by Ofir Drori
In Pana, we sat around the night fire, which burned to keep away moot-moots. The son of the chief pointed at what I assumed was Venus and said, “Is that a U.S .satellite? I know they’re spying on our village.” He went into his hut. He’d been feeding us, though he’d already mentioned he wanted the canoe as a gift. When he returned to the fire, he was carrying two pots that he set on the ground at our feet.
He said, “Ca c’est la gorille.”
Chills washed over me. I shook my head. David and I glanced at each other. There wasn’t a chance he would eat it. He tore away a hunk of couscous manioc and faked dipping it into the molasses-black gorilla stew. “Ofi,” he whispered, “it’s too dark for them to see and it’s okay if we give it all back to them.”
He was wrong, I thought, if we were going to get revenge. For if they were to believe we were hunters, we couldn’t refuse the spoils of the hunt.
I stared at the chunks of gorilla meat in the pot and pulled my legs to my chest. Here it was, almost by accident, the confrontation I hadn’t come looking for, that I hadn’t known to look for, but that was so eerily perfect I might have. Every instinct in my body screamed to run, to back away, to take shelter. A moran of the Maasai searched for the lion, not to prove to others who he was, but to determine who he was for himself. The confrontation sitting before me on the ground didn’t put my life at risk. But whether I had the tools to cope with the emotional fallout of eating the meat of an ape, I had no way of knowing. That I didn’t know this and that I might easily push the pot away were precisely the reasons why my heart was thumping against my knees. The true journey was the one from which you chose not to return. I thought of Future, Jack, and Kita as I forced the first bite of flesh into my mouth. Then a second bite. A third.
I felt sick.
“Thanks,” David said, handing the pots back. “We already ate in the other village.”
No one would understand this. No one would understand but David, and part of me wished even he weren’t here so I might be able to forget. Though it was too deep a cut to leave any hope of forgetting. I entered the house of the son of the chief of Pana and fed sugar cubes into my mouth.
* In 2008, Elad released his fifth album of experimental music, which was described by a critic as a “laid-back, evilly-humming introverted rattlesnake of electric drone.”
OCTOBER 2004
Thailand
SUIT ADVENTURES AND THE COCKROACHES OF THE SEA
The high-rise hotel of the Japanese delegation stood on the far side of Sukhumvit Road, a giant obstacle of access lanes, overpasses, tracks of the Bangkok sky train and cars zipping by at 100km an hour. Takang Ebai and Francis Tarla, both Cameroonian officials, looked at me, then back at the massive road, and we laughed as if it were our first time out of the bush.
“We can’t cross here!” Takang said. “Let’s move down. Maybe there’s a way.”
We strolled up Sukhumvit, chatting like men scouting for a bar, unconcerned with whether we were late for dinner with the Japanese delegation. We walked a kilometer along the highway and U-turned and found a small gap in the fence. And we sprinted across traffic in our suits.
We’d come to Thailand, along with 1,200 delegates from some 150 countries, for the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Vincent’s never-ending chess match had succeeded in getting LAGA onto Cameroon’s delegation, a rare feat at CITES for an NGO. In Bangkok, countries would debate and vote on proposals related to increasing or decreasing protection under international law for dozens of species, including elephants and whales. On the eve of the conference, the Japanese invited the Cameroonian delegation and me to dinner.
The marble lobby of the hotel and then the mirrored elevator put an end to conversation. I looked at Takang and Takang looked at Francis. All of us were nervous about what was waiting high up in the luxury hotel. CITES proposals and laws protecting wildlife were in direct conflict with Japanese economic interests, and, in the days leading up to the conference, the Japanese ambassador to Cameroon had been aggressive in working the halls of MINEF.
Takang, the new director of wildlife, was a forthright and honest man so overwhelmed by the breakfast buffet at our hotel that he’d insisted we not waste the abundance on breakfast alone and try to eat enough to stay full until dinner. Francis, the director of the Wildlife School of Garoua, was short, round, and full of laughter.
The elevator opened, and a Thai bellhop directed us through a restaurant to a private dining room. Two young Japanese men stood by the door. The head Japanese delegate, Kiyoshi Koinuma, was seated at a circular wood table with four other Japanese men, the head Norwegian delegate, and a Tunisian.
“Did you have a hard time finding the hotel?” said the elder Japanese.
“No, no,” Takang said, glancing at Francis. “No problem at all.”
Takang sat and shifted uncomfortably.
“So Bangkok is a beautiful city, right?” Kiyoshi said. “You should take your time and enjoy yourselves. You know there are many things to do in Bangkok.”
“Yes, of course,” Takang said, waving his hand. “We are sure to enjoy everything. Oh, yes.”
Takang had great flaring ears.
The waiters descended and loaded tiny bowls onto the table and began spinning a built-in carousel, wheeling bowls around the table’s curve with such precision it seemed rehearsed. A bowl stopped in front of me. I picked up a spoon and stared down at a piece of meat floating in colorless broth.
A younger Japanese man at the table began speaking: “Have you had a chance—”
“If you want explore the city,” Kiyoshi said, interrupting the younger Japanese, “we can take you around. You don’t only need to work; you need to enjoy.”
Francis was squeezing his napkin.
We emptied our small white bowls and placed them on the giant carousel. They were whisked around the curve of the table and replaced by more small white bowls. I stared down at another piece of meat floating in colorless broth. Takang smiled at me and let out a little laugh as he sipped from his spoon, no doubt thinking as I was that it wasn’t food.
“What you had first was shark fin soup,” Kiyoshi said. “And this is another shark fin soup, which is better.”
The Norwegian, Oystein Storkersen, leaned toward Takang and said, “How was the ivory dialogue?”
“Tiring,” Takang said. “Too tiring.”
“To me it seems to be a simple issue,” Storkersen said, setting his elbows on the table. “They just have to sell that ivory and that’s it.”
CITES had relaxed the ban on the international trade in ivory and approved the sale of the Southern African ivory stockpiles to the Japanese. But Japan had not met the conditions to become a buyer, and the heated debate between countries before the conference concerned whether to allow the sale to proceed. There were two camps: pro-use and pro-conservation. The pro-use side, supported by most everyone, including Cameroon, claimed that in order to preserve wildlife it had to be used—hunted and traded. Kill them to save them. On the conservation side, in the entire convention, only the Israelis, because of Bill Clark, the Indians; and the Kenyans, led by Patrick Omondi, were strong voices for conservation. The EU and the U.S. were conspicuously quiet on the ivory issue.
“Selling the stockpile is not as simple as you present,” I said to the Norwegian, though it occurred to me that I shouldn’t reveal my position. “The issue is what will happen with elephants, not with the existing ivory. Selling any ivory will likely lead to a surge in poaching and will open a bigger window for illegal dealing, with CITES permits used for laundering it. This is a major problem in Cameroon. Our elephants are being killed off.”
Kiyoshi began to speak in a loud voice. He moved the subject from the savannah to the ocean and criticized NGOs for acting irrationally and claimed they were harming the fishing industry. “They don’t understand the importance of fisheries.”
Takang and Francis seemed relieved that they didn’t
have to talk.
“We have a full scientific program studying whales,” said another Japanese. “There are too many of them.”
“Every time people interfere in our industry and stop us from whaling, it’s contrary to science,” Kiyoshi said. “What are the whales?” He paused and looked around the table. “They are the cockroaches of the sea.”
Kiyoshi laughed, and his laughter spread to the Japanese on either side of him, to the Norwegian and then to the young Japanese still standing at the door. Outnumbered, Takang and Francis also laughed.
More bowls of soup were spun in front of us, emptied, and ushered off.
Kiyoshi became quiet, then said, “We are very disappointed that our chair was not chosen for Committee I. We proposed a very competent man and he was not considered.” The chairman of Committee I oversaw species proposals, including those concerning elephants and whales.
I looked down at the worn knees of my old loaned suit.
Kiyoshi put a sheet of paper on the table in front of him and with two fingers spun the carousel. The paper rode past the younger Japanese and the Tunisian and stopped in front of Takang. I was close enough to read, “Cameroon: Thank you, chairman, Cameroon would like to express its disappointment that the candidate proposed by Japan to chair Committee I was not considered and to protest that no explanation has been given as to why such a competent man …”
Takang looked up.
Kiyoshi said, “Read this tomorrow at the conference.”
The meeting ended.
We took the elevator down and walked up the road looking for a place to eat.
“Director,” I said to Takang, “what are you going to do?”
“What can I do?” he said. “They are the Japanese.”
LAGA was running simultaneous investigations and making arrests in provinces across Cameroon. Many potential donors commended our work, but the risk scared them away. They said, “What happens if someone gets killed in the field? How will it reflect on us?” In spite of the worries, the World Bank and others had provided funding. And IFAW had sponsored my flight to Thailand.
But many moneyless months meant our team often worked without pay. Eunice and Julius had contributed their own resources to fund operations. I’d sold a guitar so we could eat. The constant struggle for funding had benefits, though, by weeding out those seeking comfortable jobs and by selecting a class of people driven by principle, pride, and the need to belong to a team. Every new LAGA member had to eat the proverbial shit by proving he or she could go to the field without funding and produce an operation. Those who couldn’t invent solutions, we did not want.
LAGA’s first investigator, Christopher, had died. His family thought it was from lung cancer, as he was a heavy smoker and had been coughing for months. The whole LAGA team attended his funeral.
With trust beginning to break between players in the animal trade in Cameroon and with the ability to complete transactions growing more difficult, dealers were evolving their methods, demanding that sales occur inside their homes or inside corrupt police stations, moving their contraband, arriving to sales without it, randomly switching meeting places and times. Dealers were cautioning our undercover agents to stay away from wildlife trading, warning them about the very sting operations we were setting up to arrest them in. We’d mapped the flow of ivory and endangered species along international trade routes through Central and West Africa. And we were arresting the major criminals of the trade—a police commissioner, wealthy ivory dealers who’d spent lifetimes building international relationships, foreign nationals, a man who admitted to killing 278 elephants, and a drug dealer who activated poachers.
In the first attempt to replicate the LAGA model elsewhere in Africa, Galit had traveled to Kinshasa. She was thrilled when the minister of environment agreed to our terms and welcomed us to start law enforcement in DRC. But her excitement vanished as the meeting ended when the warlord-turned-minister sent the translator out and asked her in English how she could help him get weapons from Israel.
The prime minister of Thailand opened CITES. With his face projected on screens said to be the largest in Southeast Asia, he declared, “The queen of Thailand is a conservationist.” The man who’d planned the whole conference, Thailand’s director of wildlife, was absent; he’d been sacked for approving the illegal export of one hundred tigers to China.
I participated in the Export Quotas Working Group, which was charged with setting limits on sports hunting for endangered and threatened species, including elephants, leopards, and lions. The obese American delegate chairing the group seemed to open the meeting by closing it. Though we had two weeks to work, she said, “Since we don’t have enough time in Thailand, I think we should work by email. I can do most of the work for you and send you a draft decision. My friend here is my neighbor in Washington, so we will do it together.” She pointed to her friend. He was the head of Safari Club International, the largest hunting organization in the world. Takang recognized the man as the sponsor of annual trips of African delegates to Las Vegas where they discussed the benefits of hunting in strip clubs.
Delegates sat in endless rows of tables, listening to translations of speeches on their headphones. The head delegate of each country had an electronic card used for casting the vote. The sixty-second voting period began on whether to increase protection for the Irrawaddy dolphin, against the wishes of the Japanese.* The hall went quiet. Then I looked up. Two men at the Cambodian table were arguing in front of me. They stood, faced each other, and began to shout.
“It is my decision and I cast the vote!” said one Cambodian delegate.
“This is not the position,” said the other.
They grappled over the voting button in a scene straight from Dr. Strangelove.
Later, I described the fight to a colleague, and she said, “I know that guy. He’s not from Cambodia. The Japanese forced him onto that delegation. The guy’s from Singapore and he’s been a front man for the fisheries industry for other delegations in the past.”**
The gorge with no way across that I’d found on first arriving in Cameroon seemed to stretch to everywhere.
* June 2009, WWF determined that there were no more than 76 Irrawaddy dolphins left, all in their native Mekong River, which was a long way from Japan.
** See: The Straits Times, 1/12/2006, “Shark Finning: Shark’s fin soup—eat without guilt” by Giam Choo Hoo.
APRIL 2005
Morocco
LOVE, ANGER, & ACTIVISM
I gripped the concrete railing and began up the stairs to the family flat in Tel Aviv, stairs I’d climbed dozens of times oozing blood after flying off skateboards and ramps with Mor. I was in Israel for a week, en route to a meeting in Marrakech on environmental crime. The front door was uneven along the bottom, because Elad and I had once raced to hide the damage of a wrecked hinge by planing off a few centimeters of wood. I turned the key and pushed inside. The flat was now rented to an Arab man who lived elsewhere and who’d left little more in the living room than a mattress.
My parents had divorced, my parents who’d folk-danced three times a week in all the years they’d been together. Before the end, Mor had moved away from Tel Aviv to study sociology, left, as a friend had said, “like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.” Mom moved to a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee, and Dad lived now in Pattaya, Thailand, with a woman with whom he shared no language. He was also the rabbi in the city of sin.
Below the window of my parents’ room was the overgrown yard where Mor and I had caught bugs for our lizards, the place we’d pretended we were flowers withering and Mom had sprayed us with water to bring us back to life. The kitchen was foodless, the sink dry and specked with flakes of paint. My room was cluttered, unused, my things still scattered about—letters Mor had written from South America, a projector from my teaching days, and a photograph of Kakuya. I opened my desk and found one of the rings I’d bought for Rachel in Addis Ababa, a woven ring made from the silver of melted coins.
I’d been picking at old wounds.
In Yaoundé, I’d written letters to Rachel as soon as I woke, letters I never sent, and I’d played songs on the guitar for her in the dark. What distress there was in struggling to recall the details—her nose, smile, voice. A memory from Uganda came back to me like a relief, and I remembered her subtle lisp when she said, “Ani rotsa otkhah.” I want you. The pieces were vanishing, though, memory a creature that aged no matter the care it received.
I’d realized something about myself I didn’t like. I’d moved away from, rather than toward, love, not just with Rachel but in ways that hindered my ability to see things like kindness in faces, that hindered my desire to dance in villages and to honor old men. Photography had morphed from a way of sharing the wonder of scenes into a tool, using hidden cameras, aimed at documenting crime. The Sudanese refugee in Lokichokio had been a symbol infused with a motivation that spurred me to fight for change, but I was not driven by love for him as much as by hatred for those who’d wronged him. It was hatred and anger that gave me the energy to act, that then led to the search for more causes and to an awareness of more injustice, which led to more anger. And I found myself in a place far from where I’d imagined I’d be.
I slid the ring onto my finger and unfolded one of Rachel’s poems, written in Hebrew, which I still kept in my wallet, though I hadn’t heard from her in the three years since she’d pushed me out of our apartment.
I wait for an alien wind
to summon me into a hollow refuge
where I clutch good earth until
memory carves a tear through stone.
Resting among mounds of ash
I seal my eyes