Jungle Camping

Diitabiki lies in the center of an archipelago known as Lon Wataa. Many of these islands have small villages, forming a greater Diitabiki community. Beyond Kisai, the last village of the archipelago, the Tapanahony River opens into a grand vista, the distant forest on the banks of either side appearing as a small green band between the twin expanses of air and water. This broad portion, Doo Wataa, seems more a long, bending lake, or a chain of lochs, rather than a river. The river winds around a few islands, curving gradually to the south and eventually narrowing at the village of Godolo, where up until last week I had never been beyond.

In October some friends and I took an excursion to Gaanboli, the farthest Ndjuka village, to retrieve a dugout canoe in its initial stages of construction. As I had never been past Godolo, I asked my friend Heni, rather than being invited to go on the trip. Beyond Godolo, the Tapanahony spreads into a series of taciturn streams and challenging rapids that proved particularly tricky, as the water stood unusually low, even for the dry season. After about an hour of careful navigation, the river opened up again. At one point, our pilot suddenly yelled, “Get my gun!” then, “cartridges, cartridges!” for a deer had come to drink at the riverbank. Simultaneously running the boat to shore and loading his gun, the pilot expressed distress at not having the cartridges in hand earlier. He and Heni plunged into the jungle, but the fortunate animal had disappeared.

Further on, beyond a bend, a mining town known as Pashtone rested at the base of a high hill. The settlement was exactly as a mining town should be expected: filthy, with sheds and small, but necessarily profitable shops scattered recklessly across the mud. We met with some friends of surprisingly unshady character and proceeded, in force, to the job.

Heni had found a suitable tree about a quarter mile into the jungle. Fortunately, he had cut a wide path and placed lengths of saplings, cut into rollers, so we could pull the new canoe to the river right away. Of course, we needed a rope first, so Kiikiman, the youngest of our crew, climbed a tree and cut a strong vine with a machete. The boat, so to speak, was at this point a large shell of a trunk. We tied the vine to the canoe, and the twelve or so of us heaved the fallen tree across the rollers to the river, stopping many times, often to cut the path wider or haul the boat over a large trunk. When we reached the river, we plunged it into the water, bailed, and tied the canoe to the shore to pick up the next day. The eight of us that had started out together, then continued to the campsite.

Ba Heni’s camp lies at a scenic bend in the river, just before an imposing rapid that guards the site of Gaanboli. A large flat rock with a few lagoons and sandbars was exposed at low water. Before climbing up to the camp, Heni’s son Mootie, Kiikiman, and I swam out to set fishing nets to catch our dinner and the next day’s breakfast. For the Ndjuka, meat tastes good around the clock.

By the time we had set the nets and tied up our hammocks, evening was approaching. We talked on the flat stones at the base of the camp, then cooked a late dinner, telling old hunting stories before falling asleep under the stars.

In the morning, we checked the nets again and found a large variety of fish. Piranha, a crab, pataka, waa-waa, a-gaan-koi, and dede-sama-con-dja (“dead people come here” is a type of fish) found their way into our snares. We cleaned the fish with machetes, cutting them in pieces Ndjuka style, rather than filleting them, and cooked a delicious mid-morning meal.

Before we set out, a young man from Gaanboli hailed us. The village’s short wave radio was not working correctly, and several of us took the short ride upriver to see if we could repair it. Heni and I tried changing a few settings, but it became clear that transmitter, which we could not fix, was the problem, so we began our journey home.

Since we had to tow the new boat, returning downriver took longer than coming up. When we met rapids, we unhitched the canoes and a couple of us would pole the new boat down. Not yet proficient in the art of poling, I rode in the new canoe while others directed the boat down the river. After carving out the trunk of a tree, the Ndjuka fire the wood upside-down, slowly stretching it with the heat over many days. This widens the boat and adds significant stability, as I discovered while riding in the unfinished canoe.

At one point on the return journey, the pilot, now equipped with cartages and balancing on the moving canoe, shot a kon-koni, a large, short-eared bush rabbit, and we carried our prey in the new boat.

As we approached Doo Wataa, the widest part of the river, we saw a huge cumulonimbus cloud gathering force and spreading a dark shadow over the course ahead. The cloud had forgotten that it was the dry season, and we had forgotten rain jackets. We plunged into a white curtain of water and discovered that rain jackets would not have made much difference. The rain flew hard in our faces and was indistinguishable from the spray of the turbulent water. Looking ahead was impossible, but on looking behind us I saw four-foot high waves, the largest I have yet seen on a river. The waves slammed into us head on, drenching those of us in the front and filling the canoes. We started bailing the boat with a five-gallon bucket as quickly as we could, switching off ever so often and barely keeping up with the waves. After about twenty minutes of fighting the storm, we anchored the new canoe on the shore to save both craft from sinking.

By the time we reached Lon Wataa, the storm had depleted itself. A small boat, carrying two large, bumbling men and too many barrels of oil passed in the opposite direction. A much shorter, dreadlocked pilot in a manner befitting the optimum of pirates, cursed the “incompetent dogs” who wearily greeted us as they attempted to pole the craft over rocks. The difference in temperature after the storm was remarkable, for while the air felt frigid, relatively, the river seemed nearly too hot to touch. When we finally reached Diitabiki Island, the warm water and a hot drink made the perfect ending to our adventure.

October the Tenth

The independence of the Ndjuka nation precedes that of Suriname. As a conglomeration of escaped slaves from West and Central Africa, the Ndjuka united to fight a war that decimated the punitive forces of naïve European adventurers who had greedily believed legends of El Dorado. The defeated Dutch grudgingly accepted the fait accompli of Ndjuka freedom in 1760, over a hundred years before the end of slavery in Dutch colonies, and over two hundred years before they gave up their Guiana possession completely.

It was ordained that I was to live in Diitabiki. The Ndjuka national holiday, the day they officially won their freedom from their Dutch slave masters, is my birthday. A series of competitions, a cooking extravaganza, and speeches by national leaders on the history of the Ndjuka people, made for quite a celebration. Women wore colorful embroidered skirts called pangies, and a friend lent me a traditional cross-stitch cloth to hang over my shoulder. People from the entire river, including Amerindians, came to celebrate. A six-on-six soccer tournament was the highlight of the event for many. The island brought in a shipment of government oil for the electricity generators for the occasion, and for a few weeks afterward, the lanterns were put away and the reggae reverberated throughout the village.

Great entertainment was had and exaggerated stories told for weeks when Diitabiki’s Peace Corps volunteer fell behind significantly in the canoe race. Losing was a given, for the Ndjuka seem to learn to paddle before they can walk, but to participate in the name of freedom, was well worth getting laughed at in light of Ndjuka canoeing proficiency.

A Visit from Dad

Leaving members of one’s family to their own devices in a foreign country is considered generally impolite…but that depends on where that family has traveled. My father, on the way to a couple of missions leadership conferences in Senegal and Ghana, chose to fly to Africa via a river island in the Amazon Rainforest.

My Peace Corps colleagues thought I was crazy when I told them I had planned simply to give my father instructions, and reward him, should he successfully make it upriver, by meeting him at the Diitabiki airstrip. My dad has traveled so often that I probably did not even need to give him any instructions for him to appear in my village, but flying to the city was well worth spending an extra day with him. In the city, we went to the Paramaribo Zoo, so that if he missed an anaconda, capybara, or giant anteater in the jungle, he would be able to say he had seen one in Suriname.

On Wednesday, we flew a hundred miles into the jungle in a Cessna Caravan. In flight, I pointed out the magnificent spread of hilly Guiana forest that inspired Green Mansions, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, though nymphs and dinosaurs remained unseen on our journey. Upon landing we paddled the Endurance from the airstrip to Diitabiki Island and dropped off our backpacks at Jungle Hall. We then took an invitation from my neighbor, Stephen, to go bow-fishing. That first evening, we caught thirty-six Waa-waa, bottom-feeding fish, and cooked them over a wood fire on a stone by the riverside. After a card game by candlelight, reminiscent of the nights without electricity during my childhood in Ethiopia, my father and I tied up our hammocks. Though he did not swear off beds as I have, my dad slept soundly his first night in a hammock.

On Thursday we encountered Ndjuka culture. I gave my father a crash course on protocol before our audience with the paramount chief, who was ecstatic to meet my dad. In fact, I had never seen him so animated. Gaanman Garzon thought it magnificent that my father could experience part of my life in Diitabiki, gave a discourse on the meaning of family, and chuckled over the fact that my parents had produced a mere two children. Later, while walking through the village, we sat in a traditional community meeting discussing the upcoming Ndjuka holiday. The meeting included formal debate over settled matters for the purpose of heightening public interest in the event and contained a long circular discussion before reaching the true purpose of the conference: the appointing of a logistics committee for the celebration.

We went fishing again in the evening, and my dad got a strike by, what I believe was a large peacock bass, which followed his lure before it saw us and swam away. It started raining heavily while we fought to regain the fish’s attention. That night, my dad watched me dispatch a huge tarantula that had tried to use my house as shelter from the rain.

The next morning, we rose with the sun and paddled the Endurance around the island, as I usually do several times a week. We finally completed our tour of the village in the morning, for adventure had delayed us in every previous attempt.

On Saturday, we had a relaxing morning. In keeping with tradition we cooked pancakes and made Ethiopian coffee. The plane came a little early. As we were walking to the canoe to make our way to the airstrip, we heard the Cessna land. We paddled across quickly and jogged to the plane, but thankfully, it took a few minutes to unload the arriving plane before I bid my father farewell.