Hello Keflavik, my old friend

My goodness, it seems like just yesterday I was approaching Keflavik from the west and here it is again, starring on the United Airlines Kickback Payola Map Network. That was thirteen long days ago, when I was stressing about having a kidney stolen in the Nairobi airport and waxing nostalgic about the Abe Beame administration. I am now, of course, an expert on Africa, having visited all of four of its countries for two whole weeks. I’ve taken eleven separate plane flights in thirteen days. I’ve covered probably twenty five thousand miles, visited six African cities (and environs).

I also have to say that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed intra-African air travel, against all expectations. For starters, African airlines serve hot food, even on the shortest trips. On a flight from Kampala to Kigali I was so hungry that I agreed, in obvious contravention to all FDA recommendations, to eat a meat pie (!) that was offered by the cheerful flight attendant. A meat pie! Visions of Sweeney Todd danced in my head, but it was wonderfully hot, the pastry was flaky and tender, and the meat was gloriously well spiced and delicious. I’d have paid ten bucks in a restaurant. And I didn’t end up in the hospital. In fact, I may just have to start a franchise – Rwandair’s Famous Meat Pies – I could sell them at Costco and retire. They’re that good.

While I’m on the topic, what with United Airlines? Here are the things all airlines should have: 1. PLUGS! Is it so hard to put in plugs? Virgin does it, but they don’t fly anywhere useful. Four hours into a flight my laptop dies, and I’m stuck having to read the fiction in the New Yorker, which I only do in emergencies. 2. Movies on demand. What’s with this 1960s ridiculousness of everyone having to watch the same soul-suckingly rotten movie? British Airways has a nice little movie on demand option, as does Virgin. I’d pay for a decent movie instead of having to watch Bride Wars or Marley and Me, and so would you. 3. An internet connection (but please god no Skype). I know it’s expensive to install, yadda, yadda, but it would be so useful. 4. If you’re lucky enough to get an upgrade, a flat bed seat on international flights would be worth a day’s productivity, and would make you want to live again. Again, British Airways does this, and it looks like heaven from the cheap seats. The best business class seat in United reclines just far enough to still ruin your back forever.

I’ve said it before – this kind of travel is really grueling and it takes years off your life, if you’re lucky, and decades if you’re not. And many of my colleagues, bless their due-diligence-loving hearts, spend upwards of forty percent of their lives traipsing around the world to malaria-infested backwaters (pun intended, I guess) because it’s the only way they’ll know if they’re actually making a difference with the organization’s money. And not only that, they do it with astonishingly good humor. After just two weeks of this craziness, I need to spend about a month in a darkened room listening to soft shakuhachi music and sipping herb tea.

Okay, back to Africa. If I learned one thing on this trip it’s simply this - there is no reason that the people should be so poor. The countries I visited are blessed with extraordinary natural resources, amazing tourist attractions, fertile land, and brilliant, hard-working people. And yet wherever we went in these wonderful places, we saw gripping, endemic poverty, shockingly high rates of TB, malaria, diarrhea, and of course HIV and AIDS. Walk down the street in Durban and if you see a hundred people, the statistics suggest that more than thirty of them are HIV-positive. We met women whose families live on less than $1 a day who have five or six or seven children with no possible means to properly care for them. People who spent the entire day in a health clinic to receive desperately substandard care because that was all that the staff were able to muster. Kids who went to school without having eaten. Dispenseries at health clinics with nothing to dispense. It is a tragedy, and the world’s shame, and I don’t have the slightest idea how this problem is going to get solved, or who’s going to do it. I have a not-so-sneaking suspicion that it will have to happen from within. As much as we are trying to make a real difference in people’s lives, and as valuable as it can be in very specific instances, development aid will probably only help at the margins.

It’s a muddle. Why are some countries making it work, sort of, and others simply failing? Any family in Lagos, Nigeria that can afford one has their own generator to run electricity during the daily blackouts, which does wonders for the air quality. Nigeria – awash with oil and all kinds of other stuff – can’t keep the lights on. Downtown Kampala is no less chaotic and primitive – probably more so – than Nairobi or Johannesburg, yet I was able to walk the streets safely. There’s no question that politics plays an important role. In Rwanda, President Kagame has by all accounts built a team of managers, not kleptocrats. The greatest test for that country will be the same that many other sub-Saharan African countries have failed spectacularly at – a peaceful democratic transfer of power within the agreed-upon time period (ahem, Mayor Bloomberg).

Zimbabwe was once hailed as the model for modern Africa – much like Rwanda today – and has now descended into chaos, thanks in part, many say, to Robert Mugabe’s failure to yield power. Kenya and Uganda have great promise, but grapple with corruption and mismanagement. Just one year ago, Kenya descended into ethnic violence eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide. And the list of failed or failing states is depressingly long – Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, Angola…I could go on.

But I also met some of the kindest, smartest, most optimistic people I will ever have the pleasure of knowing. On the way to Joburg airport, driving past homes surrounded by gates, barbed wire, AND electrified fences, the driver (named Lucky, although he told me he isn’t) told me that he remains optimistic about the future. South Africa is improving, he told me. The World Cup is coming, and there’s construction everywhere. He worried that when the event is over people will be out of work again, but he is nevertheless hopeful. He wasn’t being a Pollyanna – he lives in Soweto, and would have every reason to be cynical – but he told me that he was seeing change. I was blown away by the university students working on their Master’s and PhDs who are committed to using what they’re learning to go back to their countries – Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia, and others – and try to solve their many problems. Or the women (all women) who ran the many health clinics we visited – understaffed, overworked, but possessed of supernaturally good humor and optimism.

Or the Minister of Health of Rwanda, who, shortly after we met with him, announced that the country was going to provide three ambulances to each administrative district. During our trip, we heard from community leaders in a rural health clinic who told us that their biggest need is an ambulance. Are these leaders clairvoyant, or just tuned into what their people need and somehow finding a way to take on the big as well as the little problems? I have no idea. And this is Rwanda – which fifteen years ago went through genocide and civil war. They have no oil, but no blackouts. If there’s an African success story in the making, it’s unquestionably Rwanda. If Rwanda fails, it will be the most heartbreaking of failures.

The seatback map tells me we’re nearing Godthab, Greenland (sister city to Keflavik, Iceland, no doubt), so I’m nearly home, sort of. But I’m not done with the blog. I took tons of notes on my journey, and I’m committed to telling some more stories before I close out this travelogue, and I have piles of photos still to post. So bear with me for a few more days, and thanks for reading.

Durban

About to leave Durban for Johannesburg. This is a lot more like the South Africa I've heard about than Cape Town. We went for a stroll yesterday and on our way out the door, the doorman asked where we were going. We're going for a walk along the waterfront, we told him. He looked us over and decided that since we weren't carrying handbags or other snatchable items that we'd be okay. Comforting. The walk went fine, by the way. Had dinner at a place called Moyo, which could best be described as high-concept African. They had roving a capella singers, pulsating African music, and someone came by the table to paint my face with Zulu white dashes.


Your extremely dorky correspondent.

Goofy, but really fun. Oh, and I had a crazily hoppy South African microbrew! A little Oregon colonialism, no doubt, but good. And the food was great - I had a spicy chicken curry with coconut, bananas, and other stuff.


Later, I'll report on the health clinic and hospital we visited yesterday. The short story is that South Africa has the highest HIV AIDS rate in the world, and Kwa Zulu Natal, the province in which Durban is located, has the highest HIV rate in South Africa. It's truly a public health crisis, and I don't think anybody thinks they'll get a handle on it any time soon.

Cape Town - Day 2 (I think)

It's Tuesday afternoon in Cape Town, and trip is winding down. We head out to another health clinic in an hour, then off to Durban for a day, then to Johannesburg for a day, then home on Thursday.

Cape Town has been a bit of a respite in that we're in a touristy part of a modern European-style city. On the other hand, it hardly feels like Africa, the twelve jillion African tschochke shops nothwithstanding.


Cape Town waterfront - all it's missing is a tic tac toe-playing chicken.

We got away from the hurdy gurdys and juggling unicyclists and to visit a women's health clinic yesterday. The clinic was created to serve women who are affected by abuse in the home, and provides a wide variety of services, including HIV testing, counseling, and basic health care, and family planning, among them. The director was yet another one of the highly competent, deeply dedicated people we've met on our visit. The problems that people face in each of the countries we've visited are profound, but I do take some comfort in the fact that there are such impressive people working to solve them.

Today, we visited with graduate students who are studying demography in a special program at the University of Cape Town. This is said to be one of the most rigorous programs in the world, and the students are exhausted and stressed as finals approach this week. We met with six students - three from Zimbabwe and one each from Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The goal is for these young people to be able to achieve the kind of expertise in demographic research necessary to make good policy across the continent. It's a tall order, but boy oh boy is there a need to understand demographic trends here.


Grad student Innocent Karangwa (center), says he would like to return to his native Rwanda to help advance health research there.

Needless to say, funding demographic scholarship sends reporters reaching for the nearest pillow to take a life-affirming nap, but there is still so much we don't know about how to alleviate poverty that these intelligent, ambitious scholars might be able to figure out. As we learned in our meetings with Rwandan ministry officials, collecting data is hard enough, interpreting it is even harder, and the need for such experts is profound. So it won't make any headlines, but that's fine with us.

My friend E

E

My new friend E does communications for an organization that is helping Rwanda improve its health system. They educate members of the community about the various services available, and help train health professionals, among many other tasks.

When I first met him, he was in action – training a group of local mayors, police and city council members on how to help their constituents learn about the services available to them. Engage the local electeds, they reason, and you have a much better chance of actually getting your messages to the community. E led a role play exercise, getting his audience up on their feet, and acting out various scenarios that his audience might encounter back in their villages. He was a wonderful emcee – engaging the room with humor and switching effortlessly between the native Rwandan language Kinyarwanda, French, and for the benefit of his monolingual guests (well, me, since all of my colleagues understand French very well), English. He had the group standing up and sitting down, laughing and engaging, working the room with the panache of a man very much at ease with the world. Later, as we sat in the lobby of our hotel, there was a steady stream of friends or colleagues that came up to him, greeting him warmly. Apparently, there was some kind of event in the building, but he got the same treatment in the parliament building and at the various ministries we visited. “You know everybody!” I observed. “Well, they know ME,” he said, almost surprised.

E is 59. His hairline has almost completed its march to the back of his head, he wear glasses, has a forward-set jaw, a prominent lower lip, and an easy smile that uses the whole face and reveals an expanse of gums. But without a doubt it’s the eyes that I paid most attention to. They are the eyes of a man at peace. I’m not sure how to explain it any better than that. He’ll take in the room, or look you in the eye, pause a moment, and let fly with his disarming smile. He seems happy, and I liked him immediately. And he’s a communications guy, and we tend to stick together.
Someone had told me that in addition to his duties at the NGO, E was a reconciliation court judge. The reconciliation courts are traditional village gatherings, called gacaca (pronounced “ga-cha-cha”) in which a perpetrator of genocide explains his crimes and asks for forgiveness from his victims, if they are still alive, or the survivors of the people he has killed. Once the verdict is given and the sentence, if any, is served, the “genocidier” may return to his village and attempt to resume a semblance of a normal life. This process is said to be painful and highly imperfect, but preferable to every alternative. We were sitting together in a meeting of just the two of us to discuss some other business, and when it appeared we had concluded our work, I mentioned that someone said that he was a reconciliation judge. “Who told you that?” he replied, looking a little surprised, and he changed the subject. I let it go. It was all I could do to bring it up in the first place – I didn’t want to press. We then returned our conversation to some un-decided upon matter, and made a bit of easy small talk. As I said, E is a fellow who’s very easy to like, and I felt very comfortable just chatting. Maybe I passed the test. After a pause, he said, “Let me tell you my story.”

E was born in exile, in Burundi. His family was forced to flee Rwanda in 1949, after what is known in Rwanda as the “first war” – a period of attempted ethnic cleansing that forced many members of the Tutsi tribe to escape to neighboring countries, including the neighbor to the south, Burundi. His father had a seventh grade education, (“It would be like coming from University,” he said) was considered an elite, and he became chief of their village not long after they arrived. E was born in Burundi in 1951, the 14th of 16 children, of whom ten survived. With the exception of one sister, who was made to stay home to help their mother, all of his surviving siblings were educated and went on to professional careers. E eventually went to work at the Burundi Ministry of Health, specializing in child and maternal health, despite the fact that he was not a citizen of the country. In fact, he wasn’t a citizen of any country – the militant Hutu government of Rwanda wouldn’t allow him to return to his ancestral home, which he longed to do, and Burundi refused to grant him citizenship. “I was, what’s the word?” “Stateless,” I said. “Yes, I was stateless.” He was given a card by the government that classified him as a “native refugee.”

Things in Rwanda were extremely tense in the 1980s and early 90s – there were periodic explosions of violence, primarily targeting the Tutsi minority, and the tensions exploded in April of 1994 in the famous genocide, in which one out of every seven people in the country was murdered. When the genocide ended and the militant Hutu government was deposed, E took it as an opportunity to return to Rwanda to try to find his relatives and to rebuild his country. It was still a very violent and unhealthy place then, with revenge killings commonplace, and services nonexistent. He arrived in July of 1994, finally stepping foot on his country’s soil at the age of 44. He returned to his village to seek out the relatives he had never met, but not a single relative survived. All his aunts, uncles and cousins had all been killed.

E took a job at the Ministry of Health, working in his field of maternal and child health. Rwanda in the summer of 1994 was barely a state, and E struggled in the ministry to provide some help to people with almost no resources. The international aid community was well meaning, but ineffectual. “After the war, they would send things to us that made no sense,” he told me. “These big shipments of blood would arrive, but it was too late for blood.” “There was an outbreak of cholera, and they’d send water. There’s water everywhere in Rwanda – we needed medicine.”
They did the best they could, and as I’ve noted before, the country seems remarkably functional for a place that just fifteen years ago was no less lawless than the Congo is today. There are no shortage of problems – malnutrition, illiteracy, and myriad health problems among them. Yet the government’s goal is for Rwanda to be a middle class country in ten or so years.

E responded to my interest in his life, and to my curiosity about his country’s history. There was a movie on his laptop about the genocide that he wanted me to see, and after repeated failures to transfer the files from his laptop to mine, he called his son and dispatched him to town to buy me a copy. “Are you okay with the bad pictures?” he asked. I told him that I thought I could handle it. “Good,” he said. “It’s the whole story.”

In many ways, E is the face of the reconciliation, and if Rwanda succeeds, it will be thanks to him and many, many others like him. He’s a judge, and a community organizer, and he’s working his way through his own pain. He’s willing to try to put that aside for the good of the country, something which is a theme that emerges wherever you go. “It’s crazy,” E said. “You can’t tell a Hutu from a Tutsi by looking at him. We all speak Kinyarwanda. We eat the same food. We’re the same.” Indeed, bumper stickers and billboards everywhere proclaim “It’s our Rwanda,” imploring its citizens to try to move beyond the past.

“One million people died, and I think that there were three million people who were responsible. But we can’t put three million people in jail.” I asked him how he can be so positive when he’s been through so much. Has he found a way to try to forget the past? He took a moment and said, “The simple decision is not to forget but to take another strategy to live together.”

Cape Town

Finally made it to Cape Town last night after thirteen hours of travel that began with a 1:30 am wake-up call. Three flights, three countries, two airlines, and we arrived early and the luggage made it just fine. Nibble on that, United, Southwest, Jet Blue, and the rest. I know, I know, you're not responsible for the weather or air traffic control, but you still really stink.

Cape Town is a very strange place - driving from the airport past shanty towns that look very much like the Korogocho slum - an agglomeration of tin roofs and rutty dirt pathways, we arrived at a waterfront complex that brings to mind Baltimore's Inner Harbor, complete with shops, hotels, tourists, and buskers.


A billboard advertising a new development to replace the slum.

I went for a run along an ocean front promenade that could have been Santa Monica, with art deco apartment buildings and cafes taking in the view. I am told that South Africa is like that - a very thin layer of modernism and development stretches across a deep core of poverty and deprivation.

Planes, planes, and well, planes

Taking off from Nairobi, having successfully made our 4:30 flight this morning. Four hours to Joburg and then to Cape Town. The pace is grueling - we've been blasting through this trip and we're all pretty whipped. Waking up at 1:30 am to catch a flight is nuts.

I honestly don't know how my colleagues do it, but in just a week I know why. Seeing the organizations at work on the ground and meeting these amazing people - truly amazing people - is a gift. I have such a better sense of what we do and when and how it works (when it works) than I did before.

Rwanda

Where to begin? There are so many reasons to be optimistic about Rwanda. The capital is safe, clean, and beautiful. The place just seems well run. Our meeting at the ministry of finance yesterday with the director of planning was a revelation. He was a brilliant man in his early thirties – articulate, competent, and utterly dedicated to making his country a better place. And as far as I can tell, he and his colleagues are doing a pretty good job, considering where they’ve come from such a short time ago.

I mean, this country has a law that requires all motorcyclists to wear a helmet, which is something thirty U.S. states can’t say. A colleague from Uganda said that while a similar law was passed there recently, it was met with utter derision. People would wear gourds on their heads in mocking protest. There’s also a law against plastic bags. In short, this city is the African Singapore, at least on the surface. Ask anybody, and their likely to tell you how this country has revived itself only fifteen years after a genocide in which one out of every seven people in the country was killed.


Kigali City - Safe, clean and friendly

They’ll tell you that the revival is because of the leadership of Paul Kagame, the President. Kagame, the sly, intellectual, stork-like figure whose querulous portrait peers down from walls around the country, is credited with leading the reconciliation and recovery. He seems genuinely beloved. If Kagame says put on your helmet, people put on their helmets. That’s a lot of power for one guy, even if he uses it wisely.


President Kagame, watching over.

After three days meeting with government officials and a visit to a rural health clinic, I can say that there’s real reason for hope. More on why later. Off to bed now – we have a 4:30 am flight to Nairobi, where we have half an hour to make a transfer to Johannesburg, where we transfer to Cape Town. Absolute insanity.

I am in serious blog debt, sorry to say. Here’s what I owe:

• Much more on Korogocho, including a piece about the community radio station, which is for many the primary source of information and entertainment; a visit to two health clinics, such as they are; a bit about the program that cares for HIV+ children, and probably something I’m forgetting.

• Lots about our trip to the health clinic in rural Rwanda (which was a stark contrast to the real challenges of Korogocho.

• A bit about our meeting with the Minister of Health, who brings to mind a McKinsey analyst.

• A really inspiring profile of my new friend E, who spent much of his life in exile when his family was forced to flee to Burundi in the fifties, and who has returned to Rwanda to try to turn his country around.

Off to bed.

Go figure

On the road back from a remarkable rural health clinic in the southern province in Rwanda, with a better cell signal than I have in my office in the heart of silicon valley. I believe that qualifies as irony.

Kigali, Rwanda

Just got back from a morning run. Yes, you read that right. Whereas the guidebook for Nairobi warns you not to put your big toe outside the hotel, Kigali is a different kind of city. It's absolutely lovely - set among literally hundreds of hills, and there are trees everywhere. The city is also immaculately clean - on my half hour run, I saw exactly one piece of trash, and armies of street cleaners out, apparently looking for it.

It's safe to say that my presence was unusual, and as always, the children tell you what everyone else is thinking, but are too polite to say. I came upon one group of children who were maybe six or seven and they took a look at me and just laughed. Others called out "Bon Jour!" "Hallo!" and I called back. I saw one other runner - a Rwandese man who clapped at me and I clapped back. Runners solidarity translates.

More on Rwanda - a fascinating, exciting, but maybe slightly worrisome country - later.

Part Three - Big Pen Academy

As I mentioned, there are very few public facilities – the poorest of the poor have to pay for school and health care. One survey estimated that for the residents of Korogocho, fully half of their expenditures go to health care. There are approximately 500 health clinics in Korogocho, but all but six are private, meaning you have to pay. But there is no functional regulatory process for private sector clinics – it’s buyer beware. No way to run a railroad.

Getting an education in Korogocho is just as dicey a proposition. In a slum of hundreds of thousands of people, there are exactly two public schools. If you want your children to have any chance to learn to read or write, you have to pay one of the many informal schools that dot the slum. Today, we visited the “Big Pen” school, where 274 children attend primary school classes. The classrooms, such as they are, measure about twenty feet square, about the size of a normal sized bedroom, and I counted about forty children, who looked to be about five or six years old. Our visit caused understandable chaos, and the teacher didn’t particularly seem happy to see us, and who could blame her? The children broke out into wide, generous smiles, and literally climbed over each other to reach out their hands to touch us. Kids are funny – I can’t imagine that they receive regular visitors like us, yet they just cheered, and smiled and tried out their English on us. And they wanted to touch, and I did – reaching out and touching every hand.

If there are any writers from the show “Monk” (about the germophobic detective) reading this, I believe I’ve given you the ultimate story idea. According to one UN report, nearly one child in nine in Kenya dies before his or her fifth birthday, and while these children have passed that grim milestone, they are clearly not thriving. Several had open sores, many are likely ill from opportunistic bugs of one kind or another, many had runny noses, and like children of a certain age around the world, everything went into their mouths. But how could I turn away from these beautiful little children?

The kids of Big Pen

 

Head Teacher's Office

 

Making do under difficult circumstances

Big Pen Academy

 

Korogocho, Nairobi - Part Two

The Chief

When we arrived at Korogocho, we were led into a small room outside the office of the “chief” (she proudly handed out her card and it said, simply, “chief”) – the person who nominally “runs” the district. The chief is a garrulous solidly-built woman in her late forties named Rebecca Balongo, and our guide for the day, Clement Otembo, told us that “without her assistance, nothing can work.” It wasn’t particularly clear to me what she does exactly, but my guess is that she puts what government money there is to work in various ways, and applies rabbinical skills to settle disputes. In short, she is a one-woman city council.

We met the chief and she asked us to wait in the little room, and she disappeared into her office only to reappear a few minutes later in full uniform, complete with epaulets, tassels, and a military-style beret. Her short, straightened hair with brick red highlights added a little stylish je ne sais quoi. Oh, and she carried a gold-tipped stick. I noticed during my twenty four hours in Nairobi that traffic police all seem to carry a blunt object as well – some seem to favor thick bat-like jobs that look like they come out of a riot gear catalogue – others seem to go for speed and agility with long, thin metal numbers. In any case, authority appears to come accompanied by the capacity to bop you on the head and make it hurt.

As the chief welcomed us, head after head peeked into the room, just to get a glance at the weird interlopers – a group of about a dozen people, including seven or eight non-Africans.

The Chief (note the little gold-tipped stick on the table)

Korogocho, Nairobi - Part One

Korogocho, with 500,00-800,000 people, the third largest slum in Nairobi.


I just landed in Kigali, Rwanda, but I owe an account of Monday’s visit to Korogocho – the third largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Here goes.

Korogocho is a heartbreaking community for so many reasons. To begin with, these people are among the poorest of the poor – sadly, there are far too many communities a lot like this one to say who’s got it worst, but it would be understating things to say that the conditions for these people are truly, truly grim. But without getting all “Triumph of the Spirit” on you, the thing that stands out in this community is that the people in it refuse to give up - the markets, while not quite the Union Square Greenmarket, are remarkably well-ordered, with beaten up toys or bits of wire or fresh tomatoes displayed to the best effect possible.




Scratching out a living in Korogocho.


I even came upon Korogocho’s Nordstrom - a stand that had six or seven evening dresses on offer, a bit the worse for wear maybe, but not terrible. A woman fingered the cloth, trying to decide between the blue one and the red one. And the children. Probably the most heartbreaking thing about poverty, especially epic poverty like this, is to see children in such dire circumstances. But these kids were so full of energy, even joy. Wherever we went, they’d come up to us and smile and say hi – and during the entire visit not a single person asked us for money – and they seemed amazingly unfazed by their situation. They’ve got to know that their lives are hard – much harder than most. They are undoubtedly exposed to popular culture and get to see what they don’t have – a real house with real walls, a floor, running water, decent food. They’ve got to know this, and that breaks my heart.



Korogocho is a community of some 500,000-800,000 people. Thirty years ago, people relocating from the countryside began to use government-owned land on the outskirts of Nairobi. They built rudimentary dwellings – mud and straw, mostly, with a little tin here and there. They don’t own the land, and slums like this are considered “illegal” communities, and thus the government is loathe to provide services like schools and medical care, and without title to the land, there has been no serious development.

There’s very minimal electricity (some people do jerry rigged connections to the few power lines that run overhead, but it’s dangerous and technically illegal), no running water, and certainly no sewage system. There are very large water cisterns, perhaps several hundred gallons, every few blocks, which is considered fairly modern. Next to the barrels are makeshift shops, where you can pay to fill your bucket and, crazily, top off your cell phone. In one of the poorest districts in this very poor country, you can top off your cell phone. If the real reformation ever comes to Kenya, it will be started with a cell phone.



Get water or minutes.

The public restrooms are pit latrines. When the latrines are full, young men remove the waste with their bare hands and fill large drums and then wheel it down to the river and dump it there. This is said to be a pretty well-paying and sought after job. At the moment there is a cholera outbreak downriver caused by the out of control dumping of human waste into the river. That there’s no mystery to the cause of cholera in the twenty-first century makes not a bit of difference here. While we were there we visited a so-called “bio-center,” financed by the government of Ireland, which will create public toilets with running water that compost the waste and use the offgas to fire communal ovens for cooking. My wife is fond of saying that good design solves a problem, and this project is at least a three-fer – sanitary bathrooms, less wood smoke from the incessant burning of cooking fires, free fuel for cooking, and less human waste in the river. But some people are said to be wary of cooking with such a fuel, and who can really blame them? In any case the three bio centers under construction will barely make a dent in the problem.

Diarrhea, TB, and of course HIV is rampant, and I mean rampant, in this community. Of all the children who die before their 5th birthday (it’s a lot, but I don’t have this stat yet), 18% are stillborn. Sewage runs in channels in the dirt streets, if you can call them streets. People keep goats around their dwellings, which I guess helps keep down the garbage just a bit, and they keep chickens as well, although this probably makes an excellent vector for avian flu and other bad things.

Uganda's Dept of Homeland Security

Just boarding my Rwandair flight to Kigali from Kampala. Basically, they let you loose on the tarmac and point you to the plane, which is somewhere over there. My guess is that Uganda is currently at threat level paisley.

Made it

Crikey, that was hairy. Sitting at the gate with a relatively cold Tusker beer in a terminal that brings to mind the Chungking Mansion (mansion being a wildly innacurate way of describing a big building), which is to say it's a dimly lit hall filled with shop after shop selling basically the same stuff.

Today was a day I'll never forget, and not because of the traffic jam. We toured Korogocho, the third-largest slum in Nairobi. Writing about this place will take some time, so bear with me. It's a place filled with amazing stories, unbearable hardship, and it reveals the kind of generosity and hope that humans are capable of even in the most dire circumstances.

My goal tonight is to fly to Kampala, get myself to the hotel, and write for as long as I can before I pass out.

The mother of all traffic jams

Oh my god, I am currently stuck in the absolute mother of them all on my way to the airport. The cars have crossed over the median and have taken over the oncoming lanes on the highway. I have never seen anything remotely like it.

Add to that the smog-belching diesel nastiness of all manner of bus, truck and jalopy and I can only pine for my happy old days on the DC beltway. We allowed an hour for the twenty minute trip and fifty five minutes in we're nowhere neat the airport. This is gonna be interesting, for sure.

Not in kansas

On one TV in the gym this morning - CNN, natch. On the other, Al Jazeera. Just like at the Toledo Hampton Suites!

London-Nairobi

I’m looking around the plane, and I could be on a flight from Columbus to Dubuque. What the hell are all these people doing going to Nairobi? I can see, in my field of vision, at least a dozen people waaay wimpier than me. And yet. My most intrepid colleague, who’s been to Africa, oh, fifty times, wrote me the following actual note: “Bon Voyage. Don’t drink the water, wash your hands, don’t eat anything you can’t peel or isn’t cooked, no ice, don’t make eye contact.” She forgot to tell me not to drink the blood from the neck of a live cow, so maybe that’s still an option, as long as I don’t look the cow in the eye.

I’m a New Yorker! I wandered the streets during the Abe Beame administration and lived to tell about it. I survived the blackout of ’77. That place was a hellhole, and I did fine, and I was twelve.

On the other other hand, while my guidebook says moderately nice things about my hotel, it nevertheless cautions “under no circumstances should you leave your hotel at night.” Oh, goody. I’ll bet you Keflavik doesn’t have these kinds of problems.
And so I embark upon a journey that would make a Japanese tourist tired. It goes like this:

Monday – Nairobi, Kenya
Tuesday – Kampala, Uganda
Wed-Fri – Kigali, Rwanda
Sat-Tues – Cape Town, South Africa
Wed – Durban, South Africa
Thursday – Johannesburg, South Africa
Thursday night – Leave
Friday – arrive at home and plotz

The goal of this ridiculous cram session? Learn as much about what we do in Africa in as little time as possible. I’ve been warned that this will be no cakewalk. Tomorrow we will visit one of the worst slums in Nairobi, called Korogocho, and observe how our grantees are assessing the health needs of some of the poorest people in the world. Part of my goal is to document the work – talk to people, shoot video, take photos, and tell meaningful stories about what the problems are and how we think we can help to solve them.

I’ve never been so excited and so intimidated by a trip in my life. Wish me luck.


Flying over the Sahara – that, my friends, is a big damn desert.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, near Keflavik, so they tell me.

I particularly love the map view on the seat backs, which were obviously programmed by deranged geography geeks. For example, we just flew past a very large unnamed large island whose only notable town is that famed metropolis, Keflavik. “Where are we, dear?” “Just passed Keflavik, hon.” “Oh, good, we’re getting close.” (Further research revealed the island to be Iceland, which I have, in fact, heard of.) As we crossed Canada, I saw that we flew over that other important hotspot, Kuujjuaq, which was mighty helpful in orienting myself. Can you imagine, though, the sheer joy of the Kuujjuaq Chamber of Commerce when they found out they’d made the map? “Dude! We made the United Airlines map! Let’s build condos!”

Pre-boarding – SFO to London

I didn’t make my first trip out of North America until I was twenty nine years old, (just after I graduated college, but that’s a long story). My wife sold her car and we used the money for a month-long trip to Europe, and the travel bug bit. We wandered the continent like we knew what we were doing, and still talk about that trip. Since then, we go where we can when we can, dragging our amazingly intrepid daughter along – we’ve lived in Japan, taken trips to Southeast Asia, been to Europe a number of times, stuff like that.

Among my colleagues, this puts me about in the category of those old people you hear about who’ve never left the holler. I’m the equivalent of a toothless guy rocking on the porch, smoking a corncob pipe, who’s been dreaming of making the trip over the next ridge, and maybe before I die, all the way to Wheeling. Many of my colleagues spend almost as much time in Europe, Asia, and Africa as they spend at home. These are serious, badass travelers. We even have friends who moved to Yemen! For me, a trip to Africa makes my mouth a little dry.

Basically, what I know about Africa I learned from the television show Bizarre Foods, in which a profoundly color blind guy (judging from the collision of pastels that makes up his wardrobe) spends afternoons singing throat clicking songs in far-flung villages, eating weird food like this kind of stew made partly from dirt (not kidding) or drinking blood from the neck of a live cow (also not kidding). I have a feeling that they edited out the part where the host is doubled over, retching into a ditch somewhere, and has to be airlifted out for organ transplants. Anyway, while I harbor such goals in life, I’m not quite there yet. And I have a feeling that I may not do any throat clicking on this trip. In fact, I don’t know what to expect.

All Aboard!

Stay tuned - leaving tomorrow for Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg, with station stops at Ronconcoma, Princeton Junction and Newark.