Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  When we were sure the dinner ritual was over, we went out to join the men’s group, carrying with us six liters of Casanova boxed wine. It was the men with whom we needed to speak. The women held no power, and we didn’t even consider approaching them first. Estelle handed all the boxes to Chief Gaspard, who was clearly pleased and gestured for us to sit on a bench opposite him. As two teenage boys scooted down to make room for us, Chief Gaspard shouted a command to Christine in their local language. Momentarily she appeared, leading several other women. They carried three glasses and plastic cups of various shapes and sizes.

  Chief Gaspard handed a box of wine to Christine for her to serve. She first filled the three glasses and passed one to Chief Gaspard and one each to Estelle and me, before filling the plastic cups for the other people. She and the other women shared two or three cups between them. As night approached and the temperature cooled, one of the women started a fire. A chorus of insects and animals from the surrounding forest, which were much louder at night, provided an enchanting acoustical accompaniment for our little meeting by the fire. The cheap boxed wine became more tolerable with every sip.

  Estelle explained that we were a very small project with a small budget, not at all like Coron, the logging company. If we decided to locate the sanctuary here, we would bring some jobs, buy fruits and vegetables for the chimpanzees from the village, contribute to the economy in this way, but our organization would not be bringing a lot of money. We didn’t want to give them false expectations. I didn’t need her to translate what she was saying, because we had discussed what she would say.

  Chief Gaspard and Colbert nodded a lot as Estelle spoke. When the dialogue turned more personal, I made Estelle translate every word.

  One of the women asked if we had children. It was considered more respectable to be married, especially at my age, and the village people gave us the courtesy of first assuming we were married or had been. Many unmarried women in Cameroon have children, but the state of matrimony confers a higher status.

  “I have a son, named Nicholas,” Estelle answered. “He’s with my husband in Yaoundé.” Estelle had married Dana when his son, Nick, was five. Since then she and Dana had raised him, living much of the time in Africa.

  When eyes turned to me, I shook my head. “No, I don’t have children.”

  Everyone looked sad, almost embarrassed, about my plight of childlessness. There was a moment of silence as everyone looked at the ground in sympathy. It was a momentary conversation stopper.

  “How many children do you have?” Estelle finally asked Chief Gaspard, a little too cheerfully.

  “Twelve, with nine living.”

  Estelle and I nodded. It was another conversation stopper. I didn’t know whether to congratulate him on the nine who lived or give condolences for the three who died, but I knew he must have suffered. When Chief Gaspard yawned, we excused ourselves and said good night.

  Later I would learn that two of the other women around the fire were also Chief Gaspard’s wives, and they were the mothers of some of his children. Christine was his youngest and favorite wife at that time in 1999. High-ranking men in the villages usually had many children with multiple women. Children were evidence of virility and power. For a man who had little property, his progeny could be the only evidence. In this particularly impoverished area of Cameroon, people rarely had legal marriage ceremonies. Some had traditional ceremonies in the village, while others just moved in together and called each other husband and wife. If they had children while they were together, and the man acknowledged and managed to support the woman and her kids to some extent, he would be considered the husband and the woman his wife, even if he moved on to another woman. Chief Gaspard had a mud house where he and Christine were staying, and his two older wives had houses nearby.

  Back in our mud house I lay awake on the bamboo cot listening to the animal sounds of the village night. Animals that I imagined were rats, and now know were just as likely to have been geckos or huge cockroaches, crawled noisily across the raffia roof above us. Eventually, thanks to my exhaustion and a fair share of cheap wine, I dozed off.

  We awoke at dawn and packed our belongings. When we emerged from the hut, a group of women carrying machetes and balancing empty baskets on their heads, many with babies on their backs, were leaving the village to work their farms—plots of land in the national forest that they had claimed, cleared, and planted. Three young children followed closely behind them. The bellies of the children were distended from protein deficiency, and even from a distance, in the bright morning sunlight I could see bald patches on their small heads from fungal “ringworm” infections. We waved to them, and the women and children smiled and waved back. One of the younger women called “Bye-bye” to me, maybe the only English she knew. I replied “bye-bye.”

  As we approached Chief Gaspard and Colbert, again sitting on the bench where we first encountered them, they rose to bid us farewell. With a smile, Chief Gaspard accepted the money I handed him for the room, the same amount I paid Colbert for his services as a guide. As we turned to walk toward the Pajero, Estelle assured the chief that we would see them again.

  We drove about a half a mile from the village and parked along the dirt road where a small trail cut into the forest. Overconfident and eager to get a feel for the forest at our own pace, we set out on foot, equipped with my compass and a machete. We followed the tiny trail, which intersected other tiny trails. I thought the paths must have been used by village people for hunting and for gathering things they needed. The great variety of trees, undergrowth, colorful insects, and strange sounds in the African forest were fascinating, exotic. The Mbargue Forest was drier than some we had explored. It was actually a mosaic of savanna and forest, with the forest especially dense along the routes of small streams. Natural habitats for chimpanzees include both rain forests and drier forests like this one.

  Estelle and I walked happily for over an hour, sticking to the trails. When we started trying to make our way back to the dirt road where we had parked the Pajero, we were confused about which trail to take. We knew we needed to walk northwest to get to the road and our compass pointed the way, but none of the winding trails were going our way. We would need to use our machete to cut a straight track back to the road. As I gazed upward, trying to see the direction of the sun through a combination of dense canopy and cloud cover, unnecessarily double-checking the accuracy of our compass, I heard Estelle scream something unintelligible. By the time I turned and saw her retreating backside, she was barely visible on the narrow trail, running fast away from me. All at once, dozens of painful bites on my legs, and in my underwear, added misery to my confusion.

  “What the hell! ” I shouted to no one in particular, since Estelle was long gone.

  At exactly the same moment, my eyes focused on the sea of insects teeming across my shoes and my ears finally registered what Estelle had said: “Ants!!” I squealed and cussed and bolted after her, trying to reach a part of the trail without ants. Looking down at the trail, I didn’t notice as I rounded a bend that Estelle was standing right in the middle of the path, practically naked, picking off ants. I crashed into her, sending her stumbling forward. She caught herself against a tree trunk and cushioned my fall as I clutched at her and stayed on my feet.

  Estelle was not the type to suffer this clumsy slapstick silently, but it was no time for useless scolding. As soon as she was solidly on her feet again, she turned her attention to the ants still biting her.

  Within seconds I too was mostly naked and picking at little clinging flesh eaters, which refused to be flicked off easily. I soon learned to squash them quickly between my fingernails, so they couldn’t cling to a finger and bite again. Like virtually everyone else working in Central African forests, I came to know these carnivorous ants well. They don’t sting like the fire ants of Mississippi that I knew as a child, but they attack by the millions and literally eat their victims. They can quickly kill an injured or trapped animal. Fo
r healthy humans walking in the forest, they are merely a painful annoyance, but people who are accustomed to the forests don’t take their eyes from the dirt for long.

  We finally managed to wander out of the Mbargue Forest onto the road and find the Pajero by four o’clock. We headed toward the small town of Minta, where we planned to spend the night. Our map showed us that the road was unpaved all the way—the kind of narrow red dirt track that connected towns and villages in much of rural Cameroon—and we knew it was too late to be starting out. We would be finishing the drive at night, which could be dangerous. Bandits could stop a vehicle on a rural road by laying down a long two-by-four with nails sticking up from it. Cars that didn’t stop couldn’t go far on four flat tires. Police also used the nails-across-the-road technique to stop cars at checkpoints, which sometimes seemed impromptu and in the middle of nowhere, so it could be hard to tell who was trying to stop you. It was best to avoid traveling at night. When we were two hours into the drive and the clouds darkened, I suspected that our misfortunes of the day were not quite over. As twilight descended, so did a torrential rain, and the combination limited my visibility to only a couple of yards. Within a few minutes the road was slick and the Pajero’s four-wheel drive didn’t seem to be working at all. I managed to slip and slide slowly forward until I was forced to stop at a pond of water that stretched across the road.

  I had seen rain-filled basins making travel difficult on Cameroon’s roads. During rainy season, heavy logging trucks made deep basins in the soft mud roadways, and rain accumulated in them. But this basin of water, extending two yards beyond the road on both sides, was a small pond that completely blocked the road. The road was too narrow and slippery to turn around. I tried to back up, but immediately realized that backward driving afforded me even less control than I had going forward. I was sure to slide off the road and get us stuck if I didn’t stop. I turned off the car. The rain wasn’t letting up, and it was getting dark quickly. We didn’t know what lay ahead of us, on the other side of the pond, but the last village we had passed, where people might have welcomed us, lay many miles behind us.

  “We have to stay here in the car until morning,” I announced to Estelle.

  “No way!” Estelle exclaimed. She was one of the bravest, most capable people I knew, but she had a little quirk about sleeping in the dark. She needed light to sleep. I knew that was going to be problematic. There was no light at all from the sky. No way our flashlight batteries would last until morning. I felt badly for Estelle, but I secretly thanked the invisible stars that she had used the last of our candles in the village the previous night—at least I wouldn’t worry about the car catching fire, as I often had in hotel rooms when she left candles burning.

  “There’s nothing else to do,” I stated. “When it’s light, we’ll figure out how to get out of here. We’ll be safe. With all this rain, no one else will be able to come this way in a car, and no one will walk here tonight.” Since I had been a child I had always reassured people compulsively. One Saturday evening as a teenager in Mississippi, I was driving on Interstate 55 with my cousin Denise in the passenger seat when a drunk driver hit us hard from behind. Completely out of control, my mother’s car completed two 360-degree turns and crossed a wide median before finally coming to a stop facing oncoming traffic. During the terrifying spin, as Denise screamed, I struggled to raise my voice above hers to reassure her over and over, “We’re okay! We’re okay!” Now, stranded on this dirt track in Central Africa, I told Estelle, perhaps a little too casually, “We’ll be fine!”

  We were out of drinking water and already thirsty, so I used my pocketknife to cut two plastic water bottles in half and put them on top of the Pajero to catch some rain. Estelle crawled onto the backseat and through the long, dark night we talked—mostly adding up the pros and cons of the Mbargue Forest as our new sanctuary site.

  “The forest itself is beautiful, the villagers are nice, and once the bridge across the Yong River is finished, the train going to Bélabo will give access year-round,” I said, cheerfully pointing out what Estelle already knew. Jean Liboz was building a bridge across the river to facilitate movement of Coron’s logs. When it was finished, the town of Bélabo, which had train service from Yaoundé, would be only fifteen miles from Bikol. Two of the other potential sanctuary sites we had looked at were inaccessible during rainy season, which ruled them out.

  “There are enough villages to grow food,” Estelle said. “Farming is part of their culture, which is really good.” Down south in Campo, another place we had explored, the people lived off the sea and did little farming.

  “There aren’t enough people in Bikol to hire for all the positions we’ll eventually need to fill,” I said.

  “But it’ll be better to hire from different villages,” Estelle said. “For one thing, when someone in the village dies, we won’t lose the whole workforce for the funeral.” I laughed, but Estelle wasn’t kidding. If I had known then what I did a few years later, when I had seen how many funerals there were in the village—how often young people who shouldn’t have died in the twenty-first century did, indeed, die—I wouldn’t have laughed.

  We agreed that the Mbargue Forest met our criteria better than any other place we had explored. Our conversation, as usual, touched on personal issues too—difficult childhoods, families, lost loves. Estelle was a strong and capable woman, wise beyond her twenty-six years in many ways, but she was fourteen years younger than I was. When we spoke of personal relationships, when her emotional vulnerability showed through her tough-girl façade, I often felt maternal toward her. I never told her this though, because I thought she would have found it condescending.

  At one point, after dozing off, I woke to the suffocating stink of heavy cigarette smoke. I could see the glow of Estelle’s cigarette. The rain had stopped, but it was still black outside—no trace of moonlight or starlight filtered through the persisting clouds. I rolled down my window and breathed in the cool, clean air.

  “You’re giving me cancer,” I said grumpily.

  “Sorry.” She took another long drag on her cigarette and rolled down her own window a little more.

  At dawn, the pond looked even bigger than it had the night before. The road was still too slippery to back up. We had two options: wait at least half a day for the sun to dry the road a little, then try to back up until we could find a place to turn around, or try to drive through the pond. I took off my shoes, rolled up my pants, and walked out into the water, soft mud squishing through my toes. The water was up to the middle of my thighs at its deepest part.

  “It’s definitely too deep to drive through,” I said.

  “Maybe we can drain it,” Estelle said hopefully.

  By the time I had waded out of the water, she had brought out the machete, our only tool that could be used for digging, from the back of the Pajero. This was the beginning of my understanding to always carry a shovel when I traveled on bush roads. Estelle strode purposefully toward the banked mud that formed the wall of the pond off the side of the road and started hacking at the mud with the machete, slinging reddish-brown globs everywhere. Soon she had made a shallow V-shaped trough across the top of the bank, finding that the deeper she cut, the more solid was the mud. By removing chunks of it with the blade of the machete, she was trying to make a trench in the bank of the pond deep enough for the water to drain off to the side.

  “You’re brilliant!” I encouraged her. By this time her clothes, face, and hair were dappled with mud.

  It was slow going and after about five minutes of swinging the machete, Estelle was exhausted. I took over until my own arms stopped cooperating and she took the machete back. Before I got another turn with it, the sludgy brown water was flowing slowly through our trench. We deepened the trench several times when the water flow slowed to a trickle. Then we labored another half hour to make a second trench on the other side and drained more water there.

  When I waded out again, the water was just below my knees.


  “I think we should go for it,” I said, and Estelle nodded her agreement. If we got stuck, we might be in real trouble. We were out of drinking water, and I figured we were at least fifty miles from Minta.

  I cranked the Pajero, we prayed silently, and I started through the water, slow and steady. Where the water was deepest the wheels started spinning and the Pajero fishtailed, creating waves that lapped the walls of the mud banks. For a second I thought we would get stuck, but I kept my foot lightly on the accelerator, and we kept inching forward until the wheels found traction again. After what seemed like much longer than the few seconds that it was, we arrived on the other side.

  “Yeah!!” We both cheered loudly with relief.

  “Good driving!” Estelle complimented me.

  By 10:30 A.M. we had stopped at an auberge (small hotel) in the town of Minta. There was no running water, but we paid the attendant to bring us each a bucket of water from the well to clean the dried mud from our hair and bodies. We had decided to detour through Minta on our way to Yaoundé in hopes of meeting with the divisional officer (D.O.) for this district in which the Mbargue Forest stood. It was an important step. He was one of the local representatives of Cameroon’s many-tiered national government, and we would need his support if we were to build a sanctuary in the district.