Monday

And suddenly negotiations start, the sun is shining and we're allowed home for a quick shower before reporting for work at 11am. Seems a great way to have lost the weekend.

This is the rapidly emptying carpark - and yes, that is a bright yellow NGO car seen heading out.

Ulrich is busy. I play secretary manning one phone while he's on the other. He's straight off to meetings (still on both phones) while I get back to preparing the house/ restocking our camping trunk/ the luxury of a hair wash and a somewhat vague conversation with Mum and Dad in Thailand: what do you say?

Back to the office, and everyone dispersed in different directions - apart from me: a stabilization consultant with sustained brain work to do is neither useful nor productive when there is an estimated over 60,000 people displaced. I do my personal admin and make preparations for never coming back.

Rumours start of a break down in the talk. Apparently one of our teams has got cut off from town when an army helicopter descended in the middle of a children's centre on the edge of Goma where people are gathering, and this became the new front line. Panic starts and everyone thinks about preparing to go home - and then there is fire and shells falling very close to the office. The May Day signal comes but it's not much good this time.

We spend the next night in a large warehouse full of asthma inducing maize meal fumigated on Friday so also full of dying rats and poison. The mortars burn red across the sky. There's shots and rockets, but the nearby stuff is mostly a rat-a-tat-tat one way to discourage looters. Rumours about Congo declaring war on Rwanda and vice versa. And only the dark outside. You can't know what's happening.

It's really quite dull: the tension of indefinite waiting between walls of maize meal. I download trashy books to the kindle and settle in.

Ul and I - and he's a busy man now - have an odd, snatched conversation. We won't both leave next Friday: I'll leave in the morning if it's possible - and he'll stay till the end of December. Of course it's this way, and the conversation has no what-ifs and maybes. But so much for our grand year out and leaving Congo.