Aka Pygmies

Since I missed church last Sunday, due to rounding with Laura, I had my first church service here in Congo at a village about thirty minutes drive away. It was an Aka pygmie village. Most of the people in Impfondo are Bantus, although we have some immigrants from Chad as well, but I had seen a handful or two of pygmies around town. 

They are very small people...I'm taller than the men even. They have really unique, beautiful eyes and the cutest babies and toddlers I've ever seen. As we drove past one of the villages, a bunch of people were wanting a ride. We continued on to the church without them, and then once all our people were unloaded at the church, Henri and I went back for them. Otherwise there would have only been about ten other people at the service. Most were out living in the woods hunting at this time of year.

I tried to count the people once we were all in the truck. There were at least 37 (counting the babies.) This is a pickup truck, too. I kept being handed babies and pulling kids up into the bed of the truck until we had everyone who wanted to come. Needless to say, we were very squished. When we got there; I jumped down first and helped the children get down. One mama handed me her baby - it was a tinsy, adorable, very dirty (and damp) baby. When she got down, I indicated that I'd like to keep holding him, so I did, and we walked down the hill to the church building.

The singing was absolutely amazing. The guys with the drums were really into it and everyone sang loudly and joyfully in that little brick building. The singing went on for over an hour, and when it was finished, one old blind man stood up and announced that he wanted to sing some more, but there was a great clamour, so I guess he was voted down. We went on to the sermon. Henri preached in French (he is from Gabon) while Serge translated into Lingala.

Sometime during the service, the wet, diaperless, little baby I was holding got a whole lot wetter, but stayed happy until the very end, when I had to give him back to his mama. Afterwards, some of the older men, about five young guys and three women with babies on their backs led us on a walk through the jungle. They stopped to point out different plants and their uses, the animal traps all along the way they had made, and various interesting trees and bodies of water. 

The different personalities of the Aka really came out as we walked along. I could tell they were very at home in the rainforest. Some of them got really enthusiastic about different things, and the women with the babies talking and laughed almost non-stop. They even acted out how they did their fishing when the stream was high enough. 

While we'd been walking in the jungle, Henri had taken most of the people back to their village, and then returned to pick us up with the truck. We climbed in with the stragglers, as well as two or three kids who wanted a ride all the way back to Impfondo. The tires on the truck were getting flat, so all the extra loads and driving back and forth in the heat definitely wasn't helping, but it wasn't till we were a little ways further down the road that the truck protested enough for Henri to stop. "It doesn't want to go anymore," he said. We started and stopped about three more times before we got home, but it pulled through and got us back to the hospital.