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
