Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
In each tiny village—rows of wattle huts, the occasional house of mud bricks—the path
widened into long, sunbaked commons with a few palm oil trees and a talking drum. We swerved
past ducks, downy gray ducklings, chickens that screeched and flapped from beneath our wheels,
piglets, goats, and puppies running in confusion.
Just beyond each village, the road became footpath again, ten inches wide, with rutted weeds on
either side. It wound through the forest, and Jean Gaston leaned with the curves.
“The really difficult part,” he told me, “is getting funding. Madame Sally and Monsieur Michael
are doing everything they can, but these are not easy times.”
“No, they're not,” I agreed, craning my neck as we rounded a bend.
“I have been working on cassava production first. That allows people to eat and feel secure. The
other projects take more time.”
At a curve, we came face to face with three boys on a rickety bicycle, a large one pedaling,
a small one on the handlebars, and a medium one squatting on the rack behind the seat. The bike
swerved into the undergrowth and toppled, the boys flailing. Jean Gaston barely paused from ex-
plaining how the cassava was resistant to mosaic disease.
Passing thunderheads had left wet swaths, so that every ten minutes we plunged from rain-
cooled landscapes back onto the glinting path. Jean Gaston was picking up speed again even as I
could see the golden glow of copious sand far ahead.
“And I am starting pisciculture,” he told me. “Do you know what pisciculture is?”
We plowed from the full shadow of the forest into deep sand and sunlight. The wheels felt as
if on ice, the motorcycle swerving to the left as, thirty feet ahead, on the right, a boy rode his bike
into the sand. I sensed the inevitability of our next swerve, our weight about to carry us to the right.
The boy pedaled hard to stay upright in the sand, and just as we lost control and swerved, he did as
well, his bike cutting to the other side, six inches between us as we passed.
A young, ink-black woman watched, just off the path. The irises of her almond eyes blended
against her skin, giving her a beautiful, feline gaze. She had a woven basket on her back, its strap
across her forehead, and her round breasts were naked, twin infants in her arms, each of them suck-
ing at a nipple, rolling their eyes to the motorcycle.
“Pisciculture,” Jean Gaston said, “is when you find a natural spring in the forest and dig a large
hole and let it fill with water, then put fish in it. You can feed them so they get big fast, and you can
sell them. It's a lot of work, but everything's a lot of work, and without these sorts of projects, there
can be no conservation. You can't save bonobos if the people are starving.”
When we rolled into the dirt streets of Djolu, completing the usual four-hour drive in two, the
town was soaked, long mud puddles in the roads, children drying themselves in the sunlight.
“We have arrived,” Jean Gaston called to me. “And look! God has protected us from rain and
from danger.”
At the Vie Sauvage headquarters, I took my previous room, with the ubiquitous roaches and
spiders I had grown used to, but by nightfall Roger still hadn't arrived. We assumed he'd had a
problem with his motorcycle, and I spent part of the evening speaking with Cosmas, who was also
establishing a reserve. He'd habituated bonobos and won community support through development
projects, and planned to have his area legally gazetted.
Roger arrived the next day, one of his tires having repeatedly gone flat so that he had to rent
the front wheel of someone's motorcycle. Late that afternoon, only an hour before sunset, Roger
and I rode to his house in Nkokolombo, our bags tied to the back of the motorcycle with strips cut
