the eggs: you just never know

so last time i thought i had settled the issue with the eggs. there are people who walk around with 15 layers of cardboard racks of eggs on their heads. i used to think, wow, they're super agile and steady to not let those eggs fall! but in kinshasa, it turns out they are mostly hard boiled. no big whoop.
so we were on the road the other day, on our way back from bombo lumene and i had skipped lunch because i opted for a swim, and so i was starving.
the two others congolese guys with us asked to stop at this little market, and they got out and started haggling over pondu, these huge bushes of greens that are really tasty. they were buying piles, i mean, piles so large they ended up filling the entire back of our truck. i like to make funny of the taxis with this stuff sticking out all the windows, but that was eventually us.
anyway, they were doing their thing and i scanned the market and woot! there's an egg lady! so i jump out and get some eggs. i hear our driver start to say something like "check that the eggs are....." but i was too far away.
i buy 2 eggs for 600FC (pricey!) and i say to the lady, who has 2 kids hanging on her back "these are cooked right?"
and she nodded and i added, "well OF COURSE they are cooked ! who would buy raw eggs in 30 degree heat from some lady on the side of the street, right?"
and this is an important point of this story - she gave me a napkin. albeit a tiny napkin, it was a napkin, in a bag, to indicate i would be eating this egg very soon.
so back in the car, i'm riding middle backseat (i lost the shootout) and i'm eager to chow down and this egg is hard to break. i fake trying to break it on the driver's head, but instead kinda smash it on the headrest of the front seat and ...
blubbbbbbb. this egg is not cooked!
boniface is so pissed because he JUST cleaned the car and there is raw egg everywhere.
so he's screaming at me, and i'm trying to hold it right so it doesn't spill, but the white is just dripping between my fingers and i'm yelling at the dude next to me, i don't know his name because he's just a hitchiker but dude, open the window! open the window! and he's some guy who has never ridden in a car i guess (less likely), or maybe all the cars he rides in have no windows (more likely) because he's just pushing on the window, thinking it will project outward, but instead i'm dripping egg on his pants so i turn to my left and the lady next to me is all NO WAY! and this isn't exactly the kind of place you can just stop on the side of the road, there's no shoulder, every other vehicle is a giant truck overloaded with piles of stuff and jugs and goats and they have no visibility, so finally i just fling it outside an open window, and it totally smears all over the outside of the car, attached to small string of egg white on my hands.
and then it was totally silent, like after a big traumatic experience, and we are all checking out clothes, gauging the damage, and boniface is just shaking his head, pursed lips.
so i pull out my tiny napkin, and all i could say was, hey guys, she gave me a napkin, you know.

bushmeat: the show

so around the campfire at night there are a lot of stories from the bush. and i guess it gets pretty crazy out there, especially when you're these biologist guys, who clearly don't have great planning skills like me or the female park warden to estimate and carry the requisite amount of food or water. so you hear stories like, oh, remember that time we were dying of thirst on the sudanese border and we had to drink that mud? that kind of stuff.



and as it turns out, when you run out of food, or when rebels steal your supplies, you have to make do with the last resort...bushmeat. which is why whenever we're walking or driving, one of my colleagues will be like, oh, yeah, baboon, baboon is super tasty!
 
which made me imagine the next awesome tv show i want to pitch. it would be called "bushmeat," and it would feature my brother, following one of these disorganized african field teams. and the first half of the episode would be travel show stuff, meeting people in the villages, seeing how they cook and prepare stuff, and then my brother staying in a hut and nursing big bug wounds and sitting in the pirogue complaining about how hot it is and how sticky his pants are.  
and then would come the time when they would have to kill something, and that's when his butcher instincts would kick in, and he would cut the thing up, and season it with whatever is around, ok, maybe he's allowed to bring a bag of mixed salt or some maggi packets, but the rest is forest plants and whatever they can scrounge, and then he would make the tastiest meal ever.
and at the end they would show the recipe, and since it's not really pc to eat monkey meat, there would be a replacement, like, instead of antilope, try and replace it with pork or something. organic pork, actually, because bushmeat is totally organic. monkeys are herbivores you know. and that would be that.

some stories from bombo lumene

so here we are in bombo lumene, one of the parks closest to kinshasa. just a few hours away, people come down here on day trips to swim in the river, or, if you're like us, you come and stay in one of the old belgian military cabins. since we are technically ministry of environment on official business, it's even better, we are here to play, and work, and eat wonderful congolese dinner prepared by the park warden herself - that's right, a woman runs this place. and not just any woman, a beautiful, feminine badass woman who has a brown belt in judo and did paramilitary training in eastern congo, completing her target practice shooting at real live poachers. she has lots of great stories about weak, pitiful men who just can't handle it out in the wild. i imagine her eating the heads off of live scorpions and stuff.



my collegue staying in the room next door got her ankles munched by a spider the first night, and when we saw her swollen infected wounds, it was upon my wimpering that the warden came and did a thorough search of my bedroom. she says the search came up empty, but still, i bet she didn't tell me that she bit the head off a live spider or maybe a snake.


so the view is nice, and there's a little river just a scramble down the ravine that you can swim in, though watch out you don't get caught up in the current because according to all the kids there's lots of dead bodies under those rocks. and there are adorable goats everywhere that follow you to the one square meter area in the entire park where you get cell phone reception. yes, it's only right there, ok for vodaphone, for airtel it's just over there, but in this spot it's like there's an invisible phone booth, you have to squeeze in next to the other guys to make your call. the guards all wear hunter green with berets, with their knockoff giorgio armani sunglasses and do a very serious, coordinated flag raising ceremony everyday, in front of the goats.


the second day, the phone booth was empty, and that's because everyone's battery died, as the park generator has had a blown fuse for a few days. we brought a tiny generator with us from kinshasa, strictly to power our computers to do our work, and nothing else, yet, everytime it starts up, it's like children of the corn, people coming out of the forest in every direction approching you with their phone charger.


so then they asked us to hook the generator up to a plug that lit up our entire house, which, unknowingly also lit up the entire guard village a few km away, and they wouldn't let us turn it off. it was especially annoying since all the lights in our bungalow go on with the generator and can't get turned off and is a ridiculous waste of energy. the light in my bedroom is right above my bed, and so all the mosquitos and bugs were piling up on my pillow for hours and i had to get the warden to come do a room check and tuck me in.


we quickly ran out of gas, obviously, but as it turns out one of the guard's wife was going into labor and needed a ride to the town, 15km away. our driver took her there in exchange for 20 liters of fuel which they would get in town. i was trying to get some sheets or something to put on the seats cuz i didn't really want to sit in a pool of embryo water or blood the next day but there wasn't much time. but it was the driver who said "hey, hold it in, i'm not cleaning this up!"


it was a girl. they said they are going to name her after the driver, which means they need to feminize the his name (boniface). or they could name her after our project, why not, that would be just as impersonal. anyway.

travel complaints

the next time you complain about travel, just be happy you're not a passenger for multiple days on one of these:

or these:

or this thing:

at least these ones have toilets:

ladies only

being a woman in africa is no easy thing.
basically, you are meant to churn out kids (probably starting from the age of 11), and cook, and that's about it.

i've written about poo, peeing, vomiting, now let's talk about something of the female persusion and a little more sensitive - guys, look away, cover your eyes, go talk about chicks and cars or something. this is about menstruation.
let me preface this with the fact that i have always noticed that unlike any other trip where your baggage becomes more and more unbearable and cumbersome over time, when i travel to congo my bag alwyas gets smaller and smaller. sure, i give stuff away, and yeah, i guess i lose things, but really, in the end everything just gets selectively removed.
but it's nothing to worry about, theft is not about valuables, more about necessity. they won't take your laptop, because they won't know what to do with it (no one has outlets)...but a flashlight or cell phone better be locked up. your fancy patagonia fleece isn't that vulnerable, just watch out for your shoes and socks. they will never take your camera, just your toilet paper.
and so it was, the feeling of a lighter bag is a good thing right? until that day of the month came, i searched confidently in my bag for my well planned stash of tampons and maxipads.
GONE.
fuuuuuuuuuuuudge.
i'm travelling on a tiny speedboat for 2 days on the congo river with 4 dudes. we stop like, once every 5 hours at villages that consist of huts. i have a total of 400 congolese francs on me (that's less than 40 cents. don't even get me started on the economics of this trip, and how all my budgeted money was spent in one day covering for johannes, i am pretty iritated at being poor).
oh, and it is pouring rain and everything i own is either soaked in sweat, rain, or covered in gasoline.
oh, and i'm piss drunk on palm wine that i've been sipping out of a recycled beer bottle.

not a happy camper

i ask ino to borrow money he's all, what do you need, i'll buy it! you want some beer? he buys beer and hands me one.

this is not good.

recall that we are stopping in hut villages, that with the rain now are muddy hut villages. in one village, i asked a guy if i could use his toilet. he brought me to his hut, and showed me to the corner in which i could pee, in front of his family and his ducks.

i wonder what the female residents do with thier monthly task...this is more mind boggling than indonesian turlets.
i am back in the boat, i sit uncomfortably and sip my palm wine, pondering gender issues when we stop in the town of bolobo to spend the night. i am drunk, hungover, tired, and still entirely soaked and cold from the earlier rain, and quite ready to be done with this endless bumpy boat trip (i am actually looking forward to a cold brown shower in dusty hectic kinshasa?).
we check in with the missionaries, get hassled by the CGM and then wander off into the town in search of food and booze. we find a little bar with really loud music that also just happens to be a pharmacy! what luck! everyone sits in plastic chairs and orders beer and peanuts and i make an excuse and sneakinto the little store.
as a mondele, it is impossible to do anything without being followed by at least 10 children so they all join me in the pharmacy to watch. this is SO embarassing. i have a hard enough time buying tampons at the supermarket, this is something entirely different.
i scan the shelves which are full of malaria medicine, eye drops and other stuff and finally notice a box that has the same color and design at those always brand maxi pads, but the text is in chinese. i point to those, i'll take one.
my little audience chatters in response and all the blood rushes to my face. the pharmacy guy opens the carboard box with an exacto knife and pulls out a large handy plastic carrying case of what seem like adult diapers.
oh no oh no, these are from the 80s, or what comes out of those automatic machines in airport restrooms. i want to die. just imagine me walking up to the guys at the bar, with my little plastic suitcase, hey guys i just bought these, thought they might come in handy!
i negotiate a purchase by the unit, which means the guy opens the package and pulls a thick pad out, clearly showing me the blue medicinal strip and then waves it around, using it for emphasis as we do business. everyone is talking, yelling, i can feel my heartbeat in my face. it's hot, i'm sweating, i want to crawl under a rock and die.
i look in my wallet and realize i don't have enough cash and really need to turn up the bargaining. we argue and argue back and forth, i offer euros, my phone number, he then displays the wings for extra protection and squeezes it to demonstrate the absorbency, I'm half expecting him to pour blue liquid on it like in the commercial. somehow we come to an agreement and i get a package of tissues thrown in with a deal i can afford. yes! 
as it turns out they don't actually have the tissues, someone will bring them to me in the bar. the perfect alibi for when i get back to my colleagues and someone asks me what took so long! i stuff 2 thick diaper like items into the pockets of my cargo pants saddle up to the plastic table and down some beer.
momentarily, a little boy brings me the tissues and i thank him and confidently wave him away.
so i spent about 20cents on one rather thick diaper.
let's now imagine i'm a shy 14 year old girl who has no income whose family lives in a thatch hut a can barely afford enough manioc to feed my 6 siblings. it's no wonder they stole my tampons, that stuff is luxury.

bolobo

oly shit bolobo. descending the congo river in our speedboat, it's getting dark so we pull into a harbour that is dominated by rusty shipwrecks, one of them an overturned large canoe-like thing with a tree growing out of it, guarded by military guys. Dodo the boat driver urges me to put away the camera. the sounds of children and people are emanating from all over this village. we jump out of the boat, everyone forgetting to remove their bright orange life vest which only adds to the perception that we are aliens. we leave Dodo to guard the boat and head to the missionary place to check if they have room.

we walk up through the village, leading a parade of children. we pass the trait d'union, former bar turned convenience shop, and the humble abode of kingboy.

trait-d'union

kingboy lives here

we arrive at a serene missionary establishment with goats and chickens and they serve us cold beer while we wait for our rooms. we are repeatedly made aware of the rules: NO COUPLES.
i gladly accept my single room, letting the guys duke out their bunk beds.
We go back to the boat and get intercepted by the CGM, who was apparently notified by the priest (jerk). it's a guy in a cardinals jersey and his assistant in uniform with a 70s briefcase. they hassle us, rather rudely that they were inconvenienced by our unannounced arrival. we make them follow us to our boat.
we find Dodo managing well. he's apparently used to this, living, sleeping on the boat, guarding it from thieves. i ask him if he needs anything, and no, he's already managed to get a beer and dinner, and is giving himself a shave.
we grab our stuff, bid farewell to dodo and walk back up the hill. the CGM assistant guy is now eagerly asking for my number, but at the same time hassling us for money. where is the logic? we tell the main guy that we see through his bullshit but he argues that he is very important, and has a lot of work dealing with visitors, and he stops, instructs his assistant to open his suitcase to show us a wrinkled picture of a white guy with sunglasses. this guy is a very important belgian from kinshasa, and of course we know him, because we are white therefore we know all the white people in kinshasa. cardinals puts the picture back in the suitcase like he won this round and continues to follow us as we completely ignore them.
we get to the missionary and our tactics no longer work, we can't shake these guys. we finally give them our passports and lead them to our room and leave them while we drink 12 more beers in the courtyard.
they scrutinze every detail of our papers and passports, write stuff down and call people but they got nuthin'. meanwhile, we're drunk and hungry.
the missionary guy promises that our dinner will be ready in one hour, at 830pm. we are very hungry and from previous experiences where my colleagues went dinnerless at this place they don't believe him and we start to exit the compound in search for some famous bolobo grilled fish. but the missionary argues, ok dinner at 815 pm! geert presents a challenge:
we will go eat some fish and return at 9pm and if the dinner is on the table then we eat and we will pay for it.
if we return at 9pm and dinner is not ready, then we will wait and eat it and will not pay for it.
the aspiring priest thinks for a minute and hesitates, ok.
i asked geert what's the deal and he answers, "this is africa, you need to bet on two horses" and it makes sense.
we walk in the absolute pitch dark towards the nighttime fish market.
this place is nutso. there's no electricty, just candles, people, fish. it smells like fish. it's dark. the most wonderful part is that it is so dark no one knows we are mondele and we can walk through and mingle unnoticed. big fish, small fish, smelly fish. geert negotiates something with yves, one of the missionary boys, but i am too much in awe of all the fish hacking, yelling, singing, pushing, to notice. we meet up at the bar and instruct the aspiring priest to get our fish grilled and deliver to the bar. he eagerly embarks on his mission.
we get drunk, i deal with the pharmacy (story to follow), and a few beers later, our fish still hasn't arrived.
we ditch the aspiring priest for our dinner appointment. we're actuall 30 minutes late and dinner has just been served. we are hungry and won't argue technicalities. i sit down to eat and find one of the other missionary guys hitting on me. wtf, aren't you guys supposed to be celibate?
we talk to a doctor who rattles on depressing statistics about malarial deaths which outnumber hiv cases. johannes and i tell priest and rabbi jokes. hours later, we're about to go to bed and in comes yves, whom we had ditched at the market and totally forgotten about. your fish! it is uncooked. we specifically instructed him to cook the fish, and this was hours ago, what have you been up to since then?? geert lambasts him. we give the fish to the cook and go to bed. yves bows his head in shame, but along with his buddies follows me to my room and watches me undress through the curtains, and eagerly invite me to morning mass. oh don't worry, we will make sure we skidaddle before services!
at 6 am the sounds of bells emanate from the bell tower of the church. but these are not real bells, this is a recording of the vatican bells, but played at the same volume as the bar music, which means scratchy and barely discernible. i go to the restroom and hold my nose, and ultimately decide to hold my urge to pee or poop until we get to kinshasa.
goodbye bolobo.

adventure to Ngiri, part II

we arrive in the dark at Ntondo. we can't find our way (there are no lights anywhere, nor roads for that matter, just huts and stuff) so we pick up a guy from the village to guide us. we have since lost the second car, the one that happens to have all the food, and our luggage. we sit quietly on the porch of our research station situated perfectly on the lake. there are fireflies, stars reflected in the perfectly still water.
we're starting to get antsy so we pay a guy with a motorcycle to go get us some beer. beer guy is gone a long time. geert laments the departure of the doctor and his very attractive wife who also cooks a hell of a meal. beer guy returns and we are happy. the other car shows up quickly after (they must have been attracted by the beer) and in the meantime i serve up some life-saving trader joe's mix.
we went for an amazing swim in the lake, the water was warm and it's very acidic, so good for the skin! i washed my hair and cursed my lack of conditioner and hair stuff which had previously exploded in my bag which foreshadows a coming week of thick knot hair.
i sleep in an afterthought bunk bed - it's like they had a bed that was kinda high up and then decided to put another underneath. there is about 2 feet between this bed and the one above and it has been decided that i am the only one who will fit there. i slide in my bed sandwich and sleep.
the house has walls that only go so high, not to the ceiling, probably for ventilation or something. but it means you can hear everything. so in the middle of the night when guard number 1 came in to do a number 1 you heard e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. i really had to pee but decided to hold it in.
in the morning we got up super early with the sun, had breakfast (peanuts and coffee) and i went for another swim. of course, all the local boys came to stare and 13 sets of eyeballs were popping out of their sockets while i undressed, what am i supposed to do, wear a burka? some fishermen came and fished right on the beach which in theory is supposed to be a reserve. i took pictures. they were super friendly and so incredibly proud of the miniscule fish they were catching with mosquito nets. you know you are killing absolutely every living thing in this lake and you won't have anything to eat tomorrow, right?

look at my teeny tiny baby fish, only 50 calories!

bowl o fish

i give a perogue a go and once again this is a spectacle - mondele in a perodgue! like they must think we whietys have gelatinous brains, eat nothing but bread and are incapabable of anything. like when you're eating grilled goat and people go "look at the mondele eating goat!" and laugh because it's hilariously weird to them.

crazy mondele, you can't pirogue!

everyone from the research station comes to the beach to board the speedboat, which clearly isn't there. Dodo the speedboat driver had left kinshasa a few days earlier and was meant to be here by now...and his cell phone is out of minutes (convenient)...so instead we put an engine the fancy perogue and conveniently outfit it with ubiquitous plastic chairs. i called dibs on the one with the words of praise to god. i was also seated behind the guy with the gun who would protect me in the event of a pirate attack.

off we go, and i take thousands of pictures of perogues. they are everywhere and they are so cool!

pirogue # 323

pirogue # 947

super loaded perogue # 1012 - (i would take nicer pictures if i had a better camera hint hint birthday in november)

we cruise down the lake, chatting, feeling the breeze and watching the mist lift and woah, 2 hours later lo and behold i still don't have to pee and there is our speedboat! we transfer our belongings mid-lake and off we go.
now we are 4 mondeles and 3 congolese (one heavily armed) in a speedboat that no local has ever seen or imagined before. everyone and anyone you pass stops what they are doing, stares and then starts waves madly and smiling. i am doing so much waving i feel like the pope.
every once in a while we need to add gas from the 11 or so vegetable oil canisters we have on board. we calculate that this boat burns more fuel and emits more carbon than the plane we took to Mbandaka. we will never speak of this gas consumption again.
we stop in crazy little villages with markets and more staring children. the kids all come to shore and just stare. they don't talk to eachother, or poke another's arm and talk, they just stare silently. if you look them in the eye, some smile and giggle, most of them run away in fear. woah, we're in the kind of place where white people aren't just different, they are scary.
a lady comes out of a hut with a small barely walking baby who takes one look at me and screams in terror like i am the baby eater all his baby friends have been telling him about. she is dragging the baby towards me and it is doing everything as baby-possible to escape but it's no use. she finally brings the baby to me and despite its every effort makes it touch me. this thing is screaming bloody murder, and once it touches me doesn't stop. she brings it back into the hut. touching a mondele is good luck, some people say.
more kids start to follow and if you turn around they freeze, it's like we're playing a schoolyard game. geert finds some ladies selling bananas and bread and we pick up lunch.
a self-important feeling man scuttles up with his little assistant and introduces himself as the CGM immigration service. these guys again. this village has 15 huts, probably 200 people, and there's an immigration service? he's demanding our passports as usual, and we just ignore him, drink a coke, chat with the people, trying to convert their frozen staring into thoughtful conversation. a young-ish lady named Fabiola shows me her house, and proudly talks about her kids and shows me the neighboring huts that stand empty since the war, the war being the whole mess last march. she keeps saying god sent me to her that she's so happy to meet me. thanks fabiola. geert likes to ask people what they eat, what they grow. and i look under a hut and see some ducks. we should eat some duck. good idea, geert says.
the perogue catches up with us and we go across the river and negotiate a live duck for dinner. thankfully it gets carried away in the the other boat so i don't have to stare into its vacant eyes for the next few hours.
more villages, tiny bananas and peanuts.

oubangui village

next we stop at the military base (no photos, hide your camera!!!!!) for more formalities (e.g. ass-kissing). this is an old belgian colonial site with overgrown busted up mansions and a large alley lined with tall palms, where our team was previously stuck overnight for refusing to pay a bribe - er, i mean 'immigration fee.' we once again give our passports to some very important people, watch them copy the numbersand hand our paperwork to dudes as we have been doing all day.
a lieutenant ambles up and introduces himself, along with his underling. geert vaguely ignores him by looking directly through him. these guys are most likely the ones who bombed our house. the lieutenant talks with his arms behind his back, waxing poetic about the cycles of war, and how things are destroyed, but that allows new better things to grow again.
geert says wearily "yeah, that's really great, papa, but we liked our house the way it was. would you like to build it up and make it new again for us?"
the lieutenant, realizes he is being indirectly accused walks off angrily. we get back into our boat and continue.
more villages, perogues.
we finally make it bobangui, it is now 32 hours since we left kinshasa, a trip our logistics guy said we could do "in a day no problem." ha.

arrival at base camp. there's our duck, whom we've named "dinner"

we are warmly greeted by the field team, and more guys with guns. we see the house, whose roof has clearly been burnt but besides the bullet marks on the outside, no evidence of rockets or grenades or any of that sort. this is a regular ole looting, folks. it's pretty obvious who are the mutherfuckers who did this. everyone knows the rebels (who are armed with little more than machetes), and local people aren't really the steal glass windows and shoot bullets in walls kinda type.
someone brings a plastic table and 4 chairs and we sit down to some peanuts and beer to ponder. oh, we will get them, we will win...and we will use our strongest weapon....the weapon of...conservation!? we each drink from our warm Turbo King beer and no one speaks as we listen to the overwhelming sounds of the peeping frogs and insects, who all seem to agree.

adventure to Ngiri, part I

when i came to DRC 3 years ago we had a workshop to identify the most biologically important areas to conserve and protect. one of these 62 areas is the Nrigi triangle, an area in northwest DRC surrounded by the Oubangui and Ngiri rivers and is home to swamp forest chimpanzees, elephants buffalos, and probably a lot of other stuff, but who knows. a few years ago the German government agreed to support the creation of the Ngiri biosphere reserve, and this is one of Johannes' projects.
Less than a year ago, a ranger/research station was completed in a little village called Bobangui on the shores of the Oubangui river. only 2 months later, in March 2010 a little tiff erupted between some rebels and the government military, all the villagers fled to the opposite shore in Republic of Congo, and we heard the Boubangui house was destroyed, the rumours running the gamut from a canoe-launched grenade to a missile attack, to hostile takeover by rebels.
johannes had already tried 3 times to visit the famous Ngiri river ecoystem he was to protect, and he decided ths time, he was going to make it. and so there it was, we would get to the ngiri river, whatever it takes. we would fly to Mbandaka or Ntondo, where another research station is, then take a boat to Boubangui.
the trip was planned 3 weeks in advance along with our belgium cohort and luckily, i secured a spot. a few days before our trip, our logistician, olivier, whose title implies full time assistance with logistics for just these types of trips tells me "there are no flights to Mbandaka this week" which is congolese for "i never made the reservations and all the flights are booked." so we decided to charter a plane to Mbandaka on wednesday, and take the new speedboat we just purchased from the swedish ambassador back down to kinshasa on sunday. we found 2 cute french pilots from Aviation Sans Frontieres to take us to Mbandaka. We picked up an extra passenger and haggled a bit so it was a little bit more affordable.
Flying from the N'dolo airport is one of my favorite things ever. First, there's the drive through kinshasa. in one neighborhood i noticed that every single lady on the street was carrying a huge bin of bread on her head. it was mystical. Geert, our belgian colleague read my mind and pointed across the street "La!." and there is the hq of the factory rthe soze of a city block where pretty much all the bread comes from. that place must churn out over 3 million large format hot dog buns (that's what they call bread) a day and distribute it through various sources, mostly, women's heads.
we get to the small domestic airport to begin the "procedures." these involve a series of doors, offices, whatever through which you must go through to travel to a destination that is not outside DRC. thankfully we were led by Ino, our congolese primate scientist who is the master of local procedure. he has a very african way of speaking ngala without moving his jaw while looking around, scanning the horizon, doing a million things like checking his watch or drinking a beer and without fail it passifies even the most eager of bribe seekers.
we enter the first "office," which is actually a shipping container. some money is exchanged, maybe for the airport tax. i hear my name mentioned, my passport passed around, forms filled out. what are we doing here? i ask ino.
we need to pay for the visa.
"but i already have a visa"
you need a visa for your visa
and i'm about to ask the logical next question as to why you need a visa for your visa and ino waves me away, irrirated, aurelgrooves stop asking stupid questions!
i retreat into the corner with my book.
we exit and enter the next office, and something similar happens, i am uninterested.
next door is customs. customs? we aren't leaving the country. don't ask questions.
there's a booth for locals, and one for foreigners. my name is called and i am summoned to the foreigner booth.
a very serious, borderline angry man asks what do you do, where are you staying. i answer diligently, back straight.
and your birthday?
dude quickly waves me into the booth, pulls out out the id card around his neck and demands "read here" and points to the same birthdate as mine. we are twins! he exclaims and hugs me. this is the most exciting day of his life. i want to tell him how cool it is to have a birthday around thanksgiving and then realize he doesn't celebrate thanksgiving and so we are talking, shaking hands, and then geert comes and knocks on the window and urges in his flemish accent, "eh papa, c'est pour aujourd'hui ou demain?" i get pushed out of the booth, back to business.
Geert gets asked the same questions, his answer "i am the capitan of Flanders, I am staying at the Ritz Carlton and my birthday is none of your business." as the guy is writing all this down i'm trying not to snicker at johannes, who is presuming the ritz carlton is the one between the Macy's and the movie theater.
next step is the hygeine station where a guy with a lab coat inspects you, i guess. all he really does is ask you for a piece of paper than ino has, and then whispers to his assistant who adds another hash mark to her sheet. this sheet is full of hash marks, she must have been keeping score since the day this place opened. the dr. double checks her work by gingerly putting on his glasses which are in his lab coat pocket. they are thick coke bottle glasses, entirely dirty cracked and broken there is no way he can see through them. he proudly waves me by.
the bar is a bunch of metal chairs that are falling apart, and the bathroom is more like a crime scene. we are taken to our truck with our luggage and drive out to the plane. the cute pilots are scanning us with the metal detector wand and are waving it in my face trying to make beep near my nose ring. geert meanwhile declares he is going to relieve himself "a la congolese" and is peeing on an abandoned shack.
we take off, the flight is not very exciting, mostly hazy. we land in Mbandaka which has nothing particular besides a UN building with lots and lots and lots and lots of barbed wire. the airport is an impressivly run down, empty structure with one door that says
entree
baggages
sortie
the door to everywhere! there are people sleeping on different surfaces and a shoeless man at a table, reading the bible and intently making notes. he instructs us to wait. because all zero of the other passengers in this terminal also need to have their passports checked and this means a 35 minute wait. we finally get called into the CGM (immigration or something or other) office and 2 different people write my passport number down. i then realize that the top three congolese passtimes are:


1. sitting in plastic chairs
2. walking while making that despondent shuffling sound with flip flops (like my dad does with his slippers)
3. writing down passport numbers.


we are cleared and then escorted out to the parking lot which is full of armed soldiers. 2 are selected to escort us and thus begins the "formalities."
first visit is to the governor of Equateur province. he greets us in a room that tries to be the oval office in 1/10th of the size. there is a large fancy wooden table that takes up 95% of the room, the rest of it is filled with flags and those fancy boardroom office chairs. you come in the door and you can't move through the sea of chairs. i have a bag and i'm stuck between two chairs. a press guy is there, it's very embarassing. we all do our little speeches, happy to be here, we welcome you to our province, sorry your house got destroyed blah blah blah. the governor's cell phone starts to ring but he ignores it. it's playing the hokey pokey song.  finally he answers and we squeeze back out and buy some cool litchi-like fruit with long spikes from a lady outside. SO yummy.

back in the car, next stop, the real man in charge, the military colonel, who's people may or may have not bombed our house. the colonel isn't there, which would have meant an hour's wait but instead we meet his goofy deputy who has heavy dress shoes 5 sizes too big. same drill, passport numbers written down and he talks and winks at me a few times. he points to his vast empire on a map from 1963 and says he's in charge when the colonel is out. if the colonel knew about this he probably wouldn't be too happy. we then head to the office where we pick up fuel, and more guys with guns.

dirty map of DRC circa 1963

picking up fuel and guys with guns

we now have a 2 car convoy for the 4 hours drive to ntondo.

it's a bumpy dusty road through villages with kids running and screaming "mondele!" we run over quite a few chickens (man they're stupid). apparently, a chicken isn't a big deal but if you hit a goat or a kid you need to stop.

we pass a lot of awesome bicycles, packed to the gills with stuff.
we're driving really fast with guys with guns and so we seem really important. plus, not a lot of cars in these parts, so the guys on bicycles sortof freak out when we pass, it's a little sad. instead of just riding on the right and letting us pass they kind of disperse as if a helicopter is landing, feet come off of the pedals and they scatter in every direction and run off the road and crash into the bushes. they may have brakes, or maybe they don't know how to use them.

i want one of these bikes!

the windshield has a giant crack in it, and the place where the radio would be is empty.

rollin' rollin' rollin'

we stop at crazy markets like this one and the guy with the gun buys what we ask him to

geert starts singing flemish songs, meanwhile the military dude in the back is falling asleep and doing the violent head bob, but his beret manages to stay on. the way his gun is leaning on his knee makes the barrel point straight towards the base of my neck. we're hitting some nasty bumps and i'd rather not think about it. i'm sure that thing has a safety latch or something. he startles awake, looks at his gun and changes the ammunition cartridge. what was wrong with the old one? are you really allowed to sleep while we drive? have you ever shot someone?

aurelgrooves, stop asking stupid questions!