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
Got in to Zambia late
Friday night after a typical African trip – flying from Harare to Johannesburg in South Africa before coming up here to Lusaka. Easier just to fly through Johannesburg than it is to fly direct in many of these countries. And man, Johannesburg is gearing up for the World Cup next year. The whole airport has been redone – sparkling clean.
Spent the weekend here with a doctor who does work for the group InterPlast – they do reconstructive surgeries for people across Africa. Dr. Goran is one of only two plastic surgeons in the whole country. He does hundreds of surgeries a year from cleft pallet surgeries to burns and snake bites. This weekend he saw some patients post-op, then went to a vet clinic and did an operation on a dog that had some tumors on its head. I went back Sunday and saw him do a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from the foot of a yellow lab. Interesting stuff. I’m meeting him again in a bit as he has a surgery scheduled for this afternoon on the thumb of a little girl who was badly burned awhile back. Should be interesting.
July 27th, 2009 | by David in Travel
Three weeks now in Zimbabwe – 10 days of it in the bush down south, and the rest working for IOM and Caritas Internationalis else ware in the country. I’ve been here to Zimbabwe several times before, but I have to say I’m seeing it with new eyes this time. When I was last here – in July 2007 – it was a different place. Tensions were high then as Mugabe’s government clashed with MDC rivals, and the hapless Zim dollar spiraled into absurd rates of inflation. Supermarket shelves were literally empty – harkening back to the television images I remember from my childhood of the shelves of the Soviet Union of the 1970’s and 80s, where women waited in endless lines on the off chance something, anything, might be available that day.
But Zimbabwe today is different. With the end of price controls earlier this year, and the break from the Zim dollar to a range of stable international currencies, things have improved dramatically. Almost overnight, the shelves were again stocked as merchants could finally make a profit on what they sold. With supply increasing, prices fell, and you’re starting to hear the first signs of what was so noticeably missing the last time I was here twox years ago: optimism.
That said, the rural poor are still struggling mightily. I spent the day today way down south on the border with Botswana, and families there are still facing the full brunt of the economic collapse. Being so close to the border, many in the village of Mbade had left in years past to find any work they could across the border. Many of them left their families behind, abandoned completely to the hope of a new life in a new country. They will not return. That probably more than anything I have seen here is most indicative of the real impact of the crisis the people here have faced in recent years.
But I am struck by one thing about the people of Zimbabwe, above everything else – their unshakable kindness, even amid such hardships. I have seen many countries in Africa, but I honestly believe Zimbabweans are the friendliest of any I have met. It is a lesson for us all perhaps, amid the monumental hardships these people have suffered in years past. I hope, finally, the corner has been turned, but I, unlike the people of Zimbabwe, am not an optimist.
July 21st, 2009 | by David in Travel
Poaching is not a new problem in Africa, but when you see it first hand, on the scale I saw it last week, you cannot help but face the full scale of the crisis facing Africa’s wildlife. Using wire cut, ironically, from the fencing used by landowners to protect areas of their farms from wild game, or to protect game itself. After cutting the wire, poachers make simple loops, securing one end of the wire to a nearby tree or log and suspending the other over a likely game trail. Animals can be caught in several ways – around the neck as they walk into the snare, or even around the midsection if both front feet pass through the loop. Others may be caught around horns, or around one or both feet. As soon as they put pressure on the loop it tightens, and when the animal panics, they are all but trapped.
In the space of the 8 days we were in the bush we easily recovered over 100 snares. In that same time we saw 5 different poachers, and were nearly stampeded by a herd of young buffalo being chased by a pack of dogs, another tactics used by poachers to wear down their game, which they then spear when it’s too exhausted to run farther.
One day we came across a kudu bull – a large spiral horned antelope, the adult bulls of which might weight in the range of 800 pounds. This bull had been caught in a snare, which gripped him around the mid section, and against which he was struggling violently when we came upon him. As I distracted the bull from the front, a game ranger approached from the rear and cut the wire that held him, freeing him back into the bush.
Others we came across were not so luck. On the first day we found another young kudu that had been killed in a snare, his bones and a set of hors all that remained of where the poachers had found him, killed him, and butchered him.
Snares also cause grievous injuries – a hazard to both game and people. Large animals like elephants and Africa’s dangerous Cape buffalo can often break free of snares set for smaller game, but not before pulling the wire tight on their legs of necks in an effort to escape. The wounds that wire causes can become infected, posing serious risks to locals as the animals suffer with pain and often lash out at anyone who stumbles upon them, often with fatal results. One member of our group came across an elephant bull with a badly injured leg, a snare still visible wrapped around his low leg - which escaped he and his guide before a game ranger could come to dart the animal. The same anger said that 6 of the 7 Cape buffalo shot by hunters on the property last year had evidence of snare wounds.
Whatever your position on hunting, remember this: it is only when Africa’s wildlife is valued that it can be saved. Wealthy hunters, many of them American and European, are willing and eager to pay huge amounts of money to hunt Africa’s species, all of which are carefully counted by each country’s game departments to determine exactly how many of each species, if any, can be take out of the population each year to sustain a healthy herd. Elephant hunts can costs upwards of $40,000 – $50,000 in many countries in Africa – even more in others – money that supports a huge range of local industry, and in turn ensures that all involved do all they can to preserve the species for the future. Poachers have no such goals. So weather you belong to PETA, or the NRA, you need to be thinking about how to stop the poaching that is slaughtering Africa’s wildlife before there is none left for either side to argue over.
July 12th, 2009 | by David in Travel | 1 Comment
As always on these trips, it’s been a busy week. We were traveling down around Fieri in southern Albania, and spent the week interviewing farmers who had received cows or pigs from Heifer International. From what I’ve seen the process of providing a cow – or sheep or goats – to a poor family is essentially like micro credit, only with animals, not money. That cow, say, reproduces each year. According to the Heifer structure, the family then passes on one calf to another family, and can then do as they with the offspring after that. Mean time, the animal produces milk, which they can consume, or sell, or make into cheese or yoghurt to sell. Over time, it works like compound interest. If your cow gives birth each spring, you double your investment every year, which makes a huge difference for a poor rural farmer.
Being on small farms all weeks reminds you, one, how easy life is for those of us in the West, where in the US for example less than 2% of the population still lives on farms. The rest of us buy or meat already packaged, drink milk from cows we never see, and flick a switch or push a button to cook a meal. Nothing is that quick or easy on a farm.
But what really strikes you when you spend time on farms here is just how close the families are – physically, because they often share the same house, or simply build new houses on the same property as the children grow and marry – but also just close knit. I spent a lot of time photographing children this week, and it strikes you just how easily entertained they are. They play with animals, carry each other around, spend 20 minutes just trying to knock ripe fruit from the tops of trees. They don’t miss all of the distractions we heap on our kids in the US. There are no Ipods or computer games or DVDs. They don’t plunk down in front of a screen for hours on end. I really think we’re on the wrong path as far as that goes in the US.
So, packing up and off to the airport in an hour or two. Have a week to get this trip all wrapped up, then a week to pack, and I’m off to Africa for a long stretch…
June 14th, 2009 | by David in Travel
Back in Albania, after ten years. Can’t believe I’m getting old enough o say things like that, but indeed it has been a decade since I was here last, in 1999. Then, a million refugees from the neighboring Kosovo province were on the move in Eastern Europe, many of them streaming across the borders into Albania to escape the violence tearing Kosovo apart at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic. How times have changed. I remember Albania distinctly then, largely because it was a formative experience for me, to witness a full scale CNN emergency first hand. It was my first real emergency experience, working then for Catholic Relief Services, and though I have been to many since, I have to say I was eager to come back and see how the Albania of today matched my memories of those weeks here a decade ago.
I only got in yesterday, so I don’t as yet have much to go on. But my first impressions are positive. A new airport has replaced the old, Communist era terminals I recalled. The gleaming new one has wireless internet and a sleek, open design the Communists never could have dreamed up. With the weather sunny an in the 80s, we walked to dinner last night at a nearby Italian restaurant. Everywhere, people were out strolling, the women in outfits both smaller and more sophisticated than I recall from my time here in 1999. For diner I had a nicely-prepared ostrich steak – one of the menu items I miss most from my Africa days – and two cold Tirana beers.
Albania is still in transition, and is currently facing an unemployment rate of 30%, according to the briefing we received by national staff at Heifer International this morning. Rural unemployment is even higher, and more than 12% of the country’s 3.5 million people live on less than $50 a month. But I get the feeling – first impressions at least – that Albania has come far in the last ten years.
June 14th, 2009 | by David in Travel | 1 Comment
I’m in a small courtyard just now, on a beautiful morning in east central Romania. Sighisoara isn’t not known for much, save as the birthplace of the Dracula – born here in 1431, says the placard on his house a hundred yards or so down the street. Not much time to write – busy busy trip - but my first to Romania. Beautiful country – lush and green, with the Old Europe charm of tile roofs and cottage-dotted hillsides. Been visiting small villages for Heifer International which as the name implies provides cows – goats, sheep, and other livestock as well – to poor families around the world. They are then able to multiply those animals and earn income from the milk produces – sort of like microcredit with bovines. But it works – pretty amazing, actually, how just a cow can change someones life in such areas of the world.
Here for a few more days, then off to Albania on Sunday. I’ve been there before, but not since 1999, so interested to get back and take another look. Sorry for so short a blog – just not too often you get to hang out in Dracula’s home village…
June 4th, 2009 | by David in Travel
Last night in Beirut. Been a busy week – they always are – but busy with trainings rather than with photos, which is my usual work when I’m on the road. So, bit of a different twist for me on this pass through. No matter how much I travel, it still always sort of amazes me to pass back through the same place you’ve already traveled. In fact, I’m two doors down from the room I stayed in Beirut’s Ashrifiyeh neighborhood during the summer of 2006. Then, Israeli jets were bombing the southern suburbs of the city – which I could watch from the balcony of the office nearby, and which I could certainly hear from my own room. Last night someone set off some big fireworks from that part of town, and for a second I was instantly back there. So strange to me how small the world can be when you move around in it as often as I do.
On a bit of a whitewater tour at the moment – caught up in the rapids as it were. Back to the US tomorrow for two days, then off to Europe for a couple weeks, then back for two weeks and off for what is shaping up to be a long Africa trip. Spring and summer always seem so busy. But life is good – beats a desk job.
May 25th, 2009 | by David in Travel
Back in Lebanon after only a few months – you never quite know in this work where you’ll end up and how quickly you’ll be back. This trip so different from most that I take in that it’s centered mostly around training – while all of my others are for photos and stories. Working here with OTI – the Office of Transition Initiatives – part of USAID here in Lebanon. They work with local partners to build their capacity in a range of areas. Each day this week I’ve been giving trainings on how to take better photos. It’s a training I’ve given often enough before, and one that’s catching on with a lot of NGO’s because of the huge need that exists out there for better photos from NGO staff and partners.
The idea first took root years ago when I used to edit newsletters for Catholic Relief Services. Often I would see the same kinds of mistakes repeated over and over again in the photos staff brought back from the field. 13 years later I still see those same mistakes being constantly repeated in the photos used by other NGO’s. After a few hours of class time, looking over a wide range of photos and discussing what works and what doesn’t, we head outside to take photos, then come back in, upload the shots we just took, and collectively look them over, deciding what we like and what we don’t like.
The feedback has been great, I think because it’s very hands on and very practical. The shots people have come back with after only a few hours of class time have been fantastic as well, I have to say.
Fourth time now in Lebanon. Always a fascinating trip, for so many reasons.
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