe from our DRC hometown of Lubumbashi when at the end of the year, that soccer team became African Club Champions and, with mostly Congolese players, were the Cinderella runners up to the thoroughly international and star-studded Inter Milan in the Fifa World Club Championships! This was the first time ever that a non-European or non South American team made it to the finals of a Fifa world championship!
In September, we also attended the final week of the US Tennis Open, thrilling to Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Kim Clijsters, the Williams sisters (one on the court and one injured in the stands) and the Indo-Pak doubles team versus the heralded Bryan brothers, while thoroughly (and non-stop) enjoying New York City together with our first repeat visit after the well-chronicled first date cited in the New York Times.
Richard in the stands at the US Open
Earlier, we celebrated Eve’s 50th year on the planet in September with Eve’s parents and sister Tracey and brother-in-law Paul, Lawrence and his girlfriend Juliana at the Turner’s (Tracey and Paul) Farside Farm in New Hampshire.
Lawrence is now in his junior year at American University, having switched majors to philosophy to accommodate more language study—he is already a qualified French translator and has started Swahili. Christopher has had an intensive orientation to American life in his first semester at Barry University in Miami where he is focusing on acting—we are reflecting with him on next steps that make sense for him. Richard is also a junior but at The American School of Kinshasa high school where he recently was student director of a rock and roll musical, also played a few parts and was an ensemble musician.
Eve has continued her work as training and civil society strengthening advisor for a USAID-funded good governance and decentralization project in four DRC provinces, including Katanga, but also South Kivu (she has enjoyed seeing Bukavu and Lake Kivu) and Maniema where she has traveled beyond Richard’s footsteps even. She has been based in Kinshasa since late 2009 while Richard continued his role as Social Programs Manager for Tenke Fungurume Mining, living at the copper and cobalt mine site in beautiful mountains and savannah 180 kilometers from Lubumbashi.
Eve has revived her blog at www.firstwomaninafrica.blogspot.com where she has posted commentaries related to her work and travels.
Richard honed his diplomatic skills as a medium between community and corporate interests having to appease everyone from angry traditional chiefs to invading illegal miners, all the while promoting long-term sustainable development by TFM as opposed to short-term projects with “white elephant” potential. TFM has reduced malaria by 50%, eliminated cholera, created 5000 formal jobs and thousands of indirect jobs, built 6 primary schools and provided new infrastructure for a new high school. This has all been very rewarding for Richard who led company efforts to manage the social risks associated with what is DRC’s largest ever foreign direct investment ($2 billion, including the payment of $300 million in taxes, which we proudly publish). It was a constant balancing act where while aiming to increase the goodwill of the company’s immediate neighbors and create and maintain a “social license to operate” Richard and colleagues fought to fend off extortion artists in the form of government officials determined to consolidate the DRC’s position at the bottom of the World Bank list of the worst places in the world to do business.
In a big change, Richard has resigned on good terms from TFM and will start work on January 18th with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as Extractive Industries Technical Adviser, where he will be involved in US Government efforts to reduce the use of “conflict minerals.” The minimization of conflict and insecurity inspired by the mining of such minerals as coltan (used in cellphones and laptops), gold and wolramite, proceeds of which are used to perpetuate deadly ethnic rivalries in eastern Congo is mandated by recent US legislation. Richard will also play a key role in promoting improved mining sector governance in general with the DRC Government and through public-private partnerships with responsible private sector investors. He is excited at the prospect of taking his eight years of professional experience in the DRC to another level of national and international policy, diplomacy and strategy. But, most important, Richard, Eve and Richard Clyde (no longer “Little Richard” given his height which exceeds his father now) will be able to live together in the same town of Kinshasa, which we all love. At the same time we are sad to leave idyllic Fungurume. But Richard had a great send off where the respect and regard for him held by staff and community members alike was in clear evidence.
Patio of House in Fungurume that we had to leave
Richard’s going away at the yet to be exploited site full of malachite orebody
Richard got a mountain bike this year and has done reasonably well at getting more in shape while Eve is perfecting her clay court tennis skills in Kinshasa. She was even in an all-comer tennis match called Poto-Poto which in Lingala means “this and that”. All players, in this case, 93 in all, are thrown together in 5 rounds of doubles matches irrespective of gender. You move up and down depending on how many times you find yourself on the winning side of a set. Each round is three sets and each player plays one set with a different partner (i.e. one of the other 3 players). Richard moved to Kinshasa just in time to attend the final gala dinner associated with the tournament at which a Belgian youngster was awarded first place for the men and a Congolese woman won for the women. Eve’s trip to Lubumbashi, which caused her to miss two rounds, led to a precipitous drop in the rankings from 64 to 82 but she was pleased with her first attempt at competitive tennis.
We hope to be more and more fit in 2011. Eve is taking photos of Congo life and Richard is reawakening his interest in DRC history. One of Eve’s photos (see below) recently placed in the top 12 of a USAID worldwide photo competition. See the other photos at the USAID photo competition website for the December competition at http://www.usaid.gov/press/frontlines/fl_nov10/p16_winner101123.html.
Woman setting out tomatoes for sale early in the morning in Masimanimba, DRC
We hope you are happy and looking forward, as we are, to new and unexpected opportunities ahead of us all.
Love,
Richard/Muk, Eve, Lawrence, Christopher and Richard
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