Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Le Blanc and the boatmen returned around 4:00 a.m., not having found any of the fuel. They
waited until dawn and set out again, this time to the sunken pirogue. They dislodged the outboard
motor and tied the pirogues back together, then started asking fishermen if anyone had found fuel.
Though a barrel turned up, it had filled with water. A villager told the boatmen that a man had
salvaged a jerry can of gas, but when they located him, the man demanded fifty dollars, which they
eventually paid.
They now had enough fuel to get them to Mompono, part of the Bonobo Peace Forest where
BCI worked with another partner, the Congolese conservation group Protection de l'Écosystème et
des Espèces Rares du Sud-Est de l'Équateur (PERSE). Michael had called BCI's Kinshasa offices
from DC, and the Kinshasa team had contacted PERSE via the HF radio system that BCI had given
them. One of PERSE's staff, Anatole, began riding his motorcycle on a path along the river, carry-
ing a jerry can of gasoline and hoping to connect with them.
From DC, Michael was raising several thousand dollars in emergency funds. He knew how ex-
pensive fuel was in the Congo's hinterlands, but his primary concern was a group of armed tribes-
men, the Enyele, who had fought the Congolese army a few months earlier, then seized Mbandaka
Airport before being driven east into the forest. They were the remnants of an insurgent group
whose fighting in 2009, near the border of Congo-Brazzaville, had resulted in over 160,000 dis-
placed people. No one was sure how many Enyele were still in the forests, or where they were, but
they could have been near the BCI team. Normally, the pirogues would pass unnoticed through the
area, but news of stranded Westerners would spread quickly. One of Michael's friends kept telling
him that they needed to get an evac team with military contractors.
“This was one of those times,” Sally told me, “that illustrated the strength of our network. Our
team had contacts and connections throughout Équateur, from Kokolopori to Kinshasa, and as soon
as word went out, there were friends and partners ready to help us at every stop. We bought fuel in
Mompono, just enough to get to Basankusu, the first major port on the way to Mbandaka. We had
money wired and bought enough there to finish our trip. But to make it in time for Michael Wern-
er's wedding, we had to go all night again. We had a car waiting in Mbandaka, right at the river's
edge, and someone at the airport letting the airline know that we would arrive. We got there literally
five minutes before we were supposed to catch our flight.”
Listening to Sally speak, as we sat in chairs on a grassy section of the camp, I couldn't help
but try to make sense of her from what she'd told me about her youth, her childhood passion for
exploring the forest and climbing trees, or when, as a teenager, she read
Silent Spring
, Rachel Car-
son's account of the impact of pesticides not only on animals but also on humans. Books had given
me my first desire to travel and understand other cultures, and I could picture her as a girl, read-
ing her great-great-grandmother's diaries, seeing life in fin de siècle China. The fact that she had
helped create an organization whose strength was its broad network and its inclusivity made me
want to understand what in her was so drawn to people in this way. Her desire to know everyone
came across in her openness. She would spend hours in conversation and could tell me about almost
every person who visited the camp.
From her stories, I learned that her father, Joseph Wentworth Coxe III, a psychiatrist, shared her
openness. She described him as charismatic, funny, and compassionate, a voracious reader whose
agitated mind kept him up at night. He taught her the principle of service, that people should give
their lives to something. He'd studied medicine at the University of Virginia and later read the com-
plete works of Sigmund Freud when he was a navy surgeon in the Pacific during World War II.
