Herbal Remedies: Toni Lyn's First Trip to The Heart of Africa

Djolu (yellow 1) in relation to Kinshasa (green A)

I just returned from a 10-day trip to Djolu, a town in central DRC that was in many ways an appreciated break from the hustle and bustle of big dirty Kinshasa. To get there, I first took a small commercial plane to Mbandaka, a town on the Congo River and northeast of Kin.  The flight was not very exciting, small but like a plane you'd take from MI to Chicago.  Maybe the most interesting part was that the people I was going with, 3 men from a small American environmental-education-through-film NGO and 1 from the large international conservation NGO, had scheduled to pick me up at 4:45 AM for the flight.  It seemed like a bit overly cautious to arrive at the airport so early but since I was getting a ride I didn’t argue.  Since I had to wake so early and I had a lot of work to do the night before, and an extra excuse since the MSU v UM basketball game was on from 130-330 am (though in the end I couldn’t watch or listen to it, only track the written updates on ESPN.com), so I decided to pull an all-nighter.  Matt was kind enough to join me so we sat up working and reading, respectively (Matt is engrossed in The Poisonwood Bible – his SEVENTH book here, a good read to give some background on DRC. One of the others that he has read and recommends if you’re interested in DRC history/current events is King Leopold’s Ghost).  Anyway, at 4 am the car shows up.  Now, let’s review our physics – time is relative.  For example, if you have a weekend where you don’t have a lot going on and you sit down to watch a movie on Saturday night, the fact that the movie is 2 hours or 2 hours and 45 minutes probably won’t matter too much.  However, if it is 4:00 in the morning and you are rushing to finish some things and pack before you leave on a 10 day trip, 45 minutes is a BIG difference.  However, this would merely be the first (albeit, the earliest possible) time among many in my trip to remind me “T.I.A.” (this is Africa), and that definitely applies to schedules.  Although granted I have more experience with things being really delayed en Afrique than very early, but…TIA.

The plane that took us from Mbandaka east to Djolu was very small, a charter plane with just the 5 of us and two French pilots.  It was neat to be up in the air watching all the vast Congo forest stretching for miles and miles and miles (I almost wrote kilometers!).  

Then we each got loaded behind someone on a dirt bike and raced off 4 km to the Djolu research station where we are spending our time.  It was one of the best things I’ve done in DRC so far, which is good cuz I ended up spending many many hours on the back of a bike this trip. 

The objective of our trip to Djolu was to film villagers asking and talking about what they can do in the forest and how to divide the forest into different uses (“zones”) to accommodate best the different needs of the villagers as well as national and international interests (hunting, firewood, industrial logging, conservation, carbon sequestration, etc.).  The footage will be the major part of a film funded by us (the US Forest Service) and I am tagging along to help and also just to see some of DRC (it’s my first time outside of Kinshasa).

I was pleasantly surprised to be told there would be internet at the field station where we’d be staying and thus not too surprised that it turned out to be broken (although the group that runs the field station was).  The only other major logistical difficulty, if it can be called that, was that we only received meals (which was really the only way to eat) @730am (stale bread, bananas, and lemony hot water) and @3:45pm (pork, fish, chicken, fu fu (traditional dish, sort of like giant polenta balls but made from manioc/cassava), and pundu (traditional dish of manioc leaves, basically chopped sautéed greens)).  This was a strange schedule regardless but since we weren’t expecting it we ended up waiting for hours for lunch the first few days, and then again for the dinner that never came (albeit more hungrily for the former than the latter).

Our schedule had us visiting villages from 18 to 70 km away from Djolu, as well as meeting with people from Djolu itself.  We traveled by dirtbike, the other non-Congolese (American) on the trip driving himself and the rest of us, including some local assistants, riding on the backs of bikes.  Along the way we saw hundreds of people, mostly children, and I did my best to wave and yell “Mbote!” (Hi in the local Lingala) to everyone, often in response to their calls and waves. 

Once we arrived in the villages, we would sit at the front of a formal circle of seated people and introduce ourselves in French, usually translated by our AWF guide into Lingala, and then I would disappear into the background and the filming would begin.  Sometimes it was of a big meeting where people were cued/cajoled to ask/answer questions about zoning and use rights, sometimes one-on-one interviews of local chiefs or women, sometimes shots of action scenes like hunting or cutting trees.

Like most of the film shoots that I’ve experienced at field sites (the only place that I’ve had the experience, but I’ve had several), I found it pretty stressful.  For one, the work is demanding and stressful for the filmmakers as a few movements placed wrong or a few moments delay can make a big difference.  This is exaggerated when one does not share a common culture or language and thus split-second communication often devolves into shouting or even jerking and dragging people physically.  It’s pretty uncomfortable.  The other difficulty is the timing.  We sit for hours with little to do and then abruptly are rushed to the next place, only to sit again with nothing to do.  Of course, the cameraman and his assistant aren’t doing nothing, they’re running around, but I’m not that useful.  I spend most of the time doing background reading but occasionally interact with the local children, particularly by conspicuously and slowly flipping through the colored pictures in the Lonely Planet, asking the kids how to pronounce the names of leopards and pangolin in Lingala.  There is little more that we are able to communicate.  I am as curious of them as they are of me but it is nearly impossible to bridge the gap.  When we do finally seem to make contact, it inevitably ends with being asked for money.  

This was setting out to be the pattern of things but I was unfortunate enough to have a run-in with a, well, I don’t know what it was.  Presumably an insect, though I was wearing long sleeves and long pants.  Let’s just say that when people offer you a chair everywhere you go, you shouldn’t act overly tough because you want to change their mind about you being a weak soft white person, you should accept that you are a weak soft white person and take the seat.  After 2 days of sitting on the ground (if that was indeed the cause), I got bit through/under the shirt by an insect(?) that I never saw and only noticed when my arm started itching like nothing in my life has ever itched before.  For about 20 minutes I turned into a raging lunatic, walking and then pacing through the village while everyone else continued with the film work, tearing at my arm and wondering how I could rip it off.  After a bit I recalled my wilderness first aid training, and the first aid kit I was dragging around everywhere, and pulled it out, tossing its contents haphazardly as I hadn’t the mental capacity to do anything in a disciplined way.  I searched desperately for a remedy (You’re F*&*in KIDDING me, I didn’t bring any Benadryl?!!) and finally gave up, consuming something that was for all intents and purposes probably a placebo (hayfever medication?), but hey, science tells us placebos work, right?  I resumed pacing, interrupting it only to (impatiently) take a picture of three Congolese guys whose request I couldn’t deny.  I eventually made my way to David to complain of my desperation and the Congolese cameraman suggested an herbal remedy (well, he suggested suggesting it for several minutes until I YELLED at him in English to just TELL me what it was, which wasn’t at all helpful since no one speaks English here but I had lost almost complete control of myself) and when we finally communicated clearly, I interrupted him with, “Okay, you want me to pee on my arms?  Fine, sounds good.” And I ran off to the woods to do just that, with the American filmmaker yelling after me that I would have to be quite a contortionist to manage such a thing.  And yes, I did pee on my arms (both were on fire at this point, with my belly and upper chest just beginning), and maybe it did help a little, but honestly it was hard to tell, so I crouched there with my underwear around my ankles and my own urine dripping from my arms until a village woman came to get me to tell me that everyone was leaving.  Well, she didn’t speak any language that I knew more than 4 words of but that’s what I figured out.  She also “told” me that I should be careful of the corn stalks because they sure are prickly, poor soft fragile white girl must have gotten scratched by the corn stalks and now her arms hurt.  I explained that I had been wearing my over shirt (which I blame for all of this and had removed and will never wear again) and that it was insects.  She seemed very sympathetic that the insects that they live with every day must have been very hard on me.  Anyway, I spent the next 4 days in misery over the rash that had spread across half my body and is just now finally going away.

That was not the only insect encounter of course, though certainly the worst. For example, everything gets covered in tiny ants.  The package of cookies that my colleague brought with him from “civilization” is inedible (well, not according to the ants swarming all over it for days now), our “lunch” left out from the night before (maybe it was actually supposed to become dinner, gives a new meaning to leftovers), even my bed when I wake in the morning (and more and more when I get in it at night, though I do my best to brush them away).  My nights were extremely uncomfortable because of my rash and I went to bed most nights before 8:00, though I would sit up and read for hours, unable to sleep with the itching and the noise (it is always noisy here, there are about 10 roosters and they crow every 10 seconds from 530 am to 530 pm, plus random music parties every other night, the sound of the generator which actually only provides power 3 hours/day, even a scratchy crappy signal from a radio that my wallmate plays every night til after 10 and every morning starting around 5).  I also was reading a very good book (Book 12 of Wheel of Time (again), 1050 pages which I easily finished during this trip).  Anyway, although the ants are not ideal, they assiduously cart away all of the insects that attack me unsuccessfully (due to a very useful mosquito net) or successfully (if they are too small to be bothered by the mosquito net) throughout the night.  In other words, as disturbing as waking to a few dozen ants in your bed, it is perhaps preferable to waking to a graveyard of insects that tried to attack you throughout the night.

There are good moments too.  We take the dirt bikes 70km to a village where we filmed a 60 going on 90-year-old chief (who later gives me a present of raw coffee beans wrapped in a giant leaf and I give him a cheap rubber animal-shaped bracelet off of my wrist) with a leopard skin hat (for real) singing and dancing and chanting with his clan this amazing song in a way that I can’t describe except to say it was one of the best experiences of my life (and is still stuck in my head);

we roll the bikes and tight-rope across log bridges through villages where I wave and wave and the air rushes my arms (blessed relief) and the driver and I share my headphones and jam out to Michael Jackson’s Thriller (Africans LOVE MJ);

the Women’s Association gives me a present of eggs and I am later told that a present of eggs means that you have been accepted; surrounded by villagers in a far away village, I put a baseball cap on drawing stares and laughs from everyone around and I end up in a full belly laugh when my colleague suggests that it’s not a girl wearing a cap that is making them react, it’s just that they’re not fans of the Detroit Tigers; gather pebbles with the guardians and play a makeshift game of Mancala in the dirt with the Congolese workers; I have my first HOT water field shower (bucket bath); I work with the Pygmy cook to learn how to make fufu (local cassava dish, kind of like polenta); I am greeted warmly nearly everywhere we go.  I have had the chance to think about my situation, my work, my goals, my life. 

But in the end, I am very, VERY happy to be “home” (back with Matt), and I am going to take a long long bath and eat some pizza! (...after I get over this terrible bout of food poisoning - don't eat the airline food on Congo Air!)