Swimming In The Congo

Follows the childhood experiences of seven-year-old Grace Berggren, the daughter of foreign missionaries living on the banks of the Congo River, and her growing attachment to the African landscape and the people both indigenous and foreign, who surround her.

I type "International Teaching Jobs" on the Google search line and find myself looking at a long list of teaching jobs all over the world. "Here's a job in the Congo," I tell my wife, Chantal. "Africa!!!?" "Yea... really. They want a calculus teacher! I can do that!" "Okay," Chantal says tentatively. "If you want." I hit the submit button and my resume is off across the world. What follows are four action-packed years of living, working and traveling in sub-saharan Africa. This book chronicles the second, third and fourth years of these adventures, including the day-to-day life of a teacher at The American School of Kinshasa from 2007-2009 who deals with a marginal infrastructure while facing the everyday challenges of living in a war-torn third-world country, and has some great adventures in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Zanzibar. This is the sequel to the book, Calculus in the Congo, Book 1.

In 2013, three friends set off on a journey that they had been told was impossible: the north-south crossing of the Congo River Basin, from Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Juba, in South Sudan. Traversing 2,500 miles of the toughest terrain on the planet in a twenty-five year-old Land Rover, they faced repeated challenges, from kleptocracy and fire ants to non-existent roads and intense suspicion from local people. Through imagination and teamwork -- including building rafts and bridges, conducting makeshift surgery in the jungle and playing tribal politics -- they got through. But the Congo is raw, and the journey took an unexpected psychological toll on them all. Crossing the Congo is an offbeat travelogue, a story of friendship and what it takes to complete a great journey against tremendous odds, and an intimate look into one of the world's least-developed and most fragile states, told with humor and sensitivity.

In July 1961, five months after Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, 14-year-old Brenda F. Berrian’s consciousness was raised by her family’s move to the turbulent Republic of the Congo. Race, Identity, and Privilege from the US to the Congo traces Berrian’s experiences of subsequently traveling the United States, Canada, France, and three other African countries against the backdrop of emerging African independence and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Detailing the complexities she faced in her global identity as a Black woman, Berrian explores how the love and support of her parents and her developing racial, feminist, and political consciousness--strengthened by her embrace of literature and music of the African diaspora--prepared her to deal with adversity, stereotypes, and grief along the way. See more info about the book here: www.brendafberrian.com

A chance discovery was the impetus for this book. I had a cerebral aneurysm, was incapacitated for awhile, and had time to amuse myself on the internet. I discovered serendipitously that chimps, our closest genetic relatives, couldn’t float. Chimps only live in Africa, and we have a common ancestor. So by extension, we must have been living with them in the beginning and probably separated from them by crossing some watery barrier there. The rest of the book all came as a result of this realization, and over the course of several years I believe I've discovered the answer to those age old questions, where did we come from, and how did we come to be? The ebook is best viewed in colour.