Visiting gorillas

The news were grim that Saturday morning: they talked about machine guns, explosions, slaughter in a concert hall.

In our closed-in conflict zone life it didn't make a practical difference. My flatmate (seasoned readers by now know that the number, origin, profession and personality of my flatmates change frequently and regularly) took me out for breakfast – probably out of guilt for leaving us and moving back to the other life. To a world where one can find concert halls, and choose from more than one place to go out for breakfast.

In Goma, choices are a little scarce, so it was obvious that we go to "The" Bakery for coffee and croissant.

Upon entering the room, I unexpectedly burst out in a proper teenage girl gone crazy monologue:

"OMG it is really Him! I can't believe he's really here! Can we sit next to their table so I can secretly stare at him?"

We could. We did, even though the flatmate still had absolutely no clue as to who "he" is. We struggled through the usual long and painful process of ordering, and all he could make me say was that I have to immediately text the girls that "he" is here. The fact that one of the girls jumped into her car and drove to the scene made him all the more confused.

One of Goma's favourite celebrity is probably unknown outside North-Kivu, apart from the conservationist and hardcore nature-loving communities, where Emmanuel de Merode may be known. The anthropologist and conservationist, originally from a Belgian aristocrate family, is the Chief Warden of the Virunga National Park since 2008. In that quality, he is saviour of the mountain gorillas and all other animals living in the park – and, occasionally, subject to teenage crush of expat-girls.

By Martin Friedrich Jauck - http://de.rodovid.org/wk/Person:785090, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32273787

Of course, he isn't the only one who does an incredible, admirable job in the park. The Virunga, just as the entire region, has been home to civil wars and many complex and complicated armed conflicts, for decades; from poachers to rebels many groups want and try to benefit from the natural resources of the region. Being a ranger in the Virunga is a dangerous job: during the years, more than 140 of them have died in different clashes, often protecting the civilian populations. That the park is open to visitors again since October 2014, is a result of their persistent hard work.

So is the fact that I could visit the mountain gorillas. It was a visit for real, they were at home, in their natural habitat, munching on the leaves, while our group was standing in the rain, listening to the rangers odd guttural sounds, which aims to tell the gorillas that we are friends, there is nothing to be afraid of.

Was it for those grunts, that they didn't really care about us, I don't know. In any case, they weren't bothered by the four of us standing around in raincoats, wearing surgical masks, with only the sounds of our cameras and our sighs.

They didn't know that we got up at dawn, have been driving through the bumpy roads of Norht-Kivu, where the visitors are always accompanied by at least one armed escort – I was entertaining the smiling Claire with my limited swahili vocabulary. The gorillas weren't interested in the story of us climbing upwards in the jungle for a good two hours to meet them. At least we had the same opinion about the cold rain: the chief silverback was sitting with his arms crossed over his chest, visibly not being impressed by the weather. The smallest baby was hiding in his mom's arms from the cold and the rain, and was peeking out from there. He was the only one paying any attention to us at all.

We also quickly understood that the gorilla families don't get the same briefing as the tourists. We were told by the rangers to not go any closer than 7 meters, to not make eye contact with the chief because he will consider it as a challenge, and to avoid sudden movements. Some of the younger black-back males had a rather flexible interpretation of 7 meters and started approaching us if he felt like it, so we had to wonder whether keeping the distance or avoiding sudden movements is more important. The chief looked at us time and again, while munching his leaves and branches; then we tried to pretend we weren't watching him.

The most memorable part of this trip wasn't the size of the grown up gorillas, or that my hands were freezing at 3000 meters; not even the knowledge that we are watching a species that is extremely endangered – there are about 800 of them in the world, most of them living in the natural parks of DRC, Rwanda and Uganda. From the moment we met I couldn't stop thinking that although they may be sitting here in the jungle, eating leaves all day, but their features and behaviour is very human. The mom dropped on her back and laughed out loud, the chief was pouting at the rain, the kids were jumping around, wrestling, or fighting over the food.

And our departure went just as unnoticed as our arrival earlier. They went on with their usual daily activities, while we completed our descent, shivering, to the rangers' post. There we were welcomed with hot tea, blankets, big safari tent as seen in adventure movies, table set for lunch, and a gorgeous view over some other peaks of the Virunga range.

The park also operates a few lodges equipped with all commodities in the middle of the jungle – their prices are also quite remarkable. Benefiting from the relatively calmer times, they started offering different excursions in the region: besides the gorillas and the Nyiragongo volcano, they set up a tented camp on one of the tiny islands on Lake Kivu. Partially thanks to these improvements, the Virunga is recommended by no other than The New York Times as one of the tourist attractions of 2016.

This is good for promotion, it's probably an honour, maybe hope, but also an illusion: for the average tourist, this is still an extremely far, expensive, and dangerous trip. Besides, if anybody can, they shouldn't visit this region because The New York Times says so. Rather because nature, vegetation and animals alike, can been seen here in a state that is rare and can only be found in a few places in the world. "Undisturbed" sounds like a deeply ironic adjective here, yet it carries some truth.

And then, as a teaser, there is always the possibility of running into the Chief Warden in The Bakery!

Makes the people come together

One way to know it's summer now here is to notice that all major football (European-style football) tournaments are organized around this time of the year. Last January DRC was in the semi-finals of the Africa Cup (and we didn't have internet, for political reasons), this year it's something called African Nations' Championchips, meaning that only players who play in their national league qualify. Something like a Euro Cup where Christiano Ronaldo can't play.

And this year it's organized by Rwanda, and they were in the same qualifier group with DRC, and the first leg was played here in Gisenyi (the first town on the Rwandan side of the border; on a nicer day it can be seen from the canteen), and even the border was open until 10 pm (instead of 6).

The last qualifiers were this past Saturday, with no else than the semifinal at stake. Our tv doesn't really have channels these days (we used to have Al-Jazeera and some local gospelly thing), but we didn't quite need it: critical masses were watching it at the petrol station across the street, and in (and outside) of a pub just down by the roundabout, and were loudly expressing their feelings when DRC scored. And then when DRC won! Fiesta was on, just like last year, cars, motorbikes, flags, people, up and down the boulevard. Our guard came upstairs to tell us that one of the cars has the lights left on, and when we congratulated him, he basically melted into a puddle.

The semifinal was on Wednesday, and they won again, extra time and penalty shootout and all that jazz, so Sunday is the final, root for the Lépoards!

Side note: it's interesting also because it makes one wonder how much it is possible to identify with the country we live in, and whether it depends on time, or something else. If I was still living in Luxembourg, would I rather write „we won”? I still talk about the Grand Duke's family as if I know them personally (well, I was present twice when they waved from the balcony, that should count, no?), but is it just a question of getting used to? Clearly, I can't really identify or sympathize with the current president of DRC, but I mainly like Xavier Bettel because we've both been bonnevoisins, (and because he initiated and pushed through the law about same sex marriage), but I don't exactly follow his policies. When I was living in Angers in 2007, and people around me often referred to Sarkozy as „your president”, I always kindly reminded them that he's about as much of a Hungarian citizen as I am a French, and, besides, they voted for him, not me, so... start with the man in the mirror.

(The other way to know it's summer is that the days are longer. One certainly notices the sun setting and six instead of half past five.)