When I joined the SickleAfrica Data Coordinator Center in 2019, Gaston was one of the first two people in the team that I had a very lengthy conversation with, much to my own surprise, as I will often avoid having conversations with people. But Gaston managed to break down barrier. He told me how they had waited for ever for me to join the group and how great it was that I am finally in the group. I felt welcome. A few months after I joined the team, I will get the opportunity to know Gaston more, that is the person beyond the great bioinformatician he is/was. The first opportunity was when Gaston, Mario and I were tasked to take a work trip to SickleInAfrica sites in Ghana and Tanzania. The second was a trip to George (Western Cape, South Africa) with Vicky and Gaston, for the funeral of Mario’s mum. In both trips, I got to appreciate Gaston’s humility, kindness, his tenacity in difficult situations and his effective use of humor in difficult times.
Let me start with the long trip from Cape Town (South Africa)-Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania)-Kumasi (Ghana)-Cape Town. This trip was to do routine SickleInAfrica site visits. It was an interesting and fruitful trip (work-wise) but particularly challenging logistic wise. We complained all through the way. But Gaston remained calm in all this, joked about some of the things we complained about and laughed to hard about some of the things that had happened, even though we found them upsetting. Gaston turned the challenging times to more enjoyable times, and if you ask me now, I will want more of those challenges, if Gaston promises to come back and be a travel buddy again. The first thing we will learn from Gaston during that trip was how to make the best of every moment and his choice of food. Gaston used the opportunity to tell us about the beauty of Congolese cuisine and how hot chili was a key ingredient and how fufu needs to be part of very meal (Later in Kumasi, we found an instant fufu mix in one of the shops and Gaston was excited). He will live to his love for hot chili during that trip. On the first day in Tanzania, when we went for dinner, Gaston asked the restaurant service if we could have chili sauce. The staff said yes but warned that the chili sauce was very hot. Gaston commented that there was no way a chili sauce will be too hot for him, not even the one we once had in Nigeria. The staff were excited to hear, and Gaston served himself a generous portion of chili sauce. A few minutes later, we noticed that Gaston was sweating profusely and wiping the sweat off his face. At first, we laughed but then got a bit worried. Mario asked if he was okay and he responded that, the chili sauce was something else but dear Mario, I must finish the food. The next day when we went for dinner, Gaston did ask for Chili sauce again, but this time he added a very small amount to his food and wanted to know from the restaurant staff what the chili sauce was made of. He later convinced the staff to share their home-made chili recipe. We agreed that Gaston will keep a copy of the recipe and prepare a similar chili sauce which he will share with our research team. So, Mario created a WhatsApp group called Chili-Mix just so we could follow up on the agreement. A week after we had returned to Cape Town, Mario asked on the WhatsApp group whether the Chili sauce was ready for distribution. Gaston responded with a No and that we will need a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for the preparation of the chili sauce. I argued that the restaurant had given him a hard copy of the SOP (recipe), to which he said, dear Syntia, the recipe was a guideline, we need to write an SOP for the chili sauce. To do that, we need to follow SOPs for writing new SOPs, Vicky will have to confirm. We gave up. As I write, we are just two (Gaston and I) left in the WhatsApp group. Now, what do I do? Quit the group and leave Gaston alone in there…. will that be fair, or say acceptable, Gaston never left us on our own during that long trip…. Friends, what do we do with WhatsApp conversations of loved ones who have joined their ancestors? Okay, if you say clear the chat, what happens when they were in a WhatsApp group with many others—do we ask the admin of the group to remove them and then get to read that message-Gaston has been removed from the group? Or do we wait for that time when his phone number is no longer active, and we suddenly receive a message someday to say, “Gaston has left the group”. At this time, we will console ourselves that Gaston is still reading WhatsApp messages. A trip where Gaston constantly reminded us to live by the hashtag #YOLOLO (You live once, live outstanding).
We left Dar-es Salaam for Kumasi and there we will see another social side of Gaston. We had experienced some delays and felt very tired. We boarded the flight from Accra to Kumasi and the captain of the flight made the usual announcement of ensuring that all phones are switched to flight mode, but especially reminded, jokingly so, that those with Samsung phones should keep their phones switched off for the entire flight because of rumors around explosion of Samsung phones. Gaston will then mimic the flight Captain for our entire stay in Kumasi and the transit in Addis, including how he described our descent at Kumasi. In Kumasi a SickleInAfrica colleague was kind enough to pick us up from the Airport to the hotel. In the car, our host was playing the music, Soco (by Nigerian musician, Star Boy). We had never heard of the music before and wondered what Soco-Soco translated to in English. Our host didn’t know as well, but Gaston quickly said it didn’t matter we should just sing along. Throughout that trip, and back to the office in Cape Town, any complain to Gaston will be met with the response Soco Soco, soco soco baby. For a while, we will hear him sing and sometimes dance) to that music in the office, very much to our delight as usually Gaston will be quiet and only talk about work related issues. Till date, we have no idea what Soco Soco means, but we refer to it when we want to say, “keep going, all will be fine”. We will later recall all these when we travelled to George for the funeral of Mario’s mum. Again, I got to learn about his deep love for his family and how family -oriented he was. We laughed at the number of times he will receive a call from his wife asking if he is fine and, on his way, back. We told him how jealous we were that he had such a caring partner and he said he was a lucky man and how it was always comforting to see how much his wife misses him. He also joked that going by the number of calls he had received from his family in less than 24 hours, sometimes being away from home can make you realise how caring family is.
Gaston truly cared about his colleagues and students. He put their wellbeing first and made work challenges easy to navigate through his sense of humor. He will make every success worth celebrating and wanted to part of every celebration. I remember how he insisted he wanted to take a picture with me in my graduation robe and how we had to plan for that to happen a day after the graduation ceremony. All through the lock down period, whenever I talked in a meeting, we will send a message to say, dear Syntia, I am so happy you made a comment today, now I know you are fine, I think you need to speak up more during meetings. Then one day I joked that I would chair the next meeting, and, in that meeting, I will speak for ¾ of the time. Gaston said that will be a breakthrough, worthy of a paper in Nature. And we all laughed. I will sometimes, try to pull his legs and send him an email in French, much to his surprise. One day he said dear Syntia, I need to confirm with Ambroise if you actually speak French (to my comfort, this will not happen). In my last email to him in French, I was requesting that he sends a message for world sickle cell day. He wrote back to say“ Thank you dear Syntia, Hahaaah! Your French writing seems more than excellent, but I do not want to follow you in that path … I will assess it the day we meet physically, we will choose a topic and discuss it in French, what do you think? I guess it will be hot like Nigerian chilli :-) and Mario will be a referee! I wrote back and asked if he meant the Tanzania Chili, and he responded, we are yet to write the SOP for the Tanzania Chili. I will miss this funny back and forth messages with Gaston and his sense of humour, it made stressful times easy to navigate and made the work environment lively.
Gaston was very keen to set up a research project, and possibly a career, in his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). On the trip from Kumasi, we had the good fortune of sharing the same airport waiting space with a government minister in the DRC. Gaston recognized him and quicky went to say hi. He later told us that the Minister had encouraged him to consider setting up a research program in the DRC, had given him his contact details. Gaston looked forward to the time he will travel to the DRC to discuss his research ideas on Ebola with other researchers on ground, set up collaborations and get things going. On September 21st, few days before his transition to eternity, we had scheduled a meeting to discuss plans for a research project on infectious disease control, I logged-on to that meeting but was told by Vicky that Gaston may not make it as he is unwell. We then talked about how he needed to take a break and have some rest. Early morning of Friday, 24th September, I tried to reach Gaston on phone but got no response, I quickly said it is likely he is sleeping, so I sent him an SMS instead to wish him a quick recovery and to let him know I was looking forward to talking with him again. Coincidentally, Mario sent a text almost at the same time to ask if I knew Gaston was not feeling well. We again talked about how he needed to take a long rest, his plans to extend his research activities to the DRC and how he was passionate about contributing to health research in the DRC. Mario mentioned that he was worried about Gaston’s health and that Gaston had called the day before to give him and update of his recovery and to also say goodbye. I quickly responded Goodbye to where? where is he going to? What we didn’t know was that our conversation was Gaston’s way of saying, my dear people, I am already on my way. Less than 10 minutes after our conversation, Mario called to say listen, Gaston is no more. It felt like even in death, Gaston in his usual polite nature, felt the need to say good-bye, I can’t just leave like that (as he will usually say).
I may never be able to come to terms with Gaston’s physical absence. I know he would have said “my dear Syntia, such is life” I will take comfort in that. I have learned so much in the short time I worked with Gaston: the value of humor in difficult times, the challenges one may encounter in academia as an early career researcher and how to accept things the way the come. A humble soul he is/was, a passionate researcher. If I am to describe Gaston in a few words, I will say “Gaston is a person”. Adieu Dr Mazandu!
