Bukavu Week 2.0

Sunday.


We are staying in Delicias, Mama Kinja’s new joint.

If you red the Congo stories, you may remember that our team used to love eating Mama Kinja’s goat meat. This time, she has opened a new restaurant called Delicias and they have on top of the restaurant apartments for rent.

It is a humble and comfortable 2-bedroom apartment with a living area and balcony across the street from the Peres Blancs (catholic order) and the local army head barracks. Further on the view is of Lac Kivu, a water filled caldera that still burps methane bubbles; a nasty gas that keeps its waters stunted in potential.

We get breakfast as part of the deal and you can see families in their Sunday best going to church, children on their way to school, people carrying goods to sell in the markets and also squads of joggers brandying Kalashnikov’s and bazookas, plus the ever-present, armed and always pointing weapons, Blue Helmets (United Nations peacekeepers) from Pakistan, China and Uruguay.

Sunday night we were sitting in our balcony and all of a sudden Sergi pointed out the light on the side of the building had hundreds of grasshoppers swirling round the hot bulb. The air was thick with those flying and the ground started filling up with many exhausted from all the frenzy. They would rub their wings and make sounds like crickets, this coupled with a downpour, made the spectacle almost surreal.

Soon the street started to fill with people carrying bottles, swooping on the ground to trap these creatures.

Sergi asked, what do you do with them?
We eat them; they are delicious and very good for the bones.
I replied, they have a lot of protein,
They are good for the bones; they have a lot of vitamins.

The insects started to zoom into our balcony like kamikazes. In no time our balcony’s walls and floor were filled with crawling bugs. Sergi would let out a scream a la Tippi Hedren in “The Birds” every time they hit him; it was a riot of nature and man.

As the bottles started filling up, one proudly said, carrying a filled regular Pepsi bottle (33cl, 12oz) I have here 2 dollars worth. I will bring this to the other side of the mountains and they will pay 2 dollars. They are very hungry, he said smiling as he had just stumbled upon a winning ticket.

How do you eat them?
Grilled. A little bit of hot oil and voila! But not the brown ones, only the green ones are good. The brown ones, they are eaten in Kinshasa.

And that is how this animal, known in my country as the symbol of hope, is a snack in this part of the world.

In the morning Sergi and I were having our breakfast in the restaurant beneath. We looked around to see many brown grasshoppers on the windows and sills. When we turned our eyes to the floor, it became apparent that those little sticks littering the floor, were legs, grasshopper legs… green ones, of course.