The many sides of Monsieur Pick

I’ve observed in past entries that the most interesting people you meet in the field are often the “company” drivers. This trip is no exception.

Monsieur Pick (pronounced ‘Peek’ in French), the Senior VIP Driver for the peacekeeping mission, is a man of many stories. You can see that he’s a character from the moment you meet him: dressed in a suit and tie, usually wearing sunglasses, afflicted with a significant stutter that doesn’t seem to vex him at all. He invariably refers to himself as Monsieur Pick or Papa Pick; no shorter version exists. The incredible – and incredibly odd – details of this man’s life unfold before us on a daily basis.

A cousin of Mobutu Sese Sekou, his first life seems to have been one of business – the trucking business, to be exact. At some point, M. Pick went from humble mechanic to owner of a fleet of jeeps; one wonders what role his bloodline played in that. What is clear is that his bloodline went from asset to liability literally overnight, in May 1997 with the fall of his dictator cousin. M. Pick lost everything, in spite of his insistence that he had no role in politics.

Overlapping with this, M. Pick somehow developed a role in wildlife conservation. He was one of the founders of the famous bonobo sanctuary here, the only one of its kind and a crucial facility for rehabilitation and research of this closest human relative among the great apes. M. Pick’s involvement seems to have been accidental, owing to the capacity of his fleet of jeeps to haul vast quantities of vegetation for the bonobos. I’m not quite sure, since, as with all of M. Pick’s stories, the details of this one are convoluted.

Let me give you an example of how M. Pick’s stories unravel. One day, he was driving me to a restaurant to meet a colleague. When I told him where we were going, he said, “Ah yes, I know this restaurant. It belongs to the Greeks of the Hellenic Society. I am a very great friend of these Greeks, because I did them a very strange favour.” The very strange favour goes like this: one day back in the eighties, when M. Pick was driving through the provinces delivering corn in his jeep, he came across a little while girl in a village. She was about two, playing by herself. M. Pick thought it very odd to see a white girl in the middle of the Congolese bush, so he enquired after her. The villagers explained that she was the daughter of a village woman who had slept with a passing “tourist”. No one, including the woman, had any idea who this man was or where he had gone.

M. Pick thought this was very wrong indeed. It was imperative, he told the villagers, that he take this girl and find her father. The village elders said that to take the girl, M. Pick would have to marry the mother. “Fine, fine,” said M. Pick dismissively. Some livestock was exchanged, and the deal was done. Mother and daughter hop into the jeep with M. Pick. They proceed along the delivery route, with M. Pick enquiring with the priests in every village, copying their guest books so he could compile a list of Europeans who had passed through two years ago. Here the story gets confusing; somehow the mother gets lost. When M. Pick takes up the thread, he is back in Kinshasa introducing his (first) wife to their new daughter. For five years, M. Pick enquires at the embassies to cross-check the names on his list. Eventually, somehow, he determines that the child belongs to a Greek man who passed through in 1978. He gets in touch with the Greek man, who is back in Greece. The child is named Sophia (retroactively), though as far as I can tell that is the only contribution the father makes. She is raised by M. Pick and embraced by the local Greek community. She goes to school in Europe, just like the other nine of M. Pick’s children.

Last night, M. Pick dropped another doozie. Apparently he was arrested a few years ago on suspicion of being a “financier” of the disgraced former VP Jean-Pierre Bemba. He was denounced in the local papers as being a warmonger. Had one of the guards not been an old acquaintance from his jeep-route days, he is sure he would have been tortured. Instead he was released with profound apologies, and the security services at his beck and call ever since. As with all of M. Pick’s stories, something doesn’t quite add up here. But it’s still amusing as hell.

With another week to go here, I don’t doubt I’ll have a wealth of M. Pick stories to take with me.

*Edit* I forgot to mention that M. Pick was also a race car driver. It never ends.