Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
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 var-
ied 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 re-
serves, that she and Michael almost never paid themselves, and when they did, they ended up put-
ting 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.
