Back in the Mada, Back in the Mada, Back in the Madagascar….

Despite the lag in posting here, I have not had a whole lot of time to be reflective. I only had one week of so-called vacation before I was recruited to take over the reins of the cyclone relief project. While it’s okay to have some income, the pay is not great (because they recognize my lack of experience) and it requires some background that I do not have. My predecessor can whip out numbers and rates of work in a second. This is the first time I have seen this type of work up close, and I haven’t a clue as what is expected/possible from villagers in a food-for-work program.

When I first arrived in Antalaha, I had thought that the cyclone could not do much more damage than was still around from Hudah in 2000 and Ihary in 2002. Gafilo, as this one was called, managed to rip up roads, blow down houses, and generally disrupt life. The effects of Hudah were far greater, still evident fours years on. The best business to be in Antalaha is the hardware business. Everybody needs to rebuild after cyclones, and in less traumatic times, people aspire to improve their surroundings little by little. Not everyone, of course, like the people who had not repaired their roofs since the cyclone in 2000. The funny thing is that donors had given out plastic sheeting for shelter that had lasted until now. This would reduce the demand for their handouts, so they asked the producer to make the plastic more degradable!

As I find frequent place to say this, I shall repeat that there are so many things that are invariable around the world. Kids playing for a camera, for example. I don ‘t know, maybe I left the US before I had much exposure to children. Though I was once one myself ;-), I am the youngest of four, so I never had a sibling to torment, uh, to look after. (Lucky for you, Marcia – imagine GI Joe coming after YOU!) But I used to react unfavorably to American kids when they got cranky overseas with their parents. Maybe they had been pampered in order to get them to agree to stay in Asuncion, for example. Part of it had to do with the sound of the American English language. Too many nasal sounds, wrong accentuation.

I can get myself into trouble in about seven languages, but interestingly, the one I “like” amongst them also has explicit nasal vowels: Guaraní, of Paraguay. But the intonation of local speakers makes the language amusing, if not attractive. At a cookout once, a drunken Paraguayan told me he spoke several languages, including Japanese. A friend who was present asked him if he understood the greeting, “Inẽe ne cason.” He replied that yes, it was commonly used. In his drunkenness, he failed to recognize that it was a phrase in Guaraní meaning, “Your pants stink.”

Sorry, I’m rambling off to the wrong continent. This subcontinental island, Madagascar, should be enough to occupy my thoughts for a long time. This is the kind of place that gets under your skin. A South African friend just left after being here for about 12 years. It was his post that I took over. I am sure he will be back, for work or vacation. This is also the longest I have stayed any one place since leaving my parents’ home at the end of high school. Heck, I got married here. But since the year 2000, we have been hit by three cyclones in my little town. Cyclones are an annual event, but I have not heard of any one town having such shit luck over a similar period.

“The party’s over….”

It’s been four weeks since I have been in Kindu, along the mighty Congo River. Do I feel any more enriched by this? Yeah, in a lot of ways. Am I reminded of Tarzan movies from when I was a kid? Of course! (What does THE CONGO conjure up for you?) One thing I really regret is not having mastered this weblog-thang so I can put photos in the middle of the text, as I have seen on other people’s blogs. There is a link on the sidebar, “See some of the places I’ve been,” that takes you, the viewer, to a photo page, but a lot of people don’t bother with that sort of stuff. Go on, be adventurous!

So, it’s my last night in Kindu. And it’s raining like never before, except that this time there are no hailstones. The rain in Third World countries poses a conundrum. They have so little “developed” area, how do they manage to have so much “urban” runoff? It’s because they sweep their dirt! There are some things that run common in “under developed” countries which contribute to their being that way, in my opinion. It is not to say that all of these aspects are bad, but they could be prioritized a bit differently. For example, the Mayor of Bunia accused all foreigners of being too cold, because the Congolese value the “chaleur humain.” Well, this “human warmth” is what keeps his piece-of-shit cousin in a job that someone else could perform a thousand times better. (Why make an effort when I can get by on chaleur humain?) It is also what encourages people to not respect contracts. (And then the contractor can’t understand why I don’t want to be his buddy. If I can’t trust him to do the work he is obligated to do, how can I trust him to anything else?) {On the other hand, this network of social capital provides a viable substitute for a government-sponsored welfare program. So, maybe development is a government-sanctioned plot to get us all dependent on them! Pretty clever.}

Now, during leisure time, some people are genuinely interested in foreigners and their (our) perspectives on things. That was how I originally got interested in getting overseas: through knowing exchange students in high school. They had an adventurous spirit that was almost invincible, but when I did the exchange student bit in Colombia, I found out how fragile that façade can be.

And, next week I join the ranks of the unemployed. It will be nice for a little while, like a week or two. But I am sure I won’t sit still. The reason I am looking forward to it is to tend to all the things that have taken a back seat to work. Like writing letters, reading a few decent books (for pleasure, not for work). Or that very interesting course on a CD that I dropped $50 on and haven’t touched except to see how it works, once, if ever, I get around to it.

The more things change,...

So, there are things that change, there are things that run constant. I have always thought back to the fact that if I have expectations of someone, I have taken away his/her humanity. One cannot expect machine-like behavior from a person.

When I tried to weasel in a place for my wife to accompany me to Burundi, I was told that the policy of it being an unaccompanied post had been reinforced. They (the powers that be, whatever they be) have sound, security-based reasons, I am sure, although when I talk to the person responsible for enforcing the policy, she tells me about the lovely night on the town she just had with her friends, etc. And I was worried about the possibility that I would have a reserved spot on a UN flight, but my wife would be left behind.

In my recently-retired work-or-nothing attitude, that would have been okay. But it was a very difficult decision for me to give up my hedonistic lifestyle. (My mother once labeled one of my undergraduate T-shirts “hedonistic,” and I had lived by it ever since. On the other hand, at 82 years old, she is sending me unsolicited letters on how to get the most out of sex with my wife. Gotta love the spirit!) When I decided to get married, this time, I weighed the potential lifestyle changes, and in the end got married. Oh, we had our fights, and I had physically thrown her out of the house on more than one occasion. But once I decided, there was no temptation that would sway me. It was a tough decision, believe me. Too much fun just inspires more fun. But I like her a lot, that is, beyond loving her.

Way back in 1980, I did an internship at an environmental engineering firm near Yale University. There was a Chinese grad student in the house where I rented a room, and one night he read my palm. He basically predicted my marriage and divorce from my first wife (which happened about ten years later), and that I would spend about ten years searching, then find the happily-ever-after woman for me. I have always considered this in retrospect, rather than as a prediction of what is to come. But I have a good feeling, and a strong commitment, about this.

My wife still suspects every little thing I do. In some ways, she is right to do so, but not from my ‘intentions’ side of things. In our little ville of Antalaha, getting married to a vazaha is a potential goldmine to which no one woman should be privy. The undercutting, nastiness of women is played out in all its splendor. There are several things that must be in the genetic make-up of women (as there are in men, scratch-scratch-spit) that just flabbergasts me to arrive in a new country and to be able to predict certain behaviors. Women the world over do a head-to-toe-to-head check-over of new arrivals. By their own admission. I know, no big news.

I never had any idea about my parents’ sex life, or even their non-parental aspects of life. I am the youngest of four, and my parents were 39 and 36 when I was born. Heh, here I am at 45 intending to have children with my 25 year old wife. I have given up enough sperm in my life to populate a small nation, so let’s hope there’s enough left for our little family niche in the world!

I probably won’t be a good parent. I am a really effective manager, but I have often said that I could never be a Country Director in the organization until I had kids and learned the finer techniques of negotiation. Everything in its time.

Further notes 03 April 2004

After a lot of hustle on the part of my supervisor, I was able to overcome the international bureaucracy of the MONUC (the United Nations’ mission in the Congo) and get on a flight to my next destination. The budget they must have for transport, among other things, has to be greater than the GNP of even some developed nations. When I first left Kinshasa for Bunia, I was on a Boeing 727 (I think) that was as nice as or nicer than the South African Airways flight I had been on the day before. But that was the last I was to see of that luxury. We had a stopover in Entebbe, Uganda, where we got on a plane of a more appropriate size for the dirt runway in Bunia, an old Russian Antonov. (you know, where they have to light a little vodka in the engine to get it started.) For the flight from Bunia to Bukavu, I had to take a commercial flight on a Twin Otter, which seats about 19 people, but I was the only passenger on board for the first leg of it. To get from Bukavu to Kindu, I had a one-night layover in Kisangani, but I was back on the Antonov for that portion, and then used a Russian cargo plane to fly from Kisangani to Kindu. A cargo plane, where you walk up the ramp at the rear end where the forklifts bring in the large crates, and the only seats are padded benches along the sides of the fuselage with seatbelts hanging off them. There were only four of us on that flight.

The stopover in Kisangani was really pleasant, and therefore much too short. I stayed with two French guys who work with another international NGO. They have a pasha’s type of house with a swimming pool. The security situation there was so good that they did not even carry radio handsets around. We went out at night on motorcycles, had a dinner and a few beers, and went home around 11 PM (once again, due to how long it takes to get food in restaurants here). Everything was calm, and no one was on alert status.

Now, in Kindu, the project is “demobilizing” child soldiers and reintegrating them into communities, ideally by finding their real families, so you can imagine that the security situation is a bit tense. This is a completely new domain for me, and extremely complex. For example, if you look at the news about this situation, they’ll say that the children were forcibly recruited, and it is true in most cases. But in others, the parents may have supported the cause of the particular militia group, or the economic circumstances of the household were so bad that the “better” choice was to send the boy to fight. Girls, in all cases I have heard so far, were all recruited by force. One of the worst parts of this is that in addition to being expected to fight, the girls are also often raped and sometimes forced to marry a soldier. Then, when it comes time to go back home, maybe the folks in the village are against the politics of the husband, and so the girl is no longer accepted.

To make matters worse, in some cases the children soldiers participated in (sometimes atrocious) acts against their own villages: destruction of houses and schools, killing people and even cannibalism. So their reintegration into communities is the source of another conflict, as the victims’ families often want retribution. To add a little more complication, the local authorities sometimes encourage that the children go back into the militia to minimize the conflict.

The attitudes and psychological states of these children pose a huge challenge. A colleague related a story that when he was newly arrived, he was trying to be approachable, and a nine-year-old came up, looked at the computer bag on his shoulder, and acted as if he just wanted to joke around and try it on. Well, it took some 45 minutes to negotiate it back, and this “child” apparently had developed this all-powerful attitude from his time in the militia. It has been reported that one experience that creates the sense of invulnerability is eating the flesh of the victims: cannibalism. I wonder what kind of mental terrorism is performed on the children to bring them to this point. Not that I am interested, but this knowledge will come as part of the job, a job I never imagined I would have.

Of course, in the midst of all this, I have once again picked up a Stephen Covey book on how to glean the best out of life’s experiences for one’s personal / professional / moral development. Pretty cold, huh? He has a spiritual side to his writing, and relates a lot of it to real-life experiences. Many would recommend that I pick up a Bible (or counterpart instrument, depending on the religion). But I have not gleaned much from my readings, though I have seen some people put a lot of effort into it and come out “converted,” for lack of a better term. I can extrapolate some things to the situation at hand, but I am more interested in understanding it than addressing it in a spiritual manner. While spirituality may inspire kind thoughts, things like food security, shelter, safety, economic opportunities and the like often are more immediate priorities that could reduce the incidence of conflict if administered “correctly.” I have to go back to the principles of sustainable development, even though this is an emergency situation. People need to participate from the beginning and be held responsible for their actions. Holding individuals responsible needs to be a participatory as well as reciprocal activity, too. An educational base needs to be put in place, with a lot of communication and exchanges in order to break down some barriers.

MEDICINAL HERBS:
Ever since I was in Paraguay in the late 1980’s, I have been fascinated by medicinal plants, and all nontraditional (in the modern American perception) uses of plants. The fact that all the way from Paraguay, to Central America, to Haiti, to Morocco, to Madagascar, to the Congo, there are plants that, if they are not the same species, are the same genus and they are used for the same ailments in every country that I have seen them. I always wonder how many people died or were severely harmed in the discovery of a plant’s healing powers. The local doctor says, “Try this one!” The patient falls over dead, and the doctor adjusts his notes on the page “What not to treat with this plant.”

I have noticed some “similarities” between the people in my travels; some of these are far-fetched, but some seem possible. For example, the Malagasy people are descended from Africans, Middle-Easterners, and Polynesians, primarily. I has been proposed that the people of the Americas came from the Polynesian area, crossed the Bering Strait, and headed south, all the way to the Tierra del Fuego. There are traces of facial features throughout the region that could be construed to be of Polynesian origin. One colleague in Honduras once remarked that the little Chinese guy sure spoke great Spanish, without realizing he was a native Honduran. Some linguistic “ties” can be drawn, too. In Malagasy, “tembo” refers to a man’s ejaculate or semen. In the Guaraní language of Paraguay, “tembo” means penis. I’ll remember others as I reflect more on this. I’m sure you’ll stay tuned. 

It has also been proposed that extraterrestrials helped build the temples of the Petén in northern Guatemala, as well as the pyramids of Egypt. Were they the same ET’s? The name of the people in the Petén, where it rains a lot, is Maya. In Egypt, where it hardly rains, water is called “maya.” So, maybe they did the pyramids first, knew what water was called, then stopped off for some (relatively) light construction in the Petén, and said, “Shit, there sure is a lot of Maya here!” and the name stuck. A long shot, but who knows? It’s hard to keep tabs on the pesky little aliens. Just ask the Men in Black.

Getting back to the human condition, I have often seen staff in this NGO insist that the project had to give things away in order to gain the beneficiaries’ trust, and I insist the opposite: that the beneficiaries don’t appreciate anything that they have not worked for or invested significantly in. Here in the eastern Congo, for example, the staff think it’s just great that the villagers throw a party (that the project paid for) to “express their gratitude” for whatever the project just deposited in their village. Of course! Who wouldn’t be full of joy at a free party with a new school? And when it fall apart, who will feel responsible for its maintenance? They’ll just wait for the next donor or project to come along and build another. The problem often comes from the fact that the project is design unilaterally without the participation of the beneficiaries or “target population” (a term I hesitate to use in a conflict zone, YIKES).

Once in Egypt, we were running a project that facilitated the flow of production and marketing information for farmers along the Nile, from Cairo to Qena. The project conducted participatory needs appraisals with the farmers, located professional sources of information (researchers, accomplished farmers and businessmen) that responded to the stated needs, and then arranged a visit to the experts. At first, the project paid all related costs, but in seeking a way to ensure that access to information would continue once the project ended, I suggested that we incrementally shift the costs to the farmer groups, so they would not develop a dependence on the project. The staff was aghast. How could we expect these “poor” farmers to pay? My reasoning was that they stood to profit from the information, so they should consider it an investment. One afternoon, in a field office in Sohag, one of the more vocal opponents returned to the office with a wad of money in her hand, calling out, “They did it! They paid!” I immediately instructed her to go back to the women’s group and return the money. They should handle their own costs, get receipts for all expenditures, and treat this as a market transaction. The idea was that once they paid for a service, they were authorized to demand the service, overcoming the traditional fear that a humble farmer experiences when he faces a university-educated researcher. And, when money gets involved, those Egyptians can get pretty demanding. The problem we soon experienced was that farmers started making trips on their own, and we were unaware of it and, thus, could not report it to the donor about the impact (change in the farmers’ behavior and the information system, defined earlier) of the project.

There was a woman who worked with me in Madagascar…Malagasy but of Chinese descent...with whom I had one of the best rapports that I have had with national staff in years. There was, at least from my side, though she admits to it too, an attraction between us, but we both recognized the implication of our work relationship (I supervised her), and how the organization frowned on this type of relationship in the office. We respected it, but in little Antalaha, I was starved for some intellectual stimulation, and our conversations were a little bright spot in an otherwise “dull” environment. My wife, whom I just married last September, wants me to have absolutely nothing to do or say with any other woman, regardless of past experiences. In general, she is right when it comes to most local women in this small town. If a Malagasy woman hooks up with a “vazaha” (as the Malagasy call foreigners), then other women will try to undercut her status with rumors or try to directly tempt the man to stray in their direction to “share the wealth” so to speak. In Madagascar, prostitution is a way of life for many women, but this widespread practice is rooted more in the tradition that a man usually gives “something” to the woman after a date or sex early in the relationship, maybe money, maybe a small piece of jewelry. But as it happens, vazahas often carry a lot more than your average Malagasy on the street. In some bars, especially in Diego Suarez and certain discos in the capital, the women can get downright violent if you don’t pay attention to them. I had to get over an old habit that I used to occasionally buy a drink for a woman to chat a bit. If I was not interested, I would not think twice about going off to chat with another or to go home alone. There, if you buy her a Coke, she is going home with you, no questions asked. Well, unless you’re rude enough to get out of it. That part I have down pat.

HALFWAY DONE
So, I came to the Congo to close down a project. This is not an easy place to work, as relief aid has inspired some behaviors in the local population that makes them the victims, entitled to handouts. This goes further in that if you make a contract with them, they don’t feel obliged to live up to their end of the bargain. That, at least, is what I found in Bunia amongst the various ethnicities present. It seems a little different here in Bukavu, where the predominant ethnicity is Lache. But the people in the office are very good at hiding and avoiding certain procedures or responsibilities. They are quite personable. It reminds of a time in Guatemala, when someone asked me about my secretary and her performance on the job. I said she was a nice person. He asked again, emphasizing her capability as a secretary, and all I could respond was, “She’s a nice person.” For example, I (an American) would correct her (a Guatemalan) Spanish grammar. But she was a nice person, really.

Getting back to this project, it goes against all my development principles, mostly because nobody has thought beyond the handout phase. “Development” is an ongoing process that is never finished, and not a goal in itself. It’s about learning, reflecting, adapting, experiencing, and repeating the process using the newly gained learning. Here, the staff say that an “impact” has been achieved when a market has been finished. Personally, I define “impact” as a sustainable change in behaviors and / or systems. The presence of a market does not guarantee that people will use it or benefit from it. Infrastructure on its own does not move.

But an amusing aspect of this project was that I have NEVER seen or touched as much money as I have in these few weeks. I inherited the little wooden desk with over $63,000 in cash in the drawer. On some days, I disbursed over $10,000. Oh well, just a tool in the administration, that’s what I am. But I guess I am good at it because the director asked me to oversee another project, this time in Kindu, and if I was already thinking of extending my time here.

I really miss my wife. I’m heading home (Antalaha, Madagascar) at the start of May, as agreed. Back to the waste left behind by Cyclone Gafilo, which hit Antalaha with gusts over 260 Km/hr on March 7, just a week after I left.

ECONOMIC EGOCENTRISM?

In the March 6 edition of The Economist, there appeared an article “Economic focus: A modest undertaking” (p. 68), that showed that, alas, the magazine is just that, an economist at heart. They present, with grandeur and the implication, that the exercise to be undertaken by “some of the world’s leading economic thinkers” will produce a viable model for overseas aid and relief investments.

The topics up for analysis and election are: climate change; communicable diseases; armed conflicts; education; financial instability; governance and corruption; malnutrition and hunger; population and migration; sanitation and water; and, subsidies and trade barriers.

Please join me in applauding this mass exercise in mental masturbation. If you would like to have it in your face, so to speak, they say they will post all related material on www.economist.com/copenhagen-consensus, or more directly, www.copenhagenconsensus.com

My objection to this is their effort to single out any one issue without considering the interrelationships and synergies that have been apparent to all since time began. I, as well as everyone else, have an opinion on this and, of course, everyone is entitled to my opinion. Education and communication are the basis of harmonious growth and development. Unfortunately, people without access to basic necessities like clean water, healthcare, and the right to conduct productive activities (thus generating access to food), have very immediate concerns. It’s hard for a malnourished child, for example, to pay close attention in school. And in order to fulfill those needs, certain social relations are developed that may or may not be positive for the society at large, such as armed gangs as opposed to a rice producers’ association.

So, I hope that these “leading economic thinkers” will at least present their analyses that led up to their final choice. They will carry much more weight and importance than their conclusion, which should be treated as a passing fancy, at best, or maybe a lunatic opinion.

A few reflections on my Leap Year entry (29 Feb 2004) to the DRC:
The first day into Kinshasa was about normal for any third world country, except for the absence of a company rep to meet me. The service they used, though, was quite efficient in getting me through and getting a 7-day visa. The airport was typical of any Third World airport (maybe more so for Africa but it happens in Latin America too), with many people trying to hustle you for your business (to carry your bags) sometimes fighting amongst themselves. The thing that struck me was the baggage handlers should be renamed baggage manglers. I had never seen such abuse, some even looked intentional.

One spectular sight from the airplane on the way in was the Congo River. I have never seen such a large flowing body of water. It is bigger than the Nile in Lower Egypt, and it may be bigger than the Amazon, but I have only seen that on television documentaries. But it is very brown from all the erosion up stream.

Anyway, go to the hotel, and they had just had a big marriage the day before, and it was Sunday, so there was not much to choose from on the menu. But that did not stop them from taking forever to prepare it. I met a man who had been a PCV near Kinshasa x years ago, and he was informative. He works for CRS now in Baltimore, but is here for a regional meeting.

The guy from CRS told me about how corrupt everything used to be, particularly getting through the airport, but things have apparently changed quite a bit.

I did not sleep well at all Sunday night. Nervous? Scared? I miss my wife a lot. In the past, when one traveled for this company, he was allowed to make a phone call home at their expense to tell his family that he had arrived safely. Like I said, they were absent and it was Sunday.

On Monday morning, the car was late in picking me up, but after a race through the city, we arrived in plenty of time. As I approached the check-in, I noticed a whole bunch of rules that nobody had told me about, such as weight limits, etc. But, my heavy suitcase, the roll of networking wire and two notebook computers that I was carrying on made no difference to them, and I was ushered through.

The scenery from the plane started off as usual in these countries, with patches of forest between largely deforested grasslands. I can't imagine they are pastures because the people here seem too poor to raise cows. A little later, the forest cover increased, and now it was the open spaces that became the patches. Then, it was just blanket of tropical forest as far as I could see. It was amazing. It makes me wonder what I would find if I was dropped into it. I'd be terrified I would never find my way out again, as the distances and the density of the cover were intimidating, to say the least. There were occasional villages later on, ranging from a few homes to veritable villages. A dirt road could be seen every now and then, and most of the villages i saw were on the banks of a river. The first two that I saw on rivers touched a bend in the river, and then widened as a V as you got farther from the river. I found this curious, but I later saw the more typical along-the-river configuration.

Another thing was the rivers. Several snaked through the forest, and they were black, indicating to me that there is very little, if any, soil erosion under this forest cover. It would be wonderful to preserve this expanse, even conduct some serious research on it, but humanity will eventually arrive and do what they do best.

When we flew into Kisangani (about 1000 miles northeast from Kinshasa) on Monday morning, the Congo river was still very large and very silty. A short stayover in the "terminal" (as in "illness") and we were off to Entebbe. This was where I screwed up--should have taken advantage of the duty-free shops. Instead got herded into the waiting area, then was told that the plane was late, and it was no longer possible to wander about.

By popular demand (a.k.a. my sister), I will post my musings as I attempt to work my way around the world. Having gone from Latin America eastward (chronologically, Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, Mexico, Haiti, Morocco, Guatemala, Egypt, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, and soon to be in Burundi), I am amazed by how much things change and, at the same time, how many common threads of the human condition are present, no matter where I go. People used to ask me which was my favorite country, but I could never really say because it is the people with whom I interact that determine the "quality of life" in a given country.