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
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
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