Endings

Thursday I'll be on a plane like this one heading to Abidjan

It's official, since May 9th Liberia is Ebola-free.  The country that up to now had seen almost 40% of the Ebola cases and an even higher proportion of Ebola-related deaths has gone over 42 days without a new confirmed case.  The fight isn't over, last week's sudden increase (35 new cases compared with 9 the week before) in Guinea and Sierra Leone has made that clear, but it's certainly a big change compared to a few months back when there were over 100 new cases per week.  There's hope - the end seems within sight.

Glorious evening sky

I started writing this blog to let everyone know that Ebola hadn't got me yet, and I have definitely slacked off in the past few weeks, as the threat of the dreaded disease lost a bit of steam.  Now, as it really seems to be wrapping itself up, so is my time in West Africa.  I will finish my one year contract on June 8, and thanks to all the leave I have accumulated, my last day of work was this past Friday (honestly, you can't beat the UN system for vacation time!).

I spent most of last week in Abidjan going through the check-out process.  Now I'm back in Daloa to clear out of my house and hand it over to a new volunteer who should arrive tomorrow.  I hope she enjoys it as much as I did, notwithstanding the intermittent ant problem.  Next weekend I'll be back in Abidjan, this time to head out.

I still have a few weeks in Africa visiting some spots I haven't had the chance to see yet - Botswana and Madagascar are the big ones.  But that will be it.  I'm moving to New York to work in the private sector again, and while I hope to visit this continent again regularly, my time living here is almost over, at least for the foreseeable future.  Goodbyes are hard, and although I'm really looking forward to being back with my family and taking on some new challenges at work, there is a lot I will miss.  Maybe not the deranged ants, or the bureaucracy, but the people very much.

Boys on my street pause their football game for a picture

Army life

Livestock and laundry

My uncle François was a French military officer, in artillery if I remember correctly.  He died when I was 10 and my only army-related memory of him (if you can call it that since I wasn't actually there at the time) is the photo of his graduation from the military academy at St Cyr.  I know my great-grandfather served in the first World War, and several uncles during the Vietnam period (although not on the ground there).  I don't believe I have ever talked to any of them about that experience.  Basically all that I know of the military is from movies and a couple of books.  There are many details of army life that I really didn't expect.  Over the past two weeks I spent a lot of time in our more remote camps near the border with Liberia, and I was reminded of some of these things.



The Liberian civil war(s) lasted the better part of twenty years, and ended right about the time the recent unpleasantness started in Cote d'Ivoire, which was a stroke of luck for quite a few young Liberian fighters with not much on their résumé and a lot of time on their hands.  They were more than happy to come over here and take up arms again for the highest bidder, to the understandable resentment of the locals.   Meanwhile, all the Liberian refugees who took shelter here from the fighting there now overlapped with the Ivoirian refugees taking shelter there from the fighting here. And when all of that fighting had more or less simmered down, Ebola broke out over there, but not over here, so no one wanted to go back there any more and everyone here definitely wanted all of those over there to stay put for a while. So the border area is a bit of a mess and it's likely to take a while to sort it out.

As a result we have a number of camps in that area, and I visited two of them for the first time two weeks ago: Grabo and Para.  They are right up in the hinterland along the border, where rule of law is not necessarily the rule.  Those are the only two camps that the Security Unit insists you have a military escort to get to (or the only camps in Sector West at least, I really don't pay any attention to what happens in Sector East, although I believe the Ghanians and Burkinabés are pretty low key).


Bridge on the road to Grabo

It was my first military escort, so I was kind of excited, even though it was pretty routine for them.  It just involved a military pickup with a bench in the back holding three armed but not terribly attentive-looking young soldiers.  A bridge had washed out on the usual road so we took a very complicated route through the oil palm plantations and even stopped to ask the locals for directions at one point.  The locals didn't know where we were going so couldn't help much but they were perfectly friendly.

With all the trouble it takes to get to these camps I shouldn't be surprised at how happy the soldiers were to see us.  They have no internet connection out there and only patchy cellphone coverage, and I honestly don't know if I could stand that for a stretch of several months like they do. They're so visibly delighted to have visitors, you kind of feel like the guy from the Gold Rush days who used to go to Alaska with the 2 week old Seattle newspaper and charge people to listen to him read it aloud. (Please note: I do not charge them for fixing their plumbing.)

Everyone stops to greet us and ask about the work, or salutes if they don't speak the language.  They come over and watch what we're doing, and bring us a drink or a chair.  On some level they're all tourists here like me, and it always makes me smile to see them posing for pictures in front of the camp buildings or tanks or whatever.  I know they'll send them home to their families, just like I do.  The thing that still surprises me most, though, is the farm animals. Every camp has chickens running around and sometimes guinea fowl (this was the first link that came up for them, a bit random, I know), and at one Bangladeshi camp they even have rabbits. I don't remember any from "The Longest Day", but a lot of the young men who went to fight in WWII were from farming backgrounds, just like these guys, so I wonder if there weren't chickens running around the Allies' camps too.



Military salad

The other thing that surprises me is the laundry.  Soldiers here are always washing clothes.  Only the Moroccans seem to have bothered bringing washing machines - the Nigeriens and Bangladeshis do their washing by hand - but everyone hangs their clothes out to dry on any line or surface available, even on the rolls of concertina wire (razor wire) that mark the camp boundaries.  I don't know who washes the officers' clothes: a mystery of military life yet to be solved.



Grabo was the only one of the two camps where we stayed the night, and I got my own special women-only room in a private spot next to the infirmary and a special women-only prefab toilet block some distance away that clearly hadn't been used in months. It was clean, but a lot of spiders and crickets and things looked well installed and quite surprised to see me.  Finding my way from bedroom to bathroom (and back) in the dark without stepping in anything unpleasant was a new and exciting challenge, and one that I won't mind not ever having to do again. Still, the water pressure in the shower was fantastic, and my room was nice and clean and comfortable, and notwithstanding the bugle calls at some ridiculous hour of the morning and the song of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer (being predominantly Muslim countries, their battalions have imams, not chaplains, another departure from my "Band of Brothers"-centric idea of army life), I actually slept quite well.

Note: the goat pictured at the top was in the camp at Para, and that's a bit of an exception. They don't have a good perimeter fence, so all the villagers' farm animals come to snack on the army leftovers, of which there are plenty. They are frankly a bit of a nuisance and the Nigerien commander is not at all happy about them being there. The villagers are pleased though, because they're sure their livestock are safe.

"Forces Armees Nigeriennes" sheets - I want some!

Easter

Palm Sunday procession in Daloa, last week

It's funny to me that here in the country that exports more cacao than any other, there are no chocolate Easter eggs to be seen.  They have them in Abidjan, but in Daloa there was no sign of them anywhere.  I thought I would try to celebrate Easter with the locals, by going to the Easter vigil mass on Saturday night.  Little did I know it's the longest mass of the year.  Here they don't believe in skimping out on that stuff - it lasted four hours.  I probably wouldn't have gone had I known, and I definitely would not have expected to stay awake for the whole thing.  But I was expecting the kind of solemn, soporific grandeur I grew up seeing at church.

This was a whole different experience.  They had a synthesizer, and maracas, and they weren't afraid to use them.  There was singing and low-key hand-clapping throughout, but it didn't really take off until after communion, when they struck up a song that ignited the crowd and suddenly everyone was on their feet, hands in the air, clapping and waving handkerchiefs.  One of the priests led the altar boys down from the front and they danced their way down the main aisle then up one of the side ones and made a couple of laps around the pews, with more and more parishioners joining the dance as they passed, like a giant conga line.  It was sensational.

Private infirmary in Daloa, with
the Grand Mosque in the background

I don't have much of a wardrobe here, and I had tried to look appropriate in my one nice office outfit by wearing earrings and leaving my large, shapeless bag at home.  In my mind that was dressed up.  Unfortunately, it meant I didn't have my camera, so I don't have any evidence.  I wouldn't even have been the only one - I saw at least three locals filming on their cell phones.

Augustine, who went with me, says that this is fairly normal for the big feast days.  All I can say is, if you get the chance, go!  Take a nap and make sure you go to the bathroom beforehand, but go - it's totally worth it.  And don't forget your camera!

All over the place

Burj Khalifa, Dubai (true, not in West Africa)

It has been a very varied few weeks since I last wrote.  Last week I had R&R, which started with a couple of very mellow days in Dubai with Shiona, a good friend who has managed to keep in touch with me since my contractor days in Manchester.  The city is really quite incredible, especially from a construction perspective, and not just because it has the world's tallest building (pictured left).  It has to be the neatest, most organised city I've ever visited - and I've lived in Switzerland!  I think we were both impressed with just how well made everything is.  We differed on one point though - she thought it was really hot, and I was always freezing.

Shiona went back to work on Wednesday, but since I still had some R&R days I went on to Ghana.  I was happy to get back to the warmth!  It's a lot like Côte d'Ivoire, but in different colors, and in English.  There were the same roadside stalls selling pineapples and tomatoes and such, but where here lots of them are painted orange, there they have much more red.  The rhythms and ways of talking are kind of the same, too, but the language is different.  It was unexpected, and fun.

Female slaves' courtyard, Elmina Castle, Ghana

I got out of Accra and went along the coast a ways to Elmina, an old Portuguese trading post with a fort built in 1482.  Trippy to think that was before Columbus went to the Americas.  A few years later, once those who came after Columbus got settled, Elmina Castle was used to store slaves for the trans-Atlantic passage.  Apparently they held 1000 captives there at a time, 600 men and 400 women, and they could be there for two or three months.  It was quite a big place, but it's very hard to imagine what it was like with 1000 people there.  Especially with no plumbing.

Elmina continued as a slave trade hub for hundreds of years, first under the Portuguese and, from 1642, under the Dutch.  By the time the British took over in 1872 the slave trade had already ended, but this is just one of 20+ forts along the coast of Ghana alone.  I struggle to wrap my brain around how many people went through this system, and how many people it must have taken to catch and process and keep them all.  When young, bright-eyed Europeans went off to the Gold Coast to make their fortune, did they know what it would involve?  When a soldier from one African kingdom victorious over the neighbors caught and sold them to those same Europeans, did they understand what would happen to them?  Capitalism can be a scary, scary thing.

But Ghana isn't all depressing.  In fact the drive along the coast is really spectacular, lined with coconut trees and beautiful beaches, quaint, colorful towns and vendors of various kinds pursuing capital of their own.  I visited Kakum National Park, a bit inland, to tour their canopy walkway, some 30 metres up in the trees.  That was sensational too, even though I took the tour at 10 am and most of the birds and animals were already taking their siesta.  There were lots of beautiful butterflies though, which always make me happy, even when they refuse to pose for pictures.

Neighbors of an ONUCI camp showing us
the kitchen waste outfall location

I arrived back from R&R on Monday, just in time for a waste and wastewater management systems audit.  I spent the first three days of the week taking visitors from Italy to a selection of septic tanks in the sector. We are not supposed to be releasing untreated septic tank overflow from any of the camps, but 9,000 soldiers generate a lot of sewage, so wastewater management is a challenge, to say the least.  Kitchen wastewater, a form of greywater (used, but unlikely to be contaminated with fecal matter) is not as serious, but still not supposed to be going offsite untreated.  At one of the camps we found a bunch of boys who live nearby and were delighted to have their picture taken where the kitchen drainage pipe ended, near their houses outside the camp.  Fortunately (?) the pipe is broken inside the camp, so the waste is all draining out there for the moment (technically compliant!).  We have plenty of work in WatSan for the foreseeable future.

Daloa municipal dump

The audit included solid waste so we toured some of the municipal dumps, too - a first for me.  There tends to be a lot of garbage everywhere, since many people don't bother traveling far to toss their waste.  In most open spaces you'll see a pile or two of trash, usually being picked through by stray dogs or chickens or sheep or cows.  I particularly like the cows, who sometimes lie across the top of the pile, chewing philosophically.  Sometimes people pick through the piles too.  Plastic bottles are regularly reused, and you can see them for sale in the market.  There is value in all that stuff, and seeing it around all the time has really changed my perception of it.

I still wince when one of my team throws trash out the window as we're driving, but I can't really complain.  Even the official dump is just an open area, and I wonder if it's really worse to distribute garbage around the countryside than to collect it all in one place.  I'm not sure, and I still won't throw plastic out the window, but it has made me much more conscious of what I use and what I throw away.  I'm not convinced that burying all our trash, like we do at home, is a better solution.  Maybe it's best for these things to be exposed - we might be encouraged to change the behaviour that generates them.

So it has been a thought-provoking few weeks, which I like.  Still, I'm looking forward to relaxing this weekend!

View out of the "door of no return", Elmina Castle, Ghana

- By the way, if you're interested in reading about the West African slave trade from a very personal perspective, Maya Angelou wrote All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes about the years she lived in Ghana in the 60s.  Among other things, she deals with trying to find a connection to her African roots, and her relationship to those Africans whose ancestors weren't sold into slavery.

Now I'm reading A History of West Africa 1000-1800 by Basil Davidson which, notwithstanding the super-colonialist sounding name of the author, talks less about the slave trade than about all the empires that thrived in the region from trade with the muslims to the north.  It's really interesting, and a big change from the euro-centric history I got in school!

A short one

Yellow Bizness Center, Tabou

It has been a long exhausting week with a lot of travel. Now it seems very unfair that it's Sunday night already and it all starts over tomorrow.

Here are a couple of pictures from this week's trip to Tabou. The beach and lighthouse were very pretty but I particularly liked the Yellow Bizness Center near the ONUCI camp, which kind of epitomizes the creative entrepreneurial spirit I see all the time here. They do photocopies, laundry, men's hair styling, car and motorbike insurance, and school documents. And all with a fabulous yellow paint job.

Cash only

Found next to the checkout at a recent supermarket visit

Buying here is a bit different than in other places I've lived.  You pay for everything with cash. Mobile money (essentially using mobile phone credits as currency by transferring them to someone else's account), which is really widely used in Kenya, exists for transfers between friends and family and is beginning to catch on for paying power or water bills here, but less for goods and services. Credit cards are totally useless, except to withdraw cash from the cash machine at a bank, and the banknotes you get from the cash machine are 10,000 CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) francs, worth about $20. Around here that will buy you a lot of just about anything.



Stock photo of mine from a market stall

It doesn't sound that different, but it has some unexpected consequences. For one thing, small change is really valuable.  You would happily accumulate your weight in coins if only you could wait the half hour after paying your bill for the waiter to go down the street to all the other restaurants, bars and shops until he finds someone who can break your $20, and brings you back the change and the chewing gum or pack of Kleenex he had to buy to get it.  Instead, you usually unload your precious shrapnel and hope to be able to pick up some more at the supermarket.

In the street market, where they set their own prices, they can make them nice and round, or give you a discount, throwing in an extra papaya, like a fruit stall vendor did for me this morning.  The papaya sold for about $0.20, and it brought the total of my purchases (half a kilo of onions, an avocado and a pineapple) to $2.  And if you have to break a big note there's usually a bench nearby they'll invite you to sit on while they go around to all their vendor colleagues to get your change.



Official cobbler of the Man football club

Places you go to regularly, like the corner boutiques that sell powdered milk and dried goods and soap and stuff like that, may give you the old-fashioned kind of credit. They'll write down that you owe them so much or that they owe you, and next time it gets added or subtracted from your total.

The fancier the place though, the more complicated it gets. Supermarkets and pharmacies have prices just like in supermarkets and pharmacies all over the world - 1,990 CFA francs for a box of cookies, for example (almost $4 - yes, the supermarkets are also quite a bit more expensive than the street markets). You can probably pay with credit card in Abidjan, where they set the prices, so they don't really care. Here though you end up adding whatever random items they have at the checkout until it comes to a number that the cashier can make change for.  Sometimes those items are pretty special though, like the Obama Biscuits (about $0.05) I found this week.

Champions of Africa

Grand Mosque in Abidjan

It has been quite a nice few weeks since I last wrote. My parents came to visit on the 7th and stayed until the 16th. I had a fantastic time, playing tour guide and social coordinator and generally trying to impress them with all the things I think are cool or entertaining about life here.  They were very good-natured about it, I must say. Of course, it was my birthday, so I had a good bargaining chip.

We visited Abidjan, Yamoussoukro (the capital) and Man, and they had a couple of days in Daloa too, to see the camp where I work and my little house, and to have two relatively restful days while I worked.  We had dinner with my work team, who were delighted that my parents came to visit and all wanted a picture taken with them.

With a few of those who came to my work-team dinner

To celebrate Claire and Paul's arrival in Daloa on the 9th, the Éléphants of Côte d'Ivoire won CAN 2015 in a thrilling history-making penalty shoot out against the Black Stars of Ghana.  We watched it in a nice, breezy restaurant/bar called Karusel in the center of Daloa, with the teenage children of the owner and their friends adding a lot to the atmosphere. Several of them were literally on their knees praying in front of the big screen tv during the final moments of the game, not unlike the Ghanian players, but with more success.


Waiting for the bus to Abidjan

The game itself was pretty well matched but not all that exciting. The tension built though as they maintained a goalless draw through regular play and thirty minutes of overtime. It was, incidentally, a remake of the last Ivoirian victory in 1992, also against Ghana and which also went to penalties. The Ivoirian goalie, Boubakar Barry Copa, who plays for some German club I have never heard of, missed the first two penalties and we thought it was all over. The Ivoirians managed to equalize in the first five shots, and after that it was direct elimination. Player by player they went through the whole team until there was no one left but the goalies themselves. Razak, the Ghanian, went first and made a decent effort but Barry Copa was able to stop it and then score his own penalty, winning the game and the trophy for Côte d'Ivoire.  He gave a really sweet interview afterward as well, practically in tears as he thanked his mother who had been worrying because he wasn't getting that much game time.


We didn't stay around for the interviews because the town was going nuts. After some general random hugging we made our way out to the car and slowly, slowly back to the house through the streets teeming with all the young people that had poured out in spontaneous celebration. It's at times like these when you really get a sense of what it means that almost 60% of the country is under 25 years old.  There were literally throngs of youth, both boys and girls, running and bouncing and singing like I remember seeing in footage of the ANC in South Africa toward the end of the apartheid era. They were all really happy, though, and a little rowdy, but not too bad. Apparently after the semifinal three or four people were killed by cars or motorbikes because they weren't paying enough attention in the street, and that memory kept things a bit more subdued after the final.


Here's a vendor taking it easy in the market in Man

Since then the afterglow lingers one, and you still see lots of people wearing the orange jerseys, or keeping a flag on their car. Claire and Paul have since returned to France, where they're catching up on lost sleep. I am back at work, and already planning my next holiday, which will be in just under a month (hooray for R&R!). Target: Ghana. But I should be able to get a couple of blog posts in before then.


If it's cold and crappy where you are and you want some music to take you away, mentally at least, here's a YouTube video of Daloa's own late great Ernesto Djedje, showing off his dance moves on a tv show that must have been in the 70s, judging by his outfit (which alone is worth the view).

If you would like to share a bit in the CdI victory, there's a song that played all through the tournament by Fitini, also on YouTube, where the singers beg the Elephants to work hard over there. 





Éléphants victorious, photo from news.abidjan.net