Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Night in the city was nearly absolute, a wide swath of equatorial stars largely unfamiliar to my
eyes, a few bright flares out across the city. It took us a moment to find the security guard, sitting
near the gate in a folding chair, an AK-47 across his lap.
“Who stays in this hotel?” Michael asked in French. It was BCI's first time using it, and he
wanted to make sure that Sally would be safe in the room.
“Only NGOs and government,” the guard told him. “No one else comes in. It's very secure
here.”
We hesitated a moment, but the hotel's compound did look well contained, and Michael had
spent considerable time in Mbandaka. He and Sally had never had problems in their decade of car-
rying cash and supplies in and out.
“Many people here watch out for us,” he said, explaining that BCI was well known in
Mbandaka. Then, as we walked out along the road, he told me the story of a young man the locals
called Miracle Bonobo.
Since my arrival, I'd learned that many people involved with BCI have bonobo nicknames. For
example, the Congolese often called Sally and Michael Mama Bonobo and Papa Bonobo.
Mama
and
papa
are terms of respect in the DRC, but it had taken me a while to get used to being called
papa
by people in the street, by Evelyn's maids, and by the staff at airports and supermarkets. BCI's
oldest member, Dr. Mwanza, who was born in Bas-Congo in 1949 and earned his PhD in biology
in the USSR, focusing on species reintroduction, is called Mpaka Bonobo,
mpaka
meaning “old” or
“grandfather.”
The story of Miracle Bonobo dated back six or seven years, to when BCI was still building
credibility among the Congolese in the hard period after the civil war. The rebel- and government-
held provinces had just reunited under a fragmented central administration when BCI assembled its
team of boatmen. The captain was Malu Ebonga Charles, a green-eyed Congolese in his late forties
whose grandfather had been German, hence his nickname—Le Blanc, “the white.” The team often
plied the long trip from Mbandaka to Kokolopori. Among them was Médard, a young Congolese
man who became friends with Michael's eighteen-year-old nephew, Joey.
“My sister trusted me with Joey,” Michael said. “It was summer vacation, and she asked if I
could bring him back alive. I almost didn't, actually. He was all over the boat, hanging out with
boatmen, and he and Médard became friends. Being on the pirogues—the dugout canoes—is BCI's
vacation. It's the only time we get to unwind and relax. It can be challenging, of course. There are
storms on the river, and accidents. But we love it.
“Joey was lying in the sun, hanging out with the boatmen, and we were stopping to swim often,
but then he got malaria. He was so feverish that we had to stop to put him in the water to cool him
down. We were giving him medicine, but it was taking him a long time to recover. Everyone on the
boat really liked Joey, and after he went back to the US, Médard gave me a letter to send to him. In
it was fifty dollars.”
Michael paused in the dark. He was breathing a little hard and stopped, putting his hand to his
mouth as if to cough or clear his throat.
“He told me,” he said in a thick voice, “that Joey had talked about saving money for college.
Médard wanted to send the money, but fifty dollars was half his monthly salary. It was barely
enough to live on here. I couldn't believe he wanted to give away that money, and I insisted that he
keep it. I told him Joey didn't need it.
