those next door are collapsing.
The effect of all this was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, with a seventh of the country’s seventy million here, many from the provinces for work or in refuge from ethnic conflict. One in five adults is HIV positive, and, unable to afford health care, the vast majority resort to faith healing and magic. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis suggests that among the world’s megacities, only the poverty of Dhaka, Bangladesh, compares to that of Kinshasa, where less than 5 percent of the population earn salaries, and the average yearly income is less than one hundred dollars. All along the street, young men in torn, colorless clothes sold goods or looked for work. They crowded into the road, trying to find rides. Six or seven at a time stood on a single rear bumper. They held onto tailgates or the back doors of vans, fingers hooked at the edges; at stops, they lowered a hand and shook it out, repeatedly extending it back to a familiar shape.
Group taxis crammed passengers in, many of them hugging baskets or synthetic gunnysacks. On my second day, I traveled without Evelyn, and it took me longer to get a ride. The Congolese barely had to gesture; they just leaned forward, revealing what they wanted with their gazes and postures. As I’d been taught, I lifted my arm and pointed my thumb or index finger to indicate the direction I would take at the next fork in the road.
Though I’d been told that the Kinois, the residents of Kinshasa, would work me over for every penny, on my first two rides, the drivers wouldn’t let me pay. One steered a rumbling Mercedes, its windshield split, its sunbaked paint cracked like pottery glaze. Passing a crowd, he swerved to the roadside and handed me a brick of dirty Congolese francs nearly the size of a cinder block, asking me to give it to a stooped old man in a brown button-down shirt who hurried over to meet us. Maybe the driver didn’t need money, I considered when he dropped me off, refusing my cash, telling me that he enjoyed the conversation.
Each time I visited the offices, Sally and Michael were finishing grant applications and ironing out plans for our trip. The staff rushed about, coming and going, making lists and compiling reports, their cell phones chiming and ringing, Skype beeping in the background.
As I spoke to Michael, he paused to rub his eyes and catch his breath, and I realized that what I’d been taking for exuberance may have also been the jitteriness of exhaustion.
“We’ve gone from being a small NGO to something a lot bigger overnight,” he told me. “We’ve hired new office staff in the US, and we had to delay our arrival here so we could train them. And we’ve expanded our staff here as well. We have grants for work in the field, but not enough of that goes to operating costs, so we’re struggling to maintain our offices.”
That evening, some of the BCI Kinshasa staff left quickly, careful not to go home too late, when gangs armed with machetes came out. Known as kulunas, a word from Angola, from the Portuguese coluna, “column” (used for soldiers on patrol), the thugs prowled outlying neighborhoods, their faces at times painted like skulls. There were so many daily challenges for the staff and so many varied discussions in the offices—of landing strips in the rainforest, grant proposals for new vehicles, rural clinics running out of medicine, celebrities contacting BCI in hopes of seeing bonobos in the wild.
Sally joined the discussion, coming in from the next room to tell me that BCI was experiencing a sea change, a make-it-or-break-it moment. She worried about money, and in my short time there, I’d noticed that everyone in the Congo seemed to be asking for it, calling the offices and demanding it. Each time this happened, she explained deliberately to the caller what BCI could and couldn’t do, when certain funding would arrive, that she and Michael were working on new budgets, more grants, and to be patient. She told me that BCI was barely managing to fund the people on the reserves, that she and Michael almost never paid themselves, and when they did, they ended up putting the money to an emergency somewhere in the field.
Over the next week, the BCI team decided to push back our flight to Mbandaka once, then again. Normally, they ran their trips separately, one staying in Kinshasa or DC while the other was in the field, living in mud huts for months at a time to support their Congolese partners as they established or oversaw programs. But they hadn’t been to Kokolopori in over six months and had a lot to do. They chartered a bush plane from Mbandaka into the rainforest with Aviation sans Frontières and sent the boats loaded with supplies to meet us at the reserve. Two of the Kinshasa staff, Bienvenu and Pitchen, were on board, as well as BCI’s boatmen who were based in Mbandaka. After a month in Kokolopori, we would all return together to Mbandaka by boat.
Two days before we were to leave, and three after the boats’ departure, Sally got a phone call: two outboard engines had died and the boatmen couldn’t find parts in Basankusu, a town on the Lulonga River at the confluence of the Maringa and Lopori, a day or two from the Congo. Eric, who had just arrived at the offices freshly shaved, a blue oxford shirt tucked into his jeans, set out to find replacement parts and put them on an upcoming flight to Basankusu. All day the Kinshasa staff bustled about, Dieudonné getting our photography permits since it is illegal to take photographs in the DRC without governmental permission.
We delayed once more, Sally and Michael repeatedly working until after midnight. Then, a week and a half after my arrival, we were ready. We loaded the bed of a white pickup with large yellow duffel bags printed with the letters BCI and drove back toward the airport as I stared out the truck window, taking in the city’s turmoil. Women paused between four lanes of rushing traffic, plastic tubs the size of laundry baskets on their heads. Shirtless men broke old concrete with sledges, piling chunks on the median, each muscle in their torsos knife-thin and close to the skin. Further on, boys played soccer in an empty lot among the scorched hulks of old trucks and heaps of smoldering trash. There were merchants in sooty storefronts, peddlers by loaded handcarts, students waiting for buses, office workers, men and women in pressed suits and skirts, climbing into taxis with mismatched panels, holes drilled along their edges, wires knitting them together.
As we were about to climb the steps to the CAA jet that would take us to Mbandaka, a police officer and Dr. Nicolas Mwanza Ndunda, BCI’s scientific director, ran from the N’Djili Airport terminal to give a package and contracts to Sally. Mwanza is a tall, jovial-looking man in his sixties, with a paunch and a small mustache. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and the sun had us squinting, the heat off the tarmac so palpable I could feel it in my muscles.
The other passengers hurried past us to claim seats as Sally read the papers, a subcontract for a grant that would employ staff from the Congolese Ministry of Scientific Research. She signed and handed them to Mwanza, and the officer began to lift his hand in an imploring gesture. She gave him the equivalent of five dollars in Congolese francs for letting Mwanza meet us.
After we took our places, not a seat remained in the narrow Fokker jet, the last six rows of which were loaded with bags and cardboard boxes heavily sealed with brown tape. It was hot inside, the passengers sweating, though we cooled down once we were in motion.
We left Kinshasa, crossing inland away from the Pool Malebo, heading east over Bandundu Province. Below us, forested rivers scored savannah plateaus, giving the landscape the look of interlocking puzzle pieces. Équateur was just above, bordering Congo-Brazzaville to the west, the Central African Republic to the north, and Orientale Province to the east.
Équateur is known for being the most heavily forested province in the DRC, and forty minutes into our trip, as we neared Mbandaka, I stared out the jet’s window at the rainforest curving against the horizon. A distant plume of smoke rose from the endless rippled green, calling to mind a war photograph I saw years ago: a burning ship far away on the uniform ocean.
Before this trip, I’d studied the DRC on a map. Its lopsided bulk, in its place at the center of Africa, looked—just as the hackneyed metaphor says—like
