“Only NGOs and government,” the guard told him. “No one else comes in. It’s very secure here.”
We hesitated a moment, but the hotel’s compound did look well contained, and Michael had spent considerable time in Mbandaka. He and Sally had never had problems in their decade of carrying cash and supplies in and out.
“Many people here watch out for us,” he said, explaining that BCI was well known in Mbandaka. Then, as we walked out along the road, he told me the story of a young man the locals called Miracle Bonobo.
Since my arrival, I’d learned that many people involved with BCI have bonobo nicknames. For example, the Congolese often called Sally and Michael Mama Bonobo and Papa Bonobo. Mama and papa are terms of respect in the DRC, but it had taken me a while to get used to being called papa by people in the street, by Evelyn’s maids, and by the staff at airports and supermarkets. BCI’s oldest member, Dr. Mwanza, who was born in Bas-Congo in 1949 and earned his PhD in biology in the USSR, focusing on species reintroduction, is called Mpaka Bonobo, mpaka meaning “old” or “grandfather.”
The story of Miracle Bonobo dated back six or seven years, to when BCI was still building credibility among the Congolese in the hard period after the civil war. The rebel- and government-held provinces had just reunited under a fragmented central administration when BCI assembled its team of boatmen. The captain was Malu Ebonga Charles, a green-eyed Congolese in his late forties whose grandfather had been German, hence his nickname—Le Blanc, “the white.” The team often plied the long trip from Mbandaka to Kokolopori. Among them was Médard, a young Congolese man who became friends with Michael’s eighteen-year-old nephew, Joey.
“My sister trusted me with Joey,” Michael said. “It was summer vacation, and she asked if I could bring him back alive. I almost didn’t, actually. He was all over the boat, hanging out with boatmen, and he and Médard became friends. Being on the pirogues—the dugout canoes—is BCI’s vacation. It’s the only time we get to unwind and relax. It can be challenging, of course. There are storms on the river, and accidents. But we love it.
“Joey was lying in the sun, hanging out with the boatmen, and we were stopping to swim often, but then he got malaria. He was so feverish that we had to stop to put him in the water to cool him down. We were giving him medicine, but it was taking him a long time to recover. Everyone on the boat really liked Joey, and after he went back to the US, Médard gave me a letter to send to him. In it was fifty dollars.”
Michael paused in the dark. He was breathing a little hard and stopped, putting his hand to his mouth as if to cough or clear his throat.
“He told me,” he said in a thick voice, “that Joey had talked about saving money for college. Médard wanted to send the money, but fifty dollars was half his monthly salary. It was barely enough to live on here. I couldn’t believe he wanted to give away that money, and I insisted that he keep it. I told him Joey didn’t need it.
“A few months later, in Kinshasa, Sally and I got a call. Médard and his friend had been hit by a motorcycle. They were walking here, in Mbandaka, at night, and the motorcycle driver lost control or swerved suddenly to avoid a hole. We never got the story straight. Maybe he was drunk. But he was going really fast. You see how dark it is. It killed Médard’s friend instantly and left Médard unconscious and in critical condition. The hospital said that he’d suffered a massive head injury and would probably die.”
We’d stopped walking and stood on the dark road, no sense of the city around us at all, just the vast, depthless night.
“Our team sent us photos of him. His entire face was swollen. His eyelids were as big as fists. He was bleeding from his ears and eyes and nose. The Mbandaka hospital had no one who could operate on head injuries, so we called a top surgeon in Kinshasa, and he said it would cost a few thousand dollars. He asked if the injured person was essential to our operations, if we really needed to have him airlifted there and were ready to pay this kind of money. We contacted everyone we knew to help with funds, and when I called my sister, she told me she’d just received a letter from Médard, another one that he’d sent himself, with fifty dollars in it. She immediately wired me two thousand dollars for the operation.”
Again we were silent, Michael taking the time to calm his voice.
“We built BCI with an idea of family and community. We were a family. It didn’t matter if you were American or Congolese, a scientist or a boatman. That was our vision. We would have done what we did for Médard for the others, too. What we didn’t realize was how much taking care of Médard would make people trust us here. They want to take care of us, too. They know that we’re doing this for them.”
“And what happened to Médard?”
“The surgeon didn’t expect him to survive. He was in a coma when we flew him to Kinshasa, but as soon as Mwanza came into the room, Médard woke up and recognized him. I don’t know if the accident caused permanent injury, but now he seems fine. He’s still with us. You’ll meet him on the boat when we go back. People here remember the story. Everyone in the Congo is connected. The families are huge, so in a lot of areas more people are related than not. People called him Miracle Bonobo. It’s made us realize, even now, when BCI is getting bigger, that we need to stay close to the people. A few months ago, the captain of the boat, Le Blanc, had a stroke, and we helped him get care. He’s still not well, and this will be our first trip without him.”
Michael and I arrived at the bar where CREF researchers often met up when in town. A dozen plastic chairs were arranged around crooked wooden tables set in gravel, and there was a raised dance floor with tall mirrors against one wall. But the CREF researchers had already gone home, which Michael said was unusual. He said that they called themselves les beaux-frères de Jésus, “the brothers-in-law of Jesus,” and I admitted that I didn’t get it.
“It’s because Catholic nuns are called the wives of Jesus. They’ve nicknamed the local bar the Church of the Brothers-in-Law of Jesus. When they’re in Mbandaka, they meet here for what they call prier sans cesse, ‘ceaseless prayer.’ These are the words a priest would use, though in this case they just refer to drinking.”
Michael called to the waitress and began his own divine communion as a lively song blared on the sound system and people got up from a number of tables.
The Congolese are known for their love of dance. They value form in the way they greet, men ceremonially shaking hands and touching their foreheads side to side three times, women warmly kissing cheeks like the French, but adding one last kiss. When they dance, they are synchronized, the bar patrons—men and women—singing and moving together, watching their reflections in the large mirror on the wall. Kinshasa clubs have the mirrors, too, and people use them to learn new dances from each other, performing elaborate choreographies.
Later that night, I lay in bed, the room so dark it felt like a cave. Wind gusted outside, and I dozed and woke to doors slamming, curtains billowing. A storm front was pushing in, the one thing that could prevent our flight into the rainforest the next morning. I found my headlamp and went to close the windows.
As wind whistled over the city, I struggled to get back to sleep, thinking about Michael’s story of Miracle Bonobo and what Sally told me about modeling BCI on bonobo society—the emphasis on taking care of each individual, regardless of his or her role. Outside, there was the occasional, distant clattering of wind-blown trash, the shaking of windows in their frames, and soon the steady drumming of rain against the dry earth.
After a few more hours of restless sleep, I reluctantly got up and packed my bag. The rain was letting up, and outside, the wet, red streets were empty but for the occasional bicycle. Since my arrival in the DRC, people had frequently complained about the lack of rain; Kinshasa was unseasonably hot and dusty. Unlike the Amazon, whose waters lower significantly during the dry season, the Congo remains level. The river begins south of the equator, flows north of it, and curves back across in a wide sweep over a thousand miles long, so it benefits from the rainy and dry seasons that alternate on opposite sides