Basankusu: Mill Hill burns!

The fire started from our paraffin fridge. A paraffin fridge is great when you don’t have constant electricity. It has a flame which drives the coolant around the fridge, this is fed from a reservoir of paraffin in the base of the fridge. Somehow it caught fire and the reservoir exploded sending huge flames up to the ceiling.

I was in another building, where our students live and have lessons. I was with Fr John Kirwan and one of our local sisters who had come to use the internet. We heard a commotion outside – a lot of people were agitated. “Come quickly!” someone shouted. We hurried across to see what it could be and saw a crowd of neighbours in a very excited state outside the little kitchen where the fridge and washing machine were. That’s when I saw the huge flames billowing from the doorway.

We don’t have a fire service; people were throwing buckets of soil and the branches from a banana palm onto the fire, but to no avail – the fire had already got through the ceiling and into the roof cavity.

My students called to me. “Quick, Francis, get all your things out of your room!” they shouted.

“But it can’t possibly come here,” I replied.

“Yes, it will come,” they urged. “You must remove ... everything!”

My bedroom and office occupy the first part of the building, after that we have our dining room, then there is an outside seating area followed by the little kitchen and then Fr John’s two offices and bedroom – all covered by the same roof. I started picking up a few things here and there, to make the gesture of taking things out.

I couldn’t imagine that the fire would arrive in my room. I took my passport while my three students and neighbours started grabbing things from my room. I found myself in a daze, not knowing what to pick up. Eventually, I asked them to carry out my wardrobe with all my clothes inside. Next we carried my desk out, with all my papers still on top of it. They followed with my mattress and bed. What I didn’t see was the envelope in which I hide dollars – underneath my mattress. I assume that in the confusion nobody saw it fall and that it was burnt in the fire. Then they tried to pick up a large book-case – a wine bottle which I used to keep drinking water in fell and smashed on the concrete floor. I realised that panic was taking over everyone. As I picked up my laundry bucket and to follow everyone outside, one of my student’s pointed to the ceiling of my bedroom. “The fire is here, now! We have to go out!”

The next thing was that people – quite a crowd had emerged – urged me to take our car out of the garage to safe place. Our car is quite a hefty 4x4 Toyota land Cruiser. Again, I couldn’t imagine that the fire would cross from the house to the garage ... but I had to accept the experience of people in these conditions.

My office after the fire

Judith working in my office before the fire

The car wouldn’t start. They pushed it out of the garage. They pushed and pushed until it was outside our enclosure. When I returned the crowd had grown yet bigger. The police had arrived. They were keeping watch against looting – with some, but not complete success.

The roof space in the house had been left open inside to accommodate a second storey to the house. The second floor was never built. The effect of this was that air was sucked in through vents and the whole roof cavity – with the noise of a roaring jet engine – became a furnace. The timbers of the roof fell burning into every room, creating such a ferocious fire that the plaster came off the walls and the top layer of concrete on the floor buckled.

In our dining room with guests before the fire.

Our dining room/ TV room after the fire

I saw Fr John walking through the crowd. I assumed he’d given up on his room – as I had given up on mine. We started to move our saved things into safer places. My wardrobe and desk went into one of the student’s bedrooms. Now and then someone gave me something in my hand that looked like it might be worth keeping.

I’d been wearing pair of tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops when the fire had started. I’d quickly slipped on a pair of trainers, and moved my trousers into my laundry basket (actually a large plastic bucket that flour arrived in) before carrying it outside. Of all the things to rescue, I fastened a spare belt around my waste and put on my wide-brimmed hat and wandered around for two hours like that ... with my passport stuffed inside my pocket. Now, as the fire looked like subsiding, I put on a pair of socks and changed into my trousers.

Our outdoor seating area - under the same roof canopy.

Outside seating area with Dally construction engineer for the cathedral

Our laptops were safe – we’d been in a separate building with them at the onset, as was my iPhone. My other phone, the one I used every day, and Judith’s phone, which was charging in my room, vanished.

Little things mattered. The flip-flops that I’d bought in Walmart’s UK store, Asda, three years ago, and that I’d worn every day since arriving – were sadly missed. The bottle of head and Shoulders shampoo that I’d bought at Christmas and had been trying to last out over a year, had vaporised. 

Fr John had lost years’ worth of papers, letters, accounts, documents, books, photographs – not to mention all of his clothes save the ones he was wearing.

Fr Stan arrived towards the end. Visibly shocked he made us welcome in his building which is on the same plot but was untouched by the fire. “Come and sit down for a while,” he said, “There’s little more to be done.

The local priests eventually took us a mile down the road to the diocesan procure. They gave us something to eat and afterwards more of them arrived.

Fr Makabé stood up to speak. “We are all here this evening as if we were at a wake,” he said. “In our culture, when a house is destroyed by fire, it’s the same as if someone has died. And, so, we sit with you to give our consolation – to drink a little, to talk a little ... and to be together.”

They gave Fr John and myself a room each and we slept.

An aerial view of Maison St Joseph -
all the front section was destroyed ...
we were in the building top-right when it statrted.

The burn-out shell of our house