My brain is too tired to do a proper entry, and I’m beginning to question whether that will ever improve. The colleagues here seem to think it’s necessary to work around the clock, but to be honest I really think it’s largely because they have nothing better to do. I’ve been through enough meetings now to be able to say confidently that time is not well managed here. At HQ, you would never get away with scheduling meetings at 8 pm and then proceeding to blather on about everything you think on a particular subject. This disease appears to be widespread, with the result that my energy and my patience are waning. If there is enough work to keep me in the office until 9, so be it. But if I’m in the office until nine because folks can’t work efficiently, that doesn’t sit well with me.

OK, so enough bitching. You’re not interested in that. You’re interested in Goma. Well you should be. It’s a fascinating place. It’s beautiful, with crinkled green mountains and the vast, cool expanse of Lake Kivu. It’s very warm during the day, but it drops to a pleasant chill in the evening. Good thing too, because air conditioning doesn’t seem to exist here. But here I’m talking about the natural environment. The town itself is, naturally, a pit. It’s less crowded than Kinshasa, obviously, which is a teeming mass of humanity such as I have never seen. (Think Times Square, only war-torn.) Still, though, Goma has a lot more people than I thought it would – and a lot more than it used to, with so many in the surrounding areas having been displaced by violence in their villages. The hillsides are criss-crossed with white lines as ordered as chalk on a soccer pitch, which upon closer examination resolve themselves into the white plastic dwellings of IDP camps.

Of course, the fact that Goma is a pit is partly related to the drama of the natural environment. The roads are just as appalling as in Kin, except instead of mud, you’re driving over hardened lava. In some places you can still see the skeletons of cars imprisoned by it. By day, the Nyiragongo volcano looks like a child’s paper mache science project: conical, standalone, slowly disgorging a cloud of smoke. At night, it glows a menacing red, hovering disembodied in the sky like the Eye of Sauron. It’s the lava that makes the Goma airport problematic, since its presence has considerably shortened the runway. Leaving the airport, you can see clearly where the commercial jet smashed through a house and into the market, leaving a great cavity in the line of concrete buildings. It’s a sobering sight.

Also sobering are the watch towers of the MONUC base at the airport, where blue helmets gaze out over sandbags and razor wire at the goings on in the street below. Their attack helicopters (yes, that’s what I said – UN attack helicopters) and other aircraft take up much of the tarmac, just as their vehicles take up much of the road. It’s interesting to see that the Indian brigade wears blue turbans instead of blue helmets, although it’s not clear to me whether they’re all Sikh or if it’s really more of a branding exercise. Certainly the fact that their General is called “Singh” would suggest the former, but I can’t confirm it.

Saturday will be my first field visit, so probably I won’t post again until Monday. Hopefully by then I’ll be a little better rested, but somehow I doubt it.