It’s Saturday, February 3rd, 2007, and two weeks from now I’ll be on the road with Marco in his rental truck. He’s moving all of his belongings, and towing his car, to his parents’ beach house on a spit of beach in North Carolina. I’m going to be dropped off four days into the journey, at Asheville, North Carolina. My mom’s meeting me there with a rental car, after having flown from Philadelphia airport. She and I will spend a couple of days driving the Blue Ridge Parkway, which will hopefully be tranquil and beautiful in mid-February. We’ll be back to Princeton, NJ in time for my flight from JFK on February 24th. I arrive in Paris on the 25th and meet up with an old friend with whom I’ll spend the next week. She’s moving from Paris to Lyon that week, and starting her new job there. I hope to spend the following week visiting relatives in northwest France, and seeing a couple of other friends in Paris before taking off for Kinshasa.
I depart Paris for Kinshasa on March 10th. I have three days to spend there on my own, then I meet my new colleagues on the 13th. They arrive from Germany and perhaps someplace else too. I imagine we’ll be spending a few days in the city dealing with bureaucracy. Getting the right residency permits, paying the right bribes, getting the right stamps in the passport. Then we’re off to the jungle.
The final destination is LuiKotal research camp near the banks of the Lokoro River. The nearest village is Ipope, where there’s a basic airstrip hewn out of the jungle. The local tribe is called Kundu, and there are numerous small villages in the region. From Ipope it is about a 20km (12.5 mile) hike on forest paths through the jungle to reach LuiKotal camp. The trek takes a little over half a day. Once I am at the camp, it is very infrequently that I will even visit Ipope, let alone Kinshasa (probably never before 9 months). As far as I know, there’s not even a road that reaches Ipope, so really the only way to get to this camp is by chartered Cessna followed by a 20km hike. At least porters can carry some of the luggage.
The camp has negotiated with villagers from Ipope to hire porters and other workers on a regular basis. When we arrive at the airstrip, porters carry our bags into the forest for us. They tie our things onto poles for the walk. Teams come out in shifts of a week or two each, bringing surplus produce from the village and carrying out certain of our toxic wastes like batteries. The workers do our cooking and clean up, they do our laundry, and there’s someone who fishes in the river basically full-time.
That’s all five weeks away though, because I’m currently still living in my suburban home in Mesa, and working my cubicle job. My house is presently filled with boxes, packing materials, piles of important stuff, and the basic necessities of (suburban) life, like speakers and an mp3 player. This weekend, I hope to finish boxing up the majority of my possessions, and sort out a big pile of crap that just plain needs to be given away or otherwise disposed of.
I hired a Mexican for the first time the other day, who cleaned up the whole side and rear yards, and then painted the garage door and trim. He was a mormon by the name of Alberro, with whom I got to practice my rudimentary español as we ate veggie burgers in the back yard and as I tried to explain what needed to be done. He did good work. (In Mesa, illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico, stand on certain street corners on weekday mornings in hope of work for the day. They are a fundamental part of Arizona’s economy for construction and landscaping, and are utilized frequently by a high proportion of other Arizonans for occasional labour. The workers benefit with cash at the end of each workday, while the Arizonans benefit with low-cost occasional labour that does good work but requires no superfluous paperwork.)
My house is scheduled to be sold next Sunday, February 11th. I’m advertising a ‘for-sale by owner’ open house for next Saturday and Sunday, hoping to settle with the highest bidder by Sunday night. I’ll also need to sell my car, a 2005 Chevy Cobalt with 20,000 miles on it. The rest of my crap will either be stored, given away, or tossed into a dumpster.
This weekend, though, I’m packing up my house. Within the next couple of days, I need to get a storage locker where I’ll leave the majority of my personal possessions. I’m bringing a few key articles to my mom, while my sister will have the locker’s key for the rest of the stuff. I won’t really be able to communicate well from Congo, so they’ll have to determine what of my things may be needed, and find where it is.
