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.