CHAPTER SEVEN

M’BOKI 1991  

January M’boki Refugee Camp, Central African Republic

Arketa and Teresa yielded to pain, thirst, and diminishing light by slumping against a nearby tree that shielded them somewhat from the rain. Without children along, they “slept good.” Shorty before morning light, birdcalls woke Arketa. She winced as she rose onto swollen feet, slipping into the forest to relieve her self then, along with her sister, resuming the walk to M’boki. 

 

“River. You cross. M’boki,” said people in Obo. Missionary fingers walked that message across the palm of Arketa’s outstretched hand. She got it. The river. The bridge. M’boki town. She prayed as she walked. 

 

Please let us find our family and people we know. Let us find the house we need. The Mosquito nets, the cooking pot, the school, work, maybe even a generator. Please let the children be free of malaria. Let us first go to the church and give thanks. Let Teresa remember that God is great. 

         

Such thoughts occupied Arketa’s mind while sharp rocks stabbed her feet. She wanted to complain, but alongside her, before her, behind her, walked hundreds of others whose feet bled, who carried their dead, whose limbs were missing or infected or broken. Hundreds of refugees moved along with her now; those who paid the price for still being alive. Who could say it wasn’t better to be among the dead, among bodies strewn along the way, those unable to fight off malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, gangrene, snakebite, wild animals, or gunshot wounds. Who could say? 

         

 Well into the late afternoon, the women joined a narrowing line of refugees shoving toward the M’boki River bridge. Stepping from the river’s bank onto the loosely lashed log crossing she splayed her feet across wide gaps between logs, undulating inches ready to claim a foot. It is close, she thought, this M’boki. Safely across, she quickened her pace, fighting exhaustion and hunger, trying to stay alert, concentrating on destination and survival, before lurching to a sudden stop. 

Shouting!

She threw her hand across her sister’s chest to stop her forward motion. 

Men!  She saw them running from a distance, men yelling, ‘Go Away! Go away, Sudanese!’

 

“Oh God! Run!”

 

Arketa shoved her sister toward the deep forest, crashing into a dense green wall of jungle growth as they left the road. Arketa’s mind was hot, seared by colliding memories of mayhem. She threw hands over her ears and waited next for the sound of guns, expecting to be shot. The two women ran like rats chased off by leopards from a fresh kill. Where are the children? Where is my mom? Is anyone still alive? 

 

She ran, waiting to be shot or struck down. “No, no!”Arketa heard shouts in French and Arabic. “This is not trouble!” the voices cried. “You have reached the camp!” Local Zande men of the village ran after them, had run toward them only moments before, local citizens welcoming them.

 

“Bonne Année et Bonne Santé! Bonne Année et Bonne Santé!”they shouted. 

“Happy New Year! Good Health! You have arrived at M’boki,” they cried out in Songo. 

 

And so it was that early January 1991, that twenty-six-year-old Arketa, pregnant with the last of her children, the last with the deported Belgian doctor, was pulled from the forest and guided to a huge open place under a massive mango tree. She had reached the place of safety for refugees, the place initially acquired by the United Nations in the 1950’s.

         

“M’boki! M’boki!” came the shouts. 

         

Arketa looked around. She must be there, she thought. No, she thought. But no, looking further, she was sure she couldn’t be. There was no marketplace, no police station, no clinic, no schoolhouse or church – this was not yet M’boki. She guarded against panic. In Zande, French, even Arabic, she petitioned local citizens, the most of whom spoke only Songo. Using universal gestures for a moving vehicle and small children, she conveyed the need to find her children. Ah, that. She was pulled through the mob of people till she reached her mother and the circle of dull-eyed children standing with uneaten African biscuits clutched in their hands. 

         

Confusion ruled. Rain fell. This was M’boki, some said. It could not be, said others. Everyone expected a town. Some threw their hands up to stop the talk, turned on their heels and walked away, deciding to travel farther into the forest to find M’boki. Arketa’s mom said, “Look to the sun going. Find a place now for sleeping and make decisions tomorrow.”

 

Finding a place for sleeping was what they meant to do, but every precious space big enough for a body to stretch out had just that—bodies stretched out or bodies busy sweeping sleeping spaces warning off any who might encroach. People everywhere, like a mob of spectators lining the path of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. All the way to the edge of the forest, people spread leaves, cursed the rain, argued among themselves, cried alone, stared into space, or were already asleep. Arketa walked over people, around them, or past them. She listened to their talk, surrounded by their sorrows and rumors. The rain pounded. Warnings of a wandering lion ran rampant.. No one wanted to sleep near the edge of the deep forest, not without fires, not with lions and leopards nearby. 

 

Unable to believe her luck, Arketa saw a seemingly safe place fairly near the mango tree, near the center of things. Unbelievable. She called her sister to come, handed her a twig switch and told her to start sweeping before darkness fell. One sweeping stroke, then another, before the stench reached Arketa’s nose and knocked her back. Arketa shot a glance toward her mother who held her gaze long enough to convey surrender. 

         

The family gathered large leaves and put down several layers on the floor of the place. They settled children and demanded that no complaining come from any quarter of their group. The women and children of the noble Zambakaris, of the small but proud Balanda tribe, of the respected Fuzuga clan, lay with seven children under the age of seven in the collapsed ruins of a school building where local men, drunk on palm oil beer, did their toilet. That first night, the family laid themselves on leaves that covered human shit. No discussion. Arketa and Teresa did what they had to do. The first of things to learn about M’boki was learned that first night.

 

°  °  °

            

On the second morning, Arketa sized up the situation. Thousands of Sudanese milled about, naked or nearly so. Many were starving, angry, or depressed. Others were lethargic, confused, or mourning. Far too many angry young men carried weapons. Bodies of the elderly or the very young who failed to wake from their night’s sleep needed to be buried. How were a people without tools or a proper burial place, with no desire to leave the bodies of loved ones in a foreign land; how were they to bury the dead? Bodies lay untended for a time, twice victimized. Men looked for fights. Orphaned children wandered and begged. Women wept and complained. No one had possessions but everyone had talk—and the talk was about going home in a month, two months at the most. Sudan would restore peace. No one need settle in M’boki, not in this god awful dripping heat. Not slapping mosquitoes and flies and other unfamiliar stinging insects. No. 

 

On the second morning, Arketa dipped water from a clear puddle, washed herself and the children as thoroughly as she could and forced them to eat the biscuits carried from Obo. She tolerated no questions, not theirs, not the stack of them slamming around inside her skull. Under Lucia’s leadership, her husband’s red walking stick and his spear in hand, the Zambakaris walked away from the center of things. They trudged along a narrow footpath up a fairly steep hill looking for the real M’boki. Small, carelessly tended Zande tukuls dotted the landscape where a hundred or so local people lived in poverty nearly as severe as those 30,000-or so Sudanese refugees pouring in.

            

Through gestures and her few French phrases, Arketa made inquires. “M’boki. Where is it?” she asked, because thissurely wasn’t it.

 

“Cet endroit.” This, fingers pointed to the ground, “M’boki,” the local citizens said, because it was.

         

She couldn’t believe it.

 

“Where is the marketplace? Where is the police station? The school? The church? The football field?” Arketa asked because these things should be in M’boki. This was what refugees talked about, yearned for, along every step since entering Central African Republic—the townof M’boki.

         

“‘Here! Here!” the local citizens said in Songo, raising their voices, gesturing and waving arms around to encompass the area. 

         

Arketa became impatient. “M’boki! M’boki! Where?”

         

“Here! Here!”

° °  °

 

The Zambakaris were “here,” right where they were. 

 

Time to make a list of needed things. Oh. Right. No paper for jotting things in M’boki. No pen or pencil for paper. 

Gardening: no tools, no seed, no land 

Utensils: no cooking pots, water or food containers, ax or machete, matches

Clothing: None

Housing: no tukul, furnishings, plumbing, power, tools

Means of communication: None

Medical or Educational Opportunities: None

Safety: None

Opportunities for employment: None

Resources: None

 

Arriving in M’boki felt worse than the agony required to reach the place. No clothing, shoes, tools, shelter, job, food, garden, seed to sow, household goods, work, but an abundance of unshakable sorrow and increasing hopelessness. About 700 miles from Bangui (the sham of a capital city) and 125 miles from the volatile Sudanese border, M’boki offered a few small rivers that ran as long as rain fell, trees, a dwindling supply of food from the forest as people foraged carelessly where the footprint of what was a Sudanese town decades ago, and an assortment of locals eager to profit off the arrival of these desperately needy people. Sorrow and apathy reigned. Refugees languished as if everyone had consumed a cult leader’s Kool-Aid.

 

Days passed, then weeks. Naked, ashamed and stripped of dignity, schoolteachers did not, would not, teach. Plied with questions, pastors and priests pulled away with nothing but pity for God’s people, including themselves. Those with medical knowledge turned away. They did not tend. Tend with what? 

 

Go to the tree. Find the bark or leaf or sap to treat malaria, dysentery, worms or confusion, or whatever ails thousands of people swimming in despair. Go, tend yourselves while I swat mosquitoes, burn up with malaria, and bury my dead. No, the people did not plant gardens or build tukuls in those first few months, even in that first year. We will go home soon, they told themselves. No one smiled. Few cared to live, and many didn’t. 

 

Yet, on that second morning, the Zambakari women clutched the hands of sweaty children, all of them drowning in the morning’s oppressive humidity. They carried a bit of water in a broken calabash, a gourd, found a few days before near Obo. They stopped when they reached a small outpost. Gendarmerie! They stood quietly and read a sign posted in French over the door of the one room mud-brick building: “Military Police of M’BOKI.” So it was true. 

         

The three military policemen assigned to this corner of the country had a two-way radio. They had guns, they delivered news, and they attempted to settle squabbles. They greeted the Zambakaris and made a joyous fuss over Arketa’s light-skinned children. With a wave of the hand and a few words in French, they conveyed the message, “Go find your place under a tree near here, clear it, make it your home. Stay close to us.”

 

No one was assigned a “place” in M’boki. No organized plan for the camps existed. Chose what you want, Arketa was told by people who had settled a day or two ahead of her. “Choose what you want, go sit under dah big tree.” So, that is what they did before they did anything else. They found a tree, they scratched out the boundaries of their plot, “face to face with dah station of the gendarmerie.” Lucia settled next to Arketa; Teresa, on the other side of her mom. 

 

“You like it dehr? You clean it. You move dah rocks. You divide the space, how you will sleep. Go to dah forest, get dah big leaf, come back, put it as a mattress. You start putting your firewood. What can we do? There is nothing, not even dah way to get grass to build dah tukul, not in the rainy season. We are lying on dah ground like animals, naked, barefoot, with empty stomachs.”

 

After etching out property lines, Arketa and Teresa scoured the territory for anything useful. They pulled parts off derelict vehicles, left rusting since the fifties.  Metal could be bent to the shape of a cooking pot with smaller strips serving to push things like roasted termites toward or away from the fire, once there was a fire. They collected firewood where they could. Fabric found was scrubbed on river rocks and could be used it as a sieve for filtering water – once they found a way to contain it. Slippers could be cut from tire tread. So they saved the rubber, hoping to find a cutting instrument some day. 

         

While her mom tended the children, the two younger women cased abandoned dwellings. With rocks or broken clay, they dug up usable broken pots. They hadn’t yet found an elephant’s tusk for pounding corns but they didn’t have corns. Or millet. Or cassava. Or simsim. Or beans. Or lulu oil. Or milk. Or okra. Or wild yams.  But in the jungle they did find a heavy stick, a perfect substitute for the elephant tusk, and with it, they found hope. In the jungle they knelt at puddles deep enough, clean enough, to wash greens that grew near the M’boki River, about a twenty-five minute walk from their twig swept plots under those chosen trees close to the hut of three policemen. 

Don’t worry about stepping into the M’boki River they were told. No crocodiles there, just the spinach-like greens. Only,said several refugees days wiser than the newly arrived women, test it first. “You cannot’a just say, ‘I find it.’” Some of those greens are bitter. The bitter one is poisonous. “Break dah stem. If it is creamy, throw it down.” Day two—the children ate greens.

 

On the third day in M’boki, while they collected large leaves to make mattresses for sleeping, and a sliver of joy broke through. Arketa found a wild yam tendril wrapping through foliage. She followed it down to the ground, dug deep with her fingers for the prize. With the yam tucked between her bare left breast and arm, she walked across the open space to the military police station. 

 

“Bonjour,”she said. The men emerged, happy to see her light-skinned children with her. With gestures and her infectious smile, this beautiful woman with scars healing across her cheeks, pantomimed striking a match. She put that imaginary match down to the grass nearby and asked, in broken French, ‘l’avez-vous?’ Do you have it? Indeed. They did.

         

A match was struck, the smell of it gladdening Arketa’s senses. A bundle of grass ignited the twigs, burning twigs engaged small branches, branches burned long enough to fire up logs. The smell, the smoke, rose. The women wept, openly. You keep dah fire going, always going once made. You keep it for cooking, for keeping warm, for protection from snakes and meandering animals. The Zambakari women and children stood reverently, really, before the first fire since escaping their homes in Sudan. Smoke rose, refugees arrived from all around, holding sticks to the flame, and carried fire away. That fire, that joy, went a-l-l-l through the camps on shared sticks. 

 

The gendarme loaned a cooking pot. Arketa smashed the yam into pieces against a rock, she scraped peeling away with sharp scrap metal. She and her sister mashed about five pounds worth of the dry fibrous meat against a flat stone with pounding sticks. They walked to the nearest stream carrying the cooking pot, filled it, lugged the water to their tree, boiled it, mixed in the crushed yam, stirred up a storm for ten or so minutes, singed the skin of fingers, then cried over the joy of feeding fufu to their family.

 

°  °  °

 

 While periods of hard rain still fell, the Zambakari women rolled taro leaves into funnels, closing the bottom with a fold. The children placed these water traps around the plots, scattered like luminaries at New Mexico Christmastime. Everyone joined in on scouting hikes, hunting for any useful parts of buried, broken, burned or discarded clay pots. Once found, they “washed dem good” at the river. “Fill it. Carry it on your head to dah place you have.” Arketa scraped away bugs and scrubbed down large leaves being prepared as mattresses. She shook them hard and when the rain ceased for a few afternoon hours, and laid them out to dry. She and the children spent hours digging and discarding rocks from the place they chose for sleeping. There, near the fire, they placed the leaves. There, they would lie down at night.

                  

Little time passed before Lucia walked the banks of rivers seeking dah special soilfor making cooking pots. She filled her arms with it. How good it would have been to have the pajama, or the long skirt to hold the dirt. Her husband’s mother had taught her this pot-making skill. Lucia mixed the clay, shaped it into pots large and small. Her daughters brought firewood, dug the pit that served as a kiln, gave thanks for fire and waited, hardly believing they may soon have a cooking pot. They filled that newly fired and scrubbed pot with water from the river and boiled it in the night. Nice now, Arketa thought, water suitable for tea. Only, of course, there was no tea. This water was stored in a sombah, a fifteen-liter tin for holding water loaned to them by the generous gendarmerie. The boiled water was kept for just the family. 

 

The policemen, their wives and children call out in Songo to Arketa’s two light-skinned children, “Monju, monju!” Teasingly, “White person.” Arketa was nothing but grateful that those little light-skinned children charmed the neighbors. This was a blessing, for sure. 

 

The rainy season tapered off. For several weeks, no one talked about the cleanliness of water, taro leaf funnels, deep clear puddles, fat streams and small rivers through the camp provided all they needed. Now, however, it was as if the thirsty jungle sucked into its belly in every drop it could find. The nearby M’boki River was a patchwork of muddy puddles. Arketa scolded the children goodif they approached dirty water. She watched closely how people washed themselves in those few remaining puddles. Children played in them. Animals, rats, snakes and people who had not prepared well for their selves drank from them. No! Not her children.

            

Refugees who wandered by Arketa’s plot, and if nothing else was true of the Sudanese, wandering into one another’s homes was a normal practice, those people received un-boiled water. The Zambakari women strained water whenever they possibly could. In M’boki, water was water, no matter how dirty. When they could find water very few of the people bothered to boil it. Very few bothered with much of anything, so depressed was the mood, so intent were they on trekking back to Sudan, which in their minds should be possible any day now. But Arketa’s mom wanted healthy children. They boiled their water.

 

°  °  °

 

“Your plot was on the hill. Was it the top camp? Were any plots beyond you?” I asked these questions in a conversation in 2011. 

         

“EEEEIII!  We was in dah middle.” Clearly her friend of two years had not yet grasped the reality of her M’boki life. “By the end of year one, the camps stretched back nearly to Obo, nearly fifty miles,” she said.

 

“Annnd?”Arketa emphasized her point. “Dey other way, past the center Mango tree, through dah forest along to the settlement at Zamio, near Kouangodistrict, toward Bangui? It was too many miles. From our camp you cannot make it to dah end walking one whole day, six to six. No. You get to dis place on your own and now dehr are thousands of refugees each who have nothing. Thousands and thousands with nothing, yeah; like dah man with the top of dah boot. Did I tell you about him?

         

“When I first got to dah camp, I saw dis Sudanese man with only dah tops of his boots still on his feet. You know how dah boot ties with dah rope on your foot top?”

 

“With shoestrings,” I said.

 

“Dis man? No bottoms to dah boot now. Like everyone, he is walking barefoot. But he wears dah top of dah boot. What do you think,” Arketa asked, then answered herself. “I think dis is all dah man has so he keeps dat. No clothes on his body but boots on dah foot.”

         

At some point, a few weeks after the initial surge of refugees arrived, the M’boki mayor, Mr. Baragadanba, welcomed everyone. He was the boss but not, like in Sudan, a chief. His two-way radio that directly connected to some source in the capital, Bangui, made him powerful. He was a friendly man. He called the refugees together and, in his local language, Songo, gave a welcoming speech. “Blah, blah, blah.” What was he saying? Everyone wondered. 

         

Arketa later learned that he said, “Welcome. This is your place. Not only from Sudan but from all over the world, anyone is welcome to this land.” She cracked up, imagining people of the world choosing so destitute a place that offered instant death by the green snake. The Zande people of M’boki were very poor. Few of them lived long. Most of them died either from malaria or from snakebites. The green snake was “tiny, tiny, not even a half-meter long and skinny. When it is resting on dah mango leaf? You cannot see it. Even dah wife of dah mayor went to dah garden and dah green snake bite her. Before she was home, she died.”

            

° °  °

 

By March, many of the Sudanese wearied of nakedness and made clothes from tree bark. The “Bow-geh-dee.” I wrote it as I heard it.

 

The people in the camp were mostly naked. Station benefitted nothing. Chiefs, schoolteachers, priests, and preachers, it didn’t matter. The war and the walk had stripped them of everything short of pride. And pride offered them shame.  As thoroughly as they wanted to leave, these refugees wanted cover for their bodies. They looked to the practice of local people, those wearing the fabric made from tree bark, that which invited fire to consume it in matters of seconds if the wearer was careless.

 

“First, you go to dah special tree,” Arketa’s helpful neighbors instructed. “Most of doz trees you find by the M’bomou River, twelve miles from dah camp. ‘You cut it, like his,” they said, slicing down on a tree side, removing an imaginary portion of bark. ‘You get something special, the elephant tusk or pounding stick. You soak the bark good. You put the wet bark over the big log. You use the tusk or hard wood like a hammer. Beat it good. And from there you will have it nice, soft. You wear it on the bottom of you with the rope holding it.’

Mostly, just to cover dah front. No underwear,” said Arketa. “Huuu!And in your back, maybe you put another one; like small, small pieces.”

 

Like nearly all the women in the camp, Arketa was bare breasted. Sometimes, in the evening women gathered fresh small leaves and wove necklaces. Not often did Arketa do that. She learned early on that it could prove a dangerous fashion statement. Very small insects, the name of which she never learned, lived undetected in those lovely leaves and brought to their wearers an itching that surpassed that of a mosquito both in intensity and duration. “Now you have dah itching of dah mosquwitos and dah insect.”

 

°  °  °

 

Before long, camps that stretched out for miles got numbered. Twenty-five in all. People slept under trees, hunted for greens and yams and any sort of food in every expanding circles of jungle. Areas near the camps were quickly stripped of food sources. Refugees selected specific jungle sites for burying their dead, for burying aborted fetuses and delivered placentas, for burning trash and defecation. 

 

The Zambakari women knew that some of the refugees were crossing the giant M’bomou River. They knew as well that crocodiles owned the river. “No,” said her sister, Teresa. She was not about to step into a boat, to move to the unknown jungle on the river’s far side. “No.”

 

“Ouuuu,thought Arketa. What choice is dehr? They needed food. In an exchange with her sister she resigned. “If something happen to me? Take dah kids, please. Take care of dem.”

         

Rising early one morning, Arketa joined other women walking the three hours to reach the bank of the M’bomou River. Reaching it, she saw, like dah bus stop but for the pirogues.

 

Even before morning light, Arketa and others waited at an appointed place along the riverbank for local men to reach their large hewn boats. Pirogue. Canoe. Six or so passengers crowded in the wide center. Two strong rowers worked from the narrow ends; one standing the back, one forward. “Whendah boat is ready? When we are going to cross the M’bomou River? We see dah water inches below dah side of us, we pull our fingers in, make the sign like the Catholic say, ‘In the name of the Fadder, and the Son—thinking dis day is our last. 

 

“If we cross, we are alive. When dah men cross you back? Thanks be to God. Because something can happen when we are in dah middle of dah river. 

Ohh!Dis is dah first time I see crocodile like fish! You know how many refugees lose the life dehr on dat river?  Eeeeeiii! The crocodile can take you from dah small boat and go down with you.” 

The swift river current drove the boat downriver while the rowers forced it across. Reaching the far bank, terrified passengers checked for submerged or beached crocodiles, jumped from the boat, and ran.

 

“When we go for dah yam, the crocodiles watch for us. Even dah lion, dah buffalo. Dah wild dog, cheetah, elephant, everything was ready to kill us when we went into dah jungle. You did what you had to do if you want dah children to live.” 

 

For a full day Arketa squatted, dug, and freed yams from the ground. She learned to identify poisonous tubers from the sweet, edible ones. She knew to dig carefully (with tools loaned by boat owners). Yams are easily damaged and will spoil quickly if bruised. She walked and worked with at least two or three other women, each watching for wild animals, for snakes, and for glimpses of shadows that indicated time to be at the afternoon boat stop. Far upstream from her starting point, at a place appointed by boatmen who had to correct course for the river’s current, she dropped yams into the boat-owner’s baskets, her ticket home. “Fill dah basket. If you don’t get enough yams to pay dah boat, they are not going to smile at you.”

         

At four in the afternoon, Arketa climbed into a boat that moved back to the M’boki side where she started. Having survived, she crossed her pregnant self, thanking God and walking the three hours back to her plot under the tree, with thirty or so pounds of yams wrapped in taro leaves balanced on her head.

         

Three times, Arketa made the crossing; only three times. The third time was the last time. Intentionally. The third time she got lost across the river. She didn’t go again.

 

“Can I tell that story?” I asked. 

 “Ohhhh!  I’m talking to you now? My eyes is right there. You can tell it.”

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