Asher Kaufman, at 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He spent the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He arrived in Uganda on September 15. From Uganda he traveled by car to Rwanda on September 28. After a week in Rwanda there was once more a return for more travel in Uganda. On October 11 he arrived in Tanzania and on October 26 traveled to Kenya. A visit for three weeks to Madagascar followed on November 7 and then South Africa. He spent several weeks in Cameroon and then the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The following dispatch concludes the visit to the DRC and chronicles the arrival in Angola.
"The trip to the airport on March 21 went off without any serious hitches, mostly because Fr. Francois made sure we left with plenty of time. Nevertheless, it took over four hours to get there and included such adventures as navigating around trucks and vans foundered on soaked dirt roads.
Once we reached the airport, we still had some time, so I invited Fr. Francois and Fr. Apollinaire to get something to eat at the restaurant situated in front of the check-in desks since they had not managed to have any dinner. The restaurant was a rather sad operation at this time of the evening, mostly cleaned out of anything decent and left to peddle lousy beer and overpriced sandwiches. To make matters worse, they somehow did not accept credit cards, dollars, or euros.
Having been thus thwarted in our quest for food, we took a picture together and then went our separate ways. 
I checked in, cleared passport control, went through security, and arrived at the gate still with over an hour left before my flight.
The airport in Kinshasa is not a large one, though it serves a city of 17 million people. All of the gates fit comfortably into one large room, with buses filling in on the tarmac and transporting the passengers to their respective planes.
After the large airliners bound for Paris and Brussels loaded up and thundered down the runway, the only flights left for the evening were to Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, and Luanda. Soon the boarding process began, and before long I found myself before the Angolan Airlines jet that would take us to Luanda. It was curious looking, with a color scheme that seemed like it had not been updated since 1990. The hammer and sickle painted on the side, a holdover from Angola’s past as a communist state and close Cuban ally, completed the look. On the inside, the sense of malaise was only magnified by rather dirty, stained walls and small, uncomfortable seats.
After the usual formalities of passenger counts and safety instructions, the plane took off, and I soon fell asleep.
I was awakened about forty-five minutes later by a loud thud and jolt as the plane sat down rather heavily on a runway threshold. We had arrived in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, or as I like to call it, “the other Congo.” Originally, the region now called Congo was colonized by both the Belgians and the French. Once it achieved political independence, the Belgian Congo took the name of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the Congo-Kinshasa, to use the name of its political capital. Meanwhile, the French Congo took the name of the Republic of Congo, or the Congo-Brazzaville. In flights from Europe or Ethiopia, typically planes will land at both destinations to maximize efficiency and make the most of what is probably a low-yield market. For example, when I came from Paris, the Air France jet continued on to Brazzaville after leaving some passengers in Kinshasa.
In reality, the cities are right next to each other, separated only by the Congo River. In high rises on either side of this waterway, the other city is clearly visible. However, there are no bridges connecting them, so anyone wishing to cross needs to seek the services either of a boat or plane.
This flight between Kinshasa and Brazzaville is known in aviation circles for being notably short, stretching only sixteen miles. The fact that such a route is flown by giant Airbus A330s that have just made the trip from Europe adds a ridiculous connotation to the whole affair.
After arriving in Brazzaville, the plane taxied to the gate, and some passengers deplaned, while others boarded to take their places. I myself nodded in and out of small dozes and waited for the plane to be on its way again.
Eventually, we took to the skies, and I soon passed out again and was only awakened by a flight attendant coming by with the food cart. Thinking that they could probably save themselves the trouble of meal service on this 12:20-3:45 a.m. flight, I nevertheless accepted the sandwich, apple, and chips that were proffered to me.
By 3:00 a.m., the flight landed at the Dr. Agostinho Neto airport in Luanda. This is a large airport recently constructed and even more recently opened. The airport stood in marked contrast to the plane, which I described as seeming to have remained in the Soviet era. The airport was pristine, spotless, and pleasant-smelling, its cavernous hallways and large bathrooms patronized at that time of night only by the passengers of our half-full flight. As we made our way into the large customs hall, all of us proceeded through with no wait time and collected our bags with as much ease.
When I walked out of the terminal, Fr. Jose Mombo Antonio was there to greet me. He is the priest hosting me here in Angola, with whom I was connected by Fr. Jorge Tchingi, a parish priest in Hartford, Connecticut, also from Angola,
Fr. Mombo was not from Luanda but from Benguela, a city about 400 kilometers to the south. In Luanda, Fr. Mombo was staying with his brother, a high-ranking member of the military who lives about twenty minutes from the airport. We managed to catch a few hours of actual rest before starting the day, which was Sunday.
Fr. Mombo had already spoken to the parish priest of a nearby parish of the Immaculate Conception, and so I was invited to address the children at the 9:00 a.m. Mass for about ten minutes.
Now, this was the first Portuguese-speaking country I had visited on this gap year; I had had Portuguese classes in my senior year of high school but had not spoken the language since. And now, with my visit less than six hours old, I would be speaking in front of the whole parish. As I prepared to get into bed for the few hours I had before the Mass, I remember thinking that there was very little to be done about my deficient Portuguese at that late stage and I might as well get as much rest as I could.
In the morning, after taking some light breakfast (there is no concern in Africa about violating the pre-Eucharistic fast as the Masses are often comfortably past the two-hour range), we drove down to the Church, arriving about 25 minutes before Mass began.
The Church itself was quite different from what I expected, consisting simply of an outdoor platform on which the altar stood with a façade behind it. An overhang protected the altar from rain or wind, while some rows of seats were afforded the same luxury, managing to fit under the overhang. Most everyone else stood about behind these seats on some benches in a large open area with no overhead protection. I was shown a place near the altar and sat there, collecting my thoughts and planning what I was going to say in the minutes I had been given.
After the Mass, I met with the children who were interested, and we prayed the Rosary together. We were seated to one side of the open area, and some other children were laughing and talking a short distance away, with the consequent effect that every few minutes, a child would peel away from our group of about forty to go talk with his friends, not finding our Rosary to be all that interesting. As the Rosary went along, I began to dread that all of a sudden there would be some mass exodus, that a half or three quarters of the children would decide all at the same time that this was enough, that praying the Rosary on our knees wasn’t really the thing after all and that they would rather go talk with their friends or go home, and that I would be left alone to finish the prayers. However, despite my fears, this never materialized, and the vast majority of the children stayed to the end. The catechist then told me they wished to start a regular meeting of a Children’s Rosary group there and urged me to come visit them again when I would pass through Luanda again on my way to South Africa. Gratified by this productive ending, I agreed, and so I will meet with them again to pray the Rosary on April 10.
After Mass, Fr. Mombo(shown in blue above) and I returned to his brother’s house from where we had lunch and then paid some social calls, such as to the pastor of the Parish. We had dinner at a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered bitoque, a favorite dish of mine that consists of fried eggs served on top of thin-sliced steak; my order came with French fries and rice on the side.
When I was very young (about four or five years old), I remember going with my parents to a restaurant in Hartford called Oporto (the name of a city on the northern coast of Portugal) and ordering that very dish, which was always my favorite. Sadly, when I was still of a tender age, Oporto closed, and I never was able to have my beloved bitoque again after that.
That night I spent in a hotel not far away, the reservation having been made before I arrived. Blessedly, the room came equipped with a wall-mounted air conditioning unit, a welcome relief in the arid climate of western Angola.
The next day was Monday, and it was a holiday, so there was little we could do in terms of actual business. Therefore, Fr. Mombo decided we should see a bit of the city. To this end, we paid a visit to his friend, General Firmino, a military official for the Angolan government. General Firmino lives in a modest-sized house in downtown Luanda, with a nice outdoor courtyard and small swimming pool, perfect for the arid climate I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. He readily supplied us not only with his car but also with his driver to take us around to some of the more notable parts of the city.
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The first place we visited was the Museum of Angolan Military History, a museum built of a little hill overlooking the city and bay area.
Having here a perfect occasion for a historical diversion, I happily accept the opportunity to speak a bit about what I learned concerning the history of this extraordinary country.
Angola was colonized beginning in the sixteenth century as a Portuguese colony. Like most Portuguese settlements, the primary purpose was trade within the empire. It saw from early on deep commerce with Brazil, another Portuguese colony. This included the infamous slave trade to South America which continued into the nineteenth century.
Focused as always on trade, the Portuguese for centuries neglected to even occupy the whole territory they claimed to possess. In 1884, in the midst of the “rush for Africa,” the Berlin Conference obliged them to take military control of the whole territory, something which was not fully completed until the 1920s. As further evidence of the lack of Portuguese investment and developmental interest in the colony, it was markedly undermodernized compared to other contemporary African colonized such as Zaire and Kenya.
As the post-World War II Europe pursued the path of decolonization and the African colonies one by one inaugurated independent governments, the conservative, fascist Salazar government in Portugal refused to follow suit. Instead, the 1950s came and went and likewise the 1960s, and Angola remained a Portuguese colony.
In 1975, the push for independence suddenly came to a head for various reasons and before long was becoming a reality on the ground that the no one could further ignore. In Portugal, the coup of 1974 that had overthrown the Salazar government had come to pass, ushering in a left-wing, Socialist government named the MFA that also held anti-colonial views and was amenable to the proposition of de-colonizing Portugal’s African holdings. Seeing the opportunity presented by the political instability and leftward lurch of the government in Portugal, the agitators for independence seized their chance and went on the offensive. Soon, the Portuguese government had agreed to appoint a transition government to oversee the shift to an independent, autonomous nation. However, the more pressing question soon became apparent: who would lead such a nation? Three main contestants were in fact vying for this role, though other parties existed but had little military or financial support. The three were the MPLA, a rather left-leaning party headed by a revolutionary leader and thinker named Dr. Agostinho Neto; the UNITA, a more centrist, less aggrieved voice headed by Holden Roberto that was supported by countries such as South Africa, Zambia, and, implicitly the United States; and the FNLA, a party led by the intellectual and charismatic Jose Sembi that enjoyed the support of the Congo (then Zaire) and its leader, Robert Mobutu.
In a sign of how much affairs had changed, in 1974, Agostinho Neto had seemed to be on the decline politically, increasingly isolated and on the outside looking into the prospect of being Angola’s first independent leader. The Soviet Union earlier that year had cut off its ties to Neto, out of fear of appearing too opposed to Portuguese interests. The fact was, the Soviets were eyeing bigger fish, aiming to give the MFA the best chance possible to make Portugal the first communist (or at least communist-sympathetic) member of NATO. Supporting a revolutionary and anti-Portuguese voice in colonial Angola was not particularly conducive to that end.
By 1975, with the MFA in control of Portugal, the Portuguese government was leaning towards support for the educated, high class, Portuguese-speaking Neto, sympathizing with his Socialist and radical ideas, all this despite his rather anti-Portuguese rhetoric. The Soviets, feeling comfortable in supporting him again, threw their weight in his favor. The United States, meanwhile, emerging still bruised and bleeding from its catastrophic and unpopular Vietnam campaign, and fielding a Democratic-held Congress unwilling to give President Gerald Ford an inch to attempt military intervention in a place such as Angola, bowed out as a player. At this, South Africa and Zambia, seeing that the United States by no means had their backs, beat a hasty retreat, and the position of UNITA quickly crumbled, along with that of the FNLA.
So it was that President Agostinho Neto became the first president of Angola. At the museum we were able to see examples of tanks, rocket launchers, and trucks used both by the MPLA and by the Portuguese forces. We also saw the car that Neto used during a visit to Brazzaville and the car that carried Neto’s body during his funeral in 1979.
In the decades afterward, Cuban military intervention in Angola grew tremendously, with the amount of Cuban troops in the 1980s doubling that of Portuguese soldiers in Angola in 1974. Fidel Castro was interested in bolstering this emerging Soviet-aligned state and thus was generous with his troops.
However, the presence of the troops belied the underlying problem: the rule of Neto’s MPLA was by no means uniformly accepted, and large continents of the populace, still loyal to the old UNITA party, continued a decadeslong civil war. At some points the South Africans became involved, but they were beaten back decisively at the Battle of Kuito Kwanavale. With the end of the Cold War, the situation actually managed to become worse and not better. With the end of the Soviet Union, Cuba, itself a client state, now finding itself suddenly isolated, without a head to its global alliance, and only ninety miles from the coast of the United States, quickly scaled back its patronage of the MPLA government in Angola. The Civil War intensified and lasted for another ten years until 2002.
By then, an agreement was reached for the solidification of MPLA as the governing party of Angola, and at long last peace came to settle over this tortured and suffering land. This enabled Angola’s rich oil and diamond resources, always a strong asset for their emerging economy, to begin to throw about its weight on the global markets. Buoyed by its oil, Angola has come a long way economically from the days of the civil war, but the need and poverty that continues to plague many citizens persists.
To be sure, a good deal of the museum leaned generously into the realm of propaganda, prominently featuring paintings of Agostinho Neto heroically leading forward a united Angolan populace to victory and prosperity (which, as we have seen, is more than a bit mistaken) as well as pictures of crowds sobbing in the streets after his death. Nevertheless, the museum proved to be an enlightening and enjoyable opportunity to learn more about the country I would spend the next three weeks in.
We spent the rest of the day visiting some different corners of the city as well as some friends of Fr. Mombo’s before returning to the hotel for the night. 
The next day would be the trip to Bengela. What occurred on the journey and what became of me in Benguela will be the subject of the next dispatch."
To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE
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