A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [35]
A Canadian environmentalist friend asked me to check out Eric’s programs for potential carbon-offset initiatives. The Congo basin forest is the second largest tropical forest in the world—only the Amazon is bigger—and the Democratic Republic of the Congo holds 8 percent of the world’s carbon stores, making its preservation essential to solving the global climate crisis.
Eric is only three years older than I am, and his glowing, everyone-is-my-friend African smile shows no trace of war. In 1992, when he was twenty, Eric founded a small nonprofit dedicated to protecting gorillas and easing tensions between the park and his native community, which lies just outside the park gates.
I’m standing next to Eric in his field office just outside the park, in front of the first memorial I have seen in Congo: A wall lined with framed eight-by-ten photos of gorillas. “These are the gorillas killed in the park,” says Eric, and he speaks about each of them with the kind of affection people typically reserve for a beloved pet dog. “Ninja, killed April 1997 by rebels. Maheshe, 1993, poachers killed. Soso killed with her baby by rebels in 1998.”
A larger-than-life mural of gorillas graces the opposite wall, each animal with a name painted underneath. Shelves are lined with hand-carved elephants, rhinos, and chimps created in an initiative launched in Eric’s first year—an art program that trained poachers to carve souvenirs for tourists. The idea was that if these locals had another way to make a living—through ecotourism—they would give up poaching. The problem: Most of the tourists coming to the forests were being routed through Rwanda. In April 1994, tourism evaporated. Eric simply says, “The carving program went down.”
In July 1994, a flood of refugees came to these forests from Rwanda. Eric describes that time: “Three big, big, big camps were set up three kilometers from the park. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees helped facilitate them, in cooperation with the government. Not only did they come and stay in camps, they started cutting down trees in villages. Poaching activities increased; they were cutting trees from the park to make charcoal. Those people were looking for stuff in villages, like bananas or sticks or something. At first, they would say, ‘Please help, I am a refugee.’ Second, ‘Do you have some work? You can pay me a banana.’ Sometimes they would steal. Most were respectful. We had respect for refugees. They were here under UN law.
“The camps remained for one and a half years.
“We knew them only as refugees under the UN structure, not as anything else. Then, in 1996, Kabila came with the Rwandan Army to fight President Mobutu and to chase refugees from the camps. The soldiers said, ‘Those are not refugees. It’s Interahamwe, those who killed in Rwanda.’ We were confused: Are they refugees or Interahamwe?
“The camps were in our village, so when they were chased, we were chased together. It was nine in the morning. I was in my village, home with my parents, when we heard ‘Ta, Ta, Ta, Ta.’ Bullets. We took what we could—little bags. I put mine on my back, my parents got theirs, and we went in the direction of the park, thinking we’d hide out in there. But when we went that way, we heard bombing ahead of us in the forest. We said, ‘No, no, no. We’ll die there.’
“We went north, along the border of the park without knowing where we were going. Somewhere. We were tired. It was a whole day walking. It was getting dark. By that time, we were not with refugees. Everybody was saving himself. If we went in the park, they would be bombing. If we went down to the village, they would be fighting. We said, ‘We’ll stay here. If we