Halfway down the Danube

Around Baalbek

We had the place to ourselves.

It’s the off season, for one thing – tourists don’t usually show up in great numbers until April. Driving over the summit of the Lebanon Mountains, there was still plenty of snow on the ground. (Baalbek itself was fine, though – sunny and pleasant.) More to the point, there’s been some shooting along the border near Baalbek… supposedly the Lebanese Army squaring off against ISIS in Syria, though who knows. Anyway, in two hours of strolling around Baalbek I think we saw maybe three other tourists.

So Baalbek. As I noted in the last post, it’s this huge pile of ruins that used to be a pre-Christian religious site.  It was big in Phoenician and Hellenistic times, and then the Romans made it bigger.  At various times, almost a dozen different Emperors stopped here to sacrifice and take the omens. The scale of the place is impressive. For instance, there were dozens of granite columns that weighed sixty tons each. There’s no granite in Lebanon, so these had to be quarried in Egypt, floated down the Nile and overseas, and then hauled several thousand feet up and over the Lebanon Mountains. Our guide said that this was done by building two parallel “walls” – stone rails, basically – and rolling the columns along. There are also some ridiculous large solid limestone blocks – we’re talking slabs the size of a freight container, weighing hundreds of tons. There are a lot of theories about how they moved those, but apparently it’s still an open question.

(Our guide: it’s not required, but it is strongly encouraged that one takes a guide through Baalbek. Ours was pretty good. His price was reasonable – 35,000 Lebanese pounds or about $25 to guide the three of us for about 90 minutes – and he was knowledgeable and spoke good English. His patter was a bit rehearsed at times, but after the thousandth time that’s probably not surprising.)

Religion in the pagan world involved sacrifice, so the center of the complex was two sacrificial altars, one for large animals like sheep and cows and another for birds and other small stuff. Apparently the mechanics of this were fairly well known: there were basins of holy water for washing the animals in advance, flames in which to throw some of the meat, gutters (still intact) for carrying off the blood, and so forth. It does make one wonder: was the atmosphere like a slaughterhouse, all terrified bellowing and squawking and the thick reek of blood everywhere? Or did they keep it neat?

Mark Twain came through Baalbek in the 1870s, and was suitably impressed. "At eleven o'clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec, a noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It has stood there for thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travelers; but who built it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered. One thing is very sure, though. Such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled or even approached in any work of men's hands that has been built within twenty centuries past."  Twain could get a little overheated, but Baalbek really is quite something; the intact Temple of Bacchus deserves to stand beside the Acropolis, and the ruins of the main Temple of Jupiter must have been ridiculously spectacular.

It did leave me wondering: was Roman Baalbek a purely top-down construction, a prestige project for various Emperors?  Or was it funded and maintained by a huge stream of pilgrims over hundreds of years?  And if the latter... what a curious thought, to think of large numbers of people in the Roman world traveling for hundreds of miles for religious reasons.  Did the medieval pilgrim routes simply recreate something that had already existed a thousand years earlier?

There were no less than three museums in the grounds -- a Roman/Phoenician one, a Mameluke one, and a big general historical museum up by the front.  The Mameluke one was there because the Mamelukes turned Baalbek into a fortress for a while, so a lot of the Roman ruins have medieval ruins on top of them, with arrow slits and Moorish arches.  The Roman/Phoenician one contained a lot of sarcophagi, including one with a young woman's skeleton still inside.  Scattered at her feet were a number of tiny glass containers.  At first I thought they were candlesticks, but the guide said they were tear vials: mourners would collect their tears, and drop them into the grave.

In the Temple of Bacchus, there's a plaque commemorating Kaiser Wilhelm's visit to the site.  It's in 19th century German on one side, Ottoman Arabic on the other.  Apparently the Kaiser was a patron of the archeological diggings here.  History doesn't have a lot of good to say about Wilhelm, but this was a thing.

I could have killed another hour or two wandering around -- I never did finish touring the third museum -- but then we would have ended up driving down the mountain after dark.  So after about 90 minutes we moved along. There were a few touts hanging around the parking lot trying to sell us stuff, but there were so few tourists that they were pretty half-hearted.  One guy was selling yellow Hezbollah t-shirts: the Hezbollah flag is  bright yellow with a fist clutching an AK-47 on it.  I admit that I briefly considered it. (When you work in development, you're tempted by the occasional conversation starter.).  But, no.

Afterwards we stopped at a local restaurant and had roasted garlic chicken with mezze and arrack. “Mezze” is the term for all the little dishes, hummus and stuffed grape leaves and babaghanoush and such, that are brought as preludes or accompaniments to a meal. Arrack is wine alcohol mixed with aniseed; it is served cold, tastes like licorice and turns cloudy when you mix it with water.

Back in Ottoman times, there was a railroad that ran down the length of the Levant from Turkey, through Syria and Palestine, all the way to Mecca. Then someone – either the Ottomans or the French, I don’t know – built a spur going up over the mountains into the Bekaa Valley. As noted, the Lebanon Mountains are nearly a mile high and steep, so this was no small effort. Presumably the idea was to open up the immense agricultural potential of the Bekaa to export markets. So Lebanon used to have a functioning railroad system, with connections running north to Turkey and south to Egypt. But in 1947, the southern link was cut when Palestine became Israel; and then during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the whole network got broken up and destroyed. No train has actually run in Lebanon since the 1980s. And none will again for many many years, if ever; the tracks have been torn up in many places, and the rights-of-way have been built over.

I mention all this because it happens that our restaurant was next to an old rail yard. It was pretty big; I’m guessing it was the end-of-the-line yard for the Bekaa Valley branch. And sitting on the rusty tracks were several train cars, including three locomotives. Eating our garlic chicken while sipping our iced arrack, we could look out the window right at them. The locomotives were solid orange with rust, but looked otherwise pretty intact; they looked like coal-burning steam engines, built sometime in the first quarter of the 20th century. A couple of stray dogs picked their way around the old rail yard, but otherwise it was still and quiet, and obviously had been for a long time.

(Did I mention that garlic chicken, or garlic anything, is a rare treat? Claudia is violently allergic to garlic, so I gave it up when we got married. But when I’m on the road… Also, the Lebanese know how to make a good French fry! After years of soggy, greasy, tasteless Eastern European French fries, this is a tiny but real pleasure.)

On the way back to Beirut, we passed a camp of Syrian refugees. There are several hundred thousand Syrians in Lebanon right now, fleeing the civil war there, and it doesn’t look like they’re going home any time soon. The refugee camp looked like someone had put several hundred sheds down in the middle of a farmer’s field.

Going down the mountain, we ran into a a half hour of gridlock traffic -- that happens a lot, in Lebanon, and often for no visible reason -- and then, after we emerged, into a thick bank of fog: we literally could not see more than a single car length ahead.  Somewhere in there our driver Jamil asked us if he could buy us a coffee, which turned out to be Lebanese for "I need to stop and get a coffee".  So we did, at a little general store by the side of the road.  And then we came down out of the mountains and emerged from the clouds, and drove into Beirut by the bright light of the sun setting over the Mediterranean.

A trip to Baalbek

Went to Baalbek today.

I'm in Lebanon for a few weeks, about which more anon. If you're in Lebanon, you really need to visit Baalbek, because it's amazing. It was original a huge Phoenician temple complex devoted to the worshop of Baal -- yeah, the guy from the Old Testament -- and then the Hellenistic rulers reinterpreted it as "we're really worshipping Zeus, Aphrodite, and Dionysus", and then the Romans came along and rebuilt it all into an even more immense and spectacular complex dedicated to Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus. It's just ridiculously huge -- acres and acres of ruins -- and there's enough left standing to give you some idea of how astonishing it must have been, back in the day. It was a major, major religious site, maybe the closest equivalent to a Mecca that the ancient world had.

We (my colleagues and I) were considering not going to Baalbek, because there'd been some shooting and shelling along the border nearby. Supposedly ISIS is present just across the border into Syria. (Lebanese may disagree with each other on a lot of things, but they almost all agree in despising ISIS.) But we discussed it and decided to go, albeit with care. I have a negative Life List of wonders of the world that I've managed to miss despite spending time nearby -- Angkor Wat, Petra (twice), Victoria Falls -- and I really didn't want to add Baalbek. Odds and ends from the trip:

• Jamil, our driver, was a little terrier of a man, well past retirement age but still an extroardinarily aggressive driver, and still gifted with a thick, glossy head of white hair. (Which he attributed to using only the local soap from his home village, instead of shampoo.) Jamil liked to stop and yell at people for directions. I know that casual interpersonal interactions in the Arab world can seem odd to Westerners, but seriously... Jamil just shouted at people. Everyone was pretty cool, though, and we managed to get everywhere eventually.
• To get to Baalbek, you have to climb up and over the Lebanon Mountains, which are nearly a mile high and really steep. Jamil's radiator immediately began overheating. (I don't know how old Jamil's car was, but it still had a tape deck. With a tape in it.) Jamil kept pulling over and putting water in. It didn't help. When he dropped us off at Baalbek he said he was going off to "get a new radiator". We assumed he meant a radiator hose or something like that but when we met him again a couple of hours later he said, no, he had bought a new radiator and had it installed.
• Baalbek is up at the northern end of the Bekaa Valley, which means it's about as far as you can get from Beirut without leaving the country. (This is not actually very far... maybe 100 km.) The Bekaa is a lush, gorgeous valley, just 20 miles from the sea but three thousand feet above sea level, that lies between the Lebanon Mountains and the imaginatively named Anti-Lebanon Mountains, a parallel range that lies ten miles further east and inland. So the Bekaa is about ten miles wide and it stretches for about a hundred miles, north to south. It's ridiculously fertile and is the reason that little Lebanon is actually a major exporter of agricultural products: wine, olives, dairy, you name it. The Middle East's largest potato chip factory is up there.
• One passes a lot of military checkpoints. Most of these had just a couple of bored-looking soldiers: you slow down, they glance at you and wave you through. I don't know what the purpose of these is. Maybe just to make clear that there's a military presence?
• The area around Baalbek is almost entirely populated by Shi'as. It's pretty easy to tell when you're in a Shi'a town. The women are suddenly wearing headscarves, for starters. (This is not the case in most of Lebanon.) The signs get a lot more Arabic, and English and French become less common. There are still plenty of billboards, but fewer female models and they're usually wearing more clothes. And big posters and cutouts of Shi'a heroes start appearing along the roadsides... pudgy clerics in black with bushy beards and glasses, beefy looking military men in camo garb.
• There's Baalbek the archeological site, and then there's the town of Baalbek -- about 100,000 people, almost all of them Shi'a. And the town of Baalbek also includes a huge Shi'a shrine. It's a shrine to Sayeeda Khalwa, who was a daughter of Imam Hussein. This gets into come complex early Islamic history, but here's the short version: Imam Hussein is a holy martyr to the Shi'a. He was the loser of a power struggle in the generation of Islamic rulers that followed Mohammed's death. You may remember reading or hearing about the big Shi'ite shrine in Karbala, Iraq? That's the shrine to Imam Hussein. So, after the battle, it seems that his family were marched captive back to Arabia. And during the trip, his youngest daughter -- who was just a tiny thing, less than five years old -- died.And she was buried in Baalbek the town, not half a mile down the road from the old temple complex. And so today there is a huge and beautiful mosque and shrine there.  I mean, just gorgeous: all peacock blue and green with a shiny golden dome . And it particularly attracts Shi'ite women from all over the Middle East.

I suppose I should write something about Baalbek itself. But that may take a little while, and I don't want to start another blog post and leave it unfinished -- I've done that more than once over the last little while. So let's get this up, and I'll try to come back to Baalbeck shortly.

Kyrgyzstan

I spent most of the month of April in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic in Central Asia.  And now, seven months later, I'm going to blog a little about it!

I liked Kyrgyzstan.   Bishkek, the capital, was very Soviet. Wide streets, huge squares, women sweeping the sidewalks in the gray light of dawn.  It was spring, and I think spring in that part of the world comes on fast -- it was rather chilly when we arrived, four weeks later it was mellow and warm with flowers everywhere. 

Kyrgyzstan is a smallish country that is mostly mountains.  Bishkek sits on the plains some miles north of where the mountains end.  When the air is clear (which, since this is a former Soviet city, it isn't often) you can see the mountains in the distance.  They're the Tien Shan -- a range I'd barely heard of.  But they're huge: five, six thousand meters. Higher than the Alps, steeper than the Rockies. I had no idea.

Kyrgyzstan's economy has three pillars.  One is remittances from Kyrgyz workers who have left the country, mostly for Kazakhstan and Russia.  (That's pretty common across the former Soviet Union -- Moldova was much the same.)  The second is the mining and re-export of gold. While we were there, the gold bubble popped, which caused a certain amount of entirely justified consternation.  The crash in gold prices is going to knock a couple of points off Kyrgystan's GDP this year, and they were pretty poor to begin with.

The third pillar is that Kyrgyzstan  is a major re-export center for Chinese goods. They come across the border on trucks and then get transshipped to Russia and the other Central Asian republics.  At one point in the visit, we went to the "bazaar" outside of town, which combines wholesale and retail.  Whatever image the word "bazaar" conjures up, this didn't much look like it.  It was more like a series of enormous interlinked warehouses covering a couple of hundred hectares.

One section of the bazaar was all Chinese shoes. imagine a metal roof, two or three hundred meters long and maybe 20 meters off the ground. Under it, freight containers in rows two high. The lower containers are mostly retail outlets and/or showcases. The upper row of containers, connected by flimsy catwalks, are wholesale, just filled with shoes.  A million shoes? More? Anyway, enough to hit some critical mass that the whole place had a special smell. glue and leather and plastic and whatever they make soles out of.  You've had a whiff of it in a shoe store but never like this. A Platonic Smell Of Shoe.

Unfortunately, the transshipment business is also not doing so well -- the Chinese are figuring out how to bypass Bishkek, eliminate the middlemen, and sell directly to the Russians and Kazakhs.  So, all in all it's looking like a rocky year or two ahead for the Kyrgyz economy.

What else?  Well, Istopped by the Bishkek train station. It was very Soviet -- reminded me of the one in Chisinau, and also the one in Yerevan.  Apparently the station (along with some 200 km of track) was built by German POWs after WWII. Also, it seems that many of the POWs died in the process, and were dumped in mass graves somewhere in the area. I haven't been able to find any details online, though. There was no monument or memorial, not even a plaque or something, in the train station.  Kyrgyzstan was a back

The Kyrgyz themselves?  I really liked the Kyrgyz.  They're phenotypically very diverse -- Kyrgyz can look like Mongols, like south Chinese, like Turks, or even like South Asians.   But if you speak the language, and self-identify as Kyrgyz, you're Kyrgyz.  (Kyrgyz is a Turkic language.  Everyone is bilingual in Kyrgyz and Russian.)  The folks I met and worked with consistently were friendly, hospitable, and professional.  Kyrgyzstan has all the standard post-Soviet problems, but the people are pleasant and the food is good.  

Last random detail?  The Kyrgyz, like the Mongols, play a game that is basically bocce ball with sheep vertebra. I thought it was a cultural relic that got trotted out for tourists maybe. But no -- walking through a big monument square, there were a bunch of kids and teenagers playing it, and they were obviously deadly serious.

Kyrgyzstan: I really liked it, and would go back any old time.  (And if I do, I won't take seven months to get around to blogging about it.)

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.)

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

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?

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?

 

 

 

 

Chisinau, Day Forty-five or so

Well, that went by quickly.

Arrived in Moldova, started work.  Flew home two weeks later.  Picked up Claudia and kids.  Drove across Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, and Romania to Moldova.  That was... about a month ago.

-- The drive?  Not too bad, considering.  We bought one of those pod things that go on top of the car.  The boys watched a lot of videos.  Stayed the first night outside of Budapest (Hungary) the second outside of Brasov (Romania).  Leah threw an utter shrieking tantrum for an hour or so on the morning of Day Three: enough! of this driving!  I want OUT!! -- but we got through it.

We found a house.  It's fifteen minutes walk from work, in a quiet residential neighborhood.  It looks kind of like a castle and has a huge attic and a yard.  The boys like it, which is good.

Claudia is home schooling the boys, which is hard, especially since we don't have a baby sitter just now.  It's all kids, all day long for her.  We're hoping to get some help in next month.  Meanwhile, she's going at it with the two older boys: spelling, writing, math, you name it.

I'm running the project.  We're doing stuff.  We got a law passed last week.  By "we" I mean here my predecessor and our component manager, who worked on it for the last fifteen months; I had very little to do with it.  Still: law on protecting investors!  Being a minority shareholder in Moldova is no longer a very very bad idea.  (Whether it's yet a good idea remains to be seen.)  Oh, and we got audited, and passed.  Again, not much to do with me, but hey.

More seriously, we're trying to sprint for the finish line.  The project will end sometime in October, so that's just six months away.  Lots to do.

And then today we took our first trip outside of Chisinau.  We went to Orheiul Vecchei (or-HAY-ul VEK-ay), which is sort of like a miniature Grand Canyon carved by a Mississippi oxbow.  Seriously: you have a river that flows through two hairpin curves back to back, making a long flat S-curve, while eroding down through a couple of hundred feet of soft limestone.  So there are some pretty impressive cliffs, and then in between the hairpins are two parallel ridges -- penninsulas pointing in opposite directions, yeah?  These have eroded down some, so they're not as high as the cliffs around them, but they're still quite something; long narrow spits of land with cliffs dropping down to the water.  It's a natural defensive spot, so -- unsurprisingly -- there are archeological finds going back to the Neolithic.  Monastery, castle, the Golden Horde had a small palace up there for a while at one point.  These days there's a small village and a church.  It's pretty neat.

Anyway: it was a nice drive.  The road was pretty dire, but so what -- we're in Moldova.  Warm spring weather, after a week of rain. 

That was a long hiatus!  Do I still want to blog?  Let's see.

 

 

 

 

 

To Zambia

And so to Zambia.

Zambia's a medium-big, landlocked country in South Central Africa.  It's in a truly dreadful neighborhood; it shares borders with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Zimbabwe.  Remarkably, Zambia has had a more-or-less peaceful history since independence, with just a couple of local rebellions and one failed coup attempt in 1997. 

To get here I flew via Johannesburg, which is twelve hours from Frankfurt.  (Night flight, so I didn't see a thing; dozed fitfully and read.)  Jo'Burg airport is delightful -- clean and lovely.  The tiles on the floor are in a brown and white "African" pattern which is really nice.  Images of Nelson Mandela are everywhere.  There are a couple of good bookstores, which I may hit on the way out.

Then to Lusaka, capital of Zambia.  Lusaka is about 15 degrees south and about 1200 meters up, which means it has a hot tropical climate notably moderated by altitude.  Both days so far have been hot, getting up to around 37 (high 90s) but then dropping down to 20 or less (mid 60s) at night.  I like this.

Cecil Rhodes, that awesome lunatic, intended for "Northern Rhodesia" to be a white man's country.  And, you know?  It perhaps could have been.  It was thinly populated.  The natives were divided into small tribes, militarily much less threatening than the large Mashona And outside of the low, sweltering Zambezi Valley, most of it was free of the fevers that killed whites wholesale.  In an alternate universe where the British Empire lasted another 50 years, Zambia might have seen a million white settlers.  But in our world, there were never enough whites interested in settling a distant frontier when there was still plenty of land in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe).  So while there were (and still are) white Zambians, they were never more than three percent of the population, and are probably well under one percent today.

Zambia is not a crowded country.  It's about the size of Texas, but there are only 13 million Zambians.  And Lusaka is an inland city that's not on a lake or river -- it just grew up around the intersection of the country's two biggest roads.  So Lusaka sprawls.  There are only a few tall buildings in the downtown; otherwise, the city is just growing outward onto the veldt.

I got a nice walk in today -- 4 or 5 km.  (I'd been planning to walk about twice that far, but the midday sun changed my mind.)  Walked up to the new shopping mall on the Great Eastern Road, then came back through a pleasant neighborhood of tree-lined streets,that had obviously been a residential suburb back in colonial times.  The streets are mostly in pretty good condition, which is encouraging. I stopped for lunch, and to cool off, at an Indian restaurant -- Zambia's Indian population is small compared to Kenya's or Tanzania's, but as usual in Africa it occupies several key economic niches, with the pleasant spinoff of good Indian food.

Tomorrow: talking to bankers.

 

 

 

Bonobos

Today was a good day.

I haven't been thinking that a lot, here.  Nothing bad has happened to me in Kinshasa, but I haven't really fallen in love with it, either. 

But today?  Good day.

I got to sleep half an hour longer (good).  Then went with the team to breakfast at the one French patisserie downtown.  I went there on the last trip, but that was for lunch and it was crowded.  Breakfast is better.  Leisurely breakfast, with coffee and conversation: good!

(Most mornings I've been skipping breakfast, because the hotel charges $30 for the breakfast buffet.  Also skipping lunch a lot.  I bought a couple of 400-gram bags of peanut M&Ms, and have been surviving until dinnertime by snacking on them.  Yeah, I know.)

Long-time readers may recall that on these trips, we usually have a half-day free on the first weekend to do something interesting.  This time, we decided to visit a bonobo rehabilitation place about an hour outside Kinshasa.

It was awesome.

Down to Congo

None of the jobs came through.

It’s a disappointment.  On the other hand, it removes a lot of uncertainty.  There’s one other job still out there, but it can’t happen until December at the earliest.  So, we have another season in Fladungen – and we know this, which allows us to make plans.

And I have work, at least for the moment.  I’m writing this in Kinshasa, Congo.  I’ll be in the Congo until October 5, looking at agricultural supply chains.  So there’s that.

So.  Down to the Congo we go, once more!  How was it?

Honky-tonk border town

In this case, the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The border crossing at Bwera is at the far western edge of Uganda, in the northeast of the DRC.  It's up in the Ruwenzori mountains, and there's not a lot nearby.  So I wasn't expecting much.

First surprise: the road on the Ugandan side is really good.  The Ugandan government has been on a roadbuilding kick in recent years.  To reach the border we drove south from Fort Portal to Kasese (75 km) and then east to Mpondwe by the border (36 km).  The first leg took us 90 minutes, but only because we had to keep slowing down to go through villages; the road was smooth and broad all the way, clean fresh asphalt.  The leg to the border was if anything even better: 36 km in forty minutes, tops.  If you've travelled any distance in Central Africa you have some idea how amazing those times are.

Anyway.  Bwera is a surprisingly busy border town of maybe 15,000 people.  There were a lot of trucks lined up there.  The formalities at the border can take some time; meanwhile, the town of Bwera stands ready to greet the hungry, thirsty, tired, lonely truck driver and deal with his various needs.  Cold beer?  A big-screen TV showing the latest World Cup game?  Negotiable affection?  Fried food on a stick?  You can find it in Bwera.  

Also, for some reason the town is full of motorcycles.  Well, most Ugandan towns are, but these were unusually large and shiny.  I have no idea what that's about.

The Full Inbox of Life

Was offline for a couple of days: internet outage at the hotel, then on the road.  My, the e-mails pile up.

Saturday was a travel day -- eight hours drive from Kampala west, nearly to the border with Congo.  The road was sort of random: it would be good, then horrible, then fine; there'd be lots of traffic, then none.  (Though getting out of Kampala was horrible: two hours, traffic all the way.)

By tradition, these assessments get a single break activity, usually on the Saturday night or Sunday morning at the end of the first week.  (End of the second week, we're all preparing for our big presentation.)  This time we stayed at lodge in a game park -- Queen Elizabeth, out by Lake Albert.  So, after two years of regular travel to Africa, I finally did the African game park thing.

It was pretty cool, actually.

Dar Es Salaam, cont'd

The weather is gorgeous.  Hot and sunny every day, warm pleasant starry evenings.  I go out just to look at Orion tilting upside-down over the zenith, and Canopus way high up the southern sky.

I'm still not seeing much of Dar outside of meeting rooms and offices.  Had a meeting at the campus of Dar Es Salaam University this afternoon.  It's immense, and I would have loved to have spent an hour or two wandering around.  Not to be.  (I did see a flyer for this organization, which I thought was pretty nifty.  I'd love to meet the person who decided their logo should be a pangolin.)

Dar doesn't have much of a downtown yet.  Four million people, but only a handful of tall buildings.  There is a city center, which we're right in the middle of, so that many of our appointments are just a few minutes away.  This is very different from (for instance) Manila, where every appointment involved between ten and ninety minutes' drive.

The roads, at least in the city proper, are astonishingly good.

Dar Es Salaam

Mostly I've been in the hotel, or in meetings.  So, not too many impressions yet.

That said, my stint in the Congo last month has left me very inclined to be impressed by Dar.  The streets -- so clean!  The traffic -- it moves!  The hotel -- hardly any weird smells, and no strange stains on the carpet at all!

Also, Tanzania is the first African country I've encountered that has its own bookstore chain. True, it's just four stores.  And the books are new imports at Western prices (~10 for a paperback, $20 for a TPB) so they're mostly catering to expats and the rich.  But still: it makes me like the place right off.

I may or may not blog about my work, but here's one thing that has come up.  Tanzania's economy has grown rapidly in the last decade, but it's been the sort of growth the makes the rich get richer (and the capital city get very livable for expats) without moving most of the country forward.  There have been dazzling advances in a few sectors -- finance, communications -- but stuff like agriculture hasn't changed at all; most of the country is farmers, and most of the farmers are living almost exactly the same way they did twenty years ago.  Except now there are more of them.

On the plus side, they've almost totally dodged the ethnicity / tribalism bullet.  (Thank you, Mwalimu.)

Oh, and the Chinese are here in a big way.  We just missed the Chinese Minister of Commerce by a day. Not a big surprise; that seems to be the default in east and central Africa now.

Next up: Tanzania

So I'm going to Tanzania in two weeks.

Sixteen months ago I'd never been to any African country.  The count now stands at five: Burundi, Senegal, Uganda, Congo, and now Tanzania.

It would of course be totally banal and stupid to marvel at how different from each other these countries are, how much diversity there is in this huge continent.  Fortunately, I seem to lack the gene that codes for "care if I look stupid".  Frickin' Africa, man.  Senegal was nothing like Uganda, which in no way resembles the Congo, while Burundi was its own little slab of strange.

I'm tempted to do a general Africa post, but I think I'd like to wait until I'm back from Tanzania.  So, sometime in February.

Meanwhile, I just got back from the dentist.  Because I do have the Crappy Teeth Gene.  My dad had bad teeth, and so does almost everyone on that side of the family.  You don't want me to go into detail, but let's just say the local dentist here in Fladungen -- there is just one, and he's Claudia's first cousin -- is already accustomed to us calling him and saying, "Doug has to go to Africa in two weeks, and he just cracked a tooth."

Anyway.  If any of you have spent any time in Dar Es Salaam or Dodoma, I'll be interested.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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"...

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.

Back from Dakar

Didn't get to see so much this time.  Short visit -- flew in late Saturday night, flew out Wednesday -- and three very full working days.  So, not much time for sightseeing.

That said, there were a few interesting points.

-- The Senegalese government is still somewhat sensitive about criticism.  I didn't think the report we were presenting was particularly critical, but we still got a lot of pushback.  Some of it was justified, some of it was of the "why was my agency not consulted about this" sort, but some seemed just... political.  Talking to the cameras, type of thing; how dare the outsiders say that Ministry X lacks competence and has transparency problems.  I'd encountered this sort of thing before (every development consultant has) but I was surprised to see how much there was of it.

Possibly relevant (or possibly not): Senegalese President Wade has been publicly contemplating another term of office.  He's quite old, and this would require (sigh) amending the Senegalese Constitution; many observers think Wade is really setting up a run for his son.  Either way, not really a positive development -- especially since Senegal has, by African standards, a pretty good democracy, with a free-ish press and an active opposition.

Georgia, or not

I'm in Tbilisi, Georgia.

It's a scouting expedition, funded by a large consulting company, that could lead to a job here.  Or... not.  There will probably be a bid, I'll probably be part of it, then it's out of our hands.  We won't know until well past New Year's.

My second evening here, I was talking to Claudia on Skype, and doing the usual first-time-in-country stuff: the airport was very good, the traffic is crazy, the people seem nice, it's another one of those alphabets.  And she said to me, "Careful.  Don't get too emotionally invested."

So true. 

I keep wanting to write a post about Georgia.  It's an interesting country, and there's plenty to say, even on just four days' acquaintance.  But part of my brain seems to be interpreting that as... investment.

What I can say: the climate is warmer than Yerevan's.  The food, so far, seems better.  The people are more expressive.  The alphabet looks like Elvish.  The spoken language is impenetrable.

Maybe I'll have more to say in a bit.

Aaand back again

We're back.  Flew from New York to Frankfurt, picked up our car, drove two hours to Fladungen, then went straight to Claudia's cousin's wedding. 

Which was actually okay.  We were pretty beat, but the boys could run around with other kids, and constant handling made the baby happy but very tired.  So we were able to get everyone in bed by 11 (which is just 5 pm EST) and start the weary process of de-jet lagging four small children.

So where did we go?

Uganda: 2011 and all that

Everybody here is worried about 2011.  Two reasons.

One, the next round of elections.  Uganda's president/dictator, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power nonstop since 1986.  He last won re-election in 2006; he's up for re-election in early 2011. 

Nobody thinks for a moment that this election will be free or fair.  The last one involved the arrest of the main opposition leader for treason and rape.  And Museveni has only become more authoritarian and assholic since then.  (And also Uganda has discovered oil, which is a powerful incentive to stay in office.) 

On the other hand, young Ugandans -- and most Ugandans are young -- are pretty sick of Museveni.  So when-not-if he steals the election, it's unlikely to go over well.

That by itself would be worrisome but, hell, obnoxious government steal elections all the time.  But then there's also Sudan. 

In Uganda

Really a placeholder post.

I'm in Kampala, Uganda.  It's another two-week assignment.  The trip down was pretty uneventful -- saw the Nile out the airplane window, which was interesting.  Bought a really horrible sandwich in Cairo airport, couldn't finish it.  Overnight flight from Cairo: five hours to cover what took Speke and Burton months of pain.  Oh, this century of ours.

The hotel is nice.  Had Indian food tonight.  Work starts tomorrow. 

More perhaps in a bit.

Senegal, wrap

Last odds and ends about Senegal.

They don't like W.  Senegalese, without an exception I could find, don't like George W. Bush.  The reason is simple: he paid a visit there in 2003, and it was a disaster.  This was just after the Iraq invasion, and basically the whole city of Dakar had to be shut down.  He went out to the island of Goree to make a speech, and all of the people who lived there -- a thousand or so -- were taken off for a day.  Security, right? 

I found a pissy article about it online.  I discounted it heavily because, you know, The Nation.  But according to the Senegalese, it's basically correct.  Senegal doesn't seem to be one of those touchy countries, but it was a bit much.  And, you know.  Way to make a small, friendly country dislike us, Mr. President.

Railroads.  Turns out the Senegalese railroad has a glorious history of strikes and activism; one of Senegal's greatest literary works is a novel that's based on a strike in 1947.  (h/t Tzintzuntzan!)  This makes the whole privatization thing more baffling, mind.

PPP Adjusted

Leopold Senghor International Airport in Dakar is kind of a dump.  It's not horrible, but it's not very nice.  There's a huge crowd of guys at the curb trying to grab your bags and carry them, sell you last minute souvenirs, be your best friend.  Inside the terminal, everything is sort of dingy.  There are mosquitos everywhere.

But! Leopold Senghor International Airport has free Wi-Fi. I have no idea why.  But they do.

Madrid and Frankfurt airports are modern and clean and all that.  But the Wi-Fi is $15 per hour and -- in Madrid at least -- sucks; a crappy connection that kept timing out, until I finally snapped my laptop closed with twenty minutes left.

-- Obviously, I'm back.  May have another Senegal post or two, or maybe not: I have a rather fat report to finish writing, and in ten days I get on another plane for Uganda.  Let's see how it goes

Lamp Fall

So, the Mourides.

I don't really understand the Mourides.  But I do understand that they're essential to understanding Senegal.  So here's my first, very tentative attempt:

The Mourides stand in roughly the same relation to Islam that Mormons do to mainstream Christianity.

Mourides are pious, hard-working, and clean.  They have an internal hierarchy that's distinct from Islam generally.  They were founded in the 19th century by a prophet who was persecuted (though, unlike Joseph Smith, he survived; the French co-opted him, and eventually awarded him the Legion d'Honneur).  The prophet had a primary disciple who survived him, and who hammered the sect into its modern form.  They have a holy city (Touba) which is distinguished by an enormous holy building, the center of the faith.  Traditional Muslims find them intense and sincere, but also sometimes a little creepy and off-putting. Traditional Muslim clerics and theologians consider them at best very unorthodox, and at worst blasphemous and heretical.

Goree

Went to Goree today.

Goree is a small island just a few miles out to sea from Dakar.  There are ferries every hour; the ride is just fifteen minutes or so.

Back when Europeans were first cautiously tiptoeing down the coast of Africa, they developed a particular fondness for offshore islands.  Islands could be easily defended from hostile natives.  Better still, they were subject to cooling breezes.  (I can testify that Goree felt a good ten degrees cooler than Dakar, which in turn was ten degrees cooler than inland Kaolack.)  Best of all, they were somewhat protected from the devastating fevers that tended to kill Europeans wholesale whenever they ventured inland.  So, for centuries these offshore islands -- Goree, St. Louis, Bathurst down in the Gambia -- were the outposts of Europe-in-Africa.

As a result, Goree has more history-per-square-meter than pretty much anywhere.  It was a center of the slave trade for almost four hundred years.  It was swapped back and forth between the European powers a bewildering number of times -- Portuguese, Dutch, French, British.big (The French kept it the longest, almost three centuries, but the British took it away from them five different times, in five different wars.)  Pierre Loti, the French Kipling (if Kipling had sex a lot, and wrote about it) lived there for a while, as did the great British naturalist Adanson. The shipwreck of the Meduse happened on the way there.  The local primary school educated most of the first generation of anti-colonialist nationalist leaders, not just for Senegal but all across West Africa.

"The dirtiest city in Africa"

I'm in Kaolack tonight.

Kaolack is about 200 km inland from Dakar, at the head of a short, brackish river -- really an arm of the sea.  It's in the middle of Senegal's great Peanut Basin, one of the biggest peanut-producing regions of the world.  It has about 200,000 people.

And it kinda sucks.  It's hot -- really, really hot.  Somehow it's really humid and really dusty at the same time.  It's dirty -- garbage everywhere.  The streets are crumbling.  Malaria is a concern (get inside after sunset, I'm told; the local anopheles really gets buzzing around 10 pm.)  And it smells bad -- the river is low (it's the end of the dry season) and it smells, well, like a low river.  A low river that's had a lot of untreated sewage dumped into it.  I'm in the nicest hotel in town, and it smells.  Not the hotel's fault; it's just next to the river.

It's not just me.  Here's what senegalaisement.com has to say about Kaolack:

Kaolack Invicible! It resists all: legendary pollution, human and animal epidemics regular, extraordinary unemployment, tainted water, etc… [Kaolack] is the dirtiest city of Africa, perhaps one of dirtiest of the world. At the time of the tsunami which devastated Asia, its homonym inhabitant of Thailand (Khao Lak) was carried by the floods. It is at least what it would be necessary for Kaolack to clean the tons of refuse which marks out the municipal streets and waste grounds…

The harvest of the salt marshes has burned the ground for kilometers around. The refuse tips surround the town with a blue belt and an unbearable odor. Heat is often intolerable there and the mosquitos are omnipresent. It is undoubtedly the city most difficult to live of Senegal... Each year, the reading of the national newspapers teaches us that such or such epidemic has just been born in the city: cholera, yellow fever, paludism, etc… Only a few years ago, leprosy was still current by here and for many ex-leprous still beg in the streets for the city. The animals are not parcelled out better with regular epidemics such as the swine-fever.

Also, because of the local water chemistry, almost everyone has brown teeth.  (Apparently a government minister once joked that Kaolack was the richest city in Senegal, because everyone had gold teeth.)  And perhaps most damning of all, senegalaisement.com finishes with:

There is nothing to do there.

I have to say, this seems... perhaps exaggerated... but maybe not that much.  The region produces just two things: peanuts and salt.  (There's a huge white mountain of the stuff just across the river from my hotel.) Kaolack exists only (1) to get peanuts and salt down the river and away, and (2) to conduct illegal trade with Gambia, which is just 50 km or so away.  Taxes and duties in the Gambia are lower, so stuff is cheaper, so smuggling is a huge business.  If you look at a map of the region, you'll see that Kaolack is ideally placed for border crossers; not only is it within a couple of hours' drive of most of the border, but because it's also a port it's easy to make smuggled goods look at least vaguely legitimate.  ("Oh, this just came off the docks!")  The border with Gambia is so long -- I mean, Gambia is pretty much all border -- that patrolling it is pretty much impossible.  So Kaolack may not be beautiful, but in its grungy way it thrives.  I walked through the market this afternoon, and I can testify that there's all sorts of action going on; it was a mob scene, with everything from Chinese electronics to lawn furniture on display.

Kaolack has no industry worth mentioning.  There's one elderly peanut-processing plant, which makes peanut oil.  There are a lot of small traders and manufacturers, though.  If someone took the town in hand, something could surely be done with it.

For what it's worth, the people don't seem any less (or more) friendly than anywhere else in Senegal.  The number of guys who want to be my best friend in order to sell me something is about the same. Ask for directions and everyone within fifty meters jumps in to help.  Shopkeepers and staff are friendly and helpful without being effusive.

One odd thing about Kaolack: there are a lot of joggers here.  Going out for an evening walk, I must have passed twenty or thirty of them.

Also today, we briefly visited the holy city of Touba, including the famous Lamp Fall mosque.  (Briefly.  Today was a working day; we were driving down from St. Louis, and Touba happened to be en route.) But that's a story for another post.

I also met a Frenchman who'd been living here for forty years.  He was a lawyer  -- one of three in the city.  He had a modest practice in a nice house downtown.  (You could sort of squint at the house and see the backwater, barely post-colonial town, maybe a tenth the size of modern Kaolack and oh so much cleaner, that he'd moved to around 1970.)  I really wanted to ask him, "Monsieur.  What the hell, monsieur?"  But I couldn't think of a polite way to put it.  In retrospect I sort of wish I had, but there it is. 

Senegal (I)

So I'm in Senegal.

It's work -- this time an assessment of the business environment for the agricultural sector.  As in the Philippines, this is an area I knew very little about a few weeks ago.  Fortunately, it's a group effort, and the team includes several agricultural experts.

It's... really good to be working.  As a practical matter, getting dropped by BearingPoint made very little difference.  But apparently large parts of my brain were not interested in hearing this.  

Not about Saipan

Two days on Saipan (thank you, wife).

I lived there for seven years, left in 1998, came back for a visit in late 2000, hadn't been back since. It was... strange.  Lots of people I knew still there, lots of people recognized me.  Lots of memories.

But I'm not going to blog about it just now, because it depressed the hell out of me.  One, some of my best friends are going through some really awful, horrible personal stuff; and two, Saipan's economy has violently imploded.  It's like 1932 there, or anyway like what I imagine 1932 was like.  Abandoned houses, shuttered shops, massive unemployment, capital flight, former garment workers trying to turn tricks on the main tourist drag.  Just depressing. 

On the plus side, the baby has two new teeth.  And winter is visibly drawing to an end -- snow reduced to scabby patches, birds going nuts with the singing, crocus and daffodil shoots poking greenly up through the mud.

Writing my report.  More in a bit.

Singapore airport, Ash Wednesday night

I can't remember if I've blogged about Singapore airport or not.  I have, right?  So clean, so well designed?  Good food, cheap hotel with hourly rooms for showers and naps?  Friendly staff?  Free public internet?  Really, it's enough to make you swoon for Confucian-flavored authoritarianism.

En route from Manila to Frankfurt.  The world is smaller, yes it is, but it's still a full 24 hours in planes and airports.  In the great scheme of things that's perhaps a good thing, but I'm not going to smell too great at the end of it.

Ash Wednesday is the one Catholic holiday I take sort of seriously, and I regret missing Mass today.  I probably could have done it, too -- the Philippines is a country that has regular Mass services in shopping malls.  Was just too tired and distracted.

I visited Saipan, my old home, for 48 hours and a bit. There's a long post to come, or maybe two, about the sad state of affairs there.  Short version: collapse of the local garment industry + federalization of immigration + global recession = total economic collapse -- it's like 1932 there, or like what I imagine 1932 was like.  Not so cheerful.  But more on this anon.

Watched the State of the Union address in Manila.  Filipinos are... interested, in Obama.

Lake Tanganyika

Sitting in my hotel room waiting for some food (it's late) to wolf down before taking the car to the airport.

So, finally got to out to Lake Tanganyika yesterday.  And it's quite something.  It's huge.  It has surf!  Sandy beaches!  On the east and west sides, there are chains of high hills -- small mountains, really.  (Bujumbura sits on a sort of coastal plain a couple of miles wide between the hills and the lake.)

I didn't go in, because I'm twitchy about things like bilharziasis.  Although apparently the risk here is between tiny and zero; for some reason, whether because of altitude or surf conditions or whatever, the nastier African lake parasites are rare or entirely absent.  So maybe I should have -- the water looked very nice and inviting. 

If the lake really is safe for swimming, there's immense potential for tourism there.  In the evening the sun sets over the green hills of eastern Congo and the quality of the light turns all hazy and golden for half an hour.  Then at night the tropical stars come down close while the surf booms, night birds call, geckos click and whirr and bats wheel around the lights hawking for insects.  It's gorgeous.

I say "potential", but it actually was a tourist destination, back in the day.  Belgians and French from all over Africa came here in the 1950s to relax; there was a high-end hotel and a beach resort.  Right into the 1980s there were still direct flights from France (and, of all places, Moscow) bringing a few rich or adventurous tourists to a destination that was far out of the way, but beautiful and -- then -- fairly comfortable and safe.

The hotel and the resort are still there.  The hotel is a restaurant now; it has a tree to mark where one of the heroes of the independence movement was assassinated by the Belgians while he was sitting at his table.  (That's this whole fascinating but depressing story.  Short version, the Belgians -- though less than a year away from being kicked out -- preferred a rival, less nationalistic and anti-Belgian party.  The assassin used was Greek.  The assassination accomplished exactly nothing for the Belgians, but went a long way towards permanently poisoning Burundi's ethnic politics.)  The resort is in pretty good shape, with a lovely pool and a playground and a huge stretch of beach, but basically it's servicing World Bank missions and like that.  (We didn't stay there.  Cheaper hotel, other side of town.)  Maybe it'll get real tourists again, some day.  Someone would have to seriously invest in the tourism sector, though, which is not happening at the moment.

Okay, no food.  Hungry to the car, then, and grab some biscuits or something on the way -- and thanks to Noel for linking to these!

Burundi bits (3)

The ethnic thing is pervasive, and affects my work in weird ways. 

It's meetings meetings meetings all day long, yah?  Well, the way people respond can vary a lot depending on which ethnic group they're in.  For instance, some Tutsis -- not all, but quite a few -- are still smoldering with resentment at the fact that it's now a Hutu-majority government.  (Because Tutsis, although a minority, always ran everything that mattered.)  These guys tend to go off a lot on rants about the incompetence and corruption of the current governmet, and also to wax nostalgic about the good old days "devant La Crise".

There's a piece of truth here.  Everything was better "before the Crisis".  The decade-long insurgency and civil war was an utter disaster.  It destroyed Burundi's society and economy, slashing already low incomes by 50% and more, and dropped the country from "average for Africa, and clean and pretty with real growth potential" to "desperately poor even by African standards".  So, true that.  It's just that, in some cases, you can hear that what they're really saying is "back when the Right Sort of People were running things".

As for Hutu interviewees, there are fewer of these -- they're still underrepresented among the elites of business and trade -- but they tend to clam up a bit.  My translator is Tutsi, you see.

Labor is cheap

Standing outside an appointment, waiting for the car, I noticed a guy going past with a bundle on his head.

It was a bundle of secondhand clothes -- Africa is full of secondhand clothes from America and Europe -- wrapped and labelled: "Children's clothes, 45 kg".

"Huh," I said to the translator, "that guy is carrying 45 kilos on his head."

He shrugged.  "There are guys who can carry 100 kilos."

"On their heads?"

"Of course."

Silence for a bit.  Another guy went past with a bundle.  A couple of minutes later, another.

Where coffee comes from

I am learning a lot about coffee. 

But I'm barely scratching the surface!  Coffee is insanely complicated.  The process of turning coffee cherries into the stuff you buy in the store?  Complicated.  The social and technological mechanisms that support it, from washing stations to export auctions?  Complicated.  The politics, as the coffee growers struggle to organize for a better price, the government courts their votes, and the washers and exporters try to keep afloat?  Complicated.  Coffee financing?  Way complicated -- much more so than for most agricultural crops.  And it's more complicated in Burundi than in most places, because Burundi has 700,000 small coffee farmers, most farming a mixture of coffee bushes and food crops on a hectare or less of land.

The coffee sector here is desperately starved for credit.  Unfortunately, it also has very limited capacity to attract and absorb credit.  For instance:

Polio in Burundi

The last couple of posts got a bit negative.   So, some good news.

Went out with the team for a drive today, along the lake to the nature preserve.  (Hippos, crocs, lots of birds.  More perhaps in a bit.)  Ended up at the Congo border, which is just over half an hour from town: hey look, there's the eastern Congo! 

Okay.  While going along the road, we passed hundreds of people on bicycles.  (Made in China.  Note that by Burundian standards, a bike is about as big an investment as a nice car would be for most readers here.)  And at least four times, we passed people in something different: hand-powered tricycles.  Three of these were being pulled along behind bikes (though they were providing auxiliary power with the hand cranks) while one was moving alone -- not very fast, but getting there.

The first time I saw one, I said, "Huh?"  Second time I looked more closely, and spotted the rider's withered legs.

By the fourth time, I was ready to ask our driver.

Burundi bits (2)

Obama speech last night.  Haven't seen it, but I came down to the lobby and the translator was watching the rerun on CNN.  Lots of questions! 

The courtyard was once again full of armed men in combat fatigues.  The first time this happened I figured it was just a Minister paying a visit.  As a result of the peace accords, many Ministers and other VIPs are  former rebels.  Others were involved in trying to brutally crush that same rebellion.  Either way, a lot of them have been involved in acts of major violence, and there are still a lot of people who remember this.  So, much of the political leadership will only go out with heavily armed escorts.

However, this time I noticed that some of the soldiers were different: beefy older white guys with walrus mustaches.  I looked more closely and noticed the South African flag on their shoulder patches.  The hey?

Turns out the soldiers are part of a mixed peacekeeping force from the African Union.  See, when the peace accords were signed, not all of the rebels came in from the bush.  One large group -- the Force Liberation National, FLN -- stayed out and kept fighting.  But this hasn't accomplished much (except to make Burundi even less attractive to tourists and investors), so now they're considering coming in.  Their opening offer was half of all Ministries; this is not acceptable to the government; negotations are continuing.  In fact, they're continuing here at our not very large hotel, as some of the FSN brass are staying here.  Hence the soldiers.

Speaking of the hotel, the maid was cleaning my room while I was working today.  (Had an hour between meetings, spent it writing thank-you notes and followup e-mails to all my earlier meetings.)  I sat tapping at the laptop and she worked around me, as maids around the world do.  Only... I couldn't help but notice that she moved very slowly.  And coughed a lot.

I have no idea how to act here.  "Leave a big tip" doesn't quite seem to cover it.

Um, what else.

Rainy season

The rainy season started about half an hour ago.

I was changing rooms (the first one was dark and weirdly shaped) and so caught outside on the breezeway, carrying luggage.  The first warning was thunder, not discreetly off in the distance but right overhead: flashKA-BOOM!!  Then the sky just opened. 

I hadn't been in a proper tropical downpour since I left Saipan -- oh, my, more than a decade ago -- so it was pretty refreshing.  I had to stuff towels under the door to keep the water out, but who cares? 

The Burundians, I should say, were surprised -- it's about three weeks early -- and none too pleased.  Rainy season here lasts three months and, you know, it rains a lot.  Good for the farmers, but the city folk wish it would be over.

I should probably write something about the banking system or coffee processing or some such, but I'm just too tired.  Seven meetings, eleven hours, time for bed.