The Modern Young Lady's Guide to Coups, Contagions & Calamity

Beset by the mob...

2012-02-03T02:04:00.001-05:00

So I went back and forth about whether I should do this post. The goal of this blog has always been to present the silly funny and ironic ways that people across the world share a common humanity. In other words, good press to counteract the endless stories of horror that we usually see from the media. But I finally decided that it would be patronizing to whitewash the story. Bad things do happen here too. Good people are the victims of bad circumstances.

Which brings me to my day yesterday. I had heard that morning that there would be protests in downtown Bamako that day and "traffic and commercial disruptions" were possible. But I didn't think anything of it. There were a few burning tires around town as I went to my afternoon meeting and I heard marching and chanting in the street but again, nothing that unusual. Around 3 pm my colleague and I set off back to the hotel to work on the Internet. I asked our Malian colleagues if the protests were over. They told us, yes, the people have gone. We left the agricultural ministry, stopped at a boutique to buy water and snacks. All was quiet, though there were still a fairly large number of riot police and a few smoldering tires in the streets.

I should maybe pause here to explain a bit about what the original protests were about. Mali has had ongoing security issues in the north of the country for a number of years. The Touareg people has been waging a battle for a somewhat elusive goal - ranging between more development assistance to full independence. The story gets more complicated there as the desert is currently home to smugglers, thieves, al-Qaeda groups, recently unemployed Libyan mercenaries... What all of these groups have in common is that they are better trained and more heavily armed than the Malian soldiers sent up there to defend against them. There have been numerous attacks on soldiers in recent days - with many being killed - and the protesters wanted the government to do something more to protect the soldiers and civilians in the North.

At least that is where it started. Unbeknownst to us, by late afternoon the legitimate protesters had ceded the streets to the mobs. Most of the city was fine, but as we got closer to the hotel, it became apparent that this area had been hit quite hard. Every panel of glass that could have been broken was. People were on the streets but more cautiously.

Then we came around the corner next to the hotel and ran into the mob. Maybe 50 or so young men armed with bats and bricks. And here is where the true bad luck started. The taxi driver panicked. He recognized that having foreigner cargo was really bad. He stopped and started telling us to get out. To save his own ass and his taxi I guess. I was screaming at him Allez! Allez! Allez! GO! By then it was too late. Had he gunned the engine, or made a U-turn or anything but what he did- we would have probably been fine. As it stands though, the mob swarmed the taxi - first smashing out the back window and raining glass on my colleague in the back seat. Men then pulled open the doors and dragged us into the street. They separated us and began hitting us and trying to take our computer bags. A glancing blow to the head with a brick was enough to decide that the World Bank would give me another lap top. I let go but they continued to drag me along the sidewalk. I could hear my colleague screaming behind me but couldn't do anything. Then I heard two sharp cracks. The crowd holding on to me loosened its grip and started to run down the street. Tear gas canisters landed one after another around us. Generally three trucks loaded of amped up African riot police would not be my cup of tea - but at the time I was quite happy to see these particular amped up riot police. They loaded us into their vehicles and drove us to the commissariat - clearing the street in front of us with tear gas.

As it turns out- we were both mainly okay. My colleague had managed to keep her computer but she took a bit more of a beating because of it. I have just cuts and scraps from being dragged, and the general aches and pains resulting from mob violence. After being pretty rattled yesterday, I am back today to worrying mainly about what I am going to do in the next two weeks without a computer!

If Genghis Khan, so khan I!

2012-02-01T00:02:00.000-05:00

“Don’t worry – it is going to warm up next week.”

My head immediately perked up. We were at dinner with a mutual friend in a German themed beer garden with the -51F night lurking right behind the window of my right shoulder. Warmer? Thank god. The cold was killing me. You cannot imagine how cold it is in Ulaanbaatar in January. I promise. I have been nigh in the North Pole and a week ago I couldn’t have imagined it was possible to live in this weather. You step outside at night and your nose feels funny – because the moist membranes that line it freeze almost instantly. The window in my hotel room is frozen shut – on the inside – because the glass on the window is so cold that steam from the shower freezes instantly builds into an inch thicket layer of ice. I go to work every day – in a heated building – wearing ski thermals and deep cold hiking socks under my turtleneck sweater under my suit. And I spend all day drinking hot water (avoiding caffeine is really inconvenient here) to try to keep off the chill. So the promise of warmer weather was deeply thrilling.

“Really,” I ask tenatively, “how warm?”

“I don’t know – maybe 20s.”

For joy! The 20s! Whereas in DC I would take a taxi home from the corner when it was that cold – here it would be bikini time.

“Yes,” he continues, “maybe even up to 15.”

“Oh. You mean minus.”

So in addition to being god-awful cold in January – Mongolia is a different place – big country with a relatively small population squashed in between two massive superpowers. Known for cashmere, nomads, and Ghengis Khan (which I learned is actually spelled Chinngis – and literally everything here is named after him – airport, main roads, beer, vodka…).

And though I will admit that I didn’t see as much of the country as I might have given the fact that I refused to leave my ultra heated hotel room for the first… um… week, I have a couple of observations from my time here.

(1) They are really into ice sculpture. It works just like concrete but longer lasting given the climate.

(2) There is no such thing as clean coal in Mongolia (or really anywhere else for that matter but you have to give credit to true marketing genius). The city is rapidly expanding in population (downside risk of having a huge nomadic population is that they can migrate to the city likety-split). The new arrivals live in traditional tents on the outskirts – which are heated by coal stoves. Thousands of massively inefficient Chinese coal stoves running on full blast. The resulting haze lead to what I believe to be my most memorable experience with WeatherUnderground.com – which gave the forecast as “-25F with Smoke.”

(3) Mongolians like horses – equally as transport, companions, and the main course. It’s not bad, tastes more or less like venison.

(4) Mongolians also like vodka. And beer. These wondertwins combined forces on my last night for a memorable (or not) dinner with colleagues that ended with me sleeping in my bathtub.

(5) UB city doesn’t have much in the way of sightseeing. Given I didn’t go outside much but Sunday I sucked it up (desperate to do anything *besides* working) and decided to do a half-day walking tour. This lasted literally less than five minutes before I hired a taxi. First stop was Zaisan – which is the requisite Soviet friendship monument standing on a hill outside town. In addition to some lovely murals depicting happy workers, cosmonauts, and vanquished Nazis, there is a nice panorama of the smoke below. While there I met two other tourists who had climbed to the top. At first I was really impressed by the Japanese guy – who despite his age had braved the endless ice covered steps. Then I got close enough to talk to him – and saw that he was about my age. His mustache and goatee were completely iced over to a perfect snow white. Then I hit the Winter Palace – which was frigid – and in serious need of restoration in places – but contained some cool Buddhist tapestry art. My third stop was the Ganden Temple Monastery – complete with requisite giant golden Buddha – which was bumpin’ on a Sunday. And then… well. My walking tour originally had six stops. After three I decided, even with the car, screw it, I hadn’t been able to feel my toes for hours and my camera had frozen – I was going cashmere shopping.

And that pretty much sums it up. I would like to go back at some point (like July) and see a bit of the countryside. The only other cool thing I have to report is on the way in to UB I flew through Beijing. We were landing at night near the Chinese New Year – and below us hundreds of houses were shooting off fireworks. It was really spectacular. And now I am on a plane again – flying the ever-popular Ulaanbaatar to Bamako route (by way of Beijing, Addis Ababa, and Lome). It’s a good thing that none of my toes froze off – it is going to be open-toed shoes weather in a few hours.

Afar Afar Away

2011-12-25T14:35:00.000-05:00

I am late again. I guess of all the things that I could be late for at this point in my life, a blog post is probably one of the least mission-critical, but I am still going to resolve to blog more and more closely to the time of actual events in the ’12.

So I am writing this in a 767 one hour from landing and Dulles airport and the kickoff of my weeklong 7,000 mile DC-LI-NYC-PA-CA holiday swing. I spent the last two weeks cleaning data (which if you have the benefit of not knowing what that is please for the love of god don’t even change that about yourself) in the steamy tropical Dar es Salaam. None of the events encompassed in the previous two sentences are even remotely interesting *but* I spent most of the first two weeks of December in Afar.

The Afar region of Ethiopia is located in the northeast of the country – having exotic and interesting neighbors like Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia. The region itself actually lies below sea level in the Afar Depression. It will eventually flood with ocean when continental drift finally tears the Horn completely off from the mainland (though they are pretty safe for the next few millennium). And while I know that I seem to say this with alarming regularity – the people of Afar have a long proud tradition. But seriously though. The skeleton of Lucy was found in Afar. For those of use that aren’t quite sold on the “dinosaur bones are a test of our faith” line of reasoning (which I like to think is the majority of people even if the minority of Republican presidential candidates), that pretty much drops the ace of trump on this particular discussion.

Tradition has it that men are armed to protect the family’s herd – which in one go contains the household’s main food source and entire net worth. And indeed most men wear a long curved ornate sword over their traditional skirts. But the neighborhood has gone downhill since your grandfather’s day – warlords and beardos setting up shop just down the street – that curved sword just isn’t quite the deterrent it once was. But luckily you can buy a Klashnikov for about $75 bucks (of course my male colleagues asked). As such, every male over the age of 16 has an AK-47. And a few clips. (Whereas in many parts of Africa every male of 16 has a gun, but you can be reasonably assured they can’t afford bullets.)

Also, when you first cruise into “town” you notice there is a surprising amount of green being sold despite the surrounding territory having the fertility of southeastern Mars. Then you realize this isn’t vitamin rich spinach for the kiddies. It is qat. Qat is a cross between chewing tobacco and LSD – giving you a nice little mildly hallucinogenic buzz. So the basic rule of working up here is that you want to get up really early if you want to do anything – because by noon it will both be too hot and everyone will be too stoned to get much else done.

Other than that – just spent my week following a henna headed local guide with his Klashnikov over his shoulders – through the sand – sweating like a goat (no pigs allowed in Afar) in the sun under my long skirt and head scarf. Then kicking back in my little dung-constructed room in the UN guesthouse (which nonetheless had an air conditioner fully capable of commercial meat storage), eating eggs, drinking warm bottled water, cursing the irony of mosquitoes in the desert, smoking cigarettes, and getting ready to do it all again the next day. The funny thing about this is that it was all my idea. It was me that proposed we test out a new methodology for counting nomads and their herds in Africa. It was me that wrote all the grant proposals. Me that secured the funding and planned the trip. What the hell was I thinking? Next grant proposal is going to be to count traditional surfers in the Solomon Islands.

Happy holidays everyone.

Just a Batburger in Paradise

2011-11-28T05:50:00.000-05:00

So admittedly this is poor form. It has been almost a month since I got home from my latest wanderings – the standard assortment of work stuff - teaching a course in the Kingdom of Swaziland, checking in on my nomads in Ethiopia, potentially getting myself tangled in an unholy mess in Kenya - and then 10 long sunny relaxing days doing shit-all on islands of the Seychelles.

For those of you not familiar with the Seychelles, it is an island chain that split off from Gowana about the same time Africa and Asia decided to go their separate ways. Therefore, unlike most small island nations which are volcanic, the Seychelles is granite. And as those of you who have recently installed countertops (or been dragged to 1001 Long Island granite showrooms with loved ones who recently installed countertops) know – granite is nice. Particularly when mixed with stunning powder soft white/pink sand beaches and sunsets. One of the beaches we visited – Source d’Argent – was recently voted the nicest beach in the world by National Geographic. I was skeptical. I don’t know about these NatGeo guys – but this chick has been around a bit. There are some nice beaches out there.

Then I was converted. If it isn’t the nicest beach in the world – it is damned frigging close.

I was joined for this adventure by my favorite travel sidekick – whom you may remember from such adventures as Drunk Flying and Subsequent Central American Adventures and Drive and Dive 2010 – Roommate. (Roommate’s wife also came along for the first few days but she had to return to work. Interestingly, we met her boss on the flight back a week later. I’m not saying nothin’ I’m just sayin’ is all.) Our goal was to do the trip on about 100 USD per day each (excluding diving - which is worth selling a kidney every time). It involved a fair bit of haggling, some public buses, and a few home-cooked meals that were straight out of the dark days of undergrad (as a bonus we got to open a can of tuna without a can opener – also just like college), but we basically made it. We were greatly assisted by the fact that there is a law in the Seychelles that – while you can buy as much property as you want up until the shoreline – beaches are public property and therefore you must allow public access to them. Oh – hello $2000 a night Four Seasons patrons – we are just going to walk down to your magnificent white sand beach and pop a squat with you. That’s cool right? (Note: don’t fear – the 1%-ers got their pound of flesh when we bought drinks at the bar… a single sandwich cost more than the day’s car rental – add the gas too if you wanted fries with that.)

Okay, more fun facts about the Seychelles. First, they were found uninhabited by the French in the 1700s, though at least one old cemetery indicates that sailors had been passing through from a few centuries prior. As a result, the entire population had to be imported – from Africa, France, South Asia. The language and culture has evolved into a Creole mix – which if nothing else – knows how to make fish. (The written Creole language is similar enough to French that I can read it. As far as understanding spoken Creole – it is hopeless. Though in a very telling moment about a number of things in my life – one Seychellois, after listening to me speak French with my hybrid New Yorker-West African accent, asked me where I learned to speak Creole so well. *sigh.)

More Seychelles stuff – the main islands used to be home to super huge giant turtles, but various sailors, explorers, pirates, navies, etc ate them all. (Slow and tasty is apparently a pretty tough evolutionary combination when you mix with things with opposable thumbs.) But the native population was sad when there were no more turtles, so they brought over some just-regular-huge giant turtles from one of the other really remote islands. So now those guys ‘roam’ (albeit not super fast) around the island. Or more accurately the penned enclosures that every tourist establishment – regardless of size or function – conveniently has out front/back/in the parking. And these things get old – routinely into their 130s-140s. (Which led to a priceless moment in which we overheard an Italian tour guide admonishing a 120 year male turtle for bumping shells with a 30-something female – the guide jumped on the enclosure wall yelling ‘child abuse! child abuse!”)

So in the spirit of conservation – we didn’t eat any turtles. But in my grand tradition of suspending my vegetarianism to try local delicacies – we did have sautéed flying fox (pteropus megachiroptera for Elin, fruit bat for everyone else). Eating the world’s largest bat – which can have a wingspan of up to 6 feet but weigh less than 5 pounds – is a good story. It makes less appealing meal. I said it was reminiscent of overcooked half-starved duck. Roommate suggested monitor lizard. (I swear sometimes he does these things just to show me up.) In any case it came with a buffet that included all you can eat fresh grilled tuna – so we didn’t linger on the bat.

Keeping with the rather non-linear stream of conscious nature of this post – let’s talk about pirates. So the Seychelles is in the middle of the Indian OCean, and just about the only thing the island produces are tuna and coconuts (more on the latter in a minute). Everything non-tuna is imported. There are two main components of import prices – shipping and insurance. Insurance prices are directly related to how likely Lloyd’s of London thinks it is that Somali pirates will jack the boat. So the Seychellois hate pirates. Every time those crazy SOBs grab a tankership – the cost of a car in Victoria doubles. But do you know who else hates pirates? Americans. Americans hate pirates so much that they put a drone base at the airport to hunt down the pirates (and whatever else drones might get up to in the Yemen/Horn of Africa region). In addition to that – these awesome Americans *pay* the Seychellois to have the drones there. Bar none – there is not a country in the world that loves us as much as the Seychelles. Every time we got in a cab and the driver figured out we were American, they thanked us for the drones and asked us if we worked on them. We always said they were welcome but alas we were just tourists.

Then the last day of the trip Roommate and I were picking up a pizza to go at one of the beach joints. There was a young (early-mid 20s) clearly American guy sitting by himself. As single people in the Seychelles are rare – it is the honeymoon capital of most of Europe – and Americans are even more rare – and because I am insatiably curious – I asked him what his story was. He was from Alabama, contractor, working ‘out at the airport.’ I was so excited! After 10 days – a real life drone guy! When I said as much this guy almost had a heart attack. SSSHHHH!!! That’s classified information.

Someone better brief the taxi drivers.

Now from pirates to coconuts. Seychelles is also home to the Coco de Mer coconut – the world’s largest coconut. This is a fact that would probably be relegated in importance somewhere with Minnesota’s World’s Largest Ball of Twine, or Suffolk, England’s World’s Largest Rubber Ducky, had it not been for the rather unusual shape of these nuts. The female coconuts are shaped like a woman’s… ahem. And the male - long thin phallic stalks. For those of us not down with the Divine Plan – this seems like one hell of a coincidence… Moving on – the coconuts are found only in this one forest preserve. And fittingly they grow on oversized trees. But the trees are shaped like giant weeds – so the whole reserve has a distinctive Honey I Shrunk the Kids feel. Very cool to say the least. (And I really like this photo that Roommate took of me.)

Other than that – the trip was lots of driving around the islands, taking ferries to other islands, eating fishing, diving, hiking, drinking beer, reading books – generally relaxing. It was a bit of a bummer in that some of the dive sites were closed and there were bright yellow shark nets ruining the landscape on one of the most beautiful white sand beaches on Praslin Island – but two people had been attacked and killed by sharks there in a span of two weeks in August – so I guess that it was a necessary precaution. We saw some sharks while diving but they generally didn’t bother us. I guess they only eat French food. Snobs.

I think that is about it – though one of the dangers of waiting this long to post is that I am sure that I am forgetting things. My apologies. Should any of you independently wealthy readers like to bequeath me a huge sum of money so that I can quit this statistics crap and become a professional travel writer – I’ll let you know where to send the check!

Gotas de Lluvia A-Fallin’ on My Head…

2011-09-07T22:56:00.000-04:00

So Chiloe Island is about 650 miles south of Santiago – jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to being the termination point of the Pan-American highway (which starts in Fairbanks, Alaska), it is best known for misty mornings, hiking, kayaking, and mountains of shellfish at every meal. Like if Maine was in Chile.
One should have perhaps thought more about the idea going to one of the rainiest places in the country, during one of the coldest and rainy times of the year. Like if Maine was in Chile and it was early March. It was damp – to say the least. The seaside tourist market was partially boarded up – and many of the remaining stores had stowed the regional handmade knitware in favor of being Americanos (which is what stores selling used clothes are called down here).

Despite the constant state of mainly-rain, there were one or two days of mostly-sun, so I was able to sneak in a day of hiking in the national park. It was still early in the season so the trails at points were not that clearly marked (and to be honest I am not sure they ever get that clearly marked). My fellow hiker and I got a bit lost and ended up walking up into a modern version of the fairy tales that Chiloe is famous for (though their fairy tales see to include a greater incidence of vicious sexual appetites and cannibalism than I remember from your standard Brothers Grimm). We spotted two adorable little lambs, one black and one white.

(My traveling companion was Welsh and taking pictures of sheep is apparently a bit of the national pastime – when one is not mining coal or playing rugby.) We followed them down the path, trying to get a good picture, until we came upon a little wooden farmhouse on a hill. Out from the farmhouse popped a pair of forest gnomes (okay, maybe not actually gnomes but they were certainly wee). They led us into a low ceilinged wooden hut, where they imprisoned us until we bought handicrafts. No joke. I escaped with my life only by paying $2 for a splinter-throwing hand-carved wooden spoon.

The best experience of the time in Chiloe though was the sunrise kayaking trip. In the Chepu section of the park, a husband and wife team have set up a little eco-tourism lodge, with the main attraction of kayaking through the sunken forest at dawn. (I know, but this fairy tale is slightly more grounded in science. In 1960 a massive earthquake rocked Chiloe Island. It caused this section of the coastal forest to suddenly drop six feet. This proved to be an unfortunately development for the resident tree population as the forest floor was now below sea level. The ocean rushed in and the trees died. Now the sunken rotting stumps sticking out of the tidal plane is all that remain. In the misty dawn, this is a really eerie place to paddle around.) It poured most of the time, but was still worth it.

But while the outdoor activities were a bit of a washout, the bivalves were stupendous. The town of Castro is known for its pulmay – which is basically a huge pile of mussels, clams, giant mussels, giant clams, all served with (an easily removed) sausage and potato. The giant mussels were the biggest that I have ever seen. (Some of these guys had beards that would make the most harden Taliban commander envious.) This plate was work. I came in hungry, spent three hours, had three glasses of wine, read a book, picked up a fellow traveler, and I *still* had trouble finishing.

Having completed my twin missions of mollusks and outdooring, I headed north to Puerto Varas. As far as I could gather from the Lonely Planet, Puerto Varas was a beautiful Alps-like town, nestled at the base of snow covered volcanoes. Maybe. I saw a lake and more rain. Not to be thwarted, I hopped on the local bus and headed out 45 miles to the *really* scenic town. My cloud friend accompanied me. I stopped to see the majestic waterfall against the backdrop of the volcano. I saw the waterfall and Cloud. I waited 45 minutes trying (unsuccessfully) to hitchhike to the lake town. Cloud kept me company – patting me lovingly on the head with his raindrops just to let me know he hadn’t forgotten about me. I finally got to the lake, where I saw lake and Cloud. I hiked up to the first view point on the volcano trail – where the soggy tourist map promised me an incredible panorama including the lake and three snow capped volcanoes. I saw Cloud. I told him to suck it. This apparently pissed him off because he kicked it up a notch from steady rain shower to outright pouring. I stubbornly continued to hike up until the trail became a free flowing creek.
(The trail was not super well marked. There are nice painted arrows on the bottom, which peter out to arrow-shaped piles of rocks after a mile or so, which further diminish to piles of rocks after another two miles, which fade out completely after that. Going up was fairly easy – I just took the branch of the trail that seemed most against gravity – with the intention of following my boot tracks in the mud down. The creek was a major impediment to the successful implementation of this strategy.) So I gave up. And stomped down the mountain, soaked to the bone, slipping in the mud the whole way. Screw you Cloud. I will have the last laugh. I can go to places where you aren’t welcome. I can go to places where it hasn’t rained in *years.* Oh yes Cloud. It’s on.

Then the next day I headed back to Santiago for a day of museums on my way back to DC. I saw a couple of art exhibits and the pre-Columbian museum (it seems pre-Columbian society was really into psychedelic mushrooms and pottery). And mercifully in Santiago – it was cold and clear. I was enjoying my first dry day in a good long while. Then, I shit you not, I almost got fire-hosed. I was walking around Santiago and came across a couple of guys, in period costume, trying to get a 1864 steam powered fire truck to work. They had stuck the intake hose into a fountain, had a pile of burning coals on the sidewalk, and were just wailing on this baby will all sorts of wrenches and business. There was a crowd laughing and taking pictures. (This is literally in the Chilean equivalent of Herald Square.) Suddenly the contraption lets out a piercing whistle and the pistons start pumping madly. The period fire fighters rejoice! Except for the poor bastard that’s holding the fire hose. The water steam swings madly across an intersection, broadsides a bus, then arches up and directly for the crowd. This is the last picture I took before he started taking out bystanders and I was up over the barrier (admittedly into the middle of the street but fortunately there was traffic). My hair had just dried and I was facing a 14 hour flight. I’ll take my chances with an oncoming taxi.

Then, after maxing my allotment of duty free Chilean wine, it was back to DC. Just in time to meet the remnants of tropic storm Lee.

Rapa Nui

2011-09-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

Rapa Nui is what the locals call what the Chileans call Isla de Pascua which is what we call Easter Island. The place is in the middle of no where (a phrase which at this point in my life I do not use lightly). It is about equidistant from Tahiti and the Chilean mainland - but more than a 5 hour flight to either. The island itself is about the size of Manhattan south of Canal Street (though admittedly the infrasructure is somewhat less developed). Rapa Nui is also famous for being the place where humans learned a very valuable lesson about resource conservation. Once the island was about 60% covered in trees. The different family groups lived in different parts of the island in relative harmony (or as much harmony as a people that practice sporadic cannibalism can really expect), and built these large stone totems to ask their ancestors for fortune.

But in order to transport these increasingly larger stone statues, the islanders cut down more trees. This, in addition to thedaily use of trees for fishing and cooking, led the island to run out of trees. At which time, all hell broke loose, massive tribal wars started, the stone totems were pulled down either by enemy tribes or by regular people no longer buying what the elites were selling, more than 80% of the island either died or paddled away into certain doom in the blue. (Least you think that we whiteys are finally off the hook on this this one,don´t worry, we kidnapped,enslaved and basically killed off all that remained.)

Moral of the story: if you live on an isolated outpost in the middle of no where, it is best to be a bit careful with your resources, as it is a long paddle to Mars.

Fast forward a few hundred years (that´s right - this took place only a few hundred years ago), I arrive! After the blustery cold of Santiago, I am in paradise. This place is only nominally in South America, in reality it is all South Pacific. I spend the day tooling around in a taxi, exploring agricultural sites, taking pictures of statues, climbing around in caves, watching huge waves crash out of the torquise sea onto volcanic rock coastline, trying to teach my taxi driver English - amazingly the man could spend the day serenading me, in English, with Marc Anthony songs but I had to teach him the word for tree (or perhaps not that surprising). That night he suggested that I check out a traditional dance show.

I am expected some tame hula nonsense with pretty girls in grass skirts and maybe a little ukelele action. And, indeed, all of those things featured in the show. What I hadn´t really counted on was the band having a full drum kit and electric bass, and the feathered cod pieces. Oh yes, that´s right. The show opens with two almost completely naked men painting themselves with mud war paint. They are soon joined by a bunch more similarly attired warriors, all of which were either chosen for their ahem... stage presence... or else I believe I just received a profound sociological insight into why the average Rapa Nui woman had15 children. Much of the show was war dances (think the Haka performed by the New Zealand rugby players) and what I assume were some sort of fertility dances).

At once point during the performence, the warrior leader leaps off the stage, lands in front of me, grabs my neck, and raises his club screaming. I assume that this would have been both terrifying and the end of my story had I been an 18th century rival tribesman, but instead I just got a giggle spasm because my nose ended up two inches from his feathered stage presence. All and all, this might have been the most entertaining $20 I have spent in a long long time.

I spent the rest of the time in Rapa Nui hanging out, drinking Mahina, and eating ceviche and tuna empanadas. Exploring more sites, taking more pictures of statues, buying souvenir crap. It was sad to move on back to the mainland. My taxi driver came by to give me a hug and traditional shell necklace (a gesture that really touched me until I saw that literally every single tourist on check in line was wearing one), and back to the icy mainland I went.

I got off the plane at 9 pm, walked upstairs to the ticket sales, asked what they had leaving that night, they looked at me blankly, found someone that spoke English, I repeated my question somewhat less dramatically, and got a ticket south to Puerto Montt. Where I arrived at 1 am, in the freezing cold, with no hotel reservation and not speaking Spanish. At one point in my life this situation would have freaked me out but really now was no more than an inconvenience, and this self-satisfaction kept me warm until an enterprising taxi driver interested in a nice tip drove me to an English speaking hostel.

Letting My Pinko Flag Fly.

2011-08-26T21:58:00.000-04:00

So in setting a new personal best for a weekly total in frequent flyer miles, over the course of a week I flew from Dar es Salaam to Zurich to Washington DC to San Francisco (congrats Mike & Sara!) to Washington DC to Santiago de Chile. For those keeping score at home, and if you let me count the six hours that I spent raiding the complementary gummy bear and Toblerone bar in the Zurich airport lounge (which I actually had to get stamped into Switzerland to go to), that is four continents in seven days.

Don’t ever do that.

Two things are immediately noticeable when you arrive in Santiago. One, it is winter here. Complete with snow capped mountains and the occasional flurries. Two, the country seems to be in the middle of a major social uprising. Complete with water cannons and tear gas. More on that in a couple paragraphs.

So other than being located in a giant crater that is ideally designed to collect smog, Santiago is in the perfect location. Drive one hour up – snow and skiing. Drive two hours down – sea lions and surfing. And what did the master planners stick in the middle? Vineyards. Seriously. Does it get better than that? Oh yes, in fact.

Besides the awesome nearby amenities, the food here is also epic. As it was explained to me by my host, “Chilean food didn’t used to be anything interesting. Then everyone had to leave because of the dictatorship, and when they came back, they brought their food with them.” Now it is basically a 'best of' hit list, with the freshest ingredients. Plus there is all sorts of crazy aquatic shit that lives in the Antarctic current. We went to a fish market for lunch one day – cheese baked clams, sea urchin in tomato sauce, and eels stew. Washed down with a perfect crisp white wine. All delicious.

What could possible spoil the tender budding romance between Kristen and Senor Santiago? Well, riots. Hundreds of thousands of people marched for education reform (the conditions sound pretty dire) over the last two days. Basically it was peaceful, but it turned really nasty in pockets (particularly around the hotel where I am staying). 200 people were injured, 1400 arrested and a 16 year old boy was shot and killed. Protesters threw stones and bottles, police had tear gas and water cannons (and allegedly live ammunition as well).

Note – as I promised my mother – I stayed away from the protests to as much as extent as possible. There was one occasion when, just as I was thinking that was an unusually large group waiting on this particular street corner, the light changed and everyone raised their fists and started singing. I thought about pulling out my World Bank badge and lecturing them on the glories of free market capitalism, but I just crossed the street instead. I would have gotten my high-heeled, business-attired, laptop-toting ass kicked.

And, speaking in a totally personal capacity and in no way reflecting the views on my omnipotent employer, good for them – they should get a better education system. Hell – we all should.

Hot and Heavy

2011-07-31T12:50:00.000-04:00

The first thing my sister asked me when I got back: what it as hot as Haiti down there? Definitionally yes, since Haiti must be and can only be as hot as itself, but actually no, it was quite a bit cooler in Port-au-Prince than it has been over the last few weeks in say, New York or Washington. (Hot as Haiti was my grandmother’s favorite climatic expression. There were few times in the dog days of summer when it wasn’t ‘as hot as Haiti out there.’) Her second question was if I had met Wyclef Jean – to which all I had was that Bill Clinton was staying at the same hotel I was.

But what Haiti lacked in heat it made up in heavy. Haiti is a heavy country. A year and a half ago, and estimated 200,000 people were killed in the earthquake. This is the percentage equivalent of the United States losing the entire state of Arizona, or the combined population of Chicago and Los Angeles, at one time. Nearly all those were in a tightly packed section of six communes around the capital. The hotel where I stayed was in the process of being re-built after collapsing and killing 200 staff and guests. In addition, the country has been plagued with gang violence, multiple cholera epidemics, and almost statistically impossible levels of unemployment. Driving to work on morning, what the driver calls a ‘fight’ in the street is actually one guy standing there screaming at another while pointing a gun at his head. (Not to ruin the ambiance set up by the previous paragraph, but really? What could this guy have possibly done to you to piss you off that much at 9 am? Neither of you even own cars.)

But despite all the above, it is not a miserable country. It looks a lot like West Africa, which in its own way is frightening since I like to reason that one of the causes of poverty in West Africa is its remoteness, whereas from Port-au-Prince, I can get to Miami in less than two hours on American Airlines. But like a little green sprout growing in a lava field, life finds a way. And that is what Haiti feels like – healthy skin growing back over a bad scar. And like everywhere in the world, it is not immune to me stumbling through and inadvertently offending the populace. Like the morning where I got lost on my run and ended up in the middle of a displaced persons camp. Tank top, running shorts, no wallet or cell phone, standing there soaked in sweat among the tents, slightly goggle-eyed and mumbling ‘shit shit shit’ under my breath. They were nice about it – knew where I came from – and pointed me back.

Or the day that my official World Bank vehicle got pulled over for ‘illicit window tinting.’ (In a law dating back to the bad old days when kidnapping was rife, you need official permission for window tinting. Apparently it is harder to make a clean getaway through Port-au-Prince traffic with an MP’s wife screaming in your back seat if you don’t have tinting.) In any case, the cops (mounted on ATVs) pulled us over and used nails to scrap off the aftermarket tint while the driver went thermal on the sidewalk. I know I was only making the situation worse because I couldn’t stop giggling.

Or my absolute inability to grasp the concept of the Haitian dollar. I am not sure I have the story completely straight, but this is how it was explained to me (feel free to jump in and correct me on this if I am bit fuzzy on the details) : once upon a time Haiti had a currency (called the Haitian dollar) that was pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. But, as all good little MPA/IDs know, in order to maintain your peg, you need foreign currency reserves. And when those run out – that’s it for your peg. So Haiti ran out as some point, and had to float the currency. To make this more palatable, the government issued a new currency - ‘gourdes’ – at a rate of five gourdes to the old Haiti dollar. But people still liked the Haiti dollar, and even though it doesn’t exist anymore, they still generally post prices in it. But now it is no longer pegged to the US dollar and now hovers somewhere in the ~1.6 range. I have no proof that this whole elaborate system was just set up to rip me off of cigarettes, but I feel my circumstantial case is strong.

So that’s my five paragraph overview of 11 days in Haiti. It is most definitely *not* the worst place on earth – I am looking at you Choum, Mauritania. And now, after less than 48 hours in the US, I am in Ethiopia – on the third continent of my four continents in eight weeks summer 2011 tour.

Tito and the Small Hope

2011-05-07T19:22:00.000-04:00

After spending so much time bouncing around Africa, it is going to be tough to write an interesting blog post about five days at a resort in the Bahamas. And I am still coming to terms with my new underwater camera so the photos aren’t even any good. But I hope to get better with the camera, so I just consider this a baseline post.

Last weekend I took a quick five day sanity check on Andros Island in the Bahamas. Andros is the largest and probably least developed of the major Bahamian islands, which guaranteed a healthy separation between me and a potentially homicidal situation with cruise ship crowds. I stayed that the Small Hope Bay Lodge – which is kind of like summer camp for big kids. (Note to campers everywhere – it takes much less time to get to first base on a hammock if there is an open bar.) Small Hope is the type of place my sister and brother-in-law would hate – no pool and no TV. But my cabin was right on the beach, I went diving every day, the chef was excellent, and there was that aforementioned open bar.

Andros is a bit in the middle of nowhere though. It is about a 25 minute flight from Nassau in a five seat single engine prop. I know this because that is how I got back to Nassau to get my connection back to Baltimore. I had been supposed to take the comparatively luxurious 12 seater commercial flight, although it left at 7 am and would strand me in dangerous proximity to the cruise shippers for six hours. But there was this guy with a plane – which I was assured by the staff - was immaculately maintained – and he could fly me over to Nassau after lunch as long as I could track down two other passengers to share the ride. After talking a very nice Californian couple into my scheme, we headed to the airport. And an immaculately maintained five seater plane pulls up, loads our luggage, and proceeds down the runway just far enough to hit a piece of sharp coral and puncture the nose tire. That’s game over for us. The pilot assured me – with my already tight connection in Nassau – that he had a buddy that had a plane and it was all going to be no worries.

(In the mean time, the departure room had filled up with about 50 cranky Navy and Air force personnel waiting for their ride back to Florida. The crankiness may or may not have been due to the fact that their transport plane was circling overhead – unable to land without the wash of the much bigger plane flipping our little five seater stuck on the side of the runway. And do you think that they would agree to drop me off at Andrews? Even though I asked nicely? Even though there was plenty of room in their C-23? Noooo. Why do I even bother paying my taxes?)

I was starting to get a bit nervous. If I wasn’t wheels up in 15 minutes, I was definitely going to miss my flight back to the US. Then Tito shows up. You know Tito. He is the guy that comes to pick you up at the train station when your boyfriend’s car won’t start. He has a 1989 maroon Cutlass Ciera with duct tape seats on the seats. Wire is intimately involved with holding the driver side door on. The engine sounds like someone dumped a full bucket of loose screws and squirrels in it. Yeah, except in my version of the story, Tito’s hoopty is a plane. I smile apologetically at the very nice couple from California whom I had talked into this mess, and asked Tito if he could please give it a bit of gas, I had a flight to catch.

Which I did – after admittedly having to fast talk a selection of airline and ground staff. And the result of all my efforts? I am back in DC and back at work. Lesson learned: next time don’t try so hard.

Whale Sharks and My Life as a Rap Icon

2011-03-13T13:15:00.000-04:00

So in yet another example of how my life must inevitably converge with that of a rap music superstar, let me start with a shout out to the peeps that showed me love during a dark period of my blogging career. (You will notice that there hasn’t been much in the way of posts in the last few months as I have been moving back to Washington and trying to arrange a life there – but I am on the road again – don’t call it a comeback!) To the Traveler Within and Stuff Ex Pat Aid Workers Like – who singlehandedly quadrupled my site traffic by linking to my blog story about me doing something vaguely illegal with my UN passport. So many people read SEPAWL that for a week or so I was getting daily messages – sometimes from people that found me in the company directory – that I had “made it.” And also to MV, mahbrouk! Congratulations on getting your country back and I wish you (and all the Egyptian people) the best on the rocky road to democracy.

Okay – back to my regular life. I am in Kenya this week working with the stats bureau, but decided that it was in the best case for everyone’s sanity that I duck out for the weekend with the Former Roommate (famous from last year’s Drive and Dive adventure) and Roommate’s Wife for a weekend in Diani – on the south coast below Mombasa. We left Friday after work, and despite all acting about half our ages by having rum and coke and Pringles for dinner then drinking heavily all night, we made it to the docks of East African Whale Shark Trust, at the crackin’ hour of noon and still munching over very-responsible pizza breakfast, to spend the day tracking whale sharks in the Indian Ocean.

Whale sharks are giant elusive fish that are notorious in the world diving community for having just passed through whatever locale you are at the week before. I had seen one once off the coast of southern Mozambique, but it had become a bit of an aquatic holy grail for Former Roommate. This trip was going to provide a good chance though. The boat was supported by a spotter in a light aircraft. Basically we floated around in the slowly rolling waves for long stretches of time until the spotter came on the radio shouting the location (1 kilometer off your three o’clock!) at which time everyone hit the deck as the captain gunned the engine. Once at the location, the guide spotted from the bow, then yelled for everyone to get in the water – at which time the shit circus really kicked into high gear. Grabbing snorkel gear and jumping every which way off the boat to hit the water before the whale shark dove out of sight – splashing, kicking and otherwise gorging fellow snorkelers – you landed in the water just in time to see the massive fish sail off into the blue and start kicking frantically after it. Totally worth it though. These babies are beautiful. Graceful and docile from having a brain the size of a walnut rattling around a body the length of a city bus, then sail right under you blissfully. The guide actually tagged one of them for research purposes (using a truly medieval looking spear gun) and this thing didn’t bat a flipper. We spotted seven of them over the course of the day, getting into the water with six. And, despite the last drop in being in the middle of a stinging plague of blue bottle jellyfish, an excellent time was had by all.

And eschewing the typical rap icon private plane and Cristal, we opted for Kenya Airways and mango juice for the trip back to Nairobi. And instead of a Glock, I bought two seven foot Samburu spears. Should you not hear from me again it is because TSA has sent to me one of its black op prisons.

P.S. I am, as a bonus for the ladies, attaching a partial photo of the alarmingly attractive "rescue swimmer" attached to the crew of our boat, his somewhat questionable judgement in tattoos aside.

Parental Supervision Required

2010-11-21T02:06:00.001-05:00

So it has been awhile since the last post - which is inexcusable because I have been here in Africa - ostensibly having the adventure of a lifetime! In reality it has been more work than anything else - bouncing between Tanzania, South Africa and Uganda, and trying frantically to dot i's and cross t's before my approaching December 15th return to the US. Plus I had to plan a 12 day safari / Zanzibar vacation. In contrast to my usual throw-the-backpack-on-and-wander-out, my parents require a bit more advance planning. After their first African experience in Burkina Faso in 2002, I had to deliver something with a little less "smoke and dirt" if I wanted then to ever consider coming back.

So, joined by my intrepid sidekick Adonis J, we set off for five days in Arusha, Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater. It was one of my most incredible safari trips to date - and fortunately my parents got to see the big five plus some. Mom liked the elephants, Pops dug the Cape Buffalo, Adonis J and I both like the dik-dik.

I took literally thousands of pictures over the course of our visit, but as no one has the patience of that (except for maybe Alice!), I have culled and categorized them for your viewing simplicity.

Lions

Everyone likes lions, and man-oh-man did we see lots of lions. Sleeping lions, walking lions, copulating lions, lions in the road, lions under trees, lions in trees, lions on roads, lions in the grass... They walked close enough to the safari car, that in many circumstance, should you have been interested in a rather unique obituary in the local paper, you could have reached out and slapped one on the ass. There was also one particularly memorable moment where, having interrupted two lions getting busy, we got stuck in the sand while the male lion glared at us from a few feet away. We sat there for awhile wondering how this was all going to turn out (and listening to what I assume was a steady stream of Swahili obscenities from the driver), until another car came by and was able to block the lions' view long enough for the guide to hop out, kick gravel under the tires, and hop back in. Quickly. In any case, here are the lion pictures:

Leopard

We only saw one leopard and it was a bit camera shy. Though I do like the shot of the Reebok in the tree.

Cheetah
While not quite as many as the lions, we saw a bunch of these guys as well. Including one that spent a good chunk of the morning making some zebra very uncomfortable.

Civet Cat

Rounding out the big cats on our virtual safari is the civet cat. It is about the size of a extra large house cat and would certainly guarantee that your house didn't have any rats. Or squirrels. Or spaniels.

Hyenas and Vultures

Much like no matter how many baseball games I go to I never catch a foul ball, no matter how many safaris I go on, I have never seen a kill. This is as close as we came this trip, it vultures and hyenas finishing the job.

Elephants

We saw lots of elephants. They tend to go pretty much wherever they feel like - and particularly seem to like the ease and convenience of walking on main roads instead of tramping through the bush. Multiple times we had to stop so the elephants could finish crossing, including once where an old male was oncoming traffic. Again, close enough to touch.

The Herds

We were lucky enough to be in the Serengeti for the "reverse migration." While not as impressive as the regular migration - which involves thousands of animals squeezing through narrow bottlenecks on the quest north, the reverse migration - where everyone is headed back south again - is still quite impressive. Below are the best of all things hoofed.

Hippo and Rhino

One plentiful, one rare, the fat boys are getting lumped together because I didn't get much in the way of good pictures of them.

One Miscellaneous Agama Lizard

I like the lizards and this was the only one that held still long enough to get his picture taken.

Maasai

Sometimes, as a daughter, you just need to stand back and let your parents learn life's lessons the hard way. The Maasai village was one of those times. My mother developed a bit of a fetish of the exotically dressed traditional warriors native to the Serengeti. That was quickly cured with a Maasai "village tour" which included a brief introduction to Maasai culture, then full blown hard sell buy-my-crap routine. But after only an hour in the people zoo, my mother was cured. And I got some great pictures, both of the Maasai villages, and my parents.

That was it for the safari portion of this vacation. Yesterday we flew from Arusha out to Stone Town in Zanzibar, and a headed to the beach for the rest of the week. You can look forward to nothing but sunsets and nudibranches in the next post.

Drive and Dive 2010

2010-10-04T22:24:00.000-04:00

My mother thinks I work too hard (and for once she is correct). So she was excited to hear that I decided to take a week off after the brutal last few months. At least she was excited until she found out that I was planning on taking a road trip with my Former Roommate into northern Mozambique without a map or guidebook or really any sort of concrete plan whatsoever – with the vague intension of finding coral reefs and diving on them.

Things started out swimmingly. Despite drinking until 3 am the night before, we were on the road by 9. Drove all day south to a town called Mikindani – where we expected to ask around until we figured out where the ferry boat was to cross the river in to Mozambique. This devolved into a game of good news/bad news. The bad news was that the ferry sank three years ago. The good news is that they just finished a bridge. The bad news is that the bridge is a back-track and detour of a few hundred kilometers inland. And we still had no frigging map.

Fine, onward! As we got closer to the mythical bridge, the road devolved into a pitted sand track dotted with wooden culvert crossings (the last of which was so completely rotted through that we had to hug the far wall to make it across). And we needed gas.

Fortunately the sand track abruptly ended at a 1 kilometer stretch perfect tarmac – and the gleaming new Unity Bridge – which is huge and wide and well capable of taking any form of transport serendipitous enough to make it there. It was white with four giant protruding tusks (because if you are going to build a white elephant you might as well be literal about it). We dealt with the border formalities and found someone to bring us a 20 liter plastic container of gas. Across the bridge and into Moz - where I am flying down the brand new smooth tarmac. For about 400 meters. Then the pavement ends as abruptly as it began and I have to make a U-turn to find the pitted sand track we are actually supposed to be driving on.

I last about 30 kms at the wheel - fishtailing around the sand roads before– in a move rooted partially in compassion and partially in self-preservation - Roommate takes over. And so we go banging across the nothingness. We had heard that northern Mozambique was sparsely inhabited, but we passed less than 10 villages in over 100 kms. We had just driven through Number Nine, we came upon the Problem. A tractor-trailer pulling construction equipment had jackknifed across the narrow dirt road. The cab had slammed into the hillside on one side of the road and the back four wheels of the trailed hung off the edge on the other. So precariously balanced was the truck that the back two wheels of the cab were suspended off the ground. With no truck crew in sight.

We learned through a pigeon of English and Swahili that the tractor trailer crew had gone to the next town to see if it could figure something out. After a brief unsuccessful foray back to Village Number Nine in search of food (they either won’t share or didn’t have any), we returned to accident site to wait it out (at this point we didn’t have enough gas to do anything else.) We toss our mat in a shady spot under a tree and read for awhile. Occasionally one of us will tramp off into the woods to pee or futilely search for an alternate route. Basically we just swat at the flies and sit in the dirt.

A few hours in, the circus came to town. A heavy logging truck arrived, as well as a South Asian foreman, three gendarmes, and assorted hangers on. Much discussion ensued. Roommate and I moved the mat up to the top of the hill over-looking the scene and passed the water bottle back and forth. Plan A is to use the logging truck to ram the back of the stuck tractor trailer and hopefully push it free. A couple attempts at this only succeed in pushing the truck further off the cliff. Plan A ends is a large dent in the tailgate of the logging truck. Plan B, proposed by the gendarmes, was to just unhitch the trailer, let it drop over the cliff, and voila! road is clear. (The South Asian foreman was less than impressed by this suggestion.) Plan C is to dig into the cliff to make a path wide enough for traffic to get by. The foreman predicted that this can be done in two hours by ten men with spades. Perhaps true, unfortunately what we had on hand was spade, a garden hoe, a tire iron, a bent section of metal pipe, a gaggle of semi interested children, and three able bodied adults (including the Roommate). The children dug with their hands for awhile, then left. Roommate dug with the spade and pipe until his hands were bleeding (about 20 minutes). In the end, the whole process took more than seven hours and ended with some drunk guy standing in front of the car yelling for us to hit the gas (and presumably hit him) as the car pitched onto a nauseating angle before righting itself and landing all four wheels on the dirt on the other side of the truck. At that time we did in fact hit the gas and got the funk out of there.
We had just short of 100 kilometers to go before the first town of any size that might have gas or a money changer. It was 9:30 at night. The road was crap, but the alternative was to sleep in the car. We passed a hyena in the road, and banged on until we reached Mueda – a shit little town in the middle of nowhere, with a dirty little guesthouse, gas, cold beer, grilled fish, and Chuck Norris movies on TV. Success.

Next day it was back on the road again. This included only a half day of driving and only getting lost and stuck once, though there were a few uncomfortable moments as we passed men in green jumpsuits sweeping the side of the road with their metal detectors. (We both really thought this province had been de-mined already.) Extremities intact, we arrived on the beautiful coastal town of Pemba. After a late lunch of beer and fish on the beach, we made some plans for the coming days. Diving, then a drive up the coast for a hundred or so kilometers, then a boat over to the island of Ibo and then on to Matemo – where a five star all-inclusive dive and beach resort awaited us. Beers and bonfire on the beach capped off the day, and barring the one more small problem of mice getting into our luggage during the night and eating all the soap, toiletries, paper (including nibbling on the car title), and a few assorted items of clothing, we were officially on vacation.

The next day consisted of two leisurely morning dives, then a short two hour drive, then a bit of weirdness with getting the boat to the island (ie carrying the luggage as we waded into thigh deep water), then more grilled fish and beer. In fact “diving, grilled fish and beer” basically can sum up the rest of the week (with perhaps a smattering of “sitting on the boat, wandering Portuguese colonial ruins, and vodka-tonic”) so, as you have indulged me this far, I will spare you the details. For me, the week ended Sunday by jumping on a plane back to work and Dar. Roommate and Car are still in Mozambique/southern Tanzania somewhere. (Please let me know if anyone has heard from them.)

Who says you can't go home again?

2010-09-20T00:48:00.000-04:00

I try not to be an introspective blogger. Amusing anecdotes, crazy mishaps, inadvertent cultural faux pas, those are acceptable to toss up on the internet for the world to see. I shoot for ‘comically stoic’ as a medium – skipping personal triumphs as self-aggrandizing and occasional heartbreak as Sally-Struthers-esque. All of which makes this post about Burkina particularly hard. I had done quite a bit of travel in the past 10 years, but these last two weeks have been the most personally intense. Burkina is both completely different and exactly the same. An African friend described the duality to the common Western confusion between modernization and development. Yes, there is electricity and cell phones and satellite dishes and flat screens and cars where there previously had not been. But there is still the same poverty of opportunity. Village mentalities and lives are largely unchanged, even if the ornamentation has improved.

I am not sure I completely agree. Some things in Burkina have gotten better. Cell phones are everywhere – even the fous seem to have them – and the road and transportation networks are markedly improved. There are banks and ATMs in most cities and even some large villages (there were actually more in my hotel than previously in the capital city). Clean water and basic health care are more widely available. The literacy rate is still among the worst in the world – but it is ten points higher than ten years ago. Pagne pants have fallen out of fashion – meaning that today’s Burkinabe male youth look substantially less ridicules than just seven years ago.

But even with all the new bright lights and big city of the new bar strip in Kwarma N'kruma, and the massive gosplan new ‘2000’ neighborhood of condos and ministry buildings, and a new rage for constructing overpasses (including a triple-decker on the Fada road), Ouaga still feels like Ouaga. The air still smells the same – of cooking smoke, dust, humidity, peanut sauce and raw sewage. You can still get a place of riz-sauce for 100 cfa, and a cooked chicken retails for 2000 cfa (though my trip to get a poulet legendaire at Boulougou’s was thwarted by a national cooking gas crisis.) 750 ml of beer are still less than a buck (though there has been a seismic shift in beer market. Not only have two new competitors entered the scene – Beaufort and Export33 – but Brakina, the previous green bottle swamp water, has been replaced with a new brown bottle formula that tastes, dare I say it, *better* the SoBBra). Peace Corps volunteers still stock up on American whiskey and canned goods at the Marina Market, but gone are the dusty shelves and past-due expiration dates. The new Marina Market is a Burkinabe Target, encompassing three floors and selling everything from bourgeois vegetables to home furnishings. The Ouaga marché has been rebuilt after the great fire of 2003 – it is still a shit show but no longer a death trap. Fonctionnaires still wear fonctionnaire suits but it seems they are now all legislated to carry laptop bags. Taxis are no longer glorified Flintstone cars – with the worst of the worst being taken off the street. Similarly there has been a massive crackdown on tomato cans kids – I only saw a handful the entire time (including one older than I was making me think that he was not a legitimate marabou follower but rather a fou with an old can). Peanut sauce still tastes damned good. There are still rocks in the rice.

And briefly for the former denizens of Yako – Chez Abel is still alive and kicking. The catfish guy is sadly not. Yako not only has a ‘cyber center’ but the lycée has a computer center and a blog (http://lyceeprovincialyako.blogspot.com/). The upper floor of the school is structurally unsound and condemned. There are paved basketball courts. The dirt track to Koudougou is now a straight up legit road. The vulture hotel is still there but oddly there are no more vultures. The painted the mosque and it actually looks really nice. Donkeys still wake up in the morning – and inevitably you will be hungover. The new volunteer has a robinet. My elephants are still on the wall in the old house.

And finally – my friends are still there. I had fallen out of touch with most of my old colleagues but still had one or two e-mail addresses. I was worried that no one would remember me – it’s been more than seven years. But I heard back from the two and they said they would invite some of the others for drinks. Fifteen people came. (Fortunately I remembered all but one or two.) It was incredible to see everyone. To hear how well they are doing. To hear about promotions, new jobs, wives, children (including a 7 year old named Kris!). To see that they not only remembered my “il faut partager” trick with reluctant drinkers but used it on me completely successfully. To talk about the crazy old days in Yako. To just be together again.

There, you see, I made it almost all the way to the end without getting sappy. But as long as the sentimental cherry has been popped – I love you Burkina Faso.

Genesis Story

2010-09-13T04:48:00.000-04:00

People often ask me why I joined the Peace Corps. This question is asked in various tones of voice, from incredulous to honestly interested, but it has been a mainstay of almost every non-professional introductory conversation over the past ten years. My answers vary with the questioner. I usually say something along the lines of “I had been lucky in what I had all my life and thought it was time to give some back” and “I saw a Peace Corps commercial during Saturday morning cartoons in 1983 and it always stayed with me.” Both of which are true. I usually leave out the third reason. “Because I was living with my boyfriend in a shitty apartment in Queens, working in a job I didn’t like, and one day looked down the road and saw the path I was on.”

The next question people ask is usually “Did you like it?” I usually respond by asking them how they liked the time period from 2001 to 2003, just generally. It had its localized highs and lows, but yes, generally I did like it. And regardless of whether I liked it or not, the decision to join changed everything – going back to the old path just was no longer possible.

Of all the people and experiences from that time, the story of Mariam and Armella was perhaps the most influential. Mariam was my age and worked nights at the bar next to my house. As I (from time to time) could be found at the local bar at night, I got to know her a little bit. She was about my age (24), had two children on her own, Armella, age 7, and Aristide, age 3, plus she took care of Karim, age 5,the child of one of her relatives. Eventually I knew her well enough to offer to employ her at my house doing laundry and dishes and the like so that she didn’t have to work at the bar.

Mariam never impressed me with her decision making skills. She worked late with sleeping three year old tied on her back. She would come to my house and ask for money for medicine for the baby – with a brand new expensive hair weave. She completely drove me crazy with her lack of reliability in anything. But the kids I liked - particularly the oldest girl. Armella was sharp as whip. She knew to come by with a pack of her friends in the afternoon because I would give them lollipops. She also knew to come by alone with her primary school report card – class rank 5 out of 113 got a plate of bonafide American mac&cheese.

Mariam died a few months before I left. I worried about Armella. I brought by food and money once in awhile while I was still there. I sent some money back to a village elder. I wrote letters and sent them through people in the village. But eventually people moved and died, and I lost contact. I tried to find her over the years a few times through current serving Peace Corps volunteers, but never with any success.

Then a few months ago a request came into the division for technical assistance on a project in Burkina Faso. In hindsight I might have overplayed my hand a bit in trying to get it (after all Burkina generally isn’t high on Joe World Banker’s priority list) and if I end up sitting in Tchad or Guinea Bissau at some point I have no one but myself to blame. But I got it. And on Sunday September 5th at 3:30 pm, I landed in Ouagadougou for the first time since I left as a Peace Corps volunteer more than seven years ago. Burkina has and hasn’t changed over the years. (I promise to write another post next week on that.) And on Friday I took advantage of the end of Ramadan holiday to escape the office and head north to Yako.

Armella was still there - still living in the same compound. We drank Fanta and I found out she is 16 now and going into her 3eme exam year at school. (Less than 30 percent of Burkinabe children get that far in their education with the rate for girls being far lower.) She is a pretty happy kid who hates math, dissolves into giggles when we talk about all the silly games we used to play, and is excited for the school year to start. I will still worry about her – she is now also old enough to serve drinks at the same bar where her mother worked – but so far she is doing great.

I apologize for being sappy. This has been a really mixed up emotional week being back here - way more introspection that I am used to either experiencing or sharing with the world. I promise next week to have a more upbeat *oh those crazy Burkinabe* posting.

What’s with all the Italians in the Mafia?

2010-09-04T02:15:00.000-04:00

Mafia Island is about 130 miles southeast of Dar es Salaam (or about 35 minutes in a single engine prop). It is part of the Zanzibar archipelago, sharing with it the tropical climes, beautiful reef, ancient culture, incredible cuisine, and a shit ton of Italian tourists. I don’t know what it is about this handful of dots in the Indian Ocean that attracts them in droves, but hotel managers, dive shop operators and the like, all Italian. They seem particularly well adapted to the “third class service, first class price” mantra of the leisure industry in Africa.
In any case, this was my first weekend off in three months and I was determined to enjoy it. And as my 5 passenger flight touched down on the sand and shell runway, and I looked out over the small island and big reef, I knew I was right to leave my laptop locked in a desk drawer. (I take sand and shell runways to be a good omen – like men with good jobs and large tattoos – it just shows a healthy sense of priorities.) The guy that picked us up was driving a hot-wired 70s vintage Range Rover. An hour later I was standing on a white sand beach with my book and an ice cold Kilimanjaro.

Rather unfortunately for me, one of the quirks of diving Mafia is that the viz is crystal clear during high tide, and total murk at low tide. This wouldn’t have been a big deal had high tide not been at 6 am that weekend – half hour before sunrise. So each morning of my weekend started off with shivering on the beach at 5:45, watching the sky turn grey and waiting for the crew to finish loading the gear on the wooden dhow that would take us out to the reef. The good thing was it doubled my time there, because I would be done a full day’s diving by lunch, leaving the afternoon to sleep on the beach and explore the coastal mangrove forest.

Diving itself was pretty good – particularly on the early morning dives. There were lots of little things (nudi-branches and colorful flat worms) and big things (like huge sting rays and giant grouper) and all their cousins in between. My dive camera finally wheezed its last on this trip so the pictures aren’t great, but a new one is on the way next month should be a bit better.

The off-gas day (you can’t dive then fly within 24 hours) was spent poking around ruins, teasing the huge numbers of fruit bats that live in the trees, and sleeping on the beach. And arguing with Mafia’s Mafia - the over-chargin’ Italians at Mafia Island Lodge.

Musings of a Food Powered Work Machine

2010-08-22T10:45:00.000-04:00

Hopefully this entry will signal the start of more frequent posting from my outpost. I have just finished three intense weeks of work in the town of Morogoro, and am now back safe in my expat ghetto in Dar es Salaam. Despite some grueling hours lately, I did manage to squeeze in two three-hour hikes and a 1000 km road trip.

The road trip was for work, the hikes were ‘fun’. The first hike was from Morogoro up to a nearby waterfall, and turned out to be little more than an overpriced uphill march through People Tryin’ A Sell Me Shit Land. I am attaching a picture if only a reference point for the Second Waterfall.

(Interesting aside: along the way we passed a woman making small brown rolls that looked like clay. They were a locally produced nutritional supplement for pregnant women that, for a price of course, we could try. So I gave it a go. As I am crunching on something that tastes like pre-fired ceramics, the guide further described this local specialty – made of clay from the nearby woods, they also have the secondary use of decorating the exterior of mud huts. I have to admit that they got me good. If a bunch of people earning in a day what I made in a year came stomping through my town, I might be tempted to amuse myself by making them pay to eat dirt too.)

Three days after that so-called adventure, I set off on a real odyssey. I had three field teams to visit, all in the mother-loving middle of nowhere in central Tanzania. So packed up the car and the research assistant and off we went. Note that road trips in Africa are a little different than those in the developed world. The essential ingredients, like road signs, maps, gas stations, and, in certain places, the roads themselves, are non-existent. I got well acquainted with my gas light over these three days. The first day I really almost got us stranded. I left the regional capital with what I thought was a half-tank, but discovered after about 20 minutes that I had a sticky gas gauge and, by the time I got to the next sign of civilization, I was down well under a quarter. The one station in that town, however, didn’t have any gas that day. Unable to make it back, we decided to press on, even though where we were leaving the paved road and all logical hope of finding gas. Things were looking pretty dire when we finally passed a dusty building marked ‘filing station’. Gratefully we pulled in. We knocked on the door and found the Tanzania equivalent of stoned gas station attendants watching a bootleg action DVD on vintage computer screen. There were some language difficulties, but they were desperately trying to convince us to join them. We explained that we were looking for petrol. They assured us that ‘Mr. Petroli’ would be here shortly and that we should just have a seat. Sensing we were in the company of morons (who had probably watched a few too many bootlegs about American women), we decided to take our chances with the road. And left. But by now my gas light was on. We rolled (literally) into the next town and fortunately located a village gas station (a 100 gallon metal drum of gas that was transferred to my tank using a bucket and funnel system) and were able to purchase 10 liters (about 3 gallons and enough to get us through). But evidencing that I have much work to do here in Africa spreading the gospel of market economics, they only charged us only a tiny markup over the price in town, even though I was rich, in trouble and without an alternative. Makes a girl want to trace supply and demand curves in the dirt.

Next day we began, with a full tank this time, a two day odyssey to visit two more teams operating further south. I didn’t have a map or anything in the way of concrete directions but fortunately there are only about 10 roads in this country so it is hard to miss your turn. About three hours into a nasty five hour drive mostly on dirt, I found out that the field teams I was headed for had had some transportation issues (completely believable since I more than once worried that I had broken my axel on unexpected moon crater in the road) and hadn’t started working yet. This coincided with my arrival at another national park, so we decided to bugger off for a few hours and hike a waterfall.

We chose the Sonje Falls in the Udzungwa Mountains. Sonje Falls are the ‘highest falls in a national park in Tanzania’ – rising in a three tiered cascade 180 m (more than 500 ft) through the forest. (I’m attaching a distance shot for reference.) From the top, which if you can make it there, they let you walk right up to the edge and look down at the endless flat valley of sugar cane in front of you. (This is sugar country – we pass a high school whose name translated as ‘Secondary School of Cane Cutters’ – certainly a name that encourages students to dream big.)

Happy to have gotten a good hike in, we headed for the teams. Meeting one team that afternoon, we talked ourselves into an overnight at some Swiss fancy tropical medicine research center, and headed to see the other the next morning. My directions were to cross the Kilombero River and follow the road 75 kilometers. I was in for two surprises that morning. First, I had naively expected a bridge. Instead I joined a queue of all-night truckers high on glue waiting to cross on a rickety metal ferry. Secondly, I thought we would be driving through more flat, dusty valley. Instead I found myself leaning on the horn almost continuously as I wound through narrow mountain roads (which were inexplicably and mercifully paved!) – really hoping that my story didn’t end in a head on with a lorry full of illegal timber.

But we survived, visited the team, and made it all the way back to Dar by yesterday afternoon, stopping only to buy some local fabric, a blanket weaved by leper women (the store was advertised in the Swiss tropical medicine center so I am assuming that my toes aren’t going to fall off from using it), and a strange little carving made of wood, bone and porcupine quills from a road side stand that had a bunch of carvings and a phone number written on the wall in chalk if you wanted to buy anything.

(And as a bonus, I am attaching pictures of this fun multi-tone grasshopper that I found and the *huge* spiders that live in the tree under which I parked my car each morning.)

It's Always Sunny in Morogoro

2010-08-08T09:17:00.000-04:00

So I am in Morogoro for three weeks. In the dry season. Hence the title of this post.

I am going to be honest with you, there isn’t much going on in Morogoro. This is where the government decided to hold the training because it is close enough to Dar es Salaam (3-4 hours) that you can get back there on short notice if you need to, but not close enough that anyone expects you to do it regularly. And, to be honest, you want to make sure you pick a town that isn’t too interesting because you want the 70 people that you are training to be in their guesthouses at night reading their training materials – not of out having a good time. (It is perhaps also not an accident that this is one of the more staunchly Muslim cities in Tanzania.)

But that still leaves me. In Morogoro. For three weeks. In the dry season.

And things here have been extra special uneventful in the past week. I have managed to locate a decent hotel, find a place to run in the morning (as long as I am careful of the snakes), stumble on a place that sells a fair variety of South African wine, and am steadily, through process of elimination, trying to locate a decent restaurant. Some monkeys got stuck in my ceiling early one morning – making a god awful racket. That’s about as exciting as it is going to get in Morogoro.

So I took the research assistant and snuck out yesterday. Just for 24 hours. And just an hour and a half down the road to Mikumi National Park. (Mikumi is probably the most visited and least exciting of Tanzania’s national parks but whatever, at least I wasn’t working.) The game drives were a little lackluster (“guiding” prerequisite seems to be a driver’s license), but there were a couple of good lion and hippos sightings. It was also “baby season” in the park, so you will notice a fair number of little ones in these pictures. The lion sighting was actually pretty spectacular. Mother and three older cubs with a fresh wildebeest kill. You can see from the pictures how close you can get. (Note that we are actually driving in my little Rav 4 for this.) We also invested afair amount of time at the hippo pond – waiting for some sign of movement. Hippos are basically nocturnal, so other than a couple of yawns, all I got was tsetse flies in my hair.

Little Pockets of Oddity

2010-07-26T16:00:00.000-04:00

So I just returned to Dar es Salaam after a week offline and roaming around the country for the final pilot tests before my fieldwork training starts next week. It was one of those throwback to Peace Corps weeks, with little villages, dusty roads, flat tires, dirty hair, and bucket baths. But successful – project is progressing and we haven’t missed a single deadline (which in African statistical equivalent of drawing an inside straight).

One of the villages we worked in is a former sisal (a jute-like plant used to make sacks that was Tanzania’s number one export earner at independence before collapsing after the removal of government subsidies to the industry) plantation that the government nationalized a few decades back. I immediately noticed something was a little off about this place… The houses had chimneys. African homes don’t have chimneys. Ever. People cook outside. They were also made of “colonial stone” (a chalky yellow-white cement mixture that was very much the de rigeur of late colonial construction). The sisal plants still grew in the fields, but were now inter planted with maize and cassava, the main local food crops. The houses were still in their neat rows, but mud brick extensions and patchwork came off at crazy angles. The multi-story processing plant is quietly rusting into the ground. It was a weird place.

And then there were the fuchsia chicks. They were like hatched Easter eggs. The family had set up shop on the crumbling porch off the town’s main square – next to a family of ducklings. We drove by them multiple times during the day shuttling between the different field teams and each time I would ask what the hell was up with the bright pink chickens. Oh mzungu, you don’t understand anything, that is so no one steals them. Chicks all look the same, so some people dye their colors to identify them. I shudder to think about what the original purpose of the dye was that ended up on those chicks. (I am thinking car enamel.) In any case the chicks themselves seemed happy enough – pecking around with their mother at an old corn cob. And they are very liberal minded little chicks because the ducklings also were tinged slightly pink from fraternizing with their neighbors.

That night I stayed at a gas station hotel at the midpoint between two of our work sites. It was a very modern hotel for a gas station. Electricity, running water, restaurant, the works… It was even modern enough to have one of those “insert key card for power” gizmos on the wall by the door. Which would have been more impressive had the actual door locks not been key based. I looked all over that room for a light switch. I asked my colleague staying across the hall – his room had regular lights. Eventually we solved the problem by sticking my driver’s license into the slot. Lights came on. I am not sure I get it.

Expat Growing Pains

2010-07-18T01:37:00.000-04:00

So adapting to any new situation can have its movements of transition and I have had a few of those getting used to ex-pat life here in Tanzania. Whereas previously I have lived in hotels, now I have an apartment. Where I previously took taxis, now I have a car. And where I previously could always depend on the staff or one of the societal misfits at the hotel bar to talk to me, I now have to try to make “friends.” These last few weeks have been a whirlwind of trying to do all of these things, plus get this project off the ground. Hence the lack of blogging. I will do my best to remedy that.

The car has been a particular transition moment. Those of you who know me know that I am a notoriously terrible driver. Seriously bad. And traffic laws here are mere suggestions. (For example, as far as I can tell, red lights do not apply on weekends. People behind you will lean on their horns if you stop at one.) That coupled with the fact that I have to drive on the opposite side of the road here – with all manner of children, bikes, carts, animals, etc, running all over the place – means that I drive fairly slowly – at a pace that I consider reasonable but that most of my fellow motorists apparently consider actual stasis. In addition, the town is littered with huge nasty speed bumps. But while there is sufficient enough left over pavement to build a speed bump, there does not appear to have been enough funding to paint said speed bumps. As a result, there are times when you hit them going mach 1 (particularly if you are driving at night along Carjack Beach). All four tires of my Rav4 airborne probably looks cool from the outside, but from the driver’s seat it is a bit nerve wrecking.

Yes, I have a Rav4. It is considerably newer than my bucket of bolts back in DC (but the unpaved streets and speed bumps have been taking a toll). And it is white. This led to a movement of sheer personal hilarity when I came out of the expat grocery store on a Saturday morning, lugging a 12 L bottle of water and a week’s food, only to find a sea of white Rav4s and Range Rovers. Since it is a rental and I am not one to ever mentally log where I park, I had to wander a bit before tracking it down. I stopped on the way home to order a Tinga Tinga spare tire cover. Maybe a bit tacky, but at least I can find my ride…

Other than that, Dar is about traffic. Rush hour traffic here is as bad as anywhere in New York. It takes me 45-90 minutes to get the 5 miles from my office to the apartment in the evenings. All sorts of interesting things are going on around you though. People are selling fruits and vegetables, carvings, etc. There was a new one yesterday though. I was stuck in dead stop traffic next to a gas tanker. Two enterprising young men with custom wrenches ran up and opened the valves on the underside of the truck, filling plastic bags with contraband gas. When the bags were full, they closed up the valves, climbed down a drainage ditch and back up the other side, and then sold the gas at the taxi park. Then they sprinted back across to fill the bags again at the tanker still stuck in traffic. (This amazed me so much that I took a picture - which drove one of the gas stealers into a rage. Was he made that I took a picture of him engaged in a criminal act? No – just that I wouldn’t give him 1000 TSH for the privilege. I shook my head, he told God to curse my progeny, and then traffic started moving…)

To combat the traffic crisis, I joined the gym next to the office. That way I can just look out at the traffic and, it is still backed up to the turn off, just go spend another 20 on the treadmill. (At this rate I am going to be *cut* when I get out of here.) But because my workout strategy is built completely on traffic avoidance, I don’t go to the gym where all the other expats go. I am in fact the only white female I have ever seen in there, and I am usually unique in both of those respects. But the gym is okay, it has working elliptical machines and treadmills, plus weights and a couple classes. I was particularly excited about the 30 minute “intensive core workout” class. I am such a slacker about doing my abs, but with a class, I am sure that I would be better. Then I met the instructor. This guy apparently learned to speak English watching Full Metal Jacket. And as the only whitey, there was no way that I was going to make America look bad. So there I was, tank top and running shorts, pouring sweat, while these beautiful South Asia women, in their long flowing “gym burka,” effortlessly cranked out another set. They looked like elegant jellyfish on the mats. I looked like a farm animal.

Other than that, things have just been moving along. Been out in the field mostly, doing pilot testing and training, taking the occasional break to shell some corn... There was a bit of a break in the action last week when I spent three days in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, working with their Central Statistical Agency. I like Addis. It has a bit more hustle and flow than sleepy little Dar, good traditional food and some excellent pizza, nice silverwork, and a fleet of blue Ladas that serve as the city's taxi fleet (a leftover from their flirtation with communism). If it weren't for the truly amazing food poisoning that I got from the Hilton Hotel's room service, it would have all and all be a great interlude.

I am back off into the hinterlands today for another week in the field. Sorry there isn't anything in the way of pictures this time...

Kristen for Kibera

2010-06-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

Kibera is the largest slum in Africa. It is about one square mile of unpaved alleys, rusting tin shacks, and open streams of sewage. Approximately one million people live in Kibera (roughly 1 in 5 Nairobians, and 1 in 50 Kenyans overall). The HIV prevalence, crime, and chemical dependency statistics are clear off the charts. The name literally means “jungle” in one of the local languages, and is synonymous with just how bad urban poverty can be.

But it is still in habited by people, and people as a general rule are a resilient lot. Kenyans in particular are similar to Americans in the dogged belief that this bad day is just a stepping stone, and with the right amount of hustle, better days are just around the corner. One of these people is Lucy. Lucy runs the St. Vincent de Paul Day Care & Nursery School (http://vincentdepaul-organization.jimdo.com), a pre-school and kindergarten for at risk kids in Kiberia slum. She provides them with small classes, motivated teachers and a solid foundation for primary school, something comically lacking in the local public school system.

She also does outreach in their homes, checking up on which parents – often single mothers – are on the edge. She encourages them to seek regular medical care for their children and for themselves if they are pregnant. She tells them about drugs with can prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission. She encourages them, whether they are married or not, to try to start some kind of small business, because waiting for a man to come home (or not) with some money is not going to get your children out of the slums. She has recently started a rescue center on a piece of donated piece of land outside the city, for children who were abandoned or just could no longer remain at home. And she does all of this on a few thousand dollars a year given in mostly small donations over the internet.

I am one of her small donors (very small – literally a two digit donation once), and took a morning off while in Nairobi to join a few other visiting donors to meet her and see her school first hand. We also visited the home of two of her students, getting a firsthand walking tour of Kibera. I like to think that I am not easily impressed by people anymore, but what Lucy manages to do on so little is incredible. Even the non-monetary resources, getting college student volunteers from Holy Cross for the summer, convincing the UN spouses group to donate food, have the huge challenges of coordination. I am no slouch at developing world logistics, and I couldn’t organize a taxi where she works.

In any case, I am going to skip the funny anecdotes for this time, and just recognize a dedicated woman’s achievement. It was a much needed Barack style shot of hope – after two weeks of listening to taxi drivers tell me whose tribe is better than whoseother. And having six people be killed in a grenade attack at a political prayer rally across the street from my hotel last week. And working 12 hour days trying to help a country that seemed hell bent on screwing everything up. Here’s to you Lucy, for making me think that maybe this country isn’t total *%&$ed.

The Wisdom of Bobby Kelly

2010-06-13T13:32:00.002-04:00

Bobby Kelly was an outfielder for the Yankees in the later 1980s. According to baseball lore, one off-season, he and his agent walk into the general manager’s office and Bobby tells the GM that he has played well this season and thinks that he should be the starting center fielder (I think he was platooning behind Dave Winfield at this time). The GM is quiet for awhile, then nods and tells him, you know what Bobby, you are right, you do deserve to be a starting center fielder. I will take care of it. Bobby and his agent leave and go off to celebrate. Starting center fielder for the New York Yankees. Next day Bobby is traded to Cincinnati – where he was in fact the starting center fielder.

I love that story. In fact, most of you have probably heard me tell that story before many times over the years. So I should have known better when I walked into my boss’ office last January and announced that I wanted to travel less. I got traded to Tanzania.

So for the next few months I will be based in Dar es Salaam. I gave up my apartment in DC, packed everything into storage, and now here I am. Well, actually right now I am in Nairobi, but that is just until Saturday, then I go back to Dar for the next couple months. But in the meantime, a few noteworthy things that have happened in the last 8 days…

Last weekend I was still in Dar, on a 48 hour stopover to desperately unpack into my apartment, and then repack for two weeks in Nairobi. But one night a few people I know decided to sneak me into a party at the ambassador’s residence of a certain northern European nation. The party started out how they all do… sipping tepid white wine in the heat while the ambassador gives a painful speech highlighting whatever the country’s current development policy of the week is, then the two national anthems, and making chit chat while you polish off whatever tasty little national morsels come by on trays. All according to plan. At some point though, the night took a turn for the weird. The cultural attaché had booked a lively hip hop band. Which cleared out a good chunk of the crowd, but the booze was still flowing so we hung around. At some point the ambassador got up on the stage and started shouting for everyone to shut and listen to him because he was the ambassador (I think he even still only had one drink in his hand at this point). He said anyone not drinking and dancing should get off his lawn. Then proceeded to physically herd us towards the bar, after which the cultural attaché dragged us onto the dance floor. The interns at this point were drunk enough that they were physically dangerous to dance near. One actually sweated completely through his suit coat. But in the end, no one got hurt and when we got tired of dancing we got the hell off the ambassador’s lawn. With a free CD from the hip hop band.

Then I flew here to Nairobi. The flight is only an hour (about the distance from New York to DC), but as with all these things, it was a fiasco. So I got to the hotel and just grabbed my shorts and sneakers out of my suitcase and went down to the gym to run it off a bit. As I stepped out of the elevator, I immediately noticed that something wasn’t quite right. Usually it is me, a handful of BA stewardesses, and one out of shape Dutch guy. The gym was packed to the gills with American dudes. Too old to be embassy Marines, but obviously not just regular joes. After my run I asked one of the staff what was going on. Oh, I was so lucky, the American VP Joe Biden was arriving tomorrow. Oh. Shit. It turns out my compatriots at the gym were only the advance team. Over the next 24 hours, at least a hundred more showed up. The Nairobi InterContinental was going on full lockdown. We had to enter and exit through the parking garage. No taxis or within 100 m. Metal detectors in every door frame. Bomb sniffing dogs in the corridors. A sizable portion of the Kenyan military decamped to the car park. All adult males wearing those stupid little earpieces. Wait lists for treadmills. Interminably slow room service. This was a problem. I kept going up to random meat heads and asking, nay pleading, to be told when he was leaving. “Who’s leaving ma’am? I can neither confirm nor deny there is anyone here.” Three days. The last of the Secret Service cleared out just in time for the World Cup to start and the downstairs sports bar to fill with embassy Marines.

But today I decided to take the day off, get out of the hotel/office loop, hire a driver, and see a couple of the remaining Nairobi sights on my checklist. This included the Kitengela Glass Factory and the Nairobi animal orphanage. The glass factory was way out in the middle of nowhere in the suburbs, but was totally worth the trip. It is run by some insane white dude who bought a farm and started teaching the Kenyans how to blow glass using recycled beer bottles. One thing led to another and now there is an artist colony out there… complete with Gaudi style mosaics and giant metalwork sculptures. You can wander around the workshops and they do glass blowing demonstrations. I was amazed enough to buy a pitcher and glasswear set (for an obscenely low price given the rising dollar). My driver, who accompanied on my wanderings, was just floored. He just couldn’t believe how glass was made or that Kenyans were making it. We gave a couple of the workers a lift to the main road, and in exchange the workshop manager gave the driver a small gift. Over the moon. You would have thought he was the one that paid me to take him out there.

The animal orphanage is part of the Nairobi National Park system, and to the naked eye, just seems like a really depressing zoo. (All of the animals have little placards about how their parents were killed.) But, for those in the know, it is a golden opportunity to bribe your way into the cheetah cage. (Something else the driver was incredulous about – he could more readily understand bribing your way *out* of the cheetah cage.) I have a couple of other pictures of me smiling and looking at the camera, but I like this one because it is more true how I actually felt about the experience.

Well, that is all for now. Ghana just beat Serbia and the entire country just lost its shit. I am going downstairs to the bar for a Tusker and to see Germany mop the floor with the Aussies. (Less than two weeks and I already care about soccer – this trip might leave a scar.)

Swedish ABC's

2010-06-06T14:58:00.000-04:00

So this year the cleverly named ABCDE (Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics) was held in Stockholm. One of the papers I had co-written was slotted to be presented, and luckily for this junior co-author, the other two were otherwise occupied last weekend. So I got to go attend lectures, eat salmon, meet interesting people, and just enjoy the beautiful Stockholm summer. Unfortunately I did not have as much time as I would have liked to check out the city, but I did manage to seek out to stroll around a little.

And in honor of the Bank footing the bill for 4 days in Sweden so that I could deliver a 20 minute presentation and answer one question at a session that started at 7:45 am (seriously – Swedes are nuts – though fair play the sun rises at 3:45), I will do this blog entry in powerpoint slides.

Slide 1 – “Stockholm as a Beautiful City”

Stockholm is beautiful. Apologies to any loyal Norwegian readers, but it has got it all over Oslo. The city is built on a series of 14 islands, connected by bridges and surrounded by water clean enough to swim in. The old city (like many old cities admittedly) is a maze of narrow alleys, colorful buildings, and old churches. Everything is spotlessly clean and perfectly preserved.

Slide 2 – “Common Swedish Delicacies”

When people ask me questions about places that I have been, they inevitably want to know “what did you eat?” And, as I didn’t want to waste my precious lapses from vegetarianism on a common Swedish meatball I could get at IKEA, I sought out some alternatives. I ate lots of salmon – smoked, grilled, broiled. Lots of herring. Which to me was always this nasty creamy goop we had to eat on New Year’s Day for good luck, but the Swedes to some amazing things with it. The tangy mustard version was particularly good. (I should note that these are all breakfast foods. I was almost beside myself with joy when I went down the first morning. You should have seen the look I gave the waiter when he asked if I wanted *eggs*.) I also ordered the elk prosciutto at a restaurant. Eh. Elk should stick with whatever it is that elk generally do, they are a little lackluster as a designer meat product.

Slide 3 – “Royal Gossip”

I love monarchies. The whole idea in the information overload age is inherently dangerous. In America, the spotlight is on the president and his family for 8 years. And with enough spin control and armed minders, you can keep pretty much anyone in line for 8 years. After that, the fascination fades. (Would any of us care if Amy Carter were to be caught smoking crack with underage chimpanzee?) But royals have to stay in the spotlight their whole lives. Eventually something is going to be newsworthy. And in Sweden right now there is royal gossip fever! The crown princess is marrying a gym teacher. The nation is scandalized by her choice. Even worse, it was leaked to the press that her father was going to walk her down the aisle. The nation is aghast. How dare such a role model capitulate to outdated patriarchal traditions! Sometimes I think conservatives are really funny, sometimes I think liberals are even funnier.

Slide 4 – “Really Big Boat in a Box”

At these things, there is always a conference dinner. They are usually held at impressive venues and offer the unique opportunity to get drunk enough that you can’t show your face at *next* year’s festivities. Our dinner was in the Vasa Museum – which houses an intricately carved double decked gun ship that sailed for about 20 minutes in the 17th century. “Ballast” was apparently an idea still in the development stages back then, and one stiff breeze sent the whole kit-and-kaboodle down to the bottom of the bay for 400 years. Fortunately the freezing water makes it too cold the for the little microbe beasties that usually eat wooden ships – so the Vasa is amazingly preserved. And huge. Makes for an impressive backdrop for a fancy dinner.

Slide 5 – “Holy Shit, Did You Know Who Alfred Nobel Was?”

So something that they don’t much mention at the ceremonies, but Alfred Nobel, the man who endowed the famous Nobel Peace Prize, was a weapons manufacturer. No joke. The guy developed high explosives at the turn of the century – accidently killing his brother in a “lab incident.” The Nobel museum casts this somewhat inconvenient truth in the idea that everyone has the chance to redeem themselves. I guess, but man if Fox News got a hold of the idea that Obama accepted money from a socialist foreign arms dealer, Glen Beck would fantasize him into a muhejeen in the Afghan highlands in a matter of minutes.

Slide 6 – “Conclusion”

That pretty much sums it up. Following the conference I went to the airport to get my luggage out of hock (SAS lost my bags again – but as I learned from my trip last month to Norway, I should not expect SAS to deliver my baggage at the same time when it delivers me. Therefore this time I was smart enough to pack everything I needed for the conference in my carry-on), and headed down to East Africa. I am currently on a flight from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi, and I went to a really amusing foreign embassy party this weekend, but you will have to wait on that (I need to keep some things in my pocket for next week’s post.)

Oslo and Out

2010-05-02T20:53:00.000-04:00

This short posting is really just a vehicle for the seal pictures that I haven’t put up yet. Nothing too much interesting happened since the last entry. I went to the bar, didn’t see any polar bears, flew down to Oslo for the weekend, did the tourist sight rotation down there (National Museum, opera house, Viking ship museum, Vigeland Sculpture Park, etc…), had some drinks with some friends, then hopped on the plane back to the US. The weather in Oslo wasn’t very good, so the light wasn’t right for taking many photos down there. (Also, while Oslo seems to be an immensely livable city, it isn’t that photogenic…)

Hvor er alle isbjornene?

2010-04-29T10:22:00.001-04:00

So let me get this out of the way at the outset - we were unsuccessful in our quest to see a polar bear. Which is a little bit ironic because this week there have been four different polar bears sighted in the tiny town of 3000 in which we are staying. It has made national news. Residents have Facebook status updates saying things like “Arming myself to run to the store.” It’s like the polar bears are mocking me.

One of the major hindrances to polar bear viewing turned out to be the weather. The snowstorm that started at the end of the last blog post continued throughout the next day. Which certainly made the next day’s dogsledding activity slightly less pleasant, but did give it a certain air of authenticity. Johnny Norseman and I took turns driving our six dog team through the blinding snow. I couldn’t see anything at all without my sunglasses. The sled would get stuck in the fresh powder, necessitating the driver hopping off and pushing to get the dogs started again, jumping back on quickly before the dogs ran off with the passenger. And as well trained as the dogs were, they were still dogs. At one point, our team hooked a sharp right and took off after a reindeer. I have to say that it has greatly increased my sympathy for polar explorers. It would truly suck to have to do that for weeks at a time just to see your compass spin.

The next day was our big snowmobiling trip to the east coast - polar bear country. It was a long day, nearly 150 miles roundtrip, driving a snowmobile across tundra, glaciers and sea ice at speeds up to 55 miles per hour. It was a cold day too - the air temperature was only in the teens when we started, plus the wind chill plus the wind speed. This would have made things uncomfortable, but blasting across the top of a glacier, clouds blending in with the blowing snow to make it seem like the top of the world, frozen sea looming up before you, is really so god damned badass that you don’t care much about the temperature. (Though I guess it is all fun and games until someone loses as toe.) The rules for glacier driving and similar to that of the sea ice that we would cross later that day - follow the tracks in front of you. The lead snowmobile has a GPS that has a map made by helicopters. If you fall into a crevasse the whole group is going to have to wait in the cold while you and your compound fracture are towed out. Follow the tracks in front of you.

Have I mentioned how badass it feels? It’s like a really cool Super Mario Cart board come to life.

Anyway, when we got to the East Coast, where the polar bears are usually found, it was snowing like crazy with wind coming from the ocean. Taking off your gloves, even for the 30 seconds it takes to switch a camera lens, put you in imminent danger of frostbite. I hunkered down next to the heat of my snowmobile engine for a few minutes while I scanned the horizon with my 300 mm lens (basically the equivalent of a pair of binoculars) before I really didn’t care that much about the polar bears anymore. I wanted to keep my fingertips. (It didn’t help that there was a guy on my plane on the way up that was missed significant chunks of his extremities.) Fortunately, “forget the bears” was a pretty popular sentiment among the group, and we headed back across the glacier. The rest of the day was spent cruising by seals and reindeer while skimming across the sea ice with ice blue glacier walls rising at the edge of the shore. In case I haven’t mentioned this - totally badass.

Today is our last day here in Svalbard, and the weather is impeccable. Ice blue sky and no wind. Of course we chose today to explore the completely enclosed ice cave. The ice cave is formed by glacier melt water and runs for miles about six stories below the surface, with the melting and refreezing forming incredible ice stalagmites and stalactites. The tunnel ranges from walking comfortably with cathedral ceilings to wiggling on your stomach below giant chunks of ice. The caves obviously aren’t lit, so everyone has a miner style head lamp to guide the way. (Those who know me well can certainly picture the scene where I have my tripod set up on the timer and am trying to coordinate the position of my fellow hikers to most dramatically light a particularly nice ice formation.) At the end, we all had coffee and cookies in a particularly large chamber, then emerged back out into the blinding light of the glacier surface.

So tonight it is down to Oslo for a couple days - then back to Washington. Unless I meet a polar bear on the way home from the bar tonight, I will have to try again another day...

Snowmobiling 101

2010-04-26T17:05:00.000-04:00

So today I learned how to drive a snowmobile. Johnny Norseman and I took a trip with three other tourists and a guide (armed guide - every one leaving the city limits must carry a rifle or sizable handgun in case of polar bear attack) to dash around the glacier and visit Barentsburg, a random little Russian coal mining town about 60 kms from Longyearbyen. (It is sort of a long story how there is a random little Russian coal mining town in the middle of the Norwegian Arctic. It involves intricate international treaties, but the necessary bits for this story is that it was built between 1950 and 1980, is staffed by 400 Ukrainian miner and there assorted dependents, and very much feels like not only stepping into Russia, but stepping back in time into Russia. But I digress.)

The basic concept of snowmobiling isn’t that difficult. On the left, there is a brake, very similar to the one found on every 10 speed bike in the world. On the right is a level that serves as that throttle, the harder you pull back, the faster you go. The only vaguely complicated bit is that the terrain you cross is very uneven, so when you turn on any kind of gradient, you need to shift your weight by climbing off the seat and leaving hard to the high side to keep the machine steady. (It is sort of like a combination of leaning into a turn on a motorcycle and sitting on the high side on a little sailboat.) They are relatively heavy - with the one I rode weighing as much as my little Rav4 back home - but they do go over if you aren’t careful - as we will see firsthand later on in our story.

Anyway, these things a frigging blast. Blazing along the top of the glacier, under the crystal blue sky, ice flows in the ocean looming ahead, reindeer scattered on the hillsides… (A note about the reindeer here, they are pygmies! They have these stumpy little legs to keep them low to the ground so they stay warmer during the bitter cold months. If I wasn’t positive I would be run through with an antler as soon as I got too close, I would certainly bring on home - and be the envy of all the designer dog snobs at the park. But I digress.)

The trip out of Barentsburg takes a few hours with picture stops along the way. You can tell you are getting close when you see the giant plumb of black smoke rising into the sky. We had lunch at the Soviet style cafeteria - where everything was served with beets and mayonnaise. We say the aging mine entrance, the aging school, the aging social hall, the aging hospital, the aging church, the aging sports club… It must have been a veritable worker’s paradise a generation or so ago. Now the only people crazy enough to work there (there was a giant coal dust fire a few years back that was only extinguished when the entire mine was filled with sea water for a little while) are chain smoking Ukrainians on two year contracts. Cheers to those boys - after two hours I was ready to get the hell out of there.

Which only left the trip back. But Mother Nature had added a new wrinkle. It has started to snow. Less than 30 minutes into the ride, conditions were near complete white out. I was the first snowmobile behind the guide and I was struggling to keep the black speck in sight. Also, when you can’t see the terrain, you are less able to anticipate when you are going to need to compensate, leading to a few exciting moments when you hit an embankment or large bump in the snow. After an hour or so, we stop for cookies and to admire what I would assume is a fine view if the visibility ever crawled above zero. (And it was cold. It, in general, is cold here, with the high for today being only in the low 20s, but there isn’t any wind so with enough layers it isn’t too bad, unless you are on top of a glacier in the middle of a swirling snowstorm. Then it is a little chilly.) I have trouble getting my machine started, but eventually it turns over and off we go. Conditions now are really tough. I am struggling to stay upright and keep pace, but we don’t want to slow down too much because things aren’t likely to get better weather-wise. Halfway into this final push, the guide stops. I pull in behind him and turn around to look for the others. But there are no others. The guide drops the supply sled and turns around to find them.

It couldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes. (Johnny had hit a bad bump in the snow and went over. The others had stopped to help get the snowmobile back up, but they had lost the two of us in the process.) But the guide took the gun. And I was all by myself. In the middle of a snowstorm. With almost no visibility. With a supply sled full of things a polar bear might like to eat. And me, which the polar bear might also like to eat. It has been 15 years since the last fatal attack - mostly because of new safety precautions - but I was a little nervous. If I saw a polar bear, I could probably outrun him on the snowmobile, but without a GPS and in the snow, I would be causing a second set of problems. And I had had trouble getting the engine to turn over last time I started up. Just as I was convinced that I could hear the snorting and shuffling of a hungry polar bear behind my back no matter which way I turned, the guide and my fellow riders come roaring up. Back to town. Where, having faced the first situation in my life where I had a practical use for a firearm, I was now faced with a somewhat more immediate need for a drink.

And for those in the audience keeping score: in the last two days I have eaten seal, (minky) whale and reindeer.

Svalbard

2010-04-25T06:28:00.000-04:00

As I guess most of you have heard, Washington DC had the snowiest winter on record this year. Feet and feet of snow fell, closing schools and office buildings for more than a week. You could ski right down the main 16th St. route to the White House. But fortunately that has all ended. Birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and the first traces of the characteristic heat, humidity and spike in the crime rate so typical of the DC summer are beginning to creep into the air. So, what did I decide to do to celebrate the dawning of the spring season? Take a vacation. To the Arctic Circle.

There is still plenty of snow up here in Longyearbyen, Norway, the largest city on the Svalbard Islands. This is supposedly the northernmost inhabited place in the world. It is certainly northern. I am 3.5 hours north of Oslo. I am 2 hours north of the Arctic Circle. I am north of most of Greenland. You name it, I am north of it. In fact, if you had the money or inclination, the north pole is only a 16 days dogsled away. You would leave from Longyearbyen.

And what in hell am I doing up here? I must admit, that is a fairly good question that I don’t necessarily have the answer to yet myself. This trip is the brainchild of one of my grad school friends, Johnny Norseman (who previously achieved fame on this blog by being the photographer for the famous picture of me tongue kissing a giraffe). We are going to go hiking and snowmobiling and dog-sledding, and maybe, just maybe, see one of those elusive big white bears before global warming kills them all. (Like taking a no hitter into the 8th, I don’t want to jinx it by saying the word. They are hard enough to see with all your mojo working in the right direction - though there apparently was one across the bay from the airport when we landed. All I saw was a tiny black speck at the edge of the water - and the opposite bank lined with camera toting tourists. I hope to do better later in the week.)

But all that will have to wait a day or so. I am confined to Mary Anne’s Polarrigg (the decidedly quirky lodge where we are staying) until Scandinavian Airlines finds my luggage. Lost luggage in Africa is a pain in the ass. Lost luggage in Svalbard is a frostbitten toe. And in one of the more impressive customer relation moves I have seen recently, the woman at the SAS counter thought it was highly irresponsible of me to have packed my boots in my checked luggage. Didn’t I know that they lost bags all the time? How stupid could I be?

So I spent the morning sleeping in, reading my book, and gorging myself on Norwegian Sunday breakfast. And examining the décor. I guess it would be best classified as a nouveau taxidermy/mine motif. The walls are painted with coal mining scenes (which, along with tourism and observational astrophysics, makes up the bulk of the economy up here). In lieu of table runners, there are seal skins. The floor has reindeer rugs. And there are stuff polar bears everywhere (including one wearing boxing gloves that you must remember to duck when walking down the hall). The hotel key chains are made of reindeer antlers. Despite all the incredible natural splendor outside, I am starting to suspect that this might not be the place to the more strident environmentalist in the world.

Anyway, I will sign it off here. There is a nice cozy seal skin armchair waiting for me and my book. Besides, I will have regular internet access up here (bonus quirk of vacationing in the developed world for a change), so you will probably hear from me fairly often this week. The photo selections are taken from my seat in the plane during the approach. It was exactly like coming into Nouakchott over the Sahara, but pure white.

Ce n'est pas une post.

2010-03-20T16:10:00.000-04:00

So this little quickie isn't really blog-post worthy, but it amused me. I am just back from two weeks in Dar es Salaam - where all I did was work - so I don't have any good stories. But on the way out of the country, the power was out at the airport. As printing the boarding passes as they usually do was not possible, Ethiopian Airlines had to hand write them. And knowing the unreliability of the power supply in Dar, you would think they would be prepared. Instead however, someone dug way back into the way-back file to find these 70s vintage specials. Note the retro font and color scheme. And the box to tick as to whether I wanted a smoking or non-smoking seat.

Scenes from Malawi

2010-03-11T13:26:00.000-05:00

So alas, my three week field adventure in Malawi was cut short by a small crisis in Tanzania. I am back in Dar es Salaam - working constantly - and with no more monkeys on my roof. Consequently, I don't have much in the way of wild adventure. But I will post a couple of pictures from the one day in the field in Malawi that we did have. I am also adding a couple of pictures about what my life is like (conducting household and agricultural surveys in developing countries). Note the overabundance of corn in these pictures. That is true both of like in Malawi and my life lately.

Here we go with life in Malawi... And in honor of the Yankees upcoming 2010 World Championship Series, I choose a baseball narrative for this post:

Leading off and playing left field we have Corn!

In the second spot, playing short stop, we have Road Side Mushroom Stand...

Playing center and batting third we have the speedy but pesky, Kids at the Pump!

Batting clean up is the strong man of the order, the DH, Guy with Bamboo on Bike!

In the five spot and playing a gold glove first base, we have More Frigging Corn!

Batting sixth and guarding against the double down the line at third, we have Lady with Boy and Pumpkins...

Down the bottom three in our order, we have the man behind the plate, Shucking "Guess What" Corn!

Batting eighth and guarding the short porch in right, we have Bored Old Lady Getting Interviewed!

And finally, in the nine spot and playing second, we have My Class of Field Enumerators in Training!

Well that concludes our trip around the horn! For those of you who are interested in a little substance with your photos, I am adding a vignette to the previous post about me along braining a Norwegian with a scalding hot iron.

Hickory Smoked Knickers and Other Tales from the Road

2010-03-03T14:56:00.001-05:00

I only have one picture for this entry. I was working in Dar and then Nairobi, mostly the inside of office buildings, and now I am down in Zomba, Malawi. Which is beautiful and green – mostly due to the weather’s continuous state of downpour. The picture is of my room (#10) with a bunch of god damned monkeys on the roof. And I assure you, nothing is louder at 5:15 am than a troop of monkeys on a corrugated metal roof.

The best I can do is send a quick series of vignettes from the last two weeks on the road.

Hickory Smoked Knickers: As I mentioned, it rains all the time here in southern Malawi. It rains while I sleep, rains while I eat, rains while I work, rains while I run (the final one being the most unpleasant of the lot). Other than the fact that my hair never dries and is sprouting mushrooms, I have almost gotten used to it. One of its more unexpected externalities however is that it makes line drying clothing impossible. As a result, my clothes are dried in a closed room with a wood fire. (I am guessing the same on used for smoking crops at the end of the season…) Everything therefore has the slight tinge of wood smoke, like one had been using hickory scented fabric softener.

Most Dangerous Thing He Did That Day: So the hotel I was staying at for the conference in Nairobi is a new hotel - Ole Sereni. Built on the site of the former US embassy, it borders directly on the Nairobi National Park and is convenient to the airport. On the down side, the staff is god awful. I arrived fairly late for Tanzania and had to work early in the morning, so I decided to do my ironing at night. I was watching CNN, ironing linen, when someone lets himself into my room. Nairobi isn't the safest place on a good day, and this was nearly 11 pm. I pull the iron from the wall and advance on the still opening door - which eventually reveals an SAS pilot backing up as quickly as his roller bag allows. The desk had double assigned my room and given him a key. He left quickly to sort it out.

Eating Meat Like It Is My Job: So my vegetarianism has been curtailed for this trip as it has been basically meat or nothing. But if I am going to fall off the wagon, I am going to do it in style. In Nairobi I went to a work dinner at the famous Carnivore restaurant. Back in the day, it used to serve all sorts of weird game meats (gazelle, Cape buffalo, zebra – you can imagine what a country that serves springbok as an airplane meal could come up with when trying). But, alas for the flesh eater and fortunately for the endangered species, this practice has been outlawed in Kenya. I had to settle for crocodile (nice but a little boney), ostrich meatballs (heavenly – those big dumb birds were made for the ground meat culinary genre), and the internal organs of several less exotic species (livers, gizzards, etc.) All of this left me feeling more than a little nauseous, but that was nothing a few Tuskers couldn’t fix.

Unibomber in 14A: So in addition to my work schedule, I have been taking a class one day a week at UMD on topics in advanced sampling. (Tell me that is a sexy way to pass one’s limited spare time.) As a result, I end up doing my homework problem sets whenever I get a chance. In this case, it was on the 7:30 pm flight from Dar to Nairobi. It had been a really long day and I was in a foul mood, so I just hunkered down in the corner with a handful of airplane mini-beers – scrawling sigmas and deltas on my yellow legal pad and trying to make this &%*$ing proof come out right. About 45 minutes in – as I ordered my third shot glass of Heinkein, I noticed the person sitting at the end of the aisle was staring at me like my panties were stuffed with C4. The poor kid couldn’t have been more than 16 and my drinking and growling at the page with a mechanical pencil stuck in my hair was stranger than anything he had seen on safari that week. I tried to smile at him but I must have looked a little manic because he just leaned away. Oh well. Making friends wherever I go.

Newspaper Headline: The media in Africa is quite vibrant and I like reading the local papers. My favorite headline of the week: "80 passengers hurt when 36 seater bus veers off road..."

18 Hours in Addis Ababa

2010-02-19T13:27:00.000-05:00

So this isn’t really a blog entry. It is just a little teaser of an entry because I have been in the United States for almost two straight months. And I don’t blog about the US. You all (well most of you anyway) live there and don’t need me to point out life’s little absurdities. Not that I wasn’t tempted during those long 10 days where I was snowed in my apartment in Washington, drinking High Life and watching the Shining, watching my food stocks diminish to the point where I was debating between eating my roommate’s greasy frozen dinners or just eating my roommate…

But regardless I’ve been sprung. I am writing this post 30,000 feet above the bleakness of northern Kenya, on my way to Dar es Salaam. I was so excited to get back on the road again that I decided not to squander even my 15 hour layover in Addis. Usually with these things I just go to the hotel, order room service, fire up the BBC and wait to go back to the airport, but not this time! I was going to sample Ethiopia! Unfortunately in my zest for life I forgot one of my cardinal rules. Just as in college it was “never follow a hippie to a second location,” in my professional life it is “never ask the concierge to recommend a local restaurant.” I ended up at a pseudo-traditional tented eatery, complete with live (and loud) Ethiopian band, and 50 very drunk American tourists. Fortunately the food itself was epic, and the St. George’s was moderately cold, so all in all I was happy with my foray.

But it didn’t end there! I woke up this morning at 4 am. By 7 am, I was dressed, showered, packed, had answered my e-mail, sent off a powerpoint, downloaded two others, and was itching to do something… So I asked the hotel taxi driver to take me on a quick tour of town before he dropped me back at the airport. There really isn’t much going on a 7 am anywhere in the world, but he gave it his all. We went by a number of interesting closed churches and museums, drove through empty historic squares and past quiet monuments, and through what would be the bustling downtown market had anything been open. The only thing that I did get out and see was the Holy Trinity Cathedral – burial place of Haille Selaisse – former emperor of Ethiopia.

The cathedral was open for morning prayers - which meant I basically had to slip the bishop a couple of bucks to walk around. But, despite the urging of the guide that I should please use my camera – the morning worshipers *like* getting their picture taken mid prayer, I couldn’t shake a weird voyeuristic feeling, so I took lots of pictures of stained glass and wood carvings, and only slipped in a couple of shots when I thought I was being unobtrusive. Then we did a quick uncomfortable swing past the altar and tombs before I insisted that we walk around outside and look at the statues.

In any case, I am landing and heading off to what I am sure will be five fun filled days of work in Tanzania, then on to teach a three day course in Kenya. I will try to do something interesting, but it might be until I get to Malawi that I have another post for you.

The Great Goan Transit Debacle

2009-12-22T21:31:00.004-05:00

So I just got back from a 4 day conference in town of Goa in southern India. The conference had all the things you would expect from a conference: buffet meals, beach front hotel, power point presentations… Not really the stuff of great blog postings. Even the photos shown here are just a couple shots of the hotel grounds taken before dinner one night.

I could talk a little bit about the country itself, as this is my third journey there, but I am reminded of that “if you have nothing nice to say…” thing. It is not that I had problems with individual people – on the whole I find Indians to be assholes at the same rate as the rest of the population (roughly 10 percent – double if you are in an airport). It is as if the very essence of the country conspires to make my time there as difficult as possible in some kind of karmic retribution for an unspeakable sin. Seriously, I have been in 74 countries now (just tacked another one on yesterday but we will come to that). In Mauritania, I wore a burqa and children still threw rocks at me. In Congo, I lay in a delirious sweat pool with malaria while listening to soldiers firing their AK47s. I got robbed in East Timor and had a gun held to my head in Nicaragua. India still ranks dead last as 74 out of 74. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that I reflected on this as I watched a mechanic try to liberate my luggage from the overhead compartment using a screwdriver after my 10 hours in the Mumbai airport with missed connections and delayed flights. All in my first 11 hours in the country.

Now, in between my complaining about flights, I will admit that getting up at dawn to jog barefoot on the Goan white sand beach before jumping into the Indian Ocean does have a certain amount of charm. That, however, is all I am willing to concede.

But I survived. On Tuesday afternoon I boarded my flight to Kuwait to make the connection to Washington and back to the US for Christmas. Alas, United Airlines had other plans. Or no plans. In response to the blizzard, it posted a photocopied sign at its Kuwait City counter saying the flight had been canceled come back tomorrow. And sent its entire staff home. (I know this because I found my way into the personnel section to bang on their locked office door.) So my colleague and I (who has a similar level of tolerance for bullshit – actually once almost getting arrested for her response to a security guard in the Qatar airport’s suggestion the she was fixing her hair too erotically in the transit lounge) found ourselves in an increasing mass of Blackwater type guys heading home for Christmas (there were about 4 women on this flight), facing down a clearly nervous airport security guard. At one point a slightly cross eyed redneck loudly suggested the problem was that United didn’t have any staff on the ground in Kuwait – relying completely on local hired help. To which I responded, perhaps a little louder than I meant to – that I *hated* contractors. (At least we got a good laugh out of it.) Soon after my colleague and I gave up and went to the Crowne Plaza – deciding to let the World Bank corporate travel department fight it out with United Airlines as to who would be responsible for the bill.

And so I am home again. On Thursday evening, but I eventually made it. And want to wish everyone a happy holiday and the best for the new year.*

*The above does not apply to the management or shareholders in United Airlines, which despite my ever dwindling standards for customer service, seems unfailingly to surprise me with new levels of incompetence.

Unicorn on the River

2009-11-11T15:19:00.003-05:00

So despite the fact that the great Dhaka metropolitan area has the rough equivalent population of Scandinavia, the vast majority of the Bangladeshi population live in small villages across the vast delta of the Ganges. (This is the largest delta in the world- trust me, I have gotten it wrong in Trivia Pursuit before.)

It seemed only fair that I should get a rural river experience to compliment the city tour. Fortunately the friend of a friend who, along with his family, was kind enough to adopt me during my stay in Dhaka, was game to take the unicorn out and show her the river. We drove about two hours outside the city, or about one hour outside the endless urban sprawl. (Though once you do finally get past the sprawl, it becomes 100 percent rice paddy rather quick.) We drove to a town (whose name I forget but won’t be able to pronounce in a million years anyway) and rented a speed boat to take us across the river to a more rural area. (The starting point already seemed pretty rural to me but what do unicorns know?)

On the way across we stopped on an uninhabited island roughly the size of the neighborhood I grew up in. It seemed a little odd that in a country where people literally live in baskets in the market that there would be such a big island with nothing on it but a handful of cows and some scrub vegetation. The answer was that up until the most recent monsoon, the island didn’t exist. The seasonal rains have a way of reclaiming and redistributing land as the Fates see fit. (There is actually apparently a law on the books that if your land is washed away by the river, you will be able to reclaim it in roughly 15 years when it finishes materializing on the opposite bank.)

The river trip itself was interesting as well – even beyond the fact that I just like going fast in motorboats. All sorts of shit was going on on the river. (That statement can be taken literally as well I am afraid.) People fishing, people bathing, people fetching water, little rusting boats going one way, big rusting boats going the other way… I tried to take some pictures but focus is a little difficult when you are slamming across the various wakes of the aforementioned watercraft. I am posting the best of the blur.

On the other side of the river, we took a pleasant little rickshaw ride through the corrugated tin houses, the irrigated rice paddies, the NGO schools, the narrow canals… All in all a quite enjoyable day. The villagers were a-buzz about the white Muslim lady touring around town with her Bangladeshi husband (a little head scarf goes a long way apparently). Which came in quite handy when my “husband” fainted rather dramatically from dehydration at what turned out to be the conclusion of our outing. Everyone was very concerned about my potential impending widowhood as they directed me to a place where I could get juice to raise blood sugar and a rickshaw to take us back to the boat. One green coconut and a mango juice box later, we were back in business. Crisis averted, phony marriage and day trip saved.

Then it was back on the boat and back in the car and back to the city and back to work. Things have been a little nutty at work this week as I am heading (finally) back to DC soon, but I did find time to learn how to fit three full sized adults in a rickshaw, where to buy cheap local pearls, and the ABCs of South Asia vegetarian street food. All valuable skills I assure you.

Unicorn in Dhaka

2009-11-07T09:45:00.008-05:00

It is very rare that I look down at my plane ticket before getting on a flight and think “man, this is going to suck.” But as I stood on the escalator in Dubai, looking down at the teeming mass below me jockeying for a place on line to get on 2 am flight to Bangladesh, that is exactly what I was thinking. I had just wrapped up a week in Tanzania to cap the two in Uganda and was ready to just go home and watch the Yankees. Bangladesh is an impoverished country of just over 55,000 square miles and a population of 150 million people, the highest population density in the world. (To put that in perspective, it is akin to the entire population of the US east of the Mississippi River moving to Illinois.) Almost completely surrounded by India, the nearest major metropolis is Calcutta. India has never been one of my favorites, and the idea that this was condensed crowded poorer version of India was unappealing. And alcohol is illegal.

But I got on the plane anyway and five hours later I was standing bleary eyed in my hotel room, watching through the window as the English Under 19 National Cricket team ran amok in the crystal blue swimming pool. While immediately behind the 10 foot wall, naked children played in a stagnant pool of green sludge. Fabulous.

So me and my little black rain cloud took a shower and went out in search of some culturally appropriate clothing and more reasons to hate on Bangladesh. As I ventured out of the hotel gates, the first thing that I noticed was how traditional this place was. Most men wear lungi skirts and the women saris or baggy trouser-tunics combos with scarves. Full beards and skull caps appear frequently. Even downtown there were thousands of cycle-rickshaws and men carrying huge baskets of produce on their heads. And of course the requisite odd loose piece of livestock in a traffic circle.

The second thing I noticed is that I blend like a unicorn. Bangladesh’s visitor promotion slogan since independence has been “come before the tourists get here.” Safe to say that they don’t need a new one yet. I was the only whitey anywhere. And it is perfectly socially acceptable to cease all activity as gawk like I was a large white horse with a golden horn protruding from my forehead. Just keeps getting better. I got in an auto-rickshaw and promptly got taken to the wrong location and overcharged. Then found another, took it to the right location and was overcharged. Eventually I found the clothing store where I discovered that size XXL was still too tight across my shoulders. Then it took forever to find another rickshaw to take me back to the hotel.

I was not good company when I finally found one. And I was less than amused by the fact that my driver was overjoyed to have a unicorn in the back seat. He started off toward the hotel but halfway there takes a detour. He clearly wants to show me something. I am too hot and dirty to argue at this point, so I just slump lower and wait for it to be over. He takes me to the train tracks as the afternoon train rumbles by, fiercely overcrowded and with children sitting outside on the roof. He points excitedly and yells “Slumdog Millionaire!” Aww. He was so happy to show me that. I even sort of smiled. How can you hate a country like that? And for redeeming his 150 million countrymen, he was rewarded with what was likely the largest tip in the history of Bengali auto-rickshaws.

The next day was Sunday, the start of the work week here. It was also the day I met Liton. Liton is my driver – unenviably tasked with shuttling me back and forth between the hotel, Bank office and bureau of statistics. Officially this mostly involves sitting in dead-stop traffic while leaning on the horn and yelling at the rickshaw divers. But unofficially it involves keeping me out of trouble. And therein lies the rub.

Liton has spent lots of time locking me in the car this week. On Sunday, he dropped me after work at the home of a friend of a friend with whom I would be having dinner. But he kept me locked in the car until the friend came out and personally escorted me. Repeat performance on Thursday at the same place. On Monday I ducked out of work a little early to go shopping so that I would have something to wear out to the villages and Wednesday and Thursday. Shahbag market had been recommended as being near the university and having slightly hipper clothes. But it is a sprawling four story enclosed behemoth of tiny boutiques, leftist bookstores and tea rooms conducive to plotting a revolution. Liton drove up, took one look inside at the fluorescent lighting and milling crowds (and long rows of clothing racks) and promptly put the car back into gear. “No Madame, no clothes here. We go.” I had to all but pull the emergency break to get him to let me out.

And so it went up until yesterday. On Friday I met up with a fellow unicorn also working here, and we set off to see the best sights that Dhaka has to offer. This included the Revolutionary War Museum – a poignant but very graphic look at the struggle for independence first from Britain and then from Pakistan, the university – with uncongested green spaces and fancy architecture – and finally to Old Dhaka – the historic narrow-alleyed part of the city along the Ganges River. Liton brought us to the Sadarghat ferry terminal, which sits at the end of the bazaar on one of the only streets navigable by car. We thanked him and told him that we would be back in a few hours – we were going to explore on foot and by rickshaw. And Liton had a coronary. No. Not happening. Too many Bangladeshis. Too many thieves. Not a place for foreign women. No. He just flatly refused, driving us instead to a commercial area several blocks north before finally unlocking the doors. Leaving us to walk back down to Sadarghat.

(Contrary to Liton’s hysteria, I feel very safe here. I get worried when I am someplace deserted – certainly not a problem here. The equivalent population of Delaware is within earshot at all times. I could fend off an unarmed attacker for long enough for them to raise a militia.)

But back to my walking tour. And, man, if I thought I stood out like a unicorn in New Dhaka, this was a whole different cricket game. Even hiding under our head scarves, people froze and gaped. If we stopped anywhere, chunks of traffic would break off and form concentric circles of gawkers. Occasionally they would take pictures with their cell phones or yell “what country?” But mostly it was a silent wall of eyes, just tracking us like the paintings in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Odd I have to say.

In any case, we hit the sights. Visited the Armenian Church (they were here as a trading class under the British, peaking in the 1850s and fading out as things got nationalized after independence – there is currently only one very old man left), Hindu Street (which was bumpin’ on a Friday when everything else was closed for prayers), Ahsan Manzil (the Pink Palace – which certainly was Pepto-Bismol pink) plus a wide assortment of mosques, markets and bazaars. And a bunch of really narrow streets.

We decided to cap off the day by hiring some guy to row us around the river, the heart and life-blood of old Dhaka, and watch the sunset. This didn’t go quite according to plan. First, as there are no tourists, there are no touts. And we don’t speak Bangla. So we had to loiter around the ferry terminal until someone basically guessed what we might want. Which touched off a fist fight as they figured out we were going to pay an obscene sum of money (little less than $5) to just be rowed around for an hour. Eventually we were put into a low riding wooden boat of decidedly questionable sea-worthiness and shoved off into the Ganges. As there isn’t much in the way of sites on the river – it is more just soaking up the general atmosphere of the place – our river tour consisted of us being rowed around to the rower’s friends’ boats so that they could take pictures of us with their cell phones. But I got some okay pictures of them so I can’t complain.

And in general I can’t complain. Before I came I psyched myself up by thinking that I was getting sent to hell in exchange for the Yankees impending World Series win – a deal that I would have readily made should the devil have shown up in Tanzania with the necessary paperwork. (I followed game 6 from a rural village via text message sent by the only other Western Hemispherian in the World Bank office – a Canadian Yankee fan. When they won, I inadvertently taught a gaggle of child gawkers the happy dance.) But it turned out to be a lot like India but without the hassles. Pleasantly surprised I must say.

Requisite 100th Posting

2009-10-24T03:28:00.003-04:00

Well shit Himelein. Here are you, sitting at the airport in Uganda, after two weeks here and I don’t have anything of interest for a blog post. Usually, you can just phone these in, take a couple cute pictures of kids, re-tell an essentially dull story using fun and creative story telling language. But you don’t even have that this time.

I had this realization yesterday afternoon. I was working in the WB office when we basically had a communications meltdown. No internet at the office, sporadic power at the hotel… which basically caused me to have a meltdown. So I decided instead of throwing my laptop or the local IT consultant out of a window, I would write a blog post. – blink – blink – goes the cursor. Nothing to say. What could I use… Well, there is my 30th birthday that I celebrated two weeks ago with one of my buddies visiting from Nairobi, but there might be children that read this. Part of me things that it might be a useful life lesson for them to know that no matter how many times your teachers tell you that smart kids become doctors or lawyers that it is possible to structure your life in a way such that, at 30, you can be screwing around as much as I am as still be considered a success. The rest of me doesn’t want them to know how much alcohol one can consume in one evening and live. So scratch that. Oh wait! I could use that bit about the field visit I did to the district at the headwaters of the Nile where I got that beautiful hotel room on the lake only to discover that a Joba-like cloud of lake gnats descended on every lit surface as soon as the sun set – leaving me to spend the evening hiding under a blanket under the mosquito net reading by the light on my cell phone… Huh, that is only a sentence long…

You see the quandary I was in yesterday afternoon. So I busted out the “what to do in Kampala” brochure that was slowly mildewing to dust on the bulletin board of the Visiting Mission Room at the Bank. Done it… done it… done it… done it… Oh wait, here is one: the Baha’i Temple. It is one of only 8 in the world (one on each continent) and the only one in Africa. It is a nine sided building (one for each of the major religions of the world) on a hill outside the city with extensive gardens. Less than 20 minutes on a motorbike. Perfect. I will run up there, take a look at the view, snap a quick shot of the building, and bust it back down to hit the gym in time to see the Phillies-Dodgers replay at 5 pm.

So I choose a bike and driver from the mass of them hanging outside the hotel. I had had a rough trip on the way home the day before (with a burned out clutch (?) almost spilling me and my takeout off the back and into the middle of Buganda Avenue). The problem with picking a good looking bike is that it came with a good looking young man to drive it – and it is a tried and true fact that good looking young men with nice bikes drive *way* too fast. And a-way we go.
It becomes very apparent very quickly that this kid knows where the temple is from seeing it in the distance, not how to navigate Kampala’s twisting hills to actually get there. He sets off in a straight line towards it – cutting across main highways, through narrow neighborhood back alleys, and, at one point, what I am pretty sure was someone’s courtyard. Finally, we could see the road to the temple but there was a deep open drainage ditch between us and the four lane highway that we needed to cut across to get to it. No no no NO! Yes. Across we go. I had to grab this poor guy’s waist to avoid getting spilled. But we lived and made it to the temple.
And, as promised, it was nice. I don’t know if I would hire a Baha’i accountant (really, you count 8 continents huh?) but they do a nice house of worship. And the basic tenants of their faith seem pretty logical. Men and women are equal, allowing extreme poverty is a sin, be nice to each other, and the way to salvation is through scientific study and personal reflection. (Of course we relegate it to crazy fringe as we much prefer something with a good old testament stoning now and then…) Then I hopped back on the moto to get back to the hotel – realizing quickly that the only thing more frightening than the trip up was going to be the trip down as we had run out of gas and had to coast to the bottom and back across the highway to get to a gas station.

So there you go. The things I have to do for you people. And I hope you enjoy the requisite temple picture and this, the 100th blog posting.

Big Fish

2009-09-18T17:33:00.013-04:00

So this is over a week late. I have been back in the US since Sunday. I have been sick and was going to skip this last post, but then I felt a little obligated to post a few more pictures and let you know how the vacation all turned out. Mozambique really is a beautiful country. I spent a week there kickin’ it Peace Corps style, making my way up the coast in a chapa (aka taxi brousse). Though we didn’t actually break my standing record of 25 adults, 5 children and assorted animals slammed into the back of a minivan (set going to LaTodin during the Burkina 2003 hot season), we came damned close. And this trip was seven hours long. At some point the woman next to me had enough of the screaming infant on her lap (ownership of which I was never actually able to determine) and began passing him around the bus. I set a hard act to follow by shutting him up for 10 entire minutes (with the help of a touch screen iPod) before sending him on down the line. On a separate chapa trip (I took several on my journey up the coast), the driver drove directly into a telephone pole. Fortunately he was going fairly slowly and the pole had some give to it. His defense? “Since when did they get electricity out here?”
This all had such a profound effect of bringing me back to my Peace Corps days, that after I got off the chapa, and before I really knew what was going on, I had gone into the market and bought a sachet of tomatoes and a pagne.* I had to spend a good two days staring out at the turquoise water before I was completely myself again.

And, as per usual when I get close to said turquoise water, the first thing I want to do is get under it. Usually I spare you the details of my diving conquests but there was one day of diving that was really rockstar. First of all, because of the nature of the heavy current in the area, diving was faux-Navy Seal: fighting the heavy waves to launch the zodiac from the beach, riding out bouncing over the surf, negative entry for the dives… so you already feel like kind of a bad ass. On the way out, as expected, there were the usual dolphins a-jumpin’ which at this point you almost barely take notice of. Particularly as you are trying to concentrate on keeping your fillings from popping out as the zodiac with more horsepower than your car slams across the waves. At some point though, I looked up and thought, man, that is a really ugly dolphin that just did that flip. That was also a really big dolphin. Ah. That’s a humpback whale. Between us and the dive site was the annual migration. Humpbacks humpbacks everywhere. And while it was cool to see them jumping and fin slapping while on the boat, the best part of it was that you could hear the whale-song while you were diving. At one point one of the whales got curious about the buoy line (carried by the dive guide to mark our progress to the boat on the surface). He swam directly over top of us. Water amplifies sound waves so even a small outboard engine passing 100 feet above can sound like it is right on top of you. In this case the whale song was like a freight train.

But the humpbacks aren’t the reason that people come diving on the Mozambiquean coast. People dive here because of the giant mantas. Which are incredible. The visibility was poor – you could only see maybe 15 or 20 feet in front of you. Then all of a sudden these massive things swoop out of the murk right on top of you. It is a little disconcerting the first time they do it, but then really really cool. I tried to take a couple pictures, but it is really hard to do them justice. They can be up to 25 feet across. That’s bigger than my first apartment.

So after the dive, we are all on the boat, contentedly slamming back across the waves. Suddenly the captain stops and yells something excitedly in Portuguese. Boat stops, mad scramble to don snorkel mask and fins, everyone into the water. Whale sharks. I have been chasing these bastards all over the world. It has always been the wrong time/day/season. And here it was. The world’s largest fish. And it was a big fish. Even in a day filled with humpbacks and giant mantas, this puppy was big. And it swam close enough next to me that I could have reached out and touched it. Cherry on the hot fudge sundae.

The rest of the week was spent sitting on the beach, drinking Mozambiquan beer, taking sailing trips out to tropical paradises (note the use of the plural), eating seafood (the phrase “does anyone want my last lobster tail I’m stuffed” actually came out of my mouth at a meal where the bill was less than a salad at a standard downtown DC lunch restaurant), taking pictures of the local dhows (note the sails are made out of UNICEF refugee tents) and just generally being a laze-about. Then it was back to Maputo for a week of work and karmic retribution for having such a great vacation. With all my travels around the country on the local transport, I managed to get the flu. And I discovered that no one really even cares about whether it was swine flu or not. Suck it up and get back to work. So I did and now I am.

*pagna is the colorful cloth worn as skirts by West African women and Peace Corps volunteers of all genders

Reed Dance Festival

2009-08-31T13:58:00.007-04:00

Greetings from Mozambique, a country with a AK47 on its flag and a hostel inexplicably full of sharpay dogs (seriously, there must be 8 or 9 of them wandering about). I just arrived here this afternoon after a really cool weekend in the Kingdom of Swaziland (of all places).

Swazi is a tiny little country of about a million people sandwiched in between South Africa and Mozambique. It is very similar to South Africa (at least in that it was a former British colony) but a little more prosperous and way more chilled out. (It was the place to go to get up to shenanigans during apartheid era South Africa.)

I was there to see the annual Reed Dance Festival, at which thousand of Swazi girls pledge their allegiance to the queen by going out and cutting a bunch of reeds, then dancing, parading and just generally carrying on with said bunch of reeds. I will be honest with you and tell you that I don’t really understand exactly all the symbolism of the things going on, but it was an incredible thing just to be witness to. The girls had these exotic costumes of varying degrees of traditionalness (I am guessing the Ray Bans were a relatively recent addition), and were just so happy. And in general no one really made a big deal about the fact that there were whities floating around with cameras. We just sat on a rock in the shade and watch the girls go by… People didn’t even seem to be that interested in hustling us, they honestly just wanted to know what country we were from and if we were enjoying their festival. And the President of Zambia was hanging out in the crowd sans entourage. Can’t argue with that kind of company.

Other than the Reed Dancing, Swaziland was a blur of hiking, shopping, drinking and a brief ill-fated stop in a Christian revivalist ceremony (not much going on in Mbabane on a Sunday afternoon). Sorry this is a little short but I think the pictures are much cooler than anything I might actually have to say on the subject.

Kruger National Park

2009-08-27T09:39:00.008-04:00

So, after complaining for months about how I am constantly back and forth across to Africa and I never get any time off and how much of a pain in the ass it is to always be away, I finally get a vacation. At which time I, logically, promptly board a plane and voluntarily fly 15 straight hours to Africa.

In any case, I am sitting in an internet café in Nelspruit, South Africa, getting myself together after an incredible safari in Kruger National Park. I arrived in South Africa on Sunday morning, after a brutally long flight made more brutal by having to fly around that stupid hurricane. I then spent nearly 24 hours in Johannesburg without being the victim of a violent crime. (Here’s to beating the odds!) I actually even enjoyed myself, walking down to the neighborhood flee market in the suburb where I was staying to pick up some warmer clothing (it is bloody *cold* here) and a set of Mobuto sunglasses (when in Rome…) and visiting the apartheid museum. The museum was incredibly interesting in that it managed to, tastefully, commemorate hundreds of years of repression and brutality without demonizing the white minority. Though in the same way that it seems difficult to imagine that the American civil rights movement took place during my parent’s lifetime, it is nigh on impossible to believe that apartheid took place during my own. I can still remember class being cancelled in fifth grade so that we could all watch the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.Next morning, bright and early (as before sunrise), I was up and out to head east to the national park (though slightly delayed by the fact that the idiot stoners running my hostel got too f’ed up the night before to remember to unlock the gate for me - leaving me to climb the 10 foot fence in order to get out - which was fortunately the only one in all of Jo’burg not topped with concertina wire. On the way we (that merry band of characters that would be spending every walking hour together for the next three days) broke up the journey by stopping at some of the natural wonders along the way. I remember being fairly impressed with them at the time, but those memories have been completely obliterated by the wonders of the safari that followed, so I will drop the obligatory picture and move on.And we stopped to pick up booze - in the form of a five liter box of cheap but tooth-achingly sweet “dry” South African red, most notable for the warning on the side of the box: “Don’t drink and walk on the road, you may be killed.” (Here’s to knowing your demographic.)Then it was safari time. Our guide was a Afrikaner South Africa who was, like all the world’s safari guides, a crazy bastard. He took personal exception to the fact that I was a vegetarian. (He was the type of guy that didn’t eat any kind of vegetable - ever.) First of all, it was as unnatural as if I proposed sexual congress with a springbok (perhaps even more so). Second of all, I was the only one so cooking a completely separate meal for one person was a total pain in the ass. Therefore he decided to make it his personal mission to badger, bargain and straight up just starve me out until I agreed to eat meat. It actually didn’t take that long. He made a deal with me that if he could find the Big 5 (lion, buffalo, rhino, elephant and leopard) before lunch, that I would eat a ham sandwich. I agreed because, really, I have been on quite a few safaris at this point and the chances of this actually happening were nearly statistically impossible. Yeah. I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch - albeit a late lunch.
I will spare you the blow-by-blow of the safari itself, but over two days, notable sightings include: a close encounter with a lioness, multiple leopard sightings including one in a tree with a freshly killed impala, a tiny baby elephant that I went a little crazy taking pictures of, a buffalo during the night game drive, plus the usual assortment of hippos, giraffes, zebras, rhinos, baboons, warthogs, crocodiles, all things hoofed and birds that I could give a damn about. (I have attached a sizable lot of pictures for you to catch the highlights if so interested.It was actually, though, we weren’t even on a game drive for the most memorable moment. We were grilling steaks (as the guides vegetarian meal plan for the evening was “steak or starve” - I had squash for dinner), hanging out by the fire, drinking, when this massive hyena walked by the fence maybe 10 feet behind us. He was attracted by the smell of the grilling meat and came by a few times to see if he could get a taste, fortunately not coming to the conclusion that he could easily hop the 8 foot chain link fence. Which was good because it was massive. I can’t even compare it to the size of a large dog. Think more along the lines of small pony. And, hands down, the world’s ugliest creature.
Other than that, it was all tents, campfire, pre-sunrise risings, sweet wine, and swapping tales, which were probably most accurately summed up by the Irish kid as “no need of the truth getting in the way of a good story.” (He had the hyena nine foot tale and breathing sulfur fire by the 10 pm telling.) Now I am spending the night at another hostel run by stoners (though these seem older and more responsible - this is what happens when you live in an African country where things *grow*) and tomorrow, off to Kingdom of Swaziland.

Going Bananas

2009-07-22T15:01:00.006-04:00

So tomorrow is my last full day on the road. After almost two months and 28000+ frequently flyer miles, I am headed home - provided that I make the three connections between Uganda and Washington and manage not to get quarantined in Europe. I have to say, it’s about time.

I don’t have much to report, but I wanted to post a couple of photos from the field work I did this week, so I am going to ramble on for a few paragraphs anyway. I went with the teams out to Bushenyi in western Uganda, near the Rwandan and Congolese borders. It is a beautiful part of both Uganda (and Africa in general), where dawn breaks over mist shrouded banana plantations stretching across the hills. That’s right – miles and miles of banana plantations. They sure do like bananas out in Bushenyi. For example, a typical culinary day in the life of my field work goes something like this:

Breakfast – eggs, toast and bananas
Mid morning snack – banana
Lunch – two bananas
Dinner – Steamed mashed bananas with beans and peanut sauce

That last one is not anywhere near as gross as it sounds, but after a few days, you really don’t look forward to meal times much anymore.

The other remarkable thing about this area is how unbelievably poor parts of it are. Not in the sense of the West African nothing-grows-and-then-we-starve model, but government service delivery is horrific. Because of the rain and the hills, the roads are total crap, and nothing and no one gets to these areas. The primary school was mostly thatch (swarmed over by hundreds of children in truly tragic hot pink uniforms) and the health clinic was the most depressing I have ever seen. It was a two room cement box, staffed by one (a nurse’s assistant that didn’t look old enough to shave), no electricity, no water (it was hauled up from a stream 3 miles downhill), no beds, almost no drugs, just nothing. There are so few supplies, women who give birth are required to bring their own cotton gauze and razor blades. And in a country where more than 5 percent of the adult population is HIV+ (as opposed to 0.006 percent in the US), the clinic has been out of gloves for over six months.

Escape to Chimp Island

2009-07-13T08:45:00.012-04:00

So I didn’t exactly make it home to the United States last week. I even had plane tickets, and then at the last minute the boss sends me to Uganda. For three weeks. And now here I am, hanging out in Kampala, which is okay because I kinda like Kampala. I was an intern here and returned to do research for my master’s thesis, so I know the city a little. It is very different from laid-back coastal Dar es Salaam. Kampala is decidedly Central Africa, with its accompanying leafy hills, Congolese music, beans and bananas, and the sheer crush of humanity. I took a couple of pictures around the main bus station on a Friday afternoon. You can sort of tell how crowded it is, but it doesn’t do it true justice because it is impossible to stop and breathe, much less snap a photo, in the middle of it.

Kampala had changed a little since I was last here in 2007. There are more cars, cell server providers, laptop computers, ATMs and people. They have renamed all commercial establishments after the new American president. And the storks are gone.

I always liked the storks. They are maribu storks, over five feet tall and hideously ugly. They are born a mangy lot, but as a result of some unfathomable genetic compulsion, they pull out the feathers on their heads and necks. This doesn’t do much for them aesthetically. They used to everywhere in the capital, as ubiquitous as pigeons, but in the lead up to the Commonwealth meetings with Kampala hosted in last 2007, the government poisoned them all. Now there are only small packs of them remaining, which strut around with a slightly disconcerting post-apocalyptic menace about them. I take it as a great opportunity to practice with the new zoom lens.

I will spare you the details of the day-to-day work. I basically fill the days with trainings and meetings and revisions, punctuated with terror inducing rides sitting sidesaddle on the back of a motorbike taxi in a skirt and heels with my computer balanced on my lap. And eating beans and bananas. The staple starch here is mashed green bananas, which are usually served with some protein sauce, and a yellow banana for dessert. Since I don’t eat chicken or beef anymore, my life is filled with beans and bananas. Lots and lots of beans and bananas.

With the work load here being a little more manageable than in some places, I decided to take some time off on Saturday afternoon and Sunday to explore the city a bit. On Saturday I took in the downtown sites, including the Kasubi Tombs, where the bodies and/or jawbones of the local tribal kings are buried. And, notably, has the largest thatched structure in the world. I also saw the national museum, which included the requisite poorly taxidermed local wildlife and a fun section of Ugandan Olympic athletes. (The photos were obviously taken by media from other countries, as they showed Ugandan runners trailing far behind the Ethiopians and Kenyans, Ugandan boxers taking incredible shots to the head from Russians, etc…)

Then Sunday I decided to get out of town, birdwatch, check out some monkeys. I took a two hour local boat ride out to an island in Lake Victoria to visit the chimpanzee sanctuary. This was after having dinner with a primatologist the night before, all of whose stories ended with the phrase “and then the chimp ripped the guy’s face off.” Chimps are very aggressive creatures and apparently that is a common thing for them to do to a human. The sanctuary chimps seemed pretty mellow, clapping and carrying on to get the attention of the handlers to be thrown another orange or pumpkin. Plus they were behind a high voltage electric fence. Some of the birds were actually more aggressive – dive bombing anyone that walked too close to their nest. It made for some moments of hilarity when an unsuspecting human did it, but took on a bit more of a nature channel life-and-death struggle when a pair of three foot long monitor lizards went after the eggs. The bird’s attacks were unsuccessful, the lizards being just too big and scaly, but readers will be happy to know that they were chased off by the stampeding herd of camera toting tourists.

Crap We Buy

2009-06-29T09:14:00.005-04:00

So every once in awhile, my spoiled princess self is required to get back to my roots. Kicking and screaming, they tear me out of the posh hotel in the capital, dump me in an over-crowded 4x4, and send me out into the bush to do field visits.

This time I headed southwest of the capital into the foothills of Iringa. Before leaving, I had been assured that it was only a 3 hour drive on a good road. I reflected on that nearly 8 hours later as I scooped water out of a bucket in my hotel room to futilely try and rinse the dust out of my hair. I can’t argue that it was a spectacular drive though, passing through winding hills and sun drenched valleys, dotted with huge ancient baobob trees. (And I saw the answer the age old question pondered by every Peace Corps volunteer serving in Africa – what would happen to a baobob tree if you hit it full speed with a lorry. Answer: not all that much. You will, however, need a new lorry.)

The most fun part of the drive is the part where the road cuts through Mikumi National Park. At first you notice a not so subtle shift in the road signs, from cell phone ads, public service condom announcements, ads for “Bob’s snake sanctuary and campground” (what could go wrong!), to ones that say “WILD ANIMALS, next 50 km,” “Please do not feed the baboons,” and my favorite, a black silhouette of an elephant superimposed on a red and white exclamation mark. We drove fairly slowly for those 50 km, partly because it was fun to pretend that you were on safari instead of an interminable car ride, and partly to keep from superimposing ourselves onto an elephant. (Road accidents with the wildlife here are common.) We saw antelope, zebra, giraffe, etc, your typical safari offerings, and managed not to clip anything endangered.

The only things that we even came close to hitting were the baboons. Longtime readers know that I hate monkeys, oft describing them as raccoons that can think. I *particularly* hate baboons. They are like raccoons that can think and outweigh me by 20 pounds. And they are such insolent bastards. They dogged us the whole second half of the trip, even well past the boundaries of the national park, standing in the middle of the road, just glaring at you as you either leaned on your horn or weaved into oncoming traffic to avoid them. In all, they probably added as much time to the trip as the construction and bad roads combined. Stupid monkeys.

Of course, as these things go, I arrived just in time to discover that the field team I was meeting was delayed for a day, and so I had some time to kill. There isn’t much to recommend itself in the way of tourism in Iringa town, so I decided to visit the deaf and blind craft center and buy some crap (ah, how prophetic those thoughts turned out to be…) The visit starts out with a tour of the different workshops, which do weaving, sewing, bead making, pottery, etc, then a swing by the café for some passion juice, and then, inevitably, to the gift shop. As a general rule, I never give to beggars in the street, preferring to spend wildly at places like this. So I bought a recycled glass bead necklace, a shirt theoretically (and somewhat miraculously) sewn by a blind woman, and a couple picture frames and note cards made of the local specialty product: elephant dung paper. That’s right, here at the craft center, they collect and process elephant dung into assorted stationary products. Now all I need is a beau to send notes to, because nothing says “I love you” like sweet nothings scrawled across dry elephant shit. (Maybe this has something to do with why I am not married…)

The rest of the field visit proceeded fairly uneventfully. I checked some standard deviations, went out to the village to observe some interviews, GPS’d a few fields and called it a day. On the way home, I really got to chance to embrace my roots in a little $4 a night guesthouse, complete with complementary tire sandals for my bucket bathing convenience. And eat every meal with my hands. And spend three and half hours drinking chai on the roadside and waiting for a local bus to ride me the 9 hours back to Dar (the bus was only 90 minutes late in actuality – there is apparently a scheduled two hour delay on Sunday mornings so the road crew can dynamite out the pass – the timing of which might or might not have anything to do with the largely Muslim areas feelings about the resident Anglican mission.)

And now I am back in Dar for a few days before heading back to the United States for a couple weeks. I apologize for not having much in the way of pictures to share for this posting. Most of the shots on the camera are of irrigation techniques and intercropping examples – titillating for training purposes, not very exciting as travel photos.

In Love with Lombok

2009-06-16T00:55:00.003-04:00

Unless you are actually Indiana Jones (and don’t think I don’t try), it is tough to have much drama on business trip. They are all pretty much the same, high heels and powerpoints. Just last week I was forced to spend five days discussing quantitative research methodologies – which was as dry as it sounds until you looked out the window and remember that you are in Lombok, this tropical paradise just east of Bali in Indonesia.

I will spare you the details of my actual presentation (there were greek symbols involved), and instead post pictures of my scuba diving adventures. I was able to escape for a day and a half – two day dives and a night dive. In general the diving was fairly standard, clownfish, bomb-headed parrot fish, a white tip reef shark or two, phosphoresce at night… but then there were the turtles. So many sea turtles. It got to the point where you just stopped counting them and started just hanging out with them. And what you don’t get from watching Finding Nemo is how big some of these bad boys are. The average full grown turtle size is 3-4 feet long and they routinely weigh more than I do. And if you are hovering between them and where they need to be, it is advised that you move on along. I posted a couple of what I consider to be the most photogenic of my new friends.

I have subsequently left Indonesia and flown to Tanzania, stopping just long enough to see the boys in Singapore (and gorge myself on chili crab) and lose my luggage in South Africa. But eventually me and all my various bits have found ourselves to Dar es Salaam for a couple weeks. I am staring down some long hours in the office, but I will see what I can do about having at least one Indiana Jones adventure for you.

Zanzibari Rains

2009-04-26T08:47:00.007-04:00

So I am back in Dar es Salaam to finish up a few last things before I head back to Washington. I spent the last five days with one of the field teams off the coast of mainland Tanzania on the island of Zanzibar. It is an interesting place. Having been a separate state until the 1960s, it leaned a little too far to the left and was consolidated into the much larger mainland Tanganyika to keep it from becoming the Cuba of the Indian Ocean. (Though in what must have seemed like more than fair compensation in the minds of the colonial powers, the archipelago was able to lay claim to half of the letters in the name of the future country, despite having less than 5 percent of the population.) Once known for exporting spices and people, it is now known for exporting spices and importing people – with tourism being the main source of hard currency. All this taken together with the tropical setting results in a drink which is one part decaying sultanate and colonial majesty, one part fundamentalist Islam, and one part delicious sea food, blended and served in a coconut.

Though most of my time there was taken up with the rather mundane crap of earning my living, I did decide that I was going to take the weekend off. I had all sorts of *fun* non-work activities planned, diving, shopping, sightseeing, lobster on the beach… When Saturday morning arrived, I threw back the mosquito net and opened the shutters to my balcony, and of course it is pissing down rain. Bloody hell. Not to be dissuaded from my pre-planned good time, I put on my bathing suit and slogged over to the dive shop. Barack, my Kenyan dive guide and I, loaded the gear onto a wooden boat with a somewhat sickly sounding Yamaha outboard and started across the white-capped channel. Even in my full wetsuit, it was a cold trip. But once we were underwater it was fine. The lack of direct sunlight overhead and the murk because of the currents made it difficult to see. Coming upon each new corral head or sunken boat was like making a fantastic discovery. Or so I told myself because god damn it I was having *fun* on my day off. The second dive followed one of the shortest surface intervals in recorded history because it was just disgusting shivering in the rain as the boat tossed on the waves. I should have appeciated it though. When we came up from the second dive, we discovered that the wind and rain had really kicked up. The boat captain was soaked and annoyed as hell that we had spent another hour underwater. We climbed in the boat and headed back across the ocean channel. What had been chop and whitecaps in the morning were now full blown ocean rollers. And the direction of town was perpendicular to the wind, so the waves hit hard on the windward side, crashing spray over windward passenger (me), then rolled the boat hard to the leeward. Twice we lost the rail under the water, sending water crashing across the deck and scattering the heavy air tanks. To pass the time, Barack shouted stories over the wind about wooden boats like this one that had sunk in the last two weeks. His aggregate death toll was at 75 when we finally entered the harbor.

After a hot shower, I awaited a break in the rain to take a look around town. In a fleeting hour of intermittent drizzle, I was able to visit the National Museum, the Sultan’s Palace, and the former grounds of the slave market. (At the latter I found the largest spider web I have ever seen, pictured here. Keep in mind those babies are the size of your palm. Spiders? Why does it always have to be spiders?) Lobster on the beach was tabled for tuna at the bar.

By the time I woke up this morning the choices were pretty much build an ark or get out of Dodge. I headed to the airport to see if I could get on an earlier flight. It didn’t bode well that the water in the airport parking lot reached nearly my ankles. Everything was delayed, but I could fly standby for the first flight out. A few hours later, I found myself in the standby seat (ie the co-pilot’s chair) of a 12 seat plane, trying to make small talk with the Canadian pilot as we waited to clearance for takeoff. “So how long you been doing this?” “10 years.” “Always here?” “No I flew in the Canadian Arctic for 5 years.” “I see, sounds cold. Any special advice for flying a single engine prop across the ocean during a monsoon? (ha ha)” “Nah, I have to say it worries me though, the single engine…” “Oh.”

WHAT IS WITH THESE PEOPLE? Don’t they know it is not good for tourism to tell people that they might die doing said tourist activity? My day off is supposed to be *fun*. Being reminded of my own frail mortality is decidedly not *fun*.

Tepid Tanzania Training in Tanga

2009-04-22T12:16:00.012-04:00

Alright alright, I have been in Tanzania for almost a month and haven’t posted a blog entry. Fine, I know. I have been remiss in my duties. But, other than the noteworthy yet not particularly interesting event of my hard drive crashing, not too much going on here. (My battle weary computer had soldiered on despite receiving a near fatal blow in an overhead luggage rack on the Guate City – DC direct in March 2007, but alas, the heat, humidity and Confliker onslaught of tropical Tanzania did her in. Her hard drive finally gave out in the small town of Tanga, where she was lovingly attended to by an Iraqi émigré with radical clerical wallpaper on this cell phone – my national origin notwithstanding – but, in the end she just faded away… RIP). So you can’t blame my technologically hobbled self too much for being a little slow with the posts.

And I don’t have much in the way of good stories. I was ensconced in one of the nicest hotels in Tanzania for two weeks while I worked in the National Bureau of Statistics. Except for the occasional avalanche of unfiled telephone book sized questionnaires that stretches to the ceiling in most offices, it’s a statistics bureau. Not a whole lot super exciting going on there. Then I went up to Tanga for a training. And while Tanga got plenty of CNN play for being close enough to Mombasa, Kenya to appear on the inset map during all those Somali pirate shenanigans, not much going on *in* Tanga. The most exciting part (for lots of different players in fact) was me learning to drive on the other side and not kill the large numbers of pedestrians, donkey carts, children, bicycles, chickens, etc that share the narrow roads. This was only permitted by my colleague during moments of dire necessity.

I did spend a week doing field visits, while is always interesting. (And alls I have to say to Peace Corps Tanzania is buck up – you have palm trees!) As I spent most of the day during this time listening to people conduct interviews in Swahili (and having the general utility of a lawn gnome), I passed the time making faces at the children. And oh boy am I funny looking. I have included a few pictures of some of the better reactions…

Things are looking up for me now though. I am doing field visits in Zanzibar this week. And anywhere that involves white sand beaches, fresh fish, and the ubiquitous culinary use of coconut milk, is going to be a-okay in my book.

What Up Niger?

2009-03-15T07:02:00.014-04:00

(It’s pronounced NEE-jair.)

So, nearly four years since the last time I set foot in West Africa, I was back. Niger is just to the east of Burkina on the Sahel belt, so the climate and culture are very similar. To be honest, the whole experience was a little strange, like what I would imagine going back to the small town where you went to college would feel like. If the small town where you went to college was brutally hot, dusty and almost inconceivably poor. I have been lulled into complacency by years of working in Asia and East Africa. Things are different in the West.

Niamey is more low-key than most African capital these days, in that the country is still too poor to have enough cars to clog it with smog and traffic. Not to say that driving wasn’t adventurous. My taxi-man of choice for the week, Moussa, was constantly yelling out his window (the Nigerien equivalent of leaning on the horn) at trucks, bikes, motos, cars, pedestrians, dogs, camels, sheep, goats, donkeys, herds of cattle, etc that moved willy-nilly about the town. There were cops at most of the intersections to direct traffic, but it was the hot season, so they spent most of the day watching the chaos from underneath a shady tree.

The hotel where I stayed was the only four star hotel in all of Niger, having a swimming pool, exotic flowers, and a jazz band that played on the terrace overlooking the busy John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge. Disorientingly incongruous with the world outside.

I don’t really have much in the way of fun stories to tell. I spent most of my time in meetings. I did do some shopping in the famous silver markets, visit the Grand Mosque, and pick up few West African specials for my fellow Burkina Peace Corps volunteers (including a kilo of peanut flavored beef jerky, which made for an amusing interaction with the drug sniffing dogs back at Dulles.) But that’s about it.

The only vaguely interesting story I have was buying West African beer to bring back for my RPCV friends. Beer is a little tough to find in a Muslim country like Niger, but I have a good instinct for these sorts of things. So I go into the marquis, with Moussa waiting in the car like I am off to score an eight-ball of coke, and ask the kid behind the bar for four bottle of beer. I tell him that I need to pay for the bottles as well as I am taking them back to the States. (In West Africa, you can’t take the bottles out of the bars because they are recycled. Not in the melted and re-made we do it here. As in taken, (theoretically) washed, refilled and re-capped.) Kid thinks that is the funniest thing he has ever heard. No, serious, I need to pay for the bottles. When he finally figures out that I actually do plan on bringing these four bottles of beer to the United States of America, he gets really excited. He calls his friend over to tell him. And I recognize the language they are speaking as Morre (of course it is the Burkinabe selling beer). I look at them and say, “Eiya! Bwen taara fo? Nassara wunda Morre! Maam ya Mossi. Maam yuur la Ouedraogo Mariam. Maam yiita Yako!” (which is basically all the Morre I could speak even if you held a gun to my head, and means “Hey! What’s wrong with you? White people understand Morre! I am Mossi. My name is Mariam Ouedraogo (typical Burkinabe name). I am from Yako!”) Kid literally fell off his bar stool. Now he was convinced that I was some sort of weird mythical creature. He was still staring at me slack-jawed when I picked up my sachet of beer and jumped into Moussa’s waiting car.

Criminally Inclined Monkeys, Lazy Pelicans, and Rhino Protocol

2008-12-15T00:12:00.017-05:00

So I decided that after 12 consecutive days at the office, I needed a weekend off. And, as the only wildlife I had seen thus far in Kenya was a very non-descript mouse in my hotel room, it was time to go on safari.

I went to Nakuru National Park, about a hundred miles northeast of Nairobi towards Uganda. Nakuru used to be famous for the hundreds of thousands of flamingos that congregated there, but global warming has lowered water levels and the growth of the nearby Nakuru city into the third largest in the country, with accompanying pollution, has raised the toxicity of the lake to where flamingos were dropping dead in bunches. Perhaps clued in by this, most of the other flamingos took the hint and found other salt water lakes to hang out in.

But there were still some flamingos, and the suddenly available real estate encouraged the in-migration of large numbers of giant pelicans – which I actually liked more than the prissy little pink flamingos. But before we get to that, let me provide more anecdotal evidence as to why monkeys are the spawn of satan. I was in charge of watching the car while the guide paid our park fees and the other tourists hit the loo. As I stood in front of the open safari van door, a monkey jumped through the open driver’s window and started to pick through the luggage. “Bad Monkey! Get out of the car! Leave the nice Chilean lady’s bag alone!” Monkey just hissed at me. “Monkey, get out of the van now.” (I used the tone of voice usually reserved only for exceptionally stupid airline representatives.) Monkey hopped back and forth of the seats and hissed more. So I decided to stop playing nice. I took out my camera (and after a few snaps) swiped at him with the strap. “OUT MONKEY OUT!” The monkey, with all the attitude of an unjustly accused teenage girl, sauntered out of the van, stopped, hissed, and put a three fingered monkey scratch across the top of my ankle. Have I just been assaulted by a monkey?

As the guide came back, Monkey hopped off to work on the weather stripping of the van next to us. “Sorry sorry. Very naughty monkeys in Nakuru. They don’t respect women at all…” I very maturely flipped off the monkey as we drove out of the parking lot. Little simian bastard.

The rest of the safari continued basically uneventfully. We saw rhinos (blank and white), hippos, lion, hyena, jackal, baboons, buffalo, all things hoofed, and, of course, the birds. The aforementioned flamingos were nice, but I really felt more affinity towards the pelicans. They split time between the salty lake and the fresh water tributaries, eating the fish in the salty part, and bathing and chilling in the fresh water part. Can’t stay in one place, I like that in a bird.

But they were big and heavy. (They weigh more than 20 pounds, a significant accomplishment when you have hollow bones.) And they aren’t really great at flying. They are so awkward that they can only take off with a gust of wind for extra lift. And even then it is a bit of a challenge. Sometimes they struggle to get a few feet into the air before settling back down saying, “aw f*%# it, I wasn’t hungry anyway.” How could you not love these guys?

The only other really notable moment of the safari was the rhino battle. We found a group of white rhinos where three were happily munching grass in the middle distance, while one big one was right next to the road, sharpening his horn on a dead tree. We (and the other five vans full of tourists), happily photographed away as all the rhinos wandered over to only a few feet from our van. They put their heads together in a cute little rhino pow-wow, which the guide explained was their way of greeting each other and giving props to the alpha male. (Rhino protocol as it were.) Then two rhinos wandered away and cross the road, despite the traffic jam of safari vans. After we finished taking pictures of that, we realized that the big rhino hadn’t been sharpening his horn for shits and giggles. There was rhino arm wrestling going on. It was battle for supremacy between the generations! Unfortunately, I don’t know who won. About the same milli-second we realized what was going on, the drivers all slammed the cars into gear and we took off. Apparently the losing rhino usually takes out his frustration on the nearest smaller opponent. With his two buddies safely halfway across the savanna at this point, the next best thing is a comparatively light-weight safari van. (The guide apologized by saying that the company this year had fired a driver who had lost his van to a rhino charge.)

So I am back now in Nairobi, and after disinfecting my monkey wound, am drinking beer by the pool and watching the sun set. (Heard the weather was miserable in the Northeast. Must be awful. My shoulders are a little sunburned if it makes you feel better. See, I am suffering too.) Anyway, my Tusker is empty so I am going to sign off. Headed back to the States on Friday for awhile (seven weeks on the road, time to wash socks and underwear…) so Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, and Wicked Solstice to one and all.

Dubai

2008-12-04T01:14:00.008-05:00

Continuing on the the second leg of my Barack Obama victory lap tour, I flew from Indonesia to Kenya, overnighting in Dubai on the way. Dubai was one of those places, like Tokyo, that I had spent an ungodly amount of time in the airport, without ever actually getting out and seeing the city. This time I had a buddy from grad school to visit, so why not?

The Bank was nice enough to put me up in the Jumeirah Emeriates Towers. It is an uber posh (and uber tall) hotel famous on the Dubai skyline. (The picture of the hotel isn’t mine, I ripped it off from some stock photo website, but I think it serves the purpose.) You should have seen the look on the face of the receptionist when I rock up to a $350+ night hotel wearing busted jeans and carrying only my backpack (rest of the baggage had been checked through). The poor woman looked horrified, but I had a corporate reservation and my credit card cleared, so hey, who is she to judge?

My room was on the 31^st floor with big floor to ceiling windows. All the comforts you would expect at a 5 star hotel, plus this really weird and sinister looking overweight rubber ducky in the bathroom. It was a little strange to shower with that thing watching me with its weird sun-glassed eyes. Maybe I am just getting paranoid in my old age.

Anyway, the next day I had a few hours to kill before meeting my buddy for lunch, so I went down to old Dubai. The concierge kept trying to talk me into going to the mall, why would I bother coming all the way to Dubai and going to a museum? He was somewhat right in the fact that the old city wasn’t much exciting, but I have Gucci back home. The museum was cheesy generally a waste of time and three dirham, with two exceptions. The first was the pictures of the city taken from the air every ten years. As late as the 1940s, the whole place was made of twigs. By the 1950s, it had progressed to look like Nouakchott (at least how I remember it when I lived there in 2004 – don’t know what that says for modern-day Mauritania). Then somewhere before the 1960s picture, the whole place exploded. Now it looks like Singapore surrounded by sand dunes.

Couple of fun facts about Dubai that I didn’t know: Oil isn’t a big thing there. Less than 6 percent of their GDP is petroleum and related projects. Conversely, almost a quarter of it is real estate and construction. Which makes sense because they are building everywhere. And according to the census of 2006, less than 20 percent of the population were Emirate nationals, everyone else was an expat. Most were from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), with about 3 percent being “Western.” And it is a great place to be a chick, more than 75 percent of the population is male.

The second thing that was not a waste of time was the pearl diving exhibit. People have been diving for pearls in Dubai since sometime before recorded time. They had a cute little re-enactment video. (Though I was a little horrified that they just threw away the oysters after pulling the pearls out. Don’t do that! Fry it up with a little garlic. Throw it on some couscous. Really. You eat camel intestines, trust me, this is better.) And of course the video ended with the greedy merchant pouring his sack of pearls out onto the carpet and laughing, um, greedily.

So after the museum, I took the little local ferry boat across the creek to the souk section of town. I went to the perfume souk, and the spice souk, and the gold souk. The gold souk was a little nuts. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold and gems lining the windows of a narrow pedestrian street, with no security in sight. Nothing. I actually priced one of the less ostentatious pearl necklaces in the window. A steal at 15,000 USD. And that was comparatively so cheap looking that I actually stopped to ask what it cost. (My mother had previously asked me to buy her an 8mm black pearl for a ring that she was re-setting. This seemed like a good place to do this. I will spare you the details of me haggling with the gold marketeers, but the story ends with me in the back office of some second-floor shop, waiting for my credit card to run while the greedy merchant behind me is pouring ziplock gallon bags full of pearls onto sorting bins and laughing, um, greedily. Mom has her pearl now though.)

So now I am in Kenya for a couple weeks leading up to Christmas. I am sorry nothing spectacular happened to me in Dubai, but again, the words are just a conduit for the pictures. (And the duck is weird, no?)

Redemption by Poultry

2008-11-28T09:57:00.005-05:00

In general, spending holidays in foreign countries sucks. This is especially true of Thanksgiving, which no one really understands beyond the fact that it involves turkey. This year, I spent it one of the restaurants at my posh digs in Surabaya, Indonesia. My quarrel isn’t with the hotel itself, which is an incredibly beautiful iconic place, built in 1910. My room is palatial, with these beautiful wood floors that are obviously made of something you aren’t allowed to cut down anymore. (I am adding pictures of the hotel because it is all I have from this week in Surabaya, and because my sister tells me that no one really reads the words part anyway.)

No, my quarrel is mainly with the manager of the joint (British, who has a people should never be allowed to cook anything). He somehow imparted to the kitchen staff that crab rangoons were an integral part of the American holiday menu (though they were doused with mayonnaise, which is unarguably American), and that turkey should be served heavy on the spine and liver. I almost took a picture of the gravy soaked chain of vertebrae. (I was stopped by the fact that I was already eating alone with a novel and making Calvin and Hobbes style faces at the food, so anything else might be considered rude.) And, least authentically of all in my opinion, I only got one little thimble full of crappy Australian wine to wash down the culinary train wreck.

Needless to say I came back to my room a little depressed about the whole ordeal. And I was still in a mood when I woke up today. Luckily, I thought, only one more day until I can blow this crap town. Then one of the local consultants called and asked if I would like to have a late lunch, traditional Surabaya food, bebak goreng.

Now when I first got to Indonesia, I though goreng meant "food," because every dish on the menu always ended in the word goreng. It actually means fried. Nasi goreng is fried rice, mie goreng is fried noodles, ayam goreng is fried chicken... And bebak goreng is fried duck.

As it is good politics to agree to these sorts of outings, plus I didn’t have other lunch plans, off we went. Upon arrival, the restaurant looked promising – a giant fryer full of duck out front, only one main course on the menu, and not a fork in sight.

And thusly I found my redemption here in Surabaya. The memory of the turkey disaster melted away with each crunchy, juicy, fatty bite of duck. The grease running down my fingers as I scooped more duck and rice into my mouth cleansed the soul of my inner foodie. I was renewed. I was once again whole. I was once again zen with poultry.

Oecussi

2008-11-20T01:29:00.006-05:00

There are some days when I put on my blue suit, sit in my windowless office in Washington, write statistical analysis code, and wonder if I really made the right career decision. Then there are days where I get to take the helicopter to work.

I spent three days this week in the remote province of Oecussi, Timor Leste. Non-contiguous from the rest of the country, Oecussi is stuck out in the middle of Indonesian Timor. It is accessible only by overnight ferry or UN helicopter. The difference in death risk between ancient leaky ferry and ancient Russian helicopter is probably negligible, but at least the helicopter is faster and has a crew of attractive suntanned Ukrainian gentlemen.

After days of navigating the Byzantine UN bureaucracy to get myself a seat, I arrive at the airport. Things are somewhat different checking into a military rather than commercial flight. Instead of national passport and ticket, it was organizational badge and “orders.” They look at the ID, stamp the “orders,” hand you a set of earplugs and point the way to the open air waiting area. At some point, someone comes up, herds you into a group, tells you to turn off your cell phones and asks if anyone has any dangerous materials. The UN police and soldiers reach around their Batman belts containing baton, pepper stray and loaded handgun, to check their pockets for any accidentally forgotten cigarette lighters.Then shake their heads without a trace of irony and we all get on board. (One guy did transfer his extra ammunition clip to the zip pocket of his uniform, so safety was being completely ignored here.)

The helicopter is a Russian built Mi-8MTV-1. (I googled it, and found an order form! http://www.redstar.gr/Foto_red/Book/Mil_17_1V.pdf Note in the first sentence that this “multipurpose helicopter is intended primarily for airlifting assault troops and engaging hostile light armor material and manpower.” No wonder I had to sign a release saying I won’t sue if we are hit by any sort of shoulder mounted projectile…)

The name of the helicopter was part of the safety briefing. (This meant nothing to most of the civilians on the flight and none of them really spoke English anyway, but regardless, you get a nasty look if you put your earplugs in before they finish talking.) Also included was pointing out that the helicopter had four windows (clearly there were five), two door (okay got that one right) and two fire extinguishers (one is here to the left and one is… um… right then…) But don’t worry, the crew is well trained in case of an emergency. The really useful information that they don't mention is that you need to be careful with the windows (they are completely open to the outside). I under-estimated the suction and leaned out a little too far with the camera while we were flying. The Nikon almost got a quick lesson in gravity.

Oecussi was just like a three-day version of Peace Corps. It was brutally hot, no one spoke English, no electricity or running water, mosquitoes traveled in opaque squalls… I stayed in the best hotel in town for $10 a night. It had a bucket shower, squat toilet and no fan. It proved to be a long night.

After I had finished working with my teams for the day, I decided to explore despite the withering mid-afternoon sun. I walked up and down on the beautiful beach. The water was so nice and inviting. Unfortunately, the conditions violated one of my fundamental rules of traveling. I don’t swim on beaches where the locals don’t swim, and not a soul in the water. In a country with riptides, sharks and “endemic sandcroc” problems, you want to be careful about these things. So I meandered off to explore the rest of the town.

The main town, Costa, is the site of the first arrival of the Portuguese on the island in the 16th century, which explains why it is a fiercely patriotic bit of Timor Leste stuck out in the middle of Indonesia. The Portuguese were nice enough to lay it out in traditional old world Europe style, broad tree lined boulevards in nice straight lines. Which vastly simplifies a grid search of a restaurant with that telltale generator hum. Where there are soldiers, there must be cold beer… (I eventually found one attached to a hotel. I immediately switched hotels.)

The next day involved a long drive trying to meet up with one of my survey teams. Outside of the main town, there is no cell phone service in the district. So we drove from village to village, sometimes almost an hour apart, up and down mountains, asking if anyone had seen a car full of outsiders. We eventually passed them on the road by chance. (Which would be more amazing if Oecussi had more than 10 cars in it.)

After a roadside software patch and progress check, I had the rest of the day and all of the next to kill before the helicopter came to get me. It was a long hot 24 hours, particularly after I finished my book. Fortunately the helicopter ride back was uneventful. I never thought I would be so grateful to see Dili.

Humbled.

2008-11-10T18:43:00.006-05:00

Now that the election is over (and the good guys won!), I feel like the internet is filled with the lost souls of blog readers, desperate to find something to fill in their work day now that they can’t debate the relative merits of a $4000 haircut to a just plain $1000 haircut. This could be my moment, to grow from a cult classic to a main stream readership. But, alas, my real life is not cooperating. I am in Dili. Again. I spend my days at the office and my limited free time underwater. But you heard that story.

So I am going to need to improvise. On Sunday a big group of expats hired a large sailboat to take us out of the island of Aturo. It was a day of sunbathing and diving, culminating in a moonlit ride back to Dili harbor as lightening flashed in the distance, and dolphins did flips in the boat wake. And I got a couple good shots of undersea life that I would like to post.

All that I am lacking is a compelling narrative. I am going to borrow a story.

The captain of the boat was your typical Aussie – stone crazy. He build is boat piece by piece, and sails it around Southeast Asia with his much younger girlfriend and a cargo of god-knows-what. (From scallops for Australia to booze for drier parts of Indonesia, this man is an example to seafaring capitalists everywhere.)

But, as inevitably happens with people of this persuasion, we ended up playing “the weirdest thing I have ever eaten”. I am pretty good at this game. As longtime readers know, I am completely kamikaze about what I will put in my mouth.

He opened a story about spending a season castrating camels in

Australia

and feeling wasteful about “throwing away all that good meat.” I countered with days-old undercooked sheep brain in Mauritania. He moved on to the large maggots that tasted like ham-and-egg hotpockets when cooked (“not to be recommended raw though mate.”) I busted out fried termites and caterpillar-in-oil sandwiches in Burkina. He swung back with garlic and chili cicadas at his brother’s marriage into a headhunter tribe in Boreno. I whipped out live ants in Thailand. He was starting to sweat a bit and I thought I might have him on the ropes. I was running low, but I still had dog and monkey so I wasn’t worried…

It started innocuously enough with kangaroo tripe – which is cooked without washing the “semi-digested crap” out of it and doesn’t smell good. On the plus side though, it can be whipped up in only a few minutes while it takes two hours to cook a full kangaroo. Okay. Then he started talking about how they actually cook said kangaroo. The tail is cut off for later, and the stomach you had already taken out through a small incision because, see previous story, you were starving. Then the right of the kangaroo hunter begins. The hunter has earned the right to drink the blood of the kangaroo. The carcass isn’t drained of blood before it is put on the coals, so the blood gets hot and pressurized as it cooks. When it is done, the hunter puts a slit just below the ribs and drinks the stream of steaming kangaroo blood, which, in the true spirit of too much information, congeals immediately into “a really fresh like blood pudding.”

I picked up my ball and went home. The jaws of everyone onboard just dropped to the deck. The vegetarian weaved unsteadily. This guy was King.

Road Trippin' Dili Style

2008-10-09T20:38:00.003-04:00

So I have been sadly remiss in my blogging duties this trip. I have been here in Timor (a-frigging-gain) for two weeks – heading back to the

today – and this is the first opportunity I have had to write anything. That is because I have been being a very good little Banker and been out in the districts taking pictures of dirt. Yup. Dirt. I was leading the team doing the verification checks for our recent agricultural surveys, which involved taking pictures of the fields and plots of our respondents. Unfortunately for me on so many levels, it is the hot season here in Timor. Which means that basically my job for the last week has been to rock up to households, ask them a few questions, then try to convince them that they want to walk two kilometers in the scorching mid-day sun to a dry rice paddy so I can take a picture of it. Should the rural population of Timor Leste ever have need definitive proof that white people are blooming nuts, I was kind enough to furnish it.

The rest of my time was spent on a road trip with three Timorese dudes in a rickety pick-up. I will list a couple of the highlights here.

(1) My crazy driver. The driver is a terribly nice guy who speaks not a lick of English. Sometimes he would talk to me in Portuguese because I am white, and I would nod, but we never really got anywhere. In addition to being a total kamikaze on the winding mountainous dirt roads, he liked to lecture the other two guys about how much he knew about Americans. Did you know we hate smoking? In fact, not even allowed to smoke in restaurants in America. (Not that this stopped any of the guys from chain smoking all week.) As he delivered this lecture, he cracked an icy cold beer while speeding down a windy rural road. Yup, he sure knows how to make the American riding in the front seat with the broken seat belt feel nice and comfortable. Later in the trip he managed to break the key off in the ignition.

(2) Accommodation. Rural East Timor is seriously lacking in availability of Motel 8's. I for to stay in some lovely "hotels", which though lacking in electricity and running water, nevertheless came complete with all god's multi-legged and winged creatures, and plumbing that would have disgusted my Peace Corps age self.

(3) Meeting the people. This was actually kind of fun. Some got really excited to have someone that came all the way from *America* to sit on their porch and ask them about their life. They gathered up the neighbors, pets, livestock, and children, scores and scores of snotty kids, all to join in the fun. Then, I got to lead the parade to the field to take a picture. This was usually a good moment for the children to bust into whatever English language pop song they had been learning that week. You get a little misty eyed for “We are the World” and a little confused when it is a graphic rap song about deal with your bitch act out. And so it goes.

Other exciting things from the trip included a fallen tree in the roadway that we needed to find an ancient old man with a machete to chop up for us. Fortunately, the tree produced a pulpy seed pod that could be munched while waiting. Unfortunately, judging by the reaction of my intestinal tract, they actually weren’t edible to humans. There was also the musical selection. I spent three days listening to an Indonesian man sing a falsetto versions of such American classics as “Happy Birthday” and “Happy Days”, while being poorly accompanied by an electric piano. On repeat. It had somewhat of a Jack from the Shining effect on me…

It wasn’t all bad though. I got to go diving, always a highlight. And I am spending the day in Bali on the way home. (During which time I plan to prudently concentrate on gathering attractive and exotic shells so that I may barter them with the taxi driver for a ride home in the TOTAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE of my home country.)

And it was good planning on my part. I am flying from Toyko to New York on October 11th. Crossing the international dateline means 36 hours of birthday fun!