Читать книгу Of Bonobos and Men - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 14
ОглавлениеTen minutes before landing, we crossed over the wide river again. Dozens of long forested islands split it into as many as five channels, yellow and brown sandbars visible beneath the water, carved by the current into shapes reminiscent of dunes. The jet coasted low, dropped its landing gear as my ears popped, and a minute later it banged down on the runway, all of us clutching armrests and gritting teeth.
We were let out into a sunny afternoon and crossed the tarmac to the yellow terminal, the main chamber of which contained two rows of wooden benches that looked like church pews. When I heard people say Mbandaka, I listened closely. The stress was on the first syllable, the m largely silent to my ear, at most a slight holding of the lips together before the plosive b sound.
Aimée Nsongo, a short, sturdy woman who was BCI’s Mbandaka office manager, stood waiting for us. She commanded a group of young men who gathered the dozen large duffel bags, each weighing sixty or seventy pounds. We followed them outside the airport to where six Chinese motorcycles were parked. A single white pickup, rented by BCI, was in the gravel lot. The young men loaded the bags into the back while Aimée went inside to speak with agents of the Direction Générale de Migration (DGM) regarding the legal formalities of our travel in Équateur Province.
At least a dozen people sat in blue plastic chairs, drinking large bottles of Primus beer. We joined them as shoeshine boys gathered, along with vendors selling pineapples and bowls of large squirming mpose grubs, the larvae that rhinoceros beetles lay in rotting wood.
“Mmm—mpose!” Michael said as a young man held out a metal tub of what looked like thumb-size writhing maggots with pincers on their heads. He explained that both Congolese and bonobos eat them, and I would later read that they contain more protein than chicken and beef. He paid a cook to fry them in garlic, and they were delicious, with a texture and flavor like buttered lobster, the heads crunching lightly. We would spend the following weeks asking if anyone had mpose. They were our first meal in Mbandaka and would be our last one, a month later, again at the airport, before we returned to Kinshasa.
When Aimée finished with the DGM, we drove into the city along a paved road that, aside from a few humps, potholes, and fissures, was sound. Dozens of men passed the other way on bicycles, working the pedals with the laborious swaying of their bodies. Asphalt gave way to the wide red avenues of the city, multicolored umbrellas stuck in the roadside, vendors squatting beneath. Everything seemed tinged with the russet dust, concrete walls and buildings, people’s clothes and skin.
Founded in 1883, Mbandaka was formerly called Équateur. It appeared on Henry Morton Stanley’s maps at both the equator and the Congo River, like the joint in a cross. But he was mistaken; the city was in fact a few miles north of that imaginary line. Under Belgian colonial rule, the province became Équateur and the city Coquilhatville, a convoluted formulation commemorating Camille-Aimé Coquilhat, the Belgian governor-general of the Congo Free State. But within a year of taking over in November 1965, Mobutu gave the provincial capital its current name in honor of a local leader, soon therafter changing the Congo to Zaire and Léopoldville to Kinshasa.
During the Second Congo War, from 1998 to 2003, when Kinshasa was at times without electricity and water, crowds filling buckets at the river and carrying them home, Mbandaka and the surrounding regions suffered far worse. Opposing armies occupied people’s land and homes, eating their food and robbing them. Hundreds of thousands, most of them civilians, died not only of violence but of starvation and disease.
Now, Mbandaka, a city of 350,000, had yet to recover from its years of penury. Its streets were filled with bicycles, but there were only a few motorcycles and the occasional car. For less than twenty cents per trip, a constant stream of bicycle taxis carried people across town, passengers seated on the padded racks behind the driver. The bikes reminded me of souped-up low-riders in the United States: reflectors and stickers; sparkles, colorful paint, and tassels; fancy rearview mirrors on long stems; pump horns and thumb-rung bells on the wide handlebars; passenger seats of red shag rug, couch cushions, or padded chair armrests bolted side by side.
The retro persisted at the hotel whose name we couldn’t manage to identify, though we asked everyone. Four large concrete buildings stood in a fenced courtyard, each painted a different pastel. Our apartment had a living room, a stripped-down kitchen, and two bedrooms, one for me and the other for Sally and Michael. The security guard told us it was the hotel of the governor, though we couldn’t figure out if this was its name, if the governor stayed here, or if he owned it. The electricity came on briefly after sundown. As at Evelyn’s house, the bathroom had buckets of cold water for bathing and flushing.
Two men from the bank came in the door, with gym bags loaded with 15,000 US dollars in Congolese francs, at least three dozen large bricks held together with rubber bands. The exchange rate was 900 francs to the dollar, and BCI would need small bills of 100 or 200 francs. Whereas inflation had made Kinshasa expensive, a fifteen-minute ride in a taxi or a street meal easily costing ten or twenty dollars, the economy in Équateur’s rainforest was largely barter with almost no outside stimulus, and 100-franc bills—a little more than ten cents—gave the people living on the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve currency for local products.
When Sally and Michael and the two bankers had finished counting money to pay trackers and reserve staff, as well as for the costs of the trip, there were five backpacks full of cash that they locked inside three large plastic duffels. It was already dark. We ate a meal of cassava, rice, chicken, fried bananas, and amaranth greens, cooked and carried over by Aimée’s younger sister. Afterward, Sally continued making calls and meeting with people, and I was not surprised when I walked by her door and saw her asleep in her clothes.
Michael suggested that we take a walk and maybe grab a drink with researchers from CREF, the government’s Centre de Recherche en Écologie et Foresterie whose staff had worked closely in the field with BCI for over a decade. Since our arrival in Mbandaka, a few of them had stopped by to say hello. As part of its goal to support Congolese agency, BCI had supported CREF, funding them to do wildlife surveys for each of the future conservation areas. Michael explained to me that given the distances they traveled, the researchers were the best source of knowledge about everything happening in the province, and he wanted to speak with them more. We locked the door, then descended the stairs and went outside.
Night in the city was nearly absolute, a wide swath of equatorial stars largely unfamiliar to my eyes, a few bright flares out across the city. It took us a moment to find the security guard, sitting near the gate in a folding chair, an AK-47 across his lap.
“Who stays in this hotel?” Michael asked in French. It was BCI’s first time using it, and he wanted to make sure that Sally would be safe in the room.
“Only NGOs and government,” the guard told him. “No one else comes in. It’s very secure here.”
We hesitated a moment, but the hotel’s compound did look well contained, and Michael had spent considerable time in Mbandaka. He and Sally had never had problems in their decade of carrying cash and supplies in and out.
“Many people here watch out for us,” he said, explaining that BCI was well known in Mbandaka. Then, as we walked out along the road, he told me the story of a young man the locals called Miracle Bonobo.
Since my arrival, I’d learned that many people involved with BCI have bonobo nicknames. For example, the Congolese often called Sally and Michael Mama Bonobo and Papa Bonobo. Mama and papa are terms of respect in the DRC, but it had taken me a while to get used to being called papa by people in the street, by Evelyn’s maids, and by the staff at airports and supermarkets. BCI’s oldest member, Dr. Mwanza, who was born in Bas-Congo in 1949 and earned his PhD in biology in the USSR, focusing on species reintroduction, is called Mpaka Bonobo, mpaka meaning “old” or “grandfather.”
The story of Miracle Bonobo dated back six or seven years, to when BCI was still building credibility among the Congolese in the hard period after the civil war. The rebel- and government-held provinces had just reunited under a fragmented central administration when BCI assembled its team of boatmen. The captain was Malu Ebonga Charles, a green-eyed Congolese in his late forties whose grandfather had been German, hence his nickname—Le Blanc, “the white.” The team often plied the long trip from Mbandaka to Kokolopori. Among them was Médard, a young Congolese man who became friends with Michael’s eighteen-year-old nephew, Joey.
“My sister trusted me with Joey,” Michael said. “It was summer vacation, and she asked if I could bring him back alive. I almost didn’t, actually. He was all over the boat, hanging out with boatmen, and he and Médard became friends. Being on the pirogues—the dugout canoes—is BCI’s vacation. It’s the only time we get to unwind and relax. It can be challenging, of course. There are storms on the river, and accidents. But we love it.
“Joey was lying in the sun, hanging out with the boatmen, and we were stopping to swim often, but then he got malaria. He was so feverish that we had to stop to put him in the water to cool him down. We were giving him medicine, but it was taking him a long time to recover. Everyone on the boat really liked Joey, and after he went back to the US, Médard gave me a letter to send to him. In it was fifty dollars.”
Michael paused in the dark. He was breathing a little hard and stopped, putting his hand to his mouth as if to cough or clear his throat.
“He told me,” he said in a thick voice, “that Joey had talked about saving money for college. Médard wanted to send the money, but fifty dollars was half his monthly salary. It was barely enough to live on here. I couldn’t believe he wanted to give away that money, and I insisted that he keep it. I told him Joey didn’t need it.
“A few months later, in Kinshasa, Sally and I got a call. Médard and his friend had been hit by a motorcycle. They were walking here, in Mbandaka, at night, and the motorcycle driver lost control or swerved suddenly to avoid a hole. We never got the story straight. Maybe he was drunk. But he was going really fast. You see how dark it is. It killed Médard’s friend instantly and left Médard unconscious and in critical condition. The hospital said that he’d suffered a massive head injury and would probably die.”
We’d stopped walking and stood on the dark road, no sense of the city around us at all, just the vast, depthless night.
“Our team sent us photos of him. His entire face was swollen. His eyelids were as big as fists. He was bleeding from his ears and eyes and nose. The Mbandaka hospital had no one who could operate on head injuries, so we called a top surgeon in Kinshasa, and he said it would cost a few thousand dollars. He asked if the injured person was essential to our operations, if we really needed to have him airlifted there and were ready to pay this kind of money. We contacted everyone we knew to help with funds, and when I called my sister, she told me she’d just received a letter from Médard, another one that he’d sent himself, with fifty dollars in it. She immediately wired me two thousand dollars for the operation.”
Again we were silent, Michael taking the time to calm his voice.
“We built BCI with an idea of family and community. We were a family. It didn’t matter if you were American or Congolese, a scientist or a boatman. That was our vision. We would have done what we did for Médard for the others, too. What we didn’t realize was how much taking care of Médard would make people trust us here. They want to take care of us, too. They know that we’re doing this for them.”
“And what happened to Médard?”
“The surgeon didn’t expect him to survive. He was in a coma when we flew him to Kinshasa, but as soon as Mwanza came into the room, Médard woke up and recognized him. I don’t know if the accident caused permanent injury, but now he seems fine. He’s still with us. You’ll meet him on the boat when we go back. People here remember the story. Everyone in the Congo is connected. The families are huge, so in a lot of areas more people are related than not. People called him Miracle Bonobo. It’s made us realize, even now, when BCI is getting bigger, that we need to stay close to the people. A few months ago, the captain of the boat, Le Blanc, had a stroke, and we helped him get care. He’s still not well, and this will be our first trip without him.”
Michael and I arrived at the bar where CREF researchers often met up when in town. A dozen plastic chairs were arranged around crooked wooden tables set in gravel, and there was a raised dance floor with tall mirrors against one wall. But the CREF researchers had already gone home, which Michael said was unusual. He said that they called themselves les beaux-frères de Jésus, “the brothers-in-law of Jesus,” and I admitted that I didn’t get it.
“It’s because Catholic nuns are called the wives of Jesus. They’ve nicknamed the local bar the Church of the Brothers-in-Law of Jesus. When they’re in Mbandaka, they meet here for what they call prier sans cesse, ‘ceaseless prayer.’ These are the words a priest would use, though in this case they just refer to drinking.”
Michael called to the waitress and began his own divine communion as a lively song blared on the sound system and people got up from a number of tables.
The Congolese are known for their love of dance. They value form in the way they greet, men ceremonially shaking hands and touching their foreheads side to side three times, women warmly kissing cheeks like the French, but adding one last kiss. When they dance, they are synchronized, the bar patrons—men and women—singing and moving together, watching their reflections in the large mirror on the wall. Kinshasa clubs have the mirrors, too, and people use them to learn new dances from each other, performing elaborate choreographies.
Later that night, I lay in bed, the room so dark it felt like a cave. Wind gusted outside, and I dozed and woke to doors slamming, curtains billowing. A storm front was pushing in, the one thing that could prevent our flight into the rainforest the next morning. I found my headlamp and went to close the windows.
As wind whistled over the city, I struggled to get back to sleep, thinking about Michael’s story of Miracle Bonobo and what Sally told me about modeling BCI on bonobo society—the emphasis on taking care of each individual, regardless of his or her role. Outside, there was the occasional, distant clattering of wind-blown trash, the shaking of windows in their frames, and soon the steady drumming of rain against the dry earth.
After a few more hours of restless sleep, I reluctantly got up and packed my bag. The rain was letting up, and outside, the wet, red streets were empty but for the occasional bicycle. Since my arrival in the DRC, people had frequently complained about the lack of rain; Kinshasa was unseasonably hot and dusty. Unlike the Amazon, whose waters lower significantly during the dry season, the Congo remains level. The river begins south of the equator, flows north of it, and curves back across in a wide sweep over a thousand miles long, so it benefits from the rainy and dry seasons that alternate on opposite sides of the equator. But that year, Congolese said, there had been little rain. They’d never seen the river so low.
As Aimée directed the loading of the truck, Sally got through to the satellite phone of Marcel Falay, BCI’s regional director in Kokolopori, to ask if the landing strip, nothing more than a field cut from the forest, was firm enough for the plane to land. He told her the rain had stopped there. The runway was fine.
At the Mbandaka airport, we drove onto the tarmac, where a single-propeller Cessna waited for us, AVIATION SANS FRONTIÈRES printed on its side. Started by former Air France pilots during Nigeria’s war with Biafra in the late sixties, ASF, a nonprofit bush plane operation, had been expanding its routes through the Congo in recent years, as the country gained stability.
The two French pilots weighed our duffels on what looked like an aluminum bathroom scale, recording the numbers. On our previous flight, with CAA, Sally paid $5 for each kilo that exceeded our personal limit of twenty kilos, or about forty-four pounds. ASF charged $2.50 after a limit of fifteen kilos.
“This is what people don’t get,” she told me. “If you want to take anything into the field, you have to calculate not just the price but the cost of getting it from the US to Kinshasa, then from Kinshasa to Mbandaka, and Mbandaka to Djolu. That’s why everything in this country costs a fortune. Transportation is a feat.”
Already I’d noticed that bottled water and orange Fanta had gone from 1,000 francs in Kinshasa to 1,500 here. In Djolu, the few times that it was available, it would cost 2,500, even 3,000. The markup held true for diesel and gas as well, which was why BCI transported most supplies by canoe.
We were about to climb into the plane, the French pilots checking our pockets and passing metal detectors over us, when two DGM agents hurried from inside the airport and told us we’d skipped proper departure procedures.
Instantly, everyone was arguing, Sally and Michael fighting to be heard over the agents and Aimée Nsongo, who insisted that our baggage had already been searched twice upon our arrival in Mbandaka the day before, and that this was a private flight. Only when the two men heard Sally speak in Lingala—a clear sign that she knew the customs of the region and wasn’t a clueless foreigner—did they smile and relent.
“But you still have to pay airport taxes,” they told us, “and we need to record your passports.”
These weren’t the made-up taxes I’d so often read about but simply the Go Pass tickets that airports sold. Though extortion apparently still existed in the airports and at the borders, the DRC’s government had cracked down. Formerly, every official and soldier whom travelers met would harass them, accusing them of carrying banned materials or demanding passports, which only bribes would buy back. This practice of condoned corruption became institutionalized under Mobutu, whose government rarely paid its military. When the economy tanked, the people’s survival depended on their ability to make money any way they could. Now, as the DRC struggled to rebuild after Mobutu’s downfall and two wars, the soldiers, police, and administration remained neglected, unable to feed and house themselves, let alone their families, on their salaries.
“When people try to get money from us, we look at the situation,” Sally told me. “We can negotiate or just walk away if it’s something ridiculous. But sometimes we pay a little because that’s how things work here. That’s how people survive, and it creates goodwill and only costs us five dollars or less—usually a few francs. We wouldn’t be able to do our work if we tried to fight every official we met. It wouldn’t make sense.”
When we were in Kinshasa, I had seen a book on Sally’s desk: The Empress and Mrs. Conger: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds. The cover showed an old photograph of two women, one an elaborately garbed Chinese, and the other white, in equally elaborate turn-of-the-century Western dress. When I asked Sally about it, she explained that the white woman was her great-great-grandmother, Sarah Pike Conger, whose husband, a congressman from Iowa, was appointed ambassador to Brazil. The expats generally kept themselves separate from the local people there, but when Conger’s husband received his next posting, as ambassador to China, she realized how little she knew about the Brazilians and how much her aloofness had cost her. She determined that she would learn about the Chinese and even forged a friendship with Cixi, the last empress dowager of China. The photo used for the book’s cover is the only one in which the empress touches a Westerner, and Sally told me that as a girl, visiting her grandmother, she’d read the diaries of her great-great-grandmother as well as a book she wrote, Letters from China. She described how Sarah Conger wanted to set up her kitchen the way she liked and felt that the procurement of coal would be more efficient if she did it herself. But when she tried to streamline her staff, they became unhappy and ceased to work well. She realized that they had a system of exchanges that allowed for everyone involved to make a small profit and guarantee a livelihood. Though she wanted to run her house in a businesslike fashion, she saw that the Chinese system provided for more people and worked efficiently within their culture. To remind herself of such lessons and because of the affinity Sally felt with her great-great-grandmother, she kept a copy of The Empress and Mrs. Conger.
Having dealt with the agents, we climbed into the plane. As the pilots taxied on the runway, Sally took her phone out for one last call to Kinshasa. There would be no cell coverage in Djolu, no infrastructure at all, except for BCI’s satellite phone that cost $1.60 per minute. But it was too late. The single propeller had gone to full speed, and we were racing forward, lifting from the runway. The forests of Équateur spread beneath us, green horizons in all directions, faintly rippled by the contours of the land.
In Kinshasa, when I’d told Evelyn’s brothers that I would be flying to Djolu, the younger one had said, “I hope you have faith in something.”
“What would you recommend I have faith in?” I’d asked. “In the pilot, the mechanic, or God?”
He considered the question.
“I wouldn’t trust any of those three in the Congo.”
The Congo is known for airline disasters and not meeting international security standards. Before coming, I’d run across an article about an accident in which a passenger brought an unconscious crocodile in a duffel bag onto the flight. As the plane was about to land, the crocodile woke and fought its way free. The terrified passengers ran to the front of the plane, throwing it off balance as it neared the strip. It crashed, killing the pilot and all the passengers except one. The crocodile survived, only to be dispatched with a machete on the ground.
We glided above the wide, split waters of the Congo River, then cut inland. For the next two hours, we traveled three hundred miles, the evenly textured forest passing beneath us. There were occasional variations: a few massive trees reaching above the canopy; some bright red foliage, in flower or leaves to be shed; then the skeletal fingers of a dead tree. Banks of mist gathered along thin depressions. The pools of a narrow river refracted glare through the hazy clouds. Moments later, there was just forest again, more regular than the sky.
As we neared Djolu, spaces cut from the forest came into sight, scorched circles of new fields from recent slash-and-burn farming. The landing strip appeared, a thin gash in the trees, a yellow line scored along its center. A dirt road ran beyond it, past a few mud and thatch homes, into the distance. The plane banked, then descended fast, the trees rising on either side.
The landing was so smooth I hardly felt the wheels touch. We slowed and stopped as dozens of children in torn and faded clothes ran from the edge of the forest and circled the plane. We got out, standing in a crowd of at least fifty of them, a dozen men and women greeting Sally and Michael, shaking their hands, the women kissing their cheeks, the men touching Michael’s forehead with their own.
Each time I lifted my camera, the children flowed together in front of it. They called to see the screen after the shot, pushing in, trying to get a glimpse of themselves, screaming when they did, clutching my wrist and staring.
“Donnez-moi de l’argent!” they shouted. “Bic! Bic!” they said and lifted their hands, wanting pens. One of the pilots told me that at least twice a week he had to argue to keep his shirt, men coming from the crowd and insisting that they needed it more than he did. And seeing them, I didn’t find this entirely unreasonable. With the exception of those who worked for BCI, almost everyone wore threadbare clothes—T-shirts disintegrated at the shoulders, hanging from their seams, and pants tattered beneath the knees.
Again, the Congolese took charge, villagers helping under the direction of Marcel Falay. Tall and broadly built, with a perpetually jovial expression, he was BCI’s regional director and agronomist. He’d worked with BCI years before on a project. Afterward, when he was with another employer, he broke his foot in a motorcycle accident, and BCI had paid for his treatment. Later, when his contract finished, he returned to work for them, staying on even during the periods when they lacked funding.
As men and women who had been involved with BCI over the years shook my hand and introduced themselves, others loaded our bags into a Toyota Land Cruiser more battered than les esprits des morts in Kinshasa. BCI bought it from a dealer in Dubai in 2006, secondhand but in perfect condition, and had it shipped to Kinshasa, then upriver. As part of BCI’s resource-sharing agreement with the people of the reserve, it had served for many community-development projects as well as tree planting. But a driver flipped it over an incline, and that, as well as constant use hauling people and goods, had left it dilapidated, the bumpers collapsing, the panels loose. BCI’s other vehicle was stranded in Kokolopori, a Land Rover with a broken axle.
Michael climbed into the passenger seat with BCI’s new photographic equipment. He would be documenting their work for the purpose of fund-raising. Sally and I each got on the backs of the two motorcycles driven by BCI staff.
The road through the forest was as narrow as a footpath, so sandy that my driver briefly lost control and had to slide to a stop. I expected the land to be largely flat, but it rose and fell, and following the path was like going through the hallways of an old mansion, one moment closed in and the next entering a large room. This was how I felt when the forest opened suddenly into a village, a dozen houses of mud daubed on woven branches, children in underwear running out to wave. Then the forest closed in again, the path winding between hillocks and declines, before we entered another room: this time a clearing around a stream.
The bridge consisted of seven narrow fifteen-foot logs laid side by side, the gaps between them wide enough to break a leg. Sally and I dismounted, and our drivers picked the flattest, straightest log and drove across. Then the Land Cruiser arrived. Everyone got out but the driver.
A young man walked across the bridge and turned. He lifted his arms, his index fingers raised, and with tiny movements of his fingers, he directed the driver. The Land Cruiser inched forward, front wheels on two of the logs. He kept motioning, a little to the left, but halfway across, it began to go too far, only an inch of its right front wheel still on the log, the rest over the water. The young man urged it back. The driver corrected, and as soon as the front tires touched the dirt, he fired the engine and raced onto the path, the wheels crushing the grass alongside it.
Ten minutes later, we came to a similar bridge and went through the same process, but the third one was longer, at least thirty feet, with planks laid across its logs. The Land Cruiser inched forward, the wood groaning beneath it. The young man directed with his fingers as the bridge swayed and creaked. Nearby, a fisherman sat in a narrow boat carved from a small tree trunk. Beneath high reeds that were reflected around him, he floated, watching without expression.
After climbing a rise from which the rainforest spread out, immense treetops rolling on to the horizon, we arrived in Djolu. To my eye, the only thing that distinguished it as a town was the absence of dense forest. With a population of ten thousand, it was without running water, electricity, or phones. At first glance, it resembled an agglomeration of small farms, the mud houses set far apart, separated by trees and gardens, colorful clothing and blankets drying on thatch roofs. Ducks, chickens, goats, and pigs wandered about. The occasional concrete building with a corrugated roof and crumbling, water-stained walls stood out, each belonging to a different regional leader and likely dating back fifty years or more to Belgian colonial rule. Wending everywhere, between trees and hedges, behind houses, were numerous sandy paths like arroyos. The beaten dirt roads were often sunk well below the surface of the land, the clay sculpted by running water. When the rainy season came, the town must have as many waterways as Venice.
We drove in front of the stade, the stadium, a raised stone foundation the size of a hut, with eight brick pillars, a metal roof, and some benches and concrete steps, all crowded with boys and girls. On the athletic field on the other side of the road, a ragtag bunch of boys were kicking a soccer ball. The children forgot about the game and pointed at us instead, screaming, “Mundele, mundele, mundele!”
This word, meaning “white person” or “foreigner,” would be the mantra in Équateur. The children stared, wide-eyed, shouting it as if calling our names, and it took me a moment to realize that they were screaming it to draw other Congolese. They were announcing a rarity, many of them seeing their first white person in months, and farther out, in the villages, possibly their first ever.
Just past the stadium, we came to a six-room mud-brick house, the Djolu headquarters of Vie Sauvage, literally “Wildlife,” the local NGO that BCI had spent years developing as their primary partner in the region. A fifteen-foot-high termite hill hid the building from the road, and children scaled its sides, gathering at the top to get a view of our activities, or reaching down to catch the hands of their friends and help them up. In the yard of beaten dirt was a paillote, a word that literally means “straw hut,” though in the Congo it indicates a communal open-sided building with a thatch roof.
After some discussion with the Congolese staff, Sally and Michael decided to sleep in Djolu, at the Vie Sauvage headquarters. The forty-five-mile drive to Kokolopori took four hours if all went well, since the road was rutted, often with trees fallen across it and drop-offs on the sides. If we got a flat tire or broke down, we’d have to finish in the dark, holding flashlights out the window since the Land Cruiser’s headlamps didn’t work. Sally also didn’t know the condition of the camp; she hadn’t been there in over six months, and termites and insects were quick to devour rafters and the roofs of buildings.
We ate a dinner of cassava, rice, avocado, fried banana, and spicy stewed chicken in a red broth that was delicious poured over everything else. I dabbed a little of the pili-pili sauce on my food, the crushed hot pepper making me break into a sweat. We finished the meal with rainforest honey brought down from the trees, dark and liquid, poured into glasses to sip, or to be mixed with lotoko, a type of moonshine made from corn, cassava, or plantain.
Everyone appeared to know Sally and Michael, and stopped to speak. They discussed projects, people’s families, and the reserve, then, inevitably, the diminished funding and financial difficulties. All seemed to be involved with BCI in some way, doing odd jobs for Vie Sauvage or working at the Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural (ISDR), the technical college that Vie Sauvage and BCI had founded.
Josephine Mpanga, a petite woman in her late thirties, stopped by, and I learned that she ran the biggest NGO in the territory after Vie Sauvage. Several years back BCI had jump-started her work with a microcredit loan and a few sewing machines, and she had since expanded a sewing cooperative into a program to employ women on a number of development and conservation projects.
With a straight spine, her posture authoritative if somewhat fatigued, she sat across from Sally and described how she hoped to spread her work to nearby villages. Sally listened, nodding or asking questions. Later, she told me that she wished BCI could support Josephine more, that Josephine was among the most determined leaders in Djolu.
Marcel came inside to tell us that we had to visit Djolu’s newly appointed government administrator, and we followed him out. The sun had already gone down, the sky a deep blue that suggested the density of the darkness to come even as it silhouetted the palms along the road. Djolu is built on higher ground, and as we walked we had a view over the forest, the dark, misted curves of immense treetops set against the distance like mountains.
“Part of building social capital,” Sally told me, “is maintaining good relationships with chiefs and officials, and showing them that we respect their authority. If they understand our projects and goals, then the community is more likely to understand and support us.”
“It must get tiring,” I said. At that point, after the day’s activities and the constant human interactions, I was ready for bed.
She laughed, her voice a little hoarse. “Sometimes it gets to be a little intense, but I enjoy talking to people. And it makes things happen here. It’s what’s got us this far.”
We stayed with the administrator for an hour, introducing ourselves and discussing regional projects, from those on the reserve to initiatives in Djolu and at the technical college. Even hours later, after we’d returned to the Vie Sauvage headquarters and the generator had roared to life, people came to the door, pausing at the edge of the light, looking in, letting their eyes adjust as their smiles took shape and they called out Sally and Michael’s names.
Several of them ran their own conservation areas that they had modeled on Kokolopori, getting trackers and eco-guards to volunteer with the promise of eventual employment once there was funding. Whenever possible, BCI had supported them with modest amounts.
Michael showed them photos he had downloaded of eco-lodges around the world, explaining possibilities for bringing tourism to the area. Local conservationists and villagers gathered around the table, staring at the computer screen. He told me that many people here believe a drab, American ranch house with tiny windows would appeal to vacationing foreigners, and he wanted to dispel this. He brought up images of open-air bamboo buildings, elevated bungalows with wooden floors and palm-thatch roofs. It might take another decade, but if the communities protected their forests and bonobos, ecotourism could fund them far better than agriculture or logging. As the men hunched around Michael’s laptop, two teenage boys lingered in the door, listening and watching.
The headquarters doubled as a guesthouse for BCI and reserve visitors, and I went to my room, hardly bigger than its cot. Eight large cockroaches clung to the wall, as well as two gray spiders as big as my palm, with eyes that glinted like a single diamond when I shone my headlamp on them. I asked the building’s keeper about getting a mosquito net, and he told me there were no mosquitoes at the moment, but I insisted, not worried about mosquitoes either.
I crawled inside the net, tucked its edges under the thin foam mattress, and lay down. I was exhausted, but the day’s images kept coming back: the battered Land Cruiser, the fragile, makeshift bridges, the dire poverty. I wondered how much worse it must have been after the war, and how much effort must have been required to work in a place where the human need felt this suffocating. Many of us imagine carrying out dramatic changes in impoverished places, but few have the patience for the small, time-consuming, and seemingly endless details that make it possible.
I forced myself to stop thinking and drifted in and out of sleep for hours while Michael and Sally stayed with the others, their talk and laughter resonating late into the night.
