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As Aimée directed the loading of the truck, Sally got through to the satellite phone of Marcel Falay, BCI’s regional director in Kokolopori, to ask if the landing strip, nothing more than a field cut from the forest, was firm enough for the plane to land. He told her the rain had stopped there. The runway was fine.
At the Mbandaka airport, we drove onto the tarmac, where a single-propeller Cessna waited for us, AVIATION SANS FRONTIÈRES printed on its side. Started by former Air France pilots during Nigeria’s war with Biafra in the late sixties, ASF, a nonprofit bush plane operation, had been expanding its routes through the Congo in recent years, as the country gained stability.
The two French pilots weighed our duffels on what looked like an aluminum bathroom scale, recording the numbers. On our previous flight, with CAA, Sally paid $5 for each kilo that exceeded our personal limit of twenty kilos, or about forty-four pounds. ASF charged $2.50 after a limit of fifteen kilos.
“This is what people don’t get,” she told me. “If you want to take anything into the field, you have to calculate not just the price but the cost of getting it from the US to Kinshasa, then from Kinshasa to Mbandaka, and Mbandaka to Djolu. That’s why everything in this country costs a fortune. Transportation is a feat.”
Already I’d noticed that bottled water and orange Fanta had gone from 1,000 francs in Kinshasa to 1,500 here. In Djolu, the few times that it was available, it would cost 2,500, even 3,000. The markup held true for diesel and gas as well, which was why BCI transported most supplies by canoe.
We were about to climb into the plane, the French pilots checking our pockets and passing metal detectors over us, when two DGM agents hurried from inside the airport and told us we’d skipped proper departure procedures.
Instantly, everyone was arguing, Sally and Michael fighting to be heard over the agents and Aimée Nsongo, who insisted that our baggage had already been searched twice upon our arrival in Mbandaka the day before, and that this was a private flight. Only when the two men heard Sally speak in Lingala—a clear sign that she knew the customs of the region and wasn’t a clueless foreigner—did they smile and relent.
“But you still have to pay airport taxes,” they told us, “and we need to record your passports.”
These weren’t the made-up taxes I’d so often read about but simply the Go Pass tickets that airports sold. Though extortion apparently still existed in the airports and at the borders, the DRC’s government had cracked down. Formerly, every official and soldier whom travelers met would harass them, accusing them of carrying banned materials or demanding passports, which only bribes would buy back. This practice of condoned corruption became institutionalized under Mobutu, whose government rarely paid its military. When the economy tanked, the people’s survival depended on their ability to make money any way they could. Now, as the DRC struggled to rebuild after Mobutu’s downfall and two wars, the soldiers, police, and administration remained neglected, unable to feed and house themselves, let alone their families, on their salaries.
“When people try to get money from us, we look at the situation,” Sally told me. “We can negotiate or just walk away if it’s something ridiculous. But sometimes we pay a little because that’s how things work here. That’s how people survive, and it creates goodwill and only costs us five dollars or less—usually a few francs. We wouldn’t be able to do our work if we tried to fight every official we met. It wouldn’t make sense.”
When we were in Kinshasa, I had seen a book on Sally’s desk: The Empress and Mrs. Conger: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds. The cover showed an old photograph of two women, one an elaborately garbed Chinese, and the other white, in equally elaborate turn-of-the-century Western dress. When I asked Sally about it, she explained that the white woman was her great-great-grandmother, Sarah Pike Conger, whose husband, a congressman from Iowa, was appointed ambassador to Brazil. The expats generally kept themselves separate from the local people there, but when Conger’s husband received his next posting, as ambassador to China, she realized how little she knew about the Brazilians and how much her aloofness had cost her. She determined that she would learn about the Chinese and even forged a friendship with Cixi, the last empress dowager of China. The photo used for the book’s cover is the only one in which the empress touches a Westerner, and Sally told me that as a girl, visiting her grandmother, she’d read the diaries of her great-great-grandmother as well as a book she wrote, Letters from China. She described how Sarah Conger wanted to set up her kitchen the way she liked and felt that the procurement of coal would be more efficient if she did it herself. But when she tried to streamline her staff, they became unhappy and ceased to work well. She realized that they had a system of exchanges that allowed for everyone involved to make a small profit and guarantee a livelihood. Though she wanted to run her house in a businesslike fashion, she saw that the Chinese system provided for more people and worked efficiently within their culture. To remind herself of such lessons and because of the affinity Sally felt with her great-great-grandmother, she kept a copy of The Empress and Mrs. Conger.
Having dealt with the agents, we climbed into the plane. As the pilots taxied on the runway, Sally took her phone out for one last call to Kinshasa. There would be no cell coverage in Djolu, no infrastructure at all, except for BCI’s satellite phone that cost $1.60 per minute. But it was too late. The single propeller had gone to full speed, and we were racing forward, lifting from the runway. The forests of Équateur spread beneath us, green horizons in all directions, faintly rippled by the contours of the land.
In Kinshasa, when I’d told Evelyn’s brothers that I would be flying to Djolu, the younger one had said, “I hope you have faith in something.”
“What would you recommend I have faith in?” I’d asked. “In the pilot, the mechanic, or God?”
He considered the question.
“I wouldn’t trust any of those three in the Congo.”
The Congo is known for airline disasters and not meeting international security standards. Before coming, I’d run across an article about an accident in which a passenger brought an unconscious crocodile in a duffel bag onto the flight. As the plane was about to land, the crocodile woke and fought its way free. The terrified passengers ran to the front of the plane, throwing it off balance as it neared the strip. It crashed, killing the pilot and all the passengers except one. The crocodile survived, only to be dispatched with a machete on the ground.
We glided above the wide, split waters of the Congo River, then cut inland. For the next two hours, we traveled three hundred miles, the evenly textured forest passing beneath us. There were occasional variations: a few massive trees reaching above the canopy; some bright red foliage, in flower or leaves to be shed; then the skeletal fingers of a dead tree. Banks of mist gathered along thin depressions. The pools of a narrow river refracted glare through the hazy clouds. Moments later, there was just forest again, more regular than the sky.
As we neared Djolu, spaces cut from the forest came into sight, scorched circles of new fields from recent slash-and-burn farming. The landing strip appeared, a thin gash in the trees, a yellow line scored along its center. A dirt road ran beyond it, past a few mud and thatch homes, into the distance. The plane banked, then descended fast, the trees rising on either side.
The landing was so smooth I hardly felt the wheels touch. We slowed and stopped as dozens of children in torn and faded clothes ran from the edge of the forest and circled the plane. We got out, standing in a crowd of at least fifty of them, a dozen men and women greeting Sally and Michael, shaking their hands, the women kissing their cheeks, the men touching Michael’s forehead with their own.
Each time I lifted my camera, the children flowed together in front of it. They called to see the screen after the shot, pushing in, trying to get a glimpse of themselves, screaming when they did, clutching my wrist and staring.
“Donnez-moi de l’argent!” they shouted. “Bic! Bic!” they said and lifted their hands, wanting pens. One of the pilots told me that at least twice a week he had to argue to keep his shirt, men coming from the crowd and insisting that they needed it more than he did. And seeing them, I didn’t find this entirely unreasonable.