Dear Mister President
President of Congo is supposed to come and visit the Equator, the poorest region from the poorest country in the world, my new home... The president knows he is not welcomed to this place. At the last “election” his main opponent Dear mister JP Mbemba, living at the international penal court right now... got 94% of the votes. Each single guys from Equator dreams every night that Mbemba will be released from jail and come back to this country where NOTHING works and save it...
Bref, the current president is coming. Why? Officially only to visit the region, inofficially to begin campaign for the new election. He might come tomorrow at Basankusu, he might come in a week nobody knows. He might come with 10 people he might comes with 100 nobody knows... Everything is kept secret, because he knows he has lots of “chance” to get killed here. So lots of issues have to be solved: where can he live? There is no decent house with electricity and current water. How will he come to Basankusu? He is supposed to come my car, but there is absolutely no road for that.
The governor of Equator and the mayor of Basankusu will have to explain why the money sent from Kinshasa and the taxes paid by people here never went for the maintenance of roads, of rivers, of electricity network... And because they don't want to explain that they re introduced “travail forcé”
So for 1 week, travail forcé (“imposed work”?) have to be executed by everybody. Everybody is obliged to maintain roads around where he lived. So you can see mums with the machette (this long knife to cut) to cut big herbs, pupils trying to fix the road with their hands (nobody has material to do anything...) If you don't do it, the military people beat you with wood stick and make you pay... So I did it too!!!
It is really incredible what happens here! And it has to be done because otherwise people who put the state money in their pocket would give a bad image of their region... People do it, without complaining. When the mums do that they cannot go tho the forest to get food for the whole family, so people has not eaten for many days in a row and still works under the sun for a president who might come, who is responsible of their misery and that they hate...