Halfway down the Danube

The Congo again

And I'm sitting in Brussels Airport on a layover after a week back in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It was two and a half years since my last visit.  Not much seemed to have changed.  There's a new business hotel -- the Fleuve -- which is pretty nice, viz., it's actually a functioning business hotel without weird stains on the carpet or stuff falling out of the ceiling.  (Built by Chinese, and a lot of Chinese staff behind the scenes.)  What else... I guess the traffic may be a bit worse.  Otherwise, seems much the same.

I'm working with the US Department of Defense, which is interesting in its own way.  Topic for another post, maybe.  I did get to visit some interesting places!  The Congolese Ministry of Defense, for instance, which sits on a hill with a spectacular view overlooking the city and the river.  The country's main military logistics base, which was interesting if a bit depressing.  Lots of ancient machinery -- including some fascinating old machine tools from the colonial era -- and hundreds of broken vehicles, mostly trucks. 

Oh, and Mobutu's Cadillacs. Mobutu Sese Seko, who was absolute dictator of the Congo (then "Zaire") for nearly 30 years? His black stretch Caddies with the bulletproof armor.  Well, what was left of them. They're junk -- flat tires, gutted engines. Still damn impressive, though. Henry Kissinger rode in them, back in the day, and Mohammed Ali.  I guess they're still official government vehicles, and you never know when you might need a part from an old Caddy.

In my last post, I mentioned that I'd been researching US assistance to the Congo and Zaire.  There used to be US troops in Zaire!  A few hundred of them.  "Trainers".  Their mission was called ZAMISH and it lasted several years.  No lasting effect, and almost completely forgotten today.  Makes you thoughtful.

What else.  Well, munitions and ammunition are not stored very well in Congo.  That's a problem across a lot of Africa, actually.  There have been some spectacular munitions explosions in the last few years.  One of the worst took place just last year, in 2012.  It was in Brazzaville -- right across the Congo river from Kinshasa.  It was big enough that it broke windows in Kinshasa, even though the river is over half a mile wide there.  So, it's a fairly pressing issue.

(There's a theory that these blasts happen because there's a lot of pilfering at the arms depots, and when an inspector or someone gets close to the truth, someone decides to eliminate the evidence.  The Brazzaville blast killed at least 250 people, so I'd kinda like to think that wasn't true.  No way to know for sure.)

Hm, what else.  Learned a lot about Congo's state of military readiness, but I probably shouldn't talk about that.  Let's see... well, there's a big east/west divide in Congo's military right now.  (This is public knowledge.)  Mobutu didn't have a professional military -- ha ha, no -- but his Force Armee Zaire, or FAZ, had a lot of guys who had been trained in the US or Europe.  FAZ's senior generals were all kleptocrats who had no interest in anything as gauche as fighting a war, but at the middle-officer level there were a fair number of guys who were, by African standards, pretty competent.  When Kabila invaded from the east in 1997 (with Rwandan support, which is another long story in its own right), FAZ fell apart like wet tissue paper; most troops hadn't been paid in months or years, the ammunition and supplies had long since been stolen and sold on the black market, and there was no will left to fight for an utterly corrupt and discredited regime.  But that doesn't mean there was no value in FAZ; as noted above, there were some guys who were competent-ish and willing to do their jobs.  Just, not enough of them and they weren't allowed to do much.

So the east-west thing: FAZ was dominated by Lingala-speakers from western Congo.  But Kabila was coming in from the east, where he'd spent more than thirty years (!) in the bush or across the border in Uganda or Rwanda.  And in the east, they're all Swahili speakers.  So when Kabila took power, he installed Swahili speakers from his army in all the key positions. And they -- and in some cases their sons; it's been a while since 1997, after all -- are still there today.

The Swahili-speaking guys were, at best, competent guerrillas.  (At worst they were thugs.)  None had any idea how to run a modern military.  So that echelon of lower and middle level FAZ officers was kept on, because they were the ones who could actually make stuff work.  Many of them are still around today, though they're getting old.  So if you want to find (say) a professional logistician in the modern Congolese military, good chance it's some FAZ guy who has been a major for the last 20 years.  And who is going to retire soon, so someone really should be training up some new ones.

There's more to say about the Congo, but they're calling my flight to Frankfurt.  (Five and a half hour layover in Brussels airport, done.  That's the second time this year I've slept on an airport floor.)

 

From the State Department Archives

And I'm back in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a week.

So  I was doing a little bit of research on US assistance to the Congo.  There's actually a longish history -- we've been sending various forms of aid here for nearly sixty years now -- so it seemed worth at least checking to see whether anyone else had already attempted what we're trying to do.  I didn't get a firm answer on that, but and I did run across some mildly interesting old documents from the 1970s.

A bit of background for those of you who aren't history nerds: from 1962 to 1997, the Congo -- renamed "Zaire" -- was run by a dictator named Mobutu Sese Seko.  Mobutu ran his country into the ground.  At the end of his term, Congo was poorer than it had been when he took power, 35 years earlier.  16 years after he was chased out of power, the country is still suffering the consequences of his misrule; Congo remains one of the poorest countries in the world. 

But whatever else you can say about Mobutu, he was very, very good at getting money and military assistance from the US.  He was a major aid recipient for three decades, give or take.  Why?  Well, mostly because he was very good at gaming our fear of Communism and its spread in Africa. 

Anyway.  These are from "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-76, Volume E-6, Documents on Africa, 1973-76.  I think, taken together, they tell a story.  Maybe  not interesting to anyone but a fellow history nerd, but what the hey. 

Guinea

So I'm in Guinea this week.

Guinea is a small French-speaking country in West Africa, and it's not someplace I'd ever really planned on going.  But that's the nature of this business, and (sometimes) its charm.  The work is unexpected, too -- I'm contracting to the US Department of Defense this time, as part of a team that's assessing the needs of the civilian Ministry of Defense.  (Turns out the Ministry of Defense has a lot of needs.)

My impressions of Guinea are pretty light, because this has been one of those assignments where I go from airport to hotel and then back and forth from hotel to Ministry, period.  Well, sometimes that happens.  The Embassy is discouraging Americans from wandering around Conakry alone just now.

Guinea is a poor place even by West African standards.  That seems to be mostly for historical reasons.  Way back in 1958, DeGaulle offered independence to the French colonies of West Africa... but on France's terms: monetary union and continuing French influence on their military and political structures.  Most of the new nations -- Senegal, Mali, and the rest of them -- said yes.  Guinea said "Non!"  De Gaulle promptly withdrew all French assistance and colonial bureaucrats and technicians (who, by all accounts, sabotaged a fair amount of Guinea's infrastructure on the way out).  Guinea was thrown on its own devices.  It became sort of the Albania of West Africa -- Communist, isolationist, and fiercely nationalistic.  Africa nerds may be aware of some of the odd bits of subsequent Guinean history (the Portuguese raid from nearby Guinea-Bissau in 1970, with the goal of killing the Guinean President), but we'll skip over a lot of that.  They had a dictator for 26 years; he died; they got another dictator; the USSR collapsed; after 1991 their economy hit the skids; the second dictator abandoned socialism in the middle 1990s and gradually moved towards a mixed economy.

Then in late 2008 the second dictator died.  A military junta immediately took over.  The junta lasted a couple of years but couldn't stay in power, so they held elections.  A guy who had been in opposition since forever -- like, the Nixon administration -- unexpectedly won.  He's been president for a couple of years now.  Guinea still doesn't have a legislature, but they do seem to be well embarked on a fragile, tentative transition to something like democracy.

So, the poor part: Guinea had all the standard socialist mismanagement problems on top of the usual African stuff.  Like most West African countries, it exports just a couple of things (bauxite ore, corundum, a bit of coffee) and imports almost everything.  It's not a member of WAEMU, the West African monetary union, and the Guinean franc is not exactly one of the world's harder currencies.  Only about 10% of the country has electricity, and much of that irregularly.  (The lights go out in our little hotel several times a day.  There's a generator.)

To make things more complicated, Guinea is in one of the world's nastier geopolitical neighborhoods.  Guinea has six neighbors and they all either have major problems, or have had them in the recent past.  Senegal has a nasty separatist movement in its southern provinces, which border Guinea.  Mali, as you probably know if you watch much TV, is having a civil war right now.  Ivory Coast had a civil war the year before last.  (France intervened in that one, too.)  Sierra Leone and Liberia both saw protracted civil wars and horrifying bloodbaths in the last decade.  And little Portuguese-speaking Guinea Bissau is basically a narco-kleptocracy, a corrupt and violent ministate run by gangsters and drug lords.  So, a rough neighborhood. 

Remarkably, despite all these regional problems, Guinea has remained a relative -- I probably should emphasize this -- relative island of peace and stability.  There have been some unpleasant episodes, most notably in 2009 when the military junta responded to proests with mass shootings, lootings, and rapes.  But compared to the last 20 years in Sierra Leone or Liberia, Guinea has on the whole been pretty pacific.

So what's it like?  Well... tropical and hot.  Conakry seems to be a vast sprawl of city without any perceptible downtown.  (There are some big socialist ministry-looking buildings, but around them it's the same sprawl.)  The people seem friendly enough.  Everyone speaks French.  The coffee at breakfast is pretty good for coffee in Africa.  (Many African countries export the good stuff.)  My hotel room doesn't have a toilet seat but one gets used to that.  The hotel is owned by Lebanese; one of my teammates thinks they're likely Hezbollah folks doing a bit of money laundering.  (My teammates are all former military intelligence guys and don't seem much given to macho fantasizing; this particular guy spent several years in Lebanon.  So, maybe.  He didn't seem too worried about it, so I guess I'm not either.) 

I flew down here via Casablanca.  Was recovering from a really nasty head cold (antibiotics, go), so the first day or so was a little blurry.  Wish I had more chances to walk around, or at least look at a clear night sky -- I miss the tropical stars.  But I have seen a lot of cool-looking lizards, and some no-kidding bald-headed vultures hanging out on the beach waiting for garbage, and those neat little West African weaver birds that make the little hanging ball-shaped nests.

I've been spending a lot of time every day with the Guinean military, who are, under the circumstances, pretty professional.  They're surprisingly cool about the fact that they were running the country a few years ago and no longer are.  (Yes, I understand that they may not be telling the foreigner how they really feel.  But for the most part, they just don't seem that nostalgic for the golden years of junta rule.)  They all shave their heads and speak good French.  Most of them seem pretty sharp.  Certainly they've been very patient with me.

I leave late tomorrow night, so if you have any questions about Guinea, ask now.

 

 

 

Juicing season

We got our apples juiced today.

I think I mentioned a while back that we have some apple trees -- five in the back yard, one in the front.  Well, this was a good year for apples.  We have apples.  We brought a hundred and twenty kilos to the juicery, and that was after throwing at least that many away on the compost heap.  (In retrospect, I was probably too picky.  The juicer doesn't worry much about bruises or the occasional worm.)

Picking apples is pleasant exercise; you bend down a lot, then you shake the tree, then you bend down some more.  You whack the tree with sticks.  You send small boys up the tree to shake the higher branches.  You carry buckets of apples around from here to there.  I can imagine that if we had more apple trees it would quickly grow tedious, but we have just five, which means it's just a couple of hours of work, done in ten- or fifteen-minute intervals over a few days: let's go out and collect some apples.

 

Golsfortiyeva 16

I'm back in Belgrade for a couple of weeks.  Short-term work.

I took the opportunity to look up our old house on Golsfortiyeva street.  (That's the Serbianized version of "Galsworthy", by the way.  The street was named back in Communist days, after the English author of social novels.)  The street has changed so much -- new shops, repainted facades, a completely new shopping center on the corner -- that I couldn't find our house at first.  I had to ask Claudia for the house number, then go back a second time.

As it happened, the front door to the apartment had been left a little ajar.  Our house was built in the apartment's internal courtyard.  (There was some sort of obscure, long-lasting property dispute about this.  We never really got the details.)  It was a small thing, more like a bungalow -- two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room and a living room.  It seemed big enough for us, back when we had just a single small child.  I remember it as being painted bright cheerful colors, yellow and blue.  There was a large glass skylight which let in a lot of sunshine (very pleasant in winter) and that made rainfall so loud that conversation was almost impossible. 

Walking in through the apartment building, one goes up a few steps, then down a few more to reach the courtyard.  (I had a sudden physical memory of lifting the stroller with Alan in it up and down those steps.) The courtyard was empty except for a Siamese cat, probably belonging to the artist who lived in the other house in the courtyard.  (Still there, as far as I can tell -- there was a sign saying "Galerija", or gallery.)  The front steps that Alan fell down nine years ago were exactly the same. 

The house looked a little faded and run-down -- I had the impression of some years of deferred maintenance.  I considered knocking on the door but, honestly, I've lost almost all my Serbian -- and what would I say, really?  "I lived in this house nine, ten years ago.  We had some good times here."  And anyway, I remembered pretty well what it was like inside -- kitchen over there (with the tiny balcony behind it), living room with two overstuffed chairs and a couch over there, the bathroom with the swirly bath upstairs.  No point in bothering the current tenants.

Life goes on.

Dates are interesting

Well, they are.

I spent much of June running around the West Bank looking at the regulatory environment for agricultural exports.  (Yeah, it's taken me a month to get around to blogging about it.)  This involved visiting farms, greenhouses, packing houses, and even a date processing plant.  Up until then, I didn't even know that dates needed processing.  I thought -- insofar as I thought about it at all, which I guess I didn't -- it's a fruit, it comes off a tree, you eat it.  Turns out, no.  Lot of stuff has to happen first. 

Anyway, dates.  The things that look like giant raisins, yah?  They grow on date palms, which are medium sized palm trees that like a hot arid climate.  Popular across the Middle East, growing in popularity in the West as a healthy snack food.  Nice little hit of tasty calories, lot of fiber, some vitamins.  In Muslim countries they're a traditional food for Ramadan, of which more shortly.

Date palms are desert plants, but dates are a thirsty crop: if you want to grow dates commercially the palms will soak up astonishing amounts of water.  That's because the date palm adjusts its output of fruit to match the availability of water.  Palms can survive perfectly well on very little water, but then they won't produce a lot of dates.  So whenever you see a date palm plantation -- and they're a very common sight in Israel and Palestine, especially along the Jordan valley -- you're looking at a lot of water. 

A weekend in the Holy Land

Let's get the parrot out of the way first.

We spent most of today -- Saturday the 9th -- in Jericho.  Jericho is arguably the oldest city in the world; humans have been living there in some sort of urban setting, town or city or whatever, for something over ten thousand years.  We spent much of the day there.  We took the cable car to the top of the Mountain of Temptation, we walked through the ruins of an Ummayad palace, we saw what's left (very little) of the walls of Jericho mentioned in the Old Testament, we saw the tree that (allegedly) Zaccheus the publican climbed to see Jesus.  The children liked this well enough.

But then there was the parrot.

It was a grey parrot that was sitting on a railing outside the control cabin of the cable car.  When we went up (and a very interesting ride it was -- the scariest and most interesting cable car ride I've been on in years), the parrot was nonchalantly eating a sunflower seed.  The boys liked it very much.  But then, after we went to the top and walked where Jesus (presumably) walked, and was tempted three times by Satan -- you know, turn these stones into bread, leap from the pinnacle of the Temple, bow down and worship me! -- and explored the Greek monastery a bit, and stood on a cliff top with the Dead Sea in the distance and watched falcons flying a hundred feet below us, still hundreds of feet above the ground, and had coffee and ice cream, and chatted with a Filipino guy from Hawaii who had come down from Tel Aviv for the day and was horrified to find that Jericho was in Palestinian territory -- after all that, we got to the bottom again, and then David discovered that he had lost his hat!  The new cap we had bought just yesterday, in Jerusalem, with Power Rangers Mystic Force on it!  So we went back and talked to the very nice lady behind the counter, and she called up to the top, and sure enough they had found it!  But we had to wait for ten minutes for it to come down the mountain in the cable car.  So we went upstairs to wait, to the boarding platform where the cable cars loaded up...

...and the parrot was still there...

...and it was drinking a can of Fanta.  Like, by itself.  The can was almost as big as the parrot, but it was handling it without much difficulty.  It tipped up the can and drank delicately, for long minutes, while the boys -- okay, the boys and I -- watched in utter, slack-jawed fascination.

Eventually David's cap arrived, and the parrot finished its drink and dropped the can on the ground, and we left.  But sitting in the bus going home, when we asked the boys what they remembered from the day's adventures -- the ruined palace?  The cable car ride?  The mountaintop? -- the unhesitating answer was, "We had ice cream twice.  And that parrot was awesome."

So.  Here follow some scattershot impressions of the last two days.

 

Israel and Palestinian agriculture

This is a big topic, but here's a first sketch.

Israel controls much of the good land on the West Bank.  Not all, but much of it.  Very broadly speaking, if you see a piece of the West Bank that's particularly fertile soil, with good access to water, there's a pretty good chance that an Israeli farm is sitting on it.  (And if you see a piece of the West Bank that has spectacular views, good chance there's an Israeli settlement sitting on it.  But that's a topic for another post.)

That said, there's still plenty of good land left for farming by the Palestinians.  For such a tiny area -- it's just about the size of Delaware -- the West Bank is astonishingly diverse.  It's all pretty dry but "dry" covers a wide range from true desert (down south towards the Negev) to half a dozen different Mediterranean microclimates.  You can grow a lot of different stuff here, from "desert" crops like dates and olives to "Mediterranean" herbs and vegetables like tomatoes, peppers and basil. 

But if you're talking about commercial agriculture, as opposed to subsistence farming? Well, that gets complicated.  Commercial agriculture, growing large amounts of crops for processing and/or export, requires a lot of stuff that's hard to get in Palestine.  For instance, commercial farms want fertilizer.  But Israel won't allow the importation of nitrate- or ammonium-based fertilizers into the West Bank, because those could be used to make explosives.  (Timothy McVeigh blew up a chunk of Oklahoma City using a truckload of fertilizer.)  There are substitutes -- stuff like potassium chloride -- but they're generally either more expensive or not as good.

Then there's water.  Oh my, water.  This is a huge and complicated topic, but here's the short version: the Israelis have taken a very disproportionate share of the available water in the West Bank.  For instance, in Area C, the large region under direct Israeli control?  There hasn't been a single permit issued for a new Palestinian well to be drilled.  Like, ever.  Every Palestinian well in Area C predates 1967. 

Now, commercial farmers need irrigation.  A little subsistence farm may be able to survive on rainfall plus a catchment system, but that's just not going to cut it for a serious commercial farm -- you need high productivity, and you need to be able to deliver a crop at a fairly fixed time with a fairly predictable quality.  Otherwise, nobody's going to want to buy your stuff, and you go out of business.  So, you absolutely must have water.  But because Palestinians have a lot less water per capita than Israelis, water is more expensive.

Palestinian water also tends to be worse in quality than Israeli water.  Because you have a lot of people drinking from a tiny water table, there's more mineralization and higher salinity.  More saline water causes dramatic drops in agricultural productivity, to the point where you might as well not bother trying to grow stuff.  You can treat the water to improve its quality, but this is a significant capital expense, and there are environmental issues too.  Short version: if you treat 100 cubic meters of saline water, you end up with 80 cubic meters of sweet water -- and 20 cubic meters of really salty water.  Which you can't just dump somewhere, because it's going to poison the soil, and you can't just pump back into the water table, because then you're salting everyone else's drinking water.  Anyway, it's probably moot, because you need money for water treatment, and you don't have a lot of money. And even if you do find it somehow, it's just bringing you up to the point that your Israeli counterparts are starting from.

You can also try dealing with it by grafting, which is what a lot of Palestinian farmers do: you plant seedlings that are grafted onto salt-tolerant roots.  This is a workaround that can be fairly effective, as long as the water is not too terribly salty.  But, again, added expense. 

Oh, and if you farm with salty water for too long?  Over a period of years, the salt is going to build up in your soil, and kill it.  If you're doing open-field agriculture, then you can alleviate this problem with crop rotation to non-irrigated plants; over time, natural rainfall will wash the salt out, allowing you to start over.  But if you're doing greenhouse agriculture -- which is where the money is -- then saline water means that every few years, you have to throw away your ruined soil and start over from scratch.  In addition to being a rather dubious practice environmentally speaking, this is yet another added expense.

Here's an additional fact in the mix: Palestine and Israel are in a customs union.  Israel can control the flow of goods across the border, and prohibit certain things from crossing, but there are no actual tariffs.  Palestinian goods can flow into Israel (subject to health and security checks), and vice versa, without paying anything at the border.  So if you're a Palestinian commercial grower, you're competing directly with Israeli commercial growers.  And the Israelis are sitting on the best land, have better fertilizer, and much cheaper and more reliable access to better quality water.  That's before we start getting into other Israeli advantages like better technology, much more access to credit, much better developed market linkages, government assistance and subsidies, etc. etc.  Just right off the bat, with those three basic things -- land,fertilizer, water -- the Israelis are already well ahead of the game.  You could set everything else equal and Israeli agricultural products would still be noticeably cheaper.

So, consequences.  One is that every grocery store in Palestine is full of Israeli agricultural products.  Oh, there are some Palestinian crops -- watermelons, apricots, cherries, all sorts of stuff -- but it's mostly small scale and local, and it's mostly fresh fruit and produce.  If you're talking stuff that's processed and/or mass produced --  fruit juice, tomato sauce, canned beans, frozen peas, corn oil, marmalade -- it's mostly Israeli, with hardly a Palestinian product to be seen. (The Israeli advantages mentioned above are amplified by the fact that it's a lot easier to move an Israeli product into Palestine than vice versa.  Israel subjects Palestinian imports to fairly rigorous health and security checks -- every container gets examined, every pallet gets scanned -- while Israeli imports to the West Bank go through with relative ease.)

Second consequence: it's really hard for Palestinian commercial farmers to compete in international markets.  Not impossible, but hard.  Which is why commercial farming in Palestine is still pretty dinky.

That said, there are some interesting wrinkles to this story.  More in a bit.

 

 

 

In Ramallah

So we're in Ramallah, Palestine -- the West Bank.

"We" here means me, Claudia, and all four children.  I have an assignment here that will last for five weeks.  That's good in terms of, hey, five weeks of work.  Somewhat less good in terms of leaving Claude and the kids alone for over a month.  So after some discussion, we decided to bring everyone along. 

Given our current state of economic uncertainty -- I'm between long-term assignments, and am likely to be so for the rest of the year, which means we'll be living from one short-term piece of work to the next -- this may strike some as a rather reckless decision.  That's because it is, in fact, a rather reckless decision.  Going through life constantly being reckless would be pretty stupid.  But going through life never being reckless would be pretty boring.  And you don't get that many opportunities to take your kids along for a month in the Holy Land.

So: here we are in Ramallah, the temporary capital of the Palestinian not-quite-state.  We found a nice corporate apartment (three bedrooms, kitchen, swimming pool!) with a reasonable monthly rate; it's a bit farther out in the suburbs than we might have liked (yes, Ramallah has suburbs) but the kids seem happy enough.  We got here three days ago; this weekend, we go explore Jerusalem.

So, if anyone's still reading this blog -- what do you want to know about Palestine?

Larks and Lice

Hey ho, the blog's still here.  I took 40 days offline for Lent.  -- Well mostly offline.  Could still read, of course!  Ha ha, imagine trying to live without reading the Internet.  No.  But I couldn't write anything, from Ash Wednesday to Easter.

Okay, Easter was a while ago.  What's new?

Here's the big picture: I'm once again between long-term assignments.  That means we are once again back in Fladungen.  This by itself is just fine -- we like Fladungen.  But it's complicated by the fact that I don't know when (or, really whether) I will have another long-term assignment.  Moldova was great for ten months, but it ended, and my employer did not win the follow-on project.  I'm likely to be bid on something in the next little while, but nothing that gets bid in May or June will be awarded until September at the earliest.  So it's likely that we'll be in Fladungen through at least September. 

This is somewhat worrisome because if we're here that long, we should be putting the two older boys into the German school system.  Germany doesn't allow home schooling, you see.  It looks like the system is willing to not-notice kids at home for a month, two months, maybe three months... but six months or more is probably pushing it.  And we're not enthusiastic about putting the boys into school here.  (That probably deserves a post of its own.  In a bit, perhaps.)

An additional wrinkle is that I'm also not getting a lot of short-term work just now.  Not none, but not as much as I'd like.  I survived tolerably well for three years as a self-employed consultant doing short-term stuff here, there and everywhere -- that's why all those posts from Congo and Zambia and the West Bank.  But (to make a long story short) about half my work was doing CLIR assessments, and for various reasons there aren't likely to be many CLIR assessments for the next year and a bit.  So I'm having to scramble a bit.

No, we're not starving -- there's food on the table, we're paying the mortgage, all that.  It's just not where we were hoping to be right now.

Anyway.  That's the big picture; what's happening right now?

Lice!

Friday links from Bethesda, MD

We're having a friend's daughter over for a sleepover.  Two bedrooms, seven people: one kid on the couch, two on the floor.  I told a monkey story (i.e., something from the Journey to the West, which is full of cool stories).  Much sleepover-type poking and giggling, but they seem to be quieting down now.

So, links.  We flew into Dulles; I used to fly regularly into Washington National, but haven't in years.  This fellow explains why that might be a good thing.  (That blog has all sorts of neat posts -- I'm still browsing.)

This mini-series looks really interesting.  Don't know when I'd ever find time to watch it, though. -- Incidentally, I only just discovered that the Bhagavad-Gita is believed to be a later insertion, added at a time when Hindu elites were anxious about Buddhism, and drafted largely as a response to Buddhism and a critique of it.  When I read that, I actually said "of course it is" out loud.  The B-G is basically Buddhism given a half twist, and in a way that largely defangs its critique of Hinduism.

Anyway.  So I was reading a while back about the Millikan oil drop experiments, which established the magnitude of the charge on a single electron back in 1910.  They're pretty awesome: Millikan stared at a bunch of individual microscopic oil droplets through a microscope, tracking them for 60 days, waiting for them to suddenly change their speed or direction.  Millikan later got recruited to help found Cal Tech by a guy named George Ellerby Hale, who is now pretty much entirely forgotten, but who was one of the pivotal figures of early 20th century American science.  (In part because he helped create Cal Tech.  A fair number of the scientists who'd build the atom bomb studied in the house that Hale built.)  One biographer calls him "the patron saint of big science (and corporatized science) in America."  Hale was a brilliant man who unfortunately also suffered from some form of mental illness, possibly manic-depression; in between steering American science towards greatness and managing the first generation of great US astronomers, he heard voices, had endless sleepless nights, and grappled with multiple nervous breakdowns and collapses.  (No, there's no moral to this story.  The poor son-of-a-gun seems to have been just bipolar, and horribly overworked.)

Speaking of astronomy, I only recently became aware of the existence of the South Atlantic Anomaly.  It's no joke -- there are satellites that can't pass through that volume, because it's too dangerous.  No effect at the surface of the Earth, but still: interesting.  Also speaking of astronomy, this is one of the better anti-Shuttle rants.  (Except it's hardly even a rant.  Yes, the Shuttle really was that bad.)

What else... I also only recently became aware of the randomized response trick, though apparently it's been around for a while.  Yes, the dice-rolling aspect appeals to my inner gamer nerd.

Pine nut mouth.

Okay, this was kind of a nerdy collection.  I'll try to do better next time.

 

And some more about Ethiopia

I mentioned in the last post that Ethiopia had been enjoying terrific economic growth over the last decade.  Commenter Christine asked where this was coming from: oil, or something?

Well: no oil.   Ethiopia has been enjoying growth in agriculture, in manufacturing, in extraction industries (mining)... and in services.

Yeah, services.  That one is a little weird.  Services is transportation, communication, and finance.  Also tourism and accounting and consulting and haircuts and oh, all sorts of other things, but in an Ethiopian context it's transportation, communication and finance that have seen incredible hothouse growth.  Basically the country came to mobile phones and internet stuff late, but built them very fast; has a state-owned flagship airline, Ethiopian Airlines, that's doing improbably well; and has a banking sector that's seen dramatic, almost explosive growth in the last decade or so.

There are a lot of questions here.  Like: why is Ethiopian Airlines so incredibly successful?  It's a state-owned airline in a Sub-Saharan African country, which means it should either suck, or be going bankrupt, or both.  Instead it's profitable, reliable, and (despite a very famous crash) safe.  the 28th largest airline in the world, and the largest and most successful one based in Africa between South Africa and Egypt.  Ethiopian Airlines is the reason that Addis is a major regional hub, collecting flights from half a continent.  They're partnered with Lufthansa in the Star Alliance, for goodness' sake.  (There are US based airlines that Lufthansa won't partner with.)  How has EA managed this, when most other African airlines (and plenty of non-African ones) have floundered?  I have no idea.  But it's an interesting question, no?

America again

We're back in the USA.  Yah, all of us.

We plan be around for about six weeks -- basically spending the month of February working, then the first two weeks of March driving around seeing family and friends.

The day before we left, Claudia's parents took all four kids and we spent a day cleaning the house.  (Conclusion: we should do this once per month regardless.)  As we got in the car, Claudia pointed out that this is our first plane trip in almost ten years without a stroller.  Yeahh. -- It's definitely helping that the kids are getting older.  Leah can walk everywhere and we don't need to drag a diaper bag around; Alan and David are old enough to pull suitcases, and can sit quietly and read books (though of course they'd rather play Nintendo or something explosive on the iPad.) 

The trip over was, as these things go, pretty straightforward.  The plane was almost empty, which let us spread out a bit.  We flew over Greenland, which was pretty cool.  (Okay, cool for Claudia and me.  Bunch of mountains sticking up through an ice cap.  Boys were mildly interested for a minute or two.) Then we were through US immigration in about five minutes, which was totally a record.  There was a lot of traffic on the DC beltway -- it took over an hour to reach our apartment -- but otherwise, smooth enough.  Kids fell asleep in the van, woke up, went back to sleep (with a lot of jet-lag addled whimpering and complaining), woke up a few hours later FULL OF ENERGY.  It's now a quarter to six and they've spent the last couple of hours playing Angry Birds and watching Phineas and Ferb.

So, America.  Howdy.

 

 

 

 

 

A short primer on the Ethiopian banking system

Because this is what I do.

Ethiopia's banking system is weird.  It's like a throwback to an earlier Africa, the Africa of the 1970s or 1980s.  Three reasons.

First, the system is dominated by two big state owned banks.  One of them -- the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia -- accounts for almost 50% of all lending, by itself.  Throw in the other one (the Development Bank of Ethiopia) and the majority of lending in the country is being done by state-owned banks.  That was pretty common in Africa thirty years ago, when almost everyone had a big state-owned bank or two that dominated the sector.  But in 2012, state-owned banks are an endangered species.  About half of all African countries don't even have them any more.  In those that do, the SOB is usually small and specialized, either a "development bank" or focused on some neglected sector like agriculture. 

There are a couple of reasons for this.  One is that, historically, SOBs in Africa generally didn't work very well.  Another is that the big multinational lenders -- the World Bank and the IFC -- dislike SOBs, and have encouraged African countries to break them up and privatize them, or at least shrink and marginalize them.  (For the record, I think this was mostly a positive thing -- but like a lot of World Bank/IFC policies, it's been applied in a rather ideological and ham-handed way.  A lot of bad, corrupt, ineffective old SOBs needed to go, but a lot of babies got thrown out with that particular bathwater.)

Ethiopia, though.  Ethiopia is run by a bunch of former revolutionaries who are very nationalistic and not inclined to trust or listen to the World Bank and its ilk.  So they're keeping their big state-owned banks.  But at the same time, they've allowed -- no, encouraged -- the growth of a vibrant private banking sector.  There are about fifteen private banks in Ethiopia today, and they account for about 40% of lending and about 60% of deposits.  They're a vital part of the economy already, and they're growing by leaps and bounds.  So the banking sector is a true public-private hybrid. 

The second odd thing about the sector is that it's closed and protected: no foreign banks are allowed.  Ethiopia has no Barclays, no Bank of Africa, no Citi or HSBC.  That's also weird and unusual, because in 2012 most African countries have opened up their banking sectors to foreign competition.  Among other things, you can't join the World Trade Organization unless you agree to do this -- and everyone wants to join the WTO.  Out of 54 African countries, all but seven or eight are already WTO members.  (The ones that aren't are either oil-rich -- Libya, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea -- or weird recluse states like Eritrea, or tiny places like the Comoros.  Oh or Somalia, which doesn't really have a functioning government.)  So pretty much everywhere in Africa, from Botswana to Senegal, you'll encounter a bunch of international banks.  But not in Ethiopia.

The third weird thing: the Ethiopian Central Bank?  The guys who regulate the banks, control the money supply, set interest rates and all that?  The Central Bank is not independent.  Doesn't even pretend to be.  It's an arm of the executive branch.  It's there to do all the normal central bank stuff, but it's also there to carry out government policy.

Here's an astonishing example.  Couple of years back, the Ethiopian government wanted to build a hydroelectric dam.  Huge, huge thing.  Going to light up half the country.  Also going to displace tens of thousands of villagers and do untold ecological damage, including possibly wiping out Lake Turkana, but do you want electricity or not?  -- So they want to build a dam, but for various reasons nobody wants to lend them money to build it.  (Ethiopia's credit is not good: Dagong rates them CCC, and Moodys and Standard & Poors don't even bother.)  Where to get the money, then?

Well, the government of Ethiopia simply followed the Willie Sutton principle.  The Central Bank told the private banks that they needed to start buying dam bonds.  Lots of them.  In fact, the Central Bank announced that for every dollar lent by a private bank, they would have to buy twenty-seven cents worth of bonds.  Since commercial loan rates in Ethiopia are around 12% to 15%, and dam bonds pay just 3%, the banks were not very happy about this.  But they had no choice: if they didn't comply, the Central Bank would shut them down.  So they've been buying dam bonds -- millions and millions of dollars of them.  And now the government has money to build its dam.

So, a mixed public-private banking system that's protected from international competition, run by a non-independent central bank with a history of brutal intervention.  How's that working out?

Surprisingly well.  But this may need another post.

 

 

Ethiopia

So, I'm in Ethiopia.

Addis Ababa, to be specific -- the capital.  This is a job for my current employer, and it's relatively short as these things go -- just ten days.  I've been here a week already, so I go back in a few days.  Meanwhile, a few things about Ethiopia.

It's high.  Most of the country is mountains or plateaus.  Addis is about 2300 meters or 8000 feet up.  You can definitely notice this.  I have the habit of running or trotting up stairs; after three flights, I'm noticeably wheezy, and half an hour on the hotel's treadmill the other night left me light-headed and shaky.  There's about 25% less air in every breath, so I guess one must either breath 1/3 more deeply or 1/3 more often. 

The altitude also means that it's not that hot during the day, and it's actually coolish at night.  You see people walking around with jackets and sweatshirts, which is not something I'm used to in Africa.  (It also means Ethiopia is mostly free of malaria mosquitoes and some of the more hair raising parasites.)

It's Africa.  But it's slightly askew.  By which I mean that in some ways, it's very typically Sub-Saharan African, but in others it's just weird.  For instance, it's mostly Christian and part Muslim, which is pretty common in Africa.  But the Christianity isn't Catholic or Protestant.  No, it's the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which is 1700 years old, rather Old Testament (no pork, lots of fast days), and looks down on Catholicism as an upstart newcomer.  Or: everyone speaks English as a second language, which is common enough.  But the first languages are Oromo or Amhara, and everything is written in both English and the Amharic script -- which is its own weird alphabet that resembles nothing so much as Armenian.

Ethiopians look different, too.  On one hand, there are some very typical Ethiopian faces -- one spots that right away.  On the other, there's a remarkable range of skin colors and hair textures.  My tentative assumption is that I'm looking at different ethnic groups, but that's just a guess.  Certainly the place has had a history complex enough to support a lot of mixing.

The food is supposed to be excellent.  Unfortunately, I'm here on business, which means I'm gravitating towards bland foods that are thoroughly cooked.  I broke with this rule one day, and had some chili, and ended up getting really sick for a day -- nausea, chills, you name it.  (Man, I hate chills.)  Business travel makes you conservative, y'know?  So I can't talk much about the food.  Well, I can note that the coffee is brutally strong, and any meat is going to be tough.  (Seriously.  Africans generally enjoy their meat tougher than Europeans or Americans, but Ethiopians seem to take this to an extreme.) 

Ethiopia is poor, but it's also seeing very rapid economic growth.  Very, very rapid.  As in: better than 8% average growth per annum sustained for over a decade.  Since the turn of the century, they've more than doubled the size of their economy.  Since their population is growing rapidly, per capita income has only grown by about 50%.  But that's still pretty impressive.  And you can see the growth happening in real time: downtown Addis is basically one huge construction boom.  I haven't seen anything like it since 1990s China.

Of course, it's growth from a very low base.  Ethiopia is still very poor.  It's poor even by African standards.  And you see that too -- people in ragged clothes, beggars, you name it.  But fifteen years ago, it was very very poor.  Now it's just very poor.

I'll probably have more to say about the economic stuff in a day or two.  Meanwhile: questions about Ethiopia?