Lwiro and peaceful elections 10 August 2006

After the girls arrived and we did a short weekend handover, I had to shoot to Bukavu again. I phoned my moto-man, David, and off we went to see how things were going at Lwiro. I hadn’t been there in a month, another month for the dust to be ground into a fine powder. Laura gave me an MP3 player and put my favourite hard angry rock on it, so the trip there and back wasn’t so painful.When I was last there, we got some funding from the Born Free Foundation and they allowed me to use some for constructing bigger cages for the monkeys. At last, the 5 Red-tails are in one of the long enclosures, the 4 Owl monkeys are in two new and bigger cages and the Cercocerbus female is out of her 30 x 30 x 40 cm dark service cage and she can actually stand up. It is just the male and female Cercopithecus aethiops that are still in separate cages (very small) that need another bigger cage, but I don’t have more funds for this at present.A few days after my arrival, it decided to be rain season. I stupidly thought that we would make it on the motorbike but it was real difficult. Took us 3 hours to get there and the mud is like baboon shit. At one stage the mud got stuck so bad between the front tyre and the guard that the wheel just stopped and we plopped off the side! It was very funny and at least we were going slow.On Monday, the ICCN had confiscated a tiny infant gorilla that the military had given up. For every one captured baby gorilla, there is a family of 5 to 20 that has to be killed in order to get it. Gorillas protect their young fiercely. We are trying to get the baby across to Goma as the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project has more skill in caring for her. Baby gorillas are very sensitive and, unlike chimps, don’t survive very long without the proper care. It’s more red tape that we have to fight.I had to cut my time in Lwiro short as there were elections on the 30th of July. The airport is 36 kms away from Bukavu. Got there in the morning, waited the whole day. At 4pm they said the flight was cancelled. Surprisingly though, my bag went to Goma without me on the morning flight! I had to go all the way back to Bukavu on the bus and then get up at 5am to catch the bus the following day, only to be informed that the flight was only at 3pm. The other people that were also waiting to get to Goma, were ‘election observers’ and journalists. They made a stink and a flight was organised for 11am. I returned on the 28th and we waited for elections. Most of the NGO’s closed down and the mzungus went across the border to Rwanda. Nothing really happened. Everyone was happy to have their vote and things went smoothly. I think it was only in Kinshasa that there was major unrest.Our next crisis was that we were being kicked out of the house on 2nd August and we still had nowhere to go………