The Names Are Beautiful

Two weeks on the boat.

Heading first south along the Congo River, which here is known variously by its tributaries – the waters that pour in from elsewhere – or by the wide-spread basins that it forms, through which it travels as a deeper trench in the pan it must have forced and flooded and filled; in previous times.

The names are beautiful, of course (Kalombo, Kabindi, Inakibale. Buya-bwa-dalamba, Kadia, Mpungwe), and the distinctions between the nature of the waters (lake, canal, river, tributary, source) unclear to most but those who live on their shores. Or fish their flowing currents, or travel them frequently.

The river Lualaba is where we first descend, towards the south in the direction of Bukama. The second week we turn backwards (northwards, downriver, with the flow,), back through Lake Kisale, where we negotiate the vastness of a body of water that could be an ocean (from the shore, on stormy, waving, white-capped days at least).

In this place we follow the channel between the stakes (long papyrus stalks, bamboo reeds) stuck in the shallows of the mud on either side. This is how we find the river. We also see where the water changes, from picture-perfect stillness (and it is, in photos the clouds and the lake look the same...mirror images), to where it spins into a muddy surface scrim.

At least we think it is the river. On this wide, wide water, how would you know? Banks and shores spread out in the distance, barely see-able or know-able from the undersides of the clouds.

Fishermen in their canoes shout out to us, toss their arms in the direction we should go. Our captain doesn't listen. He is a non-listening captain. Captain Obama some call him, from his t-shirt only.

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Five base camps and 18,000 children vaccinated. That means 18,000 syringes, too. 18,000 vaccination cards. Boxes of them inside of trunks of them, plus all the other supplies. 18,000 children means teams of up to twenty people at each site, ready to prepare the vaccines, register the names, direct the curious crowds, vaccinate, give each child a droplet of vitamin A, dip pinkies into dye to show the vaccination. It means men and women with megaphones, or simply voices when the megaphones don't come through, in canoes, in churches, strolling through villages...two to three days before. It means planning. And un-planning. It means making it up when you arrive, too. Going with it.

It means setting up and taking down eleven tents, camping cots, two water filters. And all the loading and unloading: days of hauling blue plastic insulated cold boxes from wooden boats and reed-choked banks into the relative shade of a grass-thatched room. Of corralling children to carry boxes of Plumpy Nut on their heads. Of monitoring the distribution so the littlest ones get the lightest boxes, so the life jackets go individually (though one could easily have carried five), so everyone can participate and feel a part of it.

Using children to load boats? The newest expat who joins us mid-week asks me, incredulous.

Today (Friday) it is 5:45am and we are meant to break down the camp, pay everyone, say no to taking the host's son back to school several villages away, distribute the vaccines to the teams, repack the ice packs, reload the boats and be on the river by 6:00am. By 8:00 we should be vaccinating. In another village. Another church. Everything set up and organized, calm and clear, hundreds of children through the line.

We are family, I say, adjusting the box on the closest child's head, watching him step carefully through the mud, judging from the wobble of his puffed out chest whether or not the load is too great. I am leaning forward without thinking about it, concentrating my neck muscles the same way he is concentrating his. Worried as I watch him, and the other five children I've just sent with similar loads, monitoring their progress. I answer the expat without thinking.

In my family children help, I say.

I have spoken without thinking. I think back, later, to what I have said, and find it good. Interesting. For now, though, I push past him to get the next item that needs to be carried through the potato fields, past the clusters of sugarcane, into the muddy shallows, where I will shortly descend, up to my knees and slipping on whatever is below; feeling my abdomen contract as I lift and swing to load whatever next needs loading. It is the most risky of weight-bearing maneuvers; that most graceful of dance. Dip, drop, swing, lift. The same way I'll swing my arm out to stop the children from getting too close to the pile of sharps boxes. And monitor the shove of the oldest ones, make sure the youngest ones are not shoved towards the crumbling bank of the riverside. Though of course they could swim. Play in it everyday.

But it is what we do: you help. I help. We get there together.

And I feel this, that we are family. At 5:45am, as I am unwrapping the cord that I had wrapped around trees to keep these same children at bay so that we could have five feet of air free, space to breathe, space to feel air against our skin, though still watched by hundreds of peeping eyes, chattering mouths, extended fingers towards us – look at that! At nothing but us sitting there, a thirty minute feet break.

We are family, broadly. And though I feel frequently annoyed by small things (by too much intimacy, by wanting privacy), I also feel frequent surges of protection, affection, love. Out here and exposed to the elements (weather only first among them), eating what there is to eat (ugali, fish, lengelenge, fried sweet potatoes) and plenty grateful for it each exhausted evening.

Family. Which is another way of saying, “We are in the same boat.” Which here is literally true, as well as figuratively, as well as metaphorically and spiritually.

Actually, though, there are two boats. So, really, we are in two boats. The first week we had to tie them together at one point because an engine broke, so then we were going at the same pace for a while, connected. But still two boats.

One we call The Fast Boat, which every time someone says it fills my head with images of a boat trying to put on lipstick and frilly short skirts. Absurdly small frilly skirts that would never fit a boat that size. (And how does a boat wear a skirt? And even if it does, what does that say about it, really?)

The other one we call Bateau Pole-Pole. Each hour on The Fast Boat gives you two to three on Bateau Pole-Pole. It really is pole-pole.

The first day back on the river I wanted to hum the theme to Gilligan's Island. Then I thought that would probably be considered bad luck, so I stop myself after a few bars. Still, there was something about our team that was in the same way colorful, adventurous, slightly absurd. Something in the way that we were heading out with what we thought we might need (Nutella and Nescafe prioritized at nearly the same level as the satellite radio backup batteries), to places we do not really know, both prepared with practical skills (we have two skippers and a wealth of medical knowledge) and utterly unprepared with practical skills (I have never learned how to weave a fishing net, or to spear a water-bound creature from the air, so that I, and others, can eat).

Two weeks on the boat. It sounds like the kind of adventure you would otherwise pay good money for. Safari. Adventure camp. And it is. Completely. Better than. Except that I am being asked if I would do it. Invited to do it.

And that is pretty much how I feel about the whole thing.

Grateful. Lucky. Calm. And small. Very small. And happy. And grateful. And lucky. And calm.


*On this trip I also had a video camera, and a still camera, and was asked to keep a journal, which I did, and then to share that material, which is currently being reviewed for its ability to convey...something? Or not convey something? All these lines, the envelopes to push, the lines to respect, no toes over...not sure of the criteria myself actually. Never am. Only grasping after beauty, truth, respect in ways that pretend those words mean the same thing everywhere...

This is why I have written so little about the trip on this blog. Propriety rights until we know more.

Right now it is assumed that all of this imagery and writing will be turned into something (commercial, website feature, promotional multimedia story of some kind or another), identity of said thing unknown and perhaps destined to remain only theoretical.

In the absence of that whole project going anywhere, I will share more of the 25 pages that I wrote. 25 pages!

When did I find the time?! Exhausted late-night scribbles in tents, forgetting feet hot and swollen in my need to try to get something – something of the awe, the difficulty, the beauty – on paper, or the moments of those end-day-sunset-on-the-river trips back to the base camp, leaning into my life jacket pillow precariously wedged against the roof pole of the boat, all the rest of the team asleep among the vaccine carriers like the Sleeping Beauty palace scene; fairy dust sprinkled and we all descend, collapse into the oblivion of dreaming.

Except this was real. Is real.

Until then...