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.