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.
