Crazy People without Borders
I never finished telling the story of that night at the Paroisse St. Aloys. (I have since been to another Paroisse, it was cold, wet, full of mosquitoes, and had an uncomfortable feel of being below sea level, stuck as it was in a flat, dark, totally unspectacular jungle. It occurred to me as I toasted the priests at dinner each night that I was living a “Lord of the Rings” type adventure, especially when we were silenced by rumors on the radio that Laurent Nkunda had been overthrown. There was no electricity, and I wandering around with a candle each night, going to bed as soon as I had eaten, the way I imagine people did in the olden days, before there was TV. Like Bilbo Baggins, I missed the friends I had made in the last rest spot, and therefore cared little for adventure at that juncture.)
The reason I went to the dive bar, Noblesse Oblige, that day in Rutshuru, was that I wanted to see the Spaniards. But backing up, I wanted a drink, to avoid worrying about all the work waiting in my email inbox that I couldn’t access because I didn’t have a convoy to travel back to Goma with. Only a journalist’s one Toyota.
“I’m sorry, but that’s not okay,” said the boss when I pitched the one Toyota plan. “No, not at all.”
A humanitarian vehicle had been attacked the day before and the driver shot and killed. Bandits? Rebels? Interahamwe? No one knew. All the humanitarians knew was that any lone-traveling vehicle could mean a big hassle later.
Being “in the field,” as they call it in Africa when you leave your base to do work in a more rural site, is initially an unpleasant activity compared to what you would be doing at your base, just as Africa can be an initially unpleasant activity compared to what you would be doing in New York. Africans feel even more strongly about this, if they have already been living an urban life. The field seems to them boring and backward. In the field, you don’t have a computer, for fear of being robbed by bandits, nor Internet access, nor full-time electricity, and the radio doesn’t play any rap music, not even Tanzanian rap music. Folk tunes, evangelical sermons, or nothing. It’s either raining or dusty, and the only things to do after 3:00 when most rural people finish work for the day are sleep, drink, talk, or read. (They start work early in the countryside.)
After a few days in the field, the understimulation becomes normal, and hopefully, pleasant. More often than not, unexpected things happen that would never happen to you back in the city. I always think of the field as a Buddhist exercise in having no expectations. I’m really bad at the exercise, so that day I decided to head back to Goma, no matter what. My journalist friend urged me to lie to my boss and come along anyway, saying that my ride did have a convoy. But I never lie.
Instead, I decided to find a ride that did have a convoy. My colleagues wouldn’t be leaving until the next afternoon, but they gave me the number of an aid worker staying at the Paroisse.
I called Jerome, who told me his convoy would not be leaving until the next morning. It was fast approaching the deadline for departure if you wanted, or had to, make it back inside the Kibati roadblock before nightfall. I found my driver, who was hanging out with his friends on the street, and asked him to drive me to the UN peacekeeping base as fast as possible. We drove silently, arriving after 15 minutes at the gate of MONUC, inside a refugee camp.
Indians stood guarding it in their army uniforms. They make up a large part of the peacekeeping soldiers at MONUC, which is the acronym for the peacekeeping mission. I gestured assertively to them and explained that I needed to get back to Goma and wanted to go with them if there was a vehicle traveling. The colonel did not speak English or French. He called a translator and we waited, failing to communicate with gestures. I noticed that underneath his helmet was a strap filled with what looked like hair. What a strange strap, I thought.
Then a UN civilian car drove up, carrying a pretty young blond with freckles and a very good tan. She looked quizzically at me as I stood with the colonel, and after parking, she came over to find out what I was doing. I had seen the girl at parties.
“I need a ride back to Goma,” I said.
“Since when does your NGO need an escort from MONUC?” she said with a smirk.
“I don’t need an escort, I need a ride,” I said. I was sure already that the gossip mill would start running with a false story of my NGO changing their policy and asking for a security escort from MONUC. Goddamn aid community, you have no privacy, no matter where you go, because the only way to get anywhere is in a truck with a big sign on the side that says the name of your NGO.
“Well there are no civilian cars going back to Goma today,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
“What about tanks?” I said.
“Tanks?” she said.
“Yeah. I’m waiting for a translator to come and explain to this colonel here that I want to come along in whatever military vehicle that’s traveling back. I don’t mind going in a tank.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. Your NGO wouldn’t want that.”
I disengaged from the conversation, looking at the colonel to indicate that I still honored our plan to wait for the translator. A Congolese man showed up to translate, but he didn’t speak Hindi. He tried unsuccessfully to translate my French question into English for the colonel. I explained that English was my first language, and repeated my question to the colonel in English, which the Congolese man tried to repeat in English. The colonel didn’t understand anything. The blond girl, meanwhile, was standing by watching, and I increasingly felt the urge to run back to Goma.
After getting the colonel’s cellphone number under the pretext that I would call him the next morning for a ride, I went back to my car, spotting another humanitarian vehicle parked next to it. The owner was installing latrines in the refugee camp, and offered to bring me back to Goma with him the next morning in a convoy he would be traveling with.
We drove silently back to Rutshuru, and I resigned myself to an afternoon spent doing nothing.
At the Paroisse, I found the two orphans I had given $10 to the day before. One child, Martine, who is in 3rd grade, told me he was sick. He took a packet of quinine pills out of his pocket and said the doctor had given him them at the hospital, where he had just come from. Quinine pills used to be prescribed for malaria, and I’m not sure how effective they are. I was taken with Martine’s plight, because he’s plucky, and he’s a student. Most poor people in this country do not bother with school; it’s expensive, because the government doesn’t pay teachers, so students must.
Martine’s first plea was for new school clothes, as his white and navy blue uniform was in tatters. “Look at me,” he said dramatically. “I have to go to church in these clothes. Can you believe it? I’m humiliated.” I could not adopt him, although I did think about it.
I asked the boys where the Spaniards went. They took me across the street to the bar, Noblesse Oblige. It was a shack, and dark inside. The Spaniards were sitting at a table, and some teenage rebels were standing around with their machine guns. I joined the three Spaniards, who told me they were television journalists.
Juan, a striking and muscular 32-year-old with intense black eyes, told me that Martine had complicated cerebral malaria, and that they had visited his family to see if there was anything they could do to help. He spoke seriously, and with pain. Pedro, a rugged fiftysomething who explained that he and Juan were business partners, said he was trying to bring Martine back to Spain, where a government aid program would treat his illness and neurological side effects for free. Pedro said he would bring back every orphan in Africa to Spain if he could, and we all nodded our heads gravely in solidarity. Both Pedro and Juan were wearing cargo vests, and I noticed that all three Spaniards had on those expensive sports tee-shirts that are made of some technologically advanced material that causes sweat to dry immediately.
Diego, the third Spaniard, ordered another round of beers, two each. I protested, since I did not want to drink three beers, only two, but Diego wouldn’t have any of it. Pedro ordered a round of shots, which the men drank. They told me stories about their previous adventures in Cameroon, Kosovo, and Columbia. I told them about my adventures in Somalia, Laos, and Congo. We amused each other in this way for about 20 minutes before a chubby Congolese man joined us. His bodyguard, a young rebel with a machine gun, hung by a few feet from our table.
The chubby man was introduced to me as the mayor. He proceeded to get drunk, as the Spaniards tried to assuage his palpable anxiety at being among foreigners and journalists. Just weeks before, there was a massacre in the neighboring town, and Human Rights Watch blamed the rebels, with whom this mayor was aligned. The report was all over the news for a week. Now the mayor criticized journalists, and especially the BBC, saying they were really political, and pretended to be unbiased so as to discredit the opponents of their political patron, who he believed to be, in this case, the government. The massacre was a fabrication, he argued. And there were no women or children being forced to work for rebels. “Is a woman who is cleaning her own house a slave to rebels?” he cried.
That’s not the kind of slavery the journalists were reporting.
As the mayor knew me only as an aid worker, he said at this point that I had to be his counselor, a go-between in the conversation with the three journalists, who had apparently taped an interview with him in his office that morning. The mayor was pretending to be joking, but it was not a joke. Of course I was not going to do any such thing for him, so I laughed, and tried to appear stupid.
Diego, who was by then drunk after several shots and four beers, didn’t like how the chubby mayor was talking to me. The mayor was not looking at the Spaniards anymore, because he was trying to persuade me to stay with him into the evening. I was planning to leave any second. But before I could stand up, Diego asked me to go outside with him to take a picture. Everyone went silent, the whole bar it seemed.
I told Diego I didn’t want to stand on the street and take pictures, which would likely get us both arrested by the rebels who were standing guard at the crossroads with a gigantic machine gun. It’s dangerous to take pictures around militants in Africa, unless they’re your friends. Even governments perceive photographers to be acting as spies, and in Kinshasa, for example, photography is simply illegal. What’s more, any armed man who sees an expensive item can easily commandeer it, and therefore it’s best not to expose precious objects around them.
Diego’s suggestion was ill-timed, and alienated the mayor, who got angry, and said he hadn’t realized I was married to Diego.
“I’m not married to anyone,” I said.
“If you people are trying to make a fool out of me, I don’t like it,” said the mayor defensively.
“NO… We are not trying to make a fool of you. We are happy to have your company, Mr. Mayor,” said Pedro anxiously.
Juan seconded the sentiment. I stood up and told them I had to get back to my room, as it was getting dark. The mayor told me to sit down, and gestured for the bartender to bring me another drink. I thanked him but said that I had to go, because it’s a rule in my company that I can’t stay out past dark. The mayor continued to insist, and grabbed my arm to push me back down on the bench.
Character sketches are useful in these kinds of situations. I could see, for example, that the mayor was an insecure and dangerous man, eager to prove his power to me and anyone else. I decided to flatter him. I stopped smiling and sat down for a second.
“Sir, I respect you very much, and it has been an honor to talk with you. But I must follow the rules of my company and go home now. They are looking out for young ladies like myself when they make such rules, and I am sure you would not want your own daughter wandering around this town in the dark alone.”
He said he would walk me home. Diego objected, saying he would walk me home.
“I will walk home by myself,” I said, with a fierce look at Diego. Pedro winked at me to indicate he would come.
I got up and walked out of the bar. Pedro snuck out and accompanied me back to the Paroisse. He told me that when they had interviewed the mayor that morning, blood had been splattered on the wall of his office.
At the Paroisse, I saw a UN civilian vehicle, and the blond girl from earlier. She was staying there too. But this time she didn’t annoy me. I had already fended off the mayor and Diego, and in comparison, she was an ally – an aid worker and a woman like me. Small emergencies like this bring you down to the fundamentals.
Dinner that night was cooked by the priests’ servants: pork cuts with gravy, potatoes and cabbage. I ate with the blond girl and the Spaniards, minus Diego, who had gone to sleep off his drinks. His friends explained that they brought him to Africa because he had just been divorced, and wasn’t having his “best moment.” The Spaniards were hoping to tape another interview with the mayor the next morning, to find out why 40 male schoolchildren were seen being lead out of town in handcuffs earlier in the day.
The blond girl moderated the dinner conversation with flirtatious segues. We talked about the UN, and the war in eastern Congo. I asked about the hair-strap I saw the Indian colonel wearing under his helmet. The blond, it turned out, was charged with mediating between Congolese refugees and their Indian peacekeepers.
“That’s their hair,” she said. “They have really long beards, but they have to put the hair in a net to meet regulations.”
The Spaniards recounted their experiences in other countries, specifically with Zapatistas in Mexico. “They’re like Quakers, with guns!” someone exclaimed in surprise. Pedro described his journalism partnership with Juan as “crazy people without borders,” riffing on the NGO Doctors without Borders. Pedro, who is stout, with a moustache and beard and grey-brown wavy hair, reminded me of Earnest Hemingway, or someone Earnest might have idolized. I asked him what he thought of the writer who revered macho Spanish men doing just such things as Juan and Pedro.
“I tink he is estupido,” said Pedro. “I have been to Cuba many times, but I don’t glamorize myself just because I drank a mojito in Havana.”
By 9:00, we were all full and warm with talk. The bonding was brief, and wouldn’t endure, but at that moment we were close like siblings. I was so glad I hadn’t gone back to Goma.
I went to bed early and slept soundly.
You always sleep better in the field.
