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.