I left Goma for the second time, this time heading South around the lake and then East into Rwanda and Burundi. It was a relatively short drive to get to the border from Goma. We arrived without incident at the Zaire border crossing. The gate was across the road but there was nobody manning the station. We were a bit confused by that. To not get the needed stamps and other paperwork risked major hassles later on. The driver was reluctant to go on. We hung out for a while. Some trucks came from the other direction driving fast and crazy. They didn't even slow down after the first truck raised the gate. We had no idea why there was nobody working the border. Eventually the truck driver decided he had to just continue down the road. When we arrived at the other side, there was nobody working that side either. Very strange is all we could think.
Again we hung out for a while and no officials arrived. More trucks were leaving heading back into Zaire. We took off down the road without our precious paperwork. We drove for a while and more vehicles were coming from the opposite direction than would be normal. Some of them were motioning at us to turn around. Why? We had no idea. The driver needed to deliver his load to get paid. He wanted to continue. I was a bit nervous about the traffic but since I had no clue what was happening up ahead I kept going with the truck. I was trying to imagine the gorillas I would be seeing in a few days and my enthusiasm was blinding me a bit.
We started to see people walking rapidly carrying whatever possessions that they could carry on their backs with them. They looked frightened. The driver finally got a clue and stopped to ask them what was going on. They told us that men with guns and machetes were killing everyone they could find. We looked at each other with confused looks on our faces. Who was killing who? We didn't know anything about the local politics but we were worried now. It didn't look like there was any danger to us other than the people fleeing and the crazy driving coming toward us. The driver kept driving until he came to a small village.
Much to our dismay the town was acting crazy. We saw people with guns and machetes milling around in the arrogant way that armed thugs do when they think they are in control of the situation. Then we saw the dead bodies. Men women and children along the road chopped up with machetes. We could see smoke from fires burning in the area and heard a few distant gun shots. The driver was looking for a place to turn around. I told him not to stop for anything or we were probably going to get killed. He kind of laughed a weird scared chuckle but his eyes were glued to the men milling around. They seemed to be ignoring us totally almost like we were not there. I wished that we weren't there but I was happy that they were not paying any attention to us.
To turn around he picked an isolated yard and pulled in to turn around. There were bodies in the yard. Freshly killed it looked like but there was no need to check to see if they were still alive because they were already dismembered. Now I was scared that we might not get out of this alive. Holy shit is all I could think. Africa is just one violent thing after another. This was worse than the prisoners getting beaten in Central African Republic. I did not want to get hacked to death a limb at a time. The driver put the truck in reverse and backed out of the yard and pointed us back toward Zaire. He hit the gas but was afraid to attract the attention of the dangerous looking men by driving too fast. They did have some guns along with their machetes. Instead he just drove quickly.
We tried not to look at the bodies or at the crazy acting men either. Catching their eye might also catch their ire and a barrage of bullets. As we left the small village some people jumped up along the side of the road and tried to stop our truck. We had no idea if they were the good guys or the bad guys because we had no idea who anybody was or what the hell was happening. We just knew that we did not want to be there anymore. Suddenly delivering the load in the truck was no longer important. The driver did not stop. I think the people that jumped up and tried to stop us were trying to get away from the men with the guns and machetes but in my driver's opinion it was not worth the risk of being wrong because it would be dead wrong. He did not stop for anybody or anything.
It took us a couple of hours to get back to the border and again there were no officials manning the border on either side. Our worries about not having the right paperwork on the return to Zaire ended up not being a concern after all, we just cruised back into the country. It is kind of ironic that retuning to Zaire made us feel like we had arrived to safety. Zaire back in 1972, when this was happening, was considered to be one of the most dangerous places in the world and yet twice now in less than two months I had fled there for safety. Later on we learned that an estimated 50,000 people were killed in about two days of horrible conflict between two tribes of Tutsis and Hutus. Millions of refugees were sent fleeing into Zaire over the next years only to get stuck in refugee camps that turned out to be just as dangerous as their homeland ended up being.
When we finally arrived back at Goma we went to the little store that sold beer and sat down to drink a few. While we were sitting there eating and drinking, military trucks started to arrive in Goma. Over the next week more and more military arrived and every day more and more refugees were showing up also. Little tiny Goma was rapidly turning into a busy place. I could not get out of town because the first thing the military did was close all the roads. My truck driving friend did manage to get out by driving north but he had to pay a bribe to get through the roadblocks. He was taking passengers with him.
I sat up my tent near the little store up the road from the bar/whorehouse. The bar was doing a booming business. There was no shelter in Goma except the little rooms they rented out in the bar. My store owner was being very nice and helpful to me letting me stay near his place. He helped me watch my stuff and by letting me set up my tent out of sight from the road, he gave me some safety from all the dangerous drunken soldiers wandering around at night. I avoided them as much as I could. I did not act afraid even though I was. Showing any sign of weakness around this place would quickly result in bad things happening.
For over a week I just ate and drank my beer near the store and watched all the commotion. A few days after we arrived, 34 foot stake sided trucks full of reeking dead bodies started to drive through Goma. I had no idea where they were going with the bodies. I am just glad they did not stop because the smell of death was already permeating the air even without the trucks stopping and leaking their loads of dead bloated victims all over the road. My Greek truck driver friend taught me to put perfumed cream on my upper lip to cover up the gut wrenching smells around town. It helped but did not come close to eliminating the bad smells.
I just wanted to get to Uganda to get out of this increasingly crazy place called Goma. East Africa was considered to be much less dangerous according to everybody I talked to in Goma. I was looking forward to some peace and quiet after this crazy violent war.
Today the war that essentially started at around the time this happened to us, is still going on. Millions of people have died from the genocide that began then and still continues to this day in the areas around Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire which is now called Democratic Republic of the Congo once again.
Here are some related pages explaining the situation then and now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutu#Post-colonial_history_of_the_Hutu_and_Tutsi
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/11/60minutes/main3701249.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Silence:_Rape_in_the_Congo
This last story of the violence going on against the women and girls is an outrage but the world is not paying attention. It goes on unchecked today.
Showing posts with label Goma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goma. Show all posts
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
North to Goma, Zaire Again
I walked and waded through the mud on the trail heading back North. I tried to skirt around the bigger mud puddles because I didn't want to get stuck in the mud and sink quicksand style like the truck had done. Walking alone in the jungle I started to notice more wildlife.
There were monkeys and loud birds daily. Sometimes the monkeys caused me some problems. One morning I was eating my breakfast and drinking my hot tea when a solitary monkey snuck down and stole a large tin of margarine from me. I had the cover off because I had put some on my oatmeal along with cinnamon and sugar. The stupid monkey took the full tin up the tree and started to gobble it up. I was pissed at him for taking it and I was throwing sticks up the tree but I had no way of ever hitting him and he knew it. Even before he finished eating it all he started to get diahrea. He never vomited but his other end turned into a gusher in less than a half hour. He was feeling terrible and I was laughing at him. I had nobody to talk to or anything so I was ranting and raving at him like he understood everything I said. He must have felt the same loneliness because he stayed right there in the tree spray painting it for about an hour. I finally left him there and continued walking.
I had seen no people or signs of people in two days of walking then there was suddenly a Pygmy standing on the trail looking at me with a stunned look on his face. I stopped walking and talked to him in English and in my limited French but he never responded. I slowly walked up to him talking calmly the whole time and he never moved or said a thing. When I got close enough to reach out and touch, he suddenly reached out and fondled my long straight black hair. My white skin wasn't so rare in Africa because there are quite a few albinos everywhere I went but none of them had long straight hair like I did. I frequently had people wanting to run their fingers through my hair. I often let them to easy tensions or to show that I was friendly. This man looked to be in his thirties or so but they tend to look older than they really are so he may have been younger. After a few minutes of me trying to talk to him he finally started communicating with me. He was out hunting and he went over by a tree and showed me his prize. It was a Dikdik. They are very small antelope about the size of a small tall slim dog. I had to laugh to myself that the little Pygmy hunted for little Dikdiks. I started walking and we walked together for a while. Then he showed me that if I walked in the jungle it was actually an easier walk. Not right along side of the road where the jungle was thick right down to the ground because the road let in light but instead he showed me how deeper in the jungle it was actually easy to walk because there was very little vegetation on the ground and almost no mud either. My only problem with that is without him showing me where to walk out in the jungle I would just get lost within a short time.
We met up with his friends in maybe an hours time and through sign language and some Pidgin thown in I figured out that they were inviting me to come along with them on their hunt. So I followed them. One of them had an old rifle and while we were walking a couple of them stopped to listen and then pointed up in the canopy. I looked up and saw nothing but the one with the rifle took aim and squeezed off a single shot and a monkey came tumbling down to the ground. They seemed happy with their catch of a few Dikdiks, the monkey and some things wrapped up in leaves that one of them was carrying. We walked almost until dark and came upon their encampment. There were thirty five or so people in total with a few kids running around and about half men and half women. All of them were almost totally naked. The men sat down and started to smoke while the women started to prep the game to eat. I set up my tent. They were very interested in my tent but by the sounds of them talking back and forth they didn't like it enough to want to sleep in one. They preferred their temporary grass and branch huts. This was just a hunting camp I think but they didn't have really permanent housing anywhere from what I gathered over my time in Africa. These Pygmies acted and looked very similar to the ones I had met over in Western Cameroon. They were still the original hippies, happy go lucky, averse to work, trying to get high all the time and enjoying unbridled sexual freedom. They tried to get me to take one or two of the women into my tent but I turned them down. I couldn't see any health problems in this group of people but I was just a chicken over STDs.
I stayed with these Pygmies for a couple of weeks until my food was running low. I ate the roast monkey and Dikdiks and things with the Pygmies and even tried eating their grubs and things but I still needed my tea or coffee and my oatmeal every day. We had been moving North very slowly over the course of this two weeks or so and they led me to the road and I started walking alone again in the direction of Goma. There were more and more slash and burn farms so I knew I was getting closer to Goma.
While I was walking one morning I notice a young women using a hoe basically out in the middle of nowhere. I looked around and I didn't see any farm or people or anything but here she was hoeing away. Then she stood up and looked right at me looking at her. She was very pregnant! She bent back down over her hoe and every few minutes stood up and looked at me. The look she gave me kept me there but told me not to come any closer to her. I kind of walked back and forth wondering what was up looking over at her working. Then she went behind a downed log right near where she was standing and working. She didn't stand back up for about ten minutes. When she did stand back up, she was wrapping her newborn in a cloth. I was caught off guard by this. I went to walk over to her and she made it clear to me not to do that so I hesitated and walked back to the trail. She put the infant on her back and went back to hoeing furiously. I know now that she was delivering the placenta the next time she stopped working. Then she stood up and smiled at me and just walked away into the jungle with her baby. I went back to my walking. I finally arrived back at Goma almost a month after I left my buddy there. I stocked up on beer and slept like a rock that night.
Goma seemed to have a lot more people and activity this time. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I talked to some local people I met there including one man that was a school teacher. He spoke some French and some English so we were able to communicate quite well together. He was concerned about my walking through Zaire alone.
He kept telling me horror stories about things happening to people out in the middle of nowhere. He told me stories about the history of Zaire and the early days of the Belgian and French presence. I didn't like hearing the parts about torture and people getting their hands cut off. The Belgians started the practice of cutting hands off from what he told me and now it is a widespread practice as a sort of terror weapon. (even now in 2010 this area is fighting the longest and one of the most bloody wars the world has ever seen and cutting hands off is common practice as is mutilating females of all ages to prevent them from reproducing and to cause terror. United Nations says the genicide going on in this area today has claimed about 6 million lives so far.)
My teacher friend didn't like Mobutu the leader of Zaire but he did not tell me why. He also told me about Idi Amin in Uganda and that many of the soldiers here in Goma fled from Uganda because of Amin. I didn't know most of the history of this area and that was maybe a good thing because if I had know just how violent Africa really is I probably would not have come here like I did.
I enjoyed meeting and talking to this man. We hung out together for a few days before he had to leave to get back to his teaching job. I resolved to try to act a little safer in my choices of things I did in the future but since I was already here there wasn't much I could do. Even if I wanted to leave Africa now getting out of involved getting to the bigger cities in the East or South. No airlines flew into this part of the world yet in 1972.
I wanted to go see the mountain gorillas over in Rwanda and Burundi that I heard about and the plains in East Africa with the huge herds of animals. Over a year in Africa and I had seen very little wildlife. I was disappointed by that. I started to talk to the trucks coming and going through Goma for a ride to the highland mountain areas East of Goma. I finally found a truck that offered to let me ride up on top of his load so I headed East with him early in the morning and left Goma behind.
There were monkeys and loud birds daily. Sometimes the monkeys caused me some problems. One morning I was eating my breakfast and drinking my hot tea when a solitary monkey snuck down and stole a large tin of margarine from me. I had the cover off because I had put some on my oatmeal along with cinnamon and sugar. The stupid monkey took the full tin up the tree and started to gobble it up. I was pissed at him for taking it and I was throwing sticks up the tree but I had no way of ever hitting him and he knew it. Even before he finished eating it all he started to get diahrea. He never vomited but his other end turned into a gusher in less than a half hour. He was feeling terrible and I was laughing at him. I had nobody to talk to or anything so I was ranting and raving at him like he understood everything I said. He must have felt the same loneliness because he stayed right there in the tree spray painting it for about an hour. I finally left him there and continued walking.
I had seen no people or signs of people in two days of walking then there was suddenly a Pygmy standing on the trail looking at me with a stunned look on his face. I stopped walking and talked to him in English and in my limited French but he never responded. I slowly walked up to him talking calmly the whole time and he never moved or said a thing. When I got close enough to reach out and touch, he suddenly reached out and fondled my long straight black hair. My white skin wasn't so rare in Africa because there are quite a few albinos everywhere I went but none of them had long straight hair like I did. I frequently had people wanting to run their fingers through my hair. I often let them to easy tensions or to show that I was friendly. This man looked to be in his thirties or so but they tend to look older than they really are so he may have been younger. After a few minutes of me trying to talk to him he finally started communicating with me. He was out hunting and he went over by a tree and showed me his prize. It was a Dikdik. They are very small antelope about the size of a small tall slim dog. I had to laugh to myself that the little Pygmy hunted for little Dikdiks. I started walking and we walked together for a while. Then he showed me that if I walked in the jungle it was actually an easier walk. Not right along side of the road where the jungle was thick right down to the ground because the road let in light but instead he showed me how deeper in the jungle it was actually easy to walk because there was very little vegetation on the ground and almost no mud either. My only problem with that is without him showing me where to walk out in the jungle I would just get lost within a short time.
We met up with his friends in maybe an hours time and through sign language and some Pidgin thown in I figured out that they were inviting me to come along with them on their hunt. So I followed them. One of them had an old rifle and while we were walking a couple of them stopped to listen and then pointed up in the canopy. I looked up and saw nothing but the one with the rifle took aim and squeezed off a single shot and a monkey came tumbling down to the ground. They seemed happy with their catch of a few Dikdiks, the monkey and some things wrapped up in leaves that one of them was carrying. We walked almost until dark and came upon their encampment. There were thirty five or so people in total with a few kids running around and about half men and half women. All of them were almost totally naked. The men sat down and started to smoke while the women started to prep the game to eat. I set up my tent. They were very interested in my tent but by the sounds of them talking back and forth they didn't like it enough to want to sleep in one. They preferred their temporary grass and branch huts. This was just a hunting camp I think but they didn't have really permanent housing anywhere from what I gathered over my time in Africa. These Pygmies acted and looked very similar to the ones I had met over in Western Cameroon. They were still the original hippies, happy go lucky, averse to work, trying to get high all the time and enjoying unbridled sexual freedom. They tried to get me to take one or two of the women into my tent but I turned them down. I couldn't see any health problems in this group of people but I was just a chicken over STDs.
I stayed with these Pygmies for a couple of weeks until my food was running low. I ate the roast monkey and Dikdiks and things with the Pygmies and even tried eating their grubs and things but I still needed my tea or coffee and my oatmeal every day. We had been moving North very slowly over the course of this two weeks or so and they led me to the road and I started walking alone again in the direction of Goma. There were more and more slash and burn farms so I knew I was getting closer to Goma.
While I was walking one morning I notice a young women using a hoe basically out in the middle of nowhere. I looked around and I didn't see any farm or people or anything but here she was hoeing away. Then she stood up and looked right at me looking at her. She was very pregnant! She bent back down over her hoe and every few minutes stood up and looked at me. The look she gave me kept me there but told me not to come any closer to her. I kind of walked back and forth wondering what was up looking over at her working. Then she went behind a downed log right near where she was standing and working. She didn't stand back up for about ten minutes. When she did stand back up, she was wrapping her newborn in a cloth. I was caught off guard by this. I went to walk over to her and she made it clear to me not to do that so I hesitated and walked back to the trail. She put the infant on her back and went back to hoeing furiously. I know now that she was delivering the placenta the next time she stopped working. Then she stood up and smiled at me and just walked away into the jungle with her baby. I went back to my walking. I finally arrived back at Goma almost a month after I left my buddy there. I stocked up on beer and slept like a rock that night.
Goma seemed to have a lot more people and activity this time. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I talked to some local people I met there including one man that was a school teacher. He spoke some French and some English so we were able to communicate quite well together. He was concerned about my walking through Zaire alone.
He kept telling me horror stories about things happening to people out in the middle of nowhere. He told me stories about the history of Zaire and the early days of the Belgian and French presence. I didn't like hearing the parts about torture and people getting their hands cut off. The Belgians started the practice of cutting hands off from what he told me and now it is a widespread practice as a sort of terror weapon. (even now in 2010 this area is fighting the longest and one of the most bloody wars the world has ever seen and cutting hands off is common practice as is mutilating females of all ages to prevent them from reproducing and to cause terror. United Nations says the genicide going on in this area today has claimed about 6 million lives so far.)
My teacher friend didn't like Mobutu the leader of Zaire but he did not tell me why. He also told me about Idi Amin in Uganda and that many of the soldiers here in Goma fled from Uganda because of Amin. I didn't know most of the history of this area and that was maybe a good thing because if I had know just how violent Africa really is I probably would not have come here like I did.
I enjoyed meeting and talking to this man. We hung out together for a few days before he had to leave to get back to his teaching job. I resolved to try to act a little safer in my choices of things I did in the future but since I was already here there wasn't much I could do. Even if I wanted to leave Africa now getting out of involved getting to the bigger cities in the East or South. No airlines flew into this part of the world yet in 1972.
I wanted to go see the mountain gorillas over in Rwanda and Burundi that I heard about and the plains in East Africa with the huge herds of animals. Over a year in Africa and I had seen very little wildlife. I was disappointed by that. I started to talk to the trucks coming and going through Goma for a ride to the highland mountain areas East of Goma. I finally found a truck that offered to let me ride up on top of his load so I headed East with him early in the morning and left Goma behind.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Heading South in Zaire
Our missionary friend had us jump in the Landrover right after we finished our breakfast. We were all ready to go with freshly cleaned clothes, a nice shower and full bellies after a good hard six hours of sleep the night before. No visit from the daughter the second night but I didn't expect one either. I think she might have been locked in her room or something. We didn't talk much on the ride South. He drove us about two hours and we were maybe thirty miles from his church when he found a wide enough area to turn the Landrover around. He dropped us off in the middle of no place and nothing but thick jungle in sight. We told him thank you as well as we could considering the circumstances and then he was gone.
We kind of looked at each other and started swearing and laughing our asses off. I think we may have been laughing more out of fear for the situation we were in than anything humorous. I got blasted for my little escapade with the daughter but come on what healthy 21 year old male could have fought her off. We decided to just put up the tent and hang out for the day. We put the tent up right in the middle of the road so that we wouldn't miss any vehicles for potential rides South. Our plan was to hitch hike but there was one little flaw in the program...there were no vehicles for the next several days. We decided to start walking down the road to see if there was something we could find to eat and we needed more beer because our stash was gone.
Food was fairly easy to find in the jungles of Zaire because for generations people have been practicing slash and burn agriculture. In slash and burn, trees are cut down and piled up then set on fire. The ashes are then used as fertilizer and it is spread over the poor soil then things like corn, peanuts, papaya, bananas, mangos and other things are planted. In a couple of years they move a little and do it again because the soil is too poor to keep producing after a couple of years. The jungle grows back over the abandoned farmed area. Some of the agricultural products they planted do survive for years until the jungle again steals the light. So there are things to find that are edible all over the jungle. We would roast the corn we found growing, eat the fruit and we had to boil all our water then put purifiers in it in order to safely drink it.
We walked for a few days then came to a small village. When the people saw us they started a loud commotion. I got a bit scared at first. They ran up to us and surrounded us jumping up and down and hooting and hollering then they very excitedly led us to one of their little thatched huts. None of them spoke French or English or even Pidgin so we could not use words to communicate. Inside the thatched hut we found a middle aged man with an injured leg that was infected. It was swollen to the size of the man's abdomen. It stunk like death in the hut. My friend immediately turned and left the hut. I figured out that they wanted me to cure the man. I was a white man and all the white men they had ever met were either missionaries or doctors and most missionaries know a lot of first aid. I didn't give the man a very good chance of surviving with the raging infection and fever he had. I did not see any gangrene yet but it was only a matter of hours from what I saw and smelled.
I got the people to make me some boiling water and bring me some clean clothes. I had a first aid kit with me but this man needed a hospital not a little kit. I gave him some oral antibiotics that I had with me. Then I did some surgery. I very carefully found the center of the infection and I lanced it with my knife all the way down to the bone. There was almost no bleeding because there was no blood flowing in the swollen leg. Then I wrapped some hot wet cloth around the leg for a couple of hours. The hole I had opened up was oozing pus by then. I showed two or three of the men how to help me squeeze out as much of the pus as we could. There was a lot is all I can say. I had them throw the pus in the burning fire pit. I left the man to sleep and I went out and found my buddy. I told him what was going on and told him we had to get out of there before the man died which I was quite sure he would pretty soon. The people were elated that their friend was already feeling better and they were exceedingly friendly to us and tried to give us food and women and whatever they had. The man must have been popular is all I could think. We whopped it up with them for a couple of hours and I went to check on the man. He was sitting up and feeling better. I was kind of surprised by that. I gave him some more antibiotics and then left enough antibiotics with the man's friends for a couple more days of treatment. Then we hightailed it out of there. I think we might have been running for a bit. I wanted to be as far away as possible before the man died. The last thing I wanted to deal with was an angry village of people armed with machetes. I think we walked about fifteen miles before we put our tent up again for the night.
The next morning we were eating oatmeal and drinking tea when we heard a vehicle coming. We quickly took the tent down and got ready for a possible ride. Unfortunately for us, the vehicle was going North not South. We stood in the road waving and it roared right past us without even slowing down. It was one of those tour vans full of people with a guide and a driver that you might find advertisements for in the classified area of the travel section of the New York Times or London Times. They could have at least stopped to ask us if we needed any help. We grumbled about their rudeness and inconsiderate attitude with a few choice stings of four letter words. We walked on.
We started to see more and more slash and burn farms. We stopped and traded with them a few times for some peanuts and fruit. We found a few bottles of beer at one farm that I traded aspirins for. That was an unexpected treat. We put up the tent just down the road and got drunk. The next morning we heard another vehicle coming and it was going south. We got ready just in case it would give us a ride. It turned out to be a 34 foot truck with a Greek driver and a couple of workers packed into the cab. There wasn't enough room left on the overloaded truck for so much as a single fly. At least the driver stopped and talked to us for ten minutes. We understood he was full and he went on without us. A few hours later we saw him parked on the road. We caught up to him and all of the men were standing on the bumper looking at the engine except for one man turning the key to try to start the motor. I asked what the problem was and the owner operator shrugged with a very worried expression on his face. I had rebuilt a couple of engines in my day so I asked if I could look at the problem for him. He agreed to let me check it out. I pulled the fuel line off and had the man turn it over. Nothing was coming out. I followed the fuel line back to an inline fuel filter and took the filter out. This time when he turned it over fuel surged out. I took the filter and banged it on the frame and washed it with some gas and blew the dirt out just like WC did in Bonnie and Clyde. I put it back together and it started right up.
The driver was ecstatic. He got his helpers to move a bunch of things around and then had two of them ride on top of the truck and we jumped into the cab. It felt good to have a ride. He took us all the was to Goma. I had thought that Goma was going to be a town or at least a village but it turned out to be just a crossroads with a little tiny store and a large building that looked like it should have been sitting in a European town instead of out in the middle of a jungles of Zaire. It was two stories high and maybe 150 feet long by 100 feet wide. The large colonial design was made out of what looked like stone. It was a bar and whore house!
We had lunch and quite a few cold beers at the little store with our driver before he left us at Goma and continued on his trip to Burundi. We put up out tent a couple hundred yards from the bar. My buddy wanted to go have some fun with the girls working in the bar. I wanted no such action. So he went in and I sat out in the tent listening to all the commotion going on. There were a lot of soldiers walking around and going in and out of the bar. There were a few fights between the men and a few between men and women and a few women fighting with each other as well. It was a pretty rowdy scene. I was a bit worried about my friend in there with all these rough looking soldier types he was hanging around with. He came out a few hours later drunk and happy. He told me had fun and that he got everything he was looking for and only spent a total of ten dollars. I told him it might be the most expensive ten bucks he had ever spent when his pecker starts to rot away. He just laughed. I think he was still pissed that I had the affair with the blond girl.
We didn't get along very well the next morning. He was hung over and grouchy and I wanted to go south to see Victoria Falls at the Southern border. We ended up going different ways. I found a 34 foot truck going South that would give me a ride so I took it and said goodbye to my buddy. We talked about meeting up in Kampala Uganda or Nairobi Kenya in the next few months. It was raining a lot as we headed South.
Right near Goma the roads were pretty good but the further away we got the worse the road got. It really could not be called a road any more but was just a trail cutting through the jungle. It was just mud, mud and deeper mud. The rain was coming down like crazy. We had to stop many times during downpours because there was zero visibility. We got stuck many times but the helpers would jump out and rock the truck back and forth until they got it free again. This went on until the next mud hole and the next.
We stopped the truck for a few hours at night to let the driver sleep. Three or four days down the road I started to get worried that we would get totally stuck. I guess I could see into the future. We finally hit a large pond sized hole and the truck got stuck right in the middle of it. The wheels just spun and threw up muddy water sucking the truck deeper and deeper into the mud. Then we just sat there. As we sat I noticed that we were still sinking. I though when we hit the axles the sinking would stop. We hit the axles and it kept sinking. Then I thought it would stop when it hit the floor of the truck. Nope. It kept sinking. I decided to bail and took a running leap after throwing my bag into the clear. I landed without injury and stood back to watch as the others also decided to get clear of the truck. They all just waded through the mud with great difficulty to get to the "shore." Unbelievably to me the truck just kept sinking. It finally engulfed the cab and eventually even the high back disappeared from sight. To say that the driver was distraught would have been an understatement.
Then seemingly out of nowhere, about thirty to thirty five men with shovels and ropes showed up ready to negotiate the labor needed to get the truck out of the hole. The driver had no choice but to pay them their ransom demand to get his truck out of the muck. It was now clear that the reason the mud was so deep was that these men dug the hole to start with to capture vehicles so that they could then rescue them for cash. It discouraged me and I turned around and started walking back toward Goma. I wished the driver good luck before I left. As I turned around I could see the workers starting to dig his truck out. The load and the inside of the cab would be coated with mud. The best he could hope for is that the vehicle would start after getting cleaned up a bit and then run long enough to get someplace to seriously clean and fix it. Needless to say the it would need more than the fuel filter getting blown out this time.
We kind of looked at each other and started swearing and laughing our asses off. I think we may have been laughing more out of fear for the situation we were in than anything humorous. I got blasted for my little escapade with the daughter but come on what healthy 21 year old male could have fought her off. We decided to just put up the tent and hang out for the day. We put the tent up right in the middle of the road so that we wouldn't miss any vehicles for potential rides South. Our plan was to hitch hike but there was one little flaw in the program...there were no vehicles for the next several days. We decided to start walking down the road to see if there was something we could find to eat and we needed more beer because our stash was gone.
Food was fairly easy to find in the jungles of Zaire because for generations people have been practicing slash and burn agriculture. In slash and burn, trees are cut down and piled up then set on fire. The ashes are then used as fertilizer and it is spread over the poor soil then things like corn, peanuts, papaya, bananas, mangos and other things are planted. In a couple of years they move a little and do it again because the soil is too poor to keep producing after a couple of years. The jungle grows back over the abandoned farmed area. Some of the agricultural products they planted do survive for years until the jungle again steals the light. So there are things to find that are edible all over the jungle. We would roast the corn we found growing, eat the fruit and we had to boil all our water then put purifiers in it in order to safely drink it.
We walked for a few days then came to a small village. When the people saw us they started a loud commotion. I got a bit scared at first. They ran up to us and surrounded us jumping up and down and hooting and hollering then they very excitedly led us to one of their little thatched huts. None of them spoke French or English or even Pidgin so we could not use words to communicate. Inside the thatched hut we found a middle aged man with an injured leg that was infected. It was swollen to the size of the man's abdomen. It stunk like death in the hut. My friend immediately turned and left the hut. I figured out that they wanted me to cure the man. I was a white man and all the white men they had ever met were either missionaries or doctors and most missionaries know a lot of first aid. I didn't give the man a very good chance of surviving with the raging infection and fever he had. I did not see any gangrene yet but it was only a matter of hours from what I saw and smelled.
I got the people to make me some boiling water and bring me some clean clothes. I had a first aid kit with me but this man needed a hospital not a little kit. I gave him some oral antibiotics that I had with me. Then I did some surgery. I very carefully found the center of the infection and I lanced it with my knife all the way down to the bone. There was almost no bleeding because there was no blood flowing in the swollen leg. Then I wrapped some hot wet cloth around the leg for a couple of hours. The hole I had opened up was oozing pus by then. I showed two or three of the men how to help me squeeze out as much of the pus as we could. There was a lot is all I can say. I had them throw the pus in the burning fire pit. I left the man to sleep and I went out and found my buddy. I told him what was going on and told him we had to get out of there before the man died which I was quite sure he would pretty soon. The people were elated that their friend was already feeling better and they were exceedingly friendly to us and tried to give us food and women and whatever they had. The man must have been popular is all I could think. We whopped it up with them for a couple of hours and I went to check on the man. He was sitting up and feeling better. I was kind of surprised by that. I gave him some more antibiotics and then left enough antibiotics with the man's friends for a couple more days of treatment. Then we hightailed it out of there. I think we might have been running for a bit. I wanted to be as far away as possible before the man died. The last thing I wanted to deal with was an angry village of people armed with machetes. I think we walked about fifteen miles before we put our tent up again for the night.
The next morning we were eating oatmeal and drinking tea when we heard a vehicle coming. We quickly took the tent down and got ready for a possible ride. Unfortunately for us, the vehicle was going North not South. We stood in the road waving and it roared right past us without even slowing down. It was one of those tour vans full of people with a guide and a driver that you might find advertisements for in the classified area of the travel section of the New York Times or London Times. They could have at least stopped to ask us if we needed any help. We grumbled about their rudeness and inconsiderate attitude with a few choice stings of four letter words. We walked on.
We started to see more and more slash and burn farms. We stopped and traded with them a few times for some peanuts and fruit. We found a few bottles of beer at one farm that I traded aspirins for. That was an unexpected treat. We put up the tent just down the road and got drunk. The next morning we heard another vehicle coming and it was going south. We got ready just in case it would give us a ride. It turned out to be a 34 foot truck with a Greek driver and a couple of workers packed into the cab. There wasn't enough room left on the overloaded truck for so much as a single fly. At least the driver stopped and talked to us for ten minutes. We understood he was full and he went on without us. A few hours later we saw him parked on the road. We caught up to him and all of the men were standing on the bumper looking at the engine except for one man turning the key to try to start the motor. I asked what the problem was and the owner operator shrugged with a very worried expression on his face. I had rebuilt a couple of engines in my day so I asked if I could look at the problem for him. He agreed to let me check it out. I pulled the fuel line off and had the man turn it over. Nothing was coming out. I followed the fuel line back to an inline fuel filter and took the filter out. This time when he turned it over fuel surged out. I took the filter and banged it on the frame and washed it with some gas and blew the dirt out just like WC did in Bonnie and Clyde. I put it back together and it started right up.
The driver was ecstatic. He got his helpers to move a bunch of things around and then had two of them ride on top of the truck and we jumped into the cab. It felt good to have a ride. He took us all the was to Goma. I had thought that Goma was going to be a town or at least a village but it turned out to be just a crossroads with a little tiny store and a large building that looked like it should have been sitting in a European town instead of out in the middle of a jungles of Zaire. It was two stories high and maybe 150 feet long by 100 feet wide. The large colonial design was made out of what looked like stone. It was a bar and whore house!
We had lunch and quite a few cold beers at the little store with our driver before he left us at Goma and continued on his trip to Burundi. We put up out tent a couple hundred yards from the bar. My buddy wanted to go have some fun with the girls working in the bar. I wanted no such action. So he went in and I sat out in the tent listening to all the commotion going on. There were a lot of soldiers walking around and going in and out of the bar. There were a few fights between the men and a few between men and women and a few women fighting with each other as well. It was a pretty rowdy scene. I was a bit worried about my friend in there with all these rough looking soldier types he was hanging around with. He came out a few hours later drunk and happy. He told me had fun and that he got everything he was looking for and only spent a total of ten dollars. I told him it might be the most expensive ten bucks he had ever spent when his pecker starts to rot away. He just laughed. I think he was still pissed that I had the affair with the blond girl.
We didn't get along very well the next morning. He was hung over and grouchy and I wanted to go south to see Victoria Falls at the Southern border. We ended up going different ways. I found a 34 foot truck going South that would give me a ride so I took it and said goodbye to my buddy. We talked about meeting up in Kampala Uganda or Nairobi Kenya in the next few months. It was raining a lot as we headed South.
Right near Goma the roads were pretty good but the further away we got the worse the road got. It really could not be called a road any more but was just a trail cutting through the jungle. It was just mud, mud and deeper mud. The rain was coming down like crazy. We had to stop many times during downpours because there was zero visibility. We got stuck many times but the helpers would jump out and rock the truck back and forth until they got it free again. This went on until the next mud hole and the next.
We stopped the truck for a few hours at night to let the driver sleep. Three or four days down the road I started to get worried that we would get totally stuck. I guess I could see into the future. We finally hit a large pond sized hole and the truck got stuck right in the middle of it. The wheels just spun and threw up muddy water sucking the truck deeper and deeper into the mud. Then we just sat there. As we sat I noticed that we were still sinking. I though when we hit the axles the sinking would stop. We hit the axles and it kept sinking. Then I thought it would stop when it hit the floor of the truck. Nope. It kept sinking. I decided to bail and took a running leap after throwing my bag into the clear. I landed without injury and stood back to watch as the others also decided to get clear of the truck. They all just waded through the mud with great difficulty to get to the "shore." Unbelievably to me the truck just kept sinking. It finally engulfed the cab and eventually even the high back disappeared from sight. To say that the driver was distraught would have been an understatement.
Then seemingly out of nowhere, about thirty to thirty five men with shovels and ropes showed up ready to negotiate the labor needed to get the truck out of the hole. The driver had no choice but to pay them their ransom demand to get his truck out of the muck. It was now clear that the reason the mud was so deep was that these men dug the hole to start with to capture vehicles so that they could then rescue them for cash. It discouraged me and I turned around and started walking back toward Goma. I wished the driver good luck before I left. As I turned around I could see the workers starting to dig his truck out. The load and the inside of the cab would be coated with mud. The best he could hope for is that the vehicle would start after getting cleaned up a bit and then run long enough to get someplace to seriously clean and fix it. Needless to say the it would need more than the fuel filter getting blown out this time.
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