Three days before my trip to Africa, I got an urgent sounding call.
*We’ve got a situation*
The situation?
A warning from the U.S. State Department because of anti-MONUSCO protests.
I’m not easily dissuaded by travel advisory warnings. For one thing, our State Department kind of issues them pretty freely. A regional flare-up on the opposite end of one of the largest countries on earth? Just post a warning for the whole place, and a few of its neighbors. Not to mention, this is a region where some degree of conflict is taking place somewhere. You really need to pay attention to the immediate area where you’re going.
This time around, however, that’s exactly where the problem was.
I checked in with my friend Birori, who confirmed that indeed the flare-up of protests had gotten pretty bad and that we might have to make alternate plans.
We ended up canceling plans to visit the Congo and focused the entirety of my two weeks in Africa on Burundi. He offered to cross into Bujumbura to meet me there.
As you might imagine, I was extremely disappointed by having to cancel my plans to visit the Congo. Or, postpone them, rather.
For starters, this is the second time in three years I had to cancel a trip to the Congo. I was slated to take this trip in the summer of 2020, before the pandemic gave that a good two year bump. This time, I had the multi-entry visa in my passport and everything.
My interest in the Congo began long before I worked for an organization with programs there. My curiosity began with a stuffed giraffe that some out-of-business company decided to name Zaire. When I read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, outlining all of the Belgian king’s atrocities in the Congo, and Barabra Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, which introduced me to Patrice Lumumba, I felt that tug.
I know that the Congo in particular has been on the receiving end of gross injustice throughout history. But I know there’s always more to the story that you won’t see until you’re face to face. I had really hoped to see that this year.
There was another more recent case of exploitation this year taking place in Congo. A big environmental injustice. And I really hoped my belief that there’s always more to the story held true in this scenario.
This is potentially devastating news. Not just for the Congo, but for the whole planet.
The Congo Basin Forest and surrounding peatlands hold a lot of carbon. Maybe around 10% of the world’s CO2 is stored there. The release of that into the atmosphere would be horrific. On top of that, there are many species, including the endangered mountain gorilla, that can only be found in this forest. The biodiversity loss was another serious concern.
Birori understands the environmental concerns of the Congo at a local level better than anyone else I know. He has direct knowledge and experience from working in proximity with local communities for years, and understands how environmental concerns overlap with poverty in the country, its history, its conflict, and so on.
He and I meet at my Bujumbura hotel, and it’s really good to see him for the first time in four years.
He greets us warmly, and expresses his disappointment in not being able to take us to the Congo.
“We had everything lined up,” he told me. “The communities heard you were coming and everything.”
I found it hard to imagine someone more disappointed than myself for having to cancel the Congo visit, but I could see right away that Birori was. He had a lot he was looking forward to showing us.
I suppose there would have been a worse way to have had my trip derailed by the unrest in Congo. It was probably a lot better to have found out about it on a phone call while I was still in California, versus in person while being there. Even if my immediate safety wasn’t an issue, the journey I’d have to take would’ve meant hours on foot hiking through areas with no reception. That’s a long time to leave my family hanging.
While spending time with Birori, I do get to ask him a lot of questions about how his work is going, about his life, and about things in the Congo. I’ve gotten accustomed to Birori’s style, and like usual, his words reveal that he concurs that the threats to the Congo Basin Rainforest are real and severe. At the same his demeanor and confidence appear undaunted in the face of this threat.
He tells me about how he’s already been doing work with the communities living on the edge of this forest, almost as if they’ve been braced for a challenge.
Birori reminded me of something important. If people come into a community wanting to take away its trees, they do not get very far if that forest is one that the locals have come to value.
Yes, these communities may be vulnerable, but they aren’t helpless.
Community cooperation or opposition makes all the difference with what happens to a forest where people are living. You see this work both ways. Many reforestation efforts fail, because they happen *to* people, rather than with them. In those scenarios, people see the trees as an opportunity for short-term financial relief, and cut them down.
However, when people are involved in the process and understand the long-term strategy for keeping a forest to maintain the health of the land, it changes everything.
Effective forest protection happens when local communities have ownership of the process.
I found my conversation with Birori immensely encouraging, at a time where I really needed that encouragement.
He reminded me that, although the news was disappointing and threatening, it wasn’t an immediate switch to disappear the forest. The work will be done on the ground, with local communities, in places that are climate vulnerable and often overlooked by the headlines.
Everything I’ve learned about species conservation and forest protection points towards a recurring lesson: you don’t get very far without local community involvement.
If you see local communities as something to work against or around, you make your work even harder. But if you invest in them, if you equip them with the training and opportunities to expand decision making and leadership, you do the world a favor.
I suppose the reality I expected to find true by visiting the Congo revealed itself anyways: the fact that there’s more to the story than our headlines indicate. It’s not so much a balm for anxiety as it is a call to action.
This story isn’t over.