Life in Congo-Part 5: What a long, strange trip.



Last year at this time, travel restrictions within the city limits of
Kinshasa had just been lifted, but no one was fooled since rogue bands of
soldiers and police were robbing people at impromptu roadblocks anyway.
Midnight to 5 am was the 'witching hour' when anyone on the roads in town
was declaring themselves to be fair game and everyone acknowledged this
unwritten law. The country and world were spectators to a mental debate as
Joseph Kabila was deciding between fulfilling his inherited role as
President, or yielding to the cultural temptation to become dictator (like
his father did, leading to his assassination by disgruntled bedfellows). The
World Bank, the IMF, the UN, the USA, European powers and private
individuals were waiting in the wings with billions of dollars, watching to
see which way he went. The Rebel armies in the east were also jockeying for
position as he debated, and NGOs tried their best to chip away at the
mountain of disorder as national infrastructures stumbled forward under
their own bureaucratic inertia. People scratched out a living selling
chickens, grubs and puppies on the roadside, stores opened and closed within
weeks, businesses popped up and failed overnight, garbage piled up in the
streets, villages hunkered down and anyone with any sense at all stayed at
home and kept the windows and doors locked.



It during this time last year that cabin fever hit, and some friends and I
decided to get as far out of Kinshasa as fate and the roads would allow. The
thought of spending 2 years cooped up in a claustrophobic city was already
eating away my sense of adventure in coming here, and I truly wanted to see
some of the real Congo beyond the safety of our compound. We found a website
for a wilderness park called "Bombo Lumene", which said it was 120km east of
Kinshasa on 'newly paved' roads. The website had no date to indicate how
current its claims were, so we figured it could mean anything. Nonetheless,
the next Saturday, four of us piled into a car and headed east on the only
road out of town to see what we would see.



We got an early start and decided to take a shortcut around downtown, and
although we had all been on the route before, we were hopelessly lost within
minutes. We found ourselves on a tangled web of narrow dirt city roads
crammed with thousands of brightly-dressed people, walking everywhere like
ants swarming on an anthill. Although poverty is rampant in Kinshasa, people
take immense pride in dressing very formally and neatly when they are in
public, so there were men in handmade 3-piece suits, women in bright African
dresses, and younger men in clean, pressed T-shirts. No adults go barefoot
if they can afford not to, and no one wears short pants. There were also
lots of less fortunate folks who could not afford nice clothes, wrapped in
dirty rags and torn clothing, many of them hobbling along on stumps of legs
using pieces of scrap wood as homemade crutches, or with clubs for hands
from injuries sustained in the war or from a myriad of birth defects that
the civilized world has learned to foresee and prevent. The streets were
jammed with broken-down cars and washed-out potholes, and rimmed with miles
and miles of makeshift open-air stalls selling cellphone cards, shoes,
vegetables, furniture, used tires and anything else imaginable. People
generally stopped and looked at us as we drove through, so we uneasily
locked our doors and navigated using the high buildings of downtown on the
horizon as a guiding landmark. Eventually, we found our way past the big
stadium where Ali fought the 'Rumble in the Jungle', and out to the
recognizable main road and were back on our way, feeling relieved and a
little embarrassed at our fear.


Within 5 miles of passing the airport on the eastern extreme of Kinshasa, we
were stopped by a long queue of parked cars in the road. With no idea of
what was causing the bottleneck, we waited until the heat got really
uncomfortable, and I got out and walked to the front of the line and
inquired of the soldier there. I barely could understand his reply (not
being particularly fluent in French at that time), but it had something to
do with a bridge that was down. I went back to the car and told my friends,
who were by now surrounded by about 50 kids with big eyes, dirty, torn
clothes, various sores and deformities, and all with hands out, palms up,
saying "Money, gimme money, mundale" (mundale is Lingala for 'white guy').
Like money would have done anything for them; they needed food and medical
care. Some had climbed up to sit on the hot hood of the car, and several had
pressed against the side windows, leaving smudges of dirt from their hands
and faces. The consensus among the women in the car was to turn back for the
familiarity of the campus, but the men vetoed, probably in an effort to
regain some self-pride after our nervous drive through the urban zone, so we
sat in the 100-degree temps waiting to see what would happen.



Soon, the soldier came down the line of cars and when he saw us besieged by
the kids, he shooed them off and told us to pull out and move down the road.
We edged our way into the masses of people walking in the driving lane and
gently nudged our way to the front of the line where traffic was just
starting to creep forward. Soon, we were working our way past a huge
one-lane dirt bridge that construction crews were building over a wide
gulley which had apparently flooded and washed out the road. There were a
dozen workers sitting around and several others working with shovels,
filling in dirt around a new culvert. Several huge Caterpillar bulldozers
and a backhoe stood idle. This causeway was about 200 meters long and 50
meters tall, but the culvert they were putting in was only about one meter
in diameter, so it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the
road washed out again. We just motored through and continued on our journey,
thankful for the air conditioning and open road.



A few kilometers farther down the road, we were definitely beyond the city
limit. The buildings were gone and replaced with clusters of bamboo or stick
and mud buildings, chickens and dogs digging in hardpan yards, and grasses
and patches of trees along the road. We had been encountering some strange
small piles of dirt alongside the shoulder with tall green branches sticking
up in them. These piles were every few hundred meters, were about a foot
tall, and occurred in rows, separated by about 10 meters. Ahead, where the
road rounded a bend, one set of dirtpiles progressed their way into our
lane, forcing us into the oncoming lane. Fortunately, there was no other
traffic on the road as we rounded the bend on the wrong side. When we came
through the corner, we discovered that these were the Congolese version of
traffic cones, as there was a huge 1-ton truck stacked with about 2 tons of
sacks, goats, leaves, tree trunks and topped with about 40 people, broken
down right in the middle of our lane. The driver and some passengers had the
front end propped up on some tree stumps, and the entire front end was on
the ground, completely in parts. The people were just sitting there, looking
at the pieces and then at us as we zoomed by. A few of them waved,
instinctively ending the wave by turning their hands over, palms up.
Mundale..money.



A few hundred meters farther, we passed some kids rolling a huge truck tire
down the road and carrying part of a front end. We had no idea where they
expected to get it repaired, but then a few kilometers farther we
encountered another broken down truck, the same model, burned out and
obviously having been there for several years. There were 3 guys with
wrenches and crowbars, tearing the front end apart. Recycle, repair, reuse.
Impressive, but they still had a long way to go.



The road really started getting potholed out now; we were about 40 km out of
town and it had taken about 3 hours with getting lost and the bridge delay.
On the left, we passed an elegant oriental pagoda, with an ornate arch and
colorful paneling, hundreds of windows glinting in the sun. Only the
overgrown trees, the underbrush and the grass-choked parking lot gave an
indication that it had been abandoned. Probably some sort of Embassy getaway
for a far eastern ambassador, back in the good old days. We took a few quick
pictures and rolled on by.



The road forked. With no road sign or map to guide us, we decided to follow
the left fork, as it looked like the more used. On the left, a few
kilometers later, there was a spectacular overlooking view of a fishing
village on the shore of the Congo River below, so I hopped out for a quick
picture. We could hear drums coming from the village. Within minutes,
several dirty children emerged from the brush and timidly held out their
hands. I sighed, dug into my pocket and handed each of them 100 Congolese
francs, and got back in the car to head back down the road. Behind me, I saw
the children waving as we drove off, and then disappear back into the brush.



After about 45 minutes, when the road dead-ended in a small fishing village
on the Congo we realized our error and backtracked. There was no sign of the
children at the overlook. Once we got back to the fork and were on the right
road, we started encountering more and more trucks.the same 1-ton cargo
haulers, all broken down. It seemed like there was one every kilometer, each
one with the front end jacked up, and a wheel off. There were dozens of
people sitting around each one, patiently waiting for the repairs to be
done. Later, I heard that people will wait patiently for days and days,
since they have paid the driver for transportation and cannot afford to buy
a ride on another passing truck. Sometimes, you will see dozens of people
standing with their goods, apparently having been evicted on the roadside
for a better-paying shipment of cargo.



After another 50 km, we came to another bridge, but this one was definitely
impassable. It crossed a river about 50 meters wide, with two spans joining
at a center piling. However, the spans were completely broken off of the
center piling, and both sides were dropped 75 feet down into the river,
lying surrealistically like two roadways bowing to a monument standing
mid-river. Running parallel to the old bridge was a WW2-looking metal 'tank
bridge', which I had seen in Israel as temporary river crossings for APCs
and other war machines. We drove across this structure, rusty and rattly, as
the fishermen and washerwomen on the old tarmac looked up at us, and
continued on our way. The army guard who had been distracted doing something
in the bushes when we arrived came running out of the woods waving his arms
at us. We stopped and showed him our passports and registration, then gave
him 200CF, the Congolese equivalent of 50 cents, and kept going.



After this crossing, the road began to climb a steep hill with many
switchbacks and blind corners. We had grown accustomed to dodging the
potholes and numerous broken-down trucks, and were surprised when we came
around one corner and encountered a truck that was moving slowly along our
lane, surrounded by 20 passengers all jogging alongside. My first thought
was that they were walking to take a load off of the truck engine and tranny
as it climbed the big hill. However, alongside the road we saw several
trucks that had driven off the road, crashing deeply into the woods or off
the cliff. I realized that the passengers knew that truck brakes could fail,
and it was safer on a hill to be running alongside the slow-moving behemoth
than to be riding on top as it careened off the cliff or rolled over from
the embankment. All the wrecked trucks had been stripped of front-end parts.



At the top of the rise we found ourselves on the central Congo Plateau. The
road ran straight to the horizon, short grass framing the dirt and tar
2-lane road as it disappeared into the distance, headed towards the jungle
hundreds of miles east. There were a few people each kilometer, walking,
carrying gigantic loads of firewood or vegetables or lugging 20 gallon water
jugs, all balanced on their heads. We passed through a village with a dozen
or so stalls set up on the street side with colorfully garbed women among
the dust and debris, selling white flour in burlap bags, grubs, vegetables,
liboke, fu-fu or chiquane (a gummy, white Congolese staple food), sugar or
honey covered with swarming wasps, Coca Cola, fruits, meat and various
canned goods stacked in neat pyramids. The market was set up for the trucks
that passed through, and obviously the people riding on the trucks were
supplying the stalls with their wares, some from the jungle, some from
Kinshasa. On the edge of town, makeshift garages were set up in bamboo huts
with welders, compressors, tire jacks and truck parts: the Congolese version
of an all-purpose truck stop. Recalling the stripped-down wrecks on the
hillside, I had no doubt where the parts came from. Folks stared at us as we
rolled through, and I was tempted to suggest stopping to buy something to
eat, but didn't.



Within another 20 miles, we saw a road sign in the distance. Approaching it,
it announced our arrival at Bombo Lumene Park, and directed us 5 km down a
dirt road running straight across the plateau. We drove down the road and
arrived at a small grass clearing with three log cabin buildings that had
seen better days. We met the manager who told us that the animals had been
killed and eaten years before, and obtained a price list for visiting and
accommodation. Because of the lateness of our arrival, we only had time for
a quick hike down to the Lumene River to see if it was fishable. It was,
unfortunately, in flood stage, and the thin rope bridge used to cross it was
washed out. The manager told us that there were tigerfish in it (little m'
boto, not the giant type in the big river) however the best fishing for them
was at low water in the fall, although he did not know anything about fly
fishing. He said that he had maybe three visitors a month, and we promised
to come back in the fall, and started our journey back to Kinshasa just as a
light rain started to fall.



The drive back was uneventful: we rolled through the market town, drawing
stares from the people in the stalls again, then rolled down the big hill,
mindful that we might encounter people on foot jogging beside cargo trucks.
At the fallen bridge, the guard recognized us and waved us through with a
smile. Back at the fork in the road, we laughed about our wrong turn, and
continued on the road to Kinshasa. About 25 km from town, we approached a
two-lane bridge across a large river that we did not remember, and slowly
drove up to the crossing. The oncoming lanes looked sort of familiar, but
our lanes looked unused and it appeared that there was a pile of dirt on the
far side. We crossed slowly, saw the policeman guarding the far lanes and
remembered crossing over on the outbound leg of our trip because there were
some significant speed bumps there. However, some soldiers suddenly stepped
out in front of us, and indicated for us to open our window. In broken
English, the soldier explained that THIS side of the bridge was closed, and
we had trespassed. We explained that we had just crossed over a few hours
earlier, but he indicated that we had crossed on the OTHER side, which was
under the control of the police, and that they can make whatever rules they
choose, however THIS side was controlled by the army and now we had a
'problem', and needed to pay them something. We looked at the policeman,
expecting him to come over and intervene, but he just watched from his side.
Reluctantly, we paid the soldiers a few hundred francs each, and were
allowed to proceed.



A short while later, we crossed the dirt causeway, cruised past the airport
and were back in familiar territory. The two guys vowed to make the journey
again in the fall when the river was lower, and the women laughed and said
'have a good trip!'



So, last weekend, the two men who had done the trip last year and another
new teacher decided to head out and spend the night at Bombo Lumene park, do
some fishing, and see if the situation in the countryside had changed at
all. We left on Saturday morning, and again got hopelessly lost making the
shortcut around town. However, this time it all felt considerably more
friendly and safe. The same people were walking around in the same colorful
clothing, the streets were still clogged with pedestrians and broken-down
cars, and the roads were still beat up and potholed, but a year had passed
and it all felt more familiar to us. We found our way past the stadium and
to the main road using the downtown building as landmarks again, and soon
were rolling past the airport. We were across the new causeway within
minutes, and realized that the road had been freshly paved from town and out
at least that far. The new tarmac didn't last long, however we quickly found
ourselves at the pagoda, past the army/police bridge, then at the fork in
the road. Amazed at how close it all seemed to Kinshasa this time, we
happily headed down the correct road and soon were zooming past the
brokedown trucks and colorful locals carrying their loads on their heads.
Little children ran up to the side of the road when they saw us and waved or
held out their hands for money, not very practical at 80 kilometers per
hour.



Within a few hours, we were approaching the blown-up bridge, and I was able
to tell the story about it that I had heard it at school. Apparently, the
army destroyed it during the revolution when the rebels were approaching in
an effort to keep them out of Kinshasa. The head of the police in Kinshasa,
knowing that the rebels were going to find a way across anyway, contacted
the head of the rebel army, Laurent Kabila, and told him of a ferry crossing
a few kilometers downstream. He asked for asylum and personal safety when
they got to Kinshasa. However, Mobuto heard of his treachery and had him
killed that day, just hours before the army arrived and Mobuto fled.



The soldier guarding the bridge did not stop us this time, but instead stood
at attention and saluted us as we went past. The same washerwomen and
fishermen stared up from the fallen bridge as we crossed, and we again
encountered a slow-moving truck as we climbed up to the plateau on the other
side, surrounded by its regiment of joggers. Soon, we were rolling through
the market town, the same stalls selling the same assortment of goods, but
there were about five cargo trucks parked at the edge of town and hundreds
of people were strolling about. All the garages were busy with repairs.
Another half hour out of town, and we were driving down the access road to
Bombo Lumene, amazed at how much the country had opened up and how easy the
drive was this time.



We spent the night, I got to sleep in my beloved tent on the edge of the big
valley that held the river, staring up through the mesh ceiling at Mars, and
the next morning I was casting flies in the swift current to the elusive m'
boto. I only managed to hook a half-dozen smaller ones, about 5 inches or
so, and to the amazement and amusement of the dozens of local kids who came
down to stare at me, I tossed them back. The rope bridge had been repaired,
and I made several hair-raising crossings, holding on to the vine handrails
as the river rushing beneath gave me vertigo. A steady line of ants had
adopted the bridge as their personal crossing, so I went downstream of the
bridge and cast a #18 black ant pattern and hooked a few more unsuspecting
fish. A local fisherman showed me his catch: m'boto about 30 cm long. I was
impressed, but could not match his netting skills.



We left around noon to come back to Kin, and passed through the market town
one more time. The cluster of trucks was gone, but on the outskirts of town,
several hundred feet down the hill, one of the trucks lie across the road on
its side like a dead animal, its cargo scattered. Men were shoveling rice
and flour into sacks with shovels and hands, and people were gathering their
goods and starting to walk back towards town. One man, holding a young boy
by the hand, pleadingly held up a large bunch of overripe bananas at us. The
look on his face told an angst-filled story that still haunts me: the
Congolese version of Hemingway's "Old Man and the sea." I imagined that this
guy was taking his son into Kinshasa from the bush to sell some bananas and
start to teach the boy how the market worked in this new, emergent economy.
I imagined him saving for months, scraping together the double fare, paying
it to the driver with hope and expectation for the future, and the boy and
him proudly and carefully loading their sacks of bananas on the truck,
hanging them from the side to avoid getting damaged from all the riders on
the truck. I imagined them waving goodbye to his wife, then starting the
long journey across the jungle on the ravaged road. I imagined many times
him sitting with the boy on the side of the road for days as the truck
driver repaired flat tires and broken front ends, desperately watching his
cargo of bananas begin to ripen. Several breakdowns later, they were just a
half day away from Kinshasa, and the truck brakes fail on a hill and the
truck turns over. Thankfully, the boy is unhurt, but the bananas are
destroyed. All he can salvage is this one overripe bunch, worthless at this
market town surrounded by banana trees, and now he will not make it to
Kinshasa, his crop is ruined, and he does not have the fare for passage back
to his village for him or his son. All he has is this one bunch of
worthless, overripe bananas.



We worked our way past the truck and sat with our thoughts as we sped back
to Kinshasa. About 10 km out of town, we decided to explore an exit and
maybe find a stall to buy something to eat or to drink. The exit dumped us
onto a main road of a large, semi-modern village that was hosting some sort
of festival, with a flimsy stage set up and dozens of beer gardens set up by
the local brewery, with colorful plastic tables and seats. There were
50-gallon drums made into stoves, with chicken and fish baking on open
coals, and stalls set up with garden vegetables and fruits for sale. People
were just starting to arrive, so we joyfully parked, pulled up some seats,
and ordered a round of drinks. Several children came and sold us peanuts,
still in the shells and lightly baked, so we listened to the rollicky
Congolese music, drinking our beers, husking peanuts, and feeling a rising
sense of euphoria. We bought a bottle of the local palm wine off a small
girl, and took turns sipping the sweet liquid and washing it down with warm
local beers as the warm buzz start to rise along with our spirits, the
street carnival growing around us. For the first time in a year, I felt like
we were really in CONGO!



I wandered down the street and found some ladies selling liboke, my favorite
local dish made from fish baked in banana leaves with palm oil and
pili-pili, and bought one. I ate it back at the table, enduring some ribbing
from my partners about my fearlessness at eating local food. Just then a
woman came by with a large basket on her head with what appeared to be black
dates. However, these dates were wiggling all around: they were palm grubs,
each one about the size of your big toe, and pulsing and squirming all over
each other. One of the guys dared me to eat one, and truthfully I had always
wondered about them, so I bought a pack of three. I asked the lady to
demonstrate how to eat them. She first bit off the pea-sized head and spit
it out. Then she squeezed the body as she sucked out the innards, leaving
the skin behind like a limp wet sack. The skin is edible, but it's by far
the least tasty part, so for the second one I just tossed the skin away. The
guts tasted a lot like warm mayonnaise, with a hint of earthy flavor. Not
really all that bad, but I prefer the liboke. My friends were satisfyingly
grossed out, but I had earned the looks and admiring glances of several
Congolese near me who had also bought some.



The table next to us was rapidly filling up with some very attractive women
and a few flashy men, definitely from the city, and all covered with gold
jewelry and consuming cases of beer. One man in particular was paying for
everything, and we wondered what the story was, as he was not at all who I
would have guessed was the flashy 'alpha male' of the group. However, the
others kept calling him 'Chef', and eventually one of the women saw us
looking at their group and started chatting with us. She said that he had
just taken over as chief of their tribe that day, and this was his
girlfriend and her friends that he was treating to a day on the town. I went
over and congratulated him, shaking his hand, and she translated that he
wanted to buy our table some beers since he had seen me eat the grubs and
knew we were 'real Congolese mundales'. We happily accepted, and proceeded
to get rather hammered at the kind generosity of the Chef.



A short while later, in that giggly lighthearted drunk mindset, we started
strolling around the festival, which by now had gotten into full swing with
hundreds of partyers, rocking rhythmical music and wonderful smells of
roasting mystery meat. We were the only mundales there, and some dressed-up
clowns spotted us and encircled us, putting on their really funny and
occasionally obscene act. One clown, in whiteface, had a lit cigarette and
kept flipping it into his mouth, making funny faces, then flipping it out
again, still lit. Another had some sort of stick in his belt under his
shirt, and wiggled his hips making his belly look like it was wiggling all
over the place. I wiggled my own middle-aged white guy belly, and he and I
made fun of each other for a few minutes for the mirth of the people
watching. A pair of other clowns did a Michael Jackson-style dance, in
perfect synchronization, then fell down on their butts at the end, leaving
the crowd laughing. The clowns eventually worked their way off, a few franks
richer for their time, and we decided that we were plenty buzzed and needed
to start heading back to the compound before dark. Just then, another pair
approached us. One was a huge Congolese man, dressed sort of similarly to
Uncle Sam, with a stovepipe hat and overcoat, carrying a bicycle wheel. The
other was a midget, no more than 3 feet tall, with short arms and bowed
legs, dressed identically. Wordlessly, the midget stepped in front of us,
held out a hand to stop us, then did a perfect handstand, his little legs
sticking up in the air. The giant spun the bicycle wheel and perched it on
the midgets butt, leaving it spinning like a gyroscope. The midget kicked
his legs and started singing a song. In a fog of surrealistic amazement and
bewilderment, we fell backwards and groped our way outside the crowd and
decided that it definitely was time to get out of town. Finding the car,
we paid off the kids who had decided to wash it then guard it against other
kids who would want to wash it again, and headed back to Kinshasa and the
school, wondering what direction the country would be headed in the year to
come. It had been a weekend to remember.





--riverman