Drifting off to sleep, Albert was grateful to be exactly where he believed God wanted him to be.
Chapter 10
“Tonight, the Drums Will Beat for You”
The following morning René Ellenburger showed Albert around the mission property. “Is there anything we could use as a clinic until the hospital is built?” Albert asked as he looked around at the collection of thatch-roofed wooden buildings dotted across the three small hills.
René shook his head. “The school is full to overflowing. The house you moved into last night was the last empty space.”
Albert wasn’t sure what to say. Where would he put his supplies? And more important, where would he and Hélène treat patients?
As they continued to walk, Albert was surprised by the number of citrus trees flourishing on the property. He’d read that they were rare in this part of Africa. A row of oil palms flanked the cleared area of the mission station, and behind them the jungle rose like a wall. “You’ll see these wherever there’s a settlement,” René said, pointing up to the bunches of red fruit hanging between the leaves of the palm trees. “The locals crush them to get cooking oil. They say everything tastes better in palm oil,” he added with a chuckle.
The entire mission station was about the size of eight soccer fields placed side by side. The house Albert and Hélène occupied was located toward the top of the center hill. On the hill to the right sat the boys’ school buildings and the largest mission houses, and to the left were the girls’ school and the remainder of the mission houses. As the men viewed the surroundings, René described how it was a constant struggle to hold back the jungle and stop it from reclaiming the mission compound.
Surveying the mission station, Albert noticed a small hut down the hill to the left of his house. It was a windowless structure, with a two-foot gap to let air flow through between the top of the walls and the roof. “What’s that used for?” he asked, pointing to the hut.
“It was a henhouse, but no one uses it now. As you can see, it’s falling down,” René replied.
Albert walked over to the hut and pushed its door open. It creaked. Stepping inside, he looked up at the roof, which was made of woven squares of palm leaves. He noticed that the walls and floor were caked in chicken droppings. “Is this space available?” he asked.
“Of course, if you really want it,” René responded.
“It’s not ideal, but perhaps Hélène and I could do something with it, just to get us started,” Albert said. “If we can scrub it clean enough, we could see one patient at a time here, though I don’t see how we could store anything because of the gap at the top of the walls. We’ll get some shelves built in our living room and make that into the pharmacy and storeroom.”
“A good idea,” René commented as he followed Albert out of the henhouse and closed and locked the door behind them. “You’ll notice soon enough that everything here has to be kept under lock and key. My helpers tell me that’s how the locals know that we value those things. If an item isn’t locked up, they think we don’t value it, and it has a habit of going missing.”
Albert didn’t say anything as he followed René toward the girls’ school building. He noticed that René carried a ring of keys on his belt. This wasn’t something he’d read about in articles in the mission magazine. It was odd to him to think of locking things up on a mission station, but apparently it was necessary to stop theft. But was that even the right word to use here? Did the Africans think taking something someone left unattended was stealing, or was it just the way things were out here in the jungle? Albert didn’t know, but he had a feeling he was going to learn many lessons in patience as he adapted to life in a different culture.
During the walk around the mission property, René explained that the Africans used drums to relay information across vast swaths of jungle. “Tonight, the drums will beat for you,” he informed Albert. “By morning everyone within two hundred miles of here will know Oganga has arrived in Lambaréné.”
“Oganga?” Albert inquired.
“Yes,” René nodded. “It means fetish man. It’s the only word the Galoa have for a doctor. An oganga is the only man in their village they believe has the power to cause or cure pain and disease.”
René also explained how most local people throughout the area were ruled by a belief in taboos—prohibited behaviors that would bring down the anger of the gods or cause a person to die. It was eye-opening for Albert to learn how these taboos dominated people’s lives in the jungle. Group taboos applied to everyone, but each newborn was also given a personal taboo by a fetish man. These taboos could be anything from looking over a person’s left shoulder to dancing in a circle or walking backward into the river, all of which could cause death. René explained how difficult it was to get local Christians to break their taboos, even if they believed that Jesus Christ had set them free.
“After the drums beat tonight, the desperate ones will come to you for help, though many of them will, I imagine, be beyond help.”
Albert groaned inwardly when he heard René say this. His drugs and medical equipment were in crates that would not be delivered for another two weeks. He also had to ready the henhouse to serve as a clinic in which to treat patients.
That evening Albert and Hélène sat on their veranda, looking out at the light from the nearly full moon dancing on the surface of the river. Just as René had predicted, in the distance Albert could hear the beating of drums.
By the time he arose the next morning, Albert could hear many voices outside. As he stepped out onto the veranda, he was overwhelmed by the noise level. He was used to patients and their family members speaking privately to each other in quiet voices, but here in the jungle every detail appeared to be yelled at the top of a person’s lungs. The people also spat freely and blew their noses through their fingers onto the ground. Albert shuddered as he thought of the germs being spread by this practice.
Walking among the crowd, Albert wished he had an interpreter so he could ask specific questions of people about their illnesses. Before leaving France he’d written to Noël asking him to hire a suitable person for the job. Noël had written back assuring Albert he’d found the perfect person to serve as his interpreter, a teacher named N’Zeng. But now N’Zeng was nowhere to be found, and René informed Albert that he was apparently stuck sixty miles away in his home village arguing over an inheritance. Albert prayed and trusted that something would work out, though he couldn’t imagine what.
Despite the language barrier, as he walked among the people, Albert began to notice and identify several illnesses. Sleeping sickness slowed down a patient’s speech and mental ability to the point where the person just wanted to sit staring into the distance or sleep for most of the day. And the afflicted person always walked with a shuffling gait. Left untreated, the disease was fatal. And then there was elephantiasis, where a part of the body, normally a leg or an arm, grew so large it became impossible for patients to drag themselves around. Albert learned from the doctor aboard the Europe that elephantiasis disfigured sufferers of the disease so much that many of them lost the will to live or were shunned from their homes and villages.
The stench of illness and decaying flesh filled the air as Albert continued inspecting the sick and assessing their conditions. Meanwhile flies and mosquitos buzzed around, carrying diseases from one person to another.
Soon René provided Albert with a bright student who spoke enough French to interpret a little of what the Africans wanted to say to Albert. Hélène brought out a small desk from the house, and Albert began his first clinic. He knew leprosy by the way it deadened the nerves in the skin. A person who didn’t flinch when stuck by a pin was almost certainly suffering from the disease. People in the gathered group also suffered from other diseases such as swamp-fever, amoebic dysentery, and malaria, diseases Albert had only studied in textbooks until now. Others were suffering from hernias, ulcers, and abscesses. Albert could treat the simpler things with the few medicines he had brought in his personal luggage, but he had nothing to offer those with leprosy and some of the other diseases. And those suffering from hernias would have to wait, as there was not yet a clean, sterile place for Albert to perform surgeries.
The following day the crowd awaiting medical attention was bigger and continued to grow with each passing morning. To cope with the influx, Hélène set up a patient record-keeping system consisting of a long wooden box filled with index cards. On individual cards she wrote each patient’s name and village along with a number that became the patient’s permanent medical number. Then she recorded the reason for the visit and what treatment if any had been given. She also wrote the number on a cardboard disc with a string through it for the patient to hang around his or her neck until the next visit.
When they had any extra time, Albert and Hélène worked to fix up the henhouse as best they could. They chipped chicken droppings from the walls and floor, whitewashed the walls, and pushed the ends of palm fronds back through the woven tiles to patch the holes where the tiles had worn thin and allowed beams of blazing equatorial sunlight through.
At dusk, Albert and Hélène would sit on the veranda and look out across the river and surrounding jungle. One evening, Albert thought how the one thing he hadn’t taken into account was the isolation of living on the edge of such an immense jungle. They were basically confined to the mission compound. Several trails led into the jungle from the mission station, but Albert had been warned not to venture down any of them without a good reason, a gun, and a native guide, especially at night. The jungle was inhabited by poisonous snakes and spiders along with dangerous animals, many of which hunted prey at night. Another terror was also lurking in the jungle of Gabon—Anyoto, or leopard men. Leopard men were members of a secret cult who wore leopard masks and draped themselves in leopard skins. They also attached razor-sharp metal claws to their hands and put metal-toothed mouthpieces in their mouths. The leopard men would stalk the jungle at night, tearing unsuspecting men and women to pieces with their claws and mouthpieces. The local people were terrified of them, believing they supernaturally transformed into actual leopards so they could kill. Albert didn’t believe that part, but neither did he intend to wander off through the jungle bordering the mission property without a good reason.
Because the jungle was so dense, the area had no roads. The river was the only highway in and out of the mission station, and in its waters lurked other terrors, such as crocodiles and hippopotami. It was no place for a leisurely Sunday afternoon paddle.
As Albert thought about their location, his mind drifted back to his childhood in Gunsbach, where he used to wander for miles through the hills. He thought about Strasbourg, where he could freely bicycle around the cobblestoned city or head out into the countryside. But this place felt completely different. They were so isolated. The seven missionaries and the helpers they employed would be their constant and only companions for the next two years until they took a furlough. Albert wondered how different they would be when they returned home.
On the evening of April 26, 1913, Albert heard the far-off whistle of a steamer on the river. The next morning a paddler arrived to inform him that their crates and the piano had been unloaded at the Catholic mission station on the Big Island. Two missionaries and ten local men from N’Gomo soon arrived at Lambaréné and began ferrying the crates by canoe down to the Schweitzers’ mission station. A local store owner at Lambaréné loaned Albert his enormous canoe to carry the piano downstream. It took three long days to deposit all the crates and the piano on the beach beside the river, then one by one the crates had to be carried up the hill to the Schweitzer home. Transporting the piano up the hill took a herculean effort by a number of men.
