Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Riding

Scenes from our travel of almost 500km of roads in Sandoa, Congo.

Greetings

There are faucets everywhere that I've been in the Congo, but this is the first faucet that has worked. I looked all over the kitchen for water. Each bucket or trash can held rice or trash. No water. Weird. It took me a second to try the faucet over the sink, and when water came flowing out, I had a moment of culture shock.

Oh yeah, running water.

I've only been in the field for a month, but I've submerged into Congolese culture. Coming out again gives me small stutter steps at odd moments.

Congolese culture, like many other African cultures I have experienced, has a big accent on greetings. Hand shaking and asking how some is doing that day are un-skippable parts of interacting with someone for the first time that day. It is inexcusable to not offer your hand as you greet someone. Or at least very rude. For Muzungus, most Congolese seem to look the other way at our social faux-pas.

Handshaking is not nearly so prevalent in the western world, which I temporarily forgot about one trip back. I was fresh off the plane from Africa, and hurried to a bus station to catch the budget bus to visit friends. The bus was a bit late, but it pulled up to the curb in good order. The harried commuters and other passengers bustled on as I held back. I had a ticket for a later bus, not knowing if travel would go smoothly or not, and I wanted to see if I could change my ticket to this current bus.

When the crowd cleared, I walked up to the driver, stuck my hand out, and looked him in the eye as I shook his hand and asked him how he was doing that day. He was so shocked and surprised that he took a second to answer. That stumbling second brought me back to American culture, where what I did was very old fashioned and formal, probably to the point of embarrassment. All of my American social conventions came flooding back to me, accompanied by the rush of blood to my face. The bus driver was so flattered that, after I explained my request, he didn't even check my ticket, just let me on the bus right then and there.

I forgot about that incident for a while, but the memory resurfaces every now and then. The power of a simple greeting, of grasping a hand and giving someone the time to ask how they are. How that has been forgotten, or left by the wayside. A sacrifice to American efficiency, a relic in the age of online communication, where the only greeting we think about is an email header.

I still don't know if I made a faux-pas or not. I guess it doesn't matter at this point.

Arrived

It's the end of the explo. There's not a firm end to point to; instead there's a trickling to a stop.

Is the end when we leave the debriefing meeting with the health authorities of Sandoa? Is it when we pile in the car and drive away? Is it when we meet the Zone Director on the road, coming back from a meeting in the capital, and we say a final goodbye? Is it when we join the other team in the next district over? Or when both teams hit the road in a convoy? Or the end of the debrief meeting in the zone capital? Or the return to our back-base in Lubumbashi? Or the handshake at the end of our group debrief? The moment I press send on the final report? The goodbyes as I head to the airport? The call to turn off electronic devices as the airplane door is sealed and my lungs no longer take in the Congolese air?

Somewhere in there, it was the end of an explo, and the end of a mission. As I shuffle through customs, it hits me. I'm leaving the Congo.

I'll fly to Paris and try to pick up another mission. I'm not ready for vacation at the moment. We shall see where in the world I will be next week.

Bush Wacked

The grass parts before me like the sea. Long blades of grass, so recently arching elegantly above the single track of road, slash my arms as we blow by. I'm holding, with cramped fingers, onto the back of a motorcycle as the driver tears along the trail. As much as I'm getting stung by greenery, the poor driver is taking a whole lot more. I'm ducked into his slipstream, and only catch the occasional branch in the face as he ducks his head at the last minute. I'm fully concentrated on every dip and twitch of his head, since I can't see the single track in front of us, and we will unbalance and jump from the 6-inch-wide trail if I so much as twist to look over the driver's shoulder.

We spent 4 hours on the road in the 4x4, then another two hours finding, validating, and negotiating with the motorcycle drivers. We are an hour and a half into the bike ride, and still about an hour away from the village where we will spend the night. It's a long way to go just to do a health center evaluation, but this is the data we are here for.

A vista opens up in front of us, and the route widens to a luxurious 4 feet. I take the opportunity to swivel around like a tourist. I grin at the 3 motos behind me, slip my phone out of my pocket and take a few pictures. The rolling hills of jungle and savana against a backdrop of cloud-dotted sky is breathtaking. The Congo is beautiful, that is inarguable.

We are on a ridge, at the top of a rolling hill. We start to descend a bit, and our moto pulls ahead. It takes me a second to realize the motor is off, and we are coasting. It's only natural sounds as we bump along the die-straight track. Wind, a million insects, birds. Amazing.

The engine starts, I renew my deathgrip and return to the slipstream. One hour until the river, where we will take a local canoe across. Then the health center is apparently walking distance. We shall see. On verra.

Sanctuary

We have arrived in Sandoa, and have started our explo. At this point, it means asking countless questions of basically anyone who will listen. We spend our days seeing chiefs, administrators, health center managers (in the capital for a monthly meeting), the hospital administrator, and, most importantly, the chief medical officer of the health zone.

As we question our way through the week, we have established a very serviceable home base in a convent. We are housed among the Sisters as we undertake our mission. It is very calm and well-maintained. It's an island in the middle of dusty streets and livestock running wild. There is a courtyard garden with starfruit, avocado, and lemon trees, with manicured lawns stretching between blooming flower beds. Every once and a while a sheep or goat gets through security from the parking lot next door and runs wild, eating as much as possible. We all rally to chase them back to their side.

The Sisters are incredibly nice and accommodating. They quickly learned our foreign names and ask about our day and our mission. They all seem genuinely happy in their lives, and content to host us. They don't seem bothered by us being there and doing our thing, even when we work late into the night or leave early in the morning. There is hot water to wash with and a table full of food at each meal. It's a great situation for our explo week. We're hardly roughing it in our living situation.

The expeditions into the bush will be another story. It wouldn't be an explo without some hardship.

Bushwacking

Day two of the explo, and I'm running in front of a huge, mud-spattered land cruiser with its engine roaring. I'm about 10 meters in front of it and it's gaining fast. It plows through a mud puddle, launching water all over the hood and halfway up the windshield, but that hardly slows it down.

It's not a nightmare, and I'm not scared. That's our team's car, and I'm scouting for the passable route through stagnant puddles along our "route pourri" to get to Sandoa. Yesterday, we traveled 102 kilometers in 6 hours before getting stuck in the mud. Today, we have 119 to go, and apparently we are just reaching the bad part.

After spending seven hours yesterday wading through the same mud puddle, swarming over our poor, stuck car, I am no longer hesitant to plunge into the muck. I need to remember to take an anti-parasite tonight. Already this morning I've waded into stagnant water with a thin green film on the top countless times. I've zipped off my pants into shorts to expose my bruised, pale legs. At least they'll get the chance to tan a bit to match my arms. The water sometimes reaches above my knees. That's about the limit, but it's not a hard limit. We'll go through water up to my thighs, but it depends on the bottom. Mud is a problem, but there's a lot of firm sand. That's OK. Hence the reving engine and charging land cruiser. It takes a lot if force to get through a puddle a meter deep.

The shockwave of recently-stagnant water hits me seconds after the car roars by, after I've jumped into the jungle growing right up to the thin two-track we call a road. Turbid, smelly water washes over my feet to the ankles, and I jog forward to congratulate the driver and scout the next puddle.

We've done 20 kilometers in 3 hours. Only a hundred more to go. We have 5 hours. I hope to sleep in a bed tonight...

Embourbé

I look to see what's brushing my leg. I saw a giant spider as I brushed my teeth. Not tarantula-quality, but it looked pretty competent none-the-less. My leg is assaulted by my T-shirt, not some killer bug from hell. Cool, now to get some sleep.

I'm squeezed into a small tent, pitched on the dirt road, a few meters in front of our car. We set off on an explo today, meaning we are going into a district MSF does not work in (currently) and checking things out. We will try to determine the population's access to health care and their need, if any. We are specifically looking at malaria, which is fortunate for us, since this is the start of the peak malaria season. We'll find plenty if patients, but the trick is looking deeper. We have many pages of parameters and evaluation criteria to help us with our final report, but we only have a loose idea of where to go and how to get there.

One thing we are sure of is that the main route between the district that we just vacated and the district we will be exploring, if you want to call it a main route, is terribly, inconveniently horrible. In French, "full of holes." Which is apropos, considering we just spent 7 hours getting our car out of a hole.  We are now camped 100 meters further down the road, which was the first flat, dry spot for the tents that we saw. We will restart tomorrow, but for tonight we tried to rub the sand off, stripped out of our soaked clothes (it's rainy season in the Congo. 7 hours does not pass without at least some rain), ate a cold dinner of tuna and crackers, and crawled into our beds to gain whatever sleep we could before we set off again tomorrow. Morning. Around 6am.

Since it is almost midnight, I'll leave it there. Goodnight.