Going Back

So, the Congo preparation has begun again. My visa application is filled out, and I’m already having quasi-nightmares. Last night, I was at the airport without the following items, which my brain deemed most important: a neck pillow, medicine, and an eye mask. Frantic, I called Jesse to have him bring the items in a backpack. I woke up, told my brain to stop dreaming about Congo. I told it: Stop dreaming about Congo. Then, I fell asleep and dreamed about Congo. The next dream, we were already there, but I was wearing PJs. Then, my travel mates and I sat around in a living room, and no one really spoke to me. They talked to each other, they asked me a question or two, but no one had an actual conversation with me.

Before I fall asleep each night, it seems my mind can do nothing other than think of all the things I have to do in the next few months. Make a doctor’s appointment to get malaria meds, extra prescriptions of antibiotics in case I get sick there, and any vaccines I’m not current on. Get passport photos for the visa application. Buy stuff—hand wipes, bug spray, protein bars. Somehow come up with an ungodly amount of money to pay for all this. (That would be where “support raising” comes in—something I fear I may be allergic to.)

We had our first team meeting last Sunday, and going into it I felt somewhat sick to my stomach. For every bit of excitement I have about going back, I have an equal amount of “Oh crap, what have I done?”

I remember the morning I walked across the Rwanda-Congo border, toward Bukavu. I could literally feel order and reason falling away, like skin shedding off a snake, revealing something bright and something sinister underneath. Congo was chaos, it was manic energy. As we stood outside a squat, yellow building while Bishop and Robin got our visas, we smelled urine and human sweat and something else, something fetid. The air was still and warm. A man hobbled down the street toward us, a growth under his face the size of a couple grapefruits, making him look like one of those caricatures of Jay Leno, an enormous chin, only this was decidedly not funny.

It’s those images that come to mind now, as I go to team meetings and listen as a group of college students say how excited they are to go. I’m on this team because I’ve been before, because they can look at me and say, see, you can go to Congo and be just fine, and because I can tell them to bring a bottle of Cipro and only eat raw vegetables that have thick skins. What I want to tell them is that being in Congo feels like spending two weeks inside a pressure cooker.

But in my dream last night, there was also the lake. The bougainvillea, the mist rising off the jungles, the banana trees, the avocados. There was seeing Fiston again (though my subconscious gave him a mustache—what’s up with that?), seeing Bishop and Mama Lily and everybody. I told the team I was going back for those people, to show them I had not forgotten, that I had not forgotten what I’d seen and heard, that I will never forget.

And so I will fill out the forms and I will send the letters and I will buy the stuff. And I will pack a suitcase and a backpack (hopefully forgetting nothing important). And I will spend two days straight in a series of airplanes. And I will pass the Rwandan hills and fields of tea and clusters of eucalyptus trees. And I will cross the border and feel Congo hit me like a closed fist, and I will hate it and I will love it.