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  • Chinko
  • Samantha Libby (bio)

This is the place where dragons once lived and will one day be born again. Here mythical beasts lie waiting, growing, plotting, and scheming. Chinko is an easy place to introduce, but a difficult place to get to. At Chinko, you begin on an airstrip, a small dirt line in a lawless place. If you wanted, you could put your pack on your shoulders and walk all the way to Darfur and not encounter a single road.

Tens of thousands of elephants used to call this wide corner of the Central African Republic home. Now, fewer than a hundred of them hide in the protected wildlife refuge that spans more than 17,000 square kilometers. Even with luck, you will never see them. All that is left are monkeys that pick at burned, dry grass, and wild pigs with fantastic noses that skitter-scatter at the sound of your approach. The branches of charred trees help hide the black mamba, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world, while the great eland antelope, a magnificent creature native to this part of the world, walks through the dying bush, looking for what is left of his home.

The word “Chinko” means nothing. It is the name given to a river in a place where the river gets lost in thick brush and fields of termite mounds. Chinko Park, established to protect what little is left, is called a national park, but there is nothing national in a place without the rule of law. Chinko’s only defense is a handful of well-trained rangers who spend weeks at a time in the wild, waiting for poachers or armed groups to emerge from the thick bush and attack. This is a dangerous part of the world—everyone knows at least that much.

In war-torn Africa, outsiders often feel an obligation to dissect old clichés and invent new ones. But I show up empty-handed. After ten years working in human rights and humanitarian aid around the world, I can no longer be deluded as to my own relevance. I come for a reason startlingly few want to admit: I need to work and there is often work to be had in places where nobody wants to be.

I find myself working on a large usaid radio project in the Central African Republic when I am sent to Chinko. They want me to assess whether or not the network can be extended to include the anti-poaching efforts in the area. Be careful, my more experienced colleagues tell me. Fear is not romantic. I already know that heavily armed poachers, rebels, and mercenaries regularly move in and out of the massive area that the park is mandated to protect. But I do not understand how to be afraid there, and this, as many veterans of the humanitarian trade will tell you, is an unspoken part of any security plan. In a conflict zone, [End Page 128] fear will be your barometer for stress when the potential for danger is constant. I ask around town. Fear in eastern CAR is no adventure, I am told by a Green Beret who’d been assigned to the US mission to capture and kill the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He looks at me through hooded and tired eyes and says, You don’t know what lives out there.

But people do not come to this part of the world to listen to sound advice.

After three tiny plane rides to the eastern reaches of the country, I see fire in the distance. We land, and as soon as I set foot on the ashen ground, one man runs out from the main compound to greet the pilot and me. The Lord’s Resistance Army has entered the park and surrounded a patrol, he says. What should they do? Engage or retreat? As he begins to argue with the pilot, I walk around the base and try to look as if I am supposed to be there. I am the only woman among four hundred men. When an hour passes and there is still nothing for me...

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