Posts Tagged ‘africa’

Congo: Gorilla Videos!

July 30th, 2010

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 Adventure, Africa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Viddy Oh!

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Congo: Gorillas!

July 27th, 2010

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 Adventure, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Travels

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Kenya: Medical Free Clinic & Deworming

July 24th, 2010

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

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

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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Congo: Close Encounters With Mountain Gorillas

July 8th, 2010

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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Rwanda: Kigali and Genocide Memorial Centre

June 25th, 2010

Serena, Dani and I paddled out of Lake Bunyonyi in the morning sunshine, in a deep dugout canoe crafted out of a single log. Our taxi-driver friend Jackson met us at the dock and drove us about 45 minutes south to the Ugandan/Rwandan border. We got our Uganda exit stamps and trudged down the red-dusty road to the Rwandan side, trailed by a pack of money-changers vying to buy our Ugandan shillings. “Sister, Sister, change money!” No one, not even the Forex currency exchange office at the border, offered better than a lousy 2.5 percent exchange rate. We kept our shillings, got our passports stamped and ran over to a bus to Kigali that idled on the road waiting for us to jog up, panting, and get on.

The hour-and-a-half drive southeast to Kigali, in the center of the small country, passed jutting green hills and mountains terraced with crops, and deep valleys that dropped into villages, rivers and farms. There is a peaceful, almost idyllic feeling in the countryside that belies everything that happened here in the not-so-distant past.

Reading up on Rwanda’s history, its long civil war that culminated in a horrifying 100 days of genocide in 1994, I had expected the emotional toll to have scarred the land and the people, the unsettled ghosts of the slaughtered million to continue haunting the country and everyone in it. So I was surprised to see people smiling, laughing, going about their everyday business as if unburdened by the momentous cruelty that had happened here just 16 years ago. I had read that Rwanda has healed remarkably, the tribal lines of the warring Hutu and Tutsis dissolved, everyone simply Rwandans now. This is impressive and a wonderful example of the difficult human capacity to forgive, and yet … Maybe it’s because I’m an outsider, because my immediate association with Rwanda is that of genocide, but I looked at everyone over a certain age and I wondered: Which side were you on? What role did you play? Did you do any of the killing? What memories rise up when you close your eyes?

I can’t be the only one who thinks like this; indeed, Serena and Dani confirmed that they harbored the same ideas. Maybe the more time we spend in Rwanda the less we’ll be consumed by the atrocities that happened to it and in it. Maybe we’ll be able to move beyond all that and appreciate what — at first blush anyway — is a beautiful and vibrant place, with a capital city that comes alive at night in a million little lights scattered along the hills.

The day we arrived in Rwanda was Dani’s birthday, and we didn’t want to spoil it by focusing too much on the genocide. We skipped the memorial museum and opted for a bar that showed the World Cup games on two screens — coincidentally, the England (vs. Slovakia) match on one, the U.S. (vs. Albania) on the other. Both our countries won their respective matches and advanced to the next round, putting us all in a good mood that extended to a really delicious Indian dinner at the Khana Khazana restaurant. Expats abounded in both places, making it hard to believe at times that we were really in Africa.

Today we will visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre. It’s important and valuable that we do this, but here in our room, typing this under another in a series of mosquito bed nets, my guts tense up just thinking about it.

The next day …

We spent four hours at the Memorial Centre, and while there I heard and saw images and details about the Rwandan genocide that will stay with me for a long, long time. The Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre is impressive in its roles as a source of education, of healing, and as a dignified resting place for some 300,000 victims (and growing, as remains are still being found). I know so much more now about what happened in Rwanda than I did when I walked in (not to mention the histories of other genocides … Armenians, Jews, Serbs, Cambodians and more) and yet there are some things I will never understand. Why did the killers have to be so barbaric, why did they have to cause as much suffering as possible, why did they have to torture even babies and children? What turns an ordinary person into a savage killer who enjoys inflicting agony on others, including people they had known, liked, lived with? How was it that not even the churches were a safe haven, priests betraying their own congregants?

On display was some of the anti-Tutsi propaganda circulated by the extremist Hutus before the genocide, and it struck me as remarkably similar to the hate rants spewed by the likes of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Arguments built on lies, designed to foster distrust and fear, to divide, to demonize those who don’t share your politics or your race or your religion or your sexual orientation or your nationality. What I saw at the Memorial Centre was “us vs. them” carried out to its most extreme conclusion, hate and fear turning average people into crazed killers. It happened here in Rwanda; it could happen anywhere, and even now in my own country the seeds of this insane mob mentality are being planted and cultivated and nurtured, all under the guise of a pleasant, civilized name … Tea Party. How lovely that sounds.

That evening we went to the Hotel des Milles Collines, depicted in the film “Hotel Rwanda.” Its manager, Paul Ruesesabagina, sheltered thousands of people there during the 100 days of madness, saving them from the slaughter. We read other accounts of such heroism in the Memorial Centre, people risking their own lives to save others, and it was a good thing to remember after all that graphic, disturbing evidence of human cruelty and weakness. At the hotel I met a man named Adollphe who was a Tutsi, who was 16 in 1994 and whose father, a community leader, had been among the first to die. Adollphe was saved, along with the rest of his family, hiding in a church. He felt lucky; his father had been shot and not tortured, the rest of his family spared. He and his mother and siblings have good jobs, good lives now. But he assured us that, despite outward appearances, despite how much the country has moved forward and the people have gotten on with their lives, the ghosts are still there, always there. How could they not be?

Out in the street we saw a beggar whose four limbs had obviously been hacked off, and we knew exactly what had happened to him. He’s probably the only surviving member of his family, and no one else gives a damn about him now, because everyone’s got a story like that. Despite my “food only, not money” policy with beggars, which Serena and Dani share, we gave him both food and money. It won’t help the guy in the long run, this man whose past and present and future was ripped away in his youth by someone to whom he had done nothing. It probably only helped to make us feel a little less guilty about our own good luck of the draw, to have been born and raised in safe places, never knowing horror like this.

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Uganda: Kampala and Lake Bunyonyi

June 24th, 2010

After a good barbecue dinner at Red Chilli on Sunday night, Serena, Dani and I woke before dawn to get to the Kampala bus station for the second leg of our journey, a 7-hour trip west to Uganda’s mountain region. Since we’re doing a lot of fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants travel, we decided to once again follow our friend Nick’s suggestion and stay in an eco-lodge outside the city of Kabale, on an island in Lake Bunyonyi along the Rwandan border.

The Red Chilli staff had told us the bus to Kabale left at 8 a.m., so when we arrived at the hot, crowded, noisy bus station an hour in advance, we felt rather irritated to learn it actually departed at 9. We had no other place to sit but inside the stifling bus, and we had to claim our seats anyway, but those first two hours crammed together on the vinyl bus bench — in front of a TV screen blaring African music videos and graphic, violent, badly overdubbed Chinese martial-arts films — reeeeeally took its toll on our mood. After what seemed like way longer than two hours, the bus driver finally climbed in and the engine coughed and shuddered to life, rolling us out of there and hitting us with a merciful blast of cool moving air.

We felt nervous about this particular bus trip, since all the travel forums and blogs we’d checked the night before had warned us it would be horribly difficult. “Hellish” is a word we’d read more than once as traveler after traveler online described death-defying driving, godforsaken rutted roads and disgusting bus conditions. This journey would “challenge even the most seasoned travelers,” the Lonely Planet forums had told us, and so we felt more than a little trepidation as the bus got moving. But the trip really wasn’t bad at all … the three of us had experienced far worse in other countries. (See “Overland Through Laos” on this site for one example.) The roads didn’t seem particularly awful, nor did the driving, and the bus was a typical developing-country public bus, no better or worse than any others on which we’d ridden. We decided that either the conditions had radically improved since those forum entries were posted, or that the people who’d written them were total wimps. Most likely the latter.

We drove past green fields, crops, villages and roadside market stalls, marveling at how all developing countries, no matter the continent, share so many of the same qualities … corrugated-tin or thatched roofs, open metal-grill windows, local ads painted in faded colors on the sides of squat buildings or on cement walls, burning piles of trash. Rolling past acres and acres of banana trees punctuated by the occasional fruit stand or row of shacks, I felt like I could have been anywhere in Southeast Asia. That perception only came in waves, because in other ways there are huge differences. The buildings here have brick foundations instead of the concrete you see in Asia, owing to the red clay/dirt that’s so prevalent here and good for brickmaking. Different animals, too: the cattle used on Ugandan farms are steers with long curving horns, not the bulky caribou of rural Asia. Goats are everywhere here, and I saw one absolutely mammoth bird soar by that reminded me of a pterodactyl (I’ve got to Google it and find out what that was). The people here make the biggest visual difference; they are big and strong and sturdy, the opposite of the wiry, compact Asian body type. I loved watching Ugandan women walking down the road balancing heavy tubs, boxes or baskets on their heads, or with babies strapped to their backs, clad in vivid, regal dresses that reach their ankles.

Though the journey wasn’t the jostling nightmare we’d been warned about, we still rejoiced when the bus pulled into Kabale seven hours later. Exhausted, hungry and covered in a layer of red grit that infiltrated hair, teeth and clothes, the three of us staggered off the bus only to be accosted by at least a dozen taxi drivers trying to get our business. I’ve dealt with this before, but it still is unsettling to be grabbed at, pulled, jostled, and have several men shouting in your face and yanking at your bags in a tug-of-war over your tourist money. We chose one of the more polite cab drivers, a guy named Jackson with whom I chatted while Dani and Serena popped into a grocery store. He’s a really nice man who gave us some helpful info, and we’ll be calling on him again for rides. Always Ask A Local.

Jackson dropped us off at a boat dock on Lake Bunyonyi (“place of many little birds”) where an employee of the Byoona Amagara eco-lodge waited with a motorboat to drive us through the picturesque glass-smooth giant lake ringed by rolling, terraced green hills. Byoona Amagara is on one of the lake’s many little islands, which are home to other buildings, homes, schools, even an ancient exile island where unmarried pregnant women were dumped to die … hard to believe such a sinister place could ever exist in this gorgeous lake (it’s a museum now). Byoona Amagara is truly eco-friendly with limited solar-powered electricity and where everything (and I do mean everything) is composted. A hostel dorm, 4-person cabin, luxury cottage and two thatched “eco-domes” are the accommodations here; we have the cabin since our first choice, the eco-domes, were booked. The menu has truly delicious food, there is cold beer and good coffee and tea and Internet access, a cinema room and library, and a tiny gift shop in the cafe area selling woven basket items, African textile placemats and t-shirts. It’s from here that I’m writing this now, watching the sun go down over pink-ringed clouds behind the distant mountains. We spent the day walking up and down the surrounding hills, swimming in the lake and lying in the sunshine on a little private floating dock, listening to the musical calls and hoots and shrieks of the birds that live here, none of which I’ve ever seen or heard before.

(One of the staff just came over and wanted to know all about this iPad … I just gave her a little tour of it and she’s amazed and wanted to know how much it costs. Apple comes to Lake Bunyonyi.)

The big deal around here is mountain gorilla trekking, and we naively thought we could just come on in and find a gorilla trek to join at the last minute. Nope, you have to book way in advance, so it looks like we’ll be missing the mountain gorillas. Disappointing for sure, but it’s hard to feel too bad when we’ve already seen so much and the trip has just begun and there is so much more ahead of us. Tomorrow is Dani’s birthday and we’re moving across the border to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to celebrate where it’s more cosmopolitan. After that we’ll make our way somehow to Port Victoria, Kenya, but those exact plans are yet to emerge. Right now all that’s certain is this deepening grey-blue sky that sinks into purple behind the silhouette of trees atop neighboring hills, and the rhythm of cicadas, and chirping of crickets, and trilling of birds, and the kitchen helpers chattering and laughing and singing along with the radio, and the flickering of lanterns that they’re lighting now that night falls.

Visible in tonight’s partly cloudy sky: Saturn, the constellations Antlia, a little bit of Centaurus and Lupus, and a 3/4 moon.

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A Little Bit of London/ African Arrival

June 18th, 2010

I had a great two days in London prior to jetting out early this morning; wish I could have stayed a bit longer since I didn’t get to do all the touristy sightseeing stuff I craved. I do have a few days when I get back and won’t have to run around getting things I need for Africa, which is how I spent the majority of the past two days in London.

I got to see Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre fresh off my flight, and felt genuinely thrilled to be there after having studied/ read about the Globe all these years. It wasn’t ideal having my big overstuffed backpack and daypack with me in the narrow 17th-century bench seating as I did, but the gorgeous sunny day and amazing performances, and the smoking hotness of the actor who played Macbeth, and the lovely Pimm’s lemonade to which my lovely English friend Dani introduced me, countered the awkwardness of lugging five weeks’ worth of backpacking around the historic and crowded theatre. Afterwards we did a bit of walking around the Millennium Bridge area; I spotted the Gherkin Building which I’ve only seen in pictures and think is incredibly cool; and experienced my first English pub (Swiss Cottage Pub, across from my friend Serena’s flat where I stayed), ate my first real English pub food (bangers and mash), and caught up with some awesome friends over Samuel Smith beers.

The next day found me strangely still un-jet-lagged and ready to hit sunny London again. It involved lots of shopping around Oxford Street where Dani and I stumbled on an amazing sale at Selfridge’s and I bought clothes and shoes very much for after Africa. Picked up other odds and ends we needed … mosquito nets, water purification tablets and things of that nature … before heading out to meet up with Nick, a cool Londoner that Dani and I had met in Thailand a couple of years ago. More beers, more Pimm’s, more English pub food and some World Cup action, France vs. Mexico (olé!). Got back to Serena’s, did a final packing and a little sleep before heading out early in the morning for the airport.

Now we’re on Kenya Airways about to land in Nairobi and transfer flights to Entebbe, Uganda. More later, gotta turn off electronic devices.

In the Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Nairobi
This is a typical hot and humid developing-nation airport with one long corridor along which all the gates are lined up; in between them are duty-free shops with all the foreign chocolates and perfumes and liquor and cigarettes; tiny bookstores selling Lonely Planet guides and Internet access for $4 per 25-minute session; small canteens selling sandwiches, meat pies, chips, beer, soda and bottled water; souvenir shops filled with kente cloth garments, native jewelry, and wood carvings of African animals and tribal busts.

The people milling around, bunched along the corridor outside their gates in plastic chairs or (more commonly) on the floor, are a true mix of cultures, with more Westerners than I had predicted there would be. Most of them seem to be with volunteer or church groups, and all ages and a lot of nationalities appear to be represented. There are tons of adorable babies and children of all races, and lots of travelers meeting and chatting over beers and communal electrical outlets. It’s a very congenial place. English has been spoken quite fluently in the airport, but I’m predicting that will change once we hit Uganda.

I have to say the Kenyan people as a whole are a damn good-looking bunch — really dramatic bone structure, gorgeous smooth dark skin, dazzling smiles which they flash often. In the planes and airport they’ve blasted upbeat African music and the Kenya Airways crew are all wearing soccer-ball shirts in celebration of the World Cup being played right now in South Africa (though Kenya doesn’t have a team). The pilots give World Cup game updates during the flights. All in all I am very much liking this vibe.

Dani, Serena and I are now on a quick hop to Entebbe, Uganda where we will find accommodations after we land at midnight … our trip-planning skills have been, to put it mildly, wanting. (Two of our three flights today involved the airline staff paging us from the gate to warn us to get our asses on the plane or be left behind.) My travel snafus so far include being unable to find a camera cord for my iPad in both California and London, so I’m not sure how many pictures, if any, I’ll be able to post from the road. And I just re-injured a nasty back muscle pull that I developed last week … it had almost fully healed when I strained it again while giving the bathroom door a firm push on the middle flight from Paris to Nairobi. I heard a soft clunk before I felt a sharp, stabbing pain and now I’m back to square one with it. Not the type of injury one wants to have when one is lugging a heavy backpack and daypack around a foreign continent … but I’ve got no choice but to soldier on, riding on Tylenol and yoga stretches. Between my back injury and Serena’s chronic headache problem we’re gonna be like two cranky old ladies hobbling along and bitching about our aches and pains. I really hope we find a place tonight with a decent mattress because my “sleep anywhere” superpower is sure to be severely tested.

On to Uganda …

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BOOKED.

May 21st, 2010

I am notorious for being unprepared for major international trips and this one may blow my previous  records out of the water.

I leave in less than a month and have to … first, sort out what vaccinations I will need. I’m going to make an appointment for early next week at the San Francisco Department of Public Health Travel Clinic. From the prices listed online, the shots are much cheaper than in a private travel clinic, and I’ve heard good things about them through word of mouth.

I also have to get a Kenya visa — have to send my passport to the Kenyan consulate in L.A. for that, and I’d do it immediately IF I weren’t waiting on my passport to get back to me from Pennsylvania, where I mailed it last week to get extra visa pages attached because I FILLED THEM ALL UP since 2006. Woop woop! for that, but Boooo! for having to wait on the fed’ral gummint to return my freaking passport. How long is that gonna take?

We’ll see how this all shakes out; it won’t be the first time I’ve cut necessary trip preparations ridiculously close to the deadline and it’s a safe bet it won’t be the last.

BOOKED, though. Yeah. YEAH.

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