You forget, when you haven’t done emergency work in awhile, just how strange a scene these things can be. I;m at a hotel tonight after week of camping on a rooftop. And I’m camping here as well, in teh small yard in front of the hotel, which is filled to double occupancy with aid workers from around the world. I ran into several old friends already, which is always nice, especially in an emergency. I’m tired after 5 days, and people have been here for almost 7 weeks now, some of them. To say nothing of the Haitians, sleeping outdoors till, many of them, for fear of going back inside. It’s common after earthquakes – people are traumatized, an the thought of being killed or pinned by falling rubble is too much for weeks and months after a big quake like this one. Its hot and humid at night now, but mosquitoes are a problem. Malaria rates will surge in the coming weeks as teh rains come, and with them the standing water in the more than 300 camps will certainly breed disease. A woman died of typhoid in one of the camps today, but this far there is nothing like an epidemic, which is a rare piece of good news. Midnight now – off to my tent.
February 24th, 2010 | by David in Travel | 1 Comment
A word tonight from Port au Prince. I’m typing between two chairs, hunched over for the third or fourth hour now so please forgive any typos. Got in yesterday on the second day of commercial flights, Baltimore to Maimi, Miami to Port au Prince. Spending these first few days with the CDC – Centers for Disease Control – which is always an interesting experience. Basically they are doing what they call shoe leather surveillance, which means getting out physically to the largest of the more than 300 camps that now dot the city like ragged pock marks, sheltering many of the more than 1.1 million people now in need of shelter here. After any such disaster, rescuing survivors is always the first priority. But with that phase over – Haiti has lost as many as 230,000 people – the next great worry is disease, even as aid agencies scramble to provide food, water and shelter to survivors.
The CDC is here to prevent the type of outbreaks that made the Goma camps of the early 1990’s a nightmare, where hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, many of them complicit in the recent genocide in Rwanda, crowded unsanitary camps just across the border in Goma, Congo
. Thousands died there of cholera, which spreads rapidly once the genie gets out of the bottle in a crowded camp. The team I am here following is out and about, working with NGO’s in the camps to help them to serve as the front line of reporters for potential outbreaks of things like cholera, typhoid or malaria. Once the system is up and functioning fully, in about a month, medical staff in the many camps can report suspicious illnesses and provide the samples needed for further testing, so that any potential outbreaks can be quelled quickly.
Following that CDC team I spent a few hours today in two of the camps here. The first, now covering most of what used to be an airfield on the edge of the city, is home to 43,000 people, living under plastic tarps, mostly. Others are building with wood and even corrugated metal salvaged from their homes or the remnants of others, now destroyed. For the conditions, I found people remarkably upbeat. People smiled, posed, and joked. It never ceases to amaze me how resilient human beings can be. One man with a badly burned leg called me over and posed for a photo. I came across a boy of maybe 14 in another camp flying a kite, despite the third degree burn on his wrist, the result of a cooking fire accident in the camp. The fact that the wound was open and untreated, however, is a prime example of just how vulnerable these displaced remain and just how much work remains to be done.
February 21st, 2010 | by David in Travel
Again, I marvel at those how find time on such trips to post blogs each day. I know I’m supposed to be linked, minute by minute, to the rest of the world in this global IT age, but I wonder if people are connecting with each other every minute, when do they have time to live their lives? So busy have I been here in Peru that I haven’t had time to write a single blog. I got here on the 10th and took a rare bit of ime off in the midst of these trips to go to Macchu Pichu. The site itself was amazing, as you would imagine – an ancient civilization frozen in time. But everything leading up to it – the town of Cuzco where most tourists leave from to reach Macchu Picchu, and the town of Aguas Calientes at the base of the mountain itself, are everything that has gone wrong in a gloablized world. Every shop in the ancient town of Cuzco, one the Inca capital, is either a money exchange, a tourist booking agency or a restaurant – including a McDonalds, tucked into a corner of the ancient square.
Working for three different agencies this week has been interesting. Perhaps the oddest moment came last night when I was literally shooting photos in a gay sauna for a health agency while talking on the phone with a priest to coordinate today’s work at a seminary outside of Lima. Such is often my life on these trips. In fact, have to run now and find this seminary…
December 20th, 2009 | by David in Travel
Just over a week now in Brazil. I came down last week for the CDC Foundation, who are supporting a range of projects up in the state of Amazonas, in Brazil’s vast northwest. Amazonas is Brazil’s largest state, but also, I believe, its least densely populated. As the name implies it encompasses a vast swathe of Amazon forest, and is bisected west to east by the Amazon River or its tributaries. I spent four days in the city of Manaus, the state capital, which though interesting also represented my failure to reach a smaller town upriver known as Coari. After many years of living and traveling in Africa I thought I was prepared for the many small hurdles you have to jump to get things done, on any given day. But this effort to reach Coari ranks up there as one of the most frustrating. The tickets that were supposed to be waiting for us to take a boat upriver were in fact not waiting for us. So, we booked a plane ticket for the next day and went to work getting pics in Manaus. After a three-hour delay for a technical problem with the plane the next day, that flight was also scratched. Returning the next morning for what we were told was a definite flight up to Coari, we boarded the small 10 seater aircraft, took off, and at 2,600 feet began descending again. The pilot returned to the airport and announced that the problem from the day before had not in fact been fixed, flight delayed or canceled. Since that left us only one day in Coari, and the distinct possibility of being stuck up there if the return flight didn’t work out, we ended up never reaching Coari.
I flew into Sao Paulo three days ago – by far the largest city I have ever been too, with over 12 million people and a city center that stretches for miles. Yesterday we drove out to a project site. The drive, I was told, was over 20 miles, and took over an our in Sao Paulo’s legendary traffic, and still we were in the city of Sao Paulo when we arrived. I am shooting photos here today and tomorrow for two other agencies, then I am off Thursday morning for Peru. Though a very busy trip, with very long days, Brazil I can see is an amazing country. The diversity here is fantastic, from a photographer’s standpoint, and between the rain forests of the Amazon and the famous beaches of the east the country offers much – if not efficiency in travel by small aircraft.
December 8th, 2009 | by David in Travel
A very rare entry from inside the US for me. Came down to Atlanta last week to do some work for the CDC Foundation. I worked for them this past summer in Kenya, so it was interesting to see the other side of things here in the US. Spent the week interviewing and photographing scientists and researchers at the CDC labs, which are as impressive as you’d expect them to be. Thursday last week I interviewed Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, and a major contributor to the CDC.
But today, I spoke with Dr. Joe Boone, who had worked for the CDC for 32 years. Now he works for a science and technology company here in Atlanta as a sort of relationship manager between the CDC and the company he works for. During his time at the CDC he worked with a woman named Louise Martin – a veterinarian for the CDC who was killed in the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998. After her death, friends and colleagues started an endowment to honor her memory, which pays the way for African girls to go to school each year. Dr. Boone has encouraged his new employer to contribute to the fund, which is managed by the CDC Foundation.
The story is interesting to me in particular because I know the girls who are going to school in Kenya thanks to the Martin Scholarship. I met them on my trip there last summer. It is, from the shiny glass and steel office buildings of down town Atlanta, one of those brief melding of your two worlds that you experience when you do this sort of work long enough – a connection to some part of what feels like another life when you leave someplace like Africa and come back to the US.
November 5th, 2009 | by David in Travel
I’m in Healthrow airport in London, on the last bar of my battery power – both literally and figuratively. I’m on my way home at the tail end of a long Africa trip. For the sake of amusement, with a 9-hour layover, I’m sitting here crunching some numbers from this trip.
In all, by my count, I’ve been traveling for 81 strait days now. In that time I’ve had one day off with no work, 7 in hotels writing or on the road traveling all day, and 73 days of in the field work – out shooting photos. I’ve ridden in public buses, private planes, and one matatu in Kenya – a suicidal experience of public transport. Since June 29 I’ve shot, by estimate, more than 30,000 photos, and written captions for about 4,000 of those. I’ve recorded 7 1/2 hours of video tape, and written 45 stories, blogs, or interview write-ups. I’ve been to or through 7 countries – South Africa, three times, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, twice, and Tanzania.
In the last 81 days I’ve seen an elephant shot on a hunt in Zimbabwe, had a hairy landing in a tiny Cessna on a wind-blown airfield in Mozambique and gotten sick three times – including now, in just my last two days of traveling. I spent a day with CDC staff tracking potential outbreaks in the slums of Nairobi, and saw drought withering eastern Kenya and southern Tanzania. I saw a one year old girl on Tuesday who weighs 7 pounds, a victim of malnutrition in Kenya’s drought-plagued east, and I spoke with women who walk as far as 16 miles a day to fetch water, which they carry home, on their back, each and every day of their lives.
I turned 39 – and figured out that I spent every single one of my 30-something birthdays overseas. On the way to the airport in Nairobi last night I saw a man get hit by a matatu –(he ran off, apparently fine), and have seen about 500 almost-accidents. I went to a dinner party at an old friend’s house in Kenya, where one of the guests spent the evening on the phone coordinating the drop off of ransom money for Somali pirates – apparently a family business of his, as his father was arrested and spent a few days in a Somalia jail a few days later, I was told. In the first four weeks of this trip I lost 6 pounds. In the last 53 days I gained all 6 back plus one.. I stayed in five star hotels 30 yards from the Indian Ocean, and I stayed in $14 a night hotels with no electricity, and lots of mosquitoes. I bought 6 pounds worth of gifts, if the scale at Jomo Kenyatta Airport is accurate, and logged, by estimated count, 24 flights with five different carriers, and one private Cessna.
And I remembered, amid all of that, how much I miss my life overseas, and how difficult it can be at times to return home to the suburbs of Baltimore, where almost no one outside my family and immediate friends knows I’ve even been away this summer. I don’t mean that in a ‘poor me’ sort of way. I suppose it’s just difficult to get even your head around it sometimes – the gap that exists between the lives you lead when you do this kind of work.
September 18th, 2009 | by David in Travel | 1 Comment
So easy to let days get away from you on trips like this, when they all sort of blend into one after a few weeks. I’m always amazed that bloggers can find time – and internet access – to update their websites every day on trips. I’m lucky if I can get to it once a week, between 17 hours days and days on end with no e-mail access.
Feel I’m in the home stretch now on this trip. Wrapped up a week with the CDC Foundation today, doing captions and stories. It’s my first time working with them and they are a pretty remarkable organization. Spent all week with Center for Disease Control staff here in Kenya, seeing how they monitor potential disease outbreaks. I always wondered. It is, in short, much more hands on than I imagined. In Kibera, the big settlement just outside Nairobi I wrote of earlier, they have 27 community interviewers who spend 5 days a week, sometimes more, going house to house in their areas, interviewing and tracking the dame families for years. They do this every single week, asking the same questions to fid out if anyone in the house is sick, or if anyone has gone to the clinic in the previous week. All of that information gets entered into a larger database so that CDC staff, and the Ministry of Health here in Kenya, can monitor any potential outbreaks, like cholera, that would quickly work it’s way through a densely-packed area like Kibera. It’s good to know there are people out there checking on that stuff. And they are a smart bunch.
September 6th, 2009 | by David in Travel
While travel in the developing world often gives you a glimpse of the past – what the world was like before tractors and machinery, running water or electricity – I find, more and more, it is offering glimpses of the future, and it is not a happy one. If you count yourself among the world’s shrinking number of skeptics about the impact of global warming, you need to come to southern Tanzania – or to Kenya, or to Zambia, or to Zimbabwe, or to just about anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – and I’m certain your illusions will fade fast.
As I write this from a plastic table at a small motel in the town of Same (sa-may), a few tiny raindrops are splattering my computer screen. And though the rainy seasons is just beginning here, that is all this region is likely to see for awhile, according to the locals – villagers and water and sanitation engineers alike – that I spent the last two days with. Like many parts of East Africa, Tanzania is subject to increasingly frequent and increasingly severe droughts. For us in the West, that means no watering the lawn. For those here in rural Tanzania it means upheaval, displacement, and possible catastrophe. For the women I met today at a water point not too far out of town, it means a 14 kilometer walk, each day, to gather a single five gallon bucket of water from a distant water point when theirs isn’t turned on – which it isn’t, 6 of every 7 days due to water restrictions. From that five gallon bucket, one woman I met must wash all of her family’s clothes, cook their meals, and have enough left over for drinking water and, occasionally, bathing. There are six in her family. Ask yourself if you could use less than one gallon of water day. Ask yourself again, especially if you are a woman, if you could spend 8 to 10 hours, 6 days a week, on a quest for water, because that’s how long it takes to walk 7 kilometers, wait for dozens of other women to fill their buckets from a single tap, and walk 7 kilometers home.
And while drought is not unusual in Africa, what has me feeling a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge on this trip, visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, is that the water shortages here now are not just related to the drought. In 1997, the village of Masandare, where I spent the day, was placed on a three day a week water ration by the newly formed water authority, which recognized that there simply was not enough water for the district’s burgeoning population. For locals that meant you had access to water from your local borehole for three days of every week. The other days you walked to distant sites to fetch it.
That was 12 years ago, and water was already scarce, In 2002, that ration amount was dropped to twice each week – same water, more people. Today, it is once a week, and the water is still disappearing. The consequences of so little water form a chain reaction. Men take the cattle further in further in search of water, and desperate animals graze on any green they can find, bringing herders and pastoralists into conflict. Vegetation, once killed by overgrazing, gives up its hold on the soil, and erosion kicks in, which in turn kills other vegetation, and blows away the precious topsoil, which then yields fewer and fewer crops until, eventually planting is impossible. Poverty increases, and poor people are poor managers of their environment. In Zimbabwe, where I was earlier on this trip, the animals in the wild areas I visited are being slaughtered by poachers on a scale you cannot imagine – simple victims of hunger. This poaching has already wiped out the wild game populations of much of Zimbabwe’s rural areas – so much so that I seriously doubt they will come back in my lifetime. More rural poor are flocking to the overcrowded cities in search of work – cities built in the 1950’s and 60’s to hold a quarter of the population they now hold. In Nairobi on my way here, it was completely normal to spend an hour traveling 2 or 3 kilometers within the city, the narrow roads completely choked with traffic, a dramatic difference from just four years ago when I lived there. In Haiti, where I was earlier this year, an hour for a 4 kilometer ride would be quick. And it is only getting worse.
If you think all of this sounds too pessimistic, too gloomy to be true, you must live in America, or Western Europe. Because the rest of the world doesn’t need Al Gore to tell them the planet is sick, and we are the virus that is killing it. Do yourself a favor. The next time you brush your teeth, turn the tap water off. The next time you want to wash your car, don’t. And just because you buy energy efficient light bulbs, you are not a conservationist. We need, all of us, to think drastically differently about how we are using our resources, because every time I take a trip now I see, more and more, what the future will look like if we don’t do something immediate and drastic. Because I have seen what is coming, and it genuinely scares me. 
August 28th, 2009 | by David in Travel
Finishing up a week or so here in Mozambique – a week of firsts in that it’s my first trip to Mozambique. It was, until last Monday, the only country in southern Africa that I hadn’t been too, and I’ve wanted to see it for years. It is by most measures what I’d heard about it – depending on who you ask it is a country of desperate poverty, where the average life expectancy is 41 years old – and spectacularly beauty, as the white sand islands along the Indian Ocean coastline is as spectacular as any you will find in the world.
I was working this week for a group called Joint Aid Management (JAM), whose foundation has an interesting story. The founder got stuck on what was supposed to be a one-day trip here in 1985 – at the peak of Mozambique’s brutal civil war. When the plane that dropped him off couldn’t return for 10 days, he lived among the refugees in the camp he was visiting, burying, he told me, 30 people a day. The experience impacted him profoundly and he launched JAM as a way to help.
What I saw this week were school feeding programs. Supported by a grant form senators McGovern and Dole in the US, the grant provides two years worth of corn soy blend for schools in the program. The blend is turned into a porridge that provides 75% of the RDA for calories and nutrition for kids, and its used widely in Africa and around the world. By providing meals at schools, JAM is enabling children who would otherwise have had to drop out to work in the fields with the chance to get an education – in my opinion the only real chance Africa has for a better future.
All week I was flying around in a tiny Cessna aircraft that JAM provided. It makes it much easier to cover the massive distances involved here, especially on the bad roads. A plane turns an 8-hour drive into a one-hour flight. All went smoothly until my last landing, here in Maputo yesterday. Just as we touched down a massive tail wind hit the plane and lift the tail off the ground. For a long few seconds we were tilting down the runway on what the pilot said later was one of our three wheels, careening sharply toward the left side of the tarmac. I don’t need that much excitement with 40 days of travel still to go.
August 8th, 2009 | by David in Travel
I’m at that point in a long trip that I always, eventually, arrive at. Been on the road now for just over a month, and arrived today in Mozambique – my third country in that time. Eventually I always reach this point - a sort of traveler’s numbness, where things start to run together. The programs and the agencies running them sort of blur – school feeding and Home Based Care and Orphans and Vulnerable Children – Maputo and Ndola, Lusaka and Shangane. It’s not a complaint – just a statement of where I am right now, mentally as well as physically. I got word today that another group tacked on some more time to the trip, which is great – so I’m looking at a mid-September return, from a June 29 start. Three more countries after this week.
Much of that time with be in Kenya, which I’m much looking forward to as I lived there for four years. I passed through South Africa today – the airport in Johannesburg, at least – and was reminded again of that odd melancholy you get when you pass back through a place you used to live, and where you shared such a seminal part of your life with so many other good people. It’s like going back to your old university and seeing your old dorm room – that sort of longing familiarity for something that cannot be again again, and which, though you tried, you never really appreciated when you had it. Kenya is like that for me, and though I still have a few good friends there I’ll be seeing, the whole country is a memory for me.
So, my first time in Mozambique. Just at the hotel now. Will wash of, grab a dinner, and be ready to go at 6:30 tomorrow for what sounds like a busy week with Joint Aid Management.
August 3rd, 2009 | by David in Travel
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