WILL DO, WHAT’S THE HURRY?

If the hairdo for an ordinary person takes upto 6 hrs to materialize, it can be assumed that both the person who’s doing it and the one on whom it’s being done are not much occupied for the day. Well, theoretically yes!

People here concentrate on one task at a time, and hardly prioritize. Notwithstanding the plight of the patients, the doctors may come some couple hours late to the hospital; the lawyers may take leave in the middle of a proceeding; the government workers may sit on one petty clearance for as long as years; the air conditioner repair man may stop his work halfway, promising to return post lunch, and then vanish for days… and so on. Nobody seems to be in hurry for anything at all. This is probably why the Congolese people are always found happy. We’d see them joking and laughing with friends on the roads, having marathon chat on the mobile, sitting at someone’s house all through the day with a long slice of bread (Baguette) and drinks… and it would to knock us off our composure to see such acts of leisure performed during the peak business hour. More so, as we could never know whom to complain about such worklessness!

Like elsewhere, the system of "bribes" too works in Congo, and at times does hasten a stalled task, but how much the bribe would influence the worker depends completely on his whims. Therefore, at times bribing just seems like extra drain of money sans result!
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We’d ask the old people (old in terms of their years of stay in Congo) how they managed to live this long, and they’d answer: “...it takes time to get used to such a pace of life, but once you do, you’ll not be able to adjust anywhere else in the world... you are rendered intellectually incapable!”