Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Instantly, everyone was arguing, Sally and Michael fighting to be heard over the agents and
Aimée Nsongo, who insisted that our baggage had already been searched twice upon our arrival in
Mbandaka the day before, and that this was a private flight. Only when the two men heard Sally
speak in Lingala—a clear sign that she knew the customs of the region and wasn't a clueless for-
eigner—did they smile and relent.
“But you still have to pay airport taxes,” they told us, “and we need to record your passports.”
These weren't the made-up taxes I'd so often read about but simply the Go Pass tickets that
airports sold. Though extortion apparently still existed in the airports and at the borders, the DRC's
government had cracked down. Formerly, every official and soldier whom travelers met would har-
ass them, accusing them of carrying banned materials or demanding passports, which only bribes
would buy back. This practice of condoned corruption became institutionalized under Mobutu,
whose government rarely paid its military. When the economy tanked, the people's survival depen-
ded on their ability to make money any way they could. Now, as the DRC struggled to rebuild after
Mobutu's downfall and two wars, the soldiers, police, and administration remained neglected, un-
able to feed and house themselves, let alone their families, on their salaries.
“When people try to get money from us, we look at the situation,” Sally told me. “We can ne-
gotiate or just walk away if it's something ridiculous. But sometimes we pay a little because that's
how things work here. That's how people survive, and it creates goodwill and only costs us five
dollars or less—usually a few francs. We wouldn't be able to do our work if we tried to fight every
official we met. It wouldn't make sense.”
When we were in Kinshasa, I had seen a topic on Sally's desk:
The Empress and Mrs. Conger:
The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds
. The cover showed an old photograph
of two women, one an elaborately garbed Chinese, and the other white, in equally elaborate turn-of-
the-century Western dress. When I asked Sally about it, she explained that the white woman was her
great-great-grandmother, Sarah Pike Conger, whose husband, a congressman from Iowa, was ap-
pointed ambassador to Brazil. The expats generally kept themselves separate from the local people
there, but when Conger's husband received his next posting, as ambassador to China, she realized
how little she knew about the Brazilians and how much her aloofness had cost her. She determin-
ed that she would learn about the Chinese and even forged a friendship with Cixi, the last empress
dowager of China. The photo used for the topic's cover is the only one in which the empress touches
a Westerner, and Sally told me that as a girl, visiting her grandmother, she'd read the diaries of her
great-great-grandmother as well as a topic she wrote,
Letters from China
. She described how Sarah
Conger wanted to set up her kitchen the way she liked and felt that the procurement of coal would
be more efficient if she did it herself. But when she tried to streamline her staff, they became un-
happy and ceased to work well. She realized that they had a system of exchanges that allowed for
everyone involved to make a small profit and guarantee a livelihood. Though she wanted to run
her house in a businesslike fashion, she saw that the Chinese system provided for more people and
worked efficiently within their culture. To remind herself of such lessons and because of the affinity
Sally felt with her great-great-grandmother, she kept a copy of
The Empress and Mrs. Conger
.
Having dealt with the agents, we climbed into the plane. As the pilots taxied on the runway,
Sally took her phone out for one last call to Kinshasa. There would be no cell coverage in Djolu, no
infrastructure at all, except for BCI's satellite phone that cost $1.60 per minute. But it was too late.
The single propeller had gone to full speed, and we were racing forward, lifting from the runway.
