Our First Run in Isiro

Some call it adventure, my friend Erinn might call it “reckless abandonment”, and I am sure some will call it insanity. I call it just trying to get a little exercise in at the end of a long day before dark. Whatever you want to call it, Marie (my French counterpart here) and I had an interesting first run here in Isiro.

I was told by my “chef du base” that I could not run unless Marie or a guard accompanied me; basically we are just supposed to move in pairs. As Marie was gone all of last week (and I was sick for part of the week and in Bunia for the other part), I’ve not had the opportunity to run here in Isiro...until tonight. I DID run in Bunia with the team there--- twice in fact. Their route is a little less interesting than ours as it is a 4K loop around the airport in Bunia and this is only possible if the UN Peacekeepers are on guard. You will easily run across other aid workers on the Bunia route and it’s a pretty smooth run. In Isiro, things are a little different.

So I told Marie today that I was in desperate need of a run with everything that has been going on concerning the outbreak of suspected plague and such. (With all of the meetings and reading in French, my mind has had enough of a workout over the past few days, but my body was in frantic need.) Marie agreed to an easy run tonight, but nothing too long. Perfect. We closed down the office right after 5pm, changed, and were off. As she knows the area (she has a whole two months on me), I told her to lead. I thought we would head towards town (as we live on the edge of it) and run 10 minutes in and then back.

Running, here, sometimes attracts a great amount of attention from the people and ESPECIALLY from the kids. Why would someone run for exercise when you have to walk 15km to fetch water?? Aren’t you tired enough at the end of the day from the manual labour?? Those would be the logical questions coming from a local here as they do more manual labour in a day than I do in a week. So heading into town would have attracted attention to ourselves, let alone the kids always run along side of you and quite typically run at a faster pace in their flip-flops or barefoot than we do in our running gear. So why embarrass ourselves by running in town?? We headed out on the trails through the jungle.

It was a windy, very narrow path, mostly downhill towards a few of the waterholes. I was in my long running shorts (which are typical basketball length shorts back home) and t-shirt, Marie was in ¾ pants and a t-shirt. The overgrowth from the jungle took over the path in some parts and in other parts, the path opened up a bit. We ran, taking different routes, stopping to check where we were, and that we were not too far away from town, seeing people coming back from the water holes along the way. As long as we were still meeting people on the path, we knew we were fine.

But after a while, we did not meet anyone on the path. We couldn’t hear town anymore and the jungle seemed to grow denser, thicker and in this denseness we began to loose light. We had taken turns leading at this point, each of us as clueless as the other. My legs were covered in scrapes, blood smeared across my ankles and shins from certain scratches, but it felt so nice to run. Finally, I stopped and asked if she knew where we were, but I already knew the answer to that question. We decided to turn back and retrace our steps… very Hansel and Grettel of us, eh? Had we left bread crumbs, we wouldn’t have been able to see them on the jungle floor.

The one consistent thought which kept running through my head was “if we get lost in here, my parents will kill me!" As it is, my mom says I am hard on my guarding angel, so I knew we had to get out at some point. If not, I would have guessed my guarding angel to be slacking off a bit.

In the nick of time (concerning daylight), we found our way out of the dense part of the jungle and began to follow sounds of town. We were now in the savannah part of the jungle (large grass jungle growth, but not the overgrowth that you get with trees and such) at least able to see the sky. Once we hit town, we quickly picked up looks from the villagers and… of course about 10 kids followed us back to the house in our easy jog, running and laughing next to us. I played back and forth with them, slowing down and acting as if I was going to chase them… they got a big kick out of it.

Covered in scratches, scrapes, an entire layer of sweat only breeding more humidity in the area, and smiles we arrived back at the house 65 minutes later. Laughing, Marie said she wasn't sure she wanted to run with me again, but I signed her up for another run on Saturday afternoon. I think our next run we’ll bear the drawn looks and head towards town. But we did catch a beautiful sunsent on our run thru the jungle tonight.