Part of my intense hatred for flying stems from an unfortunate incident David and I had when traveling to Canada for Christmas a couple of years ago. We were caught in the totally bungled holiday air travel of 2004. We were stranded at more than a few airports for more than a few hours (days) and stranded without luggage at our final destination for more than a few days (a week). My heart rate shoots through the roof every time I think about it. Since then, I’ve mostly tried to pack light and not check luggage for any reason. For this 10-day trip, I very deftly packed everything I would need for any situation in a tidy little carry-on with "one personal effect such as a pocketbook, briefcase or laptop bag." But when I boarded the plane for Paris, it quickly became apparent that the other passengers around me had very large personal effects and my tidy little carry-on was not going to fit in the overhead bin. The flight attendant took it from me to stow below, which would have been fine except she came back and said, "I went ahead and checked it all the way through to Kinshasa."

I wanted to ask for it back; I could just hold it in my lap. But things were going well so far, and they had already lost David’s luggage that week, they couldn’t possibly lose mine, too.

Of course they lost my luggage. I should be so lucky as to arrive somewhere I’ve never been that’s hotter than the third ring of hell, comparable to home but without air conditioning, and meet with presidents and prime ministers every day wearing clean clothes and deodorant.

My experience in the actual country has been much, much better than any experience with any airline ever. Maybe it’s because I’ve researched the Congo so extensively, or because I’m married to an Africanist, or because I worked at The Carter Center for four years, living and breathing the ins and outs of desperation and disease in Africa, that I don’t feel like a stranger in this place. Maybe it’s because of those things. But I will confidently assert that through my voracious consumption of People magazine, Oprah and Angelina that have made this place so accessible to me, the American consumer. As such, I’ve been immensely concerned about how to describe what I’m seeing and doing for fear of perpetuating stereotypes, clichés and common misperceptions. When Angelina goes globetrotting and People puts up a map of Africa with little dots of all the places she goes, the lone photo they include of Ethiopia can’t possibly cover the range of cultures, ideas, faiths and living conditions she will encounter at each of those dots. Something that has long bugged David about his work and travel is how quick people are to generalize Africa and its culture, but one can no more generalize the United States, all of North America or all of Europe as having one culture than you could Africa, and so it has to be understood that describing Kinshasa represents only Kinshasa and the Congolese here. And even then, it’s just a small part of a huge, diverse country, which is a small part of a huge, diverse continent.

As part of The Carter Center team, I have been assigned a car, a driver and an assistant who speaks French since my French-speaking leaves something to be desired. If this country were Spanish-speaking. . .I would probably still need an interpreter, but I would at least understand half of what is being said about me, instead of only the laughter at various intervals when I appear to have said yes-yes when I meant goodbye and goodbye when I meant I don’t speak French (which I think they understood). But the people have been incredibly accommodating, and as such I’ve had the opportunity to spend almost all my time so far with Congolese locals.

My media assistant, Christian, is from east Congo in the Kivu area. Together we have driven all over Kinshasa, been in and out of a few shops, talked to people, had lunch in a restaurant, visited polling stations for Sunday’s elections, and today we visited a local woman at her house to talk about the elections and the work that she does in the community. In the car and at lunch, Christian talks about the Congo, about protocols and local custom, about people and their beliefs, about education and poverty, about the elections, about the government and military and about the will of the people. He makes the point that people have a lot of faith in the elections, a lot of hope, but people need more than hope. He said there are a lot of people who have the will to make the Congo better, to bring people out of their misery, but they do not have the power. "And the people who have the power, they do not have the will."