You can fund Pokola on Google Earth; it’s a small town in the middle of the Congolese jungle close to the border with Cameroon. Because a large French logging operation is based there it has an airstrip, electricity and a mobile phone signal which is utterly bizarre given its location. The only road into town comes from the North, and after that the only way to get further into Congo is by taking the river Sangha, a tributary of the Congo itself. It’s an amazing place – in the market you will find pygmies dressed in tree bark who have walked for days to sell carcasses of all sort of animals (this is where I saw and probably ate this: b3ta.com/questions/bestandworstfood/post1216834). The pygmies are wary of white people – as children they are told that if they misbehave a white man will come and eat them, and if you’re the first one they’ve ever seen you can imagine their reaction, but a smile to their mother will be rewarded by a smile back – complete with teeth that have been filed to points. It’s a place where the law is power and justice is rudimentary, where extortion and bribery are part of the tax system.

This is where I met Paul. He was a slight Nigerian who spoke English but no French, and he was travelling overland to Malawi to spread the Christian word. He was travelling with a small satchel containing his toothbrush, a bible and a pristine spare white shirt, and not a lot else. He had had his money, papers and everything else taken at the border, but somehow managed to beg passage on a trading barge that we were taking down to Brazzaville. Getting my car onto the boat ( www.camelworld.com/images/PICT1092.JPG ) involved the use of a large crane courtesy of Michel from the logging company, and once aboard this was my home, with my roof tent offering more privacy, space and comfort than all of the other several hundred passengers and crew.

It’s impossible to describe how crowded it was – I couldn’t get into my boot as a family of four had set up a makeshift shelter against the door, and there was a dispute over the crocodiles underneath the Land Rover which had displaced the man sleeping there; moving around the barge frequently meant climbing over the railings and walking on the three inch ledge on the outside of the hull. The cargo, mostly illegal timber and live fish and animals took up the rest of the space, and people slotted into whatever space was left, grouping into messes to cook together. There were only four Anglophones; myself, Paul, Cameroon, and Joseph, and we naturally gravitated together; apart from Paul we all spoke French, so we adopted him. The inside of the car was largely full of crap from the boot, but as I couldn’t leave the car unoccupied without appearing to be a complete arsehole I offered Paul the use of the driver’s seat as a bed; at least I felt I could trust him.

Each morning Paul, or pastor Paul as we called him, would climb to the top of the massive mountain of lumber and deliver Matins to a huge congregation, in English with Joseph translating into French. He kept one pristine white shirt in reserve for his services, but the other was definitely suffering in the filthy conditions of the boat, so I lent him one of my dark shirts to better hide the grime. As he had no money to buy food along the way I shared my fresh water, tinned tuna, pilchards, and manioc with him. I even leant him my umbrella to protect him from the torrential rain when we went ashore one evening, but he slipped in the knee deep mud and broke it for which he was mortified. When the heavy weather gave him a headache I even slipped him an aspirin when nobody else was looking.

One morning he came to me with a serious face and said he had to thank me for helping him. He opened his bible to Matthew 25:35 and read:
“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me”. I thanked him, and had to smile at such an apt passage, but now that I write this story down I find that here is one more line: “I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

A week later at Brazzaville port I was doing my best to get my vehicle craned off the boat without paying a small fortune (and failing); this involved lots of shuffling between offices with superfluous bits of paperwork so that everybody could get their cut. I came across Paul in the Gendarme’s office where he was being grilled by one of the senior officials. As he had no paperwork and no money they were giving him a particularly hard time, mostly in French which he couldn’t understand anyway, and when he appealed to me to help I’m ashamed to say I did nothing – I was far to preoccupied with my own problems. I’ve often returned in my mind to that last encounter - I could at least have tried to berate the officials for interfering with a man who answered to a higher authority, but the truth is that I was deadly tired; my own journey into the heart of darkness had left me as drained as Mr Kurtz, and I had no reserves left for anybody else.

I still hear from Paul by email from time to time – he got to Malawi, and is still out there somewhere spreading the gospel.

Length? 18 months and 70,000k
(strongp, Sat 11 May 2013, 11:42, 3 replies)

I ain't funding shit.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Sat 11 May 2013, 11:44, closed)

Then what happened?

(woocfot friends with Sacha Distel, Sat 11 May 2013, 11:56, closed)

He blew up
the Death Star. Probably.
(Rsoles, Sat 11 May 2013, 17:21, closed)