The Lion, the Witch, and the Central African Republic

In this episode we have the politics of foreign aid as it relates to the KONY 2012 campaign told through a story about an aid worker kicking painkillers in the Central African Republic. We have crocodile men, a cameo by Celine Dion, and we turn the narrative of Central Africa as a warzone full of witch hunts on its head. 

Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Christopher Mathis available on bandcamp

If you enjoy what you're listening to but would rather hold these stories in your hand, say while riding on public transport to mom's house or to the mirage of self-actualization through travel, you can buy a book or two at miragetravelpodcast.com

Transcript

The Lion, the Witch, and the Central African Republic

Welcome to the first episode of Mirage travel podcast, the sex, drugs, and amateur anthropology of travel writing. 

Hope you're all staying warm wherever you are. As I'm recording this in Western Europe, it's below freezing outside. 

I'm on the internet because one of the best things about the internet is that there's no winter.  It's also the ideal place for travel when you can't travel, and I'll admit, as I sit here on the internet, I'm traveling not only in space but also in time, back to places I've been in the past.

When looking at photos on the internet of the US embassy in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, it appears standard, lackluster even, with the token high steel fences topped with concertina wire. Concrete filled barrels line the road leading up to it. They instill in the viewer a subtle militaristic aesthetic. A flag is visible, caught in a breeze coming off the Ubangi River, a few hundred feet away. 

What stands out in the photos though is the building's cleanliness, its coat of colonial white paint. I remember it being covered in dust, but I guess everything in the past is such. Covered in dust and sepia colored. Or maybe that's just the nature of the internet, where everything is so distant it has to present itself as a joke or the apocalypse to stand out. It was neither, or a bit of both, 

As we neared the embassy I re-applied deodorant. Bangui is hot, almost always, so I covered my odor with another roll of antiperspirant I carried everywhere. It was nerves though, not the heat that had me sweating. I was anxious. It was my first donor meeting. I'd like to say I was young but that may give you the impression I was a twenty something interning abroad. I was more like a thirty something—I dropped out of college in the US, traveled around Europe, only later earning degrees in my late twenties. My first “real” job and I suppose my first “real” meeting was in the US Embassy in Bangui.  

I left my keys and ID at the door, was screened by metal detectors, then patted down by paid-for-hire private guards, the bearded and tatted former-military type of guys that multiply in conflict zones. Dudes with a hard-on for war. I’d say stereotypical. You could say the same of my sort, idealist expatriates working for aid agencies, logos emblazoned on Land Cruisers that chauffeur mostly white youth from address to address. 

The interior of the embassy, if I remember correctly, was nondescript, utilitarian even. As if the Central African Republic was a low priority for US foreign relations, which it was, and that funding for the embassy was limited. It had only recently reopened, having suspended its activities due to a coup d’etat two years earlier, on December 24, 2012. It still felt vacant. Could also be that the Central African Republic, or CAR was on the bottom of a wishlist of overseas service stations for US Dept of State employees. It’s not as comfortable as Brazil, for example. In short, let’s just say the embassy in Bangui was not a place to hang a valuable painting, and even if it was, nobody appeared moved to do so. 

The staff were friendly, I will say that, although unusually formal for Americans. Well dressed. There weren’t many staff or visitors yet I found it difficult to believe they were dressed up for us. I was dressed to the nines. It was an important meeting, but I was also hungover. The more hungover I was, the better I dressed, so as to throw off the scent of my trail, in a sense. My shirt was ironed. 

We pulled out chairs around a large oval desk, my boss, the Country Director of the NGO, and three US Embassy Reps. They were all pale, despite the blistering equatorial sun. I had heard they were rarely allowed to leave the embassy compound for security reasons. They probably returned home anemic. Maybe that’s why they were also dressed well. They looked ill. After minimal banner, I gave a rigmarole about our NGOs activities in the southeast of the country. A speech I had rehearsed the night before, complete with prompts of numbers of participants during our activities. How many people the donor's money had helped, basically. It was dry, mostly stats.

Although each of the three reps had begun a new page in their notebooks and dated the header before our meeting, none took notes. It was as if I were talking to a silent jury. Which made me question if I had made a faux-pas. I trudged along, acting, which is what I suspect most entry-level employees do. I closed with the promise that I would send them the full report by the end of the month.  

A rep, a man in his mid-fifties, turned to my boss and asked if he could provide a security update. Now, it should be said that as aid agencies working in conflict zones, a great deal of time is spent monitoring the security in the areas where we work. 

The Country Director began by thanking the donor, USAID. They didn’t smile. As US taxpayer money, I suppose it wasn’t their money anymore than it was mine. The briefing was mostly rumors of the movements of the Lord's Resistance Army.  The LRA is (or was) led by the infamous Joseph Kony, one of Africa's most notorious warlords.  The UN has chalked up over 100,000 deaths to his name, as well as the abduction of children to become child soldiers and sex slaves. Kony was indicted in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, but he has evaded capture.

Here, as my boss spoke of displaced persons, all three reps took notes. Studiously. He spoke of gunshot salvo that villagers suspected of being the LRA. The reps asked follow up questions. Asked for specific dates, numbers of miles from Bangassou and Obo, two towns in the southeast. When he concluded, they thanked him. He smiled. 

Another thing to mention is that the year was 2014, two years after the KONY 2012 campaign. Kony 2012 was (or is) an American short documentary film produced by Invisible Children Inc. The film's MO was to raise awareness about Joseph Kony’s war crimes. It created a grassroots movement that advocated the US Govt to allocate resources for Kony’s arrest by the end of 2012. The arrest never happened, but the resources were allocated. 

It was here, 3 months into my first gig, that I began to see how the politics of aid played out. Sure a great deal of humanitarian aid “helps” people in the short run. A “from the American people” sign displayed during, say, a food distribution in a drought affected area is good PR. Shit, JFK said in 1961 “Foreign aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world.” Moreover, that the US reps in Bangui were so flagrant about their interests meant that I wasn't immersed in some underground world of espionage. Because these motives were so apparent, it was I who was naive to have expected otherwise. 

To quote pambazuka.org an open access, Pan-African electronic newsletter.  

“From the period of colonialism and the imperial partitioning of Africa, humanitarianism has always been presented as a front for military operations. But, in the 21st century, this humanitarianism has to be linked to military information operations. Invisible children is one clear example of the linkages between pseudo non-governmental organizations and the US military. When the Kony 2012 documentary went viral in March 2012; many of the unsuspecting 80 million viewers quickly became aware of the explicit message that called on US citizens to support the deployment of US military forces in Uganda and Central Africa.”

So, under the guise of an international manhunt, U.S. troops deployed to five outposts in four countries, advising thousands of troops from Uganda, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Congo who are hunting Kony across a territory the size of California. 

But why then, would the military be interested in information from an NGO, when they were flying drones across the region and had professionally trained military advisors and boots on the ground in areas where Kony is purportedly hiding out? NGOs are typically accepted in the areas where they work. You’ve no doubt heard of the “winning the hearts minds” approach that the military espouses. Well, it must be a difficult task to do while wearing 50 pounds of tactical gear. NGOs, whose staff wear T-shirts and hand out free shit to people in need, and live in the neighborhood sometimes have equally good intel as covert operations. 

And this is my theory, the US government funds NGOs to triangulate, or cross-check information they collect in more secretive ways. It’s so obvious that it’s not a theory, actually. 

Last thing. It should be known that Jason Russell, the public face of this ‘non-profit’ organization, Invisible Children, was trained in the Department of Defense-funded Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California. The website of ICT explicitly states, “At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, high-tech tools and classic storytelling come together to pioneer new ways to teach and to train. ICT was established in 1999 with a multi-year contract from the US Army to explore a powerful question: What would happen if leading technologists in artificial intelligence, graphics, and immersion joined forces with the creative talents of Hollywood and the game industry?“

So, on the surface, this is what I believe the US was doing. Instrumentalizing aid for intel first, and getting good PR second. That the KONY 2012 documentary made by Invisible Children was a clandestine operation to shape public opinion is another question and one dot I won’t connect.  It does beg the question—what would happen?

But what was I doing in the Central African Republic, other than traveling, working, meeting? I was writing. And with an 8pm curfew, I was writing a lot. I drink when I write, so I was also drinking a lot. Surrounded by altruists, within earshot of gunfire, and with the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea between me and the distraction of my loved ones, a conflict zone was an ideal place to write. Dressed up and sweating, and writing. And this is what I wrote:

There are only a handful of ATMs and no more than a dozen banks in the Central African Republic, and most of them are found in the capital, Bangui. For the dozens of humanitarian organizations working in remote outposts across the deindustrialized sweep of land, what this means is that paying staff salaries and bankrolling our good deeds necessitates running money. Clutching suitcases behind tinted windows—everyone does it—so when I'm asked to fill the false bottom of a duffel bag with cash and fly to the east of the country, I say yes. I didn't want to say yes, but I didn't know I could say no. 

We roll through the asphalted corridor of the Marché des Combatants, the last stretch of road before the airport. It's a tense five minutes. The market skirts both sides of the thoroughfare, spills into it, and chokes the traffic of slow-rolling SUVs. More minor roads run perpendicular from the main drag at perfect right angles, facilitating the potential and common carjackings. These paranoid calculations are magnified with the equivalent of 25,000 dollars tucked between my knees. My duffel bag is half filled with fifteen rubber-banded bundles, each one a million francs, which makes it hard to hide. It's as large as a year-old baby and cries just as loud. 

I regret carrying the money a second time when entering the airport foyer. I'm sweating. It's hot, and I'm nervous, not to mention I've developed an addiction to painkillers. I know I've become addicted because, as I make a note on my phone about opiates while in the check-in line, the auto-spellcheck corrects the word "opiates." It's striking. My phone doesn't fix the word "paranoiac" or the spelling of the country's infamous dictator in the '70s, "Bokassa." I can't swipe-write the adjective "Orwellian," but the suggested spelling of the word "opiates" appears. I've been trying to define the experience of painkillers in writing, often on my phone with numbed fingers. The device now finishes my sentences. 

I could've coasted through the absurdity of moving enough money to skip the country if I had downed a handful of pills this morning. My thoughts would've lollygagged behind the present moment—that's precisely why opiates kill the pain. They relieve the user of the discomfort of being in the present moment. I imagine myself, instead of boarding a domestic flight, booking an international, and waving farewell to the equator and the sixty-hour work weeks that drove me to addiction in the first place.

Leaving Bangui, I go cold turkey. I'm not bound together with limitless reserves of willpower. Instead, with the million francs in my bag, I don't want to be stopped for carrying cash and then be discovered with the drugs, or vice versa. So while perspiring yesterday's chemicals, I flash my passport to the lady at check-in, accompanied by an ambassadorial smile.

Now my worry is this: the money will appear under the X-rays, I'll be whisked to a back room and interrogated, then, showing customs a document printed on company letterhead and signed by my director, I'll declare that I'm carrying funds for a humanitarian organization. To pay staff in the southeast. I'll be freed. Since everybody knows somebody in this country, due to its sparse population and kinship structures, the customs agent will dial a brother or an uncle, anyone with a gun in the town where I will land in two hours. The agent will murmur the amount of money in a black duffel bag over the phone. He'll add which organization's logo to look for on the white four-wheel-drive leaving the airport landing strip. In line for the metal detector, I scribble in pencil on my boarding pass, "A story about being robbed in the Central African Republic." 

The x-ray gives up nothing, and I shuffle into the single gate of the Bangui M'poko Airport. The interior is made of ebony, a dark wood harvested locally, which gives it the feel of a hunting lodge. The building, Commissioned in 1967, feels like an anachronism. It's a hat's off to a brighter time in the country's history, when the city was nicknamed Bangui la Coquette, or Bangui the beautiful. Being surrounded by these relics instills in me a sense of humility. Maybe I wouldn't be robbed because everybody knows somebody. I erase the note about being robbed and write, "A story about kicking painkillers in the Central African Republic."

Feeling relieved, I wonder, are my fears founded? Am I flying from one fantasy to another, weighed by the gravity of paranoia? Is it the donor reports of violence and displacement I draft that have me scanning the airport? Or could it only be the enormity of my own-self presence, my self-consciousness, a white guy in sub-Saharan Africa with the heat of the gaze of on-lookers upon me?

In the corner of the airport gate sits a bar where two UN Peacekeepers from Morocco posture over a couple of croissants. I saddle a barstool, place the bag between my feet, then call for the bartender. She wears thick makeup. Nice smile. She calls everyone "Chéri" and pours rounds of instant coffee and warm beers for the diverse mix of clientele—soldiers, humanitarians, and businessmen. It's a masculine space, and she mothers the lot of us as she dabs up spills here and there. She imbues the corner of the airport with a mood of insouciance, but it's only her nonchalance towards the world's affairs outside. She never looks out the window at her side. The rest of us do. I keep my boot on the duffel bag and wash down a stale croissant with gut-rot coffee, trying to stay alert. It's eight a.m., and due to the opiates, I slept unrested as a sleepwalker last night. I slip a dollar into the tip jar and board the twenty-seat aircraft, and the patchwork of emerald and lime-colored forests blur together as we gain altitude. I clean my nails of dirt with the boarding pass. 

I knew this: since its independence from France in 1960, the Central African Republic has experienced fraudulent elections, rebellions, ministerial mutinies, and civil wars. CAR was transformed into an empire for three years by Jean-Bédel Bokassa. Informed solely by a narrative of tragedy and exploitation, I was otherwise ignorant of the woozy aesthetic of the fog in the morning in the tropics. The jacaranda in the wooded savannas. The beauty of the land, old-growth forests, and the generosity of the people, despite adversity. I knew it was a country whose appellation was so generic—denoting a landlocked position on the African continent and boasting a form of governance by popular vote—it seemed that the nation was waiting for history to name it correctly. The latest coup d'état in the spring of 2013 degenerated into a civil war deemed by the United Nations as "the world's forgotten conflict." 

The UN has said that about many conflicts, in Yemen and DR Congo, which speaks volumes about the world's memory. 

Flying over the stretch of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that separates Bangui from Bangassou in the east, with the rubber-banded millions in the overhead compartment, my paranoia is exacerbated. I'm no longer sweating; I'm shivering. Not all too much. I'm exaggerating. The feeling is of being paper thin. I dig my hands in my pockets to keep them from trembling. 

I fly with a coworker in Human Resources. He doesn't know about the money because it's on a need-to-know basis. Martinien laughed when we boarded and said I overpacked. The need-to-know basis goes both ways, at least for a while. He informs me he's traveling to meet the Labor Inspector to tell them we're firing several staff members in the southeast due to wide-scale corruption. The first staff fired a month prior made death threats to those that weren't. Martinien also looks like he didn't want to say yes to the task. 

He asks me how to expatriate. I give him a spiel about job experience, career ladders, learning foreign languages, then applying internationally. I don't mention that I'm entry-level and landed the job since I could string a sentence together in my native language, English. That it's a plausible game of dice, played by God, that has us sitting next to one another, me in his country and not him in mine. The housing, salary, and free flights offset the hardship of living alone, I say, far from friends and family. Martinien is the first person in CAR to ask me how to leave his country. A rare thing compared to the aspirations of many youths I had heard in so many countries. Sure, a visa is hard to come by, as well as the money to fly. It's a thousand miles to the nearest ocean to take a boat. Another reason for the general humility. Either way, Central Africans are not hellbent on leaving home, at least relatively. Like I had been. 

Flying over the sparsely settled country—four million people in a country the size of Texas—I was high enough to see the bend of the horizon and low sufficient to perceive swaths of green cut by bronze laterite roads. Village roads or logging roads are the lone roads that spread like arteries across the geography. 

The plane touches down on the packed dirt runway, we move toward the waiting vehicle, and again I look left and right for figments of my imagination. 

To assuage the guilt of riding with a private driver, I attempt to befriend him and treat him like a human without the equation of class clouding our conversation. (Class consciousness is dull, even more so as it's relentless.) I forgo chit-chat or civilities. Instead, I ask Simplice, who I suspect is Christian, how the country has changed since the Muslim rebellion, the Séléka, toppled president Bozizé in March of 2013 and instituted one of their own, Michel Djotodia. On my twenty-seventh birthday, I add. He moves his hands from the bottom half of the steering wheel to ten and two. "It's easier to overthrow a government than to govern." We drive at ten miles an hour. "A week after gaining power, the alliance was already splintering, and Djotodia couldn't reel in his troops. They went on a rampage."

He speculates on foreign foul play. "France supported the Séléka through its ally, Chad. You know Bozizé promised concessions to China and South Africa for oil and uranium." Simplice chokes the steering wheel. He amalgamates the Séléka with all Muslims, some 15 percent of the country's population. His voice spans an octave and denotes frustration or racism. Or both. I don't ask him if he lost someone during the conflict. I take it as a given. 

In the rearview mirror, no car tails us from the airport all the way to the office, where the bougainvillea grows in razor wire on the compound's walls. Then, finally, the guard opens the gate. 

A crowd sits in the shade of an acacia. Twenty-odd people greet me as if we know each other and thank me in advance. Someone must have told them I was arriving with their salary. Inside the office, I lock the door and sign a document that testifies to the handover of 25 grand. The day opens before me. 

I've been awake since dawn. It's noon, so I take a break and don a pair of flip-flops. I go for a tour of the town with the local project manager. The road, so rarely used in places, is taken back by the grass and reeds. The city is flat, so we're often surrounded by gorgeous dense forests. Overhead, the circular saw of the sun cuts through a knot of clouds. 

"The LRA is not that active." Jacques preempts my question. Am I that transparent? Just as I'm expected to be monied and benevolent as I stroll about town wearing a vest with a recognizable NGO logo, I, or should I say we, meaning the West, expect the entire southeast of the country to be booby-trapped, rife with pillage, and covered in KONY 2012 stickers. My line of work relays just this narrative. Then turns around and advocates for funds to change it. So when I write a project proposal, which is why I'm in the southeast, to collect information, I function like a lightning rod for misery. 

"Listen. Kony must be going on 60, which is a long time to have lived in the bush. He's got to be off in the head. He himself has been traumatized by war. You know, though, we understand mental illness in different ways. I mean, after all, older women are often accused of witchcraft here. These people may be disturbed or have mental problems. Or even, it's a way to confiscate another's property." 

Jacques is soft-spoken. 

"There's a displaced persons camp on the outside of town, though. They come from ninety miles north where incursions by the LRA can happen." We come to a puddle in the road, creating a slip of land. He lets me walk it first. "Then again, people hear gunfire of hunters, and the village flees. As I said, people are traumatized, all of them. And the best thing they can do is run." 

"I suppose I would do the same," I say. As if I need to eternally close some gap between us. To shrug off expectations. To be the same. 

Jacques wipes his forehead of sweat. I strangely am no longer sweating. It must be the flip-flops. Or that I'm miles from my desk job, doing what I want to do, wandering around a village, making notes about foreign cultures. The spell check on my phone corrects the word "antipodes." 

Bangassou smells of abandoned houses—of mold on cement and ash. Several government offices are dilapidated and grown through by vines. The metabolism of equatorial flora, which is only the metabolism of nature in overdrive, is determined to throttle every inch of human endeavor in thorns.

"The Séléka were chased from their homes and government in the counter-coup more than a year ago. All Muslims were." His gestures are out of sync with his words, and he points to the river instead of buildings. "A Moroccan battalion of the UN Peacekeepers is stationed here and makes occasional patrols." 

We walk in the central market, occasionally nodding to passers-by. Finally, Jacques says he must leave. He pads his apology with a description of a training session he must attend. He is the project manager, yet he speaks to me like I'm his supervisor. The case of mistaken identity draws a line in the proverbial sand. We shake hands. I wish him luck. 

Dawdling back to the office, I find a deserted back road lined with flamboyant trees. The silt flicked up from my flip-flops feels good, or is it that I'm finally alone?

In Bangassou, I live in a house. The tiles are cool to walk across barefoot at noon, and the small windows mean it remains cool. It might be considered a tent because it's close to camping. The difference between clean teeth and dysentery is how I place my toothbrush on the sink. Boiling the water saves me from typhoid. There's an intentionality to the banalest of activities. There's been no electricity since the Seleka sacked the town two years ago. The rumble of the generator lays down muzak. Inversely, in the morning, before the generator starts, I wait for a passing motorcycle so that the entire house won't hear me in the bathroom. As I sit on the toilet writing, spell check corrects the word "diarrhea."

Then there's the food. I go out in the early morning for two days to scour for a baguette or any flour-based product. I make a beeline for the market but only find bush meat teeming with flies. There are plenty of plantains, but I've eaten plantains every day for a week. I find cassava, but cassava tastes like wallpaper. I'm less adaptive than I thought.

I go out earlier. It's half past eight in the morning, two hours after sunrise, and it's already late in a town with no electricity. 

"Le pain est déjà fini."

"The bread is already sold out," a woman says. She looks left and right, but nothing is moving, coming, or going except a herd of goats. I ask to be pointed in the direction of breakfast, and she, and the following people I ask, look at me like I'm senseless. The question doesn't register. Two young men string me along to the adjacent boutique. There's instant coffee, powdered milk, and soap sachets, but no breakfast. In the shop, there's upbeat music playing, and it occurs to me that I rarely hear gloomy music in Sub-Saharan Africa. It must be all the sun. I check the contents of my pockets in case I find a pill. 

"You need any help?" the shopkeeper asks.

"No, thanks," I reply. I exit the shop.

Pairs of eyes follow me in my wanderings. I pass three teens selling watered-down gasoline, then corner a street vendor who hawks Chinese imports. Although I never wear sunglasses, I feel like it's hiding, I buy a pair. But, of course, I am hiding, lying. In any case, the knock-off aviators afford me some cover.

I score on the third day of canvassing the town for any food product other than staple crops or bush meat. A Lebanese merchant, in town since the nineteen nineties, owns a grimy shop stocked with luxury goods. Canned tuna. Spaghetti. As I'm rummaging in his stock, praising the invisible hand of the market, he says:

"Look."

I'm in the corner of the shop, kneeling to inspect the imports, having an epiphany: existence, in these latitudes, is decanted to its essence. The population—the majority who hold no more than an elementary level education—inch through short lives, their country in free fall. Near the equator, everything grows, yet human life is a miracle. Yet people live here. They eat here, not much, but enough. They fuck here and have kids here, and those kids grow up and fuck, often young, but what the hell, and then the metabolism of nature swallows them all. It will do the same to me if I stay too long. I wish I were religious, like the remainder of the country, to lend some sense to the plot. 

"Look," the Lebanese merchant says again, moving toward me. He dusts off a camouflage box. "Halal" is written across it, a Moroccan military ration! I count out the money, push it into his hands, and power walk home, arms full. The eyes on me are no longer a nuisance. In my room, I lock the door and lay into an array of packaged, fortified food. If I'm less adaptive than I thought, it follows that I need to learn myself better. 

A patrol of UN Peacekeepers rolls by, waving—to me at my window, to children of an extended family, to the Lebanese merchant who I make out hunched over a calculator in the distance. I smile at the soldier with cheese in between my teeth.

The children chase the tank. Brothers and sisters, there must be four of them. The grandparents are there, and what looks to be their mother. Their situation is envious—they, unlike me, will never be alone in life. 

After eating, my morale returns. I'm on the clock but hundreds of miles from my boss. I have carte-blanche. I need only to return to the capital in a week with information to write a report and the project proposal. Then, to inform our donors that we're doing a great job and need more money. It's a suitable pretext to hop on a motorcycle taxi to the outskirts of town. We coast in neutral on downhills to save gas, under the dead power lines, to visit an education project. 

Sitting on a bench in the dimly lit school, I interview the director. He asks me about my accent, switches from French to English, and says he spent some time in England. I tell him I'm from California, which is not true, but the truth is too long to tell. It's hot again. He delivers a speech of gratitude toward my employer, the NGO, then translates for the nervous teacher by his side that I came to see the project's impact. I assume because the local language, Azandé, escapes me. His name is Leger, and hers is Clotilde. 

"As you can see, the school rooms are cross-ventilated and comfortable," Leger says. "We have new blackboards and school supplies. Even the bathrooms are inclusive and safe. We just re-installed the locks on the doors. The problem in the southeast is not out-of-school children, at least not in Bangassou. Our schools are too crowded. We lack qualified staff." The director tells me that half the teachers are parent volunteers. I notice him looking at my fingers. He asks for a piece of paper from my notepad. He draws a map.

"We're here. And the next closest school is here, five kilometers away, and the next one is here. Also, five kilometers. The schools are equally spread out."

I imagine children traipsing in long lines on the shoulder of the road.

"In this school here," he points to the ceiling to denote the school we were sitting in, "there are 300 children, and in this school here, too." He draws an X across the piece of paper on the next school out of town. "Then there's the forest, half a kilometer, and on the other side of the forest is a school with only 100 children."

He gauges my reaction, but I'm stuck on the math. For many children, the third school out of town is closer to their homes than the second one. Only a tiny forest separates them. But a road traverses the forest. There could be an equal number of students in all schools. I lower the sunglasses over my eyes, unsure if the director is staring at my pupils. 

"What's the explanation?"

"Children that attend the second school won't cross the forest to attend classes at the third school even though it's two to three kilometers closer. They claim there are spirits in these forests. There might as well be no road between these two villages." He translates this to Clothilde, who concurs. 

"Listen," he sighs, "there's a story of a crocodile man that inhabits the river. It's a way to scare children from swimming in the water. To stop children from drowning. Or river blindness, that happens too. The same goes for the spirits in the forest. It was poor farmland. A story was created decades ago to make sure nobody planted there. I'm guessing. Or they perceive it as dangerous. It comes back to the same thing." This he doesn't translate into Azandé for the teacher. 

While he is explaining this, I'm scratching. Trying to find solutions for problems that escape me. That's half of my job. The other half is bureaucracy. 

"You should see a doctor," he points to my nose.

"Do most people believe this, the thing with the spirits?"

"Do people avoid walking under ladders where you're from?" He repeats this comparison. 

Touché, I think. I want to go into the myth of the Loch Ness monster, but it's too tangential to the reason for my visit. I take a few photos, which I use as an excuse to feel like I'm working. I'll slip them into the donor report. Keep them forever. The nervous teacher poses like in a daguerreotype, quite dignified. Her shawl wraps around her shoulder at an angle that parallels the features of her face. She asks to see the photo on the screen. 

I thank them. Sincerely. No longer feeling distant, the same as saying I feel close, I touch the director's shoulder. Then, leaving the school room, it hits me. Over time, the Central African Republic became familiar, and, with some amateur anthropological acuity, I drew parallels between Western superstitions of broken mirrors and forests moved by spirits. Yet, despite the time I live here, I'll never understand. It's not that they're simple; I'll never be a part of their complexity. The funerals, the births, the whispers in the markets. Self-conscious, the children will always come toward me or walk away from me, motivated by a crocodile man lying in wait to snatch their imaginations. 

The following day, a man enters the office. He's flustered and waves a piece of paper. In his anger, his body appears asymmetrical, like a child's poorly drawn star. I share the workplace, and he addresses Jacques, the project manager. I return to my sprawling Excel sheet—I work on a data collection tool for our Gender Based Violence program. It's depressing, even as a collection tool. Think of the dataset, numbers of rapes, forced marriages, psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual aggression, and denial of resources, all disaggregated by gender. I remember the painkillers again. Feel my pockets again. 

Jacques interrupts me as I'm foraging in my bag and asks me to meet the man. I save the spreadsheet. I position myself in a chair facing him. In a culture where consensus is paramount, giving a person your full attention is considered respectful. Isn't it everywhere? In starts and fits, he presents a convoluted story detailing an attempted fraud gone wrong. The project created what was called "resilience groups," resilience being both a legitimate concept referring to persons recovering from trauma and a donor buzzword. These groups were designed around a common livelihood activity. We would finance the inputs to start the projects, such as seeds and tools, fish for fish farming, etc. Instead of buying the inputs outright, we contracted local suppliers to leverage the local economy. 

We signed contracts with the suppliers and, on a given day, distributed vouchers good for x amount of money. Something like half a million dollars in total for 15,000 people. 

The man before me colluded with a former employee of our organization—the employee fired for corruption and who later made death threats to the remaining staff. Our staff's brother owned the store that sold agricultural inputs. A conflict of interest visibly. Beneficiaries would cash out vouchers in exchange for inputs. We would then reimburse the store owner. The man standing before me received vouchers, but instead of using them to purchase seeds and farming tools as intended, he would receive cash. Our former employee took all the money instead of cutting the man his share in the scheme. The man before me is named Fidel. I almost laugh but don't. It's sad to see poor people obliged to steal from poor people—it's like watching two Greyhound bus passengers fighting to board a bus first. 

While Fidel shouts, I ponder the relationship between precarity in this breadless place and trust. People are constantly ripping each other off to the point where solidarity seems to be a luxury. Fidel waves his sweaty letter, petitioning for money. He calls me by the organization's name. Again, a case of mistaken identity. I'm finally robbed, not of money or material possessions but of my identity. I look out the barred windows of our office, wishing I could celebrate being correct instead of being continually wrong. 

"We'll study your case," I say, "next time, it would be best if you go for the tools and seeds." 

I know we won't study his case. Given the context, the next eligible beneficiary for an aid distribution is only a matter of the next name on a long list of vetted persons. This act of lying drives a wedge further between what I'm expected to be versus the person I am, somebody looking for another to walk around town with and talk politics, to understand foreign cultures. A professional who could be a conduit for foreign funding, at best. The work drives me to dip into my pockets, wishing I would've brought something to stave off the pain. 

To escape the paperwork of the office and the demands for money, I fold my computer and ride a motorcycle back into the countryside. I visit fish farms, coffee fields, and peanut harvests. I see the camp of displaced persons and their plots of farmland. One of the organizations to whom we gave seeds and tools. Paris, the group's spokesperson, punctuates his sentences with terms of gratitude. He explains how my coworkers taught his group the practice of intercropping and seed selection. Paris says they've had three harvests.

"We eat twice a day now," he says.

Before leaving, I thank him for the interview. "Good luck," I add, which is sometimes all an atheist can say. 

Another ten minutes later, I ride two hours further into the country. The project, financed by the UN and implemented by my employer, and in a roundabout way, by me, involves rebuilding homes in the village with mudbrick and corrugated tin roofing. The beneficiaries shake my hand, thinking I’m responsible for roofing the neighborhood. In a sense, I am. By taking photos, I would raise money for follow on funding. 

Mariam wears a cross as large as a fist hanging from her neck. "When the Séléka leader resigned less than a year after coming to power, Christians chased Muslims from the village." She shadows me as I take photos.

"We were living in the Muslim neighborhood because ours was destroyed. By the Muslims." An hour earlier, I had driven through an adjacent neighborhood where the driveways gave onto crumbling walls marked with soot. The project rebuilt her house and a hundred others to make room for the Muslims to return. What happens after is speculation. 

I put the camera to my eye. In the viewfinder, I see her move into the frame. She picks up a child that is tottering across the dirt and smiles. The scene seems rehearsed. 

"Come," she says.

In the backyard, she points to a lump. Two lumps. The first, she said, was her husband, who the Séléka killed. She motioned to the second, raised as high as a speed bump, and ran the length of my outstretched arms. "And that is my daughter." She urged me to take a photo, which I did, not knowing what else to do. I apologized as I focused on the mound. One is always taken aback at the size of a child's grave.

Yet further out in the countryside, miles swerving on the pockmarked road, I meet up with a coworker. She stands beside a water pump where dozens of children play. The project provided latrines to vulnerable families. Through my coworker's megaphone, she teaches good practices in hygiene to stop the jungle from creeping into everybody. I photograph a puppet show about germs.

"See you back at the office later," she goes into a lesson about covering a cough. 

I tie my boots tighter and join a dirt footpath. Thinking about the thatch huts and banana trees seemingly tacked to a darkening horizon, I imagine my coordinates in this village, whose name must rarely grace a map. Our donors finance the project, paying 15 percent of my salary as I embark on these idle conjectures. The "play therapy" project helps orphans, former child soldiers, and children who have experienced violence cope with the effects of the conflict.

Toward me comes a woman balancing a bucket on her head, and I step aside to let her pass. A rotund pig mulls around a bush. It begins drizzling, and goats form a line under the thin overhang on the left. The homeowner, suffering from polio, scissors across the dirt yard in haste. I continue and come across a bird on the footpath. It resembles a picked flower, green and yellow and red with a black head, full of color but dying, nonetheless. I squat and search for dented ribs or injured wings. From behind me, a man walks around and over the bird.

"We're in Africa," he says in passing, "either you kill it, or you let it die." When he looks back, I see his face is scarred.

"What does that have to do with Africa?"

"If you get caught up with a bird…." The man trails off. He shakes his head, which is outlined by the dark sky. I wait until he was out of sight. I stand and look away. The banana trees wave like children in the ocean. With my boot, I put the bird in the ground. It was all I could do. It was, I thought, what I should do. 

I tack toward the play therapy activity and arrive at some two hundred children. Children with low-set ears and Leukoderma clamor around me. They sing a song that switches between French and Sango, in which my name is repeated, followed by applause. The wind carves the soccer field, forcing the children to lean against it. Gloomy clouds extinguish the afternoon. Their jerseys, marked with our NGO's logo, fly out behind them as they circle me, holding hands as if I’m Colonel Kurtz himself. Then the sky, clouded from end to end, opens. 

The children and I run for cover. I hear their footfalls in the schoolroom, their panting. The wind-snuffed candle sitting on the windowsill gives me the impression of pioneering. I had entered the countryside with the zeal of settlers, not the first nor the last, to conflate travel to pastoral Africa with alchemy. I thought if I could understand others, I would appreciate what was universal in them and me. If I understood universals, I could decant what was indeed me. But this frontier closes, and with it the sense of pioneering when, on the road back to Bangassou, the driver slips on a CD of Celine Dion. It skips when hitting potholes. And the villages move by the window to the song, "My Heart Will Go On."

You're here, there's nothing I fear

And I know that my heart will go on

We'll stay forever this way

You are safe in my heart

And my heart will go on and on

At the window, a man forces a rusty bike through the mud. A dog dashes on three legs across the road. The banana trees blow in gusts of wind. Women carry everything on their heads. It’s an image of Sub-Saharan Africa so universal that it’s expected, familiar to the point that it’s invisible and no longer recognizable as different—that it’s Tuesday and not always the mutinous country I imagined it to be. And, if only for an instant, I belong. 

We coast toward town past the crumbling government buildings. I nod off at turns, more than once, so far gone I'm not paying attention, cerebral.

Tonight, due to a lack of gasoline, the generator is cut at eight. The lights fade an hour after sunset. I turn into bed to abbreviate the solitude of evenings. Outside, the frogs sleepwalk through their instincts as they sing slow songs.

To confess, I didn't leave the painkillers in the medicine cabinet. I lied, mostly to myself—about my ability to live on the equator, cornered on both sides of the day by curfews, amongst all this doom and razor wire. I lied about my willpower. In a word, about who I was. 

Seven days ago, I walked across the airport tarmac to board the plane to Bangassou on four sheets of pills stuffed into my socks. I had calculated a week of sensible highs, but the time between reaching into my pockets became shorter and shorter until this morning when I washed down the last pill. I leaned back, stared at the sun severing the clouds from behind the counterfeit aviator sunglasses, and dreaded the inevitable.

Coming down from a bender, I lie sweat-soaked in my bed, with my limbs spread to stave off the heat. I listen to Chopin's Nocturnes. Anything louder is thunder. I've experienced malaria and detoxed from opiates. The symptoms are comparable—the triple-digit fever, the arthritic condition, the faces behind my eyelids—except I can blame nature for malaria. Dressed only in the wet rag on my forehead, I've only myself to blame. I've written myself into this, shivering under a mosquito net. I'm splayed out like the Vitruvian Man across a cheap Chinese mattress. My phone's spell check corrects the word "Vitruvian Man."

 …

Following our meeting at the US Embassy, I left, feeling accomplished. That was soon eclipsed by another feeling, that of being small.  A piece of a puzzle without a box so it only makes sense once completed. I was in there, but so was the rest of the world. You flip it over and it reads Made in America. 

To close with a quote from the world socialist website:

Underlying the sudden and peculiar turn by Washington towards a “human rights” crusade against the Lord’s Resistance Army are very definite economic and geo-strategic interests. These are bound up with the recent discovery of substantial oil reserves precisely in the area where the hunt for the LRA is being staged and increasingly fractious competition between Washington and Beijing for geo-political influence in resource-rich Africa. AFRICOM and military intervention have become crucial instruments for the US in combating the wave of Chinese investments in infrastructure projects aimed at facilitating the extraction of African oil and mineral wealth.

Yet I am grateful to have witnessed a part of Central Africa, meet those I met, everyone of them. I hope that, politics aside, I had done a little to help, and gave more than I took. I still have questions about the haunted forest and the crocodile man. If there are any Azandé, Central Africans, anthropologists, or anyone who can explain, please write. What is true? What is myth? Where is the difference?