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
