Category Archives: drc

Okapi

Adventures, drc, South Africa, ,

The DRC trip keeps returning to my mind. Everything keeps drifting in that direction. Kinshasa and Goma, Bunia and Beni come up in conversations, in news feeds, in humanitarian debate wormholes down which I have fallen.

Last weekend I went to the zoo. I was with three well-traveled, cosmopolitan friends; the kind of friends with whom half an hour’s conversation can move easily through three different continents and several decades of history. A zoo trip is a great opportunity to take a long walk through pleasant surroundings with plenty of conversation-starting animal sightings. This trip was to the Pretoria Zoo. We chose this zoo for a very particular reason: Okapi.

DSC_0024

Fantasy and Travel

Adventures, drc, Travelling in Africa, Why,

Reading a passage in a fantasy novel this evening, I was transported back to Christmas Day 2011 in the rain forests of the Eastern Congo. It was a weird kind of day and in retrospect so exotic as to be life-changing. I don’t think it felt that way at the time but at this distance, it’s hard to tell. We’d gone hunting with the local people. We’d been there a day or two and taken a couple of walks across the bridge over the river which dominated the whole area. I remember being a little terrified by the ant-hills sixty feet or so up on giant tree branches. It was a little like being in a National Geographic special without the comforting best-British-voice commentary.

We joined the hunters around their fire. I remember reading before the trip that they used marijuana in their hunt preparations but we weren’t out to get high. The idea of being intoxicated in those forests, where one wrong step could lose you forever, is not appealing. It was that thick and intimidating. As we walked, the group I was with got a little behind the rest and within moments couldn’t see the others and were scrambling to find the hidden-in-the-undergrowth path.

After a while, we reached the point where they left us behind with one or two of their people; strung up their nets and faded into the forest. I’m sure they knew it would be a bad hunt because we were too noisy – strange, large people moving around when we should have been quiet.

The sounds drifted back to us through the forests. Thick, dense, suffocating forests. You could hardly see any patch of sky when you looked up. It was hot and humid and around us were giant, unfamiliar plants. I remember standing there – time seemed distorted and somehow irrelevant – and following the trunk and branches of a giant tree. Somewhere the sounds echoed. The echoes were hard to follow in that dense, overgrown clearing. The sounds were eerie. Terry Pratchett talked in one of his books about words being manipulated and used up and sent out to earn a living on the streets. I don’t think I really ever had a reference for the word “eerie” until I heard the unworldly sounds of the “pygmy” hunters driving pray towards their nets on that strange afternoon.

When I started travelling in Africa, a dear friend encouraged me to start keeping a record of each day of the travels. The discipline of writing is so valuable in capturing the moments that would otherwise be forgotten, an emotional and personal record of the things that happen. Perhaps the most specific moment of realising how important it is to record things was the moment I remember writing down in my travel journal that I’d seen a black and white monkey on the trip between Kampala and Fort Portal, seen from the window of the bus, and feeling a little like a scientist recording the sighting of a rare animal. I wouldn’t necessarily have forgotten it, but writing it down cemented the moment in my memory and made it possible to refer back to notes when I doubted, as time fades the memories, what I’d seen.

In retrospect, in hind-sight, so far and so long away, I’m struck by how different the immersive experience of being in the DRC was from the organised, planned tourism experience of Korea. On that day, so long ago, I wrote so little about the hunt. It seems so simple compared to what I am now able to understand as the impact.

Someone asked me recently if I think that travel really broadens your horizons and makes you a better person. I don’t know about the better person bit but I do know that travel changes some of your perspectives – travel means that when I read in a fantasy novel about exploring native woodlands on a faraway version of the planet, the first thing I think of is hunting with pygmies on that strange, faraway Christmas Day. My sense is that that isn’t the norm. My response to the question was to try – I fear rather inarticulately – to explain that travel stretches the borders of the possible perspectives one can hold. For me, travel means that I compare things to that strange afternoon and consider ants and bugs in terms of a range including the rainforests of Congo, instead of the standard spectrum of the country I happen to have grown up in. And my sense, humble though it is, is that the same is probably true in terms of the kind of big conversations about politics and economics and freedom.

Return

drc, Ideas, Why

“Old friends, old friends, sat on the park bench like bookends… time it was, and what a time it was, it was a time of innocence, of confidences…” Simon and Garfunkel, Old Friends/Bookends

Sitting at dinner at a nice restaurant in Rosebank, Johannesburg, chatting about life and choices and freedom. It’s been so long. So much has gone. There is something about long friendships that provides a breathing space. I suppose it’s the length of time you’ve known a person that makes the current crisis seem fleeting now.

I have found myself thinking about the DRC a lot recently. I find myself – a smell, a melody, a taste – remembering/reliving walking down a dusty street in Bunia towards the place with the delicious whole fish and chips (was it the same place with the nutella?) and the cafe with the coffee and omelettes with cheese. There was a post office along the road. A once-functional post office. What an odd thing to remember, now? Memories of compounds and an abandoned house and sewing machines and a UN convoy. And a post office. I read an article today about MONUSCO in Bunia.

My world fell apart again last week. So much like before. Before when I was supposed to go to Russia. So much like the time they postponed my Korea trip on a whim. So much like all the other disappointments. I had a conversation with a friend the other day. She’s been going through a rough time and I assumed that she would get it. She listened and cared and tried to figure out where my disappointment fell on her ladder of what-we’re-supposed-to-care-about. On her scale of things, this disappointment didn’t really register. It was something I might be sad about but nothing of particular concern. In her ordinary world, I’m supposed to be okay.

So much has happened since that DRC trip. So many places, so many people. One of the people I walked the dusty streets of Bunia with is getting involved in a media enterprise that might, for the better, change the way we understand reporting. Two others are working on amazing areas of study. I know I contribute, I know I’m not doing nothing, particularly in the past six months, but I find myself longing, hoping, wishing, a-prey to disappointment and anger and a deep sense of urgency that says this is not enough.

I live in a world, now, far more populated by the characters of these kinds of emergencies. And I love every minute of it. But sometimes, when things go wrong, when life gets complicated, I’m reminded of that little inner voice that longs for that. Do you know what I remember? One of the things I wrote about, in the journals I learnt to keep because I had a friend who taught me the value of recording every day, was the moment I first walked into a compound. There is something mythical and mystical about an NGO compound for someone in my field. It represents, I suppose, the life we’re all hoping one day to lead. This one, when we accidentally found it (we were looking for something else entirely) was a place where someone was growing basil. I remember the couches on the porch and the small prefab rooms and the telecoms equipment and the fact that someone was growing basil.

When I came back from the DRC, I talked about the emptiness. In a situation of crisis, in a situation of disappointment, that emptiness returns. I remember the day we got back to Uganda from the DRC – back to civilization. I remember taking a hot shower and sitting down with a beer and not being able to articulate what I was feeling right then. It felt like coming back from the brink.