idland

Stopping terrorism

2010-01-15T15:01:00.002+01:00

Fareed Zakaria writes the twenty most intelligent sentences I've read since the Christmas Day attempted bombing. An excerpt (but read the whole thing):

As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door.

Why is our political system incapable of saying anything anywhere near as intelligent as this?

Which MS Office component fights terrorists best?

2010-01-12T15:11:00.003+01:00

Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency.

From CNAS.

hat tip: Blattman

OLPC, We hardly knew ye

2009-09-14T02:38:00.005+01:00

The wires and blogs are sounding a death knell for the One Laptop Per Child project, which once aimed to put a cute, green, pedal-powered laptop into the hands of poor children around the world, for around $100/machine.

This has been a project that people have loved to hate almost since it was conceived, drawing criticism from computer makers, Bill Gates, Business Week, and development experts everywhere. My feeling is that anything that could offend so many people at once must have something going for it.

This is not to say it wasn't a project doomed from the start, which it was, but for none of the reasons cited by its critics. Negroponte, the OLPC founder, had one enormous innovation that nobody seemed to pick up on - he wanted to give the computers to kids, and give them unrestricted access to do with the technology as they wished. I'm sure he was thinking about kids in the West who tinker with their phones and computers and surpass their parents somewhere between the ages of six and twelve.

Whether this is a good idea or not could be debated. I would suggest asking any Silicon Valley engineer or entrepreneur whether they learned to use computers in a controlled classroom setting - the answer will rarely be affirmative. (My experience has been that people who are good with technology think giving machines directly to children is brilliant - and people who suck with technology think it's insane. Who should you believe?) But this is not the point, because this issue almost didn't enter the debate - it was so far outside the way that development projects are run in this age that many didn't even notice the ambitious access to be given to children; perhaps they couldn't even conceive of something so unbureaucratic.

It was an ambitious idea then, but doomed from the start because it cut all the traditional development players out of the market. No educational experts to build new curriculums specializing in Computer Assisted Learning, Integrated Technology Classrooms and other acronyms that serve primarily to legitimize bureaucrats. No teachers to control access to the technology. No continued role for donors, governments or political parties, no monitoring and evaluation or foreign consultants. The OLPC simply left no role for all the people who make their living solving poverty. Just computers in the hands of children, to use as the children wanted.

I think it was just a little bit too much freedom for most development types to wrap their heads around.

Zimbabwe's inflation is sustainable, or What the thugs are thinking

2008-07-04T00:05:00.002+02:00

A lot of people are still wondering about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation, estimated at about 9,000,000% as of mid-June. Cowen, among many others, is still thinking through the lens of seignorage, i.e. printing money is a tax on holders of money, but costs through the cost of bank notes and damage that inflation causes to the economy.

Hyperinflation is attributed to incompetence, a Government shooting itself in the foot, those stupid African communists.

But it's not as stupid as it looks; the problem is that commentators still think of Zimbabwe as a state with a Government. In the last five years Zimbabwe has ceased to have a Government: it has been replaced with a small group of thugs operating the machinery of a state.

9,000,000% inflation makes no sense from the perspective of a Government. Hyperinflation destroys a state because (i) its citizens turn to other currencies or escape to other countries, (ii) economic activity grinds to a halt, and (iii) the Government finally runs out of people who will pay for its paper. This usually happens well before 9,000,000%. It does not happen in Zimbabwe because (i) security forces in Zimbabwe will arrest you if you try to buy or sell anything with foreign currency, (ii) the economy has mostly been killed but there are enough remittances from family members to keep the thugs in business, and (iii) security forces and mobs in South Africa are doing everything they can to stop Zimbabweans from fleeing and keep them trapped in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe a state no longer; it is a prison for its citizens, and hyperinflation is just one cog in the machinery of punishment. 9,000,000% inflation makes a lot of sense from the perspective of a small group of thugs operating a state. By forcing people through threat of violence to continue to transact in Zim dollars, you can sell them worthless paper for the foreign currency they get from their relatives outside. They would leave, but with the assistance of your state neighbors like South Africa, you force them to stay. Their relatives keep sending them money because they will starve without it. They keep using that money to buy Zim dollars because they will be thrown into prison if they don't.

The citizens of Zimbabwe are held hostage, and the thugs known as ZANU-PF are collecting ransom after ransom from their relatives. People are waiting for the country to self-destruct, but I'm afraid this money pump is more sustainable than commentators have suggested.

It's a remarkable little operation, and it seems like few outside of Zimbabwe have understood it.

Some references:
Zimbabwe's people kept alive by remittance market
Letter from Harare

Ugly food price effects

2008-04-18T00:00:00.001+02:00

This is a strange pair of articles in today's morning news:

Across globe, empty bellies bring anger. Food prices are spiraling out of reach, sowing volatile discontent and putting pressure on volatile Governments.

Ottawa to pay struggling pork producers $50 million to kill 150,000 pigs by fall. ...Most of the meat is to be used for pet food or otherwise disposed.

Wasteful rich and hungry poor are hardly news, but I find it striking that rising grain prices should affect us so differently. There is less to eat for the poor, and more must be thrown away by the rich.

Canada is great

2008-03-21T00:47:00.001+01:00

Nothing to do with development, but beautiful:

Plans for Canada anti-terror unit found in garbage. No, this is not from the Onion. I'm happy to see that in spite of all the talk, we aren't really that worried about terrorists.

It's hard to be good

2008-03-12T00:24:00.001+01:00

The ever busy Chris Blattman complains about Development Tourists, people who go on short trips to developing countries to do things like build houses with Habitat for Humanity, or run inane research projects or work in NGOs for less than a year at a time. Who are these fools, and who do they think they are helping?

It's a classic complaint among development workers, but I really don't get it. We complain that rich country Governments don't pay enough attention to International Development, that they don't meet their international commitments, that most Americans couldn't find Kenya or Darfur on a map. But it's when a person gets themselves organized enough to find out about Habitat for Humanity and go on a home building trip, that's when all the cranky and experienced development types really get their knives out.

Why are we development workers so quick to attack people who are trying to do the same thing as us, if perhaps a little bit less informed and less cynical about it? My suspicion is that it is an expression of deep anxiety about our own ability to make a difference. By attacking the Development Tourists, we can feel better about ourselves, because we're the real thing, not like those boneheads over there.

Blattman's blog is generally focused on positive undercurrents in development. If he is going to turn on the criticism, I can think of a lot of things worse than Development Tourists. How about the jaded development types who have spent years in Africa and know exactly how to abuse the system to reap huge consulting fees for work they know is useless? How about the preachers and con men selling false cures for AIDS? The promoters of abstinence-only HIV education? Or the majority of Americans who can't tear themselves away from their reality television shows for long enough to go on a short term Habitat trip and see something outside their own country?

Why would you attack the one group of people who are trying to learn more about how they can make a difference?

Seeking a new colonial master

2007-12-09T00:08:00.000+01:00

I'm struck by the language used in the Economist's article about the lifting of the European travel ban on Robert Mugabe, the man largely responsible for the ongoing destruction of Zimbabwe. The story goes thus: faced with an increasing Chinese and Indian influence on the African continent, Europe can no longer afford to moralize to Africa's tinpot dictators, or it will lose out on the spoils. Hence the decision to allow Mugabe to visit Portugal to attend an Africa-EU summit, with one conscientious abstainer, the prime minister of the UK.

What strikes me is that all the sound bites, from African and European leaders alike, indicate a story that is not about partnership, but about sale.

Nigeria's minister of finance:

"Nigeria is becoming a beautiful bride. What is happening is the Chinese, the Koreans, everyone is coming around, and if European companies do not wake up, they will see that most of the best businesses are taken."

Apparently the goal is to have all of Nigeria's businesses taken by foreigners. Interesting.

Another unnamed "African official":

"Europe is jealous. They say we have gotten a new colonial master, but our old one wasn't so good."

(I naively thought the best idea would be to have no colonial master at all.)

The [Europeans'] main concession is to be less critical of regimes that are a bit light-fingered, or disdainful of human-rights.

It is interesting that at the end of the colonial period, most of the African colonies were loss-making enterprises for the colonial Governments. Now that Africa's resources are again perceived to be valuable, I guess we can drop the talk about democracy and human rights, and get back down to business.

Where have we heard this before?

2007-12-04T00:17:00.000+01:00

I would guess that journalists must be most willing to take liberties with the truth when they are discussing subjects or places they can count their readers knowing very little about.

So I gather from this cover story that Business Week readers can be assumed to know very little about Africa. I assume that's why the author chooses to join a couple of entrepreneurs with a factory in rural Mozambique, and incorrectly generalize this experience to a continent. He describes Africa thus:

Airports open and close arbitrarily. Roads are often unpaved and clogged. Gasoline and diesel are scarce, and rolling blackouts common. The medical precautions are even more forbidding: Traveling to mosquito-infested interiors requires a round of injections and weeks of antimalarial pills that often induce hallucinations.

Was our correspondent really taking mefloquine? Only if his physician is seriously out of touch or old-fashioned - Doxy and Malarone and far more commonly prescribed, especially for short trips like our correspondent's. And even mefloquine produces hallucinations very rarely, not "often". But hallucinogenic anti-malarials sound like a great story, so why not take some liberties. (And the round of vaccinations is not that different from what you need to travel to South America or Asia.)

As for scarce gasoline and airports that close down, that's a bit dramatic. 25% of Africa's GDP comes from South Africa, where neither of those things are true, and another good chunk comes from North Africa or various capital cities with pretty robust refueling infrastructure at least. It's not really fair to pretend that this is a normal part of the business environment.

But I am nitpicking - the rest of the article isn't that bad. The title "Can Greed Save Africa" does make one think of another time in history that greed drove all kinds of investors into Africa, harvesting resources and cutting off hands and the like...

At least one thing hasn't changed - it's the land that matters. The world is experiencing an unprecedented commodities boom. Africa is one of the planet's last untapped resources. (Though the BusWeek article talks mostly about microcredit and agriculture, the biggest business in Africa is still natural resources, and the commodities boom is driving the credit boom.) So do you think these resource extraction projects are sustainable?

The most telling comment for me is by the Dutch South Africa manager of a project in Mozambique: "I'd be the last person in history to go down as a philanthropist, but you cannot run a business when your workers are out with malaria or sick from dirty water."

This then, is the trade being offered. Anti-malarials and clean water, for the land.

Stupid headline of the day

2007-11-15T00:27:00.000+01:00

Thanks to that pillar of quality journalism, the New York Times, for bringing this barbaric practice to the front page. Just when we thought those Africans were becoming modern, embracing internet cafes and mobile phones, now they think children are witches. I guess some things never change...

Some more fishy reporting on the MDGs

2007-11-04T00:17:00.000+01:00

The folks over at the United Nations have developed a flashy new web site, the MDG Monitor, which tracks progress toward the completion the Millennium Development Goals, those "achievable" targets agreed to by all the nations in 2000.

I've long been convinced that the driving force behind the MDGs was not to increase foreign aid or development, but to increase the UN's influence in those areas. But I was curious to see how the UN is representing progress in some of my favorite countries.

So I punched in Lesotho, and received the following result.

How disingenuous! Whenever there is a goal that has virtually no possibility of being achieved, the UN is shrugging its figurative shoulders, uhhh, we're not really sure about that one. But I know for a fact the information is not insufficient - I have it on my computer! Lesotho has a comprehensive Demographic and Health Survey from 2004 that shows pretty clearly what the direction of progress is in these areas.

In fact, there's almost no hope of attaining the mortality goals, since the MDGs are measured from 1990, which predates the explosion of HIV in Southern Africa. Southern Africa's infant mortality rates, which the MDGs forecast to decrease by half, were higher in 2005 than in 1990. Should that not be described as "off track"?

This icon appears occasionally. I guess this means possible in theory. i.e. If development agencies became effective, if governments and civil servants in poor countries started to care about their poor, and if we find a cure for HIV in the next six months, then maybe this target could be achieved.

But try as I might, I couldn't find a single goal for a single country that the United Nations acknowledges to be Off Track. Sudan? No information. Congo? Nada. Surely Zimbabwe at least must be off track on some of its goals? Never heard of the place! That's right, Zimbabwe doesn't even appear on the UN's list of countries. Out of sight, out of mind!

Why does the UN want to hide the fact that so many countries are clearly failing to meet the Millennium Development Goals?

What does it take to get defrocked?

2007-09-27T03:06:00.000+02:00

The archbishop of Mozambique accuses Europe of manufacturing condoms with HIV. Words fail me. Link from FP passport.

Why there is corporate evil

2007-09-03T04:45:00.001+02:00

George Clooney has been polishing his image as a left wing man of the people who is not afraid to speak out against presidents or corporations. He speaks out against atrocities in Darfur, writes spiteful editorials about Dubya, drives an electric car and makes movies about evil corporations.

When asked recently whether he felt conflicted doing advertisements for Nestle, a multinational with all sorts of controversial practices in poor countries, Clooney answered, "I'm not going to apologize to you for trying to make a living every once in a while. I find that an irritating question." Unsmilingly.

This is a principle that seems to guide many people: Take an interest in all of the social problems that don't have anything to do with your lifestyle or career. As for the areas where you could feasibly make a difference in the world, mind your own business and just do your job.

And if George Clooney needs the money that badly, what hope for the rest of us?

Leaving Lesotho

2007-05-29T00:22:00.000+02:00

I am setting a pattern of difficult departures from Africa. When I left Rwanda four years ago, I ended up stranded in Nairobi, sick as a dog, all my cash foolishly packed in my checked luggages and thus unable to pay the Kenyan visa to get me into my airline-provided hotel.

Leaving Lesotho was not quite as dramatic, but held its own share of excitement.

The fun began even before we got out of our gated community, a sure sign of a long day ahead. A year of peaceful coexistence with our Government-financed guards had made us complacent, and we had forgotten the nonsense that paying residents are routinely put through. So as we approached the exit, truck loaded with our six overweight luggages and two bicycles, the guard hesitated in opening the boom.

"What is the problem?" I asked through the open window.

He was uncertain, peering into the vehicle, eyeing over the contents of the truckbed.

"It looks like you are moving out," he observed.

Not an unreasonable observation. I had forgotten about the twisted regulation of the place where we live: you are not allowed to move away. Not without written permission from the highly sketchy Mr. K___ who manages the housing unit.

We were on our way to the airport in Johannesburg, rendering the scene slightly more absurd. The guard could not seriously expect us to leave the truck behind, fetch a taxi to the manager's office, solicit his permission to depart, and then return. Nor was he even after a bribe - he was just fulfilling the irrational duties of the job.

We are familiar with the procedure. The expected process from here is a long, drawn out conversation, interrupted by repeated phone calls to superiors, negotiations and renegotiations, finally ending in our being allowed to leave. We have been through this kind of thing before, with the police, with customs, with anyone official - after enough time, they eventually tire of holding you back and let you through. But did I mention we have a plane to catch?

Luckily, a Mercedes van bearing a half-dozen Chinese textile mill supervisors also needed to exit the compound. While the guard dealing with us phoned his superiors from inside the station, another guard motioned our vehicle to wait while he let the Chinese truck through. I waited for the boom to go up, and then stepped on the gas and sped around the Chinese van and out the exit, the guard's objecting shouts floating behind us as we rolled down the hill. I don't mean to over-dramatize the situation - but let's not under-dramatize it either: the scene was pretty much right out of a Bond film.

It was a fitting way to get out of Lesotho. After close to two years of struggling with needless bureaucracies, for once to be able to cut through the red tape and race out of that gate without permission was immensely satisfying. One last flip of the bird to the all-powerful system.

We made it about fifteen minutes before the next challenge. Once again, our bursting-at-the-seams bakkie was a little bit too conspicuous for us to slip through unbothered, and the South African custom's officer wanted a closer look. We strolled around the vehicle together.

"What's in the boxes?"

Pretty much everything we own. "Just some clothing," I answered. "And there are bicycles in the cardboard boxes." It would be tough to pass those off as clothes.

"Where is your declaration form?"

Oh no. Here we go again. I have crossed this border over fifty times, and it is still inscrutable to me. I am always seeking the same thing, and yet every visit requires me to stand in a different line to receive it. The job of the officials is apparently to have you fill out papers and stand in line; any line and any papers will do, just as long as they convey a sufficient impression of crossing an international border.

"What declaration?" I asked, honestly confused.

"For the bikes, you need a declaration."

The bicycles are purchased in South Africa, and I have ridden them across this border dozens of times. Nobody has ever asked for a declaration, a fact that I share with the officer. I probably rolled my eyes - it was getting to be that kind of day. (In fact, I never declared the bikes in Lesotho, so technically they haven't ever left South Africa, but I figure I should keep that to myself.)

"I am going to fine you, because you are arguing with me. Because you do not respect my authority."

"Okay," I said, with more eye rolling. If I didn't get gouged by the customs agent, I would only get gouged by the airport money-changers when I tried to get rid of my rand, so I wasn't really bothered either way. Anyway, fines are cheap - the real cost is the time it takes to fill out all the papers required to record the payment of the fine.

At this point, J got out of the car, demonstrated the pregnant belly and began smiling and joking and flattering the customs officer, all Ntate this and Ntate that. (This, by the way, is the correct protocol for African border crossings. I was just utterly bored of it, and also still feeling like James Bond, who doesn't act obsequious toward ANYBODY.)

("Ntate" roughly means "Sir", a respectful form of address to a man.)

And just like that, he let us go without the fine. Turns out all he wanted was a little bit of respect.

The airport was complicated - we expected it to be, with our six overweight luggages and two bicycles. We did get things checked in, though the process took about three hours of negotiation over prices, and we finally had to resort to the technique of waiting for the attendant to turn around and then slipping objects back into the already-weighed suitcase. Don't look down on me, we're among the lightest passengers on the plane: we're entitled to a few extra kilos in the luggage.

With six of the eight bags sent, all that was left was the weight limit battle with KLM, and for J to self-inject the blood-thinner required before a pregnant woman gets on a 12 hour flight. In retrospect we did not need to hurry anymore, and could have taken some time to do this in a relaxed way. But it is easy to get caught up in the madness of the 48-hour journey with all your worldly possessions, to treat every event as if it MUST BE DEALT WITH AT THIS INSTANT, and in a frenzy no less.

So we found ourselves in a dark back hall of the Joburg airport, empty save for the occasional staff who would come through bearing trains of luggage carts in sets of twenty-five or more, which would crash into the walls with a bang that that made me leap out of my skin.

In this less than quiet environment, J was trying to inject the intramuscular blood thinner into her side. She was doing this rather than me because (i) she is a physician, and knows how to inject things; and (ii) I have a pathologic fear of needles. It is difficult even for me to watch people getting injected.

Unfortunately, the pregnant belly prevented her from seeing what she was doing, so she was waving the needle around blindly, pinching the targeted skin with the other hand.

"Here I go," she said, the needle poised to stab the thumb holding her skin in place.

Clearly this was wrong, but already bothered by the needle, the only coherent thing I could say was, "AAAaa NO WAIT STOP!!!"

She gave me an exasperated look, thinking perhaps I was panicking just at the sight of the needle, repositioned and tried again. This time she got the needle into the pinched skin of the abdomen, and then right back out the other side. Her finger on the plunger, she was about the send the drug squirting uselessly into the air.

I repeated my advice: "Aaaa NO WAIT STOP!!"

More exasperation. This wasn't working. So I took the needle from her, stabbed it in and plunged the plunger. I guess it wasn't such a difficult thing to do.

We made it through security with our handfuls of carry-ons and settled into the News Cafe on the far side, and had a couple of drinks poured for us. We still had over twenty-four hours of travel ahead of us, including over eighteen on a plane, but it hardly mattered. For the first time it was looking like we were going to make it home. The long plane ride hardly even mattered.

Adding Insults to Injury

2007-04-27T00:21:00.000+02:00

(I'm still writing about the Cape Epic. Click here for the beginning of the story.)

This is the first vacation in a long, long time where we are actually GLAD that Friday is finally here.

By the seventh day, it starts to look like we are going to complete the Cape Epic, something that only two days ago seemed highly improbable. This knowledge brings us no special sense of satisfaction or accomplishment: it is greeted with numbness and indifference, even regret. It is clearly too late to quit; but if we had the sense to have thrown in the towel on Day 4, we would be relaxed and drinking cocktails at some coastal resort instead of having to get back on our bikes and ride another 200+ kilometers. We might even still be talking to each other.

The cycling marriage between me and my partner is unequivocally on the rocks. The only thing keeping us from violence is the fact that we are getting too tired to keep the argument going, to continue giving voice to the latest complaints and criticisms. Eight days of grueling mountain biking under the requirement of never being further than two minutes from your partner. There are better circumstances under which to get to know a person, and since Day Four we have both been on our worst behavior. The pettiest things have become cause for conflict, and we carry on our pointless disputes like a bitter old couple, regardless of how many other cyclists are around us. One of us is always riding too fast or too slow, too erratically, not looking back enough, drafting too much, drafting too little. A major motivation to get to the end is that once we arrive we will not see each other again for quite some time.

The previous night we talked to a rider who had started the race on a semi-pro mixed male/female team. They had given up on each other and were now riding separately. "Riding on a mixed team, it's something everyone should try once in their life. And only once. You have to watch EVERY little thing that you say." We are not a mixed team, but we can identify.

The last two days are no less difficult than the first seven, with searing temperatures and endless climbs taking their toll on our weary spirits. And yet the abused body somehow continues to perform in its limited way, and our legs pull us through one long kilometre after the next.

There is even the occasional moment to look up from the ground to see where we are, and the views are generally stupefying. We are spending these days on a mostly blank part of the South African map - away from the coast and between no major towns - which grants the improbable mountains around us a secretive, mystic appeal. I remember looking up and finding myself atop a massive plateau, with precipitous horizons on all sides. The ground was blackened, but peppered with strips of iridescent green; I was standing on a microcosm of the globe. It was the kind of place that invites one to stare in awe, to stop, and loaf, to breathe and take it all in. We rolled through it in a matter of minutes, our attention quickly drawn from the vista and back to the trail as it pitched us down 800 vertical meters over the next 5km of riding.

The last day is especially torturous, with cross-winds and mandatory hiking sections, an absurd bone-rattling segment down the middle of a railroad track still periodically in use. It is as if the route planners (one of whom calls himself Dr. Evil) are taking this one last chance to reinforce the woeful inadequacy of our skills and training for this bike ride. It would be intolerable if not for the fact that it is the last day, that it is the last 40, the last 30, and 20 kilometres of the Cape Epic. And that we are never, ever, never coming back.

By the time we arrive at the finish line in the Lourensford wine estate near Cape Town, the party is winding down. The pros have come and gone hours ago, and the sorry stragglers like ourselves draw only a scattering of polite, sympathetic applause. The officials passing us our finishing medals seem tired and irritable, as if they were hoping the event would be over by now. Many of the marquee tents have already been pulled down, and a live band plays to an empty field where discarded paper cups suggest the earlier festivities of the afternoon.

It is all quite anti-climactic, though it is highly satisfying to hear the professional sportscaster on the sound system shouting our team name into the empty field, "The Boobee Doobees!" (The name was invented by my partner's 3-year-old daughter, but repeatedly transformed by mis-spellings and mispronounciations into something risque.)

We are smiling, but only because we don't ever have to sit on our bicycles again. M finds a trash bin twenty metres from the finish, and dramatically tosses in his helmet and bike shoes, as i unwrap the yards of gauze and medical tape that are holding my body together. Both of us are thinking that we will listen to our wives next time. (But we won't.)

A few inches from rock bottom

2007-04-18T00:25:00.000+02:00

(click here for the first part of this post, Rock Bottom)

It is difficult to say what is the worst part of a day on the Cape Epic, because every moment of the day has something miserable to contribute. In the mornings, the trauma is psychological, the unpleasant airhorn alarm, pushing breakfast into a disinterested body at 5 AM, the humiliating trip to Medi-Clinic, the putting on of tight cycling clothes on a cold morning, the hauling of the too heavy race bag to the transport vehicle, the painful reacquaintance of saddle with back side.

This morning we visited the race office in order to find out how my partner could drop out of the race and find his way back to his vehicle parked at the race start in Knysna. Ostensibly we wanted to make sure that I could legitimately ride on without him -- in reality I would only have made it about one water hole further, once the precedent had been set for dropping out. (There was also my wife on the telephone, "You can't drop out of the race before M!")

It would be necessary for him to start the day - short of riding, the only way to get a ride to the next town was to be picked up by the Medi-Clinic sweep vehicle - there is not much public transport across the blasted landscape of the Little Karoo desert.

Before long he had found his second wind and it was me who was falling apart. Feeling ill from the beginning of the day, I had eaten only a banana for breakfast, which is not the best idea when one plans to ride eight hours and burn some 2500 calories or more. At 6'1" and 145lbs, I do not have any appreciable reserves to call upon.

The world seemed to drag around me, and the few cyclists I had passed in the early minutes were now flying past me. Even the small descents were dizzying, the bike bouncing all over the place in my loose hands, the foggy shouts of riders around me, "Hold your line, #199, hold your line!"

A danger to others and to myself, I kept my mind fixed on my objective -- the porta-potty at the first water hole. After four days of drawing over half my calories from home-made chocolatty soy and wheat germ energy bars, my body's digestive system was staging a protest. What was coming out was beginning to look a lot like what was going in, and demanding to be moved at about the same frequency - one energy bar per hour.

Dramatically, I told my partner that my race was finished, and he was going to have to go on without me. I would make it to the next water hole, but no further. We ceremonially passed tubes, pump and tools from my pack to his so he would be self-sufficient.

With the bittersweet taste of having failed the Cape Epic, I relaxed for the first time in five days, and opened my eyes and ears for my last hours of riding. Still close to our starting point, we were riding through a fabulous terrain of irrigated orchards, on footpaths and jeep tracks between pear and apple trees, scrubby desert mountains looming at our sides. It would be an impressive place to ride, if it didn't hurt so much just to sit on the bike.

Whether it was the temporary peace, or the lightweight pack, an hour and a half later I still found myself within a few feet of my partner, and finishing the day again seemed possible. It helped that by this point in the race, most people in our category (that being Those Who Should Have Stayed Home) were walking their bikes on all the major climbs, and many minor ones as well. This was a saving grace for me, because walking spares the butt from the saddle, and because being pathetically slow does not lose you nearly as much time to a walker as to a rider.

As the desert heat poured into the afternoon, even walking proved difficult, and our arms and legs were glistening with dusty sweat. A rider ahead of me slumped over his bike, and with an expression reminiscent of a painting by Edvard Munch, said, "Are you all experiencing your own personal Hell?" We grumbled our assent and dragged our bikes on up the hill.

In passing, we signed up for this race thinking that it would be fun, or at least that it would have fun moments. And for some riders, perhaps even the majority, it seemed to meet that expectation. For those who finished their days in times of 5 and 6 hours, there was time to relax, have a nap and a massage, stroll through town, drink a beer, spend the afternoon sampling South African pastries in a small town coffee shop. For us, the end of each day's ride was the beginning of an evening race: to find a tent, have a shower, wash and dry our clothes and eat dinner all quickly enough to afford ourselves eight hours of sleep before the next grueling day.

As I dialed my wife that evening, all I had in mind was to let her know that I would be dropping out of the Cape Epic the next day. She, who ten months and 6,000 rand ago, had foreseen that riding this race was an utterly senseless idea, did not sound impressed. "All the people at my work are cheering you guys on! They think you're going to make it." This hardly came as good news, as I had no intention of finishing. Disappointed coworkers. It was just one more thing to be miserable about.

Continued...

The Cape Epic: My week pretending to be a pro biker

2007-04-13T00:07:00.000+02:00

Rock Bottom

"I think this is the stupidest thing you've ever done," my wife says to me on the telephone. I am in full agreement.

It is the end of the fourth day of the Cape Epic. I am supposed to be happy. After all, M and I have just completed another day of this grueling, eight-day mountain bike race, in our best time so far: seven hours and thirty minutes. For the first time since the beginning of the race, I have had time to handwash my cycling clothes, and even stroll into the middle of nowhere desert town we are passing through. We have completed almost 500km out of 890km, and the worst days are behind us.

I should be happy, but I am downright miserable. The places I would rather be (which I have just enumerated to my wife in great detail) include:

At work, in a tedious afternoon meeting.
Naked in a winter snowstorm.
In bed with e.coli poisoning.

In short, anywhere but here. Things on my little bike race are not going so well. The thought of getting back on my bike and riding another 115km tomorrow is utterly depressing.

My problems are not exclusively psychological. My palms are quite literally blue with bruises from being pounded by the rocky descents of the Little Karoo. My cheap ($800) hard-tail mountain bike has fed the full impact of every little desert stone into my hands and back, and I now dread the downhills much more than the climbs. My toes are numb from the loss of circulation caused by my Time pedals and too small bicycle shoes. Worst of all are the growing saddle sores which make each pedal stroke painful, and for which I will have to endure the humiliation of standing in the Medi-Clinic "bum line", to have my male nurse Randall apply protective tape. Finishing this stupid race cannot possibly be worth this.

The shower truck is broken, but at the edge of our tent town (in a grassy and shit-filled cow pasture), cyclists are washing themselves in the sprinkler irrigation system that borders the highway. The men are stark naked and without modesty, their dark pelvic regions standing out even from two hundred metres away. The women in their midst have kept on their bikinis, but are undisturbed by the male nudity all around them. I, on the other hand, find it all severely disturbing. It is strange to think that I am here by choice.

Today was our Recovery Day, after the toughest three days in Cape Epic history. The Recovery Day, in Cape Epic terms, is 120km with 1200m of accumulated vertical - still longer than any mountain bike ride either of us had ever done before entering this race. Our's began badly, as M's rear tire rapidly deflated in the starting gate. The culprit can only have been a thorn picked up on our way to the start line - carefully removed from somebody else's tire last night, and then carelessly chucked into the middle of the tent town.

Nervous and jittery, it takes us an inexcusable ten minutes or longer to change the tube, by which time the peloton is long gone, not to mention the Medi-Clinic "sweep" vehicle, and the volunteer crew that takes down the race direction signs after the last rider - there will be no directions left for us. We speed into town, but of course the race is nowhere in sight. Trying to maintain tempo, we desperately shout at the elderly white folk standing on the street corners, "Which way is the race, where did the cyclists go??" They wave us on with half hearted and unconvincing gestures. Fifteen minutes of furious pedaling and we have not seen another cyclist.

As any road cyclist will tell you, the nature of drafting makes it extremely difficult for a pair of cyclists to catch up to a large group - especially an inexperienced and untrained pair of cyclists like ourselves, who finish 450th out of 500 on a good day. Our only indications of where to turn are the vague clouds of dust in the distance and the race helicopter which is tracking the pros. They are already so far ahead of us that the helicopter is partially obscured by the curvature of the Earth.

After thirty minutes, we finally catch the sweep vehicles, which have stopped for a team with mechanical difficulties, and after another thirty, we have caught up to a small group of laggers. But in this first hour, we have used what feels like a full day's worth of energy, and have pretty much destroyed any possibility of this actually being a recovery day. It gets worse from there, with sandy jeep tracks and desert heat sapping what little motivation we have left. Only the watering points make it bearable, because from each it is only 30km to the next. And even at the edge of despair, one can be convinced to ride 30km to the next water hole and defer the decision to quit by one or two more hours.

next: A few inches from rock bottom

Three days to Epic pain

2007-03-21T00:20:00.000+01:00

The Cape Epic mountain bike race begins on Saturday. This is an eight day, 900km bike race, covering 15km of accumulated vertical, much of it in the forsaken desert of the Little Karoo. For reasons incomprehensible, I will be riding this race.

Looks hot out there

I think my partner and I have fair reason to be nervous. A quick scroll through some of the Cape Epic blogs online is deeply disturbing. It would appear that these people have not only been training for this race for months, but that they have been doing little else. Granted, someone who writes an entire blog just about training for a mountain bike race is probably going to be on the intense side of things, but this sort of thing is worrying all the same. M and I have taken the attitude to training that it should be fun. So when we've felt like sleeping in, or taking it easy, or had other things planned... well the training rides can wait.

Not to mention that two months ago my partner got a new bike, adding one more excuse not to train hard... "I gotta take it easy, I don't want to hurt my knees adjusting to a new bike." So when the rider communication email came about two weeks ago encouraging us to enjoy our "tapering off" period, we were thinking it was probably time to start doing some tougher training rides.

The only thing in our favor is that we live in Lesotho - where the smoothest back roads are probably bumpier than the worst that the Cape Epic can throw at us. And our bodies are adjusted to the dizzying elevation of 5600 feet. Training, whatever! We don't need to train hard, we live at ALTITUDE!!

The motley advice on the site of a guy called "Spinman" seems to be unintentionally funny... such as "take it easy on days 1 and 2." Day 1 is 2660m of vertical climbing over 105km. Day 2 is 2200m of vertical over 134km. How exactly are we supposed to take it easy? We will struggle to finish by sunset.

Here's another good one: "Finish your washing by noon if you want it to dry." This seems to imply arriving in the race village well before noon. This advice clearly does not apply to us.

Or this: "I finished like this, in spite of two raw holes 30x30mm, and 6mm deep, one on either cheek on the hotspot where the bum bones carry one's weight on the saddle." The advice I think was to apply duct tape. The better advice seems to be: DON'T RIDE THIS STUPID RACE!

This one is rich: "Be physically and mentally prepared." It comes up twice. If only somebody had given us this advice sooner!

So pretty much, we're dead.

Having run out of time to train, we've searched for commitment mechanisms. My partner's mountain biking friends back home are subscribed to his results page, so he has the added motivation not to give up, knowing they will all find out and begin ridiculing him almost before he has dragged his sorry ass off the course. A few good folk have put up money for an orphanage in Semonkong for every kilometre that we ride, so that we know we're doing it for the children. And my flight leaves Cape Town the morning after the race... so if I don't make it, the ride back to Lesotho is going to be a lot longer than just finishing the stupid race on time. Weak, but its the best we could come up with.

If this blog goes silent after this post, it means my bleached bones are roasting somewhere in the middle of the Little Karoo. Either that or I had too much pride to post about just how badly I did.

So wish us luck... we are going to need it in a big way...

Still staying away

2007-03-20T00:18:00.000+01:00

Another day off for parliament

This bus is never coming

A message for taxi drivers

Ernest Angley: The sad shadow of an old miracle man

2007-03-16T00:10:00.000+01:00

The sign heralding Ohio miracle worker Ernest Angley's visit to Lesotho is enough to make you wince. Next to Angley's pudgy face, it promises that the deaf will hear, the lame will walk, and "AIDS And Other Death Diseases" will be healed. In a country with an HIV rate of 25%, stigma and misinformation are still major barriers to prevention campaigns, and a startling number of people live in fear of discovering that they are HIV-positive. Education campaigns are our best tool, and the last thing we need is an American preacher coming to town dispensing miracle cures.

Feeling a little bit dirty but driven by morbid curiosity, three friends and I found our way to the Sunday night show at the Pitso Grounds in Maseru. They were still setting up when we arrived, and it looked to be quite the event. Public outdoor shows are not common in Lesotho - famous musicians tend to choose private clubs with stiff entry fees to cover their expenses. Angley's team was setting up spotlights, towers of scaffolding, and quite possibly the biggest sound system that has ever been used in Lesotho.

The grounds were predictably busy. The Basotho are a religious and superstitious people, and they live in a troubled time, with the future of their nation threatened by the HIV epidemic. As elsewhere in Africa, the colonial overhang has left an overly positive impression of white expatriates. So when a white preacher comes with a promise to cure HIV, it is going to draw a crowd.

Ernest Angley has been working as a miracle man for well over forty years, which raised my expectations for an impressive and well-oiled performance. The David Copperfield of faith healers. I was disappointed to see that miracle workers too are affected by age (wikipedia puts him at 86) - they become slow and rambling, old men remembering another time, slightly embarrassing and uncomfortable to be around.

The outfit was the first hint that Ernest Angley was still living in the heady world of 1970s televangelism, the white suit, azure shirt, the sparkling tie. The dark toupee and the gold, shining bible were all intimidating, but most striking of all was the face, the bulbous jowls and smooth, synthetic sheen. "Is it plastic surgery?" I wondered. "Is it a mask??" "Its Dick Cheney under there," G whispered ominously.

86 years can't stop him

Angley's sidekicks had brought their sparkling suits and mustaches with them from the seventies, and sang melodious tunes to the canned music that floated through the sound system. Religious music is big in Lesotho, and several locals asked me where they could get a recording, assuming from my caucasian coloration that I must be with the masked man. Each time someone talked to me, a suited man built like an ex-marine would quickly arrive and angrily tell the questioner that I was NOT with them. There must have been at least a dozen of Angley's thugs stalking the crowd. In any case, I was happy for the clarification. As the singing went on, the more gentler of Angley's aides scanned the crowd for visibly disabled people and escorted them to reserved seats in front of the stage.

Maseru dance party

The occasional songs in Zulu or Sesotho (usually consisting of only a few repeated words) made the crowd go wild. That was the fun part of the performance - Lesotho does not see very many outdoor dance parties. After the songs, they gave the microphone to Angley, and the show started to go weird. After weird came depressing, and after depressing came boring, and after boring came being escorted to the door by four mustached thugs.

I don't think he even introduced himself. They passed him the microphone, and he stalked the stage, shouting into his microphone, "The blood! The blood! The blood! The blood!" He was followed step for step, motion for motion, by his Basotho translator, shouting "Mali! Mali! Mali! Mali!" 10,000 people, shouting for blood.

This was followed by a long, strange speech, which was as long-winded as it was directionless. I expected that after 40 years of fine-tuning, Angley's speech would be perfect: crafted, refined, designed to whip the crowd into a religious frenzy that made people levitate and smash their glasses, throw their crutches into the air.

If you yodel, I'm leaving

Maybe from the Ernest Angley of the 50s, but not this guy. He talked for a good ten minutes about yodelling, and how he didn't care for the sound. I'm not making this up. How one day he had experimented with his voice, and discovered that yes, he could make that sound, but why would he want to? And maybe we liked to make yodelling sounds in our home churches, in which case Angley would not judge us, but he would prefer if we didn't do it at his crusade.

From yodelling, into a rambling autobiographical sketch which included a lot of conversations with God, and a lot of talents passed down, including speaking, healing, the aw-shucks Ohio accent, and presumably the Amazing Plastic Face.

After the rambling came the offering. He sped through how you don't have to give money to receive a miracle, but took his time at the fun part. "Who wants to be blessed tonight? Who's going to give 500 rand? Put your hands up, who wants to be blessed tonight? There are people here who can give 500 rand!" It was all worded so nobody reviewing a transcript could accuse Angley of associating offered gifts with miracles, but the implication was clear. No hands went up. We were thrilled. I overheard an American missionary advising the people around him, "Don't give money. Give to your local church instead."

Beneath the dejected auctioneer, the price of a miracle slowly came down: "There are people here who can give 100 rand, who wants to be blessed with a miracle tonight?" No hands. "There are a lot of people who can give 10 rand. Who's going to give ten rand tonight? Who wants to be blessed tonight? Who's going to give ten rand." One or two hands. He went down to five rand. He went down to two rand (about 25 US cents). Finally, a few hands went up. But to our disappointment, when the rainbow bags went around, it looked like almost everyone threw in a coin or two. Just in case it might make a difference.

All proceeds will be spent on 747 jet fuel

Finally, getting to the business of the miracles, one of the aides asked the deaf and mute people to stand in parallel lines at the back of the fairgrounds. D went and stood in line, and spoke with a young, made-up woman of Angley's. "I can't hear my daughter's voice," he said. "I can hear everything, but I can't hear my daughter's voice, ever since I had an affair I can't hear her voice." Taking him aside to talk about the thick presence of witchcraft in Lesotho, she suggested that he was in all likelihood possessed by a demon.

In line for a miracle

In the meantime, Angley began healing people in the audience. As with everything else about the miracle crusade, it was an underwhelming experience.

"I'm not going to point out anyone with AIDS, because I don't want to embarrass them. But you know who you are. You are a man, you are 42 years old, you have had AIDS for 3 years. Your middle name is Andrew. When you last went to your doctor, you had lost 59 pounds. You are now healed of AIDS."

The applause was polite but unconvincing. What a weak effort! Andrew?! The least he could have done was learned a couple of Basotho names before the show.

"You are 73 years old. Your daughter has died of AIDS. You have been caring for your granddaughter, who also has AIDS, and you got AIDS from your granddaughter. You would give your life to help her. You are now healed of AIDS."

The physician standing next to me grumbled. "What a great message to reinforce. That you can get HIV by caring for someone with HIV." The physician is right of course - there is no documented case of HIV transmission to a caregiver, but now maybe some people will go home, afraid to care for relatives with HIV.

A solemn woman was standing next to us, holding a baby whose face twitched in an irregular spasm. On his small head were lesions that are common in HIV-positive children, and extremely rare otherwise. With the translating help of another man, the physician gave the woman directions to the clinic where he works. It was a difficult translation, but she seemed to get the message. "Bring your child there tomorrow," he said. "We can help your child. It is free."

Too late we realized that we should not have come for entertainment. We should have prepared flyers with directions to free HIV clinics, and passed them out to everyone, especially to people with evidently HIV positive children. Next year.

Angley moved on to the one-on-one stage of the show, where he healed people who have no sense of smell. It was a strange shift, from AIDS to anosmia, but to judge from the line, this is apparently not such a common condition in Lesotho. (In my office where the toilets have been backed up for weeks, it could even be considered an asset.) Maybe at 80-something, Angley's tired healing powers need to start with some easy miracles to get warmed up.

The candidates were brought to him by the ex-marines, who by this time had almost all migrated to the stage. Presumably they were necessary to quickly dispose of any trouble-makers that made it past the screening process and on-stage. (Our friend D was rejected... likely the miracle he needs is too complex for the TV audience.)

The first woman was young, round, smiling. He put his hand on her nose and cast her nasal demon OUT!!!, the echo of the word reverberating through the sound system into the surrounding mountains. Angley waved a perfume-soaked rag under her nose. "Whoooo!" she yelped, folded in half at the hips, and spun around. The crowd roared approval. He waved it in front of her face again. She gave the same shout, and the crowd roared again. Angley was happy too, and he turned to the crowd. "Who did it? Jesus! Say it with me. Who did it?" "Jesus!" the crowd shouted back.

Next was a young, thin man, looking nervous under the spotlights. Angley cast the demon OUT! and waved the perfume-soaked rag. The man sniffed, and looked confused. "Do you smell it?" The man kept sniffing, but the confused expression did not change. Close enough for Angley. "That's what you want your girl to smell like!" he crowed. "You want to go out with a girl who smells like this!" This conversation went on for much too long before Angley sent the man off stage. "Who did it? Jesus!!"

After a few more unconvincing nasal healings, Angley moved on to those deaf in one ear. He cast their one-sided demons OUT and demonstrated the successful miracle by putting a plump finger in the person's good ear, and speaking into the other ear (and the microphone, and thus the best sound system in Lesotho). And they could hear him. Stunning.

Moving on, one of Angley's thugs brought up a woman in her 40s. "Reverend Angley," he says, "This woman has been deaf and mute for over 20 years." Angley looked keen for the challenge. Arms waving, he cast OUT! the demon of deafness, and he cast OUT! the demon of muteness.

Putting his large face close to her's, he enunciated dramatically, "baaaay-BEE! Baaaay-BEE!". And again. He repeated it at least 20 times, the plastic face seemingly stuck in a robotic loop. Finally she understood that she was to repeat after him. "aay-eee", she pronounced, struggling. "Baaaaay-BEE!" Angley shouted, feeling close. "Bay-bee," she answered calmly. Angley gave a twitter, and the crowd thundered - it was definitely the best miracle yet.

The healed woman was communicating with the friend who had come with her, and after some discussion, the healed deaf-mute turned to Angley, speaking directly into the microphone in perfect English. "I am not mute. I have always been able to speak. But I cannot hear anything." Angley, still focused on the crowd, seemed not to hear. "Who did it?" he shouted, and answered his own question. The woman said something else inaudible, and the thugs escorted her off the stage. Angley now looked a bit confused. "Whatever she came here with," he stuttered, "She left with more, that's what's important. That's what Jesus does!"

Next was a man who was actually mute, and appeared to struggle greatly just to mumble incoherently into the microphone.

Angley used the same approach. OUT!, followed by, "baaaaay-BEE!" Mumble mumble mumble, came the response. Back and forth they went for several uncomfortable minutes.

"baaaaay-BEE!" Mumble mumble mumble. "Come on man, you have to put some effort into it," Angley encouraged, the translater repeating after him.

"baaaay-BEE!" Mumble mumble mumble.

"Don't say it with your head. Say it with your lips. You have to use your lips. baaaay-BEE!" Mumble mumble mumble.

"Use your lips man, your lips. Come on Lord, he's almost there, he just needs a little bit more help. Just a little bit more healing, Lord. baaaay-BEE!" Mumble mumble mumble.

Turning halfway to the man's friend, halfway to the audience, Angley dissimulated. "We've made progress here, but he doesn't know the language. You have to teach him. When I see you next year, he'll be speaking perfectly. Who did it?? JEEEEESUS!!"

This was followed by another mumbling mute, who suffered the same indignity. Headlines from the Onion were scrolling through my mind. "Deaf-mute just not trying hard enough to speak."

It was painful to watch. I came expecting to feel anger at this charlatan spreading mistruths about AIDS, but the display was too pathetic for me to feel anything but sadness. To age with dignity is a privilege not in our control. Whatever Angley once had, it seems to have left him long ago. Between the bright lights, the thugs, the 747 and the white suit, the show can go on, but the mojo is gone. I wondered how many of his support crew have stuck around out of reverence to what this man once was, supporters who cannot bring themselves to tell him that he is a disgrace, who instead work days and nights to help keep up the charade around him.

The "healings" went on. M was getting anxious, as he'd told his wife he would be home by nine. G was looking bored. More significantly, D was starting to pass out the flyers that he had prepared in advance of the event. Their message, in short: "Believe in Jesus, but don't believe in Ernest Angley. You can be healed, through the MIRACLE OF ARV DRUGS." If that wasn't enough to get the ex-marines' attention, the flyer was topped with Angley's face blocked out by the red circle-slash symbol for NO.

It didn't take long for one of the goons to grab me and G by the arms and rudely ask if we were distributing these flyers, though he seemed to have already made up his mind.

"No," I said disingenuously.

The change in demeanour was instant. "Well in that case you can stay," with a too-wide smile.

"But I guess it is my friend who's passing them out," I went on with a helpless smile, and we allowed ourselves to be escorted to our car by the gate.

Things took a turn downhill at that point, as D and M had apparently found the anger that I had not, and an immature shouting match had developed.

"You're killing these people!"

"No, YOU'RE killing these people!"

"I may go to Hell, but I know I'll see you there!"

"I'll take my chances, you hypocrite!"

Rolling a couple of metres out of the gate, D stopped the car and passed out the rest of his flyers. We drove home in silence, each with our own thoughts. I never did get to see what Angley was going to do with all the crippled and disabled that he had assembled under the stage. But maybe its for the best.

Until next year, Lesotho!

How to (Legally) Manipulate an Election

2007-02-22T00:05:00.001+01:00

The ruling party of Lesotho has managed to steal, entirely within the letter of the law, almost a quarter of the seats in last weekend’s national election. Neither donors nor media seem interested in covering the irregularities. But the trouble is plain in the published numbers for all to see.

So begins a cutting post at Maseru Observer. It is disturbingly impressive to read how Lesotho's two major political parties have exploited the electoral rules to earn themselves about a third more seats in parliament than they were due.

The ABC are protesting the results of four individual district counts, but it seems like the wholesale trickery is a much bigger issue. Like most elections in Lesotho, it is looking like this one is going to be in the courts for a long time.

Read the post. It's a fascinating exposition of how anything less than perfection in electoral rules can result in seriously distorted results.

Voting season

2007-02-16T10:45:00.001+01:00

Tomorrow is election day in Lesotho. The level of enthusiasm about participating in democracy appears to be lukewarm, at least by African standards. Besides the occasional mass gathering or truck overflowing with ABC supporters, shouting and flashing the now ubiquitous "rising sun" hand signal, there has not been much to speak of.

And yet, it promises to be an interesting election. In the last six months, the political scene has shifted from dead boring to tumultuous, as the ruling party has broken in two. It is as if there is actually something to be contested.

And although you would not expect it, the history of political violence in Lesotho goes all the way back to independence. Since 1966, there has been exactly one peaceful election - that of 2002. This year, there have been two successful political assassinations, one attempted, and one botched attempt that ended in the killing of a volunteer physician from the Netherlands. The events most seared into the collective expatriate consciousness are those of 1998 - the Southern African Defense Force was "invited" to suppress the post-election demonstrations, resulting in mass riots, 60 people killed and the main street through town being burned to the ground.

The high turnover rate of expatriates mean that barely anyone in the community today was actually here in 1998 - most of the stories whispered in the expatriate haunts are already in their third or fourth generation and have acquired the status of myth. One thing is known - nobody predicted the mess of 1998. And so the rumors and predictions fly, will there be violence, and when, and how? And behind the concern for self and property, is there a certain thrill at feeling like a part of that most newsworthy of occurrences, a disputed election?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that expats will be leaving the country en masse out of concern for their safety. (Though in 1998, the country erupted only three weeks after the elections...) It is one of those strange schizophrenias of development thought, that we are utterly obsessed with the necessity of elections and democracies, and yet we are totally disinterested in the outcomes of those elections, especially in Africa, so long as we can call those outcomes "fair".

It is very difficult to predict the outcome next week, as there are no advance polls - the political rallies seem to be the substitute for polling, with the media gleefully reporting huge attendance at their favorite parties' packed events. These polls too are subject to bias, with the radio news in the hands of the State, and the English language Public Eye all but endorsing the upstart competitor, the All Basotho Convention.

The other uncertainty is how much tampering will take place. It seems clear that the understaffed Independent Electoral Commission (which rejected the need both for international volunteers and for exit polling) will not be able to police all of the polling stations. Some people will vote early and often, others will be illegitimately rejected or will spoil their ballots; ballot boxes will be lost, and ballot boxes will be stuffed - but how much and by who remains to be seen.

No matter how bad it gets, the spineless international organizations will declare the election to be "free and fair", because above all they want to avoid being responsible for a new bout of violence. The statistics that cast doubt on the final tally will be kept hidden - for instance, if the final tallies show that 30% of ballots were considered "spoiled" (as happened in '02, though this number was not made public), or the fact that the IEC's voter registration tallies show almost as many people registered as the census shows voting age population - surprising, given the loud complaints that thousands of people were not able to be registered.

My own informal polls show almost unanimous support for the ABC - there is definitely a sense in the streets here that it is time for change. What is not clear is just what kind of change that will be, since the leaders of the new party have spent their entire careers with the old party. One hopes it is not just a change of whose fingers are in the State wallet.

Unfortunately, the published platforms do not suggest much. ABC is campaigning on a promise to do something about poverty, with promises to improve economic development, expand health and education and reduce crime - laudable goals, if a bit vague on the how - presumably the ruling LCD would like to do all of these things as well. The highly biased wikipedia entry on the ABC leader, clearly written by a supporter, seems to express most clearly the lack of clarity of ABC's purpose:

It is believed that if Basotho could let Thabane to Office, he will try to draw new policies that would bring a broader understanding of approach to changing Lesotho's declining hope in the global market.

Indeed.

To judge from the ABC's support base in Maseru, clarity is not as important as change. But Maseru is only one small constituency in a country with the majority of its parliamentary seats located in the sparsely populated highlands. It is a bit of a bad augur - if the mountains deliver the prize to the LCD, there will be a lot of discontent and protest in Maseru.

Here's hoping that this time they don't call in the South Africans.

Amidst the puncture farms

2007-02-07T00:29:00.000+01:00

After Saturday's attack by stick-wielding topless women, we opted on Sunday to ride in tame, white-farm South Africa. Tired from yesterday, we meant to make it a relaxed day, and so when my tire went flat, we took it as an opportunity to sit beneath the shade of a eucalyptus tree and eat some snacks.

Before long a local Afrikaaner stopped his truck to chat with us through the window, his wife in the front seat and two quiet Basotho standing in the truckbed. He was thin, with a red goatee, shifty eyes, and he spoke in a conspiratorial tone that seemed to implicate us in his creepy business, whatever it was. He reminded me of that occasional Free Stater who leans into you and whispers nasty things about "the blecks", the implication being that because you are white, you must think that this politically correct talk about racial equality is all poppycock. The kind of guy who makes you want to run away shouting, "I'm not into that!" and then go wash your hands in disinfectant. I am probably being unfair, and he is probably a nice guy -- and yet my riding partner M had the same gut feeling as I. But there was nowhere to run to - he had a truck, and I a mountain bike with a flat tire.

He was building a bike track on his farm nearby, he said, and he wanted "you people" (that being us) to come advise and help him set it up. He seemed to ignore our indications that we are the only two mountain bikers that we know of in Lesotho, and a downhill track wasn't really going to bring "us people" to his farm on the weekend. I went with the, "I'm new here and haven't learned my own phone number yet" excuse -- M was not quick enough on the ball and gave the man his phone number.

"You know," the man said, "Why don't you just throw your bikes in the truck and I'll take you up there right now..."

"No!" in unison, near shouting. "It's ok, we'll ride our bikes there. Really."

That settled, he drove off, I finished replacing my inner tube, and we stood up to get on our way.

"I can't believe it," M. "I have a flat tire too." In the time we had been sitting, his front tire had deflated. Bad luck.

Five minutes, another tube replaced, we were on our way.

Five minutes more, the ground was feeling a little bit rougher than it should. "Do I have a flat tire?" I asked.

"You're looking a bit soft," M.

No shade this time, and I put on the last of our spare tubes. It was easy in the glaring sun to stretch the hot tire over the rim.

"Uh... M", I said nervously. "My front tire just went flat." In the time I was switching one, the other had deflated. It got worse: "Yeah, mine too," M sighed.

New holes in new locations. The culprit - goathead, also known as puncturevine, a long-thorned weed that has earned a reputation for puncturing soles of feet and bicycle tires. And apparently, we had planned the day's ride right through a veritable goathead plantation.

"I'm calling J for a ride," I said, defeated.

"You're giving up?? I can't believe you're giving up." Dismissively, his voice raised. "You can't call your wife for a ride on the Cape Epic, you know that right? Go, call her. I can't believe you would give up so easily!"

&*#@%#!

Grumbling, I folded beneath the verbal tirade and put my cell phone away; we sat in the sun and put patches on the multiple punctures in our tubes.

He at least agreed that it was time to turn back. We made it five minutes, not even back to the site of the first punctures. Another flat, the fourth of the day. We decided to walk to the eucalyptus trees where we had first sat. Just walking our bikes now, and we managed two more flats before arriving.

I phoned my wife, suffering another verbal onslaught from M for my trouble, but this one was not as bad as the first - we both knew we didn't have enough patches to repair the damage.

In three hours under the sun, we had clocked just over thirty minutes of riding, seven flat tires, from at least twelve punctures. Too bad for the guy building the mountain bike trail out that way - I don't think it's going to be very popular.

A crash course in cultural appreciation

2007-02-06T00:20:00.000+01:00

In training for the Cape Epic, my partner M_____ and I have set out to ride every major road in Lesotho. (We've covered about a third with eight weeks of training left.) Our rides last weekend were more eventful than usual.

The previous weekend's training ride was set back by a visitor who felt it necessary to take extended breaks and naps during the ride, so this time we headed straight for the mountains to put in some extended climbing. Not far from the airport, the tar gives way to rutted gravel and the road begins the steep climb up the first giant's stair step of Lesotho's sandstone plateaus.

It was a busy Saturday in the sticks, with herds of goats and cows winding their way up mountain passes and adding to the usual dogs and children. I am sure it has nothing on Pamplona, but wending one's way through a herd of strolling bulls on a steep and rocky road is nevertheless disturbing, their horns brushing the sleeves and handlebars as you search for the next gap. One sudden turn of a 50kg head could put a quick end to a long training program. But there was nowhere else to go, so past them we went, thinking, Surely bulls don't get angry... or attack and impale people... right? In Spain maybe, but not here... right?

Next on the itinerary was a group of about thirty men in red and black robes, red and black hats reminiscent of the Islamic kufi, crowding together down a sharp trail toward a steep cliff. The closeness of the group and sameness of the attire had the appearance of a cult ceremony, not to mention that they seemed about to throw themselves off the mountain in a mass suicide.

(Thus revealing my status as a cultural dimwit - OBVIOUSLY this was the much maligned "ritual cutting". These boys would be men soon - thus explaining the grim looks on their faces.)

Incidentally, there is a story told by expatriates that due to the highly secretive nature of the cutting ceremony, if a person is perceived to be intruding, he may be held down and, how do I say this, forced to take part. Though believed by the tellers, such tales are almost surely false - it is a myth which nevertheless contributes to the ominousness of the beating of drums from the village women up the hill.

After several hours, we returned along the same route. The drumming and dancing women were still drumming and dancing - now closer, we could see them more clearly, the flying skirts, the waving sticks, bodies covered with a white powder, bare breasts, often grotesquely large, heaving with the beat. It was a National Geographic moment, and only a few dozen kilometers from a reasonably modern capital city (which we call home). A National Geographic moment gone wrong. If only the photographers had been there.

Our approach brought great delight to the women, who leapt and addressed us, yelling, "Makhooa, Makhooa, Makhooa!" amidst other things incomprehensible, and rushed down to the side of the road.

When you ride in Lesotho, you learn to gauge the potential threats on the road ahead - dogs that might attack, children that might throw stones, horses that could spook, unpredictable drunkards, and so on. Dancing, bare-breasted women with big sticks rated at most a yellow on the threat scale, a curiosity. We are accustomed to people rushing to the road and waving or talking with us as we go past, running to keep up. But we should have known that a Basotho woman in her element is something to be feared.

Not content to stand on the side, they rushed into the middle of the road, laughing and continuing the Makhooa shout. And then they lifted their sticks and started swinging.

The first blow glanced off my helmet; the second caught me in the side. They were not striking to kill, but nor were they being very friendly about the task, and the swipe that caught me in the cheek stung enough to make me want very badly to find my way through the mass of half-naked bodies. Most frightening was the prospect of one of their sticks finding its way through a wheel, an event which could only end with my landing on my head, defenseless and at the mercy of the attacking women.

As culturally interesting as this all was, we fled as quickly as we could, the jeers chasing after us for some time. A little further down, we came across the men in the kufi hats, now sitting under a tent, with an entire village of people assembled around them. Our arrival caused something of an uproar, with about half the crowd, mostly men this time, getting to their feet and shouting. Luckily, we were descending from the mountain at this point, and we zipped through before any sort of blockade could be organized.

In all, a memorable ride. We turned the next day to South Africa, hoping to avoid bulls, violent women and recently circumsized men. While we succeeded on those counts, it was an eventful day on its own...

The better critique of the Oprah critique

2007-01-11T00:23:00.000+01:00

The Foreign Policy Passport notes Oprah's extravagant Leadership Academy for Girls, the $40M campus that she is funding outside of Johannesburg. They make this very cool-headed observation:

The better critique of Oprah's charity, though, is to ask whether she is doing the most good she can with the money she spends. I have no doubt that one $40 million super-school will do a lot of good in South Africa. But wouldn't four $10 million schools do more?

This is top notch thinking, and exactly the kind of question being taught in International Development programs around the world. It is also utterly missing the point.

Why are we so quick to engage our critical thinking on issues in philanthropy when that critical thinking part of our mind lies dormant through the vast remainder of our media-fed lives? Where were our quick-to-the-punch FP authors during Steve Jobs' recent announcement on the $599 iPhone? Trying to get one, I am sure.

Because amidst all the drooling, I didn't hear any thoughtful and cool-headed voices asking how many South African children's school fees and uniforms could be paid for by the price of a gadget that does what your other gadgets already do. Of course not - that's the kind of comment that makes you the dismal guy that nobody ever wants to talk to.

It's not about the techno-lust, but about the Pavlov response to philanthropy. It so happened that I was in Canada with family members when Oprah came on the television from South Africa to talk about her school. The response in the room was uniformly negative - we were roused from our Christmas cookie-induced lethargy to make our snide comments - "Oh, BROTHER, what is she on about NOW??" "And I bet she wants us to help by giving our money to Oprah..." "I was right! There IS an Oprah foundation, I can't believe it..."

I admit the tears and the drama were all a bit much, but they were hardly worse than the other holiday selections on the tube. Amidst soap operas, commercials with talking beavers and an unending stream of news stories about unseasonal weather, why is it that only Oprah's $40 million school wound us up enough to complain? Could our cynicism be the defense mechanism established to assuage our own personal discomfort about the vast inequalities in the world?

Who wants to think about children in Africa who can't afford school uniforms, especially when it is interrupting your opening of Christmas gifts and plans for post-Christmas sales? It's a lot easier to let yourself believe that everyone out there talking about poverty is a crook and a liar, out to tickle your conscience and steal your money.

Well there are a lot of crooks - I work with some of them - but they are not all crooks, and the immediate and massive criticism that meets any new effort to make a difference in the developing world does a disservice both to the poor and to those who are trying to help.

This is the challenge of being a member of the wealthiest 10% of people in the world. Our two easiest responses to global inequality - (1) Blindly throwing money at the problem; and (2) Criticizing all attempts to help and then doing nothing - both of these turn out to be ineffectual. What is needed is engagement, asking the question of why inequality exists, what does and does not make a difference, and how our consumption patterns in the West impact the lives of the poor elsewhere in the world.

So next time you see someone with a Master's degree puffing out his chest and asking, "Aren't there better ways to spend 40 million dollars?", take a step back and ask yourself, "Why are there only 40 million dollars, and why is it all coming from one person, and what does that tell us?" But if you ask those things out loud, don't puff out your chest, because there are too many people doing that as well.

Visuals

2007-01-02T02:10:00.000+01:00

Is anyone still tuned into this mostly quiet internet frequency? If so, you might enjoy photos from our 2006 trips to Namibia and Southern Italy. The Namibian ones are pretty stunning, if you ask me.

Nightly News Pundit Takes on Development Expert

2006-12-31T00:10:00.000+01:00

Jeffrey Sachs: This idea that the poorest of the poor are our enemies, this is the biggest lie of all time, and you are repeating it.

John Stossel: That they're our enemy??

Sachs: Well yeah, that all they want to do is shake you down.

Stossel: The poor people don't want to shake me down, the rich leaders of poor countries want to shake me down.

Sachs: Our government can find practical ways to ensure that the money that we're actually giving for real things there reach the real people.

Stossel: We're going to do that in Africa?? We can barely do it in America!

Sachs: Audit what's happening and those things have been shown repeatedly to work.

Watch the clip.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=1957412

Omens

2006-12-15T00:01:00.000+01:00

The warning signs for the impending Cape Epic mountain bike race are swelling together into a dark cloud of discontent on the horizon of the new year.

For instance, there was the route profile that was recently announced, promising a more difficult beginning than any previous year:

Day 1: Distance: 101km. Ascent: 2425m.
Day 2: Distance: 132km. Ascent: 2245m.
Day 3: Distance: 128km. Ascent: 2425m.

Day 1: Gosh, look at all the flat parts!

The good news is if you can still move by Day 4, you'll probably finish the race.

I've also noticed that the Cape Epic web site currently is headlining the question, Do you want to transfer your 2007 Cape Epic team entry into the 2008 race? We are currently offering a free transfer...

Or to paraphrase, You sorry bastard, what were you thinking signing up for this? Take a look at yourself, there is NO WAY you are going to be prepared for this race in three months time. We will be charitable and pretend that if you trained until 2008 you might stand a chance. But don't even THINK about trying to get a refund...

It's great to see this kind of inspirational message on the web site that is ostensibly promoting this race. Maybe this is South African humor.

This question on the registration form is the icing on the cake:

Just a few things we'll probably need to know

What have I gotten myself into?

Spring at last

2006-11-19T21:36:00.001+01:00

It is the Spring in Lesotho. Gone are the cold evenings spent huddled in front of half broken space heaters, covered in blankets and shivering. For two weeks in September there were howling winds carrying eye and mouthfuls of dust and debris, gusting in a fresh season of buzzing bottleflies, junebugs and mosquitoes. In the pauses between, there rose an oppressive heat, as if to move us from winter to summer without space to draw breath. Still accustomed to the cold, the locals stood sweating in their bank lines, mopping their brows and complaining about the heat, where only a week earlier they had been complaining about the cold.

After the wind came the brooding clouds, the first rains in months pounding into the hardened brown soil. The thunderstorms here are like nowhere else, and one of the best things about the Spring. Their coming is heralded by the jagged and booming lightning - it announces itself from all directions at once, converging on the Mohokare Valley. We sit on the balcony and watch the white bolts in the purple sky in awe, to the North, the South, the West, one after another - we once tried to see if we could count to five between strikes - and after ten minutes decided we could not. Lightning in the barren highlands is deadly - it is estimated to strike one person in Lesotho for every day of the summer - but in Maseru it is pure spectacle, a work of art in the heavens.

After the lightning is the rain which can fall for furious minutes or for days, finding its way in through the poor workmanship of my expatriate apartment on the hill, dripping slowly from the ceiling and coloring the walls yellow-brown with premature age. Outside, the cracked soil is so parched that it can absorb no water, and deep red rivers appear where there were foot paths, flash floods fill the streets and overwhelm the sewers. Ironically, inexplicably, the mass of water overwhelms the water systems and for days our taps run dry. When they come on again, the water is stained with the yellow-brown of the Mohokare, and carries a hint of that color for months.

When the clouds finally clear, the air is a wonderful cool, and the fields have turned from brown to a green that seemed unimaginable a week earlier. It is the Spring in Lesotho, it is the best time of year to be here.

For three months I have worked two jobs, leaving one to begin another. The work has been fascinating, and the disengagement with life outside complete. At social events I find myself totally dry of conversation, there is nothing in my life but work. My camera is unused, there is even dust on my brand new mountain bike. Something needs to change. But there is light ahead.

One of my projects is nearing completion, the other is slowing down, after two weeks of sleeplessness. The success or self-destruction of the former, yet to be determined, is a story worth telling, but will have to wait until I am further removed from the organizations and people involved. I can only say that it is a development classic. I have learned a great deal here, none of it what I expected to learn - in a word, it was nothing of Sachs or Stiglitz and all about Foucault. With that vague conclusion, my attention moves to more important things... The Cape Epic...

Your passion, our mission

2006-11-06T00:06:00.000+01:00

There are not a lot of 24 hour services in the quiet Free State, and there are fewer in Lesotho. Want a late evening pizza? Tough luck. Groceries on a Sunday afternoon? Sorry.

I only know of two 24 hour services. I have in my cell phone the number of a guy who will come tow your car at any time of day or night.

The other is the Morija 24 Hour Express Funeral Home.

The only thing you need after 10pm.

There are neon lights to help you find your way if you need a snap burial in the middle of the night.

It's a sad sign when the funeral industry is the biggest business in town.

Do not trust that man: He is with Them

2006-10-12T00:01:00.000+02:00

There is an excellent post at the Center for Global Development blog on a recent report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The report highlights the Marshall Plan and successful post-war reconstruction of Europe as the model for development in Africa. Todd at CGD makes this excellent observation:

The success of the Marshall Plan had little to do with capital infusion and mostly was about the attached conditions - precisely the opposite reading of UNCTAD. How UNCTAD decided that the Marshall Plan is a model for hands-off, long-term predictable funding is utterly baffling.

CGD calls the report "a sad indication of the desperation of some marginalized agencies to find a shred of relevance," a pretty harsh indictment. But in fact the report is only a symptom of a greater disease: the fact that Development Knowledge is never impartial.

Development bureaucracy is self-perpetuating, and the United Nations is only one of many organizations producing forests of paper with the sole purpose of justifying their own existence. There need be no deliberate conspiracy behind such things, because it is in the nature of large bureaucracy to produce effects more complex than the actions of any of its members.

Even tenured academics, in the ivory towers that are supposed to keep them impartial, cannot help but be drawn in. Think about it: academics are offered tenure because it is supposed to keep them neutral - if certain organizations start offering them fat consulting fees, how could it not affect their impartiality? Almost every academic has an informal attachment to a certain institution, whether the World Bank, the UN, USAID or whatever. This is not unnatural, because consulting jobs are based on relationships: get one contract with the United Nations, and the relationships you make will land you another, and another. But each of these organizations has its own bent on development, and its own self-promoting agenda, an agenda which cannot help but filter through that academic's research as she strives to legitimize her own contribution to the business.

I have heard top economists describe their early careers in the Research Department of the World Bank, being told by supervisors to write papers showing that trade is good for growth. Not papers examining whether trade is good for growth, but proving that it is. Such a mandate is not part of some American Free Market Conspiracy, but the very natural result of an organization full of neoclassical economists trying to prove its mandate relevant.

The best example of Development Knowledge as power is with one of the old whipping dogs of this blog, the United Nations. It is one of the most successful examples as well: the Millennium Development Goals.

At a semantic level, I find the buzz about the MDGs completely baffling. They are a set of targets that humanity would like to aspire to, ok, but did we really need a UN convention to tell us that we would like to see less poverty in the world? That it would be nice if kids everywhere could go to school? (And maybe we did need such a thing, but we already had it in the Declaration of Human Rights.)

More cynically, it is very easy to understand the buzz around the MDGs, because they are all benevolence and well-wishing and backslapping and don't engender any real commitment for any of the players involved. When every country in the world agrees to something wholly unattainable, nobody has to feel overly responsible when the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. The kind of agreements that countries are careful about signing are things like "We will not build a nuclear reactor", or "We will cut agricultural subsidies." Well-meaning global declarations are like petitions from coworkers - it is much easier to sign than not to sign.

The Millennium Development Goals are like a group of friends getting together and making strong commitments to one another, signing in blood even, that they are going to win the lottery in the next five years. The commitment has almost nothing to do with the outcome. When the time passes and it has gone unfulfilled, they will laugh and say Shucks, and move on.

But it is too superficial to compartmentalize the Millennium Development Goals as being only well-wishing and meaningless. Ideas like this do not come out of thin air. The most significant impact of the MDGs over the last seven years has been a substantial expansion in the political capital of the United Nations in the development industry. Taking over from bilateral donors and international financial institutions, the United Nations has taken the lead in the fabrication of Development Speak. The language of the MDGs is the language of the United Nations, and every time a well-meaning development organization pays them lip service, the UN's profile in development gets raised a little bit higher.

To bureaucracy, size is success, and there are now entire new branches of the United Nations dedicated to the Millennium Development Goals, new ambassadors, new summits, reams of consultants who claim to be specialists in the MDGs, whatever that is supposed to mean. In passing, it makes me wonder what all the old branches of the UN have been doing all this time, since every MDG target was already covered by at least a few UN institutions since well before the Millennium Declaration.

The UN's autistic obsession with keeping the MDGs at the center of Development Speak to the exclusion of everything else is as alive in Lesotho as it is in New York. UN reps here are incessant in repeating that the MDGs should be the guiding framework of development planning in Lesotho, regardless of what our home-grown plans might look like. "You committed to them, this is not imposed by us, the Government of Lesotho signed the Declaration," is the oft-repeated refrain. (If only we had a dime for every declaration signed!)

The suggestion of global MDG targets as the basis for local planning is senseless, and anathema to all the Development Speak about local ownership - if we have already achieved the education target, should we therefore stop spending on education, because the MDGs say so? What's more, achieving the targets in Lesotho is totally infeasible since many indicators (like life expectancy) are moving in the wrong direction. One must be ambitious but a plan is not useful as a plan if it is not grounded in reality.

But in listening, what becomes clear is that the United Nations do not really care how we make our development plans, so long as we use the three key words M, D and G, because they soon drift off when we talk about the complexities and considerations of development planning. If the Prime Minister announced cuts in health care and a tripling of the military budget, so long as he described the plan as being within the broad framework of the Millennium Development Goals, he would win accolades at the United Nations.

Why this weird fixation? Because language is powerful. If the UN can convince the other donors that the MDGs are the definition of development, then it makes sense for the UN to lead the development agenda, because after all they are the experts on the MDGs (whatever that means), they invented them.

I don't mean to single out the UN, though their weak staffing and overwhelming bureaucracy generally make them the easiest organization to make fun of. But they are not alone. The very structure of large bureaucracy gives it a huge amount of inertia, and the vast majority of individuals perpetuating that inertia do not know that they are doing it, they are just doing their jobs.

At $100 billion per year, development is big business. This is about a fifth of the global pharmaceutical market, but development is growing faster. Development knowledge produced by development organizations, which it always is, should perhaps be treated in the same way as you would treat medical knowledge produced by pharmaceutical companies. With tongs.

Amex RED: Another celebrity jumps on the conscience bandwagon

2006-09-08T01:04:00.000+02:00

Because I am a sucker for punishment, a while back I signed up for the RED mailing list. The RED campaign is the leader in a new trend in conscience consumerism, which includes a credit card that diverts 1% of what you spend to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, as well as promoting the image of partner celebrities and companies as both hip and globally sensitive.

Today, I received a bright email with a bold headline screaming Supermodel Gisele Joins American Express RED! My reaction, naturally was holy shit, that's incredible! Nevermind Lebanon or Somalia, this is serious news. Yet another celebrity has jumped on the Saviour of Africa bandwagon. Even better, she has been paired with Kenyan Maasai warrior Keseme Ole Parsapaet.

The union of conscience and consumerism

I salute the individual who came up with pairing the world's richest supermodel with the world's most loved traditional and marginalized tribe. The inherent cynicism of the campaign is absolute. If there was ever a marketing message that an informed consumer should see through, this would be it:

"The compelling image of Gisele and Keseme communicates the union of consumerism and conscience, demonstrating how something as simple as everyday shopping can now help eliminate AIDS in Africa."

Don't watch the news. Forget about trying to understand all the messed up things going on around the world. Don't think about the global distribution of wealth and the fact that one reason the Maasai are poor is that there isn't enough wealth in the world for everyone to live like Americans. Forget about it. Just go shopping.

Gisele shares her own personal philosophy of international development:

"RED makes you feel less guilty about spending and is a fantastic way to help fight AIDS every day."

Keseme says:

"AIDS is affecting my community. I think (RED) is great, it is a way of helping the world come together to help fight AIDS."

Going deeper, we learn that, 'Keseme herds and trades cattle, in the tradition of his nomadic people.' The portrayal of the African community as backward, pastoral, ravaged by AIDS and helplessly waiting for the West do something about it is an essential element of the union of consumerism and conscience.

A more accurate picture would show that one of the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic has been the mines of South Africa, where migrant workers have been coerced into brutally underpaid labor and forced to live away from their families, where they have contracted HIV from prostitutes and have brought it back to their home communities. These are the mines that produce the gold and diamonds that Giselle no longer feels guilty about spending on now that she is using Amex RED. In the real world, I am sorry to say, consumerism and conscience do not go well together at all.

Let us also note that the African is side-by-side with the supermodel because in the consumer vision, they are the same. They are not real things: they are just advertising images and stereotypes, and you should be about as concerned with the African's plight as you should be concerned with your prospects of ever dating the supermodel. That is to say, don't worry about it.

The RED campaign falls neatly into the venerated practice of turning international aid into big business for American shareholders, in the tradition of USAID, Halliburton, and overpaid consultants everywhere. It may only be a matter of time before aid agencies start counting every dollar put on an Amex card as Overseas Development Assistance.

The Case of the Crooked Camrys

2006-08-30T01:02:00.000+02:00

There is a great corruption scandal unfolding in Lesotho, which says just so much about the state of Government and democracy in this little country.

Senior politicians are under fire for a deal where they are permitted to buy the vehicles used by Government as soon as they are three years old, for the "residual value" of those vehicles. The residual value is perversely calculated to be 1% of the original value of the vehicle, so about R2,000 (USD 300) for a 2003 Camry, or R4,000 (USD 600) for a Mercedes Kompressor.

This is all part and parcel of the privatization of the Government's fleet services, which was encouraged as a cost-reducing measure by the World Bank and the IMF a few years ago. If you have lived in Africa for even a year, you should immediately recognize what is afoot - Imperial Fleet Services, the winner of the fleet contract, is giving gifts to senior Government officials in order to predispose them to renewing their contract when it expires, even though they are the most expensive fleet service provider in town.

It is not surprising to find such deals pervading almost every element of Government in a country like this one. What is shocking to me about the deal is that no effort has been made to hide or obfuscate what is such a blatant case of bribery and corruption. When engaged in a degenerate deal like this, public officials should at least have the respect to put on a stoic face and pretend to be honest or at a minimum, incompetent and confused. The failure to do so is as clear a Fuck You to the electorate as a ruling party can give.

A less egregious example may make clear what I am trying to say. Sticking to the subject of vehicles, there is a certain dealer in a certain border town, who is known to give great deals on cars, if you happen to work for a certain revenue agency. That agency, in turn, has the discretion to choose which businesses to audit. So if you happened to get a great deal on the car, maybe it was just the right day and the right time. If the dealer hasn't had his import and export data audited for sixteen years, it is surely just coincidence. This is how graft is supposed to work: all parties to the deal are benefiting, but the criminality of the affair is subtle, can never be quite pinned down.

Not so for our Ministerial car racket. This week, the Government web site, of all places, has a link to the various options for crooked transactions that were discussed in parliament. The document reads as plain and boring as any other statement of policy, discussing whether it is better to give Ministers the vehicles through Government-guaranteed bank loans (loans guaranteed to default, giving the officials the cars for free), or to sell the cars to Imperial, which would sell them back to officials at their so-called residual value. This is not a case of officials at football matches being passed sandwiches stuffed with dollar bills: there was actually a parliamentary committee established to decide between a set of equally fraudulent proposals, and the conclusion was presented to the representative body of the nation. In plain language, "This sixteen page document describes in detail how we are going to misappropriate a few million dollars from the people of this country." Moved, seconded, and approved by the sleeping majority.

The audacity of the scheme is unfathomable. Parliament is meant to be discussing a policy issue, in this case the privatization of the Government fleet, and they vote in an amendment transforming the public vehicles into the personal property of lead parliamentarians. The mentality of "a dollar for the people, a dollar for me" finds life not just in back rooms and behind closed doors, but in the most public of spaces, the parliament itself.

In a proper democracy, a ruling party that establishes a principle of giving itself handouts as a central component of every single policy issue soon finds itself voted out by the electorate that it is despoiling. In Lesotho, there is only one party with any prospect of forming a Government, and it wins elections on votes from remote communities where the citizens don't have the faintest idea of what democracy means, where development projects are targetted politically and labelled politically, where citizens are made to understand that they are only eligible for such things as health clinics and clean water because they vote for the LCD. Ironically, many of these goods and services are paid for by donors; project posters are published first in English and second in Sesotho - English-speaking donors rarely notice when a party logo gets affixed to the Sesotho version of a poster promoting the assistance.

In a small country ranking 149 out of 177 on UNDP's education index, with few secondary graduates from the highlands whence most parliamentarians hail, the possibility of proper debate over policy issues is non-existent. Discussion takes place in both English and Sesotho, and though most parliamentarians may speak English, many are not competent enough to engage in intricate policy discussions in a language of which they have the thinnest grasp. The statements that come out of parliament are often sadly indicative of the level of competence of elected officials.

The wages of sin

And yet, we meet all the global hit-or-miss indicators of democracy - there are free and fair elections, there is freedom of association and multiple political parties, a free media, and so on. On paper, Lesotho is a vibrant democracy, but in practice, the actions of head officials reveal that it may as well be a one party state - it is hard to imagine a level of corruption that would put at risk such a party as this.

The car deal was a small memo, which I am willing to bet was opened and closed quickly, a memo which was not even looked at by the majority of parliamentarians, and certainly not understood. The official opposition made no stink of the affair when the deal was made some three years ago. The process was so completely transparent, it was almost even legal.

But not quite. The Law Society of Lesotho has issued a beautifully melodramatic challenge which has been taken up by the local weeklies, and the issue has dominated the headlines for over a month now. If the Government manages to bury this, it will be clear that there is no act of corruption too blatant to get away with.

But it looks now like this story is heading toward as good an ending as we can reasonably hope for. Some cars will be returned, maybe a minister or two will be shuffled onto the backbench after the 2007 election. Imperial Fleet Services will get the new contract, and the shameless jobbery will continue, but the scheming at least will move into the back room where it belongs.

The Drakensberg Escarpment: The steep edge of Lesotho

2006-08-03T01:15:00.000+02:00

I returned last week from a backpacking trip to the edge of the Drakensberg Escarpment. I know I say this every time I go anywhere, but I think it was the most incredible trip I've done in Southern Africa. These photos are worth a thousand words, so I won't say anymore. See the slideshow here. (Most of these were not taken by me.)

Thaba Tseka to Maseru by mountain bike III

2006-07-30T01:12:00.000+02:00

(This post is in multiple parts. Click here to read how I came to the highlands with only a bike to get home or here for the story of the day's hellish ride to Mohale Village.)

The Mohale (mo-HA-lee) Village General Store is a place that triggers expatriate nostalgia, for in decor and feel, it may be the most advanced of general stores in Lesotho. It sits at the edge of a bright parking lot with neatly painted lines, its entry beneath a sloping red roof and an inviting sign, more reminiscent of Aspen than rural Lesotho. The interior is lit by bright fluorescent lights, the goods are neatly arranged in aisles and shelves, and the woman behind the counter offers a friendly Good Afternoon when you enter. The order and cleanliness is a breath of fresh air, and one feels removed to a place miles and miles away.

But nostalgia lasts only a moment, for in supply, the Mohale Village General Store appears to have been looted several times over. Three of five aisles are completely empty; the remaining two are bare at best, with only a few bags of flour and sugar, and some long-expired long-life milk.

Had I filled my pack, I might have depleted the inventory by a fourth, but I was only interested in chocolate bars and water, neither of which were available. I settled for an Orange Fanta with a thick layer of grime on the surface. I paid, and poured it down my dry throat while the cashier prepared my change.

Mohale Village is a settlement that was built for the contractors, engineers and laborers who spent years on the construction of Mohale Dam, the counterpart to Katse Dam. The expertise necessary to build the dam demanded a village for foreign experts, and the resultant planned community feels uprooted from suburban America, and keenly incongruent with highland Lesotho. A-frame two storey brick houses fill winding streets, all of them immaculate and bright. Gardens are neatly trimmed. It is the first place in Lesotho that I have seen street signs.

It is a realization of the perfect suburb, but for one thing: it is a ghost town. Construction on the dam finished over five years ago, and the village now houses only a very small number of people: a doctor, a military contingent, and a small staff whose job is to keep the place looking like it was built yesterday. To give credit where credit is due, the achievement is remarkable in a country where maintenance is perennially undervalued. To avoid giving too much credit, let us note that the maintenance of the Mohale Ghost Town comes from a fund earmarked for poverty reduction in the highlands.

I checked into the Mohale Resort Hotel, an immaculate establishment that matched the decor of the village. The room was of a higher class than any I have stayed in in a long time, and I had a particular delight in finding that I had made it to this luxury hotel before the Gideons. There were only a few cracks in the presentation, the struggling fluorescent bulb in the ensuite bathroom, the thick curtains that slid right off the rod onto the floor. Needless to say, I was the only guest. After a warm bath, there was still time to explore before the restaurant opened, so I put my bike shoes back on and strolled outside.

Wandering the empty but thoughtfully named streets of the Village is like walking the set of a Hitchcock film. The wind is a lonely voice whipping between houses, unaccompanied by the murmur of traffic or the buzz of playing children that the mind strains to hear in a place like this. For an hour I walked these empty lanes with the hotel receptionist, a middle-aged Basotho with half of a smile, a tired expression that acknowledged its owner's place in an incomprehensible world, where inscrutable people in high places have decreed that he should be paid to live in a remote community and staff a hotel that nobody ever visits.

Even in a Ghost Town, there is a social hierarchy. The receptionist showed me the apartment-style housing along the Resort parking lot where the support staff live, the lowliest of accomodation. The next level of accomodation, the two-storey barn-shaped houses that filled the valley had been for contractors on the dam, and were now empty. The most elegant homes, sitting atop the highest hill and looking down over the village and reservoir in all directions, he explained, were for the Government officials associated with the Highlands Water Project that had brought all this here to begin with. From the high streets, we could see the Basotho villages dotting the distant hillsides, a fourth, bottom rung of the ladder where life continued as if there was no giant water project.

The winter sunset signals the arrival of the evening freeze, and we hurried back to the hotel, where the receptionist disappeared into a back room, presumably to look busy, and I wandered on through the empty hotel. The staff in the halls looked at their feet as I passed, maybe embarrassed for this empty first-class establishment, or else embarrassed for me, unlucky enough to have somehow found myself here, alone and in the middle of nowhere.

I finally settled in the hotel bar, an empty room with a few plain tables and armless wooden chairs, the television tuned to World Wrestling Entertainment. The barman was asleep, his face on the counter, nestled in the crook of his arm. I took a seat a few feet from him and began taking notes from the day in my small journal. After half an hour, he lifted his head and gave me a smile, the same tired smile of the receptionist, unconcerned to have been caught napping. "What are you writing about? I hope you are not writing about me," he joked. I laughed. The strangeness of this place was not about a sleeping barman, but about everything else.

Mohale Village and posh LHDA houses

The final ride merits mention only because the story ends hanging without it. It was as much a suffering as the previous day if not more, from the moment I felt the pain of contact between the saddle and my saddle sores. (For those not up to date with the euphemisms of cycling, saddle sores, essentially, are blisters located upon the back side. Now healed, thank you.) Before I was through with breakfast, the beautiful sunrise broke into a dark rainstorm, which the receptionist assured me would last the whole day. I mentally added Wet and Frozen to Tired and Sore and all the other adjectives I was compiling to describe this trip.

Dark clouds over the reservoir

I covered the day's passes at a snail's pace, soaking cold until out of the mountains. Riding down into Machache and Nazareth, I joined the route of the Tour de Lesotho, fending off the children where they have learned that cyclists mean free water bottles. Down past Roma, I had nothing left, and the flat lowlands were as much a struggle as the highlands. I continued only because there was no real option not to, and it would have taken me a lot longer to walk.

It was a long six and a half hours home. I struggled up the last hill to the apartment, hauled my bike in the door, ate, showered, and fell asleep until morning.

I had ridden 173 mountainous kilometres over two days and fifteen hours on the road, easily the longest and hardest ride of my life. It is difficult to say that it was a good trip; I like to push myself, but to go so far beyond what I was reasonably prepared for hardly seemed worth it. With time, I assumed the memory of the struggling would fade and I would feel better about what I had done. For now, it was Monday afternoon, and I was already committed to a 5-day backpacking trip to the top of the Drakensberg beginning on Friday morning. All I really wanted was one morning of sleeping in.

Maloti Mountains and Katse Reservoir

Thaba Tseka to Maseru by mountain bike II

2006-07-20T01:04:00.000+02:00

(This post is in multiple parts. Click for Part I or Part III)

The first cracks of daylight filtered through the tattered blinds at 6:30. Other than the occasional sounds of roaring vehicles, barking dogs and arguing men, it was a quiet night. I woke feeling refreshed and with a clear head. Having laid my clothes out the night before, I was on my bike by 6:45.

Today's plan was to ride 77km to Mohale Dam in about four hours, leaving the option to stay the night or continue another 85km to Maseru. In retrospect, the plan was completely unreasonable in so many different ways.

There was the matter of the highly conflicting maps, none of which showed climbs unless they were in excess of 250 vertical metres, leaving a lot of room for unexpected challenges. There was the too heavy pack, which completely changed the dynamics of riding, turning gentle slopes into difficult climbs. There was the fact that after two hours of riding, the computer showed a measly 20km of distance covered, barely a quarter of the day's journey. In short, I had highly underestimated what I was in for.

This is not to say that the riding wasn't fabulous. Riding, put simply, is the perfect way to see Lesotho. Driving Lesotho is impressive, but feels too separated from the world, being bounced all around in a private chamber, breathing dusty and artifical air from the car's engine. Locals on the roadside turn their heads away as you approach, shielding themselves from the dust and pebbles churning up from beneath the vehicle. As for walking, it just takes far too long to get anywhere.

On a bike, the air is clean and fresh, the sounds of villages miles away are clearly audible, and yet the land rolls away at a leisurely pace. Interactions with locals are long enough to say hello, but short enough that I can make people think I speak the local language.

The mountain roads of Lesotho are well used, if not so much by motorized vehicles, and one must be careful for around many a bend are straining donkeys with felled, leafy trees in their wake, herds of goats and cows, crowds of women on their way to and from church. There are also men on horses, and it is a truly fearsome thing to hear the thundering hooves and scattering stones behind you, a dark and advancing shape in the corner of your eye. There is no rational reason to be afraid of being passed on the road by a mounted Mosotho, but I had fear in my heart each time it happened, as if I was about to be clubbed or trampled to death. This is something that can never be experienced when you travel in a Land Cruiser.

Most of the villages I passed were entirely basic, consisting only of stone and thatch huts, the nearest services miles away in Thaba Tseka. They seem unvisited by greater civilization, with the exception of the Coca-Cola man, who has come through and painted his red and white logo on brick walls everywhere. His brand has competition only from the development agencies who have planted signs for all passers by to know how they improved the livelihood of people here. A sign from Care International advertises an agricultural programme, the Japanese point to the primary schools they have built, the World Bank to a set of solar panels.

Rural people are irrepressibly friendly, and everyone seemed to find it absolutely hilarious to see a white person on a bicycle. Children ran out to the road in every village, most of them begging for money and sweets, but some picking up stones when they saw I had no sweets to offer. Many of them spend their days throwing stones at sheep and goats to keep them off of roads, so their aim is quite good. I quickly learned to engage them in conversation from the moment I was within throwing range, and to keep them confused until I was clear. So I asked them about their siblings and their goats, if they had any sweets for me, and when I ran out of things to say that made sense, I just strung together Sesotho words without context: "Oxen Mister Eating Thank You!" "Garden Tomorrow Going Very Goodbye!" It was a highly effective approach.

The vicious and barking dogs were more difficult to negotiate with, especially when they came upon me in mid-climb, when I was at my slowest. I did my best to spot them before they spotted me, saved my energy until they started chasing, and then pedaled as fast as I could, shouting threateningly and waving my arm as if throwing a stone. This last is difficult to do convincingly while riding a bicycle, and I don't think had much credibility, but I did notice some locals falling off their front porches in laughter.

I know it makes me something of an oddball, but I enjoy riding uphill a great deal, which maybe is a requirement for enjoying riding in Lesotho at all. There is something meditative about finding a rhythm and staying in that zone for an hour at a time, the beat of pedals in synchronicity with the beat of heart. I find it thrilling to stand at the foot of a mountain and to look almost straight up to a road hundreds and hundreds of meters above, and to think, That's where I'm going, and I am going to have to climb for over an hour to get there. It is elating to take those last twenty strokes across the pass and see the new world opened out below. And intimidating to look into that new horizon and see only one road ahead, climbing yet another mountain, just as big as the current one, some five or six kilometres away.

The ride was fabulous, for the first five hours of the day, though I knew I had trouble ahead. The road had barely been flat at all, one climb giving way immediately to steep descent and further climbing. After about five hours, Things started to turn sour, for the simple reason that I am not in physical condition to ride uphill for more than five hours at a time. The cycle computer stopped tracking my speed, as it cannot track speeds slower than 3 km/hr. I was by now familiar with the experience of climbing a pass only to see the next brutal pass directly ahead, but it still made me yell in frustration, and I tumbled repeatedly from my bike to catch my breath, cheek pressed against the rocky soil. I dug into tomorrow's food and ate all the chocolate bars. I contemplating ditching the pack. I drank the last of my water when the computer read 75 km, not realizing I had 15 km and a lot of climbing still ahead of me. The villages had petered out and I was alone, with cold, sweeping valleys in all directions, their rocky edges laced with ice and snow, an apt environment for my cold and broken spirit.

I don't mean to belabor the difficulty of those last three and a half hours. It was really, really bad. I was very, very unhappy. This whole ride was a terrible idea.

Of course, there was no choice but to go on, so on I went. And eventually came the tremendous relief of seeing the red roofs of Mohale Village on the horizon, which drew me like a magnet through the final climb, such that I barely felt it. The four hour ride had taken me eight and a half, and I had the same distance to cover tomorrow, but I was indifferent to the numbers; I had arrived.

Link: The eerie Mohale Village and the ride home...

Thaba Tseka to Maseru by mountain bike I

2006-07-19T01:04:00.000+02:00

There is something wrong with an alarm bell ringing before 7 o'clock on a Saturday morning, and my first instinct was rebellion against this fool of a plan to trade three long sleeps for early rising and days of struggle and uncertainty. But I had made a commitment, and it was too late to turn back.

The plan was to catch a lift halfway across Lesotho with friends who were headed that way, to be dropped off alone in the heart of the country, and to get home on my mountain bike, riding 170km across the spine of the Maloti Mountains.

The route was unknown to me, and my ability only one uncertainty among many, including the bike, the weather, the quality of the road and the quality of the people I would meet on the way. (Be careful, there are some bad people out there, one expatriate warned me.) But uncertainty and challenge are great builders of character, and it is on trips like these that one learns to be suspicious of fear. So I told myself on Saturday morning. The truth of the matter may be that this trip was driven by an unnecessary boast over lunch ("I've been thinking of riding from Sani Pass..."), followed by too much pride to make backing down an option.

An hour's drive through the lowlands brought us to the boom town of Leribe, where cookie cutter textile factories sit side by each along the highway, their windowless lengths suggesting women at sewing machines packed together like chickens, pecking away at the latest inspirations from the Gap, monitored by an all-seeing supervisor, a merciless fossil of a man, shouting angrily in fragments of English and Chinese. Only two of the hundreds of textile factories in Lesotho are owned by locals, the economist in our vehicle helpfully noted, and neither has produced goods in the last year.

In the middle of a Saturday morning, it is impossible to tell whether the workers have stayed home or have already had the doors closed behind them. Only before 8 and after 5 can you tell if the plants are operating, when the sea of pedestrians is being drawn in or expelled en masse.

From Leribe we turned South into the highlands, and civilization was quickly replaced by sharp canyon walls marked with fragments of ice and snow. We were driving into the Maloti Mountains along a highway that clings tenuously to the edges of the barren and brown hillsides, held in place by huge retaining walls that at any time look ready to fall away. The road was littered with boulders large enough to crush a person and seriously damage a vehicle. Signs advising drivers to gear down on the descents were helpfully marked with skull and crossbones.

Before long, we were meandering along the perimeter of the Katse reservoir, an artificial reservoir spanning dozens of square miles. The dam is an anachronism, a first world technology of epic scale, dropped without context into a land otherwise forgotten by time. Herdboys in balaclavas escort cows and goats across bridges built to support semi-trailers with thousand-tonne loads. At the artificial horizon, a thin line of concrete separates the blue reservoir from the dusty mountainscape beyond.

The story of the big dams in Lesotho is one of the definitive development tales of this country, and merits being told in more detail than I can give it here. In very short form, it is the story of how Lesotho was swindled of the only resource in which it was unequivocally supreme: water. Two megalithic dams were constructed in the Lesotho highlands, diverting massive volumes of water into the river that feeds thirsty Johannesburg. Lesotho's desserts from the project were limited to a few enriched officials and a whole lot of commercial debt, which is still being paid off. But that's how these things go in this part of the world.

We were not allowed to cross the top of the dam, presumably because the guard thought our driver had the appearance of a German terrorist. Luckily, an unguarded access road on the downstream side leads directly to the base of the wall. This is the way of security in Lesotho: guards will do their jobs, but they will not go out of their way to hinder your experience. If you are creative, security need not be a bother.

South Africans take security at Katse Dam more seriously, probably because they are the ones benefiting from all this suspended water. When there was civil unrest in Maseru in 1998, the South African Air Force sent a unit to Katse to secure the dam. The Lesotho Defence Force had a garrison stationed there with the same job: keeping the dam secure. The South Africans destroyed the LDF barracks without warning, killing all the Basotho soldiers inside, who may have been sleeping, or drinking, or playing cards, but were almost certainly not plotting anything to do with the dam. It is difficult to think of two countries in the world where the destruction of a military unit on domestic soil would not be seen as an act of war, but such is the unusual situation of one nation completely surrounded and dependent on a much bigger and more powerful neighbor - acceptance and non-response was the only option.

We parked under a fifteen meter concrete wall, and climbed a steel ladder to the top, finding a lunch spot almost directly under the imposing underside of the dam, an impossible mass of concrete holding back an even greater mass of water. To look up at such a thing is the rare experience of vertigo in reverse - it feels not like you are about to fall, but like the wall is leaning down upon you.

Large sections of the wall were wet and stained by water seeping through the horizontal spaces between concrete slabs.

"Do you think it's supposed to be leaking," asked G___.

"I can't imagine."

It seems much too improbable that a wonder of civil engineering costing hundreds of millions of dollars could crumble apart and fall on our heads just as we were breaking open our lunches. But this is Lesotho, and the normal rules of structural longevity and maintenance do not necessarily apply. We didn't stick around for very long.

"Are you sure you don't want to come with us?"

After seven hours of driving, we were in Thaba Tseka, and I was being offered my last chance to bail out, to trade two days of bottom-bruising cycling for a cold beer and warm bed at the top of Sani Pass. I held firm, first ensuring that the bike was still functional, and bid them goodbye.

Thaba Tseka is a minimalist district capital with a population of a few thousand, large in comparison with the villages we had been passing all day. With radio tower, health clinic, prison and police station loosely scattered between brick and concrete houses, it fills its little plateau nicely, gazing upon a deep river valley and the high mountains of the Drakensberg in the distance.

The town centre is a single dirt road populated by a few brick structures, their sides marked by words scrawled in blue paint, identifying sites where basic services can be purchased: haircuts, phone calls, fertilizer. Outside some of these there gathered crowds for no reason I could ascertain. Along one side of the road was a row of closed structures made of corrugated tin, possibly the site of sellers of a narrow range of fruits and vegetables on a market day.

Like so many mountain places in Lesotho, Thaba Tseka is a slow place. There were people about, mostly standing around. Those who were walking were walking slowly. Even the horses were ambling, the goats pausing to think deep thoughts between each chew, the donkeys staring on in indifference. It is slow, I suspect, because there has never been a reason for it to be anything but. Though many people have fields, they do not live on what they draw from the land - they subsist on cash brought from South Africa by migrant workers. The economic activity that drives Thaba Tseka takes places hundreds of miles away; the men leave for long periods of time, work hard in the mines, and then come back to Thaba Tseka to take it slow.

It was two in the afternoon, past the point where I could complete the four hour ride to Mohale Village in daylight, so I would be spending the night here. The Mountain Star Hotel was the only option in town, which I imagine is why they hadn't bothered to repair the almost unreadable sign. The female staff spoke excellent English, while the men spoke only the universal and guttural language of televised football. I found myself a small and comfortable room with television, bath, rickety wardrobe and 5-fin radiator.

The bed was covered by a single blanket, the pillow like a rock. Inside the night table drawer were three condoms of the variety that are given out by aid workers, still sealed in their unmarked blue-green wrappers. HIV what it is, I cannot come across a condom in Lesotho but wonder about its story. Had they been placed here by an aid programme, gathering dust over months and months? Or did a previous guest arrive with a handful, use a few and leave the rest behind? It may seem like a strange thing to wonder, but it is a question central to the future of Lesotho. I left the drawer open a crack so the next guest would know the option was there.

A room like this in Johannesburg, or even in Maseru could only be called a dive, but context is everything, and in Thaba Tseka it was a treat. The taps were issuing yellow-brown water, but I made myself a warm bath all the same, hoping to clear the headache that had come on in the last bouncing hours of the drive.

Tomorrow's ride would be difficult, some 80km of rough dirt roads, up and down four major mountain passes. I was excited, but also nervous. A man in town had looked up at the sky and forecast snow, which was the one circumstance that could strand me most decisively, preventing even the overlander buses from getting to Thaba Tseka. The pack felt heavier than ever, made worse by my having forgotten to leave a 2kg pair of jeans in the car. Worst of all, this headache which threatened to rattle my brain with every bump on the road.

But all this was for tomorrow. The clock read 7:15 PM as I turned out the light, curled in my sleeping bag and fell quickly to sleep.

Part II: Thaba Tseka to Mohale Dam

The short history of International Development in the modern age

2006-07-12T01:21:00.000+02:00

This is the history of International Development, as practiced by the wealthy world. It is too easy to believe that we are the innovators, that this Poverty Reduction thing has never been tried before. We must not forget that we are not the first, not even the second, but the Third Generation of International Developers.

The modern age of International Development began some 60 years ago. The Western powers, reeling from the highs of a successful reconstruction of post-war Europe, decided to scale the programme up to the rest of the world. They were roaring years, and it was the golden age of International Development, when everything was possible, every problem answerable with a technical solution. Money poured South, into power plants, roads, train lines and massive hydropower projects.

More than any other period, this was the era of the Development Economist. Just as medieval theologians showed off their knowledge by debating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, so the Economists spent their Ivy League energies discussing the magic number of dollars that would be needed to make the third world as wealthy and healthy as the first. The magic number they named the Investment Gap.

The Investment Gap dollars were sent South, but Development did not come. Nevertheless, the Economists retained their thrones as the Masters of Development. They stopped talking publicly about Investment Gaps, but deep within the bowels of the economic models at the IMF and the World Bank, the concept lay hidden, still the source of so much misunderstanding.

Investment in infrastructure was expected to be followed by economic growth. In fact, it was followed by large debt burdens, as investments failed to yield expected returns, thanks to mismanagement, corruption, and a variety of other factors. The idea that you could just drop European infrastructure into an African context and have it function seamlessly seemed silly in retrospect.

When things go wrong in International Development, you do not admit wrong - you tweak your programmes and promise more. The squandered resources of the 50s and 60s led to the conclusion that the Governments of poor countries were responsible for the let-down, ushering in the era of Structural Adjustment. Under Structural Adjustment, the civil services of bloated third world bureaucracies were cut down to size in the name of Austerity, and the Western Powers prophesied market and trade liberalization, bringing their Cold War ideologies onto the African battlefield. And the cash continued to roll South.

Structural Adjustment enjoyed great popularity among the tall, spectacled leaders of the international financial institutions for about 20 years until someone crept into the office of IMF Director Michel Camdessus and whispered, The Emperor Has No Clothes! In fact, the emperors of poor countries were doing quite well, thank you, but their people continued to be desperately poor, poor and unreachable by the billions of investment dollars coming in from the West.

In the early 1980s, a new force was beginning to influence the workings of the Development Powers: it was the Hippy School of International Development. This decentralized movement would not explode into public consciousness until some dozen years later, in 1999, when people dressed as cannabis plants and dollar bills, along with a lot of unwitting locals, were tear-gassed by the Seattle Police Department outside the World Trade Organization's annual meeting.

The more credible of the International Hippies - and believe me, the vast majority were not credible at all, take the Neo-Leninists, for instance - came from two camps with contradictory messages, though many were proud members of both camps. The first group argued that the people in poor nations would be fine if only the West would stop interfering with them; the second that the West had not met its promises, and should double, triple, and increase tenfold the Southerly cash flow.

From the first group we got the buzzword Participation, meant to represent the notion of involving the people being Developed in the story of their Development. It may have been a good idea, but nobody would ever find out, because the World Bank decided to take it on. And by the time the World Bank was through with it, Participation had been distilled into a technical series of procedural requirements with names like Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Gender Analysis (GA) and Social Assessment (SA), requirements that were anathema to field staff trying to disburse project funds as quickly as possible. The new requirements tended to be approached with the same commitment that mining companies approach environmental assessment.

(It must be said in passing that the Anthropologists had picked up on Participation long before the Economists; in fact it was at the core of what they had always been doing - listening to local people. But so drunken was their giddiness at having been right all along, that they were still congratulating themselves when they noticed that the great ships of Development had come and passed in the night. In less than a decade, the Powers appropriated and compartmentalized the idea of Participation, leaving the anthropologists in the same place that they had always been, crying out in the wilderness, heard by few and understood by fewer.)

From the second group of International Hippies came Debt Relief, Live Aid, Amex RED, Bono's latest image and a half dozen other ways for Western consumers both to feel a measure of pride about International Development (neverminding the legacy thus far), and to feel like they could make a difference in the world by increasing their spending on luxury products.

The banner of Structural Adjustment was falling, and it was being replaced by dozens of sectoral panaceas, from Gender to Human Rights, from Technology to Child Survival, and the advocates of each of these promised that their fad held the solution to the global imbalance. The World Bank, searching for a new holy grail, opened local branches under each of these names, and high-priced Western consultants declared themselves experts and advisors in all of these fields and more.

The arguments were all very convincing, but the famous End of Poverty remained elusive, and we named the 1980s The Lost Decade of Development, because so many poor countries were drifting backward on the economic scale, even as their leaders built themselves new pleasure palaces and developed their fleets of antique automobiles.

None of the new themes was proving more or less effective than any of the others. There were stories of failure and stories of success, often from the same projects depending on who was doing the telling. The Development Narrative rolled on in its characteristic pattern of incremental improvement punctuated by tragic and devastating setback in the form of natural disaster, new disease and men with names like Meles, Mobutu and Mugabe.

Everybody knew how to make things marginally better. Nobody knew how to keep things from getting disastrously worse. A vast spectrum of innovation was springing from the soil, from microcredit to water privatization, all their programmes bound together by the Fundamental Principle of International Development: Never admit failure. Just tweak and scale up.

And so we arrive in the 21st century of International Development, in a world vastly different from the 1950s and yet so much the same. The simplistic answers of the early years have been replaced by concepts so broad as to be impossible to put a finger on, words like Governance, and Institutions, that essentially mean Everything That Has Made Our Previous Efforts Fail. The language of Development has become more refined, so we now say External Assistance instead of Aid, and Partnership instead of Conditionality, even if the principles are unchanged.

The players in the game have multiplied, with the addition of foundations with unprecedented budgets but little experience or knowledge to prevent them from repeating old errors; and new donors, like the Chinese, their practices vaguely reminiscent of the political aid of the Cold War.

Property prices have gone through the roof in unlikely places, places most of us would never have heard of if we weren't in the industry, places like Kigali, Goma, Freetown, and lovely Maseru.

Struggling to hold onto a system that is fast running away from them, the Economists have tried to recentralize the Development apparatus around the notion of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. The Governments of poor countries have jumped and danced to the new tune, often at the expense of previously functional planning systems. Spearheaded by rich world consultants, a new wave of adjustment reforms, with names like Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Public Expenditure Management, a wave of reform even more difficult to understand than the last wave of reform, is sweeping through the ranks of poor countries. These are all extremely long term fixes, and the vast majority of consultants will have moved on before their solutions can be evaluated.

What will the next 60 years hold? Will the Economists successfully regain control of the Development Apparatus? Will the growth rate of the Development Agencies continue to outpace the growth rate of poor countries? Will there ever be a development practioner who will admit that her project was a wash? Keep watching this space to find out...

Defrauded!

2006-06-22T01:42:00.000+02:00

About three weeks ago, we lost network connectivity in my Government office, apparently because we had switched to a new Internet service provider. (It's funny but not unusual to join a new service provider and find yourself with no service at all for quite some time.) Interruptions like this are common, and usually get resolved at a speed in direct proportion to the number of important people who are left without access. In this case, the problem was limited to my wing of my building - a bad sign, as there are no Ministers, Secretaries or Executives there. Just overpaid consultants and underpaid civil servants. In any case, the effect of a failing network on productivity is probably neutral, as the difficulty of internal communication and internet research is balanced by less staff time spent on the surf.

After one week, the problem was identified: a broken switch. After two weeks, there was some kind of resolution to do something about it. In the third week, after we had all given up hope of restoration and were making daily email trips to the Chinese internet cafe, connectivity was restored - an unexpectedly quick resolution.

Getting internet access after three dry weeks is almost as stimulating as visiting Johannesburg after months in Maseru. Even banking web sites offer a certain thrill of interactivity.

The web site for my Visa card was showing a balance of in the range of $3,700. I am not a person who checks transactions religiously, and I wondered if it was a positive balance that I had for some reason put on my card in anticipation of spending, or a negative balance from the Namibia trip.

The transaction registry shed some light on things. First, a cash advance fee, $4.00. Interest on cash advance, $37. Then two large withdrawals from an Absa bank in Pretoria. $2,000 and $1,800. Shiiit, I thought to myself. I've never even been to Pretoria...

Suffering and scavenging at the Tour de Lesotho

2006-06-19T01:59:00.000+02:00

The Tour de Lesotho is billed as "Africa's toughest cycling challenge", and involves four major mountain passes and some 2100m of vertical ascent. The short version is an 84km route with "only" 1000m of elevation gain.

I rested on the starting line, set apart by my pale skin and unshaven legs, shivering in the morning cold. I felt good. I had been riding my road bike for 3 days, and was starting to get a feel for it. I knew the climbing wouldn't be a problem, though I was anxious about the steep and twisting downhill sections. My internet research on fast cornering and sharp descents turned up the following gem:

"Cornering requires reflexes to dynamics that are easily developed in youth, while people who have not exercised this in a long time find they can no longer summon these skills."

Not comforting. I was a late cornerer. I have not developed those dynamics.

Race profile: not your average Sunday ride

It is difficult to describe what it means to attempt an 85km ride across multiple mountain passes at a race pace on an unknown bike, having barely ridden at all in the last six months. I imagine it is something like rolling out of bed on a Saturday morning, drinking an instant coffee and then jogging a quick marathon. Or stripping down to your shorts one mild day and swimming the English Channel. It is, in a word, inadvisable. But because my foolish pride borders on something worse, I wasn't just riding to finish; I was eyeing the competitors with my mind set on winning.

It took approximately five minutes for me to come to my senses - five miserable, lung-bursting, oxygen-deprived minutes. The group in which we had started was shattered, but the pace car was still close in front of us, indicating that the racers had not yet actually begun racing. I had forgotten about the suffering aspect of cycling, proof that memory of pain and misery grows mild with time. Five minutes into the race, the old survival instincts were making it pretty clear that winning wasn't going to be in the cards.

There is a pattern in these things. Eventually, and in my case very quickly, realism overrides ambition, you let the long-legged people who actually train for these events race off ahead, and you settle into a group where the suffering is only a mild torture, something like being punched in gut every couple of minutes. It was, after all, a beautiful day. We were riding clear roads under an azure sky, the fields alive with cosmos, highland flowers shimmering in pink and white and violet. The Basotho of surrounding villages stood on their doorsteps, wrapped in blankets, and cheered us on.

The pace remained difficult for me, and the hills made more miserable by the knowledge that they were too small to register on the profile. We passed a rider who had flatted and was getting into a car. The lucky bastard, I thought to myself. He's escaped the climbs.

And then Ha Relajoe was upon us. As if suddenly angry, the road turned brutally upward and disappeared around a bend. In the distance, impossibly high, we could see its continuation over the top of the pass. I had the questionable advantage of knowing the road, having driven several times to our destination at Mohale Dam. Here, the Jetta coughs and sputters and refuses to climb in anything but the 1st gear, and even then it is reluctant.

I was slow, slower than everyone else. One by one, my fellow riders bled into the blurry horizon. I was doing all I could. I zigzagged across the road to lessen the grade. I massaged my quads with my hands to melt away the cramps, and forced myself not to look up. Just. One. Stroke. At a. Time. I was all alone. Trying so hard not to think ahead, not to hear the mind saying, This is just the beginning. The second climb is twice as bad.

Eventually pain is replaced with numbness, and time becomes irrelevant. There are no more riders and there is no more race; there is only the black tar, the watery heat, the pushing of a pedal. And mystically, the top of the hill appears though it seems impossible to in fact be arriving.

At the crest of the pass was a Powerade feeding station, and a large group of children lining the road. The Powerade barely in my hand, the first kid approached. He was about 10 years old, with bare feet and the lost eyes of malnourishment. Without warning, he reached for the drink in my hand. I threw up an elbow to block, almost losing balance. I made an angry, defensive sound, which I think was a bark.

There were dozens in his wake. They ran alongside, pointing at the Powerade, pointing at my bike bottles. "The bottles!" they shouted enthusiastically. Thinking like Bond, I took a last gulp and sent the Powerade in a tall, lazy arc into the roadside bushes. It was an effective decoy - they cleared the road to chase the bottle, and I made safely away into the descent.

The space between passes went by too quickly, and as the flat turned again to mountain, the children increased in number once more. And in greater numbers came greater aggression. My speed was in the range of that attainable by tricycles, making it very easy for even small children to jog or walk along side.

There was no longer any pretense of cheering. They just wanted the bottles. "Give us the bottle!" the mantra rang out. "Give me my bottles!" I wondered if they would use force, knowing I did not have the strength to stop them.

They were all around me, like the fans on the Alpe Huez, like vultures circling a dying animal, and it is amazing that none fell under my wheels. Or perhaps not amazing, given how slowly I was moving. The requests were increasing in creativity. They congregated in the steepest section and solicited me, some making furtive grabs toward the bottle cages. There was the positive approach: "Give me a drink and I will push you up the hill;" and there was its complement: "Give us your bottle, or we will kill you." Some were a bit out of touch, like the one who ran alongside and tried to sell me an endangered spiral aloe.

I should be more forgiving, the children's aggressiveness being brought on by passing tourists stopping to give candy and money (because they are indeed cute when they are not threatening to kill you), and the pros who I am sure were ditching their water bottles in these climbs. And nevermind the anachronism of 300 South Africans riding road bikes costing R18,000 ($3,000) past children whose families will be lucky to see a tenth of that in an entire year. But I was hardly in an introspective state... And so I barked, and I swatted, and I elbowed, and I did everything I could to make it to the top of the pass without being pulled to the ground for a gulp of water.

I did make it, and I made it somewhere in the middle of the short race group. I crossed the finish line, and collapsed in a heap. It had been a devastating ride, and I was thrilled to have done it, though I would not walk properly for some days.

It is difficult to conceive that the riders in the long race had done two mountain passes more than me in almost the same amount of time. Compounding my awe, as I took the shuttle up to the finish, I saw several teams riding back to Maseru, willingly taking on another 120km of riding and 1000m of elevation gain, as if what they had just done was insignificant.

It did occur to me on the drive home, as I watched herdboys and their goats through the car window, that I have the home court advantage - only a minority of the riders had ever been to Lesotho before the race. So next year I'm doing the long race, and with a few more days of training, I'm pretty sure I can win it.

Namibia, in pursuit of the beautiful

2006-06-12T01:26:00.000+02:00

I expected Namibia to be little more than an extension of South Africa, a cultureless expanse of farmland occupied by indigenous tribes and owned by colonial Germans instead of the colonial Dutch I am more familiar with in my region. I couldn't have been more wrong - our week and some in Namibia was the most unique and remarkable of our entire time in Southern Africa.

Namibia is about ten times the size of Lesotho, with half as many people, which in itself should have helped shape my expectations of the place. The majority of those people live in a small band of rich land across the top of the country. The rest of the country, at least in as much as I have seen, ranges from sheer desert to marginal scrubland, with occasional patches of thin scraggly trees that could only be called forests in a place as desolate as Namibia.

This is not to say that it all looks the same - I have seen more shapes and colors of desert and scrub than I thought possible. Around the capital Windhoek the dry hills are dotted with scrubby, spiny plants and unusual trees; the sun sets in strips of red and blue that float endlessly on the horizon as the land turns from amber to black. North to the salt pans of Etosha, where one horizon is an iridescent gold of savannah grasses and the other parched white with miniature landscapes carved by water out of crusty salt. West to Swakopmund, nothing but dirt in all directions, and everything we had been calling desert up until that point would be vibrant and full of life by comparison. South into the Namib and Naukluft deserts, we drove through granite canyons where the road threatened to tear the vehicle to pieces, into a land of rolling sand, where dunes bright red in color and hundreds of meters high blow into valleys pocked with dried trees that have died a long, long time ago.

Yes, there is a lot to Namibia, too much to offer more than the smallest taste in this post. You will have to go and see it for yourself.

Fairy Tale Forest, Etosha

Etosha.

The genius of the design of Etosha National Park is that the rest camps are built on the edges of water holes lit by gigantic spotlights. Thus, at any hour of the day, you will find elderly German tourists drinking a Windhoek Lager and watching zebra, springbok and rhino getting their daily fill of water. The boundaries separating human from animal are loose here, and rabid jackals wander through the camp looking for leftover meat or unattended braais (bbqs in South African English); G___ managed to corner one, and gave it enough of a start that it jumped directly into the hot coals of our table top firepit, sending sparks flying.

As the drinks are poured and the evening grows long, the animal stories become more outlandish: we woke to rumors that lions had been seen at 3 o'clock in the morning. It was a tantalizing piece of news with which to begin our own drive into the park, and sure enough, we were soon following a male lion stalking a group of springbok. They were herded together and terrified, and yet they too were fascinated by the king of the beasts - no sooner than he turned his back did the herd turn and inch toward their would-be killer like moths to a flame. It was a fascinating exchange, but ended with the lion losing interest and settling for a nap in the sun.

In the evening, as we watched a rhino drinking his fill, we were treated to a more disturbing scene. At the edge of the spotlit water hole, there appeared in our vision a group of about ten jackals, visibly excited, running in circles. In their midst was a springbok, a beautifully striped specimen of antelope, making its way toward the water. It walked slowly, a few steps at a time, seeming unconcerned by the dangerous animals running around it. One observer innocently asked aloud, "Are they playing?" But no, they were preparing their evening meal, and the game was nearing its end, the springbok separated from its herd, worn down and with little run left. The jackals stayed just out of hoof range, taking turns darting in for vicious nips. The ill-tempered black rhino briefly looked up from the water and then went back to drinking - this wasn't his problem. And the excited shapes trotted back into the darkness.

It felt like a scene from nature that I wasn't meant to see, the ugly, scavenging jackals taking down the graceful springbok, and the haunting image has stayed in my mind.

Breakfast on the savannah

Swakopmund.

Swakopmund is billed as the adventure capital of Namibia, and it is there that you can go sandboarding, skydiving, kite surfing, parasailing and so on. When we arrived, it was empty. Empty of people and, sitting at the coastal edge of the desert, empty of life of any sort. In the absence of planted trees or green grass trim, boulevards were eight lanes wide, and our's the only car in either direction. There was a huge amount of tourist infrastructure, entirely vacant - we passed through a veritable city of identical, powder blue, low slung A-frame chalets that looked like a set from the Twilight Zone. (One must wonder if it is any less strange to see this pyramidal village filled with old Germans in matching white pickups and smoking braais...)

It is a strange city, that moves directly from trendy tourist centre to posh, chain-store suburb with nothing in between. Over it all, an intermittent mist drifts in and out, often smelling of human waste, presumably the ocean giving back to the town some of the unfiltered sewage that it dumps in.

We were not completely alone in Swakopmund - there were also the reporters and cameramen, traveling in pairs, looking for picturesque backdrops for their stories: huge sand dunes, featureless stretches of desert, tacky, colonial German architecture. I could hear the cliche openings in my mind as we drove past: "The Namib desert, 100,000 acres of 110-degree temperatures and blowing sand. Probably not where you've planned your next vacation. But just a few miles from here, the world's most beautiful couple has just given birth..."

It was comic, and yet we too drove as far as the Road Closed sign blocking the way to the Burning Shore resort, just to see what we could see. We wondered about Brad and Angelina, when they went for their evening stroll, if they too shared our experience of nostrils filling with the smell of shit floating off the water.

Swakopmund, playground of the stars

The Dead Valley.

A day's drive from Swakopmund, we came to a region where towns on the map consist of gas station, general store, and toilet. Nothing else - maybe, a house where the gas station owner lives. Hotels can afford to put up signs advertising lousy food and warm beer, presumably because they know you don't have any options for a hundred miles in any direction. In the desert, the stars are bright and the Milky Way is clear; the mysterious calls of nocturnal animals echo far into the distance.

All this said, the rolling emptiness around Sesriem is probably the most tourist-trafficked area in all of Namibia, for it is here that the red sand dunes are at their most impressive, rising like mountains from the plain, sinuous lines carved by wind and lit by the rising sun. From the crack of dawn, eager tourists cover the popular, road-accessible dunes like ants on a sugar pile, snapping digital photographs in the soft sand. It is more people than we have seen anywhere since coming to Namibia, but the desert around is so vast that the sense of solitude is unchanged.

In the valleys between dunes, there is sometimes sand, sometimes water, but most fascinating are the places where there once was water and now is none. In these valleys, the dried and sunburned soil has turned a ghostly yellow-white; the trees, sheltered by high dunes on all sides, have stayed standing, possibly for centuries after their deaths. Dry branches curl desperately toward the sky, begging for rains that are centuries away. It was one of the strangest and most beautiful landscapes into which I have set foot.

Naukluft desert sunrise

Some more of our photos from Namibia will be up on my flickr page in the next day or two.

Stymied on the road to Semonkong

2006-05-22T18:04:00.000+02:00

It is the end of May in the Southern Hemisphere. For some time the heralds of winter have been announcing its imminent arrival. The apartment windows have a perpetual cloudiness, and the valley below is daily filled with a soft, cold mist, through which peeks the curved nose of the Pope's Podium. Everyone is talking about the signs of a particularly cold season: the late rains, the growing coats of animals, the movement of the birds. Saturday, there were rumors of snow in the mountains.

Nights are cold in our brick apartment. Last night, the propane heater in the living room ran out of gas, weeks earlier than anticipated - probably a half-empty tank sold as full. As the draft blew in through the irreparable cracks between window and wall, the shivering guests made excuses to leave, their wine glasses unfinished.

J____'s sister and friend are visiting from Canada. To prepare for their trip to Africa, they have packed woolen socks and their warmest sweaters. We hoped to take them to Semonkong, the place of smoke, for a few days.

I wake up early to pick up S__'s truck. The last time we drove to Semonkong, the rivers raged over the tops of roads. As minibuses pulled aside to wait for the waters to fall, hours if necessary, the unstoppable S__ gunned the Hilux through, water running up and over the hood. It is the dry season now, so the rivers will be down, but the rough road still warrants something bigger than the Jetta.

The morning is the coldest we have yet experienced here, but the day is bright, giving the spirit resilience. It is the evenings that are demoralizing, when you lie cold in bed, knowing for another eight hours the air temperature will still be falling. S__ and I stand outside his truck as he walks me through the quirks of operation, the wheel diff locks, disengaging the spare, the 4-wheel-drive, the anti-hijack switch. Characteristically, S__ is wearing shorts; I am in my winter coat and a warm hat.

The anti-hijack switch is a common alarm feature - a minute into vehicle operation, a beep sounds. You receive one beep, then two, three, four, and five, at which point the engine dies if the tiny, secret hidden button has not been pressed. The engine will not restart without a complex ritual involving locking, unlocking, disconnecting the battery, and so on. I forget the ritual as soon as it is out of S__'s mouth; I do not plan to need it.

The drive to Semonkong is always dazzling, but in the snow it is something spiritual. Powdered with white, the sharp green hills become mountains, fading smoothly into a white and blue sky. We round corners into new sweeping views in silence and awe. We stop and take photos, hundreds of photos, as if we could ever bring this experience home.

And the road continues to climb, until even the banks have clumps of melting snow, until we are driving in snow, until we are the first vehicle to pass through eight inches of heavy snow on the road to Semonkong. Making fresh tracks, we feel completely isolated, a rare sense to have in Lesotho, where villages fill the valleys and dot the hillsides. There are villages, but they seem empty, thatched icicles and drifting snow pressed against mud walls, frozen in the stillness of this winter tapestry.

The road continues to climb, the top of the pass looms ahead. The corners are impossibly steep. "The crux of the climb," I say smiling, amazed at the tenacity of S__'s Hilux on this treacherous trail. And the wheels begin to spin. The truck drifts left, right, and hunkers to a deep stop, and will go no further. To the right, a guardrail, out of place in this thousand-year-old landscape, and then the ground drops away a thousand feet to the valley below. To the left, a deep trench carved by water separates us from the rising hillside. Over it all, a thick blanket of snow hides the space between the safe edge of the road and the unsafe chasm. The beautiful road feels suddenly precarious.

The vehicle will not go forward. It may go backward, but all I can see out the back window is a vertigo-inspiring drop. The girls get out of the car to guide me. In fearful backward lurches, I navigate my way back down the winding road to a flatter section to make another run at it. ("You are not trying again," J____ says in disbelief. I am.) A second time, the vehicle grinds to a halt in the deep, not even as far as my first attempt. It slides dangerously close to the rail.

I am reluctant to give up, but everyone wants to turn back, and it seems like we will not make it. If I tell S__ that I could not make it to Semonkong in his Hilux, he may laugh about it for the rest of the year. So be it. But before leaving, I want to hike 100 metres up the road to see if we are really so close to the top of the pass.

And so we are: a new snowy valley empties out the other side, light terraces and an inviting, untouched road. I seem to hear a beep, but dismiss it, as I can see the road both ways and there is nobody for miles. Two beeps. It is the anti-hijack switch, and only I know where the button is hidden. I start sprinting downhill to the truck, arms windmilling, running shoes slipping and sliding in the deep snow. Three. I will not make it in time. Four. I arrive. The engine is off. Oh no.

"I turned off the engine," J____ says, standing next to the truck. "I didn't know what else to do." I think I could have made it, is my first thought. No matter now.

Holding my breath, I sit in the driver's seat and turn the key. Nothing. No dashboard lights even. I press the lock/unlock button on the key chain, and the doors lock and unlock. But still the truck will not start. The girls are looking nervously at me and at each other. The sun is pouring through the window and the sky turning blue. It will be a beautiful day. Key out, key in. Nothing. Deep breath. Outside there is only silence.

And then, like nothing was ever the matter, the starter engages. Relief is palpable and I press the hidden button a dozen times for good measure. We back down the road again in reverse until we find a point wide enough for an eight-point turn and make our way back down out of the snow.

The main road into Ha Ramanbane ends at a rusty gate. The gate opens into a terraced garden with wrought iron tables and chairs, a green grass paradise overlooked by snowy peaks in the distance. It is a scene from a South African lifestyle magazine, and not something one expects to find down a water-torn track in a typically dusty, Basotho highway-side village.

We stop in Ramanbane to enjoy a coffee, and meet another group from Maseru. They have come to see the snow, which is more rare than we had imagined; in all of last year, there was not a lasting snowfall in the mountains. It has been years since there was a snowfall like this one. A once-in-a-decade snowfall, coincidentally on the day we wanted to go to Semonkong.

This is the thrill of travel in a place undeveloped for travelers, to discover and experience something completely unique and unantipicated, something that could not be planned for. We live in a place where on any given day, we never know if a given road will take us where we want to go; but when the obstacles in the path are made up of sheer, unintended beauty, it is easy to know we are in the right place.

Next week, we're going to Namibia, recently famous for its celebrity visitors. Between J____ and her sister, the pediatrician and obstetrician, we might just have one of the most specialist baby delivery teams in country, so if Mr. and Ms. Pitt and Jolie are in need of any assistance, the email address top and right will reach us so long as we are not stuck on the side of the road...

An unimportant outbreak

2006-05-12T01:20:00.000+02:00

Up the main road through town, North from the main circle and past the cathedral, the wealthy town gives way to the common town. Suits, banks and Government buildings are replaced by men with wheelbarrows, women with children as backpacks and backpacks balanced on their heads, live chickens and once in a while a cow. Walk past the butchery to your right and the bustling markets selling everything that can be sold cheaply to your left. Past the high school with its green lawns, out of place in the dry and dust, right down a dirt road scarred and twisted by summer rains, you will find several small buildings that make up an orphanage.

The orphanage is run by a small woman with sharp eyes and a wandering tone. Her clothes are out of date but expensive; thirty years ago she would be glamourous, now she is slightly odd. In fact, thirty years ago she may have been Miss Lesotho, so the rumor goes. She speaks in circles, of this and that, never answering a question directly, but always turning back to her needs, to her good work and God's provision.

Like so many of those who end up solely responsible for orphan children, she is adamantly resistant to the idea of giving them up, to adoption, to any other kind of care. They are her identity, and they are her livelihood. They are her defense against the accusation that the orphanage is for her profit, that she has something to do with the regular disappearance of gifts in cash and gifts in kind. It is the children, sleeping fifteen to a room without table, beds or chairs, that make it possible for her to ask, "Where would they be, if I was not here?"

We received a phone call inviting us to the orphanage. Inviting J____, the doctor, to the orphanage to look at a strange case of rash that had affected almost all the kids and some of the caregivers too. It was on their hands, their legs, their faces, their bottoms, and it was continuing to spread. It appeared first as small white spots in a row, and then open sores and blackened, dying skin, with new white spots at the new sites of infection.

The diagnosis was scabies, a small mite that lives and lays eggs just under the surface of the skin. It is transmitted in clothes, in sheets, and in direct contact. Scabies does not have to be a big deal. Clothes, sheets and bodies are washed, a medicine is applied, and in 24 hours the problem is solved.

But for the mite, the orphanage is a dream home. Clothing is not washed. Sheets are not washed. Children are not washed except when absolutely necessary. There is no industrial size washing machine - there is a faucet, which dispenses cold water, and most of the time there is no soap. The logistical problem of simultaneously washing thirty children, thirty sets of clothes, and thirty blankets is significant. But all must be washed at once, or the mite will not be stopped.

J____ goes to the Queen II hospital, the public hospital in Maseru, to inquire about obtaining treatment. The staff refuse to make available the medicine, even though J____ is willing to pay for it. "This is a problem for Disease Control," they say. It is clear as day that Disease Control, under the administration of the Ministry of Health, is not interested in responding to a scabies outbreak in a small orphanage, but this is the way of overworked public servants - pass the buck, make it somebody else's problem.

The alternative is to bring all thirty kids into Queen II, where the staff will not be able to turn them away, but this is less than ideal. The Queen II hospital is overbooked and understaffed, and all but the worst cases will wait for hours and hours to be seen, in waiting rooms packed like sardines in a tin. Whether out of poverty or inexperience with medicine, Basotho allow illnesses to develop to levels unseen in the Western world before seeking treatment. Gangrenous limbs, open sores, bleeding pustules and an air thick with germs serve as rationing mechanisms for an ailing health system - nobody goes to Queen II until they're absolutely desperate.

Weeks pass between Disease Control and Queen II, while the infection spreads. Finally, after many calls to many people, J____ secures the medicine from a private pharmacy and returns to the orphanage. She is greeted by one of the caregivers, a round, humble woman paid a pittance to come feed and clean as many children as she can in a day. She is in the process of washing every single piece of fabric at the orphanage, out of a single bucket. The clothes lines are full, and the pile of sheets remaining is larger than the woman.

The woman sees J____ and hands her a blue tin bottle. "I have treated the children with this," she says. The bottle is unfamiliar, but looks like something you would find in a hardware store, not a pharmacy. It reads:

Jeyes Fluid
Disinfectant Cleanser
Carbolic Acid
The Strong One

On the back of the bottle, it says "do not allow contact with skin, eyes, mouth, etc.. Wash exposed skin immediately." The woman's expression is inscrutable. Has she read this? Can she read?

Expecting the worst, J____ heads on to the children's room, where as usual, they are happy to see her. The doctor is stunned. The kids look normal. There are no open sores. Only a half dozen even have the tell tale white spots of infection. The mysterious solution has won the day.

J____ treats the children with outstanding spots with the medicine she has brought. The problem is won, but only for the moment. The sanitizing process has only bought time; in an environment such as this, the disease will be back, and will spread again, and the process will repeat itself. But children are resilient; like their hunger, and their orphanhood, their constant rashes will not bring them the trauma you might imagine, because they have never known that there could be life without them.

A new constitution

2006-05-05T01:44:00.000+02:00

Few things to me are as representative of South Africa as the sight of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Designed to commemorate the long struggle for equality in South Africa, the experience of the museum is rightly described as chilling, from the moment you are given you ticket, "Admit 1 White" or "Admit 1 Black", each ticket taking you to a different entry to the museum, from which you will see different exhibits.

Atop the museum stand austere concrete pillars representing the 7 virtues enshrined in the new constitution of 1994: Democracy, Equality, Reconciliation, Diversity, Responsibility, Respect and Freedom.

The iron letters, less than 10 years old, are rusted out by rainwater, marred by long brown streaks, stained. I don't know if this is an architectural design or an accident, but it is appropriate, for when one travels through South Africa, the staining of these virtues is evident.

Almost every small town is a rich, predominantly white, beautiful town center with green grass and reformed church. It could even be idyllic. A field away, the black township built out of plastic and corrugated tin. But the town centre has faces of all colors, even if the visitors with the most color often live across the empty field.

The sight of white shop owners aggressively reprimanding their black staff is not as uncommon as one would hope. Less common, but inspiring are the whites who speak with blacks in the tribal languages.

In some ways, things are looking up. Life in the townships is improving, and plastic is giving way to corrugated tin, to bricks and a Mercedes in front. (But such things can be misleading, as it is likely that the majority of luxury cars are purchased on unreasonable financing terms and will eventually be repossessed by the bank.)

And the flies in the ointment are many. By all reports, crime is out of control, and the police are too understaffed and undertrained to get a hold of it. The lawless areas of the big cities are growing; the security fences in the suburbs grow taller and more barbed. And today in Cape Town I saw a lamborghini.

But such social change as has swept South Africa can never come easily. Those pillars over the museum are going to see a lot more rust before they can stand without irony.

Conversations

2006-04-26T01:39:00.000+02:00

1.
On a gloomy morning, I drove with my mom in the direction of Malealea Lodge. The dark sky was a beautiful contrast to the sandstone outcrops that rise out of the ground like the backs of whales from the ocean. The cold air had kept the locals in bed and the roads were empty except for us.

Just beyond the Gates of Paradise Pass, the road turned sour, two narrow tracks through ripples of overturned mud that slammed rocks into the undercarriage of the little Jetta. The route was passable, but if it rained all day it might not be on the way home, so we parked the car at the Gates of Paradise and beat our own path from there.

Before long, as happens when you hike in rural Lesotho, we had assembled an entourage of children, some gregarious, and others trying to stay out of sight, their eyes to the ground. The smallest was less than five, and wore shorts, a long winter parka, and no shoes. The oldest was a girl of 15 with full cheeks and an irrepressible smile. She was better dressed than the others, but had two ragged unmatched shoes which she wore as slippers, the backs completely flattened. Her English was fantastic. Every few minutes she would burst out with laughter as she strutted along beside us, talking about school in Malealea, the village, and where we were going.

"Your shoes are very interesting," I observed, perhaps inappropriately.

"They are all I can afford," she happily replied.

When walking with children in these environments, besides being put to shame by their ease of bare-footed movement over the difficult terrain, one is always waiting for the moment when they will start asking you for something, usually sweets or money. Others in the group did, but the girl did not, until we came at last to the edge of her village. A woman from a thatched rondavel up the hill shouted something at her in Sesotho. The girl turned to us, "May I have a pen?" she asked. I told her I didn't have one, and we said our goodbyes.

2.
J____ asked me to stop at Shoprite on the way home to buy some dog food. As far as I knew, we didn't need anything else, but I added a couple of chocolate bars to the cart, as I would be going for a long bike ride on the weekend and needed energy food.

I stood in line with my groceries, mentally calculating how much money I would need:
3 Chocolate bars: 15 rand ($2.50).
2 bags of puppy Alpo: 90 rand ($15).

The woman in front of me put her groceries on the counter. Her clothes were torn and her hair a little bit unkempt. The body odor of one who does not bathe regularly floated to my nose, a not uncommon fragrance in the Shoprite line. She had only one item: a loaf of bread, costing 4 rand ($0.67). Her change was exact. As I loaded my heavy dog food bags onto the counter, her eyes flicked briefly across mine, but there was hardly any recognition, and how could there be?

3.
Late in the afternoon after work, I was walking our dogs through the hills above our apartment. The formerly isolated trails were now wide dirt paths, and caterpillars, bobcats and other heavy trucks moved noisily about. The previously natural hilltop would be the location of the new parliament building, along with housing for the parliamentarians. It is the best real estate in town, and surely my bitterness at the audacity of the parliamentarians to claim it for themselves came in part from the fact that I was losing the dog-walking, running and mountain biking playground on my doorstep. (It's a project funded by the Chinese, who are significant donors, but aren't as concerned with accountability and poverty reduction as Western donors.)

As I returned through the gate into my apartment complex, a guard pulled me aside. He was M____, my favorite guard, and the one with whom I had the best relationship. "Mr. Paul," he said gently, taking me around the corner where the other guard could not see us. "I want to know if you can help me to find a job."

"Are you leaving?" I ask in surprise. Did the vile Mr. K____ let him go, I wonder, because he was too friendly?

"700 rand per month is not enough. I want my son to go to high school, but it costs too much."

700 rand is about $120, and M____'s monthly wage. Half of it is lost in transit fare to get to work. Primary education is free in Lesotho, but after the 7th grade, there are fees.

He showed me his papers, his C.V. as it were. They were all low quality photocopies of certificates or letters from former employees, stating that he had worked at such-and-such a place for five years, for one year, for two years, and had left in good standing.

I work in a white collar policy job in a Government Office. People on the street often ask me for advice on jobs, but I quite honestly have no idea about the working of the unskilled labor market. I told M____ that I would at least keep my eyes and ears open. Maybe something will come up.

The RED Card: American Express pretends to be charitable

2006-04-21T01:38:00.000+02:00

You will soon hear, if you haven't yet, that Bono is pushing something called RED, an American Express card that transfers 1% of all spending to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

On the surface, it's a brilliant idea. Since RED is like any other credit card offered by American Express, you're not subsidizing a charity's advertising campaign with your donation. 100% of your donation is going to the Global Fund.

Plus, the distinct red color brands you as a socially aware consumer and lets you show off your charity without having to say a word. It's a card you want to be seen using, and every time you use it, you are marketing it.

I love just about everything about it.

The devil is in the details.

It bothers me a little bit that this card is a worse deal for consumers and a better deal for Amex than the average credit card. Most reward cards are giving you 1-2% back on your purchases, whether in cash, air miles, gift cards, etc.. So at 1-1.25%, Amex Red is a little bit stingier than the others.

And then there's the matter of the charitable donation. It's your charitable donation (since you're choosing to forgo other rewards by using Amex Red), but Amex is collecting the tax deduction. So the effective reward rate drops down to about 0.75-1% depending on your tax bracket.

This is a little bit obscene. This is not corporate responsibility, its an illusion of corporate responsibility designed to give consumers a worse deal. Amex RED doesn't cost Amex anything - in fact the margin on Amex RED is higher than on their other cards. And you consumer could give more to the global fund if you just got a cash back card and sent the money on to the Global Fund directly. AND you could deduct it on your tax return!

The very same offer could have been pitched like this: Instead of giving money to charity directly, give it to Amex. Amex will take a cut, and then give the rest to the charity of your choice. And they get the tax receipt. It doesn't sound quite as responsible as the way they're pitching it.

The concept of a card that lets you give to the Global Fund every time you make a purchase is good. But on the part of the credit card company, it has to at least be profit neutral. Otherwise its just a scam.

So when you see someone using Red, don't let yourself think He's socially responsible and giving to the Global Fund. Think, He's an idiot, and giving to American Express.

What do you think?

2006-04-19T01:16:00.000+02:00

Last week's Public Eye, our local English newspaper, had a section reminiscent of a well-known American news source. But it tends to be a bad thing when serious newspapers start to look like satirical ones.

China's new role in Africa is a key topic for the 21st century, but few have discussed the cool reception the Chinese often receive. Local criminals target the Chinese in muggings and home robberies, and the police are slow to investigate. (Though I'm not sure police investigation would help). Regular editorials in the Public Eye criticize their presence here. (some recent headlines: Is Lesotho a Chinese colony? or Alarming Increase in Number of Chinese in Lesotho). Conversation upon conversation turns upon just how much locals hate the Chinese. Sadly, racist attitudes are not limited to people of poor education, or even to locals, but also find regular voice among wealthy expatriates, many of whom are happy to tell you that the Chinese are the same around the world: rude, careless, cheap, etc..

Two days after the Public Eye asked whether it was okay to mug an Asian, the Chinese-run Internet Cafe from where I post has barred its doors during the day: one must shout inside to alert the security guard to open the gate. This is no doubt bad for business, and is a small victory for those who would like someone to drive the Chinese away.

Of course, issues of race are never just about race. Chinese own a substantial and growing share of small and medium enterprises in Lesotho, and at least on the surface they appear to be the Nouveaux Riches of this country. The casino and expensive restaurants (all 2 of them) are frequently filled with well-dressed Asians.

The Chinese often do better than locals due to a combination of greater access to capital and more experience in business, particularly in dealing with international firms. It is fair to wonder, as Lesotho reports economic growth numbers in the low single digits, how much of that growing wealth is being captured by foreigners. But rather than worrying about Chinese success, decision-makers here should be thinking about what it is that makes the Chinese successful here, and how they can help local entrepreneurs develop the skills to do the same.

To resent the Chinese and wish them away is pointless. They are creating a substantial number of jobs in a country with very few avenues for economic growth. Textile cut-make-trim operations that source material from China and sell to the United States employ some 25% of people with formal jobs. That's right: 25% of all jobs in Lesotho come from Chinese businesses. They may not be great jobs, but in a country with 40%+ unemployment, the jobs are more than welcome. If the Chinese took cues from the newspapers, and packed up and left, the Basotho would be considerably worse off.

If they weren't so resented and targeted with abuse the way they are now, then maybe they would show locals more of the respect that locals want. But of all the major race groups in the world, I think that East Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans have interacted the least, and still harbor a lot of false ideas about each other. I am afraid that things stand a good chance of getting worse before they get better.

Ernest Angley and the road to Hell

2006-04-05T16:13:00.000+02:00

A new sign has appeared in Maseru, causing me some anxiety. It looks like this:

The sign is everywhere, and where there is no sign, there are smiling people in yellow t-shirts handing out flyers. Nothing since I have been here has been so well advertised as this.

In a country where fighting misinformation is a major part of the battle against HIV/AIDS, I am not sure these crusaders have picked the right side.

The sad thing is, I don't even think they are ill-intentioned. I am willing to bet Angley and his gang are here at a loss, funded by their church in Ohio. It's not a scam: they really believe in what they are dispensing. (Though I bet their home church in Ohio is not doing too shabbily...) No matter how many people show up to a crusade in Maseru, an offering plate passed among the poor here is not going to make a dent in the airfare or hotel budget of Angley and his friends.

On the other hand, those few dollars thrown into the offering plate probably are the school fees of a child, or at least somebody's dinner. Picture it: the poor throwing their livelihoods into a pot to finance wealthy preachers on their world tours. What a reversal of the message of Christ!

Of course, the worst of it is that last line on the advert: AIDS and Other Death Diseases Healed! They clearly have not thought about the irresponsibility of claiming to cure AIDS. Rather, somebody had the idea, "AIDS is a big problem in Africa, I bet that would be a real hook!"

This kind of thing isn't generally that destructive in the United States. The preacher claims to cure your cancer, you go see your doctor the next day, take a few tests, and you can verify the claim. If the miracle is a fake, nothing is lost.

But in Maseru, people have more faith, and the word of an American preacher may be as good as the word of a doctor. Especially when the preacher says you are healed, and the doctor's solution is to prescribe you medicine for the rest of your life.

So if Mr. P___ goes to see Mr. Angley, and hears that he is healed, maybe he will believe. Maybe he will believe, and, in an act of faith, stop taking his medicine. Maybe he will get sick three weeks later, and get tested again, discovering that he still has HIV. Except during his three week hiatus from the medicine, the HIV has developed resistance. And now he has HIV, and thanks to Mr. Angley, the meds no longer work.

I was hoping to make it to one of the events, but my anaphylactic reaction in Johannesburg prevented me. I'm sure that going would only have upset me further. I am told that in the culmination of the event, Angley waved his hand across the masses, and shouted, "If you have cancer, you are cured. If you have AIDS, you are cured."

I don't know if miracles happen or not. I'm inclined to think they can. But I don't for a second believe that they can be manufactured. You can't advertise that on such-and-such a date, miracles will be performed. You can't wave your hand and cure cancer and AIDS in thousands of people.

HIV is not like cancer. There is a tremendous social stigma around the disease, long queues to see an HIV doctor, and a lot of people aren't even quite sure they believe in it. All these things make a miracle cure tremendously appealing, because a miracle cure means people do not have to face up to what HIV means, to take responsibility for getting tested, to think about how their behavior needs to change.

People in Lesotho doesn't need a miracle worker. They need education, and they need compassion and understanding from their families and communities. The resources are there to help far more people than are seeking treatment at this time, but people need to take the initiative to get tested, to seek treatment. Miracle workers like Mr. Angley only perpetuate the stigma - they let people think, "Maybe he's for real. Maybe I don't have to get tested now." And the sickness spreads further.

The big event was on April 1st. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses, they turned up in large numbers to see what this great American had to offer them. But it was April Fool's Day, and the joke was on them.

An Unexpected Emergency, or It Turns Out She Was Right

2006-04-04T08:03:00.000+02:00

8PM, the night before. We are staying in Melville, at a luxurious B&B just a block off 7th, where there stretches a row of open air trendy shops and restaurants that could be out of San Francisco. It is a small island of wealth in the sea of indigence and robbery that is Johannesburg, but it is unmistakably Johannesburg all the same. The restaurant clientele is white, and dressed to the nines; the street hawkers with beaded animals and other trinkets for sale, black. Every half block of parking is watched by a guard in fluorescent stripes. The manor homes lining side streets warn of 20,000V electric fences and armed guards. One block from the strip, a road sign warns: Smash and Grab Zone: Keep valuables secured out of sight. The Jetta, at least, will be safe; everyone else is driving a BMW.

We choose the Café Mezza Luna, hidden in a narrow vine-covered alcove, where the bubble of sophisticated conversation floats out over glasses of Cape Pinotage. We send in JoAnna to inquire about a table, as she is wearing black shoes and the rest of us are feeling decidedly underdressed in our Chaco sandals. They give us a table, we eat and drink. It is the second best meal I have had in Southern Africa.

6:00 AM. I wake up early to read a couple chapters of Coetzee’s Disgrace in the cool morning air. The cold sandstone is a delight to the bare feet.

8:10 AM. JoAnna and I arrive at breakfast, where Liz & Ryan are finishing off delicious-looking meals of eggs with sizzled tomatoes and whole mushrooms. I make myself a bowl of granola, topping with flakes of coconut and cranberries, exclaiming over how tasty it all looks.

8:13 AM. I am on my third mouthful when I feel a tell-tale dryness of throat, swollen lips, foul taste on the tongue: I have eaten something I shouldn’t have. “o-anna,” I mumble, touching her arm. “Ask ‘akes ‘ere bafroom.” She looks confused. “Now,” I mumble more insistently. It may be in my mind, but I can feel the poisoned mouthful spreading through my cheeks and tongue and into my bloodstream. “Now!” Pulling her chair from the table.

My allergies are not serious, though I have many. Usually I spit out the offending mouthful, feel sore-stomached and ill-tempered for a few hours, and then back to normal.

8:14 AM. I spit the mouthful of granola into the toilet, but the foul taste is stuck in my mouth, my throat. I rinse, and rinse again. My mouth is producing saliva at an alarming rate, and I am spitting out huge gobs, one after another. I am sneezing and blowing my nose, and it hurts to swallow. The body is in rebellion, and all systems are on overdrive.

8:21 AM. I return to the table and glumly sip my tea. The hazelnut in the granola, my best guess at the cause of this, grinds away in my stomach. There will be no eggs and sizzled whole mushrooms for me today. Jakes, the b&b owner, looks on in concern. “We buy the most expensive granola,” he says apologetically, “because it has so many nuts in it!” I am feeling like an idiot, in addition to feeling like puking.

8:35 AM. I am still feeling sick. I stumble back to my room and force myself to throw up, hoping to get rid of the source of the problem. I throw up three times in short succession.

8:40 AM. Liz and Ryan head off to the Soweto tour we had booked for the morning. I elect to stay in bed. My system overdrive is now focused on the nose, which is getting stuffed like never before, and I am filling kleenexes as quickly as I can pull them out of the box. The mucus is filling in my throat as well, making swallowing and breathing more difficult, but as long as I can clear my nose, I am ok.

8:55 AM. The pace of nose blowing has slowed, but my stomach is grinding away with a new and painful intensity. I send JoAnna to the pharmacy to get me some Benadryl. She goes reluctantly, not sure it is a good idea to leave me alone. “I don’t like this,” she says. JoAnna has long disagreed with my unwillingness to carry an epi-pen for my generally mild allergies.

9:00 AM. I lie in bed, thinking of my past reactions like a soldier remembering old battles. Hong Kong, 2001: Peanut Soup. Drinking up to keep from offending Gil’s relatives. The accidental mix of Benadryl and red wine staves off the reaction, but leaves me dazed for days. Vietnam, ‘02: Grass plus unknown chemical. My first and only reaction to grass. Both my eyes swell shut for 24 hours. My Swedish neighbor shrieks upon seeing my swollen face, as if I am a monster. Rwanda, ‘03: Chicken Fried In Peanut Flour. A Trojan horse. I throw up once an hour, every hour, until morning. ’04 and ’05: No reactions, and a sense of complacency.

9:05 AM. JoAnna returns, and I pop the Benadryl. Still feeling the same. I lean back, and wait for the sedative effect to knock me out, trusting I am through the worst.

9:15 AM. I wake up gurgling, and rush to the bathroom, throwing up five more times, this time emptying my belly completely. So much for Benadryl. As I throw up, I feel something in my mouth, like a long noodle that I can’t quite pull out of my throat. It keeps coming back. “JoAnna," I say, starting to feel alarmed. "There's something wrong.”

9:16 AM. My empty stomach feels no more pain, and I sense the invader has been removed, but my throat is not right. I look in the mirror and open my mouth. There hangs the uvula, that vertical fold which sits at the back of the throat. It is the size of a large cherry. Definitely not right. When I swallow, it presses back and partially blocks my throat. “I think we should go to emergency,” JoAnna says. “Okay,” I answer.

9:22 AM. Stuck in traffic off Main Street, two blocks from the medical clinic. The trendy people stroll in front of the car, unaware that they are blocking us from life-giving medicine. We park in a gas station, in front of a sign which reads, “Parking for store clients only. Others will be towed, immediately.” JoAnna is speed walking toward the clinic as I grab my rapidly shrinking roll of t.p. from the seat. I am trying to keep up. The rebellious uvula seems to be growing still, and it is difficult to swallow at all.

9:23 AM. JoAnna reaches reception ahead of me. “My husband is having an anaphylactic reaction," she says. "Do you have epinephrine here? We need to see the doctor immediately.” The receptionist is confused. “Your husband has epilepsy, and is having a seizure?” She looks at me, and her expression says, He doesn’t look like he’s having a seizure...

JoAnna looks ready to burst, but she is in her domain now. “Anaphylaxis,” she repeats, and without waiting for a reaction, walks past the receptionist into the examination area, where patients sit on exam tables, divided by curtains. She takes charge. To the nurse: “Do you have epinephrine? We need epinephrine, now! Where’s the doctor?”

The nurse looks reluctant to take orders from this foreigner who has just strolled in off the street. “Lie down here,” JoAnna says, putting me on a table, and pulls the doctor out of his office. The receptionist and nurse are both watching in a bit of a daze.

9:24 AM. I have two needles in my forearm and a bp cuff on my wrist. One needle is subcutaneously injecting epinephrine. The second is putting a steroid directly into my blood stream. The first is to get me through the next 15 minutes, the second to get me through the next 6 hours.

9:30 AM. The swelling is starting to go down. I can swallow. I can breathe. I am starting to shiver and feel my heart pound from the epinephrine. I turn weakly to JoAnna and say, “I think maybe you’re right about the epi-pen.”

Next: the crusaders come to town...

Sticky wages and development jobs

2006-03-16T16:13:00.000+01:00

One of the rarely spoken of subjects in development is just how much dough development workers are making. Of course most folks back home think we are all Mother Teresa missionaries fighting the good fight, living on bread and water and pennies per day. The stereotype is nice, but not very close to the mark.

At first glance, a poor non-profit salary in the range of USD 30k/year sounds low, but chances are your organization is paying for your house, and probably your vehicle. (And it's a nice house.) They're also paying your plane tickets in and out, and sometimes a trip home for Christmas. If you live in a "difficult country", you get extra flights out and extended leave. In many countries, you will have a maid and a cook, and you would be surprised how many people have gardeners. You may not make a lot in gross terms, but you don't have a lot of expenses either. (And there's often not much by way of entertainment, which helps keep costs down.)

Back home, working for a non-profit means sacrificing salary to work on something you think is important. In most developing countries, working for an NGO (non-Government organization) is a job that locals aspire to, because the benefits are so great. In Lesotho, a World Vision job for a local pays three times the salary of a Government job with the same requirements. (But naturally, still less than the salary for an expatriate.)

This is a reflection both of the high salaries paid by NGOs and the low salary paid by Government, but it's insane no matter how you look at it. If the same ratio applied in Canada, given current salaries with the Canadian Government, you would get an entry-level job with World Vision and make $120,000. And you could fight the good fight, and wear sandals to work every day!

Alternatively, with non-profit jobs as the baseline, your mid-level management job in the Canadian Government would pay you less than $25,000/year and you'd still have to wear a tie. (But it wouldn't have to match your shirt. And if it did you would stand out.)

But I don't want all the development NGO people to come post angry comments about how little they are making and how they don't get cars or houses or airfare and have to eat ugali three meals a day. Because the ones really raking it in are the 'development professionals', the consultants, hired by folk like the World Bank and the United Nations to advise Government ministries or (more often) to write research reports that will sit in bookshelves.

Consultant salaries are still based on a time when working overseas was considered a punishment, and you had to be compensated for your suffering, a time before International Development was an undergraduate study program and a career. To compensate for the punishment of living in the tropics, the consultant receives airfare, relocation expenses, housing and transportation, and a tax-free salary higher in gross terms than he would get for an equivalent job back home. (And considerably less accountability for the quality of work. When your references are in Timbuktu, new employers are not as likely to call, much less get through.)

It should not be so, because working overseas is no longer a punishment. Airfare home is cheap, email and skype make communication with family easy and free, and it is now possible to buy all your favorite American products in almost every country in the world. Embassy staff who hate the local food can even order groceries from netgrocer.com and have them delivered for free within one week, via the diplomatic pouch. (It sounds absurd. In fact, it is stunningly common, and you, dear taxpayer, are paying for it.)

[Disclosure: I am a consultant, and my contract would be generous, except that I haven't been paid for three months, thanks to UN bureaucracy. And I buy most of my food locally, but drive 15 minutes into South Africa for such treats as chocolate chips and cup-a-soup, which you can't get at the local Shoprite. I have no pouch.]

Great jobs are not supposed to be well-paid, unless they are protected by difficult entry requirements, such as those for doctors, lawyers and hockey players. But development is a job that you can do with a Humanities degree. Other great jobs, like travel writer, freelance photographer, or climbing instructor, pay practically nothing because so many people are willing to do it for free. This is the labor market at work.

But in development, the lack of accountability of entrenched bureaucracies like the World Bank and United Nations have prevented the market from responding to this influx of young people willing to work for practically nothing.

The hiring practices of most non-profits are no more transparent, because they are only accountable to Charlie Church-goer in Tennessee, who sponsors two children in Nepal, which he thinks is somewhere near Nigeria. How else can you explain the number of people I meet who can't figure out how to "break in" to jobs in development, while hundreds already in are clearly incompetent, at least to judge from the complete inanity of the proposals and projects that float by my desk.

In labor market economics, we call this situation one of "sticky wages" - when people are overpaid to do a fun job for which there is excess demand. Sooner or later, these jobs have to lose some of their benefits until the balance of low pay + great fun + minimal educational requirements make them as good or bad as any other jobs out there. But until then, we'll be having a jolly good time out here, and if change has to come from folks like the UN, then it'll be a while in coming yet.

How to write an article for the New York Times on suffering in Africa

2006-03-08T01:15:00.000+01:00

The New York Times today ran a front page article on pediatric HIV in Lesotho. Unfortunately, the reporter was too keen on spreading old stereotypes about misery in Africa to hit on any of the real issues.

It seems like there is a common template used by most news organizations, where a reporter only has to insert the names of a country and of a suffering child, add a few quotes and the article is done.

For anyone else who wants to write a Times-quality article on Africa, I offer the following nine suggestions, with quotes from today's article in italics:

1. Give your article a broad title about Africa, generalizing about the entire continent from the tiny little corner of it that you visited:
Africa Starts to Care for AIDS children.

2. Open with a terrible story about a suffering child:
The 7-year-old boy weighed 36 pounds. His hair was thin and patchy, his eyes dull. [He had] emaciated limbs and a torso tattoed by a bloody rash.
"Wow," said one nurse, out of his hearing. Another murmured, "Look at him."

3. Don't bother learning the proper name of the country, and then phoneticize your invented mispronounciation for your readers:
Here in Lesotho (pronounced lay-SOTE-ho)...
(No, it is not lay-SOTE-ho, it is le-SOO-too, but the reporters weren't here long enough to catch that. The article is based on two day trips to the country.)

4. When the facts don't seem grim enough, make them seem worse through thoughtful omission:
In all Lesotho, there is only one government-paid pediatrician.
(Fact check: there is only one funded entirely by Government, but another funded by the Clinton foundation, three more funded by Baylor, and at least three more coming in the fall, and probably more. But saying that there were actually five wouldn't express the tragedy of having only one pediatrician in the whole country.)

5. Buy into the Bono/Sachs story that the only good work being done is by international charities, and the only issue is funding:
The Clinton foundation opened a new clinic. With $2M, BMS built another pediatric centre. Doctors Without Borders is training nurses...

6. Repeat the implied mistruth from earlier to reinforce how bad things are:
For Dr. Monika, the government's sole pediatrician, frustration spills over...

7. Tell a completely irrelevant story about what someone in the rural parts does for a living, because to Western ears it sounds desperate:
His grandmother, 67 and half-blind, sold homemade brooms for the $5 bus fare to the clinic.

8. Remind us how much the poor little child is suffering:
[Tsokotsa is] pitifully thin and rash-covered, [and has] been seriously ill for about five years.

9. Completely miss the opportunity to inform yourself and your readers of some of the real issues at stake, like the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS even among health care staff, the challenge of keeping small children adherent to medication when their caregivers change daily, the vast amount of misinformation spread about the disease and some of the popular myths that keep it spreading...

I like the New York Times. But I find their treatment of aid issues can get a little bit stereotypical. Today's reporter had this great opportunity to write a fascinating and informative article about the challenge of fighting HIV/AIDS in a unique corner of the world, and instead painted a completely bland picture to match our preconception of Africa as a continent of starving children waiting for the next handout from the West. The entire content of the article is summarized in a single sentence: "HIV/AIDS drugs now being given to children in Lesotho." But there is so much more to say. I am disappointed.

[Ethan Zuckerman has a good article about the mischaracterization of the African continent as a place of misery.]

Some free stuff and some misinformation

2006-03-01T07:26:00.000+01:00

This morning, I was in my office reading a memorandum of understanding describing the terms of budget support for the Government of Mozambique, when I was interrupted by the cleaning lady. (I bet you are jealous of my job now. This is cutting edge stuff.)

I see the cleaning lady most days, and we exchange the required two sentences I still remember how to speak in Sesotho as she takes out the mostly empty trash. (Yes, I now know less Sesotho than I did three months ago when I could joke with my language teacher - I am a disappointment.)

Today, she was carrying a cardboard box, and she came in to offer me one of whatever was inside. A treat! I thought, leaning forward and wondering what Basotho goodie I might get to sample. Or was it laundry detergent samples, as I have been offered before? Not today - today, it was a box full of condoms! And not just condoms, but female condoms too! I know you're curious.

I had to laugh, as did the cleaning lady, as she left to offer her goods to the others around. As strange as it is to be offered a condom by the cleaning lady, it is surely a positive sign of the breaking down taboo around sex and HIV. Though the taboo, and general lack of regard for condom use is still extremely prevalent, and the further you are from the capital, the stronger it is.

Certainly, information about HIV/AIDS is ubiquitous. Signs down the main road into town remind you that You can get AIDS by sharing toothbrushes and razors. When you leave Lesotho, the sign bids you, Thank you for visiting Lesotho, we hope you learned the ABC of preventing HIV/AIDS. (ABC is for Abstinence, Be faithful, Condom use). And then, just a little bit further, a sign and phone number for Discrete and inexpensive abortions.

The most popular local newspaper, the Public Eye, frequently runs articles about HIV, and the information is usually accurate. Though not too long ago, they ran a correction in small print:

"Last week, we incorrectly quoted Ms. L____ as saying that circumcision prevents you from getting AIDS. In fact, she said that circumcision does not prevent you from getting AIDS. We apologize for the error."

We apologize for the error! (In small print, in a small corner of the page, We! Apologize!) We apologize to anyone who may get this life threatening illness because they believed what was written in our newspaper!

It's true that you shouldn't believe what you read in the Public Eye, but in a land of misinformation on HIV, this mistake was a bit troubling.

Cutting the grass

2006-02-23T14:25:00.000+01:00

Lots of rain and no lawnmower. Time to break out the old scythe...

I'm sorry I can't put your call through right now

2006-02-21T11:28:00.000+01:00

"The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

- John Bolton, US Ambassador to the UN

UN House: an island of luxury

The United Nations building in town is only five stories, but it is one of the most stunning. The 3.5 million dollar building was a gift from the Government. Tradition calls for Government to provide office space to the United Nations. I am not sure if tradition calls for a 3.5 million dollar building while the city hospital is in ruins. The UN House has enormous glass doors, all emblazoned with the UN seal, beautiful corridors that are sunlit and vast, and a swimming pool in the courtyard. Have you ever seen an office building with a swimming pool in the courtyard? For me, it is a first.

As far as I can tell, the job of most UN staff is to go to meetings. I have never yet called someone at the UN, and not been told that they were at a meeting. (some exceptions are below).

For one full morning every week, there is a meeting attended by all UN staff. All staff really means all staff - receptionists, finance people, IT managers, policy people, and senior management. It also means all UN organizations, including UNDP, World Health Organization, UNICEF, Food and Agriculture, and so on. These organizations work on their own projects and their own mandates. When they cross paths, the people involved know where to find each other. What reason could there possibly be for an all staff meeting? The United Nations finds a reason.

Worse, the general lack of value placed on people's time is extended outside UN walls as well. I tried one day to meet the UN person responsible for aid coordination. We had set a time to meet, 4pm. He wasn't there. His mobile phone was at home with his wife, so I had a nice chat with her. Nobody else knew where he was. I made myself at home in his office for an hour, and then gave up and left.

I found him having a friendly chat with someone outside the building. There was no word of apology - he had just returned from a meeting at the Sun Hotel, the swanky hilltop venue that hosts expat visitors from organizations with unlimited budgets. (Disclosure: My swanky expat apartment is on the same hilltop as the Sun Hotel.)

We set an appointment for the next morning, where he was an hour late. It was the first thing in the morning, so no overtime meeting could be blamed. Again, no apology. It would be petty to recount this event in such detail, except that this has happened every single time I have dealt with the UN.

My contract with the Government is paid by UNDP. I am writing this in the second half of February and so far I have been paid only for two weeks in November. It is not for a lack of effort on my part to move this process forward.

There aren't even that many bureaucratic obstacles - only three. A letter needs to be sent and received, a document needs to be signed, and banking information needs to be submitted. But every step in that process involves spending two weeks trying to get in touch with a person who doesn't return phone calls, and then learning that you should actually be trying to reach a different person. You would think once I had arranged for the November payment (which was sometime in January), that the system would be established, and the rest would be easy. But you would be wrong to think that.

A recent sampling of failed attempts:

"He's not working today. The UN doesn't work on Friday afternoons."
"It's Tuesday morning. He's in the all-staff meeting. He'll call you back." (But he didn't, and nobody ever does. Ever.)
"The UN is closed today, it's a Muslim holiday."
"The UN is closed today, it's a Jewish holiday." (I am not making this up. And it's a safe bet they haven't left out the Christians.)
"He's on six weeks of leave for vacation and sickness. You're going to have to start the process from the beginning with a new person." (Back to square one. And what does this mean, taking sick leave and vacation back-to-back? Does he already know that at the end of his vacation he will be sick for two more weeks?)
Finance person: "You have to speak to Programs. We can't move until they do."
Programs person: "You have to speak to Finance. We can't move until they do." (2 more weeks to sort that one out.)

I don't mean to say the UN doesn't do anything worthwhile. But I think John Bolton is on to something.

Minibus taxi vs. my Jetta

2006-02-17T12:31:00.000+01:00

Minibus wins.

The squishing of my Volkswagon between two minibus taxis is an opportunity to learn more about the day-to-day operations of institutions in Lesotho. You would find me less cavalier about the affair if I was injured and on my way to the Queen II abattoir, or if I didn't have car insurance that was going to pay the 17,000 rand bill.

Here are some of the players involved:

The driver: He's in the worst spot - he'll be given a fine for reckless driving to the tune of a couple hundred dollars. This is more than his monthly salary, which he is no longer receiving since he has just lost his job. As with so many things that can go wrong, the poorest bear the toughest load.

The owner: He arrived at the scene within half an hour, to tell the driver how to lie to the police about the accident. Then, he took the license plates off the minibus and left with them. To what end, I am not sure, since I had already written them down, and the plate number anyway is written on the car's registration sticker on the windshield.

The police: We can't leave the scene until they arrive. Unfortunately, they don't have a car to get there. So we wait. After an hour and a half, the sky beginning to dim, they arrive. The police take my statement, writing on lined paper as I tell them what happened. I then have to sign the statement. The statement begins: "I certify that I can read and write."

(Aside: very few ordinary police officers have transportation. When you get stopped for a traffic violation, the police ask you to drive them to the police station so that they can write you a fine.)

(Aside to aside: Then they ask for a bribe so you don't have to go all the way to the station. You know, for your benefit. I won't share how I've responded to this request.)

The mechanic: The car is taken to Enbee Motors, who give the initial estimate of about 17,300 rand. The estimate is calculated while I am with the insurance agent, who tells me I need a second estimate, to make sure they aren't getting fleeced. When I return to Enbee to pick up the estimate, the manager says, "We knew you would need a second estimate so we went ahead and got it for you." He hands me a hand-written estimate on the letterhead of ENS Plastic, the nearby competitor. 17,600 rand. Suspicious, no? But since he and I both know it will be the insurers paying for the job, it will do.

The process so far has been almost too good to be true. Nothing here is ever this easy, so I am still holding my breath to see if the bill is finally going to land in my lap.

Absorptive capacity

2006-02-10T10:00:00.000+01:00

By now we've all heard Bono canvassing the world to step up their aid quotas to 0.7% of GDP. In 2004, Canada was up to 0.26%, and the United States at 0.16%.

70 cents out of every dollar doesn't seem like very much to give. But more importantly, it is a very easy idea for people to wrap their heads around, to get agitated about, to write letters to elected officials and cheer for at LiveAid shows.

And the idea that rich countries should be spending more time and money thinking about how miserable life is for about one third of the population of the world is not bad. But it's a lot more complicated than 0.7%.

Nevermind the issue of leaders who will spend their share of 0.7% on Maybachs, private jets, and gifts for additional wives. The new principle is that we should only give the money to Governments that have proven they won't spend it on Maybachs.

But even if that works, there's this idea of absorptive capacity, that you don't hear about very much, because it's difficult to understand. But it's tremendously important.

In Jeff Sach's extremely optimistic book, The End of Poverty, he waxes about how poverty could be ended if only we took his advice and increased total quantities of aid. And then there is this one sentence in one paragraph, something like "if the absorptive capacity of poor countries to receive aid prevents positive benefits from being realized, then the wonderful things I've described may not happen, and that will be too bad." Too bad indeed, but it is happening.

One aspect of absorptive capacity is a Government's ability to spend new aid in programs that make a difference in people's lives. How can it be hard to spend money? Here's a hypothetical example.

A budget year might include an allocations of $1.5M for a new health clinic, where 1M is for the construction of a building to be finished by the end of the second quarter, and 0.5M for operating costs, including staff salaries. The construction schedule is optimistic, but donors have made the money available, so the Ministry of Health is at least going to try to spend it.

But it takes a long time to procure a contractor, because of bureaucratic delays. Then, because the quality of contractors is generally low, there are construction delays. Mistakes are made, walls go up and have to be torn. The building is wired for the wrong kind of phone network, and needs to be rewired. By the end of the 2nd quarter, the new clinic is about 50% built, and 0.6M of the money has been spent.

By the end of the third quarter, the building is almost finished, and the Ministry of Health has spent half of the initial budget allocation. Obviously the staff haven't been paid, because they haven't been working. There is no way to spend the money on the project by the end of the year.

The money won't be saved for next year. In the logic of budgeting, if the Ministry of Health only spends half of their allocation for a project, the Ministry of Finance will say, "very well then, you clearly don't need that much money, so we'll ship it over to Education or Defense." But no bureaucrat is going to let his department be cut, and so begins the 4th quarter scramble to spend the money. It will go into line items that are difficult to account for, like "administrative expenses". It will be spent on things like cars for Ministry officials, or new computers, or office refurnishing, with the attitude that This money is being wasted anyway, so it may as well be wasted on me.

How often does it go this way? Most of the time. By the end of the third quarter of this year, more than half of Government departments had spent less than half of their annual quota, 33% less than they should have by that point. I can guarantee that most will find a way to spend the money, and that it won't be spent well due to the urgency of needing to spend it all at once.

So if you're a donor country, wouldn't it make sense to ask, if the Ministry of Health is only able to spend 66% of the money is already has, why should I give them even more money?

This is one of the questions donors are going to be asking this May, and it is part of my job to find an answer.

Addendum: Jeff Sachs says, "When it comes to absorptive capacity, I can guarantee you that developing countries can absorb more when it comes to health." Well, Lesotho was able to do it last year... by building a new building for the Ministry of Health, one of the nicest in town. In fact, they did such a good job of spending money that they took out a commercial loan at a costly interest rate to finance the building. Plans to replace the main hospital, considered by many to be more of an abattoir, are continuing to be put on hold.

... but no work had been done...

2006-02-09T10:18:00.000+01:00

This is a fascinating report by John Githongo, former Economist correspondent and head of Kenya's anti-corruption unit. He left his post and his country after receiving death threats related to the anti-corruption work he was doing.

The report is a chilling look into the anatomy of how these processes work. It is also insightful into the challenge of fighting corruption at the highest levels of Government - it is ultimately self-destructive behavior, because if too much is uncovered, your party will never be elected again.

The main subject is a fictitious firm, Anglo Leasing and Finance, which received contracts for tens of millions of dollars for work which didn't happen. If all went to plan, the person receiving the contract would then pay kickbacks to the Kenyan public officials who engineered it.

What I find most striking is the openness with which public officials encourage the author to cease the investigation, asking him whether he appreciates the political costs of his work.

When it becomes clear the investigation will continue, someone manages to get in touch with the fictitious Anglo Leasing, and the money is slowly paid back. Officials speak with Githongo, calling this a great victory, and now that the money is back the investigation will not continue, right?

Good job, they seem to be saying, you caught us, so we gave back the money and now let's forget this ever happened.

"He also warned me quite logically that if the stability of the regime was threatened by my work then the President would stop backing me. He sincerely commiserated with me regarding my dilemma - that of finding that the President's closest associates are deeply involved in the corruption..."

And it goes downhill from there. Read it here: http://jaluo.com/anglo%20leasing/Githongo_s_Report.pdf

Kong comes to town

2006-02-07T11:54:00.000+01:00

A common complaint among expats has long been the absence of a movie theatre. Nor is there one in the nearby South African border town. The nearest has been a two-hour drive away, along with the nearest cheesecake, bookstore, or store selling curtains.

The recent re-opening of the Kingsway Cinema was therefore cause for excitement. The cinema has long been a feature of downtown, but closed during the 1999 riots, and nobody has got around to reopening it until now.

The opening was advertised with a march of a few dozen people carrying a large banner down the centre of the Kingsway, the main road through town. This was an interesting approach to advertising, as it blocked rush hour traffic for about half an hour. But irritating potential clients is a fine idea if you are the only game in town: as we sat in our cars, leaning heavily on our horns, there was an undeniable excitement - a movie theatre! In Lesotho!

The excitement was dampened by a 4-week run of absolutely terrible movies. The biggest headliners have been Flight Plan, and The 40 Year Old Virgin. The longest running film has been the South African toilet comedy, Mama Jack, the popularity of which reinforces my perception of taste in Southern Africa.

The arrival of King Kong was therefore good news, and my English neighbor and I quickly made plans to go. We arrived for an 8:00 showing to find that the cinema was ours to share with only four other clients, all expats. It is a big theatre, seating at least 600. The manager has since decided to replace all remaining showings with... Mama Jack. Good thing we came when we did.

The theatre was long and narrow, raised only gently toward the back, in the style of the older cinemas of America that now mostly serve alternative fare. We sat in the middle and near the front, feeling a sense of vertigo, alone in the sea of dark and empty chairs.

The theatre was lined with speakers, but only those behind the screen were operating. And they were apparently operating at maximum volume, because the movie was permeated by the constant buzz of a sound system turned too high, to the point of obscuring the quieter dialogue, and nullifying the dramatic effect of scenes intended to be dead silent.

The shadow of a dust bunny obscured a substantial part of the right edge of the screen. A brush of a sleeve on the projector lens could have solved the problem in an instant. The absence of love was clear. The projection man didn't even bother to turn off the fluorescent light in the projection room, and it cast the seats around us in a ghostly glow.

The picture had the characteristic dancing black threads of an old reel. This was particularly unusual - we expect products here to be of a lower quality than back home, but why a film reel that was presumably shipped from Hollywood less than a month ago? Do production companies release low quality reels to poor countries at discount prices?

All the same, we settled in until halfway through the movie, when the scene was dramatically interrupted by the black and white flashing numbers of an ending reel. Intermission time. As the technician changed the reel, hip hop music came blasting through all the cinema speakers in perfect quality surround sound. We put our heads in our hands, close to tears.

Why oh why was this beautiful sound system not being used for our movie? The driving hum, the lost dialogue, if they were the result of cheap technology, this was forgivable, especially in a cinema with only six clients paying three dollars per head. But the technology was clearly there, and the problem was a lazy installation, a cinema owner who couldn't be bothered to connect the projector to the right sound system, maybe even a problem as small as a missing audio cable. It seemed tragic that the quality of our movie experience should be so lessened by something so trivial.

Before long, the buzz returned, signal that the reel had been changed, and we gritted our teeth and enjoyed the rest of the film. There is something surreal about watching a movie about movie-making in the 1930s, in a movie theatre out of the 1950s. There is something wonderful just about watching a movie in a cinema, after having reconciled yourself to not seeing one until 2007.

I don't think I have been to a lower quality screening; there is no doubt in my mind that I will be back.

If Zoolander could be King

2006-01-31T09:59:00.000+01:00

We spent our Christmas holiday in Swaziland and Mozambique.

Swaziland is famous in part because it is ruled by the world's last absolute monarch. It already feels like he is an old friend, so much have we seen of him. Larger-than-life photographs of him blanket the walls of buildings, he's on freeway billboards, t-shirts, pamphlets, mugs, beach towels, plates at restaurants... You name it, you can get one with his portrait on it.

It's not tourism or culture so much as mass hysteria. It's the kind of personality cult that Stalin was after. You stroll through the streets and see his descendants all around you, marked by feathers in their hair.

Almost everyone we met with a feather was in a bad mood. And wouldn't you be, the descendant of a king, but only one of five thousand and with no special wealth or privilege to show for it?

The best thing about the photos of the king are his soft, piercing stare, the relaxed diaphragm, cleared mind, deep breath, glowing and full-of-life way he smiles for the camera, perfect every time, gazing straight through the lens into your eyes. These photos are taken by his private photographers who will only release the most fashion-rag worthy portraits. It is illegal to take your own photos of the king, punishable by time in prison.

Look at this man. Does he look like a head of state? Heads of state are serious, intelligent, at the very least aware. King Mswati does not look like a head of state. He looks like a male model. He looks like Derek Zoolander.

"I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to life than being really, really good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is."

And most of his decisions reflect a Zoolander-quality thought process. Here are a few recent ones:

canceling World Aids Day for your 13th marriage ceremony, while 40% of your people are dying, now the highest rate in the world.
putting off the school year for a few weeks, because the Royal Fields need to be weeded, and this is children's work. Link
Trying to buy himself a private jet, but being blocked by donors, who thought it was inappropriate in a country with two thirds of people under the poverty line. He had to settle for a Maybach, one of the ten most expensive cars in the world. Link
Fighting HIV/AIDS by putting a five-year ban on sex for teenage girls (because it's their fault). Men are free to do as they choose. The king himself transgressed the ban two months later by marrying a 17-year-old, and then fined himself a cow. And just recently, he canceled the ban entirely to marry yet another 17-year-old.Link, Link, Link.

I have to go the bank.

2006-01-15T10:08:00.000+01:00

The lines outside the banks started this morning at nine and by ten they stretched around the block. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, all clutching white envelopes in the morning sun, barely moving. Cars are double and triple parked. Offices are empty. The pace of work, for those of us still working, has slowed to a crawl, due to the absence of support staff.

My phone will only call out through a switchboard, to prevent me from abusing my office phone privileges. (as phone calls cost about 60c/minute). Today, I can't make phone calls at all, because the woman working the switchboard is in line at the bank.

Someone on the floor needs a cd from the IT department, but she'll have to wait, because the entire IT department is standing in line at the bank. There was a guy locked out of his office, but the custodian is naturally nowhere to be found. "I may as well go the bank then," the locked out gentleman said with a shrug, and he left to join the masses.

It's not a national financial crisis. It's not a run on the banks. It's payday. Ordinarily the last Friday of the month, it gets moved up in January out of respect for everyone who spent all their money over the holiday period and would otherwise be asking for an advance. It's sort of like a monthly national holiday, where three quarters of working people take the day off to line up at the bank.

Sure, they could wait until tomorrow, when there will be no line at all.But I think this is a social event. Nobody passes up a good excuse to get out of the office, and somehow, going to the bank is always an acceptable thing to do during working hours. There are 24 hour ATMs. Direct deposit is available. Nevertheless, people routinely pick up their bags, and stroll off with a toss of the head and an "I'm going to the bank," and return hours later like it's all in a day's work.

There's a manager on my floor who goes either to the bank or the dentist every single day. What would you do at the bank if you went every single day? Open and close accounts just for the heck of it? (No free iPod shuffles here.) Withdraw your spending money, 20 rand at a time?

Nevertheless, the bank persists as the perfect excuse. Why weren't you at such-and-such meeting? I had to go to the bank. Of course, the bank. Everybody has to go to the bank.

Like taking a lollipop...

2006-01-12T16:07:00.000+01:00

The rumor has floated through that the Global Fund has just retracted a $40M grant that was coming to town to prevent mother-to child transmission of hiv. The grant was retracted because the $4M pilot project had an average treatment cost of $2,000 per head. The drug cost is about $1/head. The final report, I guess, looked something like this:

Cost of drugs: $2,000
Administration: $50,000
Unaccounted for: $3,948,000
---------------------------
Total: $4,000,000

No surprise they declined on the extra $40M. Somebody made out good, and the country is out $40M, which would have almost doubled the health budget. Or if you prefer, tens of thousands of children will be born with a fatal illness that could have been prevented. (not fatal in theory, but in practice.)

Who took the money? No one will ever know. And yet... if everyone knows each other, as they do, then somebody must know. In fact, it's a sure thing that some honest folk know who the corrupt folk are and what they did. But it's complicated to out someone when so many people are on the in. It's complicated, and $40M in aids money goes elsewhere.

Corruption back home always seems a little bit academic: it's company executives squirrelling away money through complex accounting scandals, political parties funding themselves through fake advertising programs... Back home, it's somehow remote, distant, it's not clear whose money is being stolen, nobody understands the mechanisms, and it doesn't affect life very much. It's wrong mainly because there are rules against it.

It seems so much more vile to be literally stealing the HIV treatment from small children. I guess believing that HIV/AIDS is a Western conspiracy offers some consolation to the thieves.

Where the lion shall lay with a small rodent

2006-01-05T08:53:00.000+01:00

Abstract: We visit a multi-million dollar lion breeding farm. Leanna and Sam get bit by lions. I get bit by a small rodent.

The Full Story

We thought we were going to an animal protection sort of place, where they rescued injured lions in the wild and nursed them back to health. It turned out to be a multi-million dollar farm where rare lions are bred and sold for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It's the sort of place where there are ostriches in the yard...

...and foxes behind the bar.

I'm used to pets running around underfoot. Three month old lion cubs are a bit unusual just to have around.

The more daring among us picked up and cuddled the cubs.

Before long, lion cub makes it known she is getting bored of the game. Humans are sometimes slow to understand, but a few bruising bites help get the message across. Sam puts down the baby lion.

There's a meerkat running around the place.

It's quite hilarious.

I didn't think it was quite as cute after a staff person put it in my hand and it promptly bit me, drawing a couple drops of blood. JoAnna has been helpful in telling me the kinds of diseases I can get from rodent bites. I started wondering what was in that waiver that I just signed at the bar.

The meerkat has made friends with the lion cubs. I can't help but think this friendship may not last too long.

We went on a drive in an enormous truck to see the farm's herbivores. The animals were terrified us, and fled at our approach... It wasn't quite the San Diego zoo.

Lions they had, in excess, which might explain the herbivores' skittishness. Lions in cages need to be fed after all...

Many were white lions, a rare breed that exists only in captivity. There are only about 300 in the world. This is one of the biggest, worth over a million dollars.

The lions had big, sharp teeth, which they were happy to show us.

What's a trip to the lion farm if there's not at least one photo of a tiger cub chewing on a cow's leg? More importantly, will they try to breed a liger?

Swimming in my mind were visions of opening all the doors and letting the lions loose with the herds of zebra, gazelles and wildebeests in the valley below. I think the scene would rival the Matrix...

The farm staff were putting their hands through the cages and petting the lions, pulling their tails, touching their snouts. In between cages, they told us of all the times they had been mauled and showed us the scars...

In all, it was a strange experience, though fitting for the part of White South Africa that borders Lesotho. It was something we've never seen before, but I somehow doubt we'll be back...

World Aids Day 2005

2005-12-01T14:23:00.000+01:00

With great fanfare, visits from a king and a president (of a university), the HIV clinic where JoAnna will work is opened. (Link).

Exciting, a little bit frightening. They will dispense first-line antiretroviral drugs to children, which can all but nullify the effects of HIV, making a normal life possible.

Exciting, because until recently these have been unavailable, especially to the poor. There are still not near enough drugs for the 30% or so of the population that is estimated to have HIV.

Frightening, because drug resistance develops very rapidly, and the first line drugs are the only ones available at a reasonable cost. If resistance to these develops, it will again only be the rich who can afford treatment.

It's not cold medicine - these drugs must be taken according to the prescribed regimen - if you miss one pill out of 30, that can be enough for the virus to adapt and develop resistance.

I think I would have a hard time remembering to take my medicine twice a day for the rest of my life. (Especially if my tooth brushing frequency is any indication). Now how about a 6-year-old orphan, cared for by different people at different times of the year? Not to mention the huge stigma associated with HIV, which means it can feel a little bit socially awkward to be popping the pills when you're in a public place. And it's tough to take a medicine that has side effects, when you feel just fine. And no thanks to the quacks on South African radio arguing that the drugs are an experiment pushed by American pharmaceutical companies, and instead of taking them, you should try their herbal remedies. Consider this little tidbit:

Swaziland, which has one of the highest adult HIV infection rates in the world at some 40 percent, scrapped World AIDS Day events entirely while South Africa's health minister repeated her much criticized prescription of garlic and beetroot as an AIDS treatment. (Link)

It seems like it would easy to miss a dose or two, doesn't it?

The best answer we have is counseling, so every time the patients come in, they sit down with a social worker or a nurse, who talks to them for half an hour about the importance of sticking to the plan. They bring back the pill bottle for the refill, so the pharmacist is supposed to check that the right number of pills are left, and have a talk with the patient if they aren't.

Is it enough? Maybe. Unfortunately, few HIV clinics keep good enough records to know if we're giving people life or just spreading resistance. I'm hoping to help JoAnna gather enough data in her time here to be able to tell whether this is actually working, or something needs to change. If we can convince people we're not selling their medical data to the big, bad pharma.

A long walk through the hills

2005-11-12T00:06:00.003+01:00

Friday morning, we woke early to take a small plane into the mountains. It was a very small plane. The pilot and mechanic were both trained at bible school. J looks concerned.

The flight gave us an incredible first experience of greater Lesotho. Almost immediately out of Maseru, lowlands gave way...

...to stunning grass and scrub covered mountains. We maintained a steady height of 9,000 feet, and the mountains rose up around us as we went, until we were flying between rather than over them.

The village of Methalaneng sits in a narrow valley such that the runway can only be approached at a 45 degree tilt. This bumpy strip of grass is considered one of the most challenging landings in Lesotho. We are thankful that our Bible school trained pilots are very very good pilots. (All this on a beautiful day: note the yellow windsock pointing straight down.)

It seemed like the whole town was there for our arrival.

Everybody sat around for a while to see what the Europeans would do.

After a cup of tea, and two eggs over-easy for Melvin, we began to walk...

... and walk.

...and walk some more...

...and continue to walk...

We walked across ridges...

...and we walked through long valleys...

We walked past men on horses wearing blankets and highly unusual masks...

...and past herdboys with small puppies...

A thunderstorm made us scramble for shelter, but the old woman wouldn't let us in her hut because it was bad luck to bring people in with no food to offer them. Luckily, a blast of lightning landed 20 meters away and she decided it was worse luck to have dead Europeans on her doorstep. The unventilated hut was all smoke and we felt near suffocation, but were grateful not to be among the hundreds of people struck by lightning in Lesotho every year. Pity the woman and baby and millions like her who spend hours every day breathing such toxicity. I didn't get a picture, but if I did it would have looked something like this:

In places the path was rocky...

...and in other places it was wet...

As the tallest, it was my privilege to test the depths of the brown waters after the storm.

We often had company on our journey, whether children walking over mountains to and from school every day, or adults hiking six hours to a clinic, or even the general store.

...but just as often we were alone in the wide, wide open.

But for each other, we would never have made it through.

I hope you are getting the impression that we walked for a long, long time, because we really did. Much longer than it has taken you to scroll down this page. It was the endless journey. Eight steep hours, followed by nine the next day, and at hour nine we crested the final ridge... and Melvin and Merrill looked left, and right, and left again... and, "This is the wrong valley," said Melvin. "We need to be way over there," said Merrill, pointing at a distant ridge. So I deleted the 'arriving at last' photo from my camera, and we walked for a few more hours.

At last, after two days and twenty hours of hiking the most treacherous terrain, we arrived at the Kuebunyane clinic, the destination, where we had meals from cans, and exam tables to sleep on. I have never in my life hurt so much from a hike.

But were we really home free? We woke to a fog rising from the valley bottom, and storm clouds rolling in over the mountains. When the airstrip is just an unplanted field, the pilot needs to see to land, and you couldn't see the airstrip if you were on it. (The large gray space in the right photograph hides a set of vast mountains that you wouldn't want to fly into.)

Miraculously, the fog cleared barely five minutes before we heard a motor's hum, as if fleeing before the incoming plane. 9:00 AM, and the windsock was calm for the first time that day, a beautiful sight.

We were all smiles and relief as we loaded the plane and prepared to go home.

Alas, the storm that had fled before us at Kuebunyane still lingered in the tormented airs above the mountains, and the plane bucked and dipped like it did not belong in the sky, a feeling made worse when you are flying at 9,000 feet - a height lower even than some of the passes we had hiked. The pilot had to abort the landing at Methalaneng upon seeing the full windsock and feeling the draft on his controls, but not before bringing us within a hundred feet of the ground. It was a neat bit of flying both there and through the dark clouds between us and Maseru, but had it lasted another half hour, I would have been reaching for the lunch bags in the back.

We arrived home before 10 AM with more than enough experiences for one day, thank you very much, and promptly fell asleep until late in the afternoon.

Competition in public transit

2005-10-21T08:31:00.000+01:00

The independent public transit system here is quite entertaining.

The minibuses, called combis, have about 14 seats each, and therefore seat about 20. They go screaming around corners and into oncoming traffic, through crowded market stalls, and it is the responsibility of pedestrians to get out of the way. (The biggest danger with not being used to driving on the left, is that I usually look the wrong way when crossing the street, thus not seeing the oncoming traffic.)

The operators don't seem to get paid except out of the fares they draw, which makes for an interesting competitive market. If you happen between two combis that are going to the same place, beware, for the touts will pull your arms off each trying to pull you into their vehicle to earn your fare.

Each combi is operated by a driver, and a tout who pushes passengers inside and takes their money. When the combi stops in a busy market, the tout jumps out and starts convincing people they want to go where the combi is going. I don't speak Sesotho well enough to understand the heated arguments that often develop, but I imagine them something like this:

Tout: "Thetsane, Thetsane, hurry up and get in, we're going to Thetsane!"
Bystander: "But I'm not going to Thetsane!"
Tout: "What's wrong with Thetsane? You think you're too good to go to Thetsane?"
Bystander: "I'm trying to get home, I live in Maseru East."
Tout: "That's enough out of you, dumbass, get in the combi."
Tout wrestles protesting bystander into minibus, and minibus races off.

It's naturally also difficult to figure out where they are going, because once they figure out where you're going, well that's where they're going. "Mafateng? Yes, yes, we're going there, get in, get in." And you are muscled into the combi and your fare is taken. The combi drives four blocks and stops in another place busy with combis, and the tout pushes you outside. "Mafateng is that way. Good luck." And before long, three more people have a hold of your arms and are shouting, "Mafateng, Mafateng!"

And yet, for all the shouting and misdirection, I think its more efficient than transit back home...

The language wall

2005-10-18T17:03:00.000+01:00

I hit the language learning wall today. Too many words and ideas in too little time, and slowly my brain began unlearning everything it had learned.

I was with Ms. Poho, my language teacher, when I noticed I was having a harder time remembering the new words she was throwing at me. And suddenly I couldn't understand things I have understood for days.

So I said, "Okay, I think that's enough new words for today." I didn't feel bad, as we were already going beyond her lesson plan.

She replied, "Let's do greetings again," and went on to teach me three new greetings that I had never learned before.

I repeated after her, not knowing what the words meant, and said, "Okay, I think that's enough new words for today."

"Why don't we learn some body parts," she suggested, and my already artificial smile drained away further.

After she taught me the Sesotho for head, I said in Sesotho, "My head hurts because I am studying too much Sesotho."

She laughed and taught me legs. I said, "My legs are sore because I have been in this chair so long."

She laughed again. I did not join in. She taught me arms. I looked at my watch.

I don't know what else she taught me, because soon I found I could barely even speak English.

Finally, the lesson ended, I staggered out of the building with barely a thank you, kea leboha, and promptly got on the bus in the wrong direction, realizing my mistake somewhere around the city limits.