(RM) Everyday stories

Everyday stories

Saturday, 14 July 2007 (Bastille Day and my mom's birthday - Happy Birthday Mom!)

I haven't been posting to this blog much lately. Sorry. Times are different these days at LuiKotal, and I really haven't had the opportunity to write the same sorts of entries as I did for my first couple of months here. I thought I ought to at least post some stories eventually, so now I'll just recount a number of little anecdotes that compose my daily life here. This entry, therefore, will follow more a stream of consciouness rather than describing a particular subject. Hopefully I'll be able to convey a sense of life here, in general, with a sampling of random imagery of LuiKotal.

CAMP NATIONALITIES
Camp now has six researchers from six countries: an American/Canadian (me - ok, so there are seven countries represented), a Brit, a German, a Swiss, an Austrian, and a Congolese. Two more Congolese will join us in a few days, staying for the next month. The German leaves regularly for multi-day trips in the region, and one of the incoming Congolese researchers will actually be spending the majority of her time in the village. Nonetheless, the research team at camp will fluctuate between six and eight people for the next month.

CAMP LANGUAGES
Langagues float around camp even more. When the whole research team is together, we use English. But smaller groups variously break into French and German, or generally a combination of two or three (my rusty German has improved a lot since I've been in Congo). We also use a smattering of Lingala terms for local things (mostly foods, animals, and trees), and have a few choice Lingala expressions we throw around regularly (malamu mingi mingi! = that's great!). Lingala has been the main national unifying language of the Congo for the last several decades, so the current generation of Congolese has mostly learned it as they progressed through school. The Congolese researchers here communicate with the local staff in Lingala, and foreigners that want to also learn Lingala to communicate better with the staff. I haven't learned much Lingala yet, so I mainly use French. French is the colonial language of the country, so most people here have at least a basic vocabulary in it. A few actually speak it quite well, and I often recruit those individuals to help interpret more-complicated subjects with the others. The local language of the region is Kikundu. When the workers speak among themselves, they mostly use Kikundu, although I often hear words of Lingala or French mixed in. Kikundu sounds like quite a different language than Lingala, though they're both among the bantu family. The other main languages of the Congo are Chiluba, Kikongo, and Swahili, all bantu tongues. The Congolese researcher also speaks Chiluba (of his native region) and Swahili. Swahili is becoming more of a widespread language of the country, as the leadership for the past decade or so has been from the east, where Swahili is dominant. (Many western Congolese view Kabila with contempt because of his eastern roots: he spent much of his life in Rwanda and Tanzania, and has yet to really master Lingala.) At least one of the workers speaks Portuguese, as he lived in Angola for some time, and a few can say a few English words proudly. Among the research team, we also have speakers of Spanish, Italian, and Hausa (Andrew, the Brit, lived for about 7 years in Nigeria). One of the incoming Congolese also speaks German. And in September we get a Hungarian volunteer... I'm quite impressed to be living in such a polyglot camp, especially since our total population seldom exceeds about a dozen people!

THE NEW LONG TENT HOUSE
Last month we got a new building built. The old building in that spot was still standing, but the roof leaked a lot and many of the structural members were on the verge of failure. We got the best construction guy of the village (Biebis) to spend nearly a month out here with one helper (Mopila), and they did a fine job. The building in question is actually a long roof over four tents. The vertical structural members are big tree stems, as are the main lengthwise horizontal roof supports. The latticework supporting the roof tiles is composed of smaller tree trunks, and the roof tiles themselves are made of palm leaf strips strung over bamboo strips and pinned in place with liana vines. The apex of the roof, where the two slopes meet, is covered with fronds of another palm species, weighted down with heavyish tree stems broken in the middle. There are no walls. The components of the structure are all lashed together with liana vines: there's not one piece of metal or pre-fabricated wood at all, just local materials hewn from the surrounding environment. The construction team also repaired a number of other leaky roofs (more palm tiles), a lot of other vertical supports (more tree stems), and a couple of bowing horizontal supports.

BARN-RAISING THE LAB HOUSE
During the time Biebis and Mopila were here, I also got another member of our staff, Mangos, to try repairing a different building. One of the roof's horizontal support beams had fallen off of one of its three vertical support posts, so the roof was no longer quite stable. All I wanted was for him to replace the vertical support so it could hold the horizontal beam. The building in question serves as Gaby's laboratory (he is the Congolese researcher) for chemical analyses of leaves, fruits and flowers, and is down a short path from camp. Later that morning, we heard Mangos yelling, so I called for everyone else in camp to run and help him. Sure enough, the entire building had collapsed, pivoting at the base of the remaining vertical posts so the roof came precariously to rest about a man's height away. He was fine, as was my tent, which I had put there while recovering from malaria to have a place away from the main camp to retreat to. Mangos's job for the rest of that day was to cut eight more vertical posts from the forest, so that we could put the roof back up the following day. The next day, we had what I called 'a good old-fashioned barn-raising', with everyone at camp recruited to either lift the roof sections (it was split down the apex to facilitate the task) or guide them into the newly placed vertical posts. New palm fronds were added to the roof's apex later in the week, and the building is again as good as new!

GRIT'S TRIPS
Grit (the German) is one of the two researchers who came in on the last plane, in late May. Her project sure seems cool to me, as it involves making exploratory trips to nearby forests in search of neighbouring bonobo communities. Bonobos, in contrast to chimpanzees, form groups where the males are all generally related and the females migrate to other communities once they reach adulthood. Grit aims to collect fecal samples from numerous communities of the region, in order to do DNA analyses and determine genetic relationships of the bonobos. I've been involved, with the other researchers here, in collecting samples from our habituated bonobos. She left for her fourth voyage this morning, to Ntoka. The first two trips were to places that are relatively known by our team already, as we pass through them for our own work: Bompusa and Bompindji. The third trip was past our regular range, to Bolungwa Alunga. She collected samples so far from the Bompusa and Bolungwa Alunga trips, as well as from our habituated community and another to its west. I find it to be quite an ambitious study for anyone to undertake, and hope she manages to collect samples from several other sites. It's a good challenge to help facilitate such voyages.

CHIKWANGA SHORTAGE!
The local staff complained to me today, as I gave priority to the departing team for taking our current local food supply. Chikwanga is the local staple, and Team Grit took 20 logs! Only 10 remained, to last 5 workers and 5 researchers two full days until the next food transport arrives. We've got plenty of fresh potatoes, plenty of ripe plantains, and a decent quantity of dried beans in the depot, not to mention several kilos of fresh fish and generous reserves of recently-smoked fish. So we won't starve. For the workers, though, a meal without kwanga just isn't a meal. Tough. We'll have a new supply in two days.

IMPORTED FOOD SHORTAGE
Our other reserves have been dwindling steadily for quite some time already. One of my duties here as camp manager is to monitor and maintain our imported provisions, and to estimate and order the right quantities when we have a plane come in. This is a very difficult job, especially considering the unpredictability of everything here. With the last plane's arrival, I had estimated our needs for about one month, since another plane was foreseen in June. That plane was cancelled, though, so we're really getting low on many things. The incoming plane is also the smallest model, with a very limited capacity, so I've had to get a list together to provision us for one more month without exceeding perhaps 100kg. We've already run out of Nesquik, Lipton Tea, and Nescafe, and we've got only about one or two mornings-worth of rice left. You may laugh that we lament the lack of these 'luxury' drinks, but other than that it's water - these comforts are greatly appreciated.

LOMPOLE
I'm going to Lompole again in a couple of days. The last time I went, I fell ill and ended up spending the following week at camp in bed with malaria. The trip was also pretty damn stressful, as I was obliged to hold a lot of discussions with different people in the village. Since I'm the administrateur of the LuiKotal camp, which constitutes the sole source of paid employment available to the residents of Lompole and the surrounding villages, everyone's got something to say. This trip will therefore be limited to 36 hours, including two nights. The day of the plane will obviously be very filled with work obligations, but the brevity of my stay will at least circumscribe those annoying discussions to a clearly finite period. The trip will also understate my role as an active administrator of the LuiKotal project, while allowing me a little break (however stressful) from the everyday of LuiKotal Camp itself.

THE COMPUTER(S)
One of the provisions I look forward to from the plane is a new laptop. For my first couple of months here, we had two functioning laptops for the use of the research team. The bonobos' location was also known on nearly a daily basis, so the majority of the research team was out in the forest on most days working on habituation. The bonobos were much more elusive thoughout late May and all of June, so more of the team was at camp more of the time. The result, with respect to the computer, has been almost-constant use of the remaining laptop during the daylight hours (since we rely on solar panels for power, computer time is over once the battery is dead in the evening). Depending on my work demands in the coming month, I'll hopefully be able to devote more of my computer time to personal ends. On the other hand, I spend so much time in front of the computer for work, that I often need a good break from it afterwards. I make no promises for upcoming entries!

SISTEBOL THE FISHERMAN
Sistebol is our current fisherman at camp. We always have one fisherman who stays with us, who doesn't receive a daily salary but who gets food and a cigarette with us every day, and is provided with a decent supply of camp-owned fish hooks and nets. We buy all the fish he catches, and everyone eats a decent quantity of fresh fish. The dry season started about three or four weeks ago, with only a milimeter or two of rain registered since around mid-June. This is the best fishing season, so Sistebol has been bringing back loads of fresh fish. We eat well, and smoke the surplus, so we now also have a respectable reserve for unlucky days. A good meal will include fresh fish prepared in two or three ways, smoked fish, and some freshly smoked fish that's only been over the fire for a couple of days. My favourite is the freshly smoked variety, which is tough and meaty - it's not to the point of becoming fish jerky, like the smoked fish, while most of the bones have softened enough to chew and swallow, unlike the fresh ones. I find that eating many of the fresh fish is comparable to eating a pile of needles.

BYCATCH
Twice since he's been with us, Sistebol has brought back other creatures that have become stuck in his nets. The first was a monitor lizard, perhaps almost a metre long from nose to tail. It's scales were primarily deep black, with a beautiful neon yellow pattern of stripes and dots for the whole length. It's been smoking over the fire ever since: I find it amusing to pick it up by its tail as it holds its long form lengthwise. The other bycatch was another crocodile. It's at least the fourth one since I've been here, so I didn't even go examine it this time. I saw the kitchen staff playing with it as it hung from their roof - holding its head and tail up to demonstrate its length. Pretty long. They split it open along its stomach, pinning the skin open to roast over the fire. Since I don't buy bycatch, the workers ate it amongst themselves and we got all the fresh fish that day.

GRIT'S SNAKE
We don't see snakes in camp much, but when we do we kill them. There are so many species around here, and who really knows which are poisonous or not, so to protect LuiKotal's inhabitants we have a policy of killing any snake that visits camp. Last week Grit was laying down on the bench at our table, as a beautiful snake slithered over her knees. She yelped to me but kept still, and the snake just continued up the bench and into the palm-frond roof. The cooks rushed over with machetes and quickly beheaded it, and Grit's heartbeat eventually returned to normal. The closest guess we have, as to its species, is a vine snake. While not deadly, the bit is nonetheless poisonous. Drama!

THE BONOBOS
For the past couple of weeks, our team has been with the bonobos pretty much every single day. The behaviour of our habituated community has been to travel a big loop throughout the day, stopping at a variety of specific fruit trees along the way. After being followed for most of the day, they have generally nested within a kilometre or so of where they started. When they're lost, waiting at a few known trees are good bets to find them again. I spent a day out with them a week or so ago, and got to observe a few bonobos at very close range sharing a boimbe fruit on the ground under one such tree. Unfortunately, the understorey was so dense I didn't get a very clear sightline, but Caro (the Austrian) spent some observation time with them under the same tree the following day. Of bonobos in the wild, she shot what are probably many of the best photos in existence. I'm jealous.

JUNE'S RANGE
June was a bad month for bonobo observations, as they managed to elude our team for numerous days at a time. The only way to find them again is to spend a lot of time out in the forest, covering a lot of ground to listen for their calls and look for their traces (feeding remains, recent nests, footprints in muddy areas, etc). The group was finally located on a regular basis further than they had ever been tracked before. They may well have been spending time there since research here began, but that area of our study site had been pretty much beyond the reasonable limits of where we can walk to and from in a day. The closest that a researcher could reach by trail was about 9 or 10 kilometres from camp, which was still several kilometres through dense bush from the bonobos. Getting to and from camp and the bonobos each day therefore involved three to four hours of hiking each way, much of which involved cutting through uncharted forest. An equivalent commute, in my comparison, would be to go from NY to DC each morning and evening, or from Amsterdam to Lyon. Ridiculous. To consecrate seven to eight hours of the day just getting to and from work, and then be expected to follow bonobos for 12 hours from dawn to dusk, was a ridiculous prospect. Thank goodness they've migrated northwards lately!

BADZUNGU CAMP
In order to chop around an hour and a half from the one-way commute, a tent has now been placed in the forest near the Badzungu stream. It's an easy shot from camp, down a dry, level trail. We established a system so that one person who did those long days would stay a night or two there, while others in camp would have rendez-vous and food drops to facilitate the stay. It hasn't been used too much, but the Badzungu camp is a now welcome tool in our bonobo-following arsenal.

MY VACATION
I used the Badzungu camp once to just take a little vacation from camp - it was nice to be so alone. Since I spend most of my time within the confines of LuiKotal Camp, and there are almost always at least a few people here with me: I'm almost never alone. Ah, solitude! It was great to be about 7km from the nearest human, in the middle of dense forest at night and in the morning. The darkness was so dark at night. I made espresso in the morning and sat on a log over the stream to drink it. Sweet! It was pretty frustrating (I hardly managed to get a fire going in the evening before the downpour began), and not necessarily comfortable (the ground wasn't exactly flat under the tent), but the break was nonetheless quite welcome. I've been making regular trips into the forest lately, without necessarily intending to do any research, simply to get out of camp and assuage my psyche.

THE VINE SWING
About a month ago, I noticed a long vine hanging over a big treefall near our main trail. It was probably about 20m in length, and swung over a dense tangle of fallen trunks and branches. Along its main swinging axis, though, was a fallen tree trunk, which even had a protruding branch going upwards at the point where the vine would swing in its arc. So a swing could be initiated by walking the length of the fallen trunk, and even by climbing up the protruding branch. I visited the vine swing several times, swinging from the higher branch like Tarzan. Oh what fun can be had in the forest! One afternoon I invited one of our cooks, Djoli, who had a couple of hours without cooking to do, to join me for some vine swinging. We hiked the 3km there and I did some huge swings that he filmed on my digicam. He took a turn and did a less-daring swing, but then liked it and asked me to film a second swing. As he jumped to swing though, the vine snapped and he fell off the log and into the tangled branches. His leg bled a lot, and he was pretty flustered, but it wasn't serious. When he regained his composure the first thing he asked for was to see the video. My camera's delay is so long though, that the only footage I got was of my knee as I ran over to help him. He came back to camp yesterday and showed me how his wound healed - he'll have a scar.

NEW TRAILS
One big job I did lately was to mark a new trail. Given that the bonobos have demonstrated their range to be well beyond our existing trail network, we have been extending the network over the past few weeks. By trail, it is now possible to hike about 14km from camp: the Meike-5 trail has been extended from 3km to 5km, the Venty trail was lengthened from 1km to around 4.5km, and the Tim trail now connects Meike-5 and Venty, having been extended from 700m to 2.5km. Not only has the trail cutting been tough work, but the commute to and from the existing trail ends was several hours alone. I commend all of the men who contributed to the job.

TRAIL FLAGGING
I decided to contribute by marking one of the new trails: Tim. In order to assist the users of these trails to maintain their bearings, trail markers are placed at every 50m with the trail name and the distance. Tim's trailhead is about 8km from camp, and the trail's latter 1.8km is very roughly-hewn. It was a long, hard day! I measured the distance with a waist-mounted counter that works by unwinding a long, thin thread. I had to change the spool twice over 2.5km, and it was quite a pain just to pick up the used thread on the way back (mostly in the dark). The flags will tie easily to thin trees, but of course any trees thinner than the handle of a baseball bat had been chopped to create the trail, and the tags wouldn't really reach around the remaining trees. Attaching a loop of string first was a pain, and I certainly didn't do it on as many trees as could have used it. The highlight of the day was the Bompusa River crossing, because it was a big fallen log where I was able to sit and eat a banana and some biscuits. I saw some shits on the log (yes, that's the official scientific term we use in camp) of some predator, that had obviously been eating a lot of fish. Perhaps it was an otter, but I'd rather think it was a leopard. I tied around 60 tags that day, and was out for about 12 hours - it was hard work.

THE NEW YORKER
My first three weeks or so at LuiKotal saw the camp populated by nine foreigners. One of them was Ian Parker, who is a writer for the New Yorker magazine doing some field work for a story on bonobos. He was a nice guy and a good campmate, and dealt with the rigours of the work here with grace. He wrote us recently to let us know that the draft is nearly complete, so the story should be appearing in one of the upcoming issues. Since it's a story on bonobos in general, and not necessarily just our field site, I'm sure there will be a lot of related information that he includes. Since he visited us for the story though, we surely get some decent exposure in his text - I therefore highly recommend everyone who reads this blog to go buy that issue for Ian's aritcle. The New Yorker is a weekly publication, and Ian will hopefully let us know around when the issue comes out, so I'll be sure to post that info here as soon as I know it. In the meantime though, I recommend keeping an eye out for places to pick up the New Yorker, in case you live in areas that don't necessarily have the magazine at the supermarket checkout line.

BRILLIANT
A last note I'll include here is Ian's compliment of my writings: "The blog is brilliant, by the way - and you're absolutely right about people wanting to read about oatmeal." This is quite an honour coming from such a seasoned writer, and a bit of a vindication for what I've chosen as content. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to posting entries more regularly, but in the meantime I'd love more feedback from people who I haven't heard from lately! In other words, write me emails! Thanks:)

With that, I hope you've got a feeling for what my life has been composed of lately, as well as a better picture of LuiKotal camp life in general. Again, it would be great to hear from more people out there, as I'm really quite curious as to who else I'm writing this for. I hope it's appreciated!