Body in Motion

It started pouring before we reached the village so by the time I realized where we were, we were already there.

For the first time since I had left more than three years ago, I was back, standing outside the guest house on something halfway between a dirt road and a path staring at my old neighbors’ house across the way.

It is always surreal to return to somewhere you once lived. To find some people gone and some remaining, some things changed and others completely untouched. I spent the evening with a former colleague and another acquaintance who I am glad to hear is now living in my old place.

Whirls of conversation engulf me.
Blaise is engaged.
We rebuilt the health center at Mbumba! You won’t even recognize it.
Have you spoken to Tony? He´s in South Africa.
You know those people in Sankuru. Once you marry the big sister, you can sleep with all the sisters who come after! If you do that here, your children will die.
In Kisangani, the big sister or the mother will come for you herself! Flirting with you as soon as your girlfriend is out of the room.
When these men find out they are sterile, the invite their small brothers to come and stay. They leave the brother home with the wife and wife falls pregnant.
Ah, Kabila is nothing but a Tanzanian taxi driver. Where are the intellectuals?
We have no choice: two bad candidates. We most vote for one of them.
You know people in the villages are buying voter registration cards for 500 francs ($1). (I tell them people are offering $30 in Kinshasa.)

There is wailing and ululating coming from the center of the village. Four local soccer players have been struck dead by lighting on the other side of Nkonko Tshiela. All young boys: The village is mourning. The coach is being blamed. It was too many fetishes, no doubt, that attracted the lightening.

Leon shakes his head. Lightning is always striking here. There’s something magnetic in the earth (perhaps the tons of copper and nickel, I wonder). Science, not fetishes.

Leon. I sit looking at him from across the table. Here is a man who has given his life. Leon is a gynecologist with a master’s degree in public health. He has been trained to repair fistulas and has most recently traveling the country teaching hospitals how it’s done. Leon, who I have watched many times explain why indicators are tracked to nurses in health centers made of mud with thatch tumbling from the roof.

I am awoken the next morning to layers of village noise swarming outside my window. The immediate drone of the crickets hidden in the guest house rafters, followed by the bawdy laughter of women next door. The bleating of goats mixing with those of children tortured by older siblings. And the hum from the village itself as people call from one hut to the next.

I am getting ready to begin my program for the day when two friends whom I have not yet seen pull up on a motorbike. I have told them I was coming but neglected to call on arrival as promised. They have easily tracked me down and our reunion cackles contribute to the cacophony already underway.

To be away from Kinshasa is to leave behind the chaos and dirt I have come to associate with Congo since my most recent arrival last year. But to be here in the Kasai is to remember how I first saw Congo through virgin eyes. In place of discarded plastic bags littering the ground are mangoes so plentiful, they fall directly from the tree to the earth. The largest vehicle around is usually a motorbike and goats are the biggest traffic problem. The street people of Kinshasa with bloodshot eyes and leering jeers fade into bare-foot school kids with shy eyes.

The rain has stopped during the night and the sun’s haze glints across the banana trees and maize fields. I have almost forgotten the incline of these rolling hills that attract more than lightening. Almost.