SHONA Congo


Thursday, April 23, 2009

Vacations all around

For those of you SHONA shoppers who have noticed that our stock is low and that I have been promising the arrival of a new shipment for weeks now...
our new shipment has still not arrived.
Alas.
And for those of you who are the praying sort, you can pray that it arrives soon.

Our shipment appears to have taken a vacation in Kinshasa. We ship with DHL which offers tracking numbers where you can check the status of your shipment online. Our shipment appeared to have stripped and run off in Kinshasa. Kinshasa is not the type of place where this type of behavior is recommended for either people or packages. The tracking info showed that the package had arrived in Kinshasa on the third of April, and never left. AFter a week of theatrics of all sorts, I have been assured that our package was found in Kinshasa, and had merely been set aside because the mailing info had fallen off (that ranks on the believability scale somewhere between zero and negative 10). However I have been assured by DHL officials both here and in the US that the package has now arrived in the US and is sitting in customs. God willing, the package will actually make it through customs at some point, and by the time it arrives at our stock location it will still have something inside it. Vacations in Kinshasa tend to take a lot out of you. Literally.

So for all of you who are waiting to see our new shipment, I'm afraid the wait will continue a little while longer. However please do bear with us as we work on expanding our stock in the next couple months. We have grand plans, it is just that sometimes they take a while to shape up.

While our package was on vacation in Kinshasa, I was on a short vacation in Rwanda. We went camping in the game park. That has always seemed like a bad idea to me. Game parks are where you go to see wild animals, like lions and elephants. Camping is where you sleep outside. Does anyone else notice a problem here?

This is probably the third of fourth time that my husband and I have endeavored to camp in the game park. It is also about the third or the fourth time that we have spent the majority of the night in the car instead of in our tent. One time the tent didn't work, so that wasn't really one fault. And one time a rogue elephant was stomping around our campsite. So you can't really blame us for that either. But this time we didn't see any animals stomping around our campsite and our tent went up quite fine.

We had a friend with us, who happily hung a hammock and spent the night swaying in the breeze with apparently no problems. However as my husband and I huddled on the ground in our little tent, there was an awful lot of growling and crying coming from the surrounding darkness. Hyenas and leopards do exist in the park and so off we went to spend the night in the car yet again.

The campsite was absolutely beautiful though, and I'll try and post some pics soon.

In the meantime I would like to point out that my husband and I have already returned from our vacation. And we are back to work. It is long past time for our wayward package to return from its vacation as well.

Hopefully you will see it in our shop soon.

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