One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo

by Aaron Barlow

  “The millet here is sour,” concluded Bwindi guide Enos Komunda shortly after our arrival. He and the others seemed to enjoy the trip, but missed Bwindi immediately and sent radio messages back to the park every day. Although we had traveled less than sixty miles, it was a major outing and the farthest any of them had ever been from home.

  I rose early one morning to accompany a group of tourists into the gorge. Cathy had asked me to help evaluate her newest guide, Milton, and I looked forward to spending an hour with chimpanzees, comparing the experience to gorilla viewing.

  Heavy sunlight shone red through the dry season haze as we prepared to set off. The morning temperature already approached Bwindi’s on a hot day, but cool breezes rose up from the gorge, bringing the promise of forest and shade. Cathy’s “Fig Tree” Camp sat on a wide grassy plateau, overlooking the park’s dry plains and the gorge itself, a steep-sided chasm carved by the rushing Chamborro River. The savanna stretched away across the level floor of the Rift Valley, stopped in the west by the sheer face of the Rwenzori Mountains, book-ended by the shimmering waters of Lakes Edward and George. Through it all, the gorge cut an incongruous ribbon of green, a winding, rainforest microcosm trapped in a sea of dusty plains and arid acacia.

  We drove along a rutted game track that followed the rim of the gorge, passing groups of shaggy grey waterbuck and a small herd of Uganda kob, the graceful, long-horned antelope pictured on Uganda’s national seal. They stopped grazing to watch us, tails flicking, coppery coats a pale reflection of the iron-rich soil. After a slow mile, we found the trackers waiting in the shade of a thorn tree. They had left camp at dawn to hike along the edge of the forest, listening for the unmistakable whoops and ascending shrieks of Chamborro’s thirty resident chimps.

  Unlike gorillas, who leave a clear trail through the undergrowth, chimpanzees can travel long distances without ever touching the ground. They spend more than half their time in trees, and are best located by following their vocalizations. While a troop may contain dozens of individual apes, they live in constantly shifting social structures of sub-groups and families. Calling out in the morning hours allows scattered individuals and feeding parties to maintain contact over a wide area, announcing dangers or the discovery of a particularly delicious fruit tree. The trackers concentrated on pinpointing the noise, then raced toward the chimps along the gorge’s intricate network of forest paths and game trails.

  I introduced myself to the tourists, a pair of middle-aged couples from the States, then turned things over to Milton. He reviewed the rules and regulations of tracking. His briefing sounded polished, very similar to the one we used in Bwindi. After a few questions, we began our descent into the gorge. One of the tourists dropped back to chat with me.

  “We couldn’t get gorilla permits,” he explained, referring to the increasingly popular tracking program at Bwindi. “All sold out. If we’re going to see any apes at all on this trip, then today’s the day.”

  I assured him that the chances were better than eighty percent. Although the chimps were highly mobile, and less predictable than gorillas, the gorge confines their movements, and they rarely eluded Cathy’s trackers.

  The trail sloped sharply downward. Soon we were at eye level with the forest canopy, a wall of green dominated by the crowns of towering figs and ironwood. Black and white colobus monkeys lolled like strange pied fruit in the treetops, basking in the morning sun. We passed directly beneath them; they peered down unconcerned, like wizened shamans with their white-bearded faces and long-fringed coats. Considered one of the least-evolved primates, colobus monkeys lack opposing thumbs and have chambered, ruminant-like stomachs. They digest vegetation with the efficiency of cattle, and live in tiny home ranges, surrounded by a feast of rainforest leafage. Chamborro supported one of the densest populations in Africa, with dozens of family troops scattered across the canopy. Every morning they greeted the sunrise with their gravelly calls, like a chorus of huge, baritone tree frogs.

  My stomach gave a disturbing lurch as the trackers led us toward the river, but dyspepsia had become a way of life and I dismissed it. We walked along a hippo trail, worn smooth and deep where the great beasts climbed out of the river each night to graze. The forest felt refreshingly cool; stray beams of sunlight filtered down though the canopy-like veins of gold in a shady underworld. Crossing the stream on a wide log, Milton stopped and motioned toward the treetops on the opposite shore. A dark shape melted away into the green, followed by an ear-shattering cry. We ran, trying to catch up with the chimp as it brachiated high above us. Finally, it came to rest on a broad limb, squatting with its back against the trunk, chewing absently on a handful of leaves.

  We had stopped running, but my stomach was still very much in motion, rumbling ominously, with occasional twinges of pain. I tried to attribute the feeling to excitement, but my thoughts crept back to the greasy roadside tea house where Enos and I had shared a plate of eggs. In spite of the shade, I began to sweat.

  Two more chimps appeared on the branch above us, a sub-adult and an old male with thin, wispy hair, and age-marks spotting his broad, dark face. They joined the first and all three began grooming one another, lined up along the branch like stone carvings in the eaves of a great cathedral.

  The tourists snapped photographs, and the man I’d spoken with gave me a smile and a double “thumbs up.” But I watched the apes with an increasing sense of urgency; my stomach continued to roil. Finally, I drifted to the back of the group and motioned for Milton.

  “Very good briefing today,” I began with a smile, “but you didn’t mention what to do if a tourist needs to make a ‘long call’ while they’re in the gorge. What is your policy on that one?”

  He looked puzzled. “I don’t know. It’s never happened.”

  “Ah,” I whispered. “Well, in Bwindi, we always tell people they should borrow a panga (machete), dig a hole, and bury their waste so it can’t infect the animals.”

  “It’s never happened,” he repeated sternly. “But I guess we would do the same.”

  “Good, good. Remember to say that next time.” I patted him on the shoulder and looked at my watch while he returned to the tourists. Twenty minutes to go. Then the long hike up to the van and the drive back to camp.

  I lasted for another quarter of an hour, pacing unobtrusively at the back of the group, before an audible percolating sound and a sudden cold sweat told me it was now or never.

  “Milton,” I whispered, tight-lipped. He was staring intently up at the chimps and didn’t hear me. “Milton!” He looked back, startled, and several of the tourists turned around. I smiled, trying to look casual. “Give me your panga,” I mumbled, “Your panga. Now!”

  I took the blade, nodded to the trackers, and sprint-shuffled down the trail like a Japanese dancer in a tight kimono. Ten yards, twenty…too late. My body let loose and I felt a sudden, overwhelming relief accompanied by warm dampness in all the wrong places. The smell was indescribable.

  Just out of sight of the tourists, I dove into the underbrush and ripped off my pants, scrabbling around for dry leaves to clean up the mess. I was frantic. The group would be coming this way any minute and here was the Peace Corps Volunteer: naked from the waist down, burying his underwear in a shallow grave. After brief consideration, I buried my socks too.

  Thankfully, Milton overshot his hour with the chimps by five minutes, and the tourists were still packing their cameras when I sauntered back to the group. I handed Milton his panga, then quickly took my place at the rear, as far downwind as possible.

  The talkative man lagged behind again, questioning me about life in the Peace Corps.

  “I’ve thought about volunteering after I retire,” he said eagerly. “But I had no idea the Peace Corps did this kind of thing. How marvelous!”

  I nodded and smiled, trying to stay out of olfactory range. Finally we reached the top of the gorge, a
nd everyone piled into the jeep, a small, crowded vehicle that had been sweltering in the African sun.

  I lingered on the trail, pretending to look at a bird and hoping they’d leave me behind.

  “Mr. Tour!” Milton called.

  “I’ll just walk, Milton,” I said confidently. “See you at camp.”

  “No, no,” he explained. “There are lions. You can’t walk here alone.”

  “O.K., then.” I shrugged and climbed into the back seat, squeezing between the trackers, and the friendly man who was considering the Peace Corps. The door slid shut with a loud thunk. There was a moment of horrified silence as my presence became unmistakably known in the stifling interior of the car. Everyone lunged to unroll their windows and the driver took off, bouncing away over the rough track, trying desperately to make a little wind.

  No one spoke on the ride back to camp, and I could feel the man next to me trying to edge away on the narrow seat. From the look on his face, I think I cost the Peace Corps a likely recruit.

  Dr. Thor Hanson, who served in Uganda from 1993-95, is a conservation biologist and author based in the Pacific Northwest. He spent his Peace Corps years habituating wild mountain gorillas in Uganda, an experience he described in his first book, The Impenetrable Forest. Since then, Hanson’s research and conservation activities have taken him around the globe. His second book, Feathers: the Evolution of a Natural Miracle, is due from Basic Books in 2011.

  Near Death in Africa

  Nancy Biller

  Systems and expectations, especially in the wake of colonialism, can alter even the best of intentions.

  I have retreated to the far corner of a high school classroom. My eyes are closed; I try to transport myself to a place where I can see how absurd it was for me to choose to come to Africa to meet my death before the age of twenty-three.

  There had been earlier threats. Lying under a mosquito net during training weeks at the Lycée Féminin in N’djamena, Chad, after suffering from weeks of dysentery, I heard the French nurse say “oh la la” when she took my pulse; I was sure I was going to die. The day I accidentally bit into a chicken bone and a piece of my front tooth chipped off: I was saddened to think that all the orthodontic work I’d suffered through eight years earlier would hardly have been worth the effort. My teeth and other body parts would be destroyed bit by bit, a consequence of having requested Chad for my Peace Corps experience. At my posting in Bongor, a French doctor finally found Shigella in a stool sample, easily cured with antibiotics. I maintained intestinal health by consuming yogurt on a daily basis, making it from powdered milk and a bit of starter purchased across the Logone River in upscale (French butter and yogurt available) Maroua, Cameroon. The yogurt idea came from advice I’d found in Adelle Davis’s Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, one of the few books I’d packed when leaving New York.

  The fear I felt in the Terminale classroom with screen- and glass-free windows was different. I was suffering from something other than a microorganism attack or nutritional deficiency.

  I was an English teacher for students in their last year of high school. These students had spent many years without teachers who, in France, would have prepared them by that point for the baccalaureate exam that provides those who pass with advantages in seeking employment or a university education.

  My students were bright, but they did not have enough training to pass. I did not have enough skill to make up for the years when the English teacher had not shown up or had left in the middle of a term.

  Toward the end of the Terminale year, teachers administered the “bac blanc” in their respective subject areas. The grade earned would be considered in the overall term grade. The bac blanc was something like the PSAT—a practice exam giving students an idea of how they would fare on the real bac (administered in the capital) and to help them concentrate on areas of weakness. Those areas were deep and plentiful for my students. Nevertheless, I administered the exam and imposed rules. I explained that any time a student spoke to another during the exam I would deduct ten points. I believed that I was doing the right thing, creating test conditions close to what they would experience in N’djamena later in the year. A number of students challenged me by speaking repeatedly; this would be reflected in their grades.

  After the bac blanc, school was closed for days while the teachers graded exams.

  One of those days when school was closed, after I had completed my grading, I ran into some fellow teachers at a badminton game hosted by the Chadian/Russian physician couple in town. The teachers were from the Soviet Union and they taught Russian. The year was 1978. Having grown up at a time when US school children were taught that the Soviets might invade at any time and when the apartment building where I grew up had prominent fallout shelters, I was amazed when I first arrived at this high school to find myself in real-life contact with Soviets.

  By the time we were correcting the bac blanc, the amazement had dissipated. The teachers asked me how my students had done on the exam. I trusted them as colleagues and reported that, sadly, the results were very poor. In contrast, apparently, Russian scores were strong.

  I believe that those Russian teachers then informed my students that they would receive poor grades in English, setting the stage for what happened when we returned to school after the break.

  The day I handed out graded exams, my bright, strapping students were ready. They rose up, insisting that I give them higher grades. They surrounded me, arms in the air, fists clenched, demanding justice. I backed into the corner and closed my eyes.

  I expected to be crushed. Other teachers and students passed by and saw what was happening. Some kind soul called for the help of the censeur, (the individual in charge of discipline). It seemed like hours before he arrived and, along with the chef de classe (class leader) cleared a path for me to pass between angry students.

  My Peace Corps experience taught me that I did not have the talent to be a good teacher. But it also gave me my first glimpses of the beauty and grandeur of Africa, the dignity of its people, and the enormity of their challenges. I now have two sons, both enrolled in an academically competitive public high school. Their teachers are sometimes less experienced than parents would like, and are absent almost as much as the students would wish but, thanks to my experience in Chad, I know how incredibly fortunate my children are. As I tell those boys I love so deeply, and anyone else who happens to ask, my Peace Corps experience, despite what seemed near-death experiences thirty years ago, was just about the best and most important of my life, second only to motherhood and all the challenges it presents in the technology-laden, materialistic society in which we live today.

  Nancy Biller served as a high school English teacher in Chad (in Bongor and Sarh), from 1977–79. Her commitment there ended abruptly when civil war broke out half way through her second year. All Volunteers were evacuated to Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon. As the Administrative Director for Global Health Programs at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine, she has the privilege of advising many young and idealistic medical students who are interested in volunteering in low-resource areas of the world.

  Boeuf Madagaskara

  Jacquelyn Z. Brooks

  The food we eat…put before us perhaps more graphically than might be expected!

  I lived on the southernmost tip of “The Red Island”—Madagascar—where I taught English to the Malagasy. Fort Dauphin was a dusty, run-down little town with no repairs to the roads since the French left in the 1950s. In spite of their poverty, the Malagasy were happy, loved parties and entertaining the vazah, their word for stranger.

  I seldom left the harbor town of Fort Dauphin. One evening, on his way to the local hotel, a PCV named Greg walked onto my verandah, which was overhung with lovely wild orchids and jasmine much like an old southern plantation. Smelling the French jasmine, Greg said he understood why I never went traveling, but he
wanted to invite me to his village just outside Ambovombe in western Madagascar.

  I had once been there to a teachers’ meeting. It had been market day for the Malagasy cowboys who herded the huge hump-backed zebu, raising so much dust we had to duck into a local bar. The whole time I was in the bar sipping a Malagasy Three Horse Beer, I watched the frenzied cowboys with their whips and guns as if transported to a Western movie. I wasn’t eager to visit that part of the country again.

  I told Greg that, much as I’d like to go to the celebration for the opening of the school he’d built, I had no transportation. He knew I was trying to get out of it.

  “Don’t worry, cutie,” he said. His face was streaked with dirt and sweat, his shirt caked with red earth from biking over unspeakable roads. “This is not a date. I need a lovely vazah in the front row to make my school opening official. The principal from Fort Dauphin lycee and two of his English teachers are going in his truck. I told him you might ride along.”

  The morning of the celebration, we set off as the sun rose. I wore a clean dress because Malagasy women never wear slacks or jeans. We bounced and swerved over broken rutted roads for over three hours. The two teachers next to me were dressed beautifully in white dresses with printed lambas tied around their waists, but they smelled very bad from lack of deodorant and toothpaste. I had grown used to their acrid smell; what is more I had grown to love these teachers for their courage in schools that had no books, paper or even screens on the windows. They were paid the equivalent of ten dollars a week and most lived in shabby rented rooms, going home to their families on weekends. Lanto and Nuorina sang as we bounced along, songs about cows, cyclones, moonlight, and untrustworthy lovers.