Weekend in Abidjan

World's whitest Santa in downtown Abidjan

I flew from Daloa to Abidjan on Friday afternoon. Lots of people are heading out these days, and three other women from the mission were leaving on the same Air Maroc flight to Casablanca at 2 am, so we all went out for pizza with a couple of others from the Abidjan office.  

We ate in Zone 4, the quarter where I'm staying, across the lagoon from the central business district.  It's close to the airport and has a lot of european residents.  Since the war many prefer not to have to cross the bridge to get to their flights.  Just in case.  As a result it feels about as far from Daloa as imaginable.  In many ways it feels like a French city, except you're more likely to see sheep walking down the street.

A shady handicraft-stall-lined lane at CAVA

On Saturday morning I went to CAVA, the Centre Artisanal de la Ville d'Abidjan.  I have heard about it since I got here, and it was definitely worth it.  It's a fantastic place with handicrafts from all over the country and beyond.  They have an incredible variety of wooden masks and carvings, not to mention painted textiles and much, much more.  The vendors are persistent and persuasive but not too pushy, and very happy to take time to explain the different pieces and how they fit into the culture.  It was all I could do not to come away with more than I could carry.  It helped that my suitcase was already pretty full.  And that I ran out of money.  Thankfully they only take cash!

Cathédrale St Paul d'Abidjan

Today I ventured across the bridge to visit St Paul's Cathedral, which was opened by Pope John Paul II in 1980.  I had seen glimpses of it from the bus to work during the two weeks I stayed in Abidjan on arrival in June, but this was the first time I saw it up close.  It's quite modern, and looks a bit like a musical instrument or a suspension bridge.  I think it's really cool.  Unfortunately it was closed for repairs so I couldn't go inside, but there was a choir practicing in a covered area outside and that was a beautiful experience in itself.  

It turned out that a Mass had just started in one of the other buildings, so I sat in for that - my first in Africa.  I'm sorry to say the singing was not as good as the choir outside.  I think I was the only white person there, although there was a woman and perhaps her daughter who could have been Indian. The sermon was about marriage.  The priest started out by emphasizing that Marriage is between Man and Woman which didn't particularly endear him to me.  It may have been his way of drawing in the rest of the audience though, as he went on to try to convince them to get married and stick to just one partner.  Neither of those is an easy sell around here, so I felt a bit more sympathy for him.  At the end of the Mass they blessed us all and prayed that for all of us who don't have children, this would be the year.  Priorities are clear, at least.  I wondered what the one nun in attendance thought of it.

Afterward I walked around the downtown area a bit, but everything is closed on Sunday so it was pretty quiet.  Now I'm all packed up and ready for my flight which leaves at 11:10 tonight.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Stations of the cross leading up to the cathedral

Christmas party West African style

Here they really get into their religious holidays.  Just as Ramadan was a big deal, Christmas seems to be shaping up that way too.  This week we had the Sector West HQ end of year party at camp, next to the restaurant called Welfare where I eat most workdays, on a little football field.  It's a really nice spot, with lots of shade trees and a very pleasant breeze.

That's the same dance face I make!

As well as a buffet, drinks and a few speeches, we were treated to a performance by a group of traditional Bété dancers.  Bété is the main ethnic group in the area around Daloa, and they were from a village not far from here, which happens to be the hometown of one of the plumbers in my team.  We tried to get him to dance too, but he didn't have the outfit with him.

This was my first live African traditional dance experience.  They were all men, four dancing and a few more on drums.  One of the dancers is actually Burkinabé (from Burkina Faso, our neighboring country to the northeast where they had a coup d'état a few weeks back).  The Bété and Burkinabé were on opposite sides of the recent civil war, so the fact that he has integrated into the local society well enough to join a Bété dance troop is kind of a big deal.

Normally after the Christmas party I would expect to do nothing at work for the rest of the year, but we're building a new camp in a northern town called Touba, so next week I'll spend a couple of days up there supervising the septic tank connection.  Since I head out for the holidays on Friday, it may end up being one of my busier weeks.

Weekend at the beach

The beach, with handicraft vendors,
in the evening sun

Sorry I'm late with this week's post.  I went to the beach at Grand Bassam for the weekend, on a trip organized by the UN Volunteer office in celebration of International Volunteer Day.  One of the Abidjan UNV had arranged for us to go with some orphans from a private orphanage that she has been working with called EMSF (Enfance Meurtrie Sans Frontieres), and they were super-excited about it, which rubbed off on all the rest of us. 

We spent the morning doing group activities at the orphanage.  There was yoga, arts and crafts, and an HIV awareness program for the dozen or so kids who are 14 or older.  Then it was off to a hotel by the water for lunch, beach cleanup, and general mayhem.

Some of the older kids in their new HIV awareness tshirts

All three of us who had come from Daloa and several from Abidjan stayed the night at the beach hotel and had a nice, leisurely morning at the beach.  It's a cute town, once the French colonial capital, and the roads are lined with countless handicraft stalls that would have been a lot of fun to explore.  Unfortunately, though only 430 km (270 miles) from Daloa, thanks to the road condition it took us about 7 hours to get back on Sunday, and we didn't get moving early enough to see much of the town.  It's less than an hour from Abidjan, so I should be able to go back.  I don't think I'll drive from Daloa again though!

There's a dangerous undertow at the beach so no swimming,
but plenty of fun in the surf

Lazy Sunday

Evening sky above my razor-wire

It has been a quiet week for me in Daloa.  I had no trips and no major projects at camp, just general housekeeping.

There was some Ferguson-style unrest in Odiénné, (a city in the north that I first visited a couple of weeks back - famous for its honey) after a young man died in police custody.  Our plumber stationed at the camp there lives in town and was pretty nervous for a couple of nights, but things calmed down after a government minister from the area made a special visit and apologized to the young man's family.

My weekend was uneventful too, mostly spent in the house catching up on emails and practicing the banjo.  I have made slow but steady musical progress: I can play about 5 songs poorly now - when I got here it was only 2.  I never heard of most of them before buying Banjo for Dummies, so I haven't really learned songs for everyone to sing along to yet.  The one exception is  "You Are My Sunshine" which I have been picking out with some help from the internet and, thankfully, is a really easy song.  My goal is to work up to Kermit the Frog's "Rainbow Connection", but that's still a ways away.

This evening I went out for a drive around 5pm.  It seemed like everyone was out enjoying the evening sun.  There was a soccer game on at just about every yard and vacant lot.  Everyone seemed to be in a good mood.  It was Daloa at its most relaxed, friendly and inviting.  It's not much of a cultural center, but the city has a lot of charm.

Holdup season

Ripe cacao pods

This week started with my first work security alert. On Tuesday there was a nationwide demonstration for back-pay by members of the military who had deserted the Ivoirian army to join the eventually victorious rebellion in the 2002-2007 war.  They told us of the planned demonstrations the day before, and sent us home about an hour early on the day. The main roundabout in the center of town had been blocked off, and there was more traffic than usual on the back streets, but that's all the evidence I saw.  In the morning we got a radio call telling us it was ok to come back to work.

Everyone was pretty relieved.  One of the main goals of the ONUCI mission here is DDR: Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration of the militias.  There's still a lot of work to be done.  Many people don't really trust the government yet and have held on to their weapons.  There's a lot of unemployment among youth, too, which doesn't help.

Wednesday I was at the camp restaurant having my usual lunch (salad and fried plantains - mmm) when a call came in for the head of Security, who was also eating there, about the holdup of an intercity minibus (called a "massa") 20 kilometers from Daloa on the main road to Abidjan.  We were all kind of sobered, as it was broad daylight, and considering whether it had been related to the events of the day before.

It's coffee harvest too, but it returns less these days

Someone then said, well it's the season.

Yes, it turns out there's a holdup season.  I makes sense, too - there's the cacao harvest now, and all around the region you can see the fermented grains being spread out to dry in the sun by the side of the road.  Everything is paid in cash - credit cards are totally useless and mobile money isn't very widespread.  So the cacao and coffee buyers go around with large sums on them and make good targets for the enterprising criminal.  The cacao farmers are presumably also reasonable targets for the somewhat less ambitious/organized thugs.

The condition of the roads actively helps, because there are countless places to choose from where drivers have to come to an almost complete stop to get past the potholes.  A forward-looking group of highwaymen just has to pick a suitable spot and wait for the right mark.

Unrelated picture of lizards sunbathing on my wall

And yet, things are remarkably calm.  A couple of days later I ended up having quite a pleasant roadside lunch in the very town where the holdup happened, and everything was just as normal.  In fact that's the weirdest thing about it.  For me the very term "holdup" conjures images of Depression-era bank heists.  I'm guessing that in the US and Europe a lot of the roads were probably pretty bad then, and even though it's very hard for me to imagine, there must have been a "holdup season" there too.  It may even have been worse, since so many crops are harvested at the same time, just before winter.

This morning at 6 am I met up with Augustine (who supplied me with the potted plants last week, you may remember) for a two hour walk around town before it gets too hot.  We walked to the market and back and explored some new areas in the part of town known somewhat uninvitingly as Abattoir, which was in fact really nice.  The roads aren't paved there, but they're wide and light and inviting, and there aren't many cars.  There were little kids playing and old people chatting and people getting ready for their day.

I remember when I first moved to South Atlanta in the 90s I was almost surprised that the locals didn't seem worried about drive-by shootings.  It wasn't anything like "Boyz N the Hood".  I always feel like a bit of an idiot, remembering that reality doesn't in fact look much like the movies.

Let's face it, not just my grandparents, but the grandparents of every person I know made it through the Great Depression without getting riddled with bullets a la Bonnie and Clyde.  Most of them probably never robbed a bank, either.  And here I am, peacefully working through holdup season in Daloa.  Who would have thought?

A little creek on the way back from Abattoir

Routine

Evening sky near Daloa

The good news is the ants appear to have lost interest in my kettle (hurrah!).  The bad news is they have just recently redirected their attention to my computer.  Right now they are scurrying into and out of the keys in a panic as I type.  Sigh.

Otherwise, it has been a reasonably low key week.  My WatSan (that's Water and Sanitation, sometimes also referred to as WASH - Water, Sanitation and Hygiene - my OCD always struggles a bit with that one: it should by WSAH, but that's just ridiculous) colleague Ali has gone home to Sudan on leave and the chiefs prefer one of us to be available in the office to distribute work and handle emergencies, so I have been more or less desk-bound all week.  We had some little projects to change the pace a bit, like the cleaning of the chlorine dosing tank at camp, with planning for a couple of upcoming off-base projects and the usual mountains of paperwork filling in the rest of my time.

The chlorine dosing tank being cleaned.
Is anyone else reminded of the Minions?

On the home front a local colleague, Augustine, who impressed me some weeks back with the collection of potted plants at her house, took me to the house of a friend of hers who has the most beautiful garden I have seen in Daloa.  In fact I think it's the only garden I have seen in Daloa.  Every house I had been to before has the external wall a few feet from the building and a paved terrace or courtyard in between.  No earth in there at all.  

This was a real walled garden, almost Mediterranean in style except for the kinds of plants.  It is large and terraced and divided into a number of different areas, with shade trees and flowering shrubs and fruit trees (lemon and cashew and calebasse - used to make gourds), and chickens and guinea fowl ambling around in the underbrush.  They also had a bush with pretty little purplish flowers and bright red spiky/furry fruit that's used to make red dye.  I had only ever seen it by the sides of the road outside the city of Gagnoa, and it always delights me, but this was the first time I could really take a good look at it.  Of course I didn't have my camera.

We spent a couple of hours in the garden, and the caretaker prepared two plants for me to take home in a water drum that he cut in half.  After all the work he did in the presentation I felt like I should have sprung for a nicer pot, but I'm still pretty happy with my water drum houseplants.  Right now they're on the terrace, waiting for me to figure out how best to arrange them.  Every time I open the door I see them and smile.

Water drum houseplants on the left - an exuberant papyrus that is messing with the perspective and a reddish plant (displaying the limits of my botany here).
On the right are two aloe plants in nicer pots.  Augustine got them for me from another friend a few weeks ago but I only finally picked them up yesterday.

Ups and downs

Cascades at Man

I had a lot of firsts this week.  I finally made it to Odiénné, the northernmost city in my sector, that I have been trying to get to for several months.  In Odiénné I went to the market, which was also an Ivoirian first for me, and I bought some of the Odiénné specialty, honey from the savannah.  Apparently it's collected from wild (?) bees that build their hives in the trees.  It's very tasty.  On the way back we stopped to see one of the two main tourist attractions of the western city of Man: the cascades.  The other main attraction is the monkeys that live on the sacred mountain and come down for bananas if you offer them politely enough.  I'd like to see the monkeys, but in these days of Ebola they are much less popular.  New things and new places always make me happy, so the week had a lot of highs.

Odiénné honey vendor serving up my share

There were also a fair number of lows.  It became clear that some projects I had been pushing for at work will never happen.  The first of a number of volunteers who are reaching the end of their contracts here had his leaving do on Friday.  One wall in my house has a lot of moisture damage from all the recent rain and looks like it's ready to fall in (although it isn't actually going to), and will definitely need some work.  On top of that some sad news from a dear friend left me feeling very far away.

But in the end, I had a very nice Sunday, spending the afternoon sitting at a maquis (sort of like an outdoor bar, would be a café but they don't serve coffee) in a nearby town watching the world go by.  All's well that ends well.

Cute, painted round huts in the villages around Odiénné

Ebola, Boko Haram, and politics

I don't know how things look where you all are, but here the news is pretty depressing.

The sick little girl traveling to Mali with her grandmother has now died from Ebola.  The two of them travelled across Mali on public transportation while she was symptomatic, so as many as 141 people may have had contact with her.  This triggers a combination of sadness for the two year old and her grandmother, rumored to have been coming from the child's mother's funeral in Guinea, as well as fears about what the mob reaction will be now if anyone so much as sneezes on a bus, and a kind of dread that Mali has fallen too, and we're slowly being surrounded.

There are some grim laughs out there if you
search the web for "Ebola humor"

From the US, meanwhile, we hear of the moronically short-sighted policies of the New York & New Jersey governors, to quarantine medical professionals returning from the Ebola fight.  Of course we all want to protect ourselves from this disease, but if anyone understands the risks it's the people who have been on the ground treating it.  And if we don't encourage people to go treat it on the ground in West Africa, how do we expect to stop the spread?  Has no one else played Plague, Inc?  Cuba got the message and is sending lots of doctors, it would be nice if we could pull our weight too.  They aren't contagious until they start to show symptoms, and these medical workers are painfully aware of the symptoms, of the risks of not getting treatment, and of the importance of getting isolated early.  The US is perfectly able to contain Ebola.  For God's sake, Nigeria was able to contain Ebola, and they have Boko Haram. 

Speaking of the crazies in northern Nigeria, apparently they are denying they ever came to an agreement with the government, and the hopes that the kidnapped girls would be back soon seem to have evaporated.  Thankfully in Cote d'Ivoire we still have Ghana, Togo and Benin between us, and for the moment it seems that Boko Haram are focusing their venom farther east, but right now it does feel a bit like we're surrounded by war and pestilence of medieval proportions*.

Thursday's coup d'etat in Burkina Faso didn't help.  Burkina is our other northern neighbor, just east of Mali.  I remember it from middle school because that's when they changed their name from Upper Volta, following a marxist revolution in 1983 led by Capt. Thomas Sankara (thank you Wikipedia - I didn't remember all of this from 5th grade geography), who died in 1987 in a follow-up coup by Blaise Compaoré, the guy who was in power for 27 years until - you guessed it - this newest coup.  He had proposed a constitutional amendment to allow him to stay on as president after next year's election, and it seems the people weren't impressed.  Now he has taken refuge in Cote d'Ivoire.    

There are a lot of Burkinabés here.  After independence in 1964, the first Ivoirian president and "Father of the Nation" Felix Houphouet-Boigny (it's a mouthful - you can use Google Translate's "Listen" icon for a little help) invited them down to work in the coffee and cacao plantations in the west of the country (like here, around Daloa) to contribute to the so-called Ivoirian Miracle.  It seems that they weren't given nationality though, which contributed to the question of "Ivoirité" that eventually exploded into "la crise" here in 2002.  

In semi-related local news, the court case against former president and head of the FPI political party Laurent Gbagbo (you sort of don't pronounce the first "G") is under way in the Hague, and his wife is to be tried here at home.  There is no movement whatsoever to punish the crimes committed by those currently in power, which fosters a certain cynicism about the reconciliation efforts.  The next election will be in October 2015, and it will be the first since 2010, which ended in the 5 months of bloodletting referred to as "la crise post-électorale".  Another former president and leader of the PDCI-RDA political party, Henri Konan Bedié (who came to power on Houphouet-Boigny's death in 1993 and was ousted in a coup in 1999 but is back in the game now), effectively decided the result of the 2010 election by throwing his support behind the current president, Alassane Ouattara of the RDR party, and has said he will not run against Ouattara in this election, to the vocal disapproval of some of the members of his own party.  Confused yet?  As the Ivoirian reggae star Alpha Blondy once said, if you think you understand the crisis in Cote d'Ivoire, it hasn't been explained properly.

Contributing to the quality of the Séguéla road

But it's not all doom and gloom.  On a day trip to Séguéla this week I saw promising signs of upcoming roadwork.  They say that the roads all get repaired in an election year, but this is the first sign I have actually seen of it.  The road to Séguéla is impressively bad - even epically bad.  The thought of being sent to Séguéla fills everyone with dread, which is too bad because it's a kind of charming town, with a very pretty green and white Grand Mosque, and one of the nicest hotels I have been to here (Hotel le Carrefour).  The road is paved (in theory), and only about 120 km (75 miles) long, but it takes over 2.5 hours to get there.  We passed 5 broken-down vehicles on the way - they just weren't up to the challenge.  They say you can't avoid the potholes on that road, you can only choose which potholes.  It's slow, jolting, exhausting work getting there, and all the while you're painfully aware that soon you will have to come back.  

So it's hard to convey the joy and hope I felt on our way back on Thursday when we spotted a work crew - complete with hard hats and hi-viz vests, which are not altogether common here - measuring the road and marking off sections with white spray paint.  I have never been so happy to see a group of highway engineers.  My spirits were buoyed all the way back, as it was clear that they had made a lot of progress.  There were little white right-angles marking off most of the tarmac all the way to Daloa.  There will not be much of the original road left when (it's too depressing, but maybe more realistic, to say "if") they get finished.  I was thrilled.  I can't quite say it restored my faith in politics, but it helped!

A particularly good stretch of the Séguéla road

*Note: ethnocentrically, I was referring to medieval Europe, the medieval Arab world of course having been a time/region of great peace, learning and medical advancement.

36 hours in Abidjan

No pictures of Abidjan, so here's a scenic view of Tanzania

I got back to Côte d'Ivoire from Tanzania yesterday, after a very pleasant and interesting trip. Between news of Ebola's spread to Mali and the attacks in Ottawa, traveling was a bit tense. My flight was delayed again, but this time only by about an hour, and I got back to Abidjan without too much trouble. Tomorrow it's back to Daloa and back to work.

I would like to say I took this opportunity to explore Abidjan, the Pearl of the Lagoons, but most of what I saw was out of my window in the taxi or the hotel. I'm staying in the Plateau, the central business district, which is famously dead on the weekend. That's ok with me, I was tired from all the travel, and I don't have tv at home, let alone cable, so I spent most of my time watching the tube. Or, as I prefer to think of it, catching up on popular culture.

An agama lizard in Tanzania.
Reminds me of a slightly crabby Spiderman

This afternoon there was Rugby on one of the French channels, with Clermont-Auvergne hosting the Sale Sharks. It brought back lots of nice memories of going to watch Sale play at Stockport, in the Chabal days. Today unfortunately they got crushed, 35-3. But I had fun watching.

Otherwise it has mostly been coupé-décalé music videos (see, I told you it was cultural!) and 24 hour news channels, with a brief interlude of laundry detergent ads on Saudi TV - there's obviously a more diverse clientele here than I realized. I did escape the hotel for a couple of hours this morning to go to a mall, where I bought ziplock bags, a 9 volt battery and a handful of other things I have no idea where to find in Daloa.  I'll have come back again to get a bit of a better feel for the city. Fortunately that shouldn't be too hard.

R&R - Zanzibar

A dhow on the Indian Ocean

Another eight weeks of work have passed, and that means R&R again.  Woohoo!

About 36 hours later than expected, thanks to an 8 hour flight delay and associated missed connecting flight and unexpected overnight in Dar es Salaam, and all the fun of traveling from West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, I made it to Zanzibar.

It's one of those names that seems straight out of the Arabian Nights, with sultans and everything.  The Spice Islands, in the Indian Ocean.  The kind of place I'd always heard about and always wanted to go.

By the time I arrived I was tired and dirty.  The ferry ride was freezing and not all that scenic, partly because it wasn't that easy to see the windows and partly because it was cloudy out and the sky and sea all kind of blended into a uniform light grey.  I wasn't feeling all that enthusiastic.

Once I finally made it though, I loved it.  It is much bigger than I realized, with an actual city - Stone Town - with an active local life.  There are tons of touristy things around, shops and tour companies and stuff like that, but also schools and shops and a market, and even a weightlifting association.  The old town is a warren of narrow streets, mostly not wide enough for a car, but full of people and everyone was really warm and welcoming - even the ones not actively trying to sell you anything.

Because of all the delays getting there I only got to stay 2 days, and I almost didn't bother making the trip from Dar es Salaam, but I'm really glad I did, and I hope I get to go back.

These boats could have been in Pirates of the Caribbean 

Palace of Wonder - not a bad name!

On the road

Most of the roads between towns are straight, with
gently rolling hills, but a lot more used than this one

This week was kind of crazy, with scheduled work at three camps during the week and surprise work at two other camps over the weekend.  I have always liked driving, especially long distance, so I was happy.

Driving here is exciting.  Here's a little sampling of the kinds of things you have to watch out for between towns when at the wheel:  

• Taxis - almost all 1980s model Toyota Corollas, painted the official city taxi color (green for Daloa) and often decorated with some pictures or text that's meaningful to the driver.  In Daloa they include "007", "Obama", "In Sh'Allah" and "Merci Maman".  They follow a fixed route and will stop for as many people as they think they can fit (which is more than you might expect), so they pull over at a moment's notice.
• Massa - minibuses driven between towns, but stopping at villages along the way (unlike the big intercity coaches).  These are usually old white Mercedes vans, often with the face of a famous person painted on the back - often a pop star or famous footballer, but sometimes a more political figure, like Che Guevara or Nelson Mandela.



You might be surprised by some of the
people that have been celebrated on a massa

• Trucks - especially lumber trucks.  It's probably better to be crossing them than trying to pass them, because they invariably belch lots of black smoke, making it extra hard to see the oncoming traffic.
• Motorcycles - thèse don't carry whole extended families like they used to in India, but they can easily carry 2 to 3 people, sometimes even with helmets.  Their drivers are usually pretty sensible, but they sometimes pass you from unexpected angles, especially if you've slowed down to work your way through a set of potholes.
• Bicycles - most nerve-wracking when ridden by young boys, because they tend to change direction unexpectedly without checking for other traffic.  Can be difficult too when they are carrying wide loads, like piles of wood, because they take up a lot more space than otherwise.  Cyclists often get off and push their bicycle + load up the hills.  I have only seen one cyclist with a helmet since I got here.  He was in Abidjan.  He was black, but I bet he was foreign.
• Pedestrians - people walk to market, fields or forest in single file along the side of the road, with their tools and wares or purchases on their heads.  Women and girls carry babies on their backs, and men sometimes carry children in their arms.  Now and then they'll be accompanied by a dog.  Toddlers often walk too, a little erratically, so you honk as you approach to let whoever is in charge of them know you're coming.  They often stop and step into the bushes as you pass even if there is no oncoming traffic, just in case.
• Cows - large herds are walked along the roads, apparently from Mali to the cities nearer the coast to be sold.  The cowherds are young men and sometimes boys, and are impressively good at getting the cows to stick to one side of the road when you're passing.
• Potholes - these can be anywhere, and come individually or in packs.  Sometimes you can tell the really bad ones because there's grass growing in them - a dead giveaway.
• Breakdowns - often triggered by the mercenary potholes, and usually hidden just behind a bend where they can take full advantage of the element of surprise.  If they aren't equipped with reflective warning triangles to put out they often tear out clumps of grass and put that in the roadway.  Drivers think it might be a really bad pothole and slow down - very effective!

The kind of timber truck you hope
not to have to pass on the road

In the villages, in addition to all the above, there are children playing, passengers getting on or off the massa, people selling snacks or toiletries to the massa passengers, people loading and unloading goods onto the massa, people deciding they should cross right then without looking, and farm animals.  Chickens regularly decide to cross the road, for whatever reason, as do pigs and goats and sheep.  It seems that where there are no fences the grass is always greener on the other side of the street.

All of this definitely helps keep you awake while driving.  I really like it because I get to see village life a bit and how people interact and work together.  It's stressful, but it's fun!

Arriving in Daloa - the green cars are the taxis

Feminist toilet rant

First of all, welcome to any non-feminists, male or female, who started reading in spite of the title (or didn't notice the title). I know feminists can be scary. The very word feminist is a bit of a challenge, because what we really want to be are equalists or humanists or something more inclusive, but the fact remains that half the population is underrepresented in decision-making and paid less for their contributions even in the most "developed" countries, not to mention the exclusion and injustice experienced elsewhere. We're working on improving that, and would love your help, but the word "feminist" reminds us that we haven't got there yet.

This rant, which has turned into more of a lament, was triggered two weeks ago at one of the camps where we were doing annual maintenance on a wastewater treatment unit (which means cleaning out all the sewage sludge, a very messy job) and we finished after dark.  I love sewage treatment, I think it's a noble profession and worthy and honorable work, but I definitely like to get cleaned up after doing it.  The UN provides lavatories, complete with showers, for men and women at all of the camps.  I wanted to go to the ladies' but it was locked.  The woman who works at that camp, in the Security section, keeps the key and she had gone home. Why lock the door? Because public toilets aren't safe.

If only we could all defend ourselves like Hit-Girl

It's not just in Africa, in Europe and the US parents know this and try to avoid letting their little kids go alone. But as we grow up, after we get to a certain size we forget about it. Not everywhere. I'm not suggesting that there are sexual predators lurking in the ladies toilets on our guarded UN camps (although with the male:female staff ratio I probably shouldn't exclude that possibility), but I am now very conscious that Ivoirian women don't feel safe in a public toilet that wasn't locked before they got there. That tells me a lot about how different growing up as a woman here must have been to my childhood.

Meanwhile, Ivoirian men (and male visitors to the country) routinely pee in public. They stop on the side of the road and urinate into the bushes, in town as well as in the countryside, and don't seem deterred by the presence of others. After all, it's perfectly natural, why be ashamed?

Environmentally speaking, of course, they're quite right - urine is full of nitrogen and a great fertilizer, and it is really a waste to send it all to sewage treatment works. Anyway, there are no public toilets - no fast-food or coffeehouse chains where you can buy a drink as an excuse to use the facilities either (seriously, I even checked the Starbucks locator website: the closest I could find was Cairo), and gas stations don't have them. That's what the bush is for.

You may remember, from my very first post, that I was going to relieve myself in the bush when I got my car stuck in the mud and needed five helpful young villagers to dig it out. Even something as seemingly straightforward as nipping behind some vegetation is not without its hazards. And my young villagers were helpful. Judging by the locked ladies' room door, that is something Ivoirian women are not prepared to count on. Women learn to hold it.

The locked door also reminds me that I grew up in a very sheltered, privileged environment. I had indoor plumbing at home all my life and every school I went to had safe, serviceable toilets. As a girl, this leveled the playing field for me and I was completely oblivious. When I got my first period it was a hassle and an adjustment, but it wasn't a reason to drop out of school. I graduated, without a second thought, just like the boys. Unlike poor adolescent girls all over the world, I had access to decent restrooms.

I know it's not all unicorns and rainbows for boys and men in life either. As the saying goes, everyone is fighting a hard battle, and even the biggest, strongest man will at some point need to poo (that last part isn't in the saying, or at least it wasn't before now). The risks aren't the same as for women, but in that moment in the bush I bet the feeling of vulnerability is familiar.

It seems very unfair, but I don't travel alone here any more.  I might have to use the toilet.

A plumbing and electrical parts supplier in the town of Tabou

Further reading:  there's a great Scientific American article this week on evidence showing that diverse groups are more creative, and a wonderful Indian comic book about puberty aimed at 9-12 year old girls (but welcoming all ages, and genders), called Menstrupedia.

Ladies room clip art: http://www.clker.com/clipart-ladies-room1.html
HitGirl: http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120207153754/bleedmancomics/images/a/a2/Hit-Girl.png

Reasoning with ants

Cooped up: view from my back terrace
shortly after moving in.  Still, beautiful sky!

My good friend Christina asked recently about my feelings in this new world.  When I read her comment my reflex was instant and absolute:

Feelings?  I don't have feelings.  

Call me Cleopatra, my standard reaction when my feelings aren't Happy is denial.  It isn't very mature, but I've come to recognize it, and my reaction is now a reminder that the feelings are still there - as everyone around me is usually very aware - even though I hoped they would go away.

It's not that I think my other feelings are bad, but they're usually transient, and sometimes they feel counterproductive, and certainly disproportionate.  I mean, my vital signs are all normal: clearly I'm fine.  I want to accentuate the positive, as the old song goes (here sung by the great Ella Fitz).  I really don't want to be one of those people who complains all the time, and I know how easy it can be to slip into that.  So how do I put my feelings into perspective, acknowledging them without exaggerating them?  My current ant problem might be a good example.

It don't mind ants.  In fact I don't mind most bugs, and the only ones I will kill on purpose (if I can) are mosquitoes and flies.  I call that self-defense.  Ants, I believe, are clever and hard-working and relatively egalitarian (the queen just reproduces, she doesn't tell the workers what to do).  I know they have some gender issues - it isn't the perfect society - but as far as I'm concerned (as long as they're not actually on me, in which case they must die, as I have told them repeatedly) ants are cool.  So I am flummoxed by their fascination with my electric kettle.

The kettle was the first appliance I bought after my fridge.  Here the electric generation is 50% hydropower so I felt all sustainable, compared to the charcoal that most people use to cook.  It opened up new food options: couscous and hot drinks and powdered soup (I have since added a gas burner, imagine the possibilities!).  I was doing good and taking a new step toward food autonomy.  I was in control of my destiny.

Achievement unlocked: first real cooked meal in my house,
about a month ago.  That's the kettle on the left.

The tiny little ants who live here like the kettle too.  I have no idea why.  Even though it's not much fun to come in and find them in my cocoa powder (Ivoirian cacao, of course) or in my dirty dishes in the sink, it makes sense.  I can work with that.  They managed to break into some sealed cup-a-soup packets I had on a shelf, which is annoying but impressive.  However, if I keep the dishes clean and seal my food properly or put it in the fridge, no problem.

So what's the deal with the kettle?  There's no food in it, and so no conceivable attraction.  I thought it was random at first, and that after they saw it boil they would stop coming.  But no, they keep coming, not tons of them like to the cocoa and the soup, but often at least half a dozen, scurrying in and out of the electrical element (they're really very small) or sometimes clumped together floating on the surface of any water I might have left, clinging to one another like so many tiny shipwreck survivors.  When I pour out the water and they hit solid ground they run for their lives.  That is, as long as I notice them and clean them out before I turn the kettle on.  Otherwise I get boiled ants.

Now this isn't a serious problem - it poses no significant threat to the ant population and it's actually pretty easy to manage.  What's more, I know if I told any of my three security guards or maid (yes, I'm a volunteer and yet have 4 dedicated household staff), or if I talked to the plumbers in my team or the guys in the facilities management unit at work, any of them could hook me up with someone to pump my little house full of enough toxic chemicals to give the ants pause.  But I don't particularly want pesticide in my electric kettle either.  I just want to understand why.  Not understanding, I feel isolated.

Camp hospitality: the Moroccan contingent
served us tea and breakfast on a silver tray

I feel this kind of isolation at work too, with the crushing bureaucracy that eventually I'm sure I'll get used to but so far still makes me crazy.  Yesterday my colleague in the Water and Sanitation unit was at the office (many of us go in for an hour or two on the weekend, and I will probably go again later today).  He is a lovely Sudanese man named Ali who has been here for five years and held the WatSan fort on his own for over a year before I arrived.  He asked me what I thought of the mission so far.  I found it hard to be positive, and I wouldn't want him to think that it's the people.  Everyone has been very nice to me, and particularly in our unit I have really enjoyed working with the team, learning about the country and the history of the mission and their experiences here when things were really bad during la crise.  They're the ones who are teaching me to eat with my fingers, too.  But the military/UN system is byzantine and really impersonal, and from where I stand these days, the most obvious effect of that is to undermine trust and teamwork within the mission.  Trying to get anything done often seems about as effective as reasoning with the suicidal ants.

My feelings of isolation also seem to flag injustice up in high relief.  It's the fundamental unfairness of life, and I am simultaneously a privileged international staff member, with pay and benefits far better than that of the local staff (who don't get security guards, by the way, not to mention R&R, first choice of the PPE, or evacuation if things get really bad) not to mention all locals not working for the UN, and at the same time a woman in a professional world designed and almost exclusively occupied by men (the admin assistant, Carole, and I are the two women in the sector's 40 engineering staff), who doubtless had the best intentions but clearly have no idea how non-men experience the world (I'm still working on the feminist toilet rant - that's for another time).  The result is that I often seem to alternate between feelings of guilt and indignation/self-pity.

Happy: pretty flowers and butterflies all over
(but the butterflies rarely sit still for the camera)

In all honesty, my annoyances and frustrations are mostly not about Great Injustice.  They are mostly about things as insignificant (to non-ants) as boiled ants.  In fact their one redeeming feature is that they do sometimes make me think about more profound problems, so I really shouldn't ignore them or edit them out of my story here.  Then when I'm feeling a bit more mellow and in control maybe I can learn how to improve them.  It's a lot easier to see things like that in a new place.  Even though I have felt crabby a lot of the time recently, I'm genuinely grateful to be here.

I know with time I won't be as annoyed by the little things, and I won't notice the big things as much either.  Either fishing the boiled carcasses of ants out of my tea will have become habit (maybe, like in the old joke about Peace Corps volunteers, I will even reach the point where I eat them for the extra protein) or I will have caved to the pressure to nuke my house.  I will eventually know who to ask for the key to the ladies room at every camp where we work, and to ask for it before everyone leaves if we're working late on sewage treatment plant maintenance (foreshadowing: the source of the feminist toilet rant material).  Right now I'm in classic culture shock, with the accompanying annoyance, isolation, and judgmental nit-pickiness (there's a good description of it on Sheffield University's study abroad webpage, if you're interested).  It's very common, and almost all of you have probably felt it too, even if only when changing jobs or something like that.  Eventually, the culture shock will pass, and I'll feel less isolated, and less annoyed.  It's typical.

Nothing annoys me more than being typical.  I guess I'll just have to learn to live with that.

Quiet weekend

Nicely painted workshop at the corner of my road

It's a rainy weekend in Daloa, and there's not a lot to do besides surf the net in my little house behind the Total station on the road to Abidjan.  That's my actual address - as far as I can tell, here the streets have no name.  I guess now I know what U2 was singing about.

It doesn't feel like a post from me without some mention of Ebola, so here's a link to an educational (?) music video by DJ Lewis, an Ivoirian dj.  The music is "coupé-décalé", a dance genre started by Ivoirian émigrés in Paris and then brought back to become popular here (and not all as weird as this one).  DJ Lewis was on the charts a few years back with a similar hit about bird flu - seems to be a bit of a theme...

Finger food

Papaya season is just starting - they're not hard
to eat with your fingers, but can be messy!

Here, eating "à l'Africaine" means eating with your fingers.  It's not just for chicken wings - under the guidance of my Ivoirian plumbing crew I have really expanded my finger food horizons.  It's a whole new world of etiquette but they're coaching me and progressively more food ends up in my mouth and less on my clothes.

It takes a bit of practice, and maybe some spare napkins, but this is definitely something everyone can try at home.  I bet your kids will enjoy it, and you'll have fewer dishes to wash, so it's ecological too!

First things first, wash your hands because you'll all be eating from the same dish.  At the restaurants they bring two little buckets of water to the table with a hand towel and either a saucer of laundry detergent or a bottle of liquid soap.  One bucket is to lather and the other to rinse.  You can just go to the sink though, a lot of restaurants have one or two at the back just for that.  In fact at a place we went to on Wednesday they said they weren't using buckets any more because of Ebola.

A fairly typical "maquis" or streetside restaurant/bar.
The sinks are along the back wall.

Use only your right hand, because the left has other, toilet-related responsibilities and nobody wants that in their communal plate.  Then just tuck in.  Take a handful of rice, squish it together in your fist or against the side of the dish with your fingers and then use your thumb to flick it into your mouth.  When you get comfortable with that you can try dipping it in sauce or pinching it against some cooked onions or chopped tomatoes.

Uncle Sam rice, imported from Thailand

The trick is not to take too much at a time.  I made that mistake at first, I thought I could eat rice like a fist-full of popcorn.  It wasn't pretty.  The main starches here are attiéké (a couscous-like dish made from manioc/yuca), and rice, although they gave us spaghetti at the Niger battalion camp where we were working this week.  The spaghetti was actually the easiest.  It was cut up and stuck together pretty well on its own.

For protein it's mostly chicken, which is easy, and fish, which is not.  The fish is generally served whole, possibly in a sauce, and you just reach in and tear off chunks of the flesh.  Be careful because it can be surprisingly hot, though for once it's your fingertips not your tongue getting burned.  Then you're supposed to work out the bones with your tongue and spit them discretely into a neat pile on the table beside your plate or, if outdoors, onto the floor.  They do the same thing in China, which was where a few years ago I learned that my spitting skills are nowhere near refined enough.  Here I play it safe at the restaurant by just taking the bones out with my fingers.  All my dinner table companions kindly ignore the faux-pas.

Bon apétit!

I haven't tried eating goat with my fingers yet,
but it can't be as hard as fish!

Electrical woes

Inside of a newly cleaned 2 m3 water storage tank
(on it's side)

My weekend has been hijacked somewhat by electrical problems at my little house in Daloa.  It seems that when the developer built the group of houses in 2011, in the middle of "la crise", they didn't have access to (or didn't budget for) good quality electrical cables, so now mine have taken industrial action.  Since Thursday they are working at severely reduced capacity, overheating and tripping the breaker if I use more than one appliance at a time, including the fridge.  It will all be fixed on Tuesday, they tell me, when they will rewire the house.

So now the fridge is on and I'm at the office using the internet.  I didn't bring my laptop so I only have access to work photos, which explains today's picture.  Still, it's a nice color, isn't it?

Weekend at work

A weaver bird poses by its nest near the camp

Sorry I didn't get a blog post out this weekend, we had a bit of a crisis at work.

Here it's rainy season and last week on Tuesday we had a terrific storm that brought down a major electricity transmission line feeding the southwest of the country.  All of our camps have backup generators, so that was no problem, but the local water company, SODECI, apparently does not and one of our camps in that area was hit particularly hard.  They have a borehole to supplement what they get from SODECI, but that hasn't been working very well for a few weeks now.

Pulling the pump pipework out of the well
(it is not supposed to be muddy)

The camp in question is pretty isolated, in a town right on the border with Liberia, and with the whole Ebola situation the soldiers from Niger stationed there are understandably a bit on edge.  When the water was still out after 4 days, tempers were running high.  So I went down with two of our plumbers for the weekend and replaced the borehole pump, which had been overwhelmed by mud.  It didn't fix the problem, and we'll have to go back to clean out the well completely and maybe even put in a new one, but at least the troops there don't feel like they've been abandoned.  SODECI got the water running again by Friday night, which really helped!

I didn't do much of the actual pump removal, I stuck to the (less dirty and maybe not quite equally important) job of taking pictures.  I made it up to the guys by doing most of the driving, and by doing all the paperwork for our trip - and in the UN, there's a lot!

Will try to get a blog out this weekend though, as usual - maybe about the joys and pains of driving here...