Gorilla Protection

This is Balemba. Great news: the villager that went missing last month has finally reappeared. He showed up dehydrated, thin, dirty, and barefoot, but alive!

This is what he told me:

Having walked from Rumangabo to his village in Bukima, he got started working in his crop field. After a couple hours, two young men with guns approached him and asked him why there weren’t any other villagers around. He told them that he was just there earlier than the others.

The men then became threatening and took the food he had with him (sweet potato with beans). They ordered him to follow them, taking him to an area near the Bukima Patrol Post. For three days, he was subjected to interrogations and beatings.

Once they were satisfied that he actually knew nothing, they transferred him from Bukima to Bikenge. There, he witnessed widespread poaching and saw other villagers forced to work for the rebels. At one point he also saw a group of gorillas in the forest (Diddy thinks it was the Kabirizi group). This was the first time he had seen gorillas in their natural habitat.

Kwibesha from the Kabirizi group

He was forced by the rebels to bring 200 liters of water every day from a spring several hundred meters into the forest. He survived on potatoes and slept in an abandoned hut, with the rebels in their tents nearby.

He did the best he could to hide his fear and fatigue from the rebels. In the end, he was finally freed because he was smart enough to do everything the rebels ordered him to do. Oddly enough, the rebels asked him to come back from time to time to bring them cigarettes. They even offered him a job as a tracker, with the promise that he could one day become a park ranger. He of course declined the offer and left, eventually finding his way to the displaced people’s camp at Kabaya.

He is still very traumatized by his ordeal, but hopefully he will get better soon.

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