Oui5: Road to Recovery - Gorillas in ze Mist

June 2014

This is taken exactly 2 seconds before the hammock gets flipped inside out - tears!

This has been a long break from updating the blog. The reasons are diverse, but not least was that in late January I injured my knee. There isn’t even a great war story behind it: on a lazy Sunday afternoon playing ultimate. I heard/felt a tearing from my right knee, and looked down to see the kneecap pointing at three o’clock. It looked very wrong, anatomically speaking, but the pain wasn’t (yet) that bad. Happily, a woman on the field was some sort of primate/wilderness physician and so she had me lie on my back, take deep breaths, and then basically slid the knee cap back into its groove like a giant, hairy oyster. Funnily enough, pretty well the whole time I was super conscious that the kiddos were watching on the sideline and that I therefore shouldn’t roll around shouting obscenities like some sort of shaggy haired Italian footballer. As I recall though, an oath or two may have escaped my lips.

Hmm, at what point is this road not a road? (Aberdares Ntl. Park)

The next couple of months were not that bad from a pain perspective, but horribly uncertain from a medical prognosis one. I had thought that legal advice was inherently dodgy, but the medical profession has its share of muppets. One guy, basically THE sports surgeon in town, didn’t even touch the knee before he asked if I was free tomorrow for him to operate. He had even populated the insurance claims forms for me with my particulars! It seemed hasty, so I asked a few open-ended questions to assess whether he was a snake, or just a dummy. Aside from the steady stream of Latin terms (a red flag from law school that the person has no idea what they are talking about), his bedside manner was comically abrupt. At one point, he asked me to stop referring to him as ‘Doctor’ because, he said, pointing with a model femur over his shoulder to some sort of medieval looking gilt-framed certificate (also in Latin) allegedly attesting to the fact that, after a certain point of qualification/fellowship, a medical professional goes full circle from Mr. to Dr., back to Mr.

Is this a thing?

I bade him farewell, making sure to say, with good, solid eye contact, “Thanks for the consultation, Doctor. I’ll be in touch.”

Of course, I wasn’t. What a douche.

After several consultations, the medical advice did converge around the following:

(i) This was an unprecedented event for my knee.

(ii) I am not a professional athlete (or a professional in anything in particular, for that matter).

(iii) The kneecap seemed to be blissfully reunited with its colleagues.

(iv) I should therefore wait and see, always reserving the right to operate.

I therefore chose to wait (and not operate), and applied my own common sense healing accelerants: time with family, laughing a lot, sleeping a lot, cod liver oil (unscientific, but a bizarrely soothing ‘no pain no gain’ childhood ritual), and rehab. Four months on, I am happy to report that I am much better, and in fact just ran 10K in the forest, slowly and gingerly to be sure, but it felt good!

Having never been injured before, it was a real eye opener to have to deal with the betrayal of the body. One low/high point was waiting for an elevator, supported by crutches, and being physically unable to use my phone to while away the minutes. Just goes to show how out of touch one gets with the constant distractions.

Anyway, I have a whole new respect for the beautiful, self-healing machines we call our bodies. A. and I celebrated my comeback to the world of the able-bodied by going gorilla trekking in Rwanda last weekend.

A and I were going to be presenting at the same conference in Kigali, a first for us!

S and I field test the internet of things as a side trip to the mobile payments for empowered communities conference. (A waterproofed SIM is dropped into the handpump, thereby sending out water flow/breakdown info to the operator remotely, to allow for better repair resource management).

So, we decided to go a few days early and drive out to Musanze (roughly, 100km or 2 hours from Kigali) and check out the gorillas. S. and F. came too, and it was fun to do a short road trip through the rust-coloured hillsides up on the beautifully tarmacked roads. S. had one puking session, but she handled it stoically, reaching wordlessly for a brown paper bag (plastic is illegal in Rwanda, and you are patted down by customs for any bags or wrapping such as one puts on car seats before getting on a plane!). On arrival, while I retrieved the bag from the car to throw it away, it gave way (just outside the car, thankfully). Just as I was checking the horizon for whether the host of the lodge had seen this disaster, her dog bounded up and joyously lapped up the vomit. S. and I exchanged a meaningful glance, and then stepped over the oblivious hound, to where the tea and biscuits awaited us.

Kigali Genocide Memorial

Our plan was to have an early night, and then leave early next morning to the Parc National des Volcans, where we had secured two permits (children under 15 not permitted) to hike up the mountain, and spend an hour with the gorillas. While these permits were not cheap (500USD per person for East African residents, and I think 900 Euros per person for non-residents), one got the sense that the government was actually putting some of it back into the local community. We saw new looking schools, clinics and sanitation facilities, some bearing a cheerful signage: “Paid for by Gorilla tourism”

6am the next morning saw us huddled under a thatched roof waiting area in the national park, in pouring rain, awaiting a briefing of which primate ‘family’ we would be visiting that day. Whoever is the marketing this thing has got the whole ‘sell a narrative, not a product’ thing down.

We were to visit a family called Aurashta, which had a new-born and a set of twins. At this point in the briefing, the large group had been whittled down to about 8 of us, and apart from A. and myself (clad, respectively, in track pants, a fleece and a rain jacket), the crew looked like they were about to claim a 6000 meter peak, while filming a documentary underwritten by ArcTeryx. One lady asked pointed questions of the guide about the relations between the various cousins displayed on the ‘family chart’.

Having lived here a while, and unless the animals in question are either eating or mating with each other, I’m not super into the whole safari thing. But I was also here off a one hour flight, on my way to a business conference – the whole thing was a kind of elaborate date for the two of us.

But I knew that white people love them some gorilla action when one of the ArcTeryx people in our group literally elbowed an HIV+, wood gathering, single mother with 3 kids out of the way to get a closer look at the Aurashta gorilla genealogical chart on the wall of the shack we were in.

Ok that didn’t happen.

But, socio-economically speaking, it did smack of that to me - a widdle bit.

Bottom line though, and all tough talk aside, the experience of being around the gorillas was unforgettable. Being a meter away from a silverback, on foot and surrounded by the rainforest and the mist, was at once exhilarating and profoundly frightening. At one point, the alpha produced a prodigious poop (which smelled like high quality weed), and then proceeded to eat it, absent-mindedly staring into the middle distance, like you or I would eat a Magnum on a beach.

A and I looked at each other silently, because we knew S. would have loved that!