We have been in Congo for over a month now and we have got many impressions already. We’ve spent the first ten days in Brazzaville where we stayed at a catholic hostel. Much of our energy was used to learn to do very basic things such as take the bus or taxi, walk accross the street, buy water, to always use mosquito repelent, learn which sort of water is used for different purposes in the bathrooms and so on. We spent our days with Mouck, the responsible for the Gothia project here. He gave us a guided tour of the city and he showed us some restaurants, internet cafés and other good-to-know places.

When we arrived in Brazzaville there was an ongoing football tournament at one of the Gothia school facilities at Mfilou. Different teams from Brazzaville in ages that ranged between 9-16 yrs old were invited. During our first week we watched some matches, met with leaders, coaches and players and at the same time trying to get ourselves acclimatized. The missionary church was also celebrating its 100th year anniversary all over Congo. We got the chans to take part of the opening mass, there was many people, a lot of singing and many speakers. It was a new experience that lasted four hours.

We left to Pointe Noire on september 27th to attend a two week french course and to learn about customs in Congo and about their culture. We stayed at an old swedish school called Sueco, within walking distance to the town and the ocean. Apart from the french studies, we had some spare time to visit different markets, swim in the ocean and surf. During our stay in Pointe Noire we had much spare time, furtunately books and games kept us busy.

Now we are back in Brazzaville and we can finally experinece a ”normal day” as volunteer. We have been placed with families where we are getting installed. We have also started to work with the football project and during the coming weeks we will be taking turns visiting the three football facilities around the city. Everything else seems to be working pretty good despite of the cultural differences and we are learning new things everyday. Elin and Louise’s biggest problem so far have been the mosquito bites and Louise is the first out with malaria. After three weeks of stomach aches, sicknes and feber we are a bit reliefed to know what all of this came from and hopefully she will get a lot better in a few days with the help of some medicine.

Hopefully we can soon get into the rutines here and eventually have a normal day at work.

Greetings from us football volunteers
Elin, Louise and Simon