Leaving Kinshasa

I’m back, and have no excuse for my long absence other than the fact that there is nothing quite like having two foreign armies, one of whom has been a sworn enemy for the past decade, cross the border at the invitation of a host government that can’t seem to manage the presence of several armed groups on its soil. Given the nature of my day job, trying to keep track of developments (let alone the reasons behind them) has been a full time job, and then some. Anyway, I am traveling away from Kinshasa right now, enabling me to escape the phone and emails for a few days and freeing up some time to post.

One of the greatest challenges we have encountered since moving to Kinshasa is that of leaving “Planet Gombé,” as we fondly call our neighborhood, to experience something of the country besides the little corner of it devoted to the business of making, keeping, diverting, and spending money (both public and private). Travel to The Interior or The Bush, as it is invariably and self-importantly known, is uncommon for the diplomatic community with the exception of trips to hot spots such as Goma. Those who get to The Interior (I prefer this term to The Bush after our recently concluded political experiment) gain almost legendary status, and I enjoy being a legend as much as the next bureaucrat. Thus I am constantly plotting ways to leave Kinshasa and see something of this amazing, frustrating, entropic country.

Given that Kinshasa has approximately eight million residents but lacks any viable public transportation system, just leaving the city can be a challenge. Even if one is fortunate enough to have a vehicle, just leaving the city means hours of battling the traffic I have described in previous blogs. Once one successfully negotiates the anarchy of driving in Kinshasa, one is faced with the decayed to nonexistent road infrastructure in the countryside. A particular challenge is the country’s hydrology, which necessitates bridges or fords. The terrain does not lend itself to the latter, and the former require some semblance of upkeep, making either choice a chimera here. Thus, traveling overland any more than 100-200 kilometers in any direction is impractical, even in a 4x4. Given that the DRC is the size of Western Europe or the U.S. east of the Mississippi River, 200 kilometers hardly rates as The Interior. A dirt bike light enough to carry in a pirogue across the many streams and rivers one is bound to encounter remains an option for those with the time and energy, but your chronicler does not have a surfeit of either. Finding fuel for the dirt bike is another challenge, but the “invisible hand of the market” even operates in the bush, and one can, surprisingly, find fuel if one is willing to pay an exorbitant amount for it.

Leaving Kinshasa by boat would be another logical choice, particularly in light of the mythical status traveling the Congo River has achieved since the travels of Henry Morgan Stanley and the publication of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Alas, the would-be escapee from the capital will find this option as daunting as overland travel. Barges do depart from Kinshasa for points in The Interior, but it can take up to two months to travel to the last navigable point on the Congo River, Kisangani, and the trip is rife with dangers and frustrations. These include but are not limited to maintenance issues with the overworked and under-loved water craft, multiple groundings on sandbars, river pirates, extortion by unpaid security forces, the opportunity to come down with a host of tropical diseases, the utter lack of sanitation, and the frustration that will inevitably build from weeks of being asked for things: money, a house, one’s possessions, a wife, a visa to the U.S. (complete with plane ticket, college tuition, and free room and board at a family member’s house), etc. These requests seem outlandish, but at one point or another I have heard them all, and in a society in which the average person has nothing excess, requesting a piece of a wealthy mondele’s excess can seem fairly reasonable and part of the natural order of things. Thus boats are out for now, although I do intend to descend (twice as fast as the ascent) the Congo River from Kisangani at some point in this tour of duty.

That leaves one choice for travel into The Interior besides walking: air travel. The DRC is dotted with air strips, some of them simply flat places with mown grass or scraped dirt, and others Cold War relics capable of handling modern fighter aircraft and, famously in the case of Gbadolite, chartered Concorde jets that once whisked former president Desire Mobutu Sese Soko to Europe on a whim. Of the handful of air carriers serving the interior, even fewer offer much in the way of security and dependability. One of these options is the United Nations Mission in the Congo (MONUC), which offers space-available travel on its aircraft for official business. Since almost all of my travel in the DRC is official, I have exercised this option on several occasions to visit Kisangani and Goma and have described these trips in previous blogs. Dependable and serving a wide variety of locations in the Great Lakes Region, MONUC remains the mainstay of official domestic travel in the DRC and without it the diplomatic community could not function. For all of its worth, however, it logically focuses on areas where it has troops present, so the chance to visit a location that has nothing to do with peacekeeping is a rare one.

My next few blogs will describe a trip to The Interior, to a village called Kole, where we maintain a small research station studying Monkeypox with an eye towards developing a treatment for it. MONUC does not serve Kole, so I had the privilege of using an alternate air service: Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). I patronized MAF when we lived in Chad and was impressed with the professionalism, courage, and devotion of its staff and the excellent condition of their aircraft. My recent flight to Kole confirmed my opinion of the organization and the important work it does in a harsh and often unsafe environment.

The DRC is a humbling place on many levels: the power of nature, the scale of greed and corruption, the tyranny of distance, and the allure of violent means to achieve ends make one feel small and vulnerable. MAF, however, manifests another, greater, power: that of a single-minded and selfless service to God and humanity as old as the two Great Commandments. The love they pour forth is no less humbling than the material phenomena described above, yet rather than making one feel small and vulnerable it shows what potential for good there is in humanity when its energy and intellect is directed towards positive and affirming metaphysical ends.