Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and President Joseph Kabila, the World Bank, and other multilateral donors supported it in the
context of developing innovative approaches to long-term protection of the rainforest. The pro-
ject would provide livelihoods for the local communities, as they would be the ones managing and
zoning land, and the concessions would link up to other reserves and unofficial protected areas in
the Bonobo Peace Forest. It was for this project that BCI advisor Dick Rice, who'd developed the
concept during his time as chief economist with Conservation International, would soon be meet-
ing Sally in Mbandaka, along with members of BCI's Kinshasa team, officials from the ICCN, the
Ministry of the Environment, and CI.
Sally described other areas where BCI had done
sensibilisation
, where enthusiasm wasn't lack-
ing, only funding. Among the most promising sites was Lilungu, on the Tschuapa River, midway
between Kokolopori and Sankuru. The bonobos there had become so habituated that they would
come into the trackers' camps. They were also feeding in the fields, and the village women had
taken conservation into their own hands, growing buffer crops that the bonobos could eat instead of
the people's food. Given that bonobos weren't destructive and harvested carefully, unlike monkeys
and baboons, this approach worked.
As we talked, we sat just inside the tarpaulin shelter, in the shade as the sunlight beat down on
Michael in the front of the boat, where he faced the widening river. After a pause, she told me how
suited she felt for her life now, how much the aspects of the work that others might find intolerable
had thrilled her, whether it was living in mud huts for months, being dirty and sweaty and surroun-
ded by insects, spending as many as ten or twelve days in dugout canoes without privacy, or dealing
with the turmoil of Kinshasa. She paused and added that during the hardest periods the relationships
she had forged with the Congolese kept her going.
“I remember hearing people say,” she told me, “that if you're depressed, help someone else
and it will make you feel better on the simplest level. The suffering in this country is unbelievable.
People have so little and yet are so resilient and hopeful in the face of what other people would see
as hell on earth.”
The next day, we read and talked, occasionally pushing the boat off a sandbar. A fisherman
held up what looked like a thirty-pound carp from his tiny pirogue, eliciting shouts of surprise from
everyone. Landrine bought it and cut it into chunks that she seared over the fire.
That afternoon, we stopped in Basankusu, a vision from another world, like a movie set from a
film about space cowboys—a distant, dilapidated outpost, crowded with rusted relics of machines
and the carcasses of old ships. One iron hulk, maybe a hundred feet long, sprawled on the shore, an-
other half submerged just below. There was a barge so loaded with bags and boxes that it appeared
as if it might capsize, already floating at an angle. At the top of the mountain of haphazardly lashed
sacks, people had tied on red and blue plastic chairs, so many of them bundled together that they
looked like the blossoms in a bouquet.
On shore, a ship's boiler with large iron rivets served as the wall of a building. Shirtless men
with the bodies of athletes loaded the barge as women washed pots and clothes in the scummy wa-
ter, the surface streaked with soapsuds and the rainbow sheen of oil. At least fifty pirogues clustered
at the shore. Docking, we squeezed into a gap, our sides rubbing theirs. We had to step into an empty
boat next to ours before we could reach the sand. Broken dugouts lay alongside smoldering refuse,
wood and thatch and vines, scraps of plastic, though never soft drink or water bottles—these we
saw for sale in the market, empty ones for 200 francs each. The rank smoke drifted over everything,
and I held my breath as we walked through it.
