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.