Chapter One

We decided to build in the middle of Mbandaka. The year was 1974, and the country was Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Millard and Linda Fuller and their four children had been there for a year before I arrived. I spent four days coming up the Congo River on a large boat with 200 Zairois passengers, planning to spend a month helping the Fullers launch an ambitious housing project near the place where the river crosses the equator.

The need for housing there was critical. Local government officials had offered Millard his choice of several large pieces of land if he would help solve the shortage. One of those sites was a patch of underbrush with giant termite mounds—some as high as fifteen feet!—that divided the town down the middle. Under orders of the Belgian colonial governor years earlier, it had been left empty as a "sanitation strip" between black Congolese residents and white European settlers living near the river. In the local Lingala language, that strip of land was known as Bokotola: "One who does not like others."

The morning after I arrived in Mbandaka, Millard and I looked over the various available parcels of land. We quickly agreed that it was time to claim Bokotola for the people. The mayor of Mbandaka supplied us with a crew of thirty to fifty men each day. We worked hard from dawn until dusk, clearing lines of sight, laying out roads and a playground, and driving corner stakes. Sometimes I scrambled up to the top of a termite mound with my surveying instrument and worked over the tops of the small trees. One very busy and exhaust