Words and Images by Matthew Cotten

Two and a half years later we look back at our experience during the early COVID-19 epidemic in a small, East African country where we were working to follow the virus.

The presidential elections took place on January 14, 2021. The government shut down the internet for about a week beforehand. I lost a complete sequencing run (samples, costly reagents, time, effort) when the shutdown occurred, and had much frustration trying to analyze data without access to online databases and analysis tools. On the bright side, I came home to find a gift from my neighbors, a battery-powered transistor radio so I could hear the news without internet or power.

Given the ongoing pandemic, the rallies that took place before the elections were probably not a good idea. Occasionally when the opposition party seemed to gather too much support the president would use the COVID rules to shut down opposition rallies. Gathering crowds of people, moving from village to village, shouting and singing were effective ways to spread SARS-CoV-2. They had big sound systems mounted on trucks covered in yellow or red posters, depending on the party. These would drive down the main road once or twice an hour and usually park at the marketplace corner near my house, generate a gathering, play inspirational music and shout slogans. Loud events but fortunately short.

I would tire of my own cooking so every week or two I would walk the 4 or 5 miles to one of the few restaurants that found a way to remain open. Clients were few so service was fast if you ordered something simple.

Automobiles were forbidden so I walked a lot, exploring the back roads and lanes in the district. The shortcut to the nearest restaurants and shops that were open was through this valley. There was a spring and people washed their clothes and there were many small gardens.

I was there alone from the end of February 2020. This drawing was from Schipol Airport on my last flight before the borders closed. The pandemic was just starting but people were afraid of travel and the airport was nearly empty. People were still concerned and careful.

Outside of work I tried to stay busy, growing nasturtiums, marigolds and bamboo to draw. That was pleasant. There were no real seasons here, just wet mornings and maybe not-so-wet mornings, it was almost always sunny in the afternoon. The marigolds, nasturtiums and bamboo thrived. Zinnias didn’t do very well, they all succumbed to some kind of mildew, plus my seeds all came up with wretched pink blossoms so I gave up on zinnias. These are second or third generation seeds and I had carefully culled all the pink flowers in the previous generations but the zinnia color genetics are complex.

Marigolds grew especially well there. It had nothing to do with the lockdown except that I wouldn’t have taken the time to notice otherwise. I think we had gone through three generations of marigolds since the lockdown started. I started to see the plants growing places where I hadn’t planted them, they were so hardy. Wind or birds or ground squirrels were spreading the seeds. 

A Johns Hopkins team set up a very useful website to track COVID-19-reported cases. Here is a drawing of the webpage when there were less than 40,000 cases globally. I had planned to draw this page regularly, maybe weekly to track the epidemic but soon the entire map turned entirely red. The virus was everywhere.

My living room. I spend a lot of time there during lockdown. I could only go to the lab for essential work, all the analysis was done at home. People were ignoring the masking, travel and social distancing rules so it was safer to work from home. There was a nice view of the garden and bamboo. Lovely red brick floors. In the garden there was a bird bath I had made by a local potter, ibises came daily and splashed about with lots of commotion. It was like living next to a children’s wading pool. Woodland kingfishers came often and dove into the water like kingfishers do.

Another view of my election radio. I could pick up music from DRC stations. I could hear young men shouting emphatically in a foreign language. There were often church hymns, and long addresses from political figures and loud advertisements for flavoured drinks. It was a fascinating device, from a different era and mostly superseded by the internet but useful in this context.

East African Bamboo, November 2019 to July 2021

Just before the virus started to spread, we planted 10 bamboo plants. The plants stayed quiet for some months but then started to grow in earnest and for some reason they were very calming to draw. Simple shapes, easy leaf patterns to remember, lovely rich greens. Here are some of my bamboo drawings, of no big importance, fairly useless except as evidence of survival through those awkward times.

I was attracted by the bamboo colors, the rich and varied greens of the local bamboo sorts. Plus long ago as a boy I had a bamboo fishing pole. Where we lived in East Africa there were clusters of bamboo in gardens, along the roads, big islands of impressive green growth. Regularly someone would come and chop down some or all of the stalks and then the cluster would grow back over the next weeks. Since the root system was intact the regrowth was impressively rapid.

These drawings were from November 2020, one year after we planted the original 10 plants. 4 or 5 of the original had 10 died, the remainder stayed quiet and then began regularly pushing up new culms, regularly spaced from the original plant.

There was a second sort of bamboo growing there, with beautifully varied dark green vertical stripes on a yellow background. My friend tells me that in Vietnam this is a special bamboo and a spirit might live in such bamboo and you should take care about cutting down such bamboo. There was a large stand of such striped bamboo nearby. I’d seen no spirits but there were weaver birds occupying the grove, much activity from the birds building their nests. The ground around the stand was littered with failed (or rejected) nest attempts. I understand that if the female is not happy with the nest when presented, it gets destroyed. Maybe this had something to do with the spirits.

I liked the bamboo growth progression, first a very tall leafless culm emerged. These culms grew very quickly, a meter in a week. They had waited, gathering energy underground and some signal occurred to activate this rapid growth. I liked to think it was me poking around and shaking their siblings. The culms then reached some height limit, stopped the elongation and then pushed out small branches in groups of three, one long center branch and two secondaries, a waltz. Again there is a pause of a few days while the plant gathered energy or waited for a signal and then suddenly three spidery branches grow very quickly with alternate leaves near the termini. The space around the stalk was then crossed with thin branches and delicate green leaves.

All stages of growth now, I walk out each day and find evidence of that rapid bamboo growth. A towering spindly stalk that was not there earlier in the week. A fat culm pushing out of the earth, ankle height one day, above my head three days later.

In any case, the bamboo provided an answer to the frequent question “What do I draw”. And for a few months until I tired of the subject it was an activity nicely different from sequencing coronavirus samples and dealing with reagent procurement.

Here was 14 months of bamboo growth, 11 months of COVID lockdown. I had painted a mark on the wall when I first planted the bamboo. The mark has faded and is almost hidden by the bamboo.

Some months later, after a second lockdown was imposed, the bamboo had grown. It was now much taller than the wall and the bamboo was attracting small birds and providing shade. I had only planted a few marigolds and they spread. This was my last bamboo drawing, gouache and white pencil on grey paper.

I am a virologist and biochemist with a long interest in painting and how ink and pigments interact with paper and water. I have been lucky to have lived and worked in a variety of locations and I have kept a drawing diary of what I have seen through the years. See more at Ebolatent.