San Francisco: More Goodies from the Ferry Building

August 4th, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

It’s a little disconcerting to be posting so much Africa stuff when I’m so far away from there* … and back in San Francisco … so here are some snaps taken locally. One of my favorite places in any city, anywhere, is the Ferry Building, where organic meets om-nom-nom.

* But there are more Africa photos in the hopper, and they will be posted in the near future. Woop woop!

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Posted in Fooooooooood., Photo Galleries, San Francisco, USA: California

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Congo: Gorilla Videos!

July 30th, 2010 by Eileen 1 comment »

Here is some video evidence that I did, indeed, hang out in close proximity to Congolese mountain gorillas. Much of the video clips show them playing with each other: running, chasing, swatting, rolling around, wrestling.

According to the BBC News, gorillas play games of tag like humans … and that looks like what we’re seeing here:

Here are some of the younger gorillas. The littlest one kept coming right up to us, so close that the gorilla guide had to keep shooing him back:

Here are some of the young gorillas hanging out, and toward the end the silverback comes charging through … just to keep the young’uns in line (and also to show the visitors who’s boss).

And here is the silverback a bit later, high up in a tall tree, foraging for fruit (and tearing the hell out of some big, thick branches at the same time). He looked like King Kong!

Here is some info about how to get involved in saving the Congo’s endangered mountain gorillas — either to go gorilla trekking yourself, or make a donation.

~ peace, love, and giant apes ~

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Posted in Africa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Viddy Oh!

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Congo: Gorillas!

July 27th, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

Here are some photos taken while gorilla trekking in the Democratic Republic of Congo, July 2010.

I went on this expedition with the rangers of the Virunga National Park.  Here is my blog entry for this day, “Close Encounters with Mountain Gorillas.” Here are video clips I took while gorilla trekking.

For permission to reprint images without watermark, please contact me at eileenploh@gmail.com.

Thanks and enjoy!

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Posted in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Travels

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Kenya: Medical Free Clinic & Deworming

July 24th, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

The next couple of days in the clinic went much the same as the first, except the number of patients increased with every day. Word was spreading around the region that there were mzungu doctors at the Port Victoria hospital, and they were giving away free medications. People showed up who appeared healthy but claimed to be sick; some mothers brought all their children, saying vaguely that they thought they might all have malaria. You couldn’t blame them for wanting to stock up; if they weren’t sick now, they would be at some point, without this kind of access to medications or nutritional supplements. The doctors inevitably prescribed something — vitamins, Advil, folic acid — just to make sure people were walking out of the pharmacy with something useful. So many of them wanted to see the lone mzungu doctor Casey, who’s still in med school, that some patients came back and waited in line again, after they’d already seen a Kenyan doctor, just so they could have an appointment with him.

One thing the doctors prescribed a good deal was Oral Rehydration Therapy, to anyone with diarrhea and to all sick babies and children. It’s just a simple mixture of salt and sugar — the salt to replace lost sodium, the sugar to ensure its absorption in the intestines. But it saves lives all over the developing world, where diarrhea (and associated dehydration) is the second biggest cause of death among children under 5.

The pharmacy had packets of oral rehydration salts, the kind found in all travel med kits, that they doled out until they ran out. Dani had written and illustrated a bunch of leaflets in English and Swahili, with instructions on how to mix oral rehydration solution. We dragged a table outside to where people were clustered around the pharmacy window waiting for their prescriptions. There, with the help of a translator, she did ORT demonstrations and passed out the leaflets. When people received prescriptions for ORT after the packets were gone, Danielle would meet with them in the Nutrition/ORT office for a one-on-one testimonial, and to give them sugar and salt. I’d bet anything that several Kenyan kids will, over the years, owe their lives to Dani.

I went to two more schools to dispense deworming pills, hiking for 3 hours down dirt roads and smaller dirt paths, through mud-hut villages, before we arrived at the remote schools. The uniforms were more worn, the buildings more run-down, the teachers more likely to carry thin reed sticks with which they would swat errant kids into place. They had the same reaction to seeing mzungu as the children in the first school. This time I remembered to dispense pills with my sunglasses off. I’d learned in other countries that people who’ve never met Caucasians before are especially interested in seeing blue and green eye color. It is disconcerting to have person after person after person staring at your eyes, but I did make eye contact with every child, and I was glad for that. The clinic organizers had recommended that we volunteers deworm ourselves before leaving this area where parasites were so prevalent. So at one school I demonstrated taking the pill for a couple hundred children, brandishing the big tablet with a flourish before washing it down with water.

When we got back from the hike that afternoon, after giving away thousands of deworming pills, I arrived to find more people than ever gathered outside the pharmacy. With a growing stream of patients and one harried pharmacist being assisted by just one volunteer (Megan, who wasn’t a pharmacy tech), we had a serious bottleneck. One of the other volunteers, Laura, and I squeezed into the small pharmacy room to help. The pharmacist would read the prescription from the growing stack in front of him, scribble the drug and dosage onto a small Ziploc bag, and one of us would locate the medication and count out the pills. We stayed in that office until after the sun went down. The building electricity never came on and the hospital groundskeeper had to wedge in there holding a flashlight so we could see to count. We worked like this until all the day’s prescriptions were filled. We took prescriptions written by non-clinic doctors, too, if we had the right meds. We dispensed drugs and supplies for a huge variety of injuries and illnesses (especially malaria); we saw people of all ages, including a baby named Barrack Obama. I admit I threw more vitamins, Advils, Tylenols and Pepcids into the bags than were prescribed. I knew they wouldn’t go to waste.

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Kenya: Medical Free Clinic, Day 1

July 18th, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

The morning of the first day of the clinic, and we hadn’t even set it up. We arrived around 7 a.m. — we were supposed to open at 8 — and already at least 100 people had lined up outside the hospital waiting for us.

We’d been told more than once that “in Africa there is no hurry” and today this was maddeningly true … keys had to arrive, meetings had to be held, organizers had to walk through the clinic building and figure out what rooms should be used for what purpose. The rest of us sat outside on benches, in a small shaded area with benches in front of the clinic building, and busied ourselves preparing intake forms and other administrative stuff. I wrote signs in both Swahili and English for the various clinic functions: Admissions, Clinic, Pharmacy, Nutrition/ORT (Oral Rehydration Therapy). Massive suitcases containing donated medications, syringes and first-aid supplies sat unopened. More and more people kept arriving, and it was past 10 by now and the patients were growing less patient by the minute. Finally we got word that we could move into the clinic building.

We began dragging the suitcases indoors. Before we could get them all inside, though, some of the patients waiting in line saw us making the move and a few of them hustled up to the benches we were vacating. This triggered a mad stampede of people running en masse, to claim these valuable spots closest to the door. Some of our staff were afraid they’d be trampled, and really it was a legitimate fear. Lots of needy people, plus foreigners showing up with free health care and drugs, can easily become a recipe for disaster. Lesson number one for this fledgling medical camp: crowd control, right off the bat.

Inside, I stood with a couple other volunteers in the pharmacy room and we unpacked the medications. The shelves filled up with antibiotics, antimalarials, antihistamines, antifungals, dewormers, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, paracetamol, vitamins and lots more. The three Kenyan doctors we’d recruited, plus Casey and the handful of local nurses we’d hired, had begun seeing patients. People started trickling in, handing us their prescriptions even before we’d gotten everything unpacked. Ready or not, we were open for business.

At one point I looked out the pharmacy door and saw Casey in the hall with the old man we’d seen yesterday in the village, the one with the mass on his leg. They were sitting on a bench with a cardiologist named Kenneth, who had flown in from Nairobi to donate his time. It was good to know that at least the man would see a doctor and get that giant lump removed and biopsied, a chance he probably wouldn’t have had without our clinic. Turns out that Casey’s mud-hut diagnosis was spot on; I hoped the guy had just the bone infection, and not cancer. He’d have to wait several days for his biopsy results to come back from Nairobi. At least he’d have an answer. That had to be better than nothing.

As soon as we’d emptied the last suitcase, I beat it out of there to let the local pharmacist and one volunteer get started on the incoming flow of prescriptions. It was about 2 p.m., and after a quick and unsatisfying ham sandwich, was time for me to help with the outreach part of the clinic: going to schools for deworming.

I walked with Rennatus, Serena, Laura, and Ferdinand to a nearby public school. We had a big bottle of deworming pills with us, enough for the thousand or so kids from first through eighth grade. Each child had to take a tablet to kill internal parasites, and most of these kids surely harbored at least one of the main types of parasites so common in the area: schistosomes, helminths, pinworms, hookworms, tapeworms, whipworms and more.

The school was a series of frankly dirty cement rooms in the middle of well-trimmed and lush grounds, a battered Kenyan flag flapping on a pole. We went first to the office of the headmaster to introduce ourselves. Rennatus had sent word of our mission through a teacher, but the headmaster hadn’t gotten the message, or maybe he had forgotten. Either way, he seemed glad to see us, and agreed to set up a couple of tables outside for us with pitchers of water and communal cups; yes, communal cups. Not the most hygienic of situations by a long shot, but 1000 disposable Dixie cups were rather out of the question here.

The teachers let their students out of the classrooms grade by grade, and they ran over to our tables, yelling and shouting, a manic sea of faded and well-worn blue uniforms. Most of them had spotted us out the window, and they reacted to us in much the same way the kids in the village had. It took all the teachers’ efforts to get them lined up in some semblance of order so they wouldn’t mob us.

All we had to do was stand there with surgical gloves on (for sanitary purposes, though that seemed rather moot, what with 1000 of them sharing six cups) and dole out the pills, child by child. Three seventh-grade girls appointed themselves my water helpers, taking turns filling the communal cups and giving them to each kid who received a pill. I greeted every kid in line with some basic Swahili phrases I’d memorized: hello, how are you?, what’s your name? and, after they swallowed the rather large and bitter pill: good job!

The whole situation seemed surreal to me. Not just the rockstar treatment that came our way, but the fact that none of their parents knew we’d be here today, medicating their children. We’d been told the deworming pills had no ill effects; that this type of treatment was necessary and potentially lifesaving in this area; that infected kids would pass the dead parasites over the next couple days; that nothing adverse would happen to kids with no parasites.

But I still felt as though we were committing a fundamental wrong. In the U.S., and many other cultures, it would not be okay at all for strangers to show up and dispense pills to an entire student body without parental consent, no matter how well-intentioned. The headmaster and teachers acted like it was just fine, though, and I had to remind myself that I was working within their culture and not the other way around. I tried to see the situation through the children’s eyes: lining up in the schoolyard so the mzungu lady in rubber gloves can hand you a pill to swallow. That had to be surreal for them, too.

By the time we got back to the clinic, crowd control was under way, in the form of a lottery system and a larger-than-life local volunteer named Mishat with an affable personality and booming James Earl Jones voice. Everyone had received a numbered ticket, and Mishat passed through the crowd, identifying those who needed to be seen right away and arranging for their number to be called next. It took another hour for the day’s patients to move through the system, and we headed home at around 6 p.m. Dark was falling and the rest of the staff looked as tired and worn out as I felt. As we walked down the main dirt road of Port Victoria, I saw a bright and colorful spot bouncing in the air: the kids from yesterday, still playing with the beach ball we’d brought. Next year, I thought: 1000 beach balls. At least.

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Kenya: Port Victoria and Outskirts

July 16th, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

Our group woke ready to head to the local hospital, set up in a clinic building on premises, and start unloading all our suitcases full of donated medications before tomorrow, the first day of the clinic. But we didn’t have permission to take over the building yet; that would have to wait. We headed over anyway with a local volunteer, Ferdinand, a cousin of Rennatus.

Seven of us walked about a mile into the center of Port Victoria, discovering right away that the locals here don’t see mzungu too often. Children screeched and waved, and adults eyed us curiously or greeted us with “Karibu!” (welcome). Some of the kids ran over to us and jostled each other to shake our hands and practice their English: “How-are-you-I’m-fine” in robotic, excited voices, laughing hysterically when we answered. I had two of Dani’s beach balls with me. On a couple of occasions I pulled one out of my bag and spent a few minutes blowing it up in front of the puzzled audience, who’d confer with each other about what this mzungu lady could possibly be doing. Then I’d toss the ball over to them, and happy shrieking would take over. The kids got so much enjoyment out of the beach balls that I was mad at ourselves for failing to bring more.

We took a little tour of the local hospital. I’ve been in public hospitals in a developing country before; namely, the Philippines, and I’ve seen the less-than-sanitary conditions, the lack of supplies, the outdated equipment, patients piled together in too-small, dingy rooms. But it never fails to shock and upset me. The children’s ward, in particular, hit me right in the gut: here’s one crying baby girl in a cot with both her tiny legs in traction, high in the air; a child with horrible burns, lying under a little tent made from a worn-out blanket, another small sickly cough permeating the room. No specialty wards anywhere, not much staff in sight, and I’d bet no very strong painkillers either.

Ferdinand asked if we’d like to visit the village where he grew up, and it was a relief to say yes and get out of that hospital. We walked back through the center of town, past the kids we’d met earlier, still playing with their beach ball. Port Victoria’s town center is really just an intersection with a gas station, market stalls, various shops selling clothing or fabric, packaged groceries, animal feed, farm supplies; shacks identifying themselves as hotels, a couple of bars, and lots of individuals selling their wares (shoes, cooking utensils, street food) from blankets on the ground or from big baskets they carried around. Dirt swirled up constantly from the unpaved roads. Cows and chickens and goats roamed around. A mountain, whose name I don’t know, rose in the distance at one end of the main road.

It only took a couple of minutes to get through the town center and head down the dusty road toward Ferdinand’s village. Kids along the way clutched each other and screeched at the sight of us, sometimes following our group down the road. We walked through floodplains with large swampy pools here and there; one reason for the pervasive malaria in this region. When we came to a narrow river, we had to wait for a large canoe that served as the ferry. A bridge wouldn’t have been hard to build, but the frequent flooding and less-than-optimal building materials available here would crumble it in no time. These big canoes were the way to go, on most trips carrying several bicycles jammed together into the bow. We paid our ten shillings apiece and got to the other side where it was more of the same: a dirt road with marshy fields stretched out on either side, most of the transport in the form of bicycles or boda-boda (motorcycle taxis). This was an road where no motor vehicle could pass; the lack of bridges ensured that.

Ferdinand’s village consisted of nearly identical huts made from branches, dried mud and cow dung, with thatched palm-frond roofs. Most were round, others rectangular, all very small. In these villages, water comes from central wells or cisterns, carried back home in big plastic jugs; light comes from the sun, the moon, lanterns, candles, fire and flashlights. The kids here were especially excited by our arrival, even more so than the ones in town. The last time they saw mzungu was when Casey had been here two years ago on a similar trip, and they remembered him. We found ourselves mobbed by kids and young adults, at least 50 of them, all of whom wanted their photo taken and screamed with delight when they saw their images on our digital camera screens.

We followed Ferdinand along narrow pathways that wound through the close-set homes, past goats and chickens and flapping lines of laundry. The kids accompanied us in a big pack, the bolder ones grabbing our hands in ones and twos. When we ducked into the house of Ferdinand’s older brother, they stayed outside, gathering at the window to peer in.

We mzungus were surprised to see there was plenty of room inside the hut for several visitors to sit comfortably. We probably shouldn’t have been; with extended family and community at the heart of village life, naturally they would make space for big gatherings. The walls inside are draped with plastic, fabric or some kind of oilcloth to keep the dust at bay; the partitioned rooms small but serviceable with beds, tables, armoires, couches, chairs and stools. The decór runs to that curious third-world habit of displaying children’s toys (mainly plush animals) and pictures of babies or animals one would find in an elementary school classroom. Inflatable balls advertising Fanta soft drinks hung gaily from the ceiling of this particular home — smaller versions of the beach balls we’d brought from England.

Ferdinand’s brother was telling us about an elderly man in the village who had a problem with his leg. Casey was the sole medically trained one of us in the bunch; he made it clear he wasn’t a doctor yet, but would be glad to take a look. We left the first house and walked over to the home of the old man. The kids sprang up to join us, the ones who’d initially grabbed our hands quick to locate their chosen mzungu and clutch our fingers again. When we reached the second hut, again they assembled themselves on the ground and waited.

Casey’s patient was in his late 60s, thin and frail; he would have been mistaken for an octogenarian or older in Western culture where life just isn’t this taxing. When he rolled up his pant leg it was hard not to visibly react. Right beneath his left knee protruded a lump bigger than a golf ball, but more pointy, with a cracked tip that revealed pink flesh underneath. He waved flies away from it as he explained that this had started growing a couple of months ago. Casey examined the mass and then palpated down the rest of his leg to his foot, asked him to move his toes and ankle, and asked some questions though Ferdinand the translator.

“I’m not a doctor,” Casey repeated for the zillionth time, “but what I think this is, is chronic osteomyolytis, a bone infection. Can he make it to the clinic tomorrow? We’ll have a doctor look at it.” The man’s son agreed to bring his father into town tomorrow. The patient, his son, and two wives — yes, two wives, not uncommon in these parts — thanked Casey profusely. The kids outside jumped up when we left and gathered around us again.

Walking alongside Casey I asked if the guy could be helped. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “With an infection like that, after it’s been there for a while it becomes squamous cell cancer, and I bet that’s what’s happened already. If it has, then the leg will have to be amputated, and he still wouldn’t live long. But even if it’s just the infection, he needs to be on IV antibiotics for at least a month. I don’t know if that’s even gonna be possible here.” We looked around at the mud huts, the lack of running water or electricity; the long hike into town, bisected by a river. In short, the guy was probably screwed. That would be the diagnosis: Sorry, you’re screwed.

Even as the kids gathered around us at the roadside, dancing and jumping up and down and yelling their goodbyes, I felt a little trepidation. Was this type of thing going to be a typical case tomorrow? How many more “Sorry, you’re screwed” diagnoses would the doctors be making? The need around here might be too much for what we had to offer.

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A Little Theft, A Whole Lotta Bumpy Road

July 10th, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

After our grueling jungle trek, Dani and Serena and I decided we deserved a day at the Hotel Serena for poolside piñas, and we’d begin the journey to Kenya refreshed and rejuvenated that night. Our sense of relaxation came to an abrupt end not long after we left the hotel, when Dani had her backpack stolen from the bed of the pickup truck in which we’d been riding. Dani wisely had all her valuables in the daypack she kept on her, so there was nothing of worth to the street kids who had run alongside the truck and lifted her bag. Size zero female clothing, miniature high heels and Caucasian-complexion makeup didn’t interest them, so with the help of a friendly local businessman, Dani miraculously got her bag back the next morning. Just about everything was intact (albeit smelly and dirty). We chalked it up to a valuable travel lesson we needed; we’d been too complacent, had ignored the gut instincts that told us putting our bags in back wasn’t a good idea.

And now we had to double-time it to Kenya, busing it from Gisenyi to Kigali to Kampala to Kisumu. More than 24 hours and two border crossings later we arrived at the guesthouse in Kisumu where our friend Casey, and other volunteers with the medical project he’d organized, had gathered.

Casey, a med student at Tulane, was there with fellow project planners and volunteers from the U.S. They’d been organizing this free clinic for about a year, and had brought thousands of dollars’ worth of donated medications and supplies to set up in a local hospital in rural Port Victoria, on the Ugandan border. It was the home town of one of the organizers, Rennatus, a public health officer now living in Atlanta. Of the three of us latecomers, Dani was the only one with health skills to lend to the project (she’s a nutritionist). But as we’d learned in previous volunteer stints abroad, anyone willing to help can and will be put to work.

We took much-needed showers and met up with the other volunteers at a small lakeside restaurant for dinner (grilled tilapia eaten, per custom, without utensils) and Tusker beers. Then it was on to the Hotel Imperial bar to watch Ghana vs. Uruguay in the World Cup. Ghana, the only African team left in the tournament, had the rabid support of everyone in town and so we all cheered for them too: me and Serena and Dani and Casey, and the others: Megan, Stephanie, Laura (all Americans) and Rennatus, Mike, and Merugi (Kenyan-Americans). Ghana lost in a heartbreak ending just as both Casey and Laura started feeling the first rumblings of travel illness (blamed on some street-vendor samosas eaten that morning). The day was definitely over.

By 3 o’clock the next afternoon, when we met at the bus station for our trip west to Port Victoria, the worst of Casey and Laura’s puking was over, though they still felt pretty lousy. I felt bad for them, first on a jostling and hot 2-hour bus ride, then crammed into a matatu (mini-bus) for another two hours. It was definitely a Developing Country Travel Experience, with 22 passengers packed into 10 designated seats, more people clinging to the outside of the vehicle, and all the associated smells and sights and sounds that come with it. My iPod kept me sane as I pressed against the window and thanked the travel gods that at least this road was (by Kenyan standards) relatively smooth. A million stars and a big meal greeted us when we arrived in Port Victoria, and then we distributed ourselves into the three resident houses where we’d be spending the next five days.

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Congo: Close Encounters With Mountain Gorillas

July 8th, 2010 by Eileen 1 comment »

Our lead tour guide Norbert was a park ranger who spent every day tracking gorilla families through the jungles of the Virunga National Park, keeping tabs of their movement throughout the rolling mountain range. We would be tracking the largest gorilla family in the region, called the Kabirizi, spotted in the area in the past few days. The family consisted of 34 gorillas including one male silverback, two male blackbacks, and 10 adult females, nine of whom had babies. The rest of the family were juveniles of various ages.

Dani, Serena and I set out with Norbert and two other guides (whose names, embarrassingly enough, I’ve forgotten, so I’ll call them Tracker Guide and Rear Guide). We walked for about half an hour across a peaceful rolling green steppe, dotted with bright multicolored clusters of wildflowers, until we reached the edge of the jungle.

We’d been told to wear long-sleeved shirts, long trousers and even gloves, to avoid stinging nettles and insects; we knew this would be a tough jungle hike. But as Serena and Dani and I entered the jungle, we were still surprised at how dense it was … no paths, just Tracker Guide bushwhacking through the vines and branches with a machete as Norbert followed, trailed by me, Dani, and then Serena, with Rear Guide last.

Tracker Guide soon found evidence of the gorillas’ path through the forest … torn-off bamboo shoots, broken branches and flattened vines the main clues. We got on the gorillas’ trail and began tracking them in earnest. Every once in a while the guides would stop and Norbert would take GPS readings, log them in a journal, and call the coordinates in to the ranger office to enter in their computer system. They did this kind of tracking at this altitude every day, and subsequently were waaaaay fitter than we three mzungus huffing and puffing behind them. None of the rangers carried a pack or even a canteen, and they tramped through the jungle with ease in their canvas uniforms and rubber boots. Every 45 minutes or so, Norbert would say, “Let’s take a pause,” and the guides would stop and let us drop to the ground and gulp water while they waited politely, not out of breath in the least. If they were annoyed at us for slowing their regular pace, they didn’t show it.

To be fair, this was a brutal trek. We slogged through vegetation dense enough to make us regularly lose sight of one another just a few feet apart, branches hitting our faces as we walked on a carpet of vines so thick our shoes rarely touched the jungle floor. Vines snagged our feet, ankles and legs, making it necessary to yank loose with just about every step. Large stinging ants attacked regularly and mercilessly, able to inflict pain even through denim, swarming into shoes and up trouser legs. Stinging nettles slashed at my gloveless fingers, shielded behind the daypack I carried in front. Our gear wasn’t optimal; for instance, none of us had the correct waterproof footwear. I wore rubber-soled walking shoes, and Dani and Serena had athletic sneakers without much traction. Our unplanned travel style had, yet again, come back to bite us in the ass as we slipped and slid over vines, slick logs, and mud. Had we known we would be gorilla trekking, we’d have prepared better … maybe. Probably not.

After a couple hours we came upon a spot where all the branches and vines had been flattened over a broad area; Norbert said this was where the gorilla family had spent last night, or perhaps the night before. Big piles of fly-covered poop confirmed that theory. Norbert checked the ground for stinging ants and, finding none, invited us to sit in this recently abandoned gorilla nest for a break. The rangers waved away our offers of water or snacks. Tracking Guide and Rear Guide went ahead of us to evaluate the gorilla path and take coordinates. Norbert stood above Dani and Serena and I, watching blankly as we passed around hand sanitizer, energy bars, Red Bull. “We’re from the city,” Serena explained lamely.

Since our path had been forged by gorillas, there was no rhyme or reason to the way it wended and switchbacked up and down. Our patience started to wear thin, and we became more vocal. “Any time now, gorillas, any time,” became a refrain, the cussing and complaining more frequent. We understood clearly that no one could predict where the gorillas would be, that we could be trekking for hours before we found them, but that didn’t stop us from whining, “When are we gonna find them?” or “They’ve got to be close now, right?” Norbert tried to explain to us what we already knew: “Gorillas are not cows. They must move, constantly, to find food. They always are moving. We never know where they might be.”

“Right, right,” we’d respond. “We know that. We’re just bitching.”

On and on, up and down, step after yanking step, the path growing steeper and steeper until we found ourselves climbing a vertical wall covered in vines. Though our protests of “This CANNOT be the only way to get there,” and “This is f’ing RIDICULOUS” we had no choice but to follow our stoic guides up this insane path. We had to grab onto vines, test their strength first and then haul ourselves up, our scrabbling feet rarely able to find a decent hold on the wet vegetation. Even Norbert was having trouble with it, his feet giving way on occasion just like ours did with almost every step. My daypack, transferred to my back now, swung from side to side, tipping my balance. The occasional small ledge offered no rest; we could simply never let go of the vines, or we would fall.

I stopped climbing for a moment and looked behind me and then down. I shouldn’t have. The mountain wall dropped down … far down … the valley below yawned endlessly, the rest of the mountain range vast and distant. We were nowhere near solid ground. Two things occurred to me: one, that if any of us should fall, she’d take out everyone below her; and two, that I was in perhaps the worst place on earth to suffer an injury. We were three hours by foot into a foreign jungle. There was no freaking way I could get hurt here; none, period. My only possible exit from this was through my own power. Fear adrenaline propelled me in the only direction I could go — up. By the time I got to the top of the wall and could stand without clinging to a vine, my hands were shaking so much from exertion and shattered nerves that I could barely uncap my water bottle.

“I hate these sodding gorillas,” Serena panted. “Why can’t they just pick a nice normal path?”

About an hour passed (still uphill, but none that dramatic again) before Tracker Guide doubled back to tell us the gorillas were straight ahead. We didn’t fully believe it; we’d been walking and climbing for so long after these elusive gorillas it seemed like we’d never find them. But when Norbert told us to put on our surgical masks — supplied at the beginning of the expedition, to prevent disease passing to or from the gorillas — we knew this was really it. And then the sky opened up and the rain started to pour down as, I guess, only a Congolese jungle rainfall can.

We had one hour to spend in the gorillas’ presence, in accordance with the rules of the tour, aimed at limiting their exposure to humans. Norbert asked us if we wanted to wait until the rain stopped before we entered the area and the clock started ticking. “To protect your cameras,” he said. “So you won’t be taking pictures in the rain.” Thunder rolled in the distance and the rain had soaked through my daypack, my jeans, and pooled inside my surgical mask. It seemed like a good suggestion. Then we could hear the unmistakable low, bellowing grunt of a very big animal. “No,” we all said at once. “We want to see them now.”

We followed Norbert down a short hill and turned a corner. About 10 meters away, under cover of low spreading branches, sat two big black gorillas. One was cradling a baby, exactly like any human mother I’ve ever seen. The rain glistened on the tips of her shiny fur; it seemed to just bead up and roll off, and even though my teeth were by now chattering, the water running in rivulets down my pant legs and into my shoes, I would bet anything that baby was as warm and comfortable as he ever had been. We stood transfixed, not wanting to move or even breathe. I fished my camera out of my rain jacket and took some blurry pictures.

Branches rustled and three young gorillas came galloping over, between the two adult gorillas and us. They swung on vines, tackled each other and rolled around, acting goofy and loud and pretty much like any human teenager I’ve ever seen. They came right up to us, hooted and beat their chests; Norbert shooed them back, but they did that a couple more times. Though they were young gorillas, half the size of the two adults behind them, they could intimidate. “Don’t be scared,” Norbert told us. “They want us to play with them. They are happy to see mzungu.”

When we mzungu didn’t accept their invitation, the young gorillas resumed running and jumping and rolling around with renewed vigor. It seemed like they were putting on a show for our benefit; they’d charge right past us, close enough at times that we could have reached out and touched them. To watch gorillas play like that in the jungle — now four, five, six gorillas swinging and climbing and rolling and romping and chasing and swatting each other and beating their chests — didn’t seem real, like a production staged for our benefit. But, no, this is really how gorillas act in the wild.

We could have stayed there and watched them all day, but Norbert urged us to walk a bit farther in to see more. Our lead guide really came into his element around the gorillas; he began talking to them in a low throat-clearing grunt, a pretty great imitation of how they sounded. Norbert pointed out the gorillas all around us … in the treetops, climbing across branches, slinging themselves heavy-armed along the ground on their knuckles. Since the jungle was so thick, most of the time a mad rustling signaled their presence well before we could see them. Their chest pounding echoed around us like drumbeats. We were surrounded by gorillas.

The mothers went up in the treetops with their babies and mainly stayed there. The others were alternately on the ground or climbing trees looking for food. They really tore apart the jungle, pulling huge limbs loose and tossing them aside as they stripped them of their fruit, and sending branches or treetops crashing to the ground with their weight. It seemed like they were completely trashing the place, but I guessed it all would grow back in no time.

The rain petered out and a humid steam rose up, and there they were, the Gorillas in the Mist, just as Dian Fossey had described them. Some of them passed us so casually, just a few feet from us, we knew they didn’t consider us a threat. Still, every close encounter with a big gorilla — particularly the gigantic steely-eyed silverback alpha male (who, in one goosebump-raising instance, crossed within five meters of me) — gave us a thrill of fear.

Norbert said it was time to go. I stood there for a minute longer, trying to take at least one or two final photos that weren’t blurry (as my camera by now had gotten very, very wet). The big gorilla above me sprang to a neighboring tree. A thundering crack and, boom, down came the top half of the tree, gorilla and all. He had fallen pretty far, and for a good half-minute I heard nothing but silence. I wondered if he’d been hurt, and if so, how badly. But then a rustling, and a furry black head popped up through the branches and leaves. The gorilla hoisted himself onto the log of a fallen tree that crossed my path. He walked on it until directly in front of me, then he sat down and fixed his gaze on me. It took every bit of control I had to stay there. I snapped a few pictures and lowered my camera, looking at his face for real, not through the lens, at his absolutely human eyes. Then, photo time over, he got up and kept climbing, leaving his momentary diversion standing in awe as he continued on with his day.

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Congo: Goma

July 3rd, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

Newly inspired to see mountain gorillas, Serena and Dani and I went the next day to the Rwanda Tourism Information Centre in Gisenyi. As we’d figured, they had no openings. Only eight slots are available per day to go gorilla trekking (because the conservationist programs aim to limit the gorillas’ exposure to humans), and all of them are usually booked well in advance. We had hoped for last-minute cancellations. No such luck.

Disappointed, we headed down the road toward the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The national border was only a couple of kilometers away and we could walk there; we figured the day wouldn’t be a total waste if we could at least see a bit of a different country. We knew the Congo is considered one of the most dangerous countries one could enter, with no real functioning government and rumblings of the country’s civil war still flaring up in many parts. But our new British friend David, who’d been working on the Congo and Rwandan borders for years, had told us that the city of Goma was safe. The danger, admittedly, held its own appeal — who wouldn’t want to explore a place where few outsiders dare to travel? Still, we felt leery as we got our Rwanda exit stamps and walked over to the immigration office of the Congo side.

Signs in French welcomed us to the DRC, and the immigration officers inside the plain cement office beamed and called jovial hellos at us. Hmmm, not a bad first impression. While we handed over the $35 visa fee, a tall, thin young man approached us and asked us if we were the three foreign ladies that had been in the Rwanda tourism office earlier that day, asking about gorilla trekking.

His name was Innocent (pronounced in the French “inno-CENT”) and he worked for a company called Green Hills Eco-Tours that promoted regional programs including gorilla trekking and exploration of the active volcano Mt. Nyiragongo, just outside Goma. The Rwandan tourism agents had contacted him thinking we might want to hear about gorilla trekking in the Congo, but we’d left the office before he got there. Clearly, three Caucasian women (mzungus, in the local parlance) are a rare sight in these parts, and we looked mighty conspicuous amid the other border crossers, immigration officers, and women selling fruit on the side of the road.

We walked with Innocent up the long, dirty and dusty road, bisected by a thin median and flanked with cement walls, heading toward the Goma city center. Innocent had warned us that the locals here do not like it one bit when mzungus take their photo. If I’d had my camera out, I would have snapped pictures of a mostly gray landscape. United Nations transport vans and humanitarian agency vehicles chugged down the pockmarked road, clotted with porous black lava rocks left over from the last time Mt. Nyiragongo erupted in 2002. A series of barbed-wire-topped gates and grim concrete walls shielded UN buildings, hotels, and the offices for aid organizations such as Action Against Hunger, UNICEF and Medecines Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). I took a quick photo, careful not to let anyone see. Only a few friendly smiles or greetings stood out among the hard stares of the people we passed. Even the city of Gisenyi, which we’d considered not entirely friendly to travelers, seemed more welcoming than this. Cargo planes flew close over our heads toward the UN airport nearby.

We approached the center of town, one abandoned or falling-apart storefront for every two in operation, the streets rutted and unpaved, black lava rock and dirt everywhere, the sidewalks teeming with people on foot. People rolled by on chikudus, curious wooden two-wheeled push bicycles that look like oversized children’s kick-and-go scooters. Green Hills Eco-Tours was located in a nondescript office containing only a desk, a couple of chairs, and some framed gorilla pictures on the concrete walls. The company worked directly with the Congolese national park system, and a parks officer sat behind the desk, a stack of gorilla trekking permits in front of him. Uganda and Rwanda’s gorilla tours were always booked solid, they had told us at the Rwanda tourism office, but “there are always spots in the Congo.”

Obviously, this was because of the security risks in the unstable country, and even our friend David (who’d encouraged us to go to Goma) had warned us against leaving the city limits, due to potential rebel attacks. To make matters worse, tomorrow was day one of the 2-day Congolese Independence celebration, a time when rebels unhappy with the current balance of power tended to exert their muscle. The US State Department’s warnings against travel to the DRC could not be more explicit: Essential travel only is advised at this time. Other travelers clearly heeded the warning. The gorilla trekking permits in the Congo were $100 cheaper than in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, yet the slots remained unbooked.

We had to make our way to Kenya in two days to meet our friend Casey and help him with the free public health clinic that he’d organized via the Tulane University School of Medicine. If we were going to get there for the opening day of the clinic, we could only go gorilla trekking the next day, the worst day of the year for us to enter the Congo. Innocent worked with gorilla tours in Rwanda and Uganda as well as in the Congo, and he put in a call to the Uganda tourism agency to ask about cancellations.

While we waited for them to call Innocent back, we went to lunch in a nearly empty restaurant. A big buffet waited for us; these are common in the region, with dishes such as creamed spinach, shredded cabbage-and-carrot salad, fresh avocado, roasted goats’ meat, baked plantains in a light tomato sauce, black beans, fried potatoes, and sliced fruits such as banana, watermelon, green apple and passionfruit. The waiters seemed blown away by our presence. Innocent’s cell phone rang. There were three last-minute cancellations in Uganda, three days from now, the day we were supposed to arrive in Kenya.

So now we had a decision to make: go gorilla trekking tomorrow, on the most dangerous day of the year in the Congo, or go in Uganda and arrive two days late to our volunteer work in Kenya. Innocent assured us that the Congo trip would be safe. The mountain region around here was more secure than in the rest of the country, he said, and we’d have armed park rangers escorting us. We still weren’t convinced, and decided we needed to get on the Internet and do some checking. Innocent, stand-up guy that he is, walked us over to an Internet cafe where we endured quiet stares — some friendly, some not-so-friendly, most of them very curious — as we waited for a computer to open up.

An hour later and we still hadn’t gotten the answers we needed. Internet connections were slow, we were working on foreign keyboards, and most of the travel sites and forums we tried to access wouldn’t open up in the Congo. Of all our Google search results, we could only open that same US Department of State warning: only essential travel to the Congo is advised.

We walked back to Innocent’s office as the sky darkened, discussing the pros and cons of our options. Innocent seemed certain of our safety on our way to, and inside, the Virunga National Park where the gorillas live, and offered to accompany us. The Congo trekking was a bit cheaper than the others, and its gorilla protection programs clearly needed whatever tourist money they could get. We decided that karma would be on our side if we chose the Congo. So we booked three slots to go trekking the next morning.

The next day …

Gorilla trekking means waking up early, very early; in our case, 4 a.m. An hour later found us crossing the Congo border again; half an hour after that, Dani and Serena and I sat the back of an SUV, its windows tinted dark, with Innocent and a hired driver in front.

The road out of Goma looked much the same as the one leading into it: as bumpy and rutted as they come, black lava rock jutting up, everything covered in black dirt and choking dust. Instead of walled-off UN buildings and humanitarian agencies flanking the road, though, fields covered in black rocks, dingy trees and dirty wooden huts stretched out on either side of us. The massive, pointy-topped Mt. Nyiragongo loomed in the distance, backlit by the pink-streaked clouds of the rising sun. The brightening sky, and the vivid hues of the dresses and head wraps of the women we passed, served as the only spots of color amid so much black, brown, and gray. It occurred to me that had it not been for this volcano, the city of Goma and its surrounding countryside wouldn’t have appeared nearly as bleak and depressing and ruined as it did to me. I took a few photos, but the violent bumping and jarring of the SUV on the rocky, pitted road made any quality images impossible.

After about an hour of this, the SUV pulled up next to a small wooden structure, a Virunga National Park ranger station, and an affable green-clad ranger in a beret strode over. He exchanged a few words with Innocent, and greeted Dani, Serena and me before zipping up a thick black parka, adjusting an AK-47 strapped to his chest, and speaking into a walkie-talkie. Then he climbed onto a motorbike and zoomed ahead of us. Our driver followed him, going faster now to keep up with the quicker bike, flinging us around the back seat even more vigorously. This was our security escort, part of our gorilla tour package. “Our biggest responsibilities are quality and security,” Innocent told us. “All these rangers keep track of our guests at all times. This is our obligation to you.”

We started winding up onto the mountain, the SUV really bucking and jerking now, our road barely more than a rocky path through fields of crops and wooden hut after wooden hut. The atmosphere went from dark and dust-clotted and sour to green, fresh, cool, herb-scented mountain air. People sat in front of their huts cooking or washing, children playing unattended. Others walked up and down the path, rolling big loads of crops on chikudus, or balancing boxes, baskets and bundles of sticks on their heads, babies strapped to the backs of most women and many children. Goats, pigs and chickens ran around.

Innocent told us the agrarian villages in these mountains had been largely spared from the civil war, free to grow their beans and bananas and potatoes in peace. Besides the gorillas, these people were the main beneficiaries of local eco-tourism — indeed, we passed a bright, modern school that Innocent said was built with tourist dollars — and, in contrast to the reaction to us in Goma, lots of them actually seemed happy to see us. The children shrieked and waved and chased the SUV, shouting “Mzungu! Mzungu!” and adults gave us thumbs-up. Lots of the kids also yelled “Give me money!” with palms outstretched, a common response to seeing (seemingly) rich white tourists not only in Africa, but in developing countries around the world. At one particularly steep incline, the SUV stalled, unable to navigate the hill. Again and again we tried to drive forward until the driver asked us to get out so he could back way up and build some speed on approach. We got out and before long were surrounded by lots of children, their hands out.

I never know the correct way to act in these situations — to reinforce the begging doesn’t seem like a good idea, but then again, denying food to a poor African child doesn’t, either. I dug in my bag and handed over a packet of crackers. We waited for the SUV to make it up the hill; it kept stalling at the same spot. More people came up the hill to watch the action and ogle us. Word of my largesse had spread and others approached me. One older lady asked, “Bisquit?” a few times before I realized she was asking for “biscuits.” When I dug in my bag again, a forest of hands grabbed at me. I gave my remaining two packs of crackers to the two older ladies in the crowd, thinking they were moms and would surely distribute the goods fairly. A crowd of young men by now had gathered behind the SUV and pushed it up the hill, and after cheering and clapping, we climbed back into the vehicle and continued up the mountain.

Up and up we climbed until the road really became indistinguishable from the rocky terrain around us. A Virunga National Park pickup truck, its bed converted to bench seats, waited for us. We transferred vehicles and continued up for another 10 minutes or so, until the crops gave way to a broad, open, rolling steppe. Another ranger station stood there, and we hopped off the truck. We had arrived at the beginning of the gorilla trek.

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Rwanda: Kigali and Lake Kivu

July 3rd, 2010 by Eileen No comments »

We stayed in Kigali another day and night, visiting one of the rural genocide memorials — a Catholic church in nearby Nyamata. There, about 5,000 people had been killed while hiding in the church, believing it to be their only safe haven. Serena, Dani and I hired a taxi driver and drove out of the city, into the gently undulating hills, about 45 minutes south. It was close to dusk and the caretakers were closing up when we pulled in. They agreed to give us a quick tour, and really that’s all we needed.

In the main sanctuary the screeching of bats punctuated the stillness. A statue of the Virgin Mary, mounted just under the bullet-hole-pockmarked ceiling, presided over wooden pews covered in mounds of moldering clothing … that of all the victims murdered there. Downstairs is a white-lit room with glass shelves containing skulls and bones, the former lined up row by row and the latter piled up neatly, femurs and tibias carefully stacked.

To see all these remains on display is, of course, disturbing, and one wonders why the memorial planners chose to lay the victims to rest in such a public manner. But this is one way to really understand the scale of the carnage that took place here, the sheer numbers of people all killed at once. Lots of the skulls show how their owners succumbed … small round holes meant bullet wounds, while jagged holes in a spiderweb of cracks and fissures meant death by bludgeoning.

Outside the quiet still church, we could hear the rhythmic calls of large birds swooping through the trees and the distant singing of another, very much alive, church congregation nearby, punctuating the quiet and deepening dusk. Two more mass graves are outside, sunken cement pits with steep staircases leading to barracks-like corridors. These are lined with shelves three deep of skulls and bones, arranged in the same neat symmetry. Row after row, skull after skull, one set of empty eye sockets after another that seem to stare back at you.

We left a donation to the memorial and tips for the two caretakers who had stayed late to tour us around, and got back into the car for the journey home. Night was falling fast and we realized no one around here had electricity, so it had became eerily black. Only the bright full moon, and our headlights falling on the winding mountain roads, lit our drive back.

The next day we got on a bus and bounced about three hours west to Lake Kivu, which spans the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was really a spectacular drive — Rwanda has been called the “Land of a Thousand Hills” and “Africa’s Switzerland,” and all the picturesque towering green hills and valleys do live up to the nicknames. We passed other genocide memorials … these are evidenced by purple bunting and signs in the local language which contain the words “Jenocide” and, in English, “Never Again.” I remembered what our friend Adollphe had told us a couple of nights earlier: that in the capital city of Kigali, the victims had mainly been dispatched quickly and neatly, by shooting — but out in the provinces is where the real sick stuff took place. Slow, torturous butchery by machete or club or knives or rocks. I had to shake this knowledge away and try to appreciate the haunting and endless beauty of the landscape. It wasn’t possible, though; both the sweeping majesty of Rwanda and its tragic history have become inexorably intertwined.

By the time the undulating hills had given way to craggy mountains spiking up through the clouds, we rolled into the lakeside border town of Gisenyi. Because we’ve utterly failed at planning anything on this trip — which is both exciting and stupid, depending on how you look at it — we got to Gisenyi after dark with no room booked and only a few vague ideas of the local accommodations. After a few inquiries, we found a rather pricey but gorgeous place right on the lake called Hotel Paradis, which would do for one night until we could find more reasonable lodging in town in the morning. It turned out to be some great fortune that we did this, as our next-door “neighbor” was an absolutely fabulous, interesting and fun woman named Sharon who came to Africa as a retirement gift to herself after years of teaching English as a Second Language at UC-Berkeley. It also turns out she knew my cousin Sue Conley and her Cowgirl Creamery business partner, Peggy (is there anyone in the Bay Area who doesn’t know Peggy and Sue?). We had nice tilapia dinner in the hotel’s rustically lush open-air common room, drank Primus beer, and watched Ghana beat the USA in the World Cup match before Sharon went to bed early, as she was getting up before dawn to go gorilla trekking.

The next day the three of us spent the morning outside the hotel being thoroughly charmed by some local kids, playing with a blow-up beach ball and plastic kite we’d brought along for just such an occasion. We moved to a less luxe but serviceable guesthouse in town and went exploring through Gisenyi. At first glance, we really didn’t like the town much … the streets too rocky and dirty and rutted, the buildings too ramshackle and depressing, the people eyeing us suspiciously. We trudged along a hot dirt road looking for the lake beach until a local guy came out, took pity on us, and corralled two boys walking by to guide us to the lakefront. Twenty minutes later we crested a hill and saw the vast Lake Kivu rolling out before us, its sandy beaches alive with people sunning and swimming and playing in the water.

Along the lake was some sort of public expo, sort of like a fair without rides, just a lot of booths with crafts and food and a DJ on a stage blasting dance music. Our attitude toward Gisenyi brightened considerably as we sat by the water and feasted on grilled corn on the cob and goat kebabs and fried potatoes, washing it down with lemon Fanta. Then we walked over to the nearby Hotel Serena to watch the World Cup game, England vs. Germany.

While at the hotel we met another very cool person, an English guy named David who has been living/working in Rwanda and the next-door border town in the Congo, called Goma, for years. After lamenting England’s loss to Germany, David ended up convincing Serena and Dani and I of two things: that we should check out the Congo, because Goma really kinda/sorta does not apply to all the travel advisories warning us otherwise; and that we should go gorilla trekking come hell or high water, because that would be one of the most unforgettable experiences of our lives. We made plans to cross the border the next day and see what Goma is like, and figure out how to get ourselves signed up for a last-minute gorilla trek.

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