Halfway down the Danube

Friday links on Thursday

Because of the holiday, and all.

Newt Gingrich wrote his Ph.D. thesis on education in the Belgian Congo.  Apparently Newt speaks French?  Someone should ask him about that.

Carlos mentioned the Congo band Konono No. 1 to me.  I keep meaning to order their Congotronics CD.  Anyone out there heard them?

I had never heard of the Bullwhip Effect until recently.  A pretty good explanation is here.  There's an online game you can play to test it.

The deer learned.  They learned the hard way.  And they still remember.

How deep into one of the dark places have you been?  I've gotten to orangey-brown.

This list of stuff from ten years ago is mildly interesting.

Most of these are dopey, but a few are dead on.

You may or may not be interested in bloggers meeting with Treasury officials, but it's worth a moment to skim forward and read the last three or four paragraphs of this post.  Learning when someone is trying to do this to you, and when and how to do it yourself, are really useful skills.  (I have a mental category of "really useful skills that nobody ever teaches you".  Many are work-related, but by no means all.)

Iggy Pop began as a cheap Jim Morrison knockoff; see, e.g., here.  (Well, actually he began life as James Osterberg, Jr., the son of a high school English teacher in suburban Michigan.  Anyway.)  Yet at some point he became something... more.  It's not clear to me when, how, or why, though I'm pretty sure David Bowie was involved.  Nothing much to add there; it's just something I sometimes think about.  Well, and that it would be cool to read a character-driven science fiction novel whose main characters were based on Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Lou Reed.  Yeah, maybe I need to get out more.

On the historical roots of government competence in two regions of Nigeria.  Fascinating, if true.  I am faintly reminded of the very marked difference between southern Serbia (formerly Ottoman) and northern Serbia above the Danube (Austro-Hungarian until 1918).  Stuff works a lot better in one region than the other, even today.

And here is a cool paper about adaptations for walking and running in genus Homo.  (.pdf, but not long.)  I like that they provide a summary table, and the graph is good too. 

And that may be it for 2009.

Paying the mortgage

Let's start by saying I can't stand Megan McArdle.  I think she's a so-so writer and a deeply mediocre thinker, and her continued popularity baffles and slightly dismays me.

That said, this discussion seems to be a new low even by McArdle's low standards. Mike gives some good arguments, and if you click on the links Steve Waldman gives some more.  Apparently I'm coming late to this discussion, which was all over a certain particular slice of the blogosphere last week.  (Although, oddly enough, one of the best ripostes was actually written a couple of weeks earlier.)

The heavier hitters have already weighed in and hit, but I'm going to scamper in between their legs and make a perhaps slightly disreputable but, I think, relevant point: I would bet a fair amount of money that Megan McArdle has never had to worry about making a mortgage payment.

For no particular reason -- this isn't relevant, really -- that makes me want to write a little about my own mortgage payments.

Writers block

I don't get it very often. 

But when I do, it's unpleasant, because writing is more or less what I do for a living.  So the inexplicable inability to write more than a sentence or two at a time gets compounded by a fairly unpleasant cocktail of economic anxiety and "what the hell is wrong with me?"

So far, it's always passed within a day or two.  Like my occasional bouts of insomnia, it seems to be just this weird thing that I get sometimes.

(Hey, this post is clearly labeled TMI.  Right down there at the bottom, see?)

Schwimmbad

Went to the Schwimmbad yesterday, down in Bad Neustadt.

It's two pools indoor and two out, plus one of those long slides, a kiddie pool, a whirlpool, and a sauna.  It's nice.  Alan is becoming a strong little swimmer.  David, much less so -- David overthinks stuff, and ties himself up -- but it will come.  Jacob and Leah just love splashing around.

What really struck me, though, is how warm Bad Neustadt is.  It's just 35 km south of us (20 miles) but it feels more like 200.  There was almost no snow on the ground there.  In Fladungen, nasty, crusty, re-frozen snow covers everything.  It's easily 8 or 10 degrees Fahrenheit (4 or 5 Celsius) colder here.  Part of that is altitude -- we're about 100 meters higher up -- but mostly it's our weird microclimate, shivering under the chilly shadow of the Hochrhoen.

Anyway.  One other thing: we are right now near, I think -- I hope -- the point of maximum logistical difficulty in doing this sort of thing.  Alan and David can change by themselves, but can't be relied on to do it neatly and not forget anything.  Jacob can't change himself. (Or, more precisely, can but won't.) Leah is still in diapers.  We have to carry bathing suits and towels and swim toys and flippers in a huge bag, because the boys are not at the point yet where we can give each his own backpack.  (Though maybe soon.)  And once in the pool, one parent has to stay in the kiddy pool at all times.

It's one of those parenting paradoxes: half the time you're looking at them and thinking, you are so adorable right now, must you change?  I can't stand it!  And the other half you're thinking, grow up grow up grow up damn it hurry up grow up!

Actually, I can think both of those more or less at the same time.

Anyway, Schwimmbad.  Winter fun!

Reading Kipling in the Congo

That was kind of strange, yes.

Every US Embassy has a lending library.  Typically it's a couple of bookcases along a wall, filled with books that Embassy staff have dropped off.  The rule is pretty loose: take a book, drop one off.  It seems to work. 

The books tend towards thrillers and mysteries, with sometimes a strain of military stuff from the Marines and the defense attache.  You don't find a lot of high-end literary fiction, nor a lot of nonfiction.  I'm not sure whether that's because Embassy people don't read that stuff, or because they don't give it away.

But anyway: I've given a lot of stuff to those libraries over the years, so I'm not shy about grabbing a book or two.  In this case, a volume of short stories by Dorothy Sayers, and Life's Handicap by Kipling.

So,  Kipling.

Really, really random thoughts after Christmas

Bacteria are small.

Your average bacterium is a few micrometers long.  That's between five and six orders of magnitude smaller than you.  So, if humans were the size of bacteria, the planet Earth would be about the size of a large house or a small apartment building.  It would orbit a couple of hundred kilometers away from the Sun, which would be the size of a small mountain.

If the Earth were the size of a bacterium... okay, have to think here, let's see.  About twelve orders of magnitude?  So the Sun would be a tiny glowing speck about the size of a grain of dust.  The Solar System, out to the orbit of Neptune or so, would be about the size of a small room.  The Milky Way Galaxy would be um, um, about 10 to the ninth power meters is about a million kilometers across -- about the size of the Sun.

Bringing it back a little: to a bacterium, you are a world.  A small one, like a moon or something, but three-dimensionally full of holes and tunnels and such.

* * * * *

The boys got this Lego set for Christmas.  (That's not its official name, of course.)  It included a P. Squiddy alien -- this guy.  (See also.) 

But while the boys liked the set, they were nonplussed a little, because they already had a P. Squiddy.  Daddy, is he twins? 

Well, he can't be twins because we already have the Skull Twins.  So there has to be a backstory.

They still believe

It's probably the last year that all our children believe in Santa. 

Alan is seven and a half, David six.  By next year one or both of them will be a hardened little skeptic. 

But this year, they got the full treatment.  Much discussion of how Santa pulls it off.  (There are mysteries -- how does he get down our tiny chimney? -- but hey, Santa must not be showing all his cards.)  Milk and cookies left for him; empty glass and a couple of crumbs on the plate, come morning.  You know the drill.

Claudia pulled off a particular masterstroke.  The boys have been listening to Christmas music, and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" has been a particular favorite.  One of the boys came up with the idea of asking for Rudolph's autograph.  Reindeers don't sign autographs!  But they can do hoofprints.  Claude spent several minutes making a stamp out of a potato...

Anyway.  It was a good Christmas.

Miscellaneous Belgian Congo stuff

Odds and ends.

There needs to be a verb for noodling around on some particular topic online.  Rambling from link to link, and such?  "Googling" is just part of it.

Anyway.  I knew that, during WWII, the Belgian Congo stayed loyal to the Allies.  (This in contrast to the French African colonies, which split between Vichy and DeGaulle.)  What I did not know was that in 1941 the Congo mobilized a force of several thousand men -- native troops, native "bearers", and a handful of white officers -- marched north into the Sudan, and then marched east to invade Ethiopia. 

Ethiopia, of course, had been conquered by Mussolini a few years earlier -- poison gas and machine guns, and such -- and so was an Axis property, full of Italians.  Still, it was a pretty damn bold move on the part of the Belgians: a 2,000+ kilometer march through jungle, savannah and mountains, with an assault against a numerically superior and well entrenched foe at the end. 

There's not much about this online, but here's a .pdf of a 1942 pamphlet about it, or here's the same information as a web page.

Lego Space Police

A break from things Congo-related.

Today was the boys' last day of school, and the baby's last of child care.  Two weeks vacation for everyone!  Yay!  Well, we got through it last year.  So we know it can be done.

One thing I've wanted to do: get back to serious story telling.  I'm starting with the Lego Space Police.

Lego has a policy of not giving too much backstory to its little plastic characters.  Which makes sense.  The Space Police are kind of an extreme example, though.  There are bad guys (the Skull Twins, the guy with the squid head) and good guys (the Space Police) and they both fly around in cool-looking vehicles that a seven-year-old can build in an hour or so.  And that's about it.

But that's fine.  So far, the Skull Twins have used their mind control powers to steal a massive energy crystal (it's really a Bakugon, and if you don't know what a Bakugon is... well, some other time) from an auction house where Buzz Lightyear and a variety of McDonalds Happy Meal characters were bidding on it.  Then they went to Villains World, an unpleasant volcanic planet orbiting a black hole.  (The magma pools keep the atmosphere warm, but the constant eruptions and dust storms keep nosy neighbors away.)  After various contretemps with the other villains, the Space Police show up.  (Alan built a very neat little unmanned probe which tracked their ship.)  Big fight scene, many villains captured but some escape, big chase scene which ended with the bad guys activating their hyperdrive right on the planet's surface!  Did they survive?  We'll find out... tomorrow!

Well, we're going to have to fill the next two weeks somehow.  And serial stories do keep them interested, and can sometimes even be used for behavior modification.  Sometimes.

Home for Christmas, and some thoughts on Congolese history

I was starting to wonder, there.

There were absolutely no flights to Frankfurt.  So in the end I caught one to Hanover, a few hundred km further north.  Caught the last southbound train and arrived in Fulda just before midnight, in time to stand shivering in the falling snow, a long way from the equator.  I didn't much care, honestly.  I was neither in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, nor Charles DeGaulle Airport either.

Speaking of which, I have a tentative idea on why the Congo got so very screwed up.  These are from a conversation with Carlos, who is very good at helping me clarify my own thoughts.

Yet still more adventures in the McDonalds in Charles De Gaulle, Terminal 2A; or, the Congo and the Paris Club

I have been joined in the McDonalds by some very disconsolate Germans. 

They were supposed to fly to Frankfurt yesterday, but their flight was canceled.  So they got rescheduled onto a flight today, but that one got canceled too.  The next available flight is tomorrow morning.  So rather than spend yet another night at Charles de Gaulle Airport, they have decided to take a flight this evening to Berlin.  How will they get from Berlin to Frankfurt?  They do not know.  But at least it's in Germany, okay?

Outside, temperatures have risen just over freezing.  There's a wide broad expanse of snow on the tarmac just outside the window, and I can see it getting a bit slushy around the edges.

Let's talk about debt relief for the Congo.

Further adventures at the McDonalds in Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2A; or, banks of the Congo

Second day at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Last night's flight was cancelled; apparently the weather over Central Europe is continuing uncooperative.  So I got to stand in line for an hour at the transfer desk, then got a voucher for a night at a hotel and a boarding pass for the next afternoon.  Well, we shall see.

Meanwhile, let me carry on with some further thoughts about dollarization in the Congo.  If this is not the sort of thing that interests you... um, I dunno.  I was going to put another link there?  But somehow sitting here in the McDonalds is sapping my urge to surf the net for interesting links.  Although not, apparently, my urge to talk about dollarization.  Go figure.

The McDonalds in Charles De Gaulle Terminal 2A, again (and books)

Because, as noted two weeks ago, it has free wi-fi.

I read some books while in the Congo.  In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, by Michela Wrong, was good to excellent. Is this the only English biography of Mobutu in print?  Anyway, it weaves some pretty good journalism into the story, and -- based on my whole two weeks in the Congo -- she seems to know her stuff.  Recommended.

Blood River, by Tim Butcher, was considerably better than I thought it would be.  Since he's a reported for the Daily Telegraph, I was expecting a fairly predictable conservative screed about how Africa's problems are the fault of Africa's wicked leaders, corruption, and failure to adhere to good free market principles.  Not so.  It's actually a pretty good travelogue of travel through some alarming and awful places, along with a fascinating description of what fifty years of negative economic growth and deindustrialization look like.  Not very cheerful, but recommended.

The predictable conservative screed turned up in Africa: The Shackled Continent by Robert Guest.  Guest was the Economist's Africa correspondent for many years, and the whole book reads like a series of Economist articles.  There was a time when I would have grooved on this.  Today I find it almost unbearably annoying.  I know enough about Africa to know what he's downplaying or leaving out, and how important it is.  The fact that there are a few good bits -- the drive with the beer truck through rural Cameroon -- just makes the rest of it that much more annoying.  It's the first book in a while that I've just left behind.

I also read a volume of Kipling.  But reading Kipling in the Congo deserves a post of its own, if time allows.

Congo, Day Thirteen: Tired

It's raining outside.  I just want to go to bed.

Gave two presentations today -- one to the Ambassador and various Emba-people, one to the Congolese government -- and then had a longish meeting at USAID.  I have an executive summary thingy to write before leaving tomorrow, but I don't feel like doing that tonight.  Early bed.

-- Commenter Lorraine asked about various dishes here in Kinshasa.  Well, I have had capitaine (it's a river fish).  But otherwise, no. 

See, when travelling on business? I tend to be really conservative about food.  No salads.  Nothing with ice in it.  No fruit I haven't peeled myself.  All meats well done.  Nothing too spicy (though I have taken small doses of the local pili-pili).  Nothing too new and different.  Nothing from street vendors or little local restaurants... in fact, no restaurants that aren't regularly patronized by the expat community.

That is so boring that it makes me a little sad to type it, but there it is.  If I were living here, I would be a bit more daring; I'd want to discover exciting new local dishes, and I could afford to get sick now and then.  But most of my business travel consists of short, intense assignments where I'm often already stressed, short on sleep, and unable to exercise (the Grand Hotel has an exercise room, but it's been undergoing renovations since 2007).  And even if I did discover some fantastic new dish, I'd only be able to enjoy it once or twice before flying off to another continent, to return who knows when.

So I'm  not willing to take even modest chances.  I just can't afford to lose a day to illness (or a night to indigestion).  Sad but true.  It's sort of a monastic existence.

On the plus side, in Nairobi I found an all-night grocery store that sold McVities Digestive Biscuits, arguably the single best food substance ever!  So there's that.

Okay, to bed.

Congo, Day Twelve: Pause for perspective

Congo is big.

It's big, and it's poor, and the various pieces of its economy are so loosely connected that the analyst hesitates.  It can be debated whether there really is such a thing as an "economy of the Congo".  I am not talking only about regional disconnects -- though those are large, and historically significant -- but about the lack of links between sectors and levels of the economy. 

Much of the country's population consists of subsistence farmers who live far from any working roads, railroads or airfields, who have no access to banks, and who may go for months at a time without touching a Congolese Franc note, never mind a dollar.  Things like exchange rates and inflation affect these people very little.  Another large group -- several million people, by most estimates -- lives off of the mining sector, mostly by small scale or "artisanal" mining.  These people are in a sub-economy that is more monetized than that of the subsistence farmers, but not by much.  They do have to worry about exchange rates and such, but the price of their metals is more important.  And then there are the seven million urban inhabitants of Kinshasa.  Who, despite being desperately poor, are urban, meaning they live in a cash economy.  Exchange rates and inflation are a big deal for them, but largely in the sense of "will things poke along like before, get worse, or go to hell entirely?"

When I get to talking about dollarization, bank intermediation, and such, it's just worth remembering that we're talking about one sliver of Congo's economy.  (Or "Congo's economy".)  Interest rates and Central Bank policies and the like can have a huge impact on the urban Kinshasans, rather less on the miners.  For the subsistence farmers of the deep Congo basin, they're about as meaningful as rain falling on Mars.

Okay, I'm just coming off of another twelve hours in planes, buses and airports.  (The flight from Nairobi?  Sits on the tarmac in Brazzaville for an hour or two before proceeding to Kinshasa.  Hey, another African capital.  Or at least its airport runway.)  So that's all for right now. 

The Congolese Franc and its special friend, Mr. Dollar

Noel Maurer just wrote a whole post about how much he's enjoying the Congo stuff.  So I figure it's time to tackle a subject near to his heart: dollarization. 

This may take a couple of posts.  I'll try to keep it accessible for readers who are not economists.  (Note: IANA economist.)

First let's talk a little about the Congolese Franc.

Off-road driving, and Nairobi again

The road to the airport was blocked.

It took a while to figure this out.  Traffic stopped, for no reason that we could see; but no oncoming traffic was coming the other way, which was suggestive.  Though it took a while to realize this, because every other vehicle, in an attempt to get ahead, had swung into the oncoming lane, so that the road was filled solid.  Big trucks bearing pallets of refined copper from the mines, minibuses with young men hanging off the back: all stood idling, waiting.  Every minute or so a bicycle loaded with bundles of charcoal would pass us, heading for town.

Eventually we saw that the cars up ahead were, with great difficulty, turning around.  A bus began to work its way back and forth, sawing through the mass of stalled vehicles, until it miraculously managed to get pointed back towards town.  The whole mass began to ferment, break up, and turn back.  And we started to wonder if we would reach the airport in time for the (single, daily) flight to Nairobi.

But we had a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and a driver who knew the lay of the land.  So we left the main road, and cut across fields of red clay.  There had been heavy rains the night before, and the red clay of Lubumbashi, when wet, turns into astonishing masses of glutinous mud.  We lurched and swerved and plunged, sheets of dirty water flying as we slammed down into deep ruts and potholes.  Once or twice the wheels began to spin and we feared the worst.  But our driver knew his business, and we recovered and lurched onwards.  Off to one side we could see the accident that had blocked the road: an ugly looking thing involving a bus and one of the copper trucks.  The airport road would be blocked for hours to come.  Four-wheel-drive cars could attempt a long detour around; everyone else would have to go home.

How bad is Congo's government?

A commenter asks a reasonable question:

You mention that the Congolese government is incompetent. I think we can all concede that -- although Kabila the Younger is, sadly, probably the best leader Congo's ever had (but, really, CALIGULA would be the best leader the Congo has ever had.) Based on your experiences in Africa, how does the Congolese government stack up against its continental compatriots -- is it the worst you've yet seen?

The short answer is, yes, it's the worst I've yet seen.

The mouth of the Congo (2)

A little more about the lower Congo.

So there are these immense rapids, the largest in the world, cutting off most of the Congo basin from the lower river and the Atlantic.  Nothing larger than a kayak can descend the lower Congo to the sea, and even kayakers don't always get through.  In some spots the river runs through narrow gorges, flowing at over 50 km/h and becoming for a while the deepest river in the world at over 200m (650 feet) deep.  The rapids are so powerful that they create microenvironments that can create new species of fish.  There's one medium-size dam on the river already -- the Inga Dam, built in the 1970s as a showpiece for Mobutu's Zaire -- but it's not tapping a tenth of the river's potential.

A full-size hydroelectric system plus locks for shipping would utterly transform the region.  The amount of electricity that could potentially be generated is boggly-huge -- basically, the lower Congo is like the Mississippi dropping the height of the Chrysler building.  And locks or a canal would allow oceanic shipping far into the center of Africa.  It's such an obvious idea that it's been floated since colonial times, and it's still being discussed today.

But I'll be very surprised to see it happen.  The amount of money required is fairly immense -- much larger than Congo's current government budget, or indeed its entire GDP.  And while the project could, in principle, be quite profitable, the administrative, economic and social difficulties are at least as huge as the engineering ones. 

Apropos of which, I met an interesting engineer in Lubumbashi.

Lubumbashi: the Central Bank

Visited the regional Central Bank office today.  High point of the visit: money distribution.

The Congolese franc trades at about 900 to the dollar.  However, the largest note is the 500 franc -- about 55 cents.  So, large purchases require great masses of cash.  On Kinshasa's street of the moneychangers -- universally known as "Wall Street" -- one can see the changers sitting beside piles of cash, the notes assembled into bricks, the bricks piled high in stacks. 

The regional central bank was like that, only more so.  Besides Lubumbashi, Katanga Province has five or six towns large enough to have banks.  And each town gets a shipment of cash every sixty days.  Depending on the size of the town, the shipment will weigh between half a ton and six or seven tons of money.

Since the roads have pretty much collapsed, the cash is sent by air.  The bank puts the money into large metal lockers -- about the size and shape of an old-fashioned steamer trunk -- and loads them onto one of the little propellor planes run by Congo's many local air services.  The cash, along with a manager and several security guards, is then flown to the town and distributed to the local banks.

Lubumbashi, first impressions

My feelings about the Belgian colonialists grow ever more mixed.

On one hand, the Belgians sucked.  In terms of their colonies, they were basically meaner, dumber French.  There was the whole Congo Free State thing, where they managed to wipe out half the population of the Congo in 25 years or so.  Then fifty years of the Belgian Congo, which was better, but that's not saying much.  Twenty years after the Congo Free State had closed up shop, the Belgians killed seven thousand workers in four years on the Matadi-Kinshasa railway.  They didn't abolish the use of leather whips on Congolese workers until six months before independence.

It wasn't just the violence, though that's the biggest part of it.  The Belgians treated the locals with relentless contempt.  By the 1950s they'd allowed a small handful of Congolese to get high school degrees and to be considered "evolues" -- literally, "evolved ones" -- but Kinshasa was still a segregated town where Congolese had to get out of white districts after nightfall, and at independence there were less than twenty Congolese with university degrees in the entire country.

On the other hand, the Belgians did build some stuff.  I saw a little of this in Bujumbura, and more in Kinshasa.  But you can see it more clearly here in Lubumbashi, the former Elizabethville.

Nairobi, briefly

So we're off to Lubumbashi.

Formerly Elizabethville, pronounced loo bum BAH she, it's the capital of mineral-rich Katanga province.  (I think that's the official title: "mineral-rich Katanga".)  Katanga has a long and complicated history; it was very nearly part of Northern Rhodesia (what today is Zambia), but the Belgian expedition just pipped the British and King Leopold snatched it away.  Later, at independence, the Belgians tried to peel Katanga from the rest of the country, leading to the Congo Crisis and a brief but nasty civil war that accomplished little except to further blight Congo's already dim prospects.

But all that was a while ago.  Lubumbashi today is a provincial capital and a mining town, and... I don't know what else.  I guess we'll find out.

Oil, or not

From the frozen wastes of Cambridge, Massachusetts comes a haunting, mournful cry.  Yes,  Noel, I will link to you.  And on a subject close to your heart, I think. But first I must fly to Nairobi, and Lubumbashi, and then back again.

Meanwhile, on a couple of points Noel raises in his post:

• You are right to be surprised that the railroad from Mabadi works at all.  For several years during the war, it didn't.  I have no idea how Kinshasa managed with no access to the outside world except by air.  Lots of towns in the African interior are in that situation, but a city of six million?  It must have been... difficult.
• The secret police are an inheritance from Mobutu's day. Today they are scary; back then they were very very very scary.  They weren't very efficient at creating a police state, because not much in Congo is efficient, but they were quite good at keeping people terrified.
• The oil thing is its own strange and complicated topic.

Africa's 50th

June 30, 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence.

Congo won't be alone.  So far, only two sub-Saharan African countries have had 50th anniversaries -- Ghana and Guinea, which got their independence in 1958 and 1959.  But 1960 was the great boom year for decolonization.  So over the next 12 months there will be 50th independence ceremonies in Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Madagascar, both Congos, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon, Chad and Mauretania.  That's seventeen countries with almost half a billion people.

If I were writing for the Economist, or some such, I'd spend a couple of paragraphs on a beard-stroking retrospective about the high hopes of independence, and how they've been dashed by misgovernment and corruption and war, and how today a few glimmers of hope light the horizon, and blah blah like that.  But just thinking about that is boring, no?  So here's a thing: these celebrations look to be a really huge deal.  Here in the Congo, people are already talking about it.  In addition to being an immense national party, the government also views June 30 as a deadline by which it wants to accomplish various things.

Well, national anniversaries don't generally accomplish much except to leave behind a quickly dated monument or two.  Still, a continent-wide series of massive celebrations stretching over a year is a pretty cool thing by itself, no?

Congo, Day Five

More meetings.

The banking system is, as usual, surprisingly robust.  It seems to be very hard to kill a banking system.  War, coups, famine and terror may cause banks to go turtle and stop making loans to any but a few favored lenders, but when the dust settles the banks are still there.  Corruption and misregulation seem to be more serious threats than a war or two.

Congo has never had government bonds.  That's actually sort of strange.  Even Burundi has T-bills.  (And, weirdly enough, has never once defaulted on them.)  But Mobutu didn't like the idea, and then after he fell things were just too crazy for a while.  So, no bonds.  Foreign debt consists entirely of bank loans.  And when the government runs a deficit, it doesn't issue bonds: it just asks the Congolese Central Bank to lend it the money at zero interest.  Historically, this has led to problems.  They're talking about starting to issue bonds Real Soon Now, but they've been doing that for a while.

Does anyone want to hear about Congo's financial system?  Let's talk about Kinshasa a little

Kinshasa is a very poor city, but it is a city.  It has hair salons, car repair shops, dry cleaners.  (Dry cleaners are everywhere. I bet there are dry cleaners in Antarctica.)  Astonishing traffic -- there are a surprising lot of cars, and the roads are bad.  The driving is African, which is to say it would be terrifying if anyone could get up any speed.

There are several very expensive supermarkets aimed at expats.  (Everything imported is very expensive; see the last post for part of the reason why.)  Internet connectivity is spotty, but Blackberries seem to work just fine -- go figure. 

Because it's going to snow tomorrow

... a memory of happy summer days at Lewes Beach, DE.  Also, for the husband, because the Congo seems to be quite depressing.

The mouth of the Congo

The geography of the Congo is kinda strange.

Okay, the geography of most African countries is strange.  As someone or other said, Europe divided the region in a manner both completely self-serving and unbelievably haphazard, like monkeys at a salad bar.  But Congo -- as usual -- is an extreme case.  It might make sense to have a country that consisted of the Congo River basin.  But Congo consists of about 3/4 of the Congo basin, plus a bunch of other odds and ends tacked on around the edges.  Much of the north bank of the river is owned by Congo-Brazzaville (which is another country entirely).  The northern and eastern fringes of the country aren't part of the Congo Basin --- they're the Great Lakes region, part of east rather than central Africa.  And there's that weird long bulge into Zambia, which deserves a post of its own.

One of the obvious odd bits is at the mouth of the river.  If you look closely at a map of the Congo, you'll notice that although it's immense -- "as big as the United States east of the Mississippi" is the example that's always used -- it just barely kisses the Atlantic Ocean: Congo has only only about 25 miles (40 km) of coastline.

Look even more closely, and you'll notice that the Congo coastline snips off a piece of Angola.  Angola is a large country, and most of it is to the south of the Congo, but a little piece about the size of Rhode Island (or, if you're European, Montenegro) is north of the Congo's Atlantic coast.  The reason for this is complicated, and involves a little history.

Congo, Day Two

Well, that was a day.

We spent much of the day at the U.S. Embassy.  A while back I blogged about how the modern American embassy tends to suck, because it's a big ugly fortress built outside of town.  Well, the Embassy in Kinshasa is a small, ugly fortress in the middle of town.  It's the first U.S. embassy I've ever been in that was... I'm not sure how to put this.  Grubby?  Dingy?  Run-down?  It was hard to put my finger on it, but there was a general air of dilapidation that was very unlike what I've come to expect.  Most American embassies have an ambience somewhere between "shopping mall" and "community college".  This felt more like a public defender's office.

(This is not to harsh on the Embassy staff, who were uniformly professional and helpful to a bunch of consultants dropped suddenly in their laps.  In fact, I think it's a tribute to the State Department that employee morale seemed as high as it was.)

Anyway.  We had a security briefing, which can be summarized as "alarming"...

Congo, Day One

So I'm in the Congo.

What I'm doing: I'm part of an assessment team, looking at problems of economic governance.  There are five of us, and we're led by a former U.S. Ambassador.

Why: well, the proximate cause is that Secretary of State Clinton visited back in August and promised the Congolese government some help.  A lot of foreign aid has flowed into the Congo, but not very efficiently There's not much coordination among the different donors, so some sectors are getting more aid than they can absorb, while others that could provide real benefits with a modest bit of assistance are being ignored.  Meanwhile the Congolese government has a limited capacity for determining needs and priorities in a methodical, objective sort of way.  So an overview by outsiders could, perhaps, be useful.

The larger cause is that China is moving into the Congo in a big way.  They recently inked a deal with the government to build all sorts of infrastructure -- roads, rails, hospitals -- in return for the output of several major mines.  But that's a long complicated story, and deserves a post of its own.

Saturday night, Kinshasa

Haven't seen much of Kinshasa, yet.  Arrived at night, and it's not a well-lit town.

A few random notes.  If you've ever traveled in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, you'll know that when a plane lands there, people -- the passengers on board -- clap.  The first time this happened, it struck me as a little worrisome.

Well, when you land in Kinshasa, people don't clap.  They break into full and loud applause, complete with cheers and whistles.

The baggage claim was crowded, hot, and very slow.  The expediter was there, though, so I was "handled" and put in the car.  The road from the airport is better than you might think, though there was one stretch that was basically a single huge flooded pothole.  Apparently the Chinese are about to sink a lot of money into fixing roads around here.

The Grand Hotel is about what you'd expect: fading carpets, loud air conditioning, faint smell of mold in the room.  The internet connection is very intermittent.  I went down to the front desk to discuss this and everyone immediately lost all their English.  Well, it will probably be good for me to have limited online time.  Really.  I'm sure it will.

Okay, bed time here.  More in a bit --

Saturday morning, Charles DeGaulle

Sitting in the McDonalds, which has free wi-fi.

Here's a question: will free wi-fi eventually be something that gets offered pretty much everywhere?  If so, how long will it take?  If not, where will the holdouts be? 

You'd think that the long-term trend would be towards ever greater availability.  On the other hand, places with large numbers of "captive" laptop users -- airports come to mind -- will be inclined to charge for wi-fi, because, hey, they can.  Other-other hand, the airport will have to impose a rule on all its lessees prohibiting them from offering it free, or everyone will end up at the McDonalds.  Other-other-other hand, why hasn't this airport done that yet?

Anyway.  Morning flight out of Frankfurt.  I came yesterday to put my mother-in-law and Jacob on the plane to Cyprus, then took the S-Bahn into downtown Frankfurt for dinner with some gamers who I'd previously only met online.  (There is a very lively English-language campaign in Frankfurt.  So close, and yet so far.)  Stayed overnight at a cheap hotel.  Got up at 4 am and walked a mile to the Bahnhof to catch the train to the airport.  (At 4 am on a Saturday morning, there are a surprising number of people on the streets of Frankfurt.  Many of them seem to be just heading for bed.)  And now I'm in Charles DeGaulle Airport, about to catch my flight to Kinshasa, Congo.

About which more anon.

Friday links once more

From coffee bean to carbon atom.  I really like this one.  I can remember when I thought all single-celled organisms were more or less the same size.  Not so... if an amoeba was a blue whale, bacteria would be dogs and cats and rats and mice, more or less.  (And viruses, hey, would be insects.)

Is Bosnia doomed?  I should blog about this over at the Fistful.  Meanwhile, readers who find this sort of thing interesting will find this interesting.

An Atlantic article about an interesting town in Azerbaijan.  There was a little bit of this in Yerevan -- Iranian kids coming up there to party, type of thing -- but not nearly as much.

I had never heard of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative before I started researching this Congo trip.  But, wow, they have a blog and everything.  Unfortunately, it's not clear if they're actually doing any good yet.  Still, props for trying -- someone should be doing this, and one has to start somewhere.

The World Bank Development blog and Vox are the sorts of places I go to once or twice a month, to skim.  Most of the stuff there isn't for me, but occasionally a piece turns up like this one.  It's not a world-shaking insight, but I'd say it's correct, relevant, and useful -- which is not bad for two pages long.

There's no particular reason to link to this article, except that I think it showcases a number of tropes pretty well.  The first sentence of the third paragraph, for instance, includes the words "languishing" and "infected" -- which, right there, tell you what kind of article this is going to be. 

Also, there was a line that made me laugh out loud.  Can you spot it?  It's near the end.  It is --

The obligatory Sarah Palin post

Everyone in the blogosphere has done one, so here's mine.

A while back, the guys at FiveThirtyEight.com discussed whether Palin could win the Republican nomination in 2012.  Nate Silver said yes, while his co-blogger Tom Schaller said no way.

I'm with Schaller, but I'm going to add an argument that I think he missed: running for President is goddamn hard work.  If you're serious about it, you have to start six months to a year before the Iowa caucuses, and then you have to spend pretty much all your time campaigning.  Long, long before a single ballot is cast, you will have endured endless rubber chicken dinners in Iowa and winter festivals in New Hampshire and eight-hour marathon fundraising sessions on the telephone, shaking down donors for cash.

Ten trains

Had to go to Bonn today, to get my visa for the Democratic Republic of Congo.

An obvious first question is, why is the DRC's Embassy in Bonn when the capital moved to Berlin ten years ago?  Well, I don't know the answer to that, but here's a guess: there are significant Congolese diasporas in France and in Belgium, and maybe down in Switzerland.  The Bonn embassy can serve parts of those countries, which an embassy in Berlin could not.

Of course, it's also possible that Berlin is just too damn expensive.

The fallen Falcons

Sixty-five years ago last week, an American bomber crashed just down the road from here.

The bomber was a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress based out of England.  It had a crew of nine, all of whom survived the crash.  It hit between the villages of Heufurt (which is about 2km from here) and Nordheim (which is about 5 km further down the Streu).

In the last post, I noted that the valley of the Streu had very little military significance.  This was a good thing for the crew, because -- other than sending their sons away, and rationing and the like -- the war had not much touched this region.  No bombs had fallen on Nordheim or Heufurt or Fladungen.  So the bomber crew were not killed on the spot by enraged civilians with clubs and pitchforks -- which was a thing that happened, some places, when a bomber went down too close to the people it had been bombing.