Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
kissing cheeks like the French, but adding one last kiss. When they dance, they are synchronized,
the bar patrons—men and women—singing and moving together, watching their reflections in the
large mirror on the wall. Kinshasa clubs have the mirrors, too, and people use them to learn new
dances from each other, performing elaborate choreographies.
Later that night, I lay in bed, the room so dark it felt like a cave. Wind gusted outside, and I
dozed and woke to doors slamming, curtains billowing. A storm front was pushing in, the one thing
that could prevent our flight into the rainforest the next morning. I found my headlamp and went to
close the windows.
As wind whistled over the city, I struggled to get back to sleep, thinking about Michael's story
of Miracle Bonobo and what Sally told me about modeling BCI on bonobo society—the emphasis
on taking care of each individual, regardless of his or her role. Outside, there was the occasional,
distant clattering of wind-blown trash, the shaking of windows in their frames, and soon the steady
drumming of rain against the dry earth.
After a few more hours of restless sleep, I reluctantly got up and packed my bag. The rain was
letting up, and outside, the wet, red streets were empty but for the occasional bicycle. Since my ar-
rival in the DRC, people had frequently complained about the lack of rain; Kinshasa was unseason-
ably hot and dusty. Unlike the Amazon, whose waters lower significantly during the dry season,
the Congo remains level. The river begins south of the equator, flows north of it, and curves back
across in a wide sweep over a thousand miles long, so it benefits from the rainy and dry seasons that
alternate on opposite sides of the equator. But that year, Congolese said, there had been little rain.
They'd never seen the river so low.
As Aimée directed the loading of the truck, Sally got through to the satellite phone of Marcel
Falay, BCI's regional director in Kokolopori, to ask if the landing strip, nothing more than a field
cut from the forest, was firm enough for the plane to land. He told her the rain had stopped there.
The runway was fine.
At the Mbandaka airport, we drove onto the tarmac, where a single-propeller Cessna waited for
us,
AVIATION SANS FRONTIÈRES
printed on its side. Started by former Air France pilots during Ni-
geria's war with Biafra in the late sixties, ASF, a nonprofit bush plane operation, had been expand-
ing its routes through the Congo in recent years, as the country gained stability.
The two French pilots weighed our duffels on what looked like an aluminum bathroom scale,
recording the numbers. On our previous flight, with CAA, Sally paid $5 for each kilo that exceeded
our personal limit of twenty kilos, or about forty-four pounds. ASF charged $2.50 after a limit of
fifteen kilos.
“This is what people don't get,” she told me. “If you want to take anything into the field, you
have to calculate not just the price but the cost of getting it from the US to Kinshasa, then from Kin-
shasa to Mbandaka, and Mbandaka to Djolu. That's why everything in this country costs a fortune.
Transportation is a feat.”
Already I'd noticed that bottled water and orange Fanta had gone from 1,000 francs in Kinshasa
to 1,500 here. In Djolu, the few times that it was available, it would cost 2,500, even 3,000. The
markup held true for diesel and gas as well, which was why BCI transported most supplies by ca-
noe.
We were about to climb into the plane, the French pilots checking our pockets and passing metal
detectors over us, when two DGM agents hurried from inside the airport and told us we'd skipped
proper departure procedures.
