Palmer in Africa

Book Deal

2009-03-24T05:53:00.002-08:00

I signed a deal with Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to publish a book about Ghana's witch camps in 2010.

“In your country…”

2007-05-24T04:29:00.000-08:00

I had just dropped my passport at the sleepy Tamale branch of Ghana Immigration so I could get my 60-day visa extended to the end of my trip (“Why do you want to stay in Ghana?” Oh, um, stammer, stammer. Jeez, who knew these questions would be so difficult…) when a police officer stepped into traffic, stopped the motorbike I was riding, confiscated it and arrested the driver.

It all happened so suddenly, and so strangely, that it took me a while to realize what was going on.

“Do they do this like this in your country?” the police officer shouted at me, gesturing wildly. “Are you able to do this like this in your country?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Do what? Do men on motorbikes ferry me around while I run errands? (No, they do not, but sometimes I wish they would.)

He was looking at me as though he expected an answer, so I said, “Do you know my country?” (Sometimes I get mistaken for being Dutch, and you know, they have some pretty interesting ideas about what’s legal and what’s not over there in Holland.)

It then became clear that the cause of this Oscar-worthy performance of law-and-order fury was the fact that Daniel, the motorbike driver, was not wearing a helmet. Daniel, looking sheepish, pushed his bike into the police station – conveniently located a mere 12 steps away – where it was parked and the keys were locked away in a cabinet.

Whether it is a law in Ghana that a motorbike driver must wear a helmet is unclear to me. I’m not really sure that the laws are written anywhere easily accessible. I really wanted to ask – “May I see the article of the Traffic Act to which you are referring? I’d like to see the proscribed punishment” – but my job was clearly to just stand there, quietly.

The arresting officer made a small speech about how this was all for Daniel’s safety. Does he want to have an accident, have his brains spread all over the street, then be taken to the hospital there and have the doctor write, “serious brain injury” on the paper?

No sir, he does not.

You see all these bikes? (There were dozens upon dozens of them, including some old bicycles. Now, I know for a fact it’s not a law in Ghana that a cyclist must wear a helmet…) Then the message became garbled. I thought he was trying to say these bikes were all from people who were not wearing helmets and therefore had their brains spread on the street, but it turned out they were from people who were not wearing helmets as they passed the police station, were also conveniently arrested and then were unable to pay the, um, fine.

Daniel, who is a government employee, a civil engineer in the department of public works, just stood at the counter. I leaned against it and eyed up the prisoners. Every so often I would sigh. Especially when the “massa” would break from writing his report to study the latest in wrestling videos (“Me, I’m growing tired. Tired of these wrestlers,” he said) or talk on his mobile phone or yell at the prisoners.

He told Daniel he would be sending him to court on Friday. Daniel continued to stand by the counter. He asked him to give his mobile phone number and Daniel dutifully gave 10 digits. He told him to sign a paper, so he signed.

I continued to lean.

“What is your explanation?” the officer said.

“I forgot my helmet. I forgot it at the office,” Daniel said.

Several minutes went by as this was scratched down on the paper.

“What else?” the office asked.

“That is all,” Daniel said.

“You have nothing else to say?”

“Um, no.”

“Where is your license?”

“In my car.”

“And where is that?”

“At the mechanics.”

“Well, you go and collect it and bring it here.”

So we left. Ghanaians do not need a license to drive a motorbike – just a helmet, apparently – so when the officer asked “where is your license,” what he meant was, “where is your wallet?”

I talked it over with Daniel and he suggested it would be better if I continued to the Internet café. (I am somehow a bad luck charm for him – the day before, when we were riding out to Gambaga – in his Benz, no less – we hit a sheep. The only casualty was his tail light.)

But the officer’s question -- “can you do like this in your country?” -- got me wondering. Since we enjoy public health care, helmets are mandatory for the driver and all passengers of any kind of two-wheeled vehicle, so, no, I could not be ferried around helmetless in Toronto.

But can the police “do like this” in Canada?

My dealings with Canadian police have been rather limited. I was once in the truck when Dad got a ticket for driving around with an overloaded, um, load. And, in a humiliation to end all humiliations, I was once busted for running a red light. On my bike. By a cop on a bike. The earth did not open up and swallow me, as I’d begged for it to do, so instead I got off with a warning. It took weeks for the flush in my cheeks to fade.

Otherwise, my dealings with Canadian cops have been of the Can-I-speak-to-the-duty-sergeant/anything-to-report/lady-you-gotta-be-on-the-other-side-of-the-yellow-tape variety. I am fairly certain, though, that the police cannot seize your car if you, say, fail to wear a seatbelt.

Of course, they can’t set up random roadblocks, stop every commercial vehicle and taxi and collect their own wages from the drivers in the form of folded 5,000 cedi notes tucked into driver’s permits either.

Are you able to do this in your country? Why, no, Mr. Officer. If this happened in my country, one of us would end up in a lot of hot water.

Through the Looking Glass

2007-04-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

The new Casa del Karen -- without the groovy terrace or the excellent washing machine -- but with a little TV and air conditioning and a flush-toilet and bathtub. There's a lizard in the closet and I've killed three cockroaches so far. I am cooking on a charcoal stove (once a day is about all I can muster, usually pasta or rice. The market has mangoes, tomatoes, garlic and onion, plus all the ingredients for jollof rice.)

Napoa, above, firmly believes she is still practicing.

Assiba, above, has no sons and was accused by her rival's son's wife -- she treated the boy as a son when he was growing up, bringing him candies and new clothing.

Just arrived back in Accra after my first two weeks at the witch camp and I feel mentally exhausted. It feels like I fell through the looking glass...

I arrived in Gambaga with 50kgs of luggage in tow, most of it electronics and food items, to snag the last room at the NORRIP guesthouse, which has been empty each time I've stayed there in the past. This time it was full to capacity with Afrikaner miners flying helicopter surveys of northern Ghana in search of minerals. (How bizarre. They work five hour shifts
and spend the rest of the time drinking. The first time we met, it was because one of them had been trying to light a brandy bottle (why?) and burned his hand. They suspected I might be a nurse and could help them out. Much harrassment ensued until I finally gave up and left. They are tolerable when sober, but slightly frightening drunk. The Ghanaian staff are all
keeping a very wary eye on them, especially as relates to pure little me.)

I made my initial visit to my contact, Simon, who helped me sort out a list of who I need to speak to, where and by when. He came up with a list of women and worked out a guy who could translate, then took off for the remainder of my time. The translator turned out to be a total peach. He's doing his teacher training in Tamale, so I only get one week with him, but he was so fantastic I said, "Gee, Carlos (a weird first name for a Ghanaian kid) I wish you had a twin brother." And, of course, Carlos does have a twin brother, so he'll be my translator from here on in.

The only thing I need to sort out is transportation. I thought I'd be able to make it by scamming motor bike rides and hiring taxis, but the road is so incredibly intolerable that it's kinda not feasible. It's like driving on a corrogated roof. We did a 40-km journey on the Tuesday and I could feel it for two days afterward. (Poor Simon had the earliest symptoms of giardia at the time; I don't know how he did it.)

The women themselves are real mind benders. Lots of sad stories of jealousy, or outbreaks, or just old ladies outliving their usefulness. I'd walk away a true believer, then consult Carlos who invariably said, "Oh Madam!" in a real disappointed,
what-a-gullible-dunce sort of way. He firmly believes every one of the women is a witch and we had all sorts of trippy conversations about what makes a witch and how to identify a witch. The theme: trust no one.

I feel more confused than ever and have hardly commited a word to paper.

Splattered...

2007-04-17T01:45:00.000-08:00

The first bird with the slit neck landed rather gracefully in the middle of the semi-circle, jumping and flopping like a popcorn kernel in a hot kettle before landing on its back at the edge of the crowd. It was the semi-annual sacrifice in Yong-duuni, a small village on the outskirts of Tamale and the village and their neighbours were honouring the ancestors in hopes of peace, good crops and fertility.

A procession of chiefs and chiefs' wives made their way to raucous drum beats down to the "earth shrine," a spot in a clearing that was protected by a pile of ancient-looking wood. The chief moved slowly -- the "cold" was hurting his bones -- and a man twirled a brilliant red and green umbrella over him the whole way. His wives were collecting coins for the drummers, who were keeping up a steady, chest-shaking rhythm and shouting out the history of the Dagomba as they walked.

We were not allowed to take pictures of the actual sacrifice, which involved a calabash of pinkish liquid scooped over the ground and the ritual killing of a dozen chickens and one very unhappy goat. ("Make the lambs stop screaming...") The way the chicken lands as it dies determines the answer of the ancestors -- whether they'll honour the request for peace and prosperity -- and the first chicken landed well, on its back, to the relief of the crowd. The second, a speckled brown hen, landed on its feet, trying in vain to squawk with its slit throat, blood pouring with the effort. It flipped and flopped into the crowd. Throats were being split like an assembly line and there were flipping and flopping chickens everywhere and everyone wanted them to land without interference, so they could interpret the ancestors' answer.

I was trying to get out of the way of one bird when another landed at my feet. My skirt had already been sprayed with blood and there was a droplet on my minidisc recorder. Something warm slid down my foot and I looked down expecting to see cherry red blood. Instead, it was white and mucusy: chicken shit.

The process was repeated again at the house of the ancestors, although this time the chickens were simply slit and shoved into the circular mud hut. The ground where the libations had been poured was mashed into round, sticky balls of mud and everyone tore off a piece and smeared it on their forehead. It was protection from evil spirits.

More drumming followed and coins were tossed by the jubiliant crowd, which by this time was worked into a frenzy. We made our goodbyes -- the chief gave us a guinea fowl and three yams in thanks for our coming, and offered me a bed for the night -- before slipping back to the main road, feeling exhausted from the chaos.

Freelancing 101

2007-04-04T06:52:00.000-08:00

In the past few weeks, I've had a couple emails from people asking for advice about freelancing. Most of the emails go something like this: "I stumbled across your blog (hope you got your fridge issues sorted) and thought I would ask your advice about freelancing from Africa." Then the person either says he is moving to Africa in about three days and would appreciate any advice or contacts (meaning he would like my contacts, please) or, the person says he is thinking about moving to Africa in about three months and would appreciate any advice or contacts (meaning he would like my contacts, please).

And so, in the name of efficiency:

How to be a Freelance Journalist in Africa in 12 Easy Steps

1. Don't send emails asking for another freelancer's contacts. This shows you have never freelanced, have no contacts and have no idea how difficult it is to establish contacts. Once you've spent a few months combing the Internet for the *actual* address of the foreign editor for a freelance-friendly paper in Dallas, you'll understand why freelancers can be so territorial about their contacts.

2. Buy "The World on a String." It's an excellent guide, particularly for people with limited journalism experience, covering everything from scouting markets to cold calling editors to sending pitch letters to writing invoices.

3. Buy the Writer's Guide or Writer's Market or Similar. Nothing makes me angrier than Canadians who decide to freelance from African and can think of no other outlets for their articles but the Globe and the Star. The world is a big place and there are tons of markets in it.

Don't forget about trade mags, specialty publications and websites. Some of them pay big bucks.

Look at where other freelancers working outside your intended area are working -- many keep blogs or websites with clipping files -- and take some clues from it.

Decide where you'd like to pitch and then start sending out emails introducing yourself, your credentials, your intended destination, your date of departure and a line or two about story ideas. Be realistic. If you have no writing experience, you might want to save the New York Times for a few months.

Whatever you do, keep it short. This is good advice for all of your contact with editors. They fancy themselves busy people and get annoyed at any emails that go beyond a page. If they respond to your email -- many editors don't bother if they don't take freelance or aren't impressed by your letter -- make sure you ask for the contributor's guidelines and freelance agreement. It'll be easier to sign and fax when you're in a place rife with telephones, Internet access and fax machines. Get an email for their assistant and another for their deputy.

4. If it's at all possible, get a newsroom job before you leave home, even if it's sorting mail and answering telephones. Even if it's only for a couple months, you'll learn so much about the pace of a news organization, what gets them excited, what makes them angry, what causes their eyes to glaze over. You'll meet lots of people with plenty of advice and a few war stories and you'll make great contacts. You'll see your potential list of editors to contact blossom and they'll be more likely to respond to an email from someone they know. And you'll get a chance to look at the "sked" of stories. You'll have a sense of what makes it into the paper, what the writing style is and how best to summarize your story into a nutgraph.

5. Practice pitching. It's the key to your success. If you can't pitch, you can't freelance.

Pitches, generally, should mirror the top five or six paragraphs of your actual story. If you send in a boring skedline, it shows you're a boring writer. If you send in a scattershot pitch, shotgunning all the elements of your story, it shows you're an unfocused writer who lacks a good sense of news.

Generally, a pitch should borrow from the top of your story, give the word length, reveal whether there's photos and offer a date by which the story can be delivered. You want to include your contact information. And again, keep it short.

6. Read about Africa. There are amazing books out there by Africans and non-Africans, as well as some real crap. Try Achebe, Robert Guest, Beryl Markham, Emma's War, They Poured Fire, the Purple Hibiscus, The Village of Waiting, Blue Clay People, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, The Fate of Africa and Soldiers of Light.

7. Finding a suitable market is like peering into a crystal ball. You need to know where the news is going to be and whether you're equipped to handle it. Be realistic: most editors don't know anything about Africa and have no interest in it. You need a place with good, interesting stories and a reliable communications system and a good transport system. You don't necessarily need to be in a newsy place, like Lagos or Nairobi or Jo'burg; lots of editors are looking for quirky stories about culture or trend pieces about science or technology or innovation in Africa. It may come as a shock, but lots are looking for "good news" stories that don't involve famine or drought or AIDS.

Once you decide where you're going, contact a local journalist or a foreign journalist working in the area and ask them specific questions. "Any advice and contacts" is a phrase to be avoided. One thing you need to know is who else is there and who they're working for. You don't want to arrive in Kampala only to discover that the city is flooded with freelancers who have a lock on the market.

And please, don't be one of those assholes -- pardon my French -- who decides to move to Africa and work at an African news outlet, whether paid or unpaid. You're actually *not* more qualified than African journalists and you're just stealing a job from someone who needs it.

8. Google everyone. Contacts you make may not have your best interests at heart. A case in point: a young man just turned up here in Ghana with the idea to go to Zimbabwe and do some stuff for the New York Times. He contacted a local journalist who offered to act as his fixer. The Reuters correspondent recommended checking into the local journalists' background and turns out he works at a government paper where some pretty rough stuff has happened. Who knows what he might have walked into if he hadn't done his homework.

9. Be safe! If you're a freelance journalist, no one has your back. No one.

10. Resell, resell, resell. Read those contributor contracts carefully, because the way you make money is by reselling your pieces, so if they require exclusivity, you need to weigh whether the pay is worth it.

11. Visit Africa. Seems obvious, but if you're going to relocate here, you should probably try it out first.

12. If you're a print journalist, get some radio equipment and a decent digital camera. If you're a radio reporter, get a decent digital camera. Turning your pieces into print stories and radio pieces and online pieces triples your income. Easy.

Hope that helps.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

2007-03-27T07:49:00.000-08:00

Came back from the desert to a series of emails from my father, a scanned copy of a 5-pg letter from the Canadian Arts Council informing me that they will be giving me a huge pile of free money in order to do research on witches in Ghana.

Free money! And witches!

The only hitch is that I have decided to leave Ghana, as I feel a level of hostility here that is not good for a person. I've started scouting for jobs, mostly in Asia. (I'm not particularly ready to go back to Canada, where the elusive balance between fresh and jiggy and boring and stodgy has yet to be reached.) But I am a vain person and I wanna have my name on a book.

So I'm moving north, to the witch camps. I'll divide my time between Gambaga and Nakpanduri, where there is no cell reception, no Internet and no pizza. Perhaps I will get a car. And maybe a pet goat.

Into the Tenere...

2007-03-27T06:29:00.000-08:00

After a week of sinful living, we got up before the sun and headed all groggy and dehydrated to the bus station for our trip to Niger. A former Peace Corps from Niger now living in Ghana, told us it would be four to six hours to go from one capital to the other. She must ride on a magic carpet, because it took us 10 hours.

Crossing the border was painless and the differences between Niger and Burkina were subtle but important: Niger is at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index while Burkina is a couple spots above it. Still, at Burkina there was no hassle. At Niger, there was a huge gaggle of dusty, dirty, scraggly boys, all with tomato tins around their necks, all looking for "cent francs" or "un cadeau" or something.

Niamey was wonderful. Hot and dusty, but really laid back, yet really vibrant. We made a second home of GG's, a bar with rotisserie chicken and chips and cold bottles of Flag beer and basically wandered and explored and finally figured out that to get a cab, one has to shout their destination at any cars that pass. If the driver speeds away, he's not going in your direction. But if he nods, you get in and wait for him to drop you and the other passengers in order of destination.

We spent a morning with the last herd of wild giraffes in the region, loading into two cars with three other backpackers and finally -- FINALLY -- getting away from the city after more than an hour of dithering and dickering. There was the usual annoyance at the gate: the fee for entry, the fee for guide, the fee for the vehicle, the fee for a blue sky and an intense sun, the fee for simply breathing. And a drive with the guide up on top of the car, looking for what have to be the tallest giraffes I've ever seen, camoflaged brilliantly in the sandy terrain.

A day later, we were sardined into another bus, this time pointed north in the direction of the fabled salt-trading city of Agadez, the gateway to the Tenere desert. The same expat told us expeditions into the desert could be expensive -- around $1,000 for a week -- and we scoffed. We'd only be gone a couple days (who needs to see a week's worth of sand?) and so it might be a couple hundred bucks. Of course, we only discovered that there are no ATMs in Niger after we'd already set off for Niger, so we'd already sent off a request for a Western Union transfer. We were counting our pennies the whole way and annoying the artisans in the process. But after a morning of to-ing and fro-ing with Dan the Man and Trevor Whatever, our traveling companions for the following eight days, we'd bargained the cost down to $500.

Emily and I, dry and dusty and exhausted from the bus ride, flopped back to the concrete cell that was our hotel room and discussed the choices we've made in life. "This is going to be the hardest traveling I've done," I remarked, at which Emily blanched and said, "Seriously?!" We were spending eight days camping in the desert, with a driver and a 4WD and a cook that would make us mutton stew with couscous, mutton stew with rice, mutton stew with potatoes. Still, I've never had to poop outside before.

Our first night was came with a brilliant salt-and-pepper spray of stars, but was brutally, brutally cold. I woke Emily up with my shivering. We were sharing a blanket, huddled in our little tent, trying to ignore the ridges of sand digging into our backs. The next day I bought two pairs of socks and that night I wore everything in my backpack, including silk long underwear and two pairs of pants, with a pair of pants wrapped around my neck like a scarf. I'm considering writing to Gap about this, as it's the perfect thing to do with gauchos, which are likely long out of style. I wore them around my neck most days until well after noon, when I had finally thawed, and I looked smashing.

Overall, Niger was gorgeous. Lots of rocks and rock art, including some amazingly detailed giraffes carved into a rock face some 8,000 years ago. The people were gentle and generous and I learned a new card game, Huit, which demands to be played in French and is an even funner version of Uno. Yes, funner than Uno.

Boo'd Diamond

2007-03-27T05:48:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, I stumbled upon the FESPACO festival, arriving in Ouaga just as the festival opened, purely by coincidence. I was oblivious in the way that most tourists are -- there was a stampede at the opening ceremonies and two people were trampled to death; I only learned this at this year's festival -- and really enjoyed the event, having no expectations of it. I thought it was romantic to sit under the stars, watching African films in Africa surrounded by Africans.

This year, we waited two hours in line just to drop off our accreditation forms. Schedules and catalogues became as scarce as cold water, the festival hadn't printed enough and ran out only a day into the seven-day event. Some film-goers picked up their $25 passes for free. A couple times we made it to the theatre before the film, which would arrive in the arms of an usher riding on the back of a moped. We missed the opening few minutes of "Africa Paradis" because there guy with the keys to the box office hadn't shown up and there was no one to sell tickets.

Still, we saw some amazing films and had a very decadent week of sleeping in air conditioning, washing in hot water, swanning about watching movies and eating pizza at every opportunity.

The winner, Ezra, was a picture about child soldiers, shot in Rwanda but ostensibly about Sierra Leone. My favourite, Juju Factory, was about Congolese living in Belgium. I cried like a baby at the end of Tsotsi -- man, that kid can act! We both loved "Shoot the Messenger," a highly controversial BBC film about black stereotypes, and a documentary about the Jonestown massacre, the "don't drink the Kool-aid" cult of the 1970s. We had long discussions over "The Mother's House," a documentary following an 11-year-old girl and her HIV-positive mother while they lived for four years in the grandmother's house. The girl spirals downward under the eye of the camera, cutting herself and getting hooked on drugs.

But, secretly, I think we were most looking forward to Blood Diamond and Last King of Scotland, the Hollywood contributions to Africa's Cannes. To be considered for competition, a film must have a director with an African passport, so neither of these films were fighting for the Golden Stallion. But they were undoubtedly the most popular films of the festival, with line-ups that started an hour before the film and stretched around the block.

Unfortunately, both were dubbed in French, so we didn't stay for Last King. Still, I caught enough of Blood Diamond -- mislabelled as Bood Diamond in the program -- to know that I didn't like it.

In truth, I was bound to hate it. I've got that uppity self-righteous thing going on about Africa and of course, feel very strongly that no film with Leonardo DiCaprio in it could ever capture the complexities of an African issue. And there's the smokin' Jennifer Connolly as journalist character, that was bound to raise the hackles, what with the blouse unbuttoned to here and the "what wouldn't I do for a story?" arc to the storyline. (And the god-awful dialogue, perhaps made worse by the French translation, I dunno, but who says with a straight face: "I prefer complex situations.") There is a moment where, confronted by supposed Karamajor fighters armed to the teeth and looking like fierce little Dogon trolls covered in fetishes, Connolly brashly pushes forward and asks for a picture. She squeezes them together and frames them up as one of them claims her for his wife. I was immediately annoyed. But upon further reflection, I decided this is actually an interesting tactic and may have to try it out, should I ever be in the presence of angry Keebler elves.

Still, there is the siege of Freetown, which is as exhilarating as the first 20 minutes of Ezra, three times as bloody and probably not far off. And the right-on moment at a rebel checkpoint, when two little 10-year-olds shoot a patronizing social worker in the head when he tries to rationalize with them as though they were children.

But there is also a moment where they drive on the LEFT, which is just stupid Edward Zwick, and a moment where, looking wistfully out the window, Connolly spies a cheetah running alongside the media bus. A media bus? A cheetah? People, please. And the shot of Jack Dawson at the end -- I pretty sure he was channeling Jack Dawson -- with the elephants munching on the savannah below. Elephants? Savannah? Man, Mozambique is pretty, but Sierra Leone is gorgeous in its own right (that's right, Zwick. RIGHT!) and it doesn't look like Mozambique. There are few elephants and hardly any savannah.

Boo'd Diamond wasn't much of a misprint afterall.

Border Cross-ing

2007-03-27T05:19:00.000-08:00

Filled with a spirit of discontent towards Ghana, my roommate, Emily, and me decided to skip the 50th anniversary celebrations and instead head north to Ouagadougou for the FESPACO film festival and then to Niger from there.

We caught the dreaded STC, which I'm increasingly convinced stands for "shite transportation company," and were nattering away about how, for all the frustrations I feel lately, the great thing about Ghana is the fact that there are no touts when you travel. It's all very systemmatic. You want to put your bags in the bus, then you get a baggage ticket and then you get on the bus. You don't want to put your bag on the bus, then you just get on the bus.

Seventeen hours later, the bus deposited us in Bolgatanga in the dead of night and we made our way to a little hotel on the edge of town. It's humid in the south but so dry in the north that our skin dried out pretty quickly and we were clamouring for lip gloss and moisturizer. A leisurely breakfast and then we were in a shared cab heading to the tro-tro station, where we caught a shared cab to Paga, the border city that's better known for the sacred crocodiles that are hand-fed sacrificial chickens by tourists looking for ghoulish photos.

We handed over 20,000 cedis each, expecting 10,000 in return. Instead, we were told it would cost us each 5,000 for our bags, which had ridden in the empty boot of the car. There are 8,000 cedis in a Cdn dollar, so that means we were being charged less than a dollar each, but more than a dollar in total. And it didn't matter anyway, because I will fight on principle and this, to me, was a principle worth fighting for.

So we fought. Much hand waving. Much clucking of tongues and indignant "ehs!"

But the driver had our money and therefore all the power and he just walked away. In the end, the boss told us that if we didn't like it, we could go complain at Customs. He underestimated my willingness to embarrass myself over 10,000 cedis. A principle is a principle.

So we went to Customs and they probably watched in disbelief. Small talk about the journey and how long we'd been in Ghana and where we were from and where we were going. And then the pitch: "We are having a problem and we're hoping you can help." And then the ace card: "This is not how Ghanaians treat their visitors." And then the save: Snap, snap and a small boy is sent to find the driver.

We trot out our Twi (Emily's is soooo much better than mine) and joke about my two words of Ga, "thank you" and "goat's ass," which are pretty much all I need, I've found.

And within minutes, the boy is back with a 10,000 cedi note. "In fact, they were talking about this issue when I arrived," he said.

And we were off to the border, where the guards noticed that Emily's entry stamp had run out about a month before. A month and three days to be precise. It costs a 200,000 cedi fine per month that the stamp is expired, but I've found that it's much easier to pay the fine than try to deal with Ghana Immigration in Accra. When I left at Christmas, I paid 600,000 cedis and it seemed a wise investment. I just nodded and tried to look innocent when the man asked whether I understood that a leave to stay for 60 days was, in fact, a leave to stay for 60 days.

But these guards were going to charge us an extra month for the three days. The pitch: "Oh my friend, isn't there anything we could do?" The ace card: the silent stare, the idea that we have lots of time to think it over and maybe negotiate. And again, the save: Emily's Twi. A small lecture followed up with a "Have you heard?" in Twi, to which she replied, in Twi, "Yes, I have heard."

And then we walked to Burkina Faso.

Niger

2007-03-26T06:05:00.000-08:00

Some pictures of Niger. A write-up to follow when I'm not so scattered or, um, bus-lagged.

This is one of our campsites, just to get a sense of the dunes. That red speck is our jeep.

Hidden in the middle of this photo is a small block school, the only boarding school for Tuareg children.

Racism

2007-03-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

This is the headline that ran in the Statesman...

And this is me, working my contacts, at the baseball game.

God's waiting room

2007-02-17T02:15:00.000-08:00

My grandmother died Thursday, in the wee hours of the morning. She was born in December 1911, which would have made her 95. She had severe dementia and had lived in a nursing home for nearly 10 years, the last few in a haze of sedatives. In these times of cancers and heart attacks it’s nearly unheard of, but she died of old age.

She lived virtually her entire life in a small patch of Euphemia Township, leaving her parents’ farm for her husband’s farm down the road, moving to a neighbouring county only when she was placed in the nursing home. She was an only child, well educated for her time and place: she finished high school. She met my grandfather when she was a child attending the one-room schoolhouse; he used to joke that he literally dunked her pigtails in his ink well.

They married late. The photo shows my grandfather standing tall and thin, with a hooded eyelids and a crop of thick, dark hair. (He was exactly the same when died, except he had a crop of thick grey hair.) My grandmother stands beside him, slim and petite, her jet black hair hidden under a hat, a wide smile showing off her perfect teeth. By the time I got to know my grandmother, she was a large woman with grey curls, but she still had those perfect teeth.

Her life revolved around food, mostly the preparation of it. She was an incredible gardener and kept a huge patch of vegetables where we later built a house. There were always peas to shell and French beans to trim and cut. There were turnips and beets, peppers and radishes, lettuce and cabbage and cauliflower. There was corn, which she sheared from the cobs to accommodate my grandfather’s dentures. What couldn’t be eaten fresh or immediately frozen was canned and lined up in her cellar, a rank little cupboard under the stairs. In my mind’s eye, she was always standing near the stove, sometimes gingerly placing Mason jars in a huge black pot, other times pulling from the oven a greasy chicken coated in pepper.

Their farm was Norman Rockwell-esque, with a “gingerbrick” house and a few acres of beans or wheat or corn bordered by a wooded creek that drew deer in the fall and froze to form a skating pond in the winter. In the summer months, in the days before Dad and the orchard came together with a chainsaw and a box of matches, we picked pears and apples for pie, hand-cranking the apple peeler in the yard and throwing the scraps to the big-headed cows that waited by the fence. We diced and squished tomatoes for sauces and juice, sluicing it through a cheesecloth to remove the seeds. Raspberries, strawberries and black currants were turned into jam. Peaches and cherries were pitted and canned.

Back when we kept hens, I can remember sitting with her at a work table set up under a tree in her yard, fishing the guts out of freshly slaughtered chickens, the semi-feral barn cats circling nearby. She had warned me to be careful, because if I punctured one of the organs – the liver, maybe? – it would poison the meat. She always cooked the gizzards, so there was no room for error.

I seem to remember her having a reputation amongst our farming community for being a good cook, although these days a lot of the foods she prepared would be considered too fatty or simple to be impressive. She was a master at the hearty comfort foods that were the mainstay of celebrations, whether Thanksgiving or Easter. She had a huge freezer in the kitchen and another upstairs in the spare bedroom. In one, she kept pies and sticky raisin buns and banana chocolate chip muffins. In the other, she kept frozen meat and vegetables and a package of wagon wheels, a snack food that I’m not even sure they make anymore, that squeezes marshmallow between two chocolate-coated arrowroot biscuits. I have no idea what possessed her to put them in the freezer, but it was the ideal place to keep them: we could sneak up and eat them anytime. I’m not sure how she realized they had all been eaten, but there was always a fresh box.

Some of the sparkle went out of her when she was declared diabetic. She was supposed to control it by diet and for the first few months, the pounds melted away as she measured out quantities of sugar and potatoes, always with a bit of a disappointed sigh.

Grandma’s farmhouse was a mash of clutter and oddities, from the wooden windmill on the TV to the ugly, weirdly painted ceramic bulldog in the spare bedroom. Grandma always referred to the bedrooms as “Shirley’s room” and the “South bedroom” and I swear I was in my late teens before I figured out which was which, such is my sense of direction. Before we moved across the road, we spent nights in Shirley’s room during our visits, and Grandma, ever conscious of the cold, made every effort to cook us alive by tucking us in with two heavy wool blankets and an electric blanket on its highest setting over top of it all just for good measure.

Both Grandma and Grandpa were avid card players and after their boarder taught us the fine art of Euchre, they would take us across the road to the school on Friday nights for community card games. We were never particularly skilled – we helped build the collection of knickknacks by winning the “low score” prizes – but we behaved well. When too few students and too many school board costs closed the school, spelling the end of games night, Grandma burned up the party phone line getting the gossip from her girlfriends, who lived in town and attended a different church but knew most of the same people.

She and my grandfather were married for nearly 50 years and when he died, the routines she had built up began to unravel. She read the paper every day, watched the six o’clock news and always tuned in to hear the obituaries on the noon radio news, but she was never very interested in politics or grain prices or whatever was making headlines. She became a bit forgetful and sentimental in a wonderful way: when we would come to visit, she would feed us pie and tell us stories about Dad, how he failed his driver’s license, how he paid his way through college, the car he was driving when he started dating my mother, how he broke his collarbone twice falling out of the hay loft, how even as a boy he longed to own horses, but Grandma was too afraid of them to permit it. She would often mix up our names, calling me “Sandra-Janet-Lynne-Karen” and on a particularly rattled day, she might throw in Shirley, Doug, Robert or John. Sometimes Tippy, the little dog she’d had for years.

In the days before she entered the home, she became increasingly paranoid and frightened. She fell asleep most nights in front of the TV and was up pottering around in the dark at 4 a.m. She lost her license. Mom started going by extra early to collect her for outings, as she developed a habit of hiding her purse and forgetting where she put it, yet could not be persuaded to leave home without it. I suspected she didn’t know me, but didn’t want to let on.

Dementia turned her into a different person. When she wasn’t heavily sedated, my church-going Grandmother apparently swore like a trucker, wandered and developed an intense hatred for one of the other residents. She lost her teeth and eventually her speech. The last time I saw her – before I moved to Africa nearly three years ago – her sentences trailed off into muffled murmurs. She tried to tell us about a trip to Detroit to pick up a tractor; on the ride home Mom told us that had never happened. They had no idea where these stories were coming from.

So when the nurse called Monday to say Grandma was in distress and seemed to be slipping away, she were summing up the previous decade. She had been slipping away from us for a long time, living in a body that refused to give up, ruled by a mind that had gone long ago.

It is a relief to know she is finally at peace, as my mother says. It’s comforting to know she was not forgotten in God's waiting room after all.

My spirit is on sick leave

2007-02-06T08:25:00.000-08:00

An email I (gratefully) received from a reader last week:

"I am doing undergraduate research at Michigan State University about
selective media coverage that portrays African countries in a negative way.
I can't remember exactly how I stumbled upon your reporting, but I was
attracted to your positive portrayal of Ghana, as well as other African
countries, without negating some of the obvious hardships embedded in the
cultures. I hope to explore and document Africa in this way in the near
future, but for now, I'm stuck in Michigan doing undergrad research.

"Anyways, I was hoping that you could offer a bit of feedback on why the
American press is so disproportionally hungry for negative stories about
Africa, and generally reluctant to report positive stories. I'd also like
to know if this has anything to do with your decision to work in Africa."

Today I helped a little girl in a school uniform cross the street. I said hello to all the vendors on my usual route to Michelle's house, where lately I've taken up residence at her kitchen table so I can scam her wireless. I had a banana smoothie for breakfast. I woke up to brilliant sunny weather.

I was also called racist.

I've written about how much I worry about how my writing is perceived (under a posting called "Sunshine Journalism") and so you can imagine that I had to sit down when my friend Justin called to warn me that the Statesman -- the paper I worked with during my last stint with Journalists for Human Rights -- had reprinted an article I did for Newsday under the banner headline: "A RACIST JOURNALIST ON GHANA: The Statesman came across on the worldwide web this example of racism disguised as journalism by a Karen Palmer for Newsday, NY, USA."

The Newsday article is about a delegation from Major League Baseball, in town to lend support to Ghana's nascent Little League teams. You can find it here: http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/mets/ny-spghana045080195feb04,0,343817.story?coll=ny-mets-print

For six weeks I worked in the Statesman's newsroom; each week I delivered a seminar on journalistic basics, complete with work books and games and ways to keep the staid stuff kind of interesting. I gave up the job when my freelance commitments meant I couldn't give the time I thought the job deserved. I left in a hurry, but it had nothing to do with the Statesman. I thought I had the editor's respect and support. Clearly, I was wrong.

When I spoke to him this morning, he told me he actually hadn't read the piece all the way through, but he trusted the sports editor when he said it was racist garbage and told him he could deal with the story as he saw fit. He said both he and the news editor agreed it might have been "a bit harsh" to run that headline. When I asked him to kindly point out the racist elements so that I might learn from this experience and avoid similar accusations in the future, he told me he took exception to my description of Ghana as an "impoverished West African nation" and felt I was biased in my reporting of the fact that there was no popcorn or peanuts for sale at the game, but women selling eggs and pepper and men selling vanilla ice cream and fresh coconuts.

But Gabby, I said, that is what happened.

No it's not, he said.

Yes it is, and frankly, how can you tell me what happened when you weren't there?

Oh, we had a reporter there, we just chose not to run his story.

I told him I was devastated by this, that I take seriously my responsibility to portray Africa generally and Ghana specifically with fairness and accuracy, that I couldn't believe it was a newspaper that I had worked for that would label me a racist. He told me I was being too emotional.

He told me he had instructed the sports editor to write a column explaining his actions and that I could write a piece to go with it explaining mine. I told him I would not be writing for the Statesman and was only interested in seeing an apology published in the column. He told me he would not be apologizing and I can't tell him what to do. But you can tell me I have to write an article for you Gabby? Does that seem fair?

He told me he could imagine how I was feeling. I should consider him a friend, not a foe.

My friends don't call me racist.

As the Statesman's own editorial says today: "apologising after the damage has been done is not good enough; rather, the media must stop the stories before they start. ... There are official checks in place, supposedly to counter the kind of sloppy journalism which too often seems to dominate our newsstands. ... There are unofficial checks too, which we must become more disciplined about enforcing if the media is to retain a scrap of credibility."

I know the Statesman's sports editor. We've spoken about how he's from a small town outside Suhum, whose name was changed when the British arrived and they found it too hard to pronounce. I know he's been writing a political column for more than 15 years for various newspapers, always using code names and code words for people and episodes from Ghana's history. I know all this because I got to know him. But he never got to know me. I suspect he had no idea that "a Karen Palmer for Newsday" was the same woman who came into his office twice a week to help with editing and story structure and journalism skills. I'm just another obruni, not worth his time, hardly worth his notice.

So, I walked a little girl across the street today and was rewarded with a smile. I walked through my neighbourhood and felt like it was my neighbourhood. I got to eat what Africa provides and Canada will never have. I got sunshine in February.

When I leave this country, I will try hard to remember these things. What I'll be unable to forget is that today I was called a racist.

I hope that the editors at the Statesman come across this entry and that they see it as heartbreak disguised as anger.

Pest Control

2007-02-05T03:08:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks, we’ve been finding evidence of mice: turds left on the food shelf, the countertop, on the stairs leading to the storeroom. I even saw our unwanted guest, streaking from the garbage to the safety of under the sink when I came into the kitchen.

We found a mouse trap, but it was either broken or too much for our little brains. We swept up the poop, moved the appliances to sweep up broken bits of rice or bread and wiped down every surface, packed up anything edible that might seduce a mouse and cleaned out the storeroom, tossing anything that might make a good nest.

Then late last week, ants invaded. We always have ants, lines of them marching around the bathtub, around the faucet and circling the drain of the sink in the kitchen. Any bits of food left on the counter will, within minutes, be surrounded by a frenzied group of ants trying to engineer its removal. Even smashed bugs will bring them out for a feeding frenzy, like the insect equivalent of vultures. We’ve been blasting them with sweet-smelling ant killer, only to find their brethren picking around their bodies a few minutes later.

This time, they were in all the usual places and climbing in furious columns up and down the kettle cord. Nothing new, we figured. We’re always finding ant bodies floating in our boiled water. They’re probably chewing up crumbs from the toaster, which sits beside the kettle.

Then we came home to a strange smell in the kitchen. Again, nothing shocking. Ghana’s power has gone wonky. Last week we had 48 hours without power and it appears that we’re headed for a similar week this week. (Infuriating. Absolutely infuriating.) So everything in the fridge and freezer went off, including the fridge itself, for the third time in four months. We tossed all vegetables and meat, all dairy products and any leftovers.

But something stunk. I made a joke about our little mouse having died underneath the fridge. We packed up the garbage and went to bed.

But it was worse in the morning, floating in stinky waves, the concentration of it nearest the door. We were stumped. The garbage was empty, the fridge was empty, the kitchen was clean. So in the afternoon, while Emily was boiling water, I got sick of looking at these ants heading for the kettle and decided to clean out the toaster. I turned it upside down and shook out it. Out tumbled one or two crumbs and three or four mouse turds and I made a comment to Emily about how our little friend had been eating our crumbs.

I shook and shook, uprighted the toaster and peered inside. A big piece of burned toast was wedged in one of the slats, which explained the ants. And then, a stomach-turning thought. You know how you can look at a picture that’s supposed to be the silhouette of both an old hag and a young beauty, but you can’t see it until – suddenly – your perception shifts and the outline changes altogether? Slowly, slowly turned over the toaster. Looked in. And sure enough, the outline of a tail.

I dropped the toaster. “Oh. My. God. The mouse is in the toaster. He’s *in* the toaster!”

The little beast had obviously gotten hungry enough to climb into the toaster in search of a few scraps, then had either gotten wedged in there or been electrocuted. There was nothing to be done but thank the powers that be that he didn’t fall out when I was furiously shaking it and to remember back to the last time we’d made toast. (I brought baguettes back from Cote D’Ivoire, so it had been a while.)

The ants are carnivores: they were furiously tearing the dead mouse to bits.

I’m off to buy a new toaster.

Get the Pledge

2007-01-10T08:07:00.001-08:00

This is Ghana from a helicopter during the Governor General's visit last month.

This is Ghana from the airplane this week.

That haze is the Harmattan, a wind that blows in from the Sahara every winter, bringing half of the desert with it. Everything, and everyone, is covered with a fine layer of grit. Those with weaker constitutions get respiratory infections, cough up mud and pull plugs of clay from their nostrils. The upside is that it's drier and cooler (even the African sun can't penetrate such a thick cloud of dust) but the downside is that it's still humid, so instead of just being sweaty, you're muddy.

Yay.

Photographic Evidence

2007-01-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

A chief at the gathering in northern Ghana for the Governor General's visit

A little girl chews on some dusty sandals during a meeting

The men named the Governor General a chief, the first such honour they've bestowed on a woman. They came wearing flowing modified boubous and brilliantly coloured towels

These boys put on a bit of a show for the cameras while we waited for the GG's helicopter to show up. Lots of backflips and a few bellyflops.

The grannies gather to talk about improvements in the village.

Christmas Don Com, Hallelujah!

2007-01-10T06:07:00.000-08:00

How beautiful is Sierra Leone?

It's hard to imagine that there was ever a war in this country. The people are friendly and generous, loud but not aggressive. The scars are not immediately evident, not the emotional or physical ones. The kids are hilarious; a couple came barrelling up to wrap themselves around my legs. Sure beats repeated calls of "Obruni!" Freetown is a charming city set in a bowl of rolling hills and valleys -- so many that the airport is a few kilometres away, across a wide river, so most visitors to the city end up taking a helicopter to the city proper.

We had a lovely time at the beach, bobbing in the gentle sway of the ocean, feeding on fresh fish and shrimp, reading a slew of books sent by Orla's friends and sleeping whenever the urge struck. We played a lot of RummyCube and drank a lot of beer and generally chilled out.

All of which left me with a much more positive outlook for the next week, which involved a 12-hour journey "up country" to the town of Kono, in the diamond mining region near the Liberian/Guinean borders. I arrived in the dark and was promptly bundled up onto a motorcycle -- my favourite! -- and sent off to a guest house. I ended up at a hotel across from a cinema where they were showing an Arabic film at a deafening volume. Not to be outdone, the boys at the guesthouse put a Nigerian film in the VCD player and cranked up the volume. I kept hearing them repeat the phrase "But we have a guest!" as they fought over their choice of film, figuring it was good hospitality to show me a movie, but I mostly wanted to escape the noise.

There is no electricity and no running water in Kono, so when night falls and the generators go quiet, it is well and truly quiet. Around 3 a.m., I came thudding out of sleep to the sound of a sheep bleating.

Sheep: "mmmmmmmaaaaaaaaaa!"
Sheep: "bbbbbbbbaaaaaaaaaaa!"
Me: "Shut up! Shut up!" Echoing out into the hallway and into the rooms of the other guests, who surely applauded my attempts at animal control.

I had to get out of bed to kick the guard in the shin and tell him to shut the animal up -- right now! -- or I was going to shut it up for him. Apparently this sheep's mate died after eating a bit of plastic. Sounds like a horrible way to go, a bit of plastic tying up your intestines until you go all septic and die, but I was thinking I might hand feed the other sheep a little shopping bag or something.

I woke up in the morning with a lump the size of a golf ball in my throat. Kono is an exceptionally dusty town and the Harmattan had left an extra haze of grit and dust over the town. Diamond dealers line Kono's main drag, but otherwise, there is *no* sign that there are diamonds in the area. There are "mines," pits of mud and piles of dirt, but there is such rampant poverty. So many young men just sitting around with nothing to do.

It was the same in Kenema, about five hours away. I lucked out and caught a ride two-thirds of the way there with a couple guys from the Integrated Diamond Management Program. They had a Land Cruiser and a familiarity with the road, which swerved in and out of rock beds and up and down the valleys. The landscape was just stunning -- mile after mile of lush hills and mammoth cottonwood trees. It was really breathtaking, among some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever come across on the continent.

At Tongo Diamond Fields, I got out of the car and onto another motorbike. With the caution to go slow-slow and careful, we set out on what was a 40 mile journey. Let's do the math there, shall we? An hour later, after I began whimpering in agony, after my bag had slammed into my thumb about fifty times, after my backpack had managed to do permanent damage to my spine, I finally hobbled off the bike in front of a guest house. I could barely walk up the stairs to my room. That was enough to keep me away from bikes for at least a week or two.

At Kenema, there were no sheep. There were mosques. Thirteen mosques. With loudspeakers. And, unfortunately, electricity. The one nearest my hotel had a tape from Saudi, which they played, starting at 4.39 a.m. and running until 5.43 a.m. I woke up ready for a holy war.

I spent the morning running a few errands, like sending a postcard and changing some money. The post office looked like it hadn't seen a postcard in a long, long time. The money changing place caught on fire while I was there. It was the weirdest thing. One minute it was pure pandemonium (some people support lining up for service, others try to subvert the line. And yet everyone is willing to fight about who is in line and who's not) and then it was a different kind of pandemonium. Suddenly there was no line, just a dash for the stairs. Me and an old guy sitting on the bench *in line* just blinked at each other. The uppity Lebanese guy who was changing the money and dolling out attitude came running back in, barefoot, to tell us to run. Or whatever he said, I couldn't understand a thing. I just decided to follow the crowd.

Kenema has running water, so I figured they'd sort themselves out and I went to find someone else to change my American dollars into leones. That's when I met Ali Hassan, a diamond dealer/building supplier who invited me to lunch. Normally I beg off invitations from old men, but a girl lets her guard down every now and again. We were served jollof rice in the back room and when Ali asked if I was married, I nearly shouted, "I knew it!" So imagine my surprise when he laughed at my "um, no" and said, "Yeah, you journalists never want to get married." And so commenced a really enjoyable lunch. Seriously.

Back in Freetown (the most unusual thing happened: I took a bus ride without incident, that both left on time and arrived on time and even though I was sitting with my bag on my lap, I was actually comfortable) I met up with an Australian lawyer, Andrew, who keeps a genuinely interesting blog at http://fleeingthejurisdiction.wordpress.com/. We had such a nice conversation that I managed to talk myself hoarse. Or rather, mute. This is my third silent day. Talk about agony!

(The title of this post, by the way, is from a Sierra Leonean song. The second line goes something like: "Happy New Year! We thank God we no die! Happy New Year!" It's actually pretty catchy.)

Bush Babe -- Part II

2006-12-10T11:06:00.000-08:00

My ankles are a mess, a tangle of angry red welts and scratches. I blame Olivier, a photographer I've been working with lately, although he claims it's my lack of long pants that led to my hideous disfigurement.

A French photo agency has asked him to do some pictures on the theme of bush meat. Olivier wants to follow guys who set fire to the bush and smoke out the little beasties that are then served with fufu. Ghanaians -- actually, West Africans -- seem to be crazy for bushmeat. It's illegal to hunt it during the dry season, which starts in October and ends in March, but this is the time of year when the boys selling bushmeat by the roadside do the most business. They line the road to Kumasi, waving dead duikers and "alligators" and sticks of dried grasscutter stretched out on racks and smoked over a fire. They look like giant jerky lollipops with little rat heads. (The bushmeat, I mean. Not the sellers.)

So Olivier contacted a firefighter in Winneba, a coastal community about two hours from Accra, and he arranged for us to meet up with some hunters. Once we arrived, they got cold feet and needed a day to be coaxed into letting us follow them into the bush. Our first disappointment was learning that they don't use fire; they use clubs and cutlasses, evoking images of the baby seal hunt. Dogs flush them out of the thickets and grassy knolls where they burrow and feed, then the hunters whack 'em til they're dead and then slit their throats.

There is an outright ban on hunting with fire, but lots of people do it because it's so much faster. The animals run in a predictable direction and you can kill them on their way out of the fire. The downside is that the bush is dry, I mean DRY, and it tends to light like tinder and get out of control quickly. Farms go up in smoke, the entire livelihood of a couple families can be wiped out in a matter of minutes. Plus, it kills everything in its path and steals the sustenance for any animal lucky enough to survive the fire.

I'll have to put up a picture of a grasscutter; this is the second time I've mentioned them. As I've said before, they look like the result of a drunken encounter between a beaver and a rat. They're furry and rather large, but there's surprisingly little meat to them.

And apparently they're really fast. And rather good at hiding.

We set out at 5 a.m. We met up with the hunters and their 20 dogs at 5.30 a.m. and started walking. The dogs' tails were wagging in excitement. The boys were laughing and joking. There was one dog hopping on three legs, the fourth having been hit by a car. There was a whiny one named Burundi who sounded like a squeak toy and a white pit bull named Robot.

By the first hour, we had tramped through a burned field and soaked our shoes with dew. All the boys were carrying clubs/walking sticks. The dogs were trotting along happily. They boys were talking low, exchanging whistles and grunts. Any time there was the slightest sighting, the slightest sign of excitement from the dogs, there was a shout for Mamadou, the ringleader, who wore a white ski cap on his head and white plastic sandals over black socks. Each time, the hunters formed a circle around the thicket, encouraging the dogs to get in and sniff out the rodents with little clicks and sounds like "och! och! och!" I couldn't understand most of it; they were speaking in Twi.

By hour three, the dogs tongues were practically touching the ground. We stopped briefly to knock a few papayas off a tree, grab a drink of water and douse the dogs with river water. (Olivier and I brought two litres of water and a sack full of snacks, so when I say "we" I mean "them.") By this time we had waded through knee-high grass. We'd seen a few signs of grasscutters, little corn sprouts chewed by their little rat teeth and drops of grasscutter poo. I'd turned my ankles a couple times stumbling into little holes. There were vines and thorns and myriad other scratchy things to catch arms and legs and patches of skull. My pantlegs were soaked to the knee, my sneakers were black with ash and dotted with little pickers.

By hour four, I was wondering if anyone would notice if I just curled up in a little ball on the ground.

Finally, FINALLY, Olivier cried uncle and said he could stand it for another hour, but then he'd have to pack it in. (We were both hoping that it would just take another half hour, then we'd finally find something. Then another half hour. And another half hour.) He'd already taken all of his water and I was selling him sips of mine for 5,000 cedis. I had recorded lots of sound, but hadn't taken a single note. Olivier had taken a billion pictures. But had we killed anything? No. Usually the guys catch five grasscutters and a couple rabbits in one go. It's the curse of the journalist that when you want to see something, it doesn't happen, whether it's an overcrowded ER or a good grasscutter bashing. And frankly, all that blather about the seal pup hunt? I was just waiting for something to get its skull smashed before I melted. I was ready to pass around matches and smoke out the little critters.

The dogs were dead tired. There were no more wagging tails. Anytime their owners called them into a thicket, they waded in, then sat down, panting. Who could blame them? It was roughly 50,390 degrees.

At hour four and a half, the boys stopped to point out a "wampum," a lizard that they said they don't bother hunting. The junior firefighter accompanying us obviously missed that line, because when they released it, he went after it and bashed it once, in a two-handed, over the head kind of smash and sent it to the afterlife. A guy called Biscuit put it in a bag, its tongue hanging out of its mouth, a sharp tooth having gone through it. He said he might get 35,000 cedis for it, a little less than $5 Cdn.

At hour five, I threw in the towel, chased down the lead hunter and told him we were leaving him. A quick interview later, we were walking down a dirt road to find a tro-tro to get out us out of there.

The only thing I got was the scratches on my ankles, and the comforting thought that if I'm going to make any money out of this misadventure, I've got to do it all over again. Only this time, with fire.

The Royal Visit

2006-12-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

Governor General Michaelle Jean popped into Ghana for four days during her five-country tour of Africa, an event that had me acting like a "real" Canadian journalist again.

It was a disagreeable fit, proving what I've long suspected: I am no longer fit for "real" journalism, the stuff that entails long days and tight deadlines and listening to handlers and PR people and trying to follow and yet stand out from the pack. It's been a long time since I've done anything organized. I'm mostly off on my own, riding around in tro-tros and wrangling someone else into translating. My deadlines are never tight.

But this time, I was riding in helicopters and motorcades. The schedule was down to the minute. There was one other Canadian, a reporter from Canadian Press, and a lot of local media. There were two PR people, a handler from the High Commission and someone contracted specifically to help "wrangle" me and the local media.

I know that one of the GG's PR people has visited this blog, so I'll keep my comments to myself. Suffice it to say the low point of the visit came when "The Moment" of Michaelle Jean standing at the Door of No Return turned into another eviction and the view of some security guy's butt.

For the most part, I think Ghanaians loved the GG. The kids at the library were totally enthralled. The Ghanaian journalists were mostly confused -- as we all are, I think -- about what a GG actually does. The president was reportedly smitten. Someone wrote an anonymous love poem to Jean in the Daily Guide that was printed after she left, each stanza starting with the letters in her name. Disc jockeys on the radio made some rather crude comments about the president being late for meetings -- "and we all know why! He had to see Michaelle off at the airport..." My property manager sent me a message when I let him know the fridge isn't working (again!? Why fridge gods? Why!?!) telling me that "The GG is hot."

I thought she did very well. Clearly, Africa has resonance for her and it was so refreshing, especially after the regal smugness of Adrienne Clarkson, to see her touching people and dancing with abandon and really getting involved. She seemed willing to try, which is essential here, and willing to have people chuckle at her. We met her in a closed-door meeting with JHR, in which she spoke about her introduction to journalism in Haiti. You can tell she still has all the instincts.

If only I could say the same...

Alright, alright!

2006-11-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

It's been a month since I updated this thing and I've been getting complaints. I'm fine, I'm still alive. I used to wonder how this lapse in posting thing could happen on other people's blogs and now I understand. It's not so much that life gets too busy to post, but more like it gets too routine.

I moved. I'm living in Osu, for people who know Accra, and it appears to have been a move for the better. No housegirls cruising by the windows at 5 a.m. with their eyes peeled for signs of the obruni sleeping in her underwear. No battle ax old ladies screaming at the housegirls. No random screaming fits about the previous tenants or the bills they left behind. No workmen traipsing through at 8 a.m., leaving their boot prints on the floor, their work clothes in the kitchen and their dirt on the furniture. Instead, I'm in a one-bedroom oasis, where the only problem appears to the chronic demands from the day guard.

I am still working for JHR. I'm still working as a freelancer. I've just sent off my pitch to a couple agents and am hoping to hear that the book will go ahead. I am settling in and making friends and generally living life.

Essentially, nothing worth blogging about!

Culture Clash

2006-10-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

"This is like a film," Bercy said to me, laughing, because I woke up this morning to discover I had been evicted.

Things have been going really poorly on the housing front, I suppose you could gather that from the previous entry. I had intended to write an update when the work was finished and I could compare it to childbirth (you know, how now that it's over it wasn't so bad and look what I got out of it...) I'd hoped to take some photos, but the work still hasn't finished and I am no where near settled, so no photos.

I'm not really sure what happened. I think it's a combination of culture clash and unrealistic expectations and the landlady's inability to separate me from the previous tenant from the previous tenant's subletters and the fact that if I'd waited until Nov. 1 to move in, I probably wouldn't have been so difficult to deal with.

Basically I went yesterday to pay for broadband installation and discovered upon arrival that the landlady had come in earlier that day and revoked her permission for me to install the broadband. No warning, no discussion, no nothing. I phoned her and asked her what was going on and she said there was an unpaid bill from the previous tenant for 1.4 million cedis and she was no dummy.

Apparently not.

So I called up the subletters, who are still here, and they thought the figure was a bit high, but came up with a million cedis. (Just over a hundred Canuk dollars.) We had a big chat about the place. I was telling them that Pearl, my landlady, has
refused to let me sign the tenant agreement because she knows I want her to go away. I'm tired of her always popping up. The housegirls are there at 5 a.m., peering into the windows while they sweep and wash and otherwise bang around, getting a good view of the obruni sleeping in her underwear. Pearl shouts at them constantly. I mean, constantly. In fact, I found one of them crouched up behind the front door one day, in tears. Connie, who stayed there for a couple months when she first arrived in Ghana, told me she used to hear Pearl slapping a bunch of eight and nine year old kids who were visiting.

I thought I was being patient withe the constant flow of workers coming in and out and in and out and the constant noise and
distraction and the constant delays. I thought I held it together well after they chopped down the only shade tree to make palm wine and then informed me that someone would have to come on the property every day for SIX weeks to tap the tree. (In an ironic aside, the workers came yesterday and removed the tree because it was "spoiled" and produced not a single drop of wine.)

I said in no uncertain terms when I got off the overnight bus from Tamale on Sunday morning that I wanted her to stop moving my furniture around. She told me it was the girls as they cleaned, which I'm 98 per cent sure was a bald-faced lie. I told her that was fine, but if they move something, they should move it back.

I could have really lost my cool when she walked through the door Monday afternoon saying, "knocking" to tell me that her son was on his way over to see the place and would be there in 15 minutes. My mind was so on my work -- trying to get a radio piece refiled and get a story off to Ottawa -- that I packed up my laptop and headed for a quiet Internet cafe. She pointed out this a.m. that that meant she couldn't get into the apartment, as she doesn't have a key. Oops, but c'mon. Everyone knows -- and our unsigned agreement states -- that she needs to give me 48 hours notice, not 15 minutes.

While I was up in Tamale, the real estate agent I had worked with before taking the house texted me to say the price of a one-bedroom I'd seen in Osu had come down to $450. I think they call it "serendipity;" the timing was pretty fortuitous. So I called him yesterday from Ghana Telecom and we arranged to meet this morning. I had worked my stomach into knots by morning trying to puzzle out how I would get my money back.

Turns out I needn't have worried.

Pearl handed me an envelope with $7,400 in it -- that's $400 for the past month, which is about what I figured I'd be willing to forfeit -- and told me she didn't want to rent the place to me, then railed at me for half an hour about how I spoke badly to her in front of the house girls and how I don't appreciate how hard she's worked to make the house comfortable
for my convenience and how she was embarrassed in front of her son. She also went on and on and on about how the subletter had hung up on her ("I wish Nikki was here! I wish she could see me now!") and how the subletters had destroyed the place (she hadn't set foot on the property in two years, hadn't done a lick of maintenance...) and the garden was in shambles and so on and so forth.

I didn't say anything. I was just glad to get the money back.

I'm moving tomorrow and hopefully unpacking all in one day, as I'm giving a presentation on Friday and then heading for Anamabo beach, something that's been planned for weeks. I just really need a sleep and a drink.

The new place is on the third floor of a building in Osu, behind Koala. It's a one-bedroom, with air conditioning and a huge terrace. It's got a nice big bathroom and a fully-stocked kitchen. Hopefully there will be no more fridge fiascos. I sold
the fridge and cooker this a.m. to a friend for the same price I bought the fridge. He's coming to collect it tomorrow. My new landlord is the head of Somotex, which is a major distributor of fridges, etc. so there's also a washing machine, which is excellent news.

My brain is totally fried.

Rock Bottom

2006-09-28T08:35:00.000-08:00

While I was up north, I met with a Canadian priest who has lived and worked in northern Ghana for more than 30 years. Now he runs the Tamale Institute for Cross Cultural Studies and has become a trained "diviner."

Going for a divination is a lot like having your tarot cards read, except it looks into the past instead reading the future. Most people go to the diviner when something is going wrong and they want someone to peer into the past and see what they did to cause one of the ancestors or spirits to punish them.

The diviner puts some bibs and bobs and cowrie shells into a little bag, gives them a shake or a toss and empties the bag onto the ground or table. Then he interprets them, meaning the magic of the cowries is that they can lead the diviner to the series of questions that may unlock the secrets in the person's conscience of what's causing them anxiety.

I could really use a little read of my recent sins to get the spirits back on my side.

I have recently rented a house down by the beach, in a little slice of Accra known as "La." Ghana has this screwball custom where tenants pay their entire year's rent up front. Everyone does it -- I've talked ot cab drivers lately who say they have to live in rooming houses because they cannot scrape together enough to make a year's deposit on a room in Accra. The country director for JHR told me they were told by a landlord in Kumasi that if they wanted the apartment, they'd have to pay eight years in advance!

Essentially, that meant scrounging around for $7,800 US, meaning my brother reluctantly let me dip into my retirement fund to extract some much-needed cash.

Getting the money here was like the story line for an aspirin commercial. I hired my favourite taxi driver -- and the most reliable and generous person in my life right now, my best friend, Bercy (you will meet him when he comes to Canada) -- to escort me through the day so there was no chance of being robbed. My darling brother called Visa to make sure they would let me have the money and they agreed, so long as I left five per cent with them. I had made arrangements at the forex and ensured that Pearl, the landlady, would be home when I came with the money.

But when I got to the bank, they would hear none of it, saying they could only give me $500 a day.

I was directed to the next teller. She directed me to a man who sat far, far behind the counter. He demanded my credit card and passport. I explained that I had already contacted Visa and could not understand why the bank was telling me something different, when the authorization had come from Visa. He told me it's bank policy. But why!? Why?!

The man told me he would see what he could do and wandered away to nose in on an altercation with another customer. If a butterfly had fluttered past, I'm pretty sure he would have chased it, so long was his attention span. He sat down at a desk for eight seconds, picked up the phone and came back 17 seconds later (after stopping quickly to nose in on yet another customer altercation) and told me he had worked hard and bent the policy and could offer me $2,000.

Thanks, I said, but I was after $7,000.

He nearly had a seizure and railed to anyone in the bank who would listen about how this white woman did not appreciate all of his hard work. "Do you want me to cancel this transaction?" he said menacingly. "You don't want this $2,000 I got for you?" "What transaction?" I said, which made his head blow off and orbit the room.

I walked down the street to Standard Chartered, who told me they could give me $3,000 and the reason is that if they give anymore, they get in trouble from the Bank of Ghana. Well then. There's an explanation, at least.

So, down to the forex bureau with my backpack full of 23,770,000 cedis. In 20,000 notes. I had made arrangements at the forex and had called them that morning to make sure the money was there and had called a second time to request a receipt be ready with the serial numbers written on it, as my landlady is paranoid about counterfeiting.

But when Bercy and I arrived, not only was the cash not there, there was no sign of a receipt. An hour later, we were at the landlady's, who looked crestfalled at the $20 notes included in the bundle. "But I like hundreds," she pouted.

Bercy and I started this little adventure at noon. It was now 4.30 p.m. I was becoming the living embodiment of Murphy's Law.

Did the same thing the next day, but got up early and decided to go when the bank first opened at 8.30 a.m. Essentially that meant I got all the same frustrations, plus the added bonus of having to wait a half hour for the bank employee in charge of Visa transactions to show up.

By Day 3, I decided to take a break from the bank and go fridge shopping instead. I had a bit of a showdown with a friend over the brand new fridge that was left in the house and had lost. It was a new and novel experience not to get my way and I didn't like it one bit. I really don't want it repeated.

So Bercy came at 8.30 a.m. and we headed to Makola market, and after three stores, it became clear I was too cheap even for Makola and Bercy decided it was best to hit the second hand stores on the outskirts of town. The fridges and other electrical items there come in shipping containers from Europe. Some of them are pilfered from people's trash piles and refurbished by brilliant African mechanics.

We picked out a little fridge no bigger than me. It was $200. The guy told us we'd have to wait while they filled it with freon. So I bought some "pure water" and Bercy and I sat in the car talking about religion and the UN and Kofi Annan and soccer and everything in between.

Two hours later, the fridge was just cooling down and I was heating up. By the time we delivered the fridge it was 4.30, meaning my sole accomplishment of the day was buying a fridge. Gives me a whole new respect for Sears.

Four days later, I was back at the house divvying up the last of the furniture and pulling things off the walls ready for the painter, when I opened the fridge door and noticed that while the light was on, it was like a sauna in there.

Bercy came to my rescue, but we were unable to fix it. I called the number on the receipt -- which came with a week long guarantee -- and got someone who spoke no English, who passed me on to someone who slurred his words and shouted in my ear.

Bercy came the next morning at 8 a.m. and by 9 a.m. we arrived in Teshie at the refrigerator store, where we were told the mechanic had not arrived and they had no power anyway, so we'd have to leave it and come back tomorrow.

I asked whether we could call to make sure it was ready. The guy pointed to one of the numbers I had called the night before. "That number doesn't work," I said. He started waving his hands in my face, patting my arms and shoulders and telling me it does work. I told him to stop touching me and that I'd also called this other number, who did it belong to? Turns out it was the mechanic who shouted at me the night before. The owner told me he would ask him about it. I was feeling pretty annoyed by this point anyway -- having gotten nearly no sleep the night before after getting some bad news -- and told him that I would like an apology for the inconvenience of having to come back and for having been yelled at.

"This is what I'm telling you," the guy said, again waving his hands in my face, grabbing again at my arms and shoulders.

No, I said. I've been keeping track, listening closely even, and the word sorry has not actually passed your lips.

The guy exploded, the gesticulating would have put an Italian to shame. I lived in Europe for 20 years, don't tell me how things are done! You would never do this in Europe!

I was taking steps backward to avoid the physical onslaught and finally hissed: "Stop touching me. Right now.

I don't care how long you've been in Europe. I don't care about Europe. I'm here, in Africa, standing in front of you, asking you to treat me with a little respect."

At which point, I burst into tears.

Not delicate, gentle, droplet down the cheek tears, but full-on hysterical sobbing tears.

Everyone collectively recoiled in horror.

Africans don't cry. They just don't. They might shed a tear or two at a funeral, but they could slam a door on their finger, witness their husband cheating on them, hear their child take the Lord's name in vain, hear that they've tested positive or whatever else might upset a person and never, but NEVER, shed a tear.

Bercy hustled me to the car. "Don't cry," he said, looking stricken. "Don't cry. Stay strong. Be strong within you. I'm here. Don't worry. Don't cry."

The more he tried to comfort me, the harder I cried. I cried all the way home. I cried as we loaded up Orla's couch. I cried as we carried it home.

And man, I thought "white woman with blond hair" got me a lot of stares. That's nothing compared to "white woman with blond hair and puffy, red-rimmed eyes." I expected to hear a report about it later on Joy News, such was the interest.

When I got to the house, the landlady told me the painter had not arrived. She sighed. I sighed. "I'll be so glad when this is over," I said. She laughed. While I was gone, she'd decided there were two leaks in the roof and all the doors needed sanding and polishing, the garden had to be reseeded and the windows should be replaced.

Eep.

On the upside, a stranger stopped and gave me a lift today. And my contact lenses are fitting well, now that my eyes aren't so dried out. And I do not have cancer. Anymore. And this from my mum: "Oh dear, I'm sure you're exhausted from everything that's been going on in your life lately. Try to put things in perspective - you're healthy, have work, and this is just a bump in the road of life. Wish I could give you a hug. Consider yourself hugged."

Which, of course, just made all the other people at the Internet cafe recoil in horror at me crying, again.

Light(s) Out

2006-09-26T13:29:00.001-08:00

Ghana's rainy season has been markedly dry this year and the Akosombo dam, which provides power to Ghana and two other West African countries, has dipped to its lowest level in nearly 20 years. This is not good news: it is only the tail-end of the rainy season (okay, really, it's the start of the dry season -- hotter and hotter each day -- but everyone seems to refer to it as "the tail-end" because it's still raining) and already they're rationing power.

It needs to rain in Burkina and northern Ghana in order for the dam to fill properly and since Burkina is terminally dusty and dry, I'm not sure there's much hope for improvement. When I was in Tamale, it pissed rain in an utterly surprising way. Two days of the 10 I was there, it poured, poured, poured rain, and there was nothing to do but sit by the window and marvel.

When it rains at home, it’s timid and meek, sometimes unpredictable, often sustained over long periods of time and usually given to showers that fall neatly down in drops that are easily shielded by an umbrella. Here when it rains, it just goes for broke, turns on all the taps and lets the floods go. It has a noise and a rhythm and is usually unpredictable. In Liberia, where it rains every day, it comes without warning and goes just as quickly, sometimes before the sun has gotten out of the way. Because almost every building in Accra – and most cities in Africa, for that matter – are domed with corrugated steel, the rain takes on a kind of echo, falling heavily and banging out a rhythm.

The rain in Tamale, which came loud and fast and long, lasting more than four hours at a go, first started with splotches the size of quarters and quickly fell so heavily it was no longer possible to distinguish one drop from another. Then it began blowing in from every direction and just when you thought it was at its heaviest and the streets had been cleared and the sewers were raging and the rain was sluicing off the roofs in rivers, it found more holes in the heavens and came down even harder, moving in visible sheets that blurred neighbourhoods and completely obscured the tiny bit of landscape I could see from my room at the guesthouse.

Regardless of the rain, we're already doing something called "load shedding." That means that every two days, it's "lights out." It's also, as far as I'm concerned, the way of the future. Pretty soon there's not going to be any country that doesn't do "load shedding" to stave off "brown outs" and whatever other fantastic euphemistic language they come to mean "too many consumers, not enough power."

When I was in Uganda, the power rationing was actually more severe. One day you got 12 hours in the day, the next you got 12 hours at night. We planned our lives around it, had dinner at Rohini's when the power was on and when it wasn't, we went to the spot or out to a restaurant around Bugolobi Flats. (Such a great name; right up there with Ouagadougou.) It's nearly the same here, except that I have no money right now and am not making it to the drinking spot. Instead, for the past two "lights out" nights, I've sat in the dark, reading by candlelight, cursing the power outtages and my serious lack of friends in my adopted home. It's been, shall we say, depressing.

I find the rotation much better than the old way -- "dammit the power's out!" and having no idea when it might flicker back on -- but still, it's not ideal. The spots are probably doing booming business and no one is seriously crabby yet because the ngihts are still cool enough that you can sleep without a fan or AC. But come December, look out. Oh, look out. The traffic is sometimes terrible, because even though everyone knows when the power is going to go out in a certain area, the cops are not keeping up with replacing the lights with traffic cops, so it's always a bit of a snarl around some of the major intersections. (A typical picture is to see every car nose to nose and drivers frantically waving and screaming bloody murder at one another. Again, may I just say: it's called a queue and sometimes it makes life easier.)

The day time power outtages are actually somehow more obnoxious, mostly because I find it impossible to get anything done while I'm counting down the minutes of battery I have left. Plus, the Internet doesn't work from home when the power's out. And lately the phone has been blinking on and off, costing me at least one assignment.

Sigh...

Sunshine Journalism

2006-09-21T02:32:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure there is a worse insult someone can hurl at a white person in Africa than "racist." I'm not sure there's a worse insult someone can hurl at a white journalist working in Africa than "racist." In plenty of circumstances, it's probably deserved, but having been on the receiving end -- taxi drivers occasionally throw out "racist" when you're negotiating a fare -- it smarts, terribly, when you see yourself as being in love with the continent, the people, the culture and others see you as filled with hate and superiority.

While some readers might snort at the idea that I worry how I write about Africa, it's true. I worry about feeding into the idea that Africa is scary or dangerous or violent or starving. This blog doesn't always reflect that, it's true, but at the same time, I think it gets the idea across that often the most violent person on the continent is me with low blood sugar on a hot, sweaty day spent crushed up against fellow passengers during a long overland journey.

During my stint in East Africa, I wrote hardly any "good" news. I wrote mostly about AIDS and the orphans it leaves behind. I think it's a major crisis that's just being ignored and I would have to be the most hard-hearted SOB to stand by and write sunshine stories while there is so much suffering that is going so ignored.

Still, that's one of the reasons I chose Ghana. There is plenty of "bad news" here -- infant mortality rates and unemployment and illiteracy and poverty -- but there is plenty of good, uniquely African news here too.

This week I sat in on a "Rebranding Africa" conference that aims to improve the image of the continent on the world stage. It was pretty comprehensive, looking at everything from the way local media paints their home to the way international journalists portray the continent to the way diasporans represent their homelands to the way NGOs and charities feed into the idea that all children here are half-naked with bits of rice stuck to their cheeks and flies scratching around the corners of their eyes.

It was at times infuriating; at times inspiring.

The delegates talked about how to counter bad news with good. How to get powerful messages of success to the journalists who usually write about war and famine and disease. How to harness the power of the Nigerian film industry and turn it into something every African can be proud to call their own. How to get blogging. How to take on the Economist, a publication that was uniformly panned as evil.

South Africa has this amazing campaign on right now to "brand" itself as a nation of possibilites. It's capitalizing on its global image as a country with an incredibly painful history that has managed to face the truth and reconcile and build, beautifully, on the shared strengths and amazing character of its people. The brand's boss, Yvonne Johnston, showed these video clips of sweeping clifts and amazing sunsets and wild animals and colourful people and vibrant cityscapes and traditional dress and women walking with bowls on their heads and children dancing and... all the things that make Africa great. I was tearing up.

Another man gave a presentation about the negativity of the media, beginning with a clip from the Economist, something filed around the time of the Congo's election, which said many people didn't really know what they were voting for. There was a quote from a woman saying she didn't really know who was running or who she would vote for or even whether she would vote. She was identified as Monique, a smoked-monkey seller in a remote jungle town.

Initially, I screwed up my forehead and stared at the guy. What is wrong with that? The woman is what she is, should she not be quoted because she didn't give her last name? Because the quote makes her look uninformed? I wasn't really sure what he was getting at and it was starting to make me angry how he kept referring to it as perpetuating negative African stereotypes.

Then he said, "I don't imagine the majority of Congolese people eat monkey meat, but this journalist has just reinforced a tired stereotype about the way Africans live."

My heart sank. He definitely had a point. And my inability to recognize it strikes me as the worst kind of racism. The unconscious kind. The kind that is so subtle and ingrained, the person committing it doesn't even know they're doing it.

It's food for thought. The paragraph said "most" people don't know what they're voting for. So why not ask a popcorn seller, or a boy selling PK? Why not say she is a mother of three? Why not identify her in another way? Her comments are certainly valid and she really does sell monkey meat. But should the journalist have tried harder to find someone who represents the mainstream?

It's all a good debate.

Maybe I'm thinking about this more and more because an article I wrote for the Star drew *major* criticism from Toronto's Ghanaian community. The foreign editor forwarded me an email from a woman who lambasted the article and called it a perpetuation of the Star's racist agenda. She was irate that I had besmirched the reputation of the Asante king. (The story was about a cocaine commission underway here; two lines referred to the fact that the Asante king's name has been mentioned at the hearings.)

Or maybe it's because as of next week, I'm going to be working with Journalists for Human Rights again. (Yes, I'm a huge hypocrite. But don't stop loving me. I need the money.)

Bewitched

2006-09-17T14:04:00.001-08:00

I am in the earliest, tentative stages of looking at writing a book (how's that for a sentence that hedges its bets?) and spent the past week up in northern Ghana doing some research. Two years ago, when I was working with Journalists for Human Rights, we visited a camp for women accused of witchcraft about three hours outside of Tamale. We literally flew in and flew out. It took us two days to reach the camp and we were only there for about three hours before we had to push on.

While we were there, we met Hawa Mahama, an 80-ish year old woman (age being a fluid and not-so-important concept) who had lived at the Gambaga camp for 12 years. She was banished from her home village by her brother, who accused her of being a witch after her nephew woke from a dream in which he saw her trying to kill him.

Her story haunts me. When people ask me about the kinds of stories I write, I always think of Hawa, the emaciated, nearly-blind woman we met at the witch camp, who was cursed a witch in a ritualistic sacrifice involving the enigmatic chief and a charmed chicken.

It is difficult from a Western perspective to understand the African belief in spirits and sorcery and witchcraft without sounding belittling or condescending, without resorting to stereotypes or cliches. It is difficult to articulate what makes the African people -- and I say Africans because in the research I've managed so far, there is a strong belief in witchcraft in virtually every corner of the continent -- what makes the African people so in tune with the forces around them. The best explanation I've had comes from two different people: firstly, that for most Africans, the world exists in two spheres, the seen and the unseen. And secondly, the African mind philosophizes in the concrete and needs an explanation as to "why" something happened. When no concrete explanation can be found, the spiritual will do.

In the past few days, I've visited an earth shrine, where the chief consults a shrine dedicated to the ancestors to determine whether a man or woman has witchcraft. He brews a concoction that dissolves their power. It's his job to monitor the mood of the spirits and to make sure the ancestors have been remembered and honoured in an appropriate way. After much joshing about my husband and my bride price, I was invited back in February to help with the bi-annual sacrifice.

The next day, I visited Nyani witchcamp with a Catholic catechist who works closely with the community to meet their basic human needs. It is taboo in this particular village to "chase" people, so it has over the centuries, developed a reputation as a sanctuary. There are nearly 600 people living at the "camp" -- essentially a village unto itself -- who have been accused of witchcraft. Again, they consult with a fetish priest who takes them to the shrine and puts the question to the ancestors. If they confirm the person has witchcraft, a concoction is brewed that not only robs them of their powers, it makes those powers somehow reverse, so if they practice witchcraft again, they die.

(The family of the fetish priest told me they are paying for their own kindness. While people can seek sanctuary in Nyani, the land is stretched beyond its capacity and there is virtually no industry and too many elderly people who require food and care, but have neither the strength nor the money to pay for it. When I asked what they needed the next time I visit, the boys thought for a moment and then asked for a football.)

One of the women I interviewed was there because her husband's other wife accused her of witchcraft. One woman was there because her son felt she must have worked the black magic that killed his son. Another man said he came to the camp looking for something to break his witch powers -- which he did not know he had until people started blaming him for the death of his nephew.

Because I am thinking about writing about witchcraft in Ghana in increasingly modern times -- its causes and implications, its limitations on development, its tension with women's rights and empowerment, its manifestations in "spirit children" and urban settings and charismatic Christian circles -- I went north to visit the four witch camps dotted around Tamale, as well as interview some of the players who work with the women and their accusers.

That meant meeting Simon Ngota, a social worker who spent nearly 20 years working with the blind on agricultural projects before moving to Gambaga to work with women accused of witchcraft. He has been in Gambaga for more than 12 years and through his thoughtful interventions, more than 315 women have returned home to their villages.

This is an astounding figure and an astounding accomplishment to a "problem" that has no easy solution.

In his little blue office, decorated with anti-lynching posters, are three big placards of fading photographs. One was a close-up shot of Hawa and as we talked more and more about Simon's strategies for working with communities and convincing women to go home, I asked about this woman, calling her by name, much to Simon's delight.

Her village was the first that Simon visited when he took up the post at Gambaga. There were six women at the camp from that village, a clear sign that all was not right in the village. He took off his shoes and knelt before the chief and explained that dreams are natural and sometimes deaths are natural and while we might not always be able to explain why someone got malaria or why a child died too soon, it isn't always witchcraft that's to blame.

The chief would not be swayed. No matter how often Simon visited and no matter how hard he tried, the chief still called the women wicked and refuse to hear of them returning to the village. They cause disharmony, he said, and scare the young men into leaving for Kumasi and once they're gone, there's no one left to farm.

But Hawa is now home. She left more than a year ago, her things packed into the back of the battere Operation Go Home pick-up.

What happened? The chief died, and with him the stigma and memory of a long-ago dream that cursed a woman and robbed her of 12 years with her children and grandchildren.

Under the Rainbow

2006-09-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

“Ghanaians are a unique people whose culture, morality and heritage totally abhor homosexual and lesbian practices and indeed any other form of unnatural sexual acts."
-- Minister of Information and National Orientation, Kwamena Bartels, announcing that an international conference for gays and lesbisans scheduled to take place in Accra would not happen on his watch.

Ghana's gays battle AIDS underground
Group speaks to one man at a time on dangers of HIV Homosexuality is against the law in African nation
Aug. 21, 2006
KAREN PALMER
FOR THE TORONTO STAR

ACCRA, Ghana—Azumah Nelson looks for a certain sway of the hips, a girlishness in the way a man gestures or smiles, a kind of subtle flirtation that gives away his preference for men.
He knows the effeminate ones will lead him to others.
Nelson, a self-acknowledged "effem" with chiselled cheekbones, curly eyelashes and a theatrical enchanté sort of handshake, is fronting a rather dire campaign in the gay community, approaching one gay man at a time with a warning.
"We try to tell them that the menace is out there, that right now the menace is in Ghana," he said.
That "menace" is AIDS.
While the fight against AIDS in the West has always included the gay population, the prevention message has never really reached Africa's gays and lesbians, largely because they are nearly invisible on a continent where homosexuality is mostly illegal.
"The problem has not even been talked about and because it has not been mentioned, they think it is not a problem at all," said Mac-Darling Cobinnah, founder and executive director of the Centre for Popular Education and Human Rights in Ghana.
Based on media reports, as well as posters and billboards sponsored by the Ghana AIDS commission and UNAIDS, he said, gay Ghanaian men and women got the impression that AIDS was confined mostly to prostitutes and cheating husbands and wives.
In the absence of formal prevention messages aimed specifically at gay men and women, Cobinnah's group has gone underground to spread the word. Only South Africa and Kenya have made similar efforts to reach out to the gay community.
Five pairs of men, including Nelson, work as peer educators selling condoms and lubrication in five neighbourhoods across the West African nation's capital, targeting men they know or suspect are gay.
The work is not without hazards. Ghana, a politically stable but economically impoverished West African nation, is serious about sending an anti-gay message: two men discovered with gay pornography were sentenced to four years of hard labour in prison, and bail for a woman recently arrested for lesbianism was set at more than $1,000 (U.S.).
The funding for the centre's peer educator training came from a somewhat surprising source, the United States Agency for International Aid, or USAID, the official aid distributor for a country where gays are staging their own fight to widen their rights on issues such as marriage and adoption.
A small organization like the Centre for Popular Education, whose volunteer base is about 30 men and women, might be able to do more if large and powerful agencies like UNAIDS — the United Nation's agency charged with preventing the spread of the disease — took the lead, he said.
"No one talks about it and the experience all over the world shows that men who have sex with men are most at risk," Cobinnah said.
"They always hide behind the law. They never want to talk about such issues," he added. "For some people, it's just ignorance. There's no law saying you can't talk about such issues."
Still, talking about homosexuality can be fraught with danger: exposing oneself as gay can lead to violence, as can wrongly identifying another man as gay.
The message is simple, said Nelson.
In fact, it's a spin on the usual A-B-C (abstain, be faithful, use condoms) campaign, and pairs condom use with the introduction of lubrication meant to make homosexual sex both more pleasurable and less likely to result in blood transfer.
(In a separate program, women are taught how to fashion their own dental dams out of locally purchased condoms.)
Statistics show it's working: the peer counsellors figure they've spoken to nearly 800 gay men in five Accra neighbourhoods, twice the target number the program hoped to reach. They've also sold nearly 18,000 condoms and more than 500 tubes of lubrication.
The demand for lube is the most obvious sign the message is getting through, Nelson says. When its price in stores was raised recently, counsellors were besieged with requests for cheaper tubes of the gel.
It's unclear how many gays in Ghana are infected with HIV. Overall, the country's AIDS rate is 3.1 per cent, a relatively small number compared to countries such as South Africa or Botswana, where more than 20 per cent of people are infected.
But because the gay community is largely hidden, it's difficult to track figures Since homosexuality is illegal, the Ghana AIDS commission does not collect statistics about sexual orientation.
"We know there are deaths weekly. There are a lot of funerals amongst the gay population," Cobinnah said.
"They cannot be linked to AIDS, as there is no research to support it, but every week we have to attend a funeral of a gay in one of the regions."
A study conducted among more than 150 gay Ghanaian men in March 2004 showed the men considered anal sex safer than vaginal sex. They were also generally uneducated about sexually transmitted infections like gonorrhea and HIV.
In some ways, the campaign is lonely work. Azumah Nelson is a stage name, used only for work as a peer counsellor. Cobinah also sometimes uses a pseudonym. He struggles to keep the program going; in fact, it runs out of funding in September.
"If a member is arrested for selling condoms or lubrication, we don't have the means to represent that person in court," he said. "We don't even have enough funds to operate."
Selling condoms is not illegal in Ghana, but recently police have used carrying condoms as grounds for an arrest for prostitution.
Officially, Cobinnah's group is devoted to human rights and advocates for more than greater freedoms for gays and lesbians.
Its small office — painted purple and surrounded by shanty homes, beauty parlours and makeshift auto body shops — is decorated with dozens of posters, some warning against the spread of AIDS, others opposing domestic violence, some pushing for greater rights for women.
If the plethora of rainbow flags weren't a clear tip-off, the DVD of Queer as Folk playing in the corner would be a sure indication of the organization's pro-gay tilt, yet many of the group's neighbours have no idea of its work or stance.
"It's not so much hidden as it's underground," he said. "We're trying our best to come out and be visible."

Visiting the Family

2006-08-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

To step off the plane in Ghana feels different each time, just as Beryl Markham warned that it would.

The first time I felt anxiety, dread and excitement, the second time it filled me with unreasonable joy to see the giant "Akwaaba" sign. This time I didn’t even look out the window. We were on the ground before I realized it. It was old-hat to go through immigration. I know the drill. I know the drill.

All of which made the first night in Accra rather depressing. Grey, dreary and drizzling. Everything mildewed and wet from months of rain and humidity. An empty apartment. Why did I come back? Did I really want to be here? Really?

My first full day in Accra, though, and all seemed well. A tro-tro ride introduced me to Wilson, who offered computer help -- even for the Mac-minded -- and his phone number and paid my fare as well. Christian, the taxi driver, dropped me off at the house even though it was a shared cab. The kids shouted obruni. The goats bolted in front of cars. And the jollof was just like I remembered it.

That hollow, doubtful feeling is mostly gone. I've started taking African dance and joined a gym and have filed two stories. I've lined up two more sources to sell work. Orla and I spent an idyllic day at the Botanical Gardens in Aburi, having a surprisingly ant-free picnic. I will begin this week to hunt for apartments and will put together a proposal by week's end to do some traveling, first to Cote D'Ivoire, then to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Guinea should be covered, but since Lebanon exploded, I suspect there will not be enough money unless I can get there overland. (These countries are in a line, but not one that is easily traversed.)

It feels good to be back. In his "Letters to a Young Poet," Wilke says writers need to write like they need to breathe, they simply live to write and must write to live. I held my breath for seven weeks, exhaling only when I touched down back on African soil. For nearly two months I was so stuffed up with writers block that I could not put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. Even emails were somehow tainted by this absolute need to just shut it off, turn it off, give it a rest.

After two years, my conclusion is that freelancing is not for the insecure: it brings out the absolute worst in you, makes you wheedling and obsequious, doubtful and suspicious and paranoid. Being home felt like such freedom that I did not want to be weighed down by the responsibility of earning a living, writing about the trials of other people’s existence while spending my nights picking raspberries and systematically, in a sickening sort of way, chewing my way through the pantry.

It rained buckets, turning everything into this lush, green, vibrant wonderland. The grass grew long and sort of sticky. Twilight in the raspberry patch, knowing that this was a gift to me: early season raspberries and plenty of them. Enough for pie. Enough for ice cream. Enough for a whole summer, squeezed into a couple weeks that came a month earlier than expected. Slipping down the side of the hill, reaching further and further for blackcaps that have suddenly appeared: another gift. Sitting, silently, on the deck. Just looking at the flowers. Mind a complete and total blank. Just looking at this wonderous thing that is just growing so beautifully. Just there. The place where I bond with my mom, bent over with gloves and shears, babbling about the neighbourhood gossip or plans for the next trip. So many gifts, to be able to see these flowers in their August intensity in the middle of June, absolutely bursting with colour and bees and butterflies. In the hands of someone else, it is probably some sort of metaphor for time, or for my relationship to the people who tend it when I am not around. But my mind is a blank; filled up with just the image and nothing more.

(And speaking of visiting family, this is my nephew, Kitty.)

Raiding the Supply Closet

2006-06-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

My pen ran out of ink today, right in the middle of a pig pen, as I was asking widows and HIV-positive women about raising orphans and raising pigs to pay for raising the orphans. And I thought: "That's it. I'm out of here."

So, I'm coming to Canada for the rest of June and most of July. I'll be doing the usual Karen Palmer Freeloading Freelancer tour of southwestern Ontario.

See you soon...

-30-

2006-05-30T04:12:00.000-08:00

When I was six, my sister and I shared two Barbie dolls, a blonde-haired Barbie with a button on her back that made a kissing noise when pressed and a dime store knock-off Barbie with brown hair and gargantuan proportions, especially when compared with Barbie. We had no Ken doll, my mom made most of the dolls clothes on her sewing machine and we learned early on how to cut windows that opened like shutters into shoeboxes that were reborn as the Dream House.

My friend Christa had all the accoutrements we lacked: the house, the car, the camper, the Ken. Whenever I went to her house to play, our Barbies invariably fought over Ken, changed in and out of dozens of outfits and fought over Ken some more. Even at six, we had an appreciation, even a flair, for soap opera drama but the plotlines of our Barbies lives had little variation. She went to university, then got a job as a nurse or a teacher, our imagination around career options being somewhat limited at six. By 22, she was considered successful in her chosen field, she’d successfully seduced Ken and was married by 24. (Bygones were always bygones with the Barbie who lost out; she was always the bridesmaid.) By 26 she had her first invisible baby – neither of us had a Barbie baby – and by 30 she had three little darlings, the husband and the career.

And then the story stopped. What more could be said? What more could happen? She had done it all and done it on schedule, before the age of 30. It was time to start all over again, change outfits, change careers and change the catfights that brought Ken to her clutches in the first place.

Why, at six, did we see 30 as the end?

We use 30 as a deadline all the time: company president by 30, millionaire by 30, bureau chief by 30, settle down by 30, sow the wild oats until 30, married by 30.

Think about all the movies or books where 30 plays a part in the plot, where ambition to “do” something by 30 drives the story. The pacts that friends make: If neither of us is married by the time we’re 30…

Thirty is the age at which we have it all figured out, that we stop playing around. It’s the age by which, if you haven’t done what you set out to do, you’re probably not going to do it.

(In the newspaper business, -30- is meant to represent the end. It’s a holdover from the time of telex machines, when editors would have no idea whether you’d finished your brilliant overseas dispatch or had simply run out of money or, in some cases, electrical current.)

On this continent, 30 is way past middle age. In Zimbabwe, life expectancy is estimated to be 34, meaning a midlife crisis comes at 17 and the average Zimbabwean doesn’t live to see 35.

For my 30th birthday, I got up and went to interview the electrical company spokesperson about their HIV program. I went to lunch and ate Indian food as the owner chewed out the guard for some real or imagine slight. I went to the Trade Fair and remembered why I don’t like crowds, especially crowds of children. The minibus mate tried to weasel an extra 10 kwacha out of me, and when I looked bored and unruffled, he told me he would forgive me this time. Thank you, I forgive you too, I said. For what, he asked. For trying to cheat me on my birthday, I said. I read a handful of birthday wishes sent via email. I went home, watched a movie, cursed my cell provider for cutting out. I went for dinner with two women I’ve known for two weeks, but who’ve become friends nonetheless. Then we went to a bar where the music was lame and the men were lecherous. I went to bed and woke up the next morning feeling no different: not older, not wiser, not any less depressed by the idea of 30.

In the past week, one man I interviewed asked if writing my story was part of a school project and someone else guessed I was turning 25 when I told him it was my birthday. Back in the day, when I had just turned legal and would seethe when anyone asked to see my ID, people – smug, vain, older people – would say: “One day you’ll appreciate that.” Sadly, that day has finally come.

I might say I was lucky, at 30, to be living a life that makes me content. There are very few people in their 20s who want something as intangible as satisfaction by 30, but I feel in lots of ways that I am living a life that satisfies me – something that is far more important to me now, at 30, than being famous or married or rich. I look at friends who have chosen the more conventional path – the kind I always scripted for Barbie – and are miserable with it.

Still, I am alone and as I turn 30, it weighs on me more and more. I guess you could say I’m growing up.

-30-

Life
Every experience under the sun
Karen Palmer
806 words
2 May 2006
The Toronto Star
ONT
D03
English
Copyright (c) 2006 The Toronto Star
KIGALI, Rwanda -- There is a certain exhilarating energy to an Africa bus stand.

It is manic, confusing, chaotic and overcrowded, the vans lined up nose-to-nose in a haphazard way while dozens of boys in plastic sandals and 50 Cent T-shirts bark out strange place names and try with feigned urgency and real competitiveness to steer you toward their minibus.

There is the inevitable give-and-take about the fare, accompanied by many exclamations of "In the name of Jesus, sister! Amen!" and a second round of negotiations about that hefty bag on your back.

There is the patient or not-so-patient wait while the bus fills, squeezing in 20 where 15 would sit comfortably.

Then a delay, another delay, a start of the engine, a blaring of the radio - brassy Congolese, American rap or hip hop in an unrecognizable language - a small shift forward, a sputtering of the engine.

Through the windows, boys and girls sell glucose biscuits, sugary Fanta soft drinks, bottles of cold water, boiled eggs with salt and piri piri sauce, tiny sweet bananas, oranges that are actually green, sticks of roasted goat meat, greasy samosas from a giant tub.

And once underway, there may be a sales pitch for aphrodisiacs or a sermon ("In the name of Jesus, my sister! Amen!") or a Nigerian film playing loud enough to be heard in Nigeria.

There is always a breathtaking landscape dotted with tiny homes and cheering, waving children.

Inside the bus there are curious questions: Where are you from? What are you doing here? Where is your husband? How do you find our food, our country, our people?

There is usually a test of your knowledge of the local dialect; a pass is rewarded with delighted giggles. There are the insightful conversations about politics and development, the back-and-forth about hopes for the country. Then the shy declarations of the secret wish for more education, to one day see Canada.

At your destination, there is the budget hotel, costing anywhere from a dollar to $15 a night and described variously as a brothel, only for the desperately downtrodden or, hopefully, friendly, well-kept and clean.

On good nights, there is the sound of chirruping crickets, the buzz of motorbikes, the soccer fans down at the drinking spot cheering Arsenal or Man U or Chelsea.

On bad mornings, there is no power and only a bucket and a plastic cup for a shower.

On the streets there are wide-eyed children, some tied to their mother's back, others peering out from behind her skirt with broad smiles or looks of astonishment or fear.

Some are even bold enough to try out their English, asking and answering their sole phrase: "How are you? I am fine! How are you? I am fine!"

The continent is too big, too varied to be summed up in words: there are camels and soldiers, deserts and jungles, gorillas and lions, mystics and juju masters, chapatis and cassava, Muslims and Christians, a jumble of vibrant colours and masses of people.

There is a constant sense of struggle, endless sources of frustration, frequent assaults on the senses, brilliant scenes of innovation and resilience, heartbreaking displays of humanity, enough injustices to challenge a traveller's principles, sensibilities and long-held beliefs.

Travelling in Africa is not for the timid: you have to put yourself out there to get the most out of it. It requires equal parts compassion, patience and humour and will often reveal more about you than it will itself.

As aviator Beryl Markham wrote in her 1942 autobiography West With The Night:

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved.

It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings.

It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts.

It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.

It is what you will and it withstands all interpretation. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.'

It is all these things but one: it is never dull.

Karen Palmer is a former Star reporter who has moved to Africa.

The Nature of Things

2006-05-30T04:10:00.000-08:00

Last week, the night guard at Doogles backpackers lodge (which is a dump and looks nothing like Mua Mission, which is pictured) came upon me crouched on the path to the chalets, one hand clutching my toothbrush, the other tossing stones further up the trail. Maybe he came because he heard me muttering, “Go on, get.” Or maybe he was just curious about why I was throwing stones. “There’s a toad,” I said, as he nearly stepped on it. A big, ugly, warty brown toad. He looked like a big, ugly stone. I felt silly, of course – a grown person paralyzed by a toad in the road – but I was hoping the guard would take up the cause and get the toad to move out of the way – not only out of the way, but away. Far enough away that it wouldn’t suddenly jump out again, or find its way into my room. I had already hit it with three fistfuls of stones, all very carefully aimed, none so violently thrown as to actually hurt him. Yet the stupid, ugly thing just sat there in its stupid toady way being all toad-like and stupid. Finally, with the guard’s boot nearly on top of him, he darted into the bushes.

This is brave little me in Africa.

Last night, there was a giant spider dangling from the ceiling and when I blew on it, he settled into the curtains, completely camouflaged. There was another hairy black one with stubby legs near the toilet and two Daddy Long Legs up near the showerhead. I slept under the mosquito net, confident they were catching bugs in their webs. Outside, there was a chorus of tiny tree frogs, their chirrups as rhythmic as breathing, their deceptive sound suggesting they were as big as hamburger patties.

This morning I went for a long walk up a hill that I will call a mountain near a mission called Mua on the road between Zomba and Lilongwe. The path leaves a small village, crosses through some maize and cotton and pea fields and continues through straw-like grasses taller than me and finally up into the rocky, tree-studded mountainside. It was loaded with grasshoppers, which make me flinch. One landed on my elbow and I shrieked. Even though it only landed on me for a nanosecond, it felt like it had suctioned onto my arm. I was already getting quite an arm workout trying to keep the buzzing flies away from me. Tse-tse or otherwise, I tend to swell up like a weirdo when flies bite and I wasn’t interested in giving them a free ride up the hill on my sweaty T-shirt.

At one point I decided to sit down on a rock and catch my breath. It was around 9 a.m. but already the sun was intense, just beaming down as though it was passing through a magnifying glass. After weeks of frosty temperatures – each morning wrapped in the shroud of a heavy, moving mist – the sun felt good but oppressive and I was coated in sweat by the time I sat down, a droplet falling from my ear onto my shoulder and my whole clavicle slick. It was the just the tiniest bit of a clearing, a widening in the otherwise narrow footpath. Across from my rock was a burned tree stump with three cobs of maize shoved into a hollow. This whole area is mystical and spiritual, with rapids curling around a hole in the rock that surrounds the river. The local people believe that this hole leads to the spirit world and that evil spirits can pull people down into it at their whim. The past two days there have been drums and singing and chanting coming from somewhere deep in the village as they install a new chief with masked dancers and spirit people known as gulies, who can spring up out of nowhere.

So I wondered whether this clearing had a particular spiritual meaning and whether the maize was meant to be an offering, or whether some bored kids just decided to shove some corncobs in a hole in a tree. As the sweat dried, I was surrounded by butterflies, literally hundreds and hundreds of little grey moths with white splotches. There were a few orange ones, a couple yellow ones and one or two brilliant blue butterflies who folded up their wings and looked like fallen leaves.

There is an “orphanage” nearby for lost and wayward animals and when I visited, there were a couple smelly ducks, a little antelope, an even smaller deer with wide Disney-esque eyes, a couple vervet monkeys pacing on the beams of their cages, another kind of monkey I’d never seen before, with light eyes and a bushy coat, and an old baboon who collects shiny coins from tourists, which she turns over to the night guard when he brings her food.

I saw a group of vervet monkeys down at the orphanage, swinging in the trees of the deer cage and generally reminding all the caged animals of the vague concept of freedom. When I passed today through the gates leading to the mission’s cabins, the branch of a bush swung with the lost weight of a retreating animal, too much bounce to be a bird, but probably a monkey. I waited and they slowly revealed themselves, stalking along the branches, wondering about me like I was wondering about them.

After I had returned to my room, rinsed out my socks and washed off the sweat, I sat outside with a book, listening to the water running in and around the giant hole in the river. Upstream, not far from my door, women pound clothing against the rocks, some with a rage that’s clear in each snap of the clothing, others with a rhythm that suggests they’re thinking about something else. Occasionally there is a big splash and some hearty laughs, a naked child landing in the water after dropping from the rock.

There is a buzzing, not from tse-tses, but from big, big bees and other insects that are as long and as fat as my thumbs. There was a rustling in the grass that sounded like a person walking gingerly toward me, but when I craned around to see who was coming, there was a massive, massive lizard – as long as my leg and as heavy as a toddler – walking slowly and diagonally toward my cabin. He had not seen me yet, sitting silently with a book in my lap. His tail swayed like a snake and his tongue darted in and out like a gecko. He was speckled, black and yellow. Ugly. As soon as I stood, he settled for one second, then took off, lickety-split, running flat out like a sprinter for the safety of the river.

At lunch, Marie – the lab tech turned lay missionary I caught a ride up with – told me she figured he was a gila monster, pronounced hela monster. His colouring was meant to show his bite is poisonous.

At least he didn’t jump.

Mzuzu

2006-05-18T09:07:00.001-08:00

It was a hellishly long flight down to Lilongwe, capital city of Malawi, a splinter of a country wedged between Zambia and Mozambique. At Lilongwe, the sun was shining and it was a brilliant afternoon: after a month of dull, grey skies and daily thunderstorms, it was such a welcome change. It took virtually no time to go through customs, but then there was a wait for the baggage, then the search through the baggage. (I just finished reading “Swahili for the Broken Hearted” by Peter Moore, who writes about how Malawi’s crusade against the corruption of Christian values once had immigration officers shaving men’s heads if their hair fell below their ears and saw women having to roll a Coke bottle down the leg of their jeans to prove they were loose fitting and morally acceptable.)

I paid $20 to take a taxi into town and chatted with Charles, the driver, about potential story ideas. He told me that violence against women had been in the headlines – one woman had her eyes gouged out, the other lost her hands to a jealous ex – and suggested I go to the tobacco auction floors to see how the buyers were ripping off sellers. Turns out he was a great editor: the tobacco sellers are now on strike.

He also convinced me to check into a more expensive hotel, since the cheaper ones were all full of prostitutes and couldn’t be guaranteed to be safe or secure. That’s how I ended up at the Korea Gardens, paying $40 for a room with a television. The Kenya Airways food was the reason I spent most of the day in bed, getting up periodically to change the channel.

The next morning I took advantage of the beautiful weather to check out a bit of dusty Lilongwe, which feels like a large town. I managed to get myself totally turned around, but finally arrived at the centre of Old Town, where I hit the post office and the ATM (where the machines kept blinking in and out of service), bought a phone card and wandered into the Shoprite, a South African chain that always makes my jaw drop. It’s got such selection, so I stocked up on M&Ms and bags of chips and went home to watch “SuperSize Me.”

The next day I met up with Toni, who had very kindly agreed to house me at her place in the north. We went out for dinner with her boyfriend and a British mechanic, a CFAO salesman and a senior buyer with Limbe leaf tobacco, who asked if I was married 15 seconds after we met. (I learned later he was loaded, loaded, loaded, having been a confirmed bachelor for years. He spent his money on properties in Spain, Dubai and Scotland and spent the down season in India and Brazil. Sigh. Such regrets.)

The next morning we went to the airport to pick up some social work students from Ryerson who were doing a placement up in Mzuzu and would be staying with Toni as well. We packed the back of the truck full of luggage and took off, passing grassy fields and tiny villages and huge craggy rocks.

Toni accomplishes more before breakfast than most people do all day, so my week in her care was a busy one: she had me full of story ideas and lined up with interviews before I could blink. But it was good to get moving again. I’ve gotten so lazy it’s embarrassing.

I decided I wanted to write about education and the Millennium Development Goal of free primary education. Over three days I visited five different schools, including one government school, two private primary schools and two primary secondary schools. One was run by a British guy and seemed a happy, healthy place to have children learning their ABCs and how to multiply fractions. The rest seemed like a good place to keep children dry while it’s raining. The primary school had 95 children in each class and they were doing their sums with bottlecaps spilled out on the floor. The secondary school had 127 teenagers in one class and when we visited they were doing nothing: it was pouring rain and their teacher was curled up in the lounge with a charcoal stove at his feet.

We managed to take a ride up into the mountains, bouncing around in the back of a Land Rover as Eric, a Rhodesian tobacco farmer, kicked the carbon out of the engine by pushing it through virgin forests, small pockets of rainforest and further and further up the grassy hills.

Mzuzu has decidedly British weather – cold, rainy and grey – so I hit the used clothing market, replaced my wardrobe and added two fleece sweaters to the ensemble. Apparently the climate is great for tobacco, and good for paprika peppers, which Toni’s boyfriend farms. I visited and watched dozens of African employees grade the peppers, deseed them and lay them out for drying. Lloyd’s farm is massive and it’s difficult to imagine that the world could ever consume so much of the fiery red spice.

Toni’s friend Janet called to say she was coming up north to review a hotel north of Mzuzu and Toni signed me up for the trip, which gave me a bit of a break from the bleak weather. It was strange to go from shivering and wearing a fleece to dipping my toes in the surf while surrounded by women wearing bikinis. The place was called Sangilo Sanctuary and it lived up to its name. It was filled with gorgeous carvings and had been very cleverly designed to give lakeviews from virtually every vantage point, even from the toilet. The beach was a small cove, completely isolated and surrounded by equally empty little inlets that guests had claimed as their own. We had a delicious, simple meal and went to bed around 8.30 to the sound of waves hitting the shore.

The next day we tootled back to Mzuzu and were on the road again at 8 a.m. the next morning, stopping first at the Swahili market (so named for the vendors who go to Dar to buy up goods shipped in from the Philippines, Hong Kong and Paris). We had to stop at another lodge in one of the forest reserves to make arrangements for Janet’s editor to enter the annual bike race and we bumped and swerved down a sandy lane before abandoning the enterprise for fear the car would fall apart. We drove another 15 kilometres and realized we’d been driving on the wrong turnoff. It was a lovely little spot, nestled next to a man-made lake, where hiking trails crisscross through the bush and kayaks scuttle around the pond.

We set out for Lilongwe, trying to make it before the sun set and the driving became treacherous, only to hear a loud scraping sound at about the halfway point. The rear right wheel had split, the tread worn completely bald, and the spare turned out to be soft as well. We enlisted the help of some locals, who came with a bicycle pump and a desire to impress. Within 25 minutes we were off again, but we had to drive for about an hour in the dark, dodging cattle carts and roadside bicycles and the occasional lumbering semi-truck with weak headlights.

Travelling with Janet meant that our room at Sangilo was free and our lunch at the lodge was free and keeping with our skint tradition, we decided to crash on the couch of a couple Canadians Janet had met on her way through Lilongwe. They were quite accommodating and I slept like a stone, despite their insane dog barking madly through most of the night.

Janet had a to-do list as long as my arm, so she hit the ground running while I sat in the garden of a nearby hotel, sipping a tea and plowing through the stories I’d worked on while up north. I stopped in at the bookstore, debated taking some money out at the bank, wandered the grocery store and ended up at the “mall,” where I sat on a bench reading a book. By 3.30, we had collected another friend and were heading into the hills leading to Blantyre. It was a rather sedate drive, broken up by a short stop at a huge pottery factory, where we sampled some cheesecake as the sun set in a fiery red ball.

Now I’m in Blantyre, at a backpackers lodge not far from town, but close enough to the bus station that guests are forbidden to leave after dark. I expect to be here a few days – I’ve got lots of AIDS stories and a few tobacco stories and an assassination attempt to write about. My birthday is next Friday, so maybe I’ll sneak off to the lake for a while.

Corrupting the Whistleblower

2006-05-18T09:07:00.000-08:00

More than a decade ago, David Munyakei was a young clerk processing slips at the Central Bank of Kenya when he noticed an unusual number of payments – for unusually high sums – going to a company called Goldenberg.

He dug around and discovered the company was being paid for exporting gold and diamonds – two things Kenya doesn’t have. The company turned out to be a shell, a pipeline to the pockets of politicians and well-placed businessmen. It became Kenya’s biggest corruption scandal, costing the public purse an astonishing $600 million (US).

For his role in it, Munyakei was fired, arrested and harassed. He received death threats, was forced to leave the capital and for a brief time even changed his identity. For more than 10 years he has lobbied to have his job reinstated, without success. Instead of a stable, well-paid government job, with benefits and pension, Munyakei has mostly pleaded poverty.

The Goldenberg scheme is a complicated one, but it essentially created an account for gold exporters to deposit U.S. dollars. In exchange, they would be paid out of the account in Kenyan shillings, plus 20 per cent. It was a way of both attracting foreign investment and reducing the country’s reliance on foreign aid.

The hitch was that the gold was likely smuggled from the Congo and the “exporters” were claiming 35 per cent above the export price from the government.

The investigations have so far revealed that the corruption involved dozens of judges and journalists, senior officials at several banks, handfuls of businessmen and scores of politicians – possibly even former president Daniel arap Moi.

Everyone, it seemed, but the young clerk who stayed late to work through the book of transfer orders.

I thought Munyakei would make a good hook for a story on the latest round of corruption scandals currently plaguing Kenya. I pictured him as clever, soft-spoken and patient. I figured he would have the confidence of someone who knows he has done exactly the right thing and the humility of a man who has been martyred for it.

I reached Munyakei through Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog agency, who awarded the whistleblower a medal in 2004.

When we met, Munyakei began by asking if Transparency International had told me about his “arrangement,” something about an allowance and money for accommodations. I was confused, but it soon became clear he wasn’t telling me about Transparency International’s generosity, he was saying he wanted compensation from me.

He told me he had come into the city from the famed Masai Mara game reserve and now had nowhere to stay and no means to get home. He looked like a young man, with springy black curls and the light skin and Arabic features of Kenyans born on the coast. The clerk position was his first job.

I asked him how much he needed.

Two hundred dollars, he answered, without hesitation.

That’s a lot of money, I said. Nairobi has a rough after-dark reputation, so I had less than $9 in my pocket, enough to pay for our drinks and a taxi ride back to the hotel the airline had put me in for the night.

Besides, it’s unethical, I told him. I don’t pay for interviews and most reputable news agencies have a strict policy against the practice.

Selling a story makes it vulnerable to manipulation since people are tempted to make the details juicier so there’s more of a payoff. It makes it difficult to trust the details.

It sounds cold-hearted, but I’ve interviewed street kids, orphans, women dying of AIDS, destitute farmers starving during the country’s drought and I haven’t given money to any of them.

I feel strongly that people should tell their stories because they want to, because they see the value in giving voice to an issue or cause, not because it’s something they can sell.

When I chafed at the idea of paying $200 to hear his story, Munyakei became wheedling and insistent, asking me how much I could give, saying it was negotiable. Like a carpet salesman or a tout trying to sell me a safari, he told me he had a family to feed. There was no protection for people like him, he said, and no one cared whether he was starving.

I said I had read that he was working in the city.

That’s a myth, he told me. Okay, he does have a job, but the salary is so small it can hardly be considered work, he said.

(I emailed Transparency International later and they confirmed Munyakei is indeed working in Nairobi – in the Office of the President. A spokesperson for the organization said they were “shocked and disappointed” by Munyakei’s request for money. She also said they sometimes pay his travel expenses if he attends TI functions.)

When I finally stood up to leave, Munyakei told me I’d misunderstood. I wouldn’t be “paying.” He was kidding when he said he wanted $200. “Forget I said that. I was joking,” he said. “Can’t you take a joke?”

Most Kenyans consider him a kind of public hero and many have sympathy for the turn his life has taken. An education fund for his three daughters was even established through a legal aid clinic.

I shut my notebook. Munyakei said he would settle simply for money to get home, telling me he lived in Narok, a dusty trading town about five hours from Nairobi.

Although the fare costs about $5, Munyakei told me he would need $25.

The more he talked, the faster I gulped down my soda. I was beginning to really dislike this man and just wanted to get away from him.

Finally Munyakei lowered his voice and repeated that he had nowhere to go and no way to get home. I could just pay for a hotel room now and submit it as part of my regular expenses later.

I paid for our drinks, told him it had been interesting to meet him, then walked out to a taxi.

I’m not sure I did the right thing. I felt guilty watching him walk into the shadows of the bus stand and wondered where he would spend the night, if he really had nowhere to go.

It made me angry that a man who was supposed to represent everything that is good and fair and decent about Kenyans had proven to be just the opposite.

I wasn’t sure which side of Munyakei’s life showed the greater need for whistleblower protection: the good deed that had reduced him to a pauper, or the fact that the lack of protection had turned him into the very thing he was fighting against in the first place.

Out of Rwanda

2006-05-18T09:02:00.000-08:00

I managed to get out of Rwanda in one piece, having convinced the Star to pay for a one-way ticket to Lilongwe. I figured it would be far easier than trying to get through Western Tanzania, an area of the continent that my guidebook was rather silent about.

My last week in Rwanda without Tess, a British woman I’d met my first night in Kigali, with a decidedly boring one, saved at the last minute by the arrival of an American girl named Isabelle, who was sent to me from Kampala by Tess.

I was in Rwanda primarily to write about some American missionaries and felt completely frustrated after a month of getting the run around. At the last moment, I managed to get out to two of the churches the Purpose Driven missionaries had visited, one in Kibungo, where the pastors and a translator trotted out some little-seen Rwandan generosity. The town seemed to be carved out of banana groves and we took a drive up into the hills to visit some of the parishioners, including the little orphan whose picture I put up a while back.

A few days later I wrangled a ride with an Anglican official to Kindama, a two hour drive down a “road” that was the worst I had seen in Rwanda. It was a bit hard to believe that a country like Rwanda, with butter-smooth roads and winding, terraced hills, could have an area like this, which was mostly flat and marshy, with a road that seemed to get worse and worse as it stretched on toward Tanzania. The church service was long and hot and entirely in Kinyarwanda, but the singing was amazing. The interview afterward was not exactly forthcoming – we had a major language barrier as neither of us really spoke French – but the pastor and I could laugh about it. We had a pleasant lunch together and then I took some photos of him with his wife and their seven children.

The next day, I packed my bags and left the Kigali hotel for the seventh and final time, walked into town to check my email, bought some samosas to eat for lunch and basically whiled away the morning until it was a reasonable hour to turn up at the airport. I was incredibly glad to get out of Rwanda, a country that is beautiful to look at but is so scarred by its history, it’s a tough one to handle for an extended period of time. Isabelle was telling me about a Rwandan man she’d met, who took her to his mothers grave and told her all about his experience of the genocide. His mother was raped by four soldiers – including a friend of the family – and left for dead. His father had both hands cut off by rebels at a roadblock and they’d left him at a hospital. He was never seen again. This man, who was 12 at the time, had walked to a refugee camp in Uganda. At the end of the day, Isabelle thanked him and told him how much she enjoyed meeting him and making friends with a Rwandan. He responded by telling her he loved her and would always love her and that every breath he drew from that moment forward would be for her.

All of which is to say that Rwandans are a bit intense. This particular man told Isabelle he could never love a Rwandan woman, as they were all so deeply damaged by the genocide they were incapable of love. In the span of 45 minutes, he sent her four text messages, each more breathless and lovesick than the one before. Every young man I met seemed to be lovesick. Eric, a 23-year-old tennis player, actually asked me to clip off a lock of hair so he could carry it in his wallet. He was serious. It was the last time I saw him.

Kigali had just hosted a three-day worship-a-thon featuring American televangelist Joyce Meyer, so the entire crew was waiting in the airport lounge. I had done a little research on her, figuring I could attend one of the sessions at the stadium and file a freelance story on the influx of missionaries into Rwanda. The weather and my trip out to the church conspired against me, though. Still, I found out that Ms. Meyer is worth about $95 million. She has no congregation, but makes her money through personal appearances, taped services, syndicated radio shows and a book-writing career whose productivity rivals Barbara Taylor Bradford. A few years ago she was busted by the IRS for the dodgy set up of her ministry and for using tax rules for pastors to circumvent paying for her extravagant lifestyle, which features a private jet and three Mercedes Benzes.

Anyway, the entire Joyce Meyer crew was waiting in the lounge, looking at pictures of their trip. A woman with a huge head of curly hair wandered through the security scanners and wondered aloud: “Should I just go into the VIP lounge? I mean, am I VIP enough?” Turns out she was the singer at the event. (So the answer to her question was: No. No you are not.)

In typical Kenya Airways fashion, we were squished like sardines into chairs that could double as torture devises. A few hours later we touched down in Nairobi and since I was in the sixth row, I bolted out of the plane like a racehorse out of the blocks, made my way to the customs desk and managed to get my $20 transit visa before the rest of the passengers had even queued. I had a long to-do list now that I was back in a big city. I wormed my way downstairs and settled my night’s accommodation while waiting for my baggage to arrive. I had hoped for the Panari Hotel, where the owners spent $600,000 building a huge ice skating rink, but instead it was some place I’d never heard of and the airline woman told me it was “a little outside of town.” I even haggled trying to get the airline to pay for my visa, but to no avail. Then I went to the bathroom. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And still no luggage. There was not even a sign flashing on any of the carousels suggesting that the baggage had arrived. I pestered a few of the guys in the lurid green vests and they told me to “wait, wait” as though I was some twitchy European that had just landed on African soil.

Finally, more than an hour after arriving, my red backpack came spinning out of a carousel marked “Johannesburg.” I hope it enjoyed the trip.

It was another hour’s wait for the Budget bus to leave for the hotel. There were two women and a couple French men and myself and we’d all been on the bus waiting for some mystery passengers who never arrived. We drove into the city – I feel like I know Nairobi so well now, even though I’ve never been beyond Westlands – and pulled up at the Boulevard Hotel. We stayed here with my parents when they were visiting, so I know it costs $90 a night, comes with hard, over-stuffed pillows, offers DSTv and a yummy buffet breakfast. The women started to get off the bus and the driver told them, no, no… you’re going to the Safari Club. My eyes popped. The Safari Club is even more exclusive than the Boulevard Hotel and the women were duly impressed when they got off the bus. Then we drove past the Serena, past the PanAfric and up into a hill where we stopped at my hotel, a down-at-the-heel hotel place where the walls were made of onion skins, the bathrooms had seen far, far better days and the television managed to pull in the local station, but with static interrupting the sound.

I tried the phone, since I had made plans to do an interview while I was in town. It was now approaching 9 p.m. I couldn’t get through, so I went for my complimentary dinner, then tried again. We made plans to meet at the Hilton.

In the bush...

2006-04-29T04:06:00.000-08:00

This is a boy I met yesterday who neither talks nor laughs nor smiles. He doesn't even play with other children. He lives in the banana groves with his grandmother. His father died and his mother abandoned him. No one knows what's "wrong" with him. He was one serious little dude.

I'm off to Malawi.

An hour with Gahonda & Family

2006-04-17T00:20:00.000-08:00

Deep in Rwanda's northern hills, where five volcanoes separate it from the Congo and Uganda, live the world's only mountain gorillas. After 20 years of intensive conservation and research efforts, there are seven hundred of them, up from 650 ten years ago. At least five groups of them -- representing almost a 70 gorillas -- have become so used to the presence of humans that they're visited virtually every day by a group of eight camera-toting tourists.

When I first arrived, I met a British woman who was meeting the gorillas on April 11 and I was easily persuaded to get a permit for the same day and join Tess and three friends who would be visiting. We arrived in the tiny, rough-and-tumble town of Ruhengeri in the afternoon and watched an already grey sky turn the colour of wet concrete and unleash buckets and buckets of rain. The already muddy streets became more puddle than road and started worrying about what that would mean for our trek up the hill.

We met a driver with a 4x4 at 6 a.m. and started out, bumping along a road made of rocks, seemingly on square wheels. (My back was sore the next day and it was purely from the ride there and back.) At the gorilla office, we met up with the three other groups who would be heading out. The girls seemed to know all about the different groups: Susa is the largest and has connections to Dian Fossey; Group Thirteen has an aggressive silverback male; two of the groups go in and out of the Parc, crossing over to Congo regularly and sometimes requiring a hike of more than six hours to reach.

The gorillas are a major boon for Rwanda: each permit costs $375 US, which entitles a holder to spend up to one hour with the gorillas. There are no guarantees, although it's virtually certain that visitors will see the gorillas. They can sometimes be wily, though, and spend the entire hour hidden in bamboo. In the rainy season especially -- from mid-March to mid-May -- gorilla visits can be tricky, as they hate rain and will hide if it gets too wet. (SEE STORY BELOW)

We were set to meet the Sabinyo group, who are led by the oldest silverback in the region, a 45-year-old named Gahonda, whose brother also helps protect the pack. There were four women and two juveniles and three babies, including an eight-month old who hadn't yet been named.

Gorillas are organized in groups or families with a dominant male and several females, with whom he mates. Any other silverbacks or males in the group are often just there for companionship and protection, although Olivier said they will try to "cheat" with the women whenever they get a chance and will be severely punished by the dominant male if they're caught. A few will go off on their own and try to establish their own groups, but the males will fight fiercely to keep their women with them. It's dangerous for the women with children to leave a group, as the new silverback will kill all of her babies in order to establish his own genetic trail in the group. Infanticide is actually pretty common amongst gorillas and no one is really certain what happens with the babies after they've been killed. Fossey theorized that they were eaten by their mothers, but she never came to a conclusion.

The girls had come prepared with serious all-weather gear, hiking boots, even "waders" to keep the stinging nettles and ants off their legs and shoes. I was wearing my tired old drawstrings (the drawstring finally busted, so I was always hiking them up) and some silk long underwear, a tank top, t-shirt and hoodie, which I finally found around the corner from the hotel. I bought some sneakers two days before. I'd looked in vain for a rain slicker, figuring it could get pretty wet on the mountain.

Just before stepping beyond the rock fence that marks the boundaries of the park, our guide Olivier stopped for a snack break and we took in the terraced hills around the place, the potato farms and the green that just seemed to stretch on forever. It was still early, and a bit chilly, so there was mist settling in the folds of the hills, sometimes looking like lakes.

Olivier explained that we would hear him making noises that would help calm the gorillas and that when he told us to move, he expected us to move in a tight group -- the size of the group compensating for our size as individual people -- and that we were not to make loud noises, use the flash on our cameras or point our fingers. The flash might scare them and pointing would make the gorillas think we were throwing them something.

We started up the hill, into a dark, dank jungle of bamboo, up a path that had been churned into ankle-deep mud by a line of buffalos. We slid and squelched our way upward, the suctioning plop of our walking sticks keeping a rather steady rhythm. There were a few squeaks from a few birds, but no other signs of life. Of course, with eight hikers, a guide, three porters and three AK-toting soldiers, there was little chance that we would be quiet enough to see anything like a dikker or a golden monkey.

The bamboo would let out a hiss like a shower head when moved by the breeze, but otherwise it was quiet. Occasionally we would come out into a clearing full of the soft green of eucalyptus trees. (A gorilla who chews on eucalyptus acts like "one who has taken alcohol," Olivier told us, since it's got a bit of alcohol in its leaves.)

After walking for about an hour and a half, my hair plastered to my forehead from a combination of sweat and raindrops splattered by moving leaves, my shoes black and soaking from the mud, Olivier's walkie talkie came crackling to life and announced that the gorillas were heading our way and if we kept up our pace and they stayed still, we'd be there in about a half an hour. It seemed like only 15 minutes later that we came upon a man and a woman, both dressed in uniform, and as I smiled hello at the woman, I noticed a gorilla in the bamboo just beyond her shoulder. I was so surprised I nearly squealed.

Suddenly they were everywhere in the dark, shady bamboo, sitting and chewing on bamboo shoots. Most didn't seem too upset by our presence but some would tolerate us for only a few minutes before getting up and walking away. It was pretty incredible to see them just saunter by. If we were in the way, they'd sort of hesitate, then just go for it. All the while, Olivier was making these low rumbling noises in the back of his throat, sort of like clearing your throat, known as "belch vocalizations," which is a noise that the gorillas themselves make. I have a picture that's nothing but blur because as I went to take the picture, the gorilla started chest beating and it scared the beejebus out of me. Apparently they do that when they're trying to intimidate, but the younger ones also do it when they're happy or playing. Olivier claimed that this one was just happy to have company.

One of the silverbacks, the brother of the dominant male, was nursing a shoulder wound, a punishment for cheating with his brother's women, and walked using only one hand, as he'd been fighting with a lone silverback who was trying to steal the women. The woman we'd met when we first arrived was a vet, dispatched to see whether it could be treated. He sat rather placidly in the bamboo, snapping off bamboo shoots, peeling them, munching for a while, then leaving the peels and moving on to the next group of shoots.

I had pictured a visit to the gorillas as being a hike up to the group, then sitting on the ground and watching them from a stationary position -- as thought they were part of a play -- for the hour. But we were constantly following them. If one moved away, we moved toward another, then another. The rule of staying back seven metres was definitely broken. We were often within two metres, closer if the gorilla decided to move. We were all pretty enthralled, but were cursing the darkness of the bamboo. It was impossible to take a decent photograph. And then, after watching a mother and a baby amble away, suddenly they just disappeared.

We'd been with them about 15 minutes and I think we all silently figured we'd spend the next 45 minutes searching for them. It was amazing how such huge creatures could get away so quickly and disappear so thoroughly. It turned out they were just moving into a beautifully sunlit clearing, where a couple actually sat and seemed to pose for the paparazzi. We followed them up the hill and watched them build nests in the soft green plants. A few flaked out on their backs, a couple just nestled down. Olivier had told us that they spend most of their day eating and the rest of the day sleeping and grooming. When we walked up to the babies, they were in full-on play mode, tumbling over their mothers as they wrestled, biting one another and growling and occasionally chest beating. It was amazing.

All too soon, Olivier was announcing the last two minutes. It was quite possibly the quickest hour that has ever elapsed.

An hour goes fast when you're with gorillas; A couple of primates seemed to be posing for the paparazzi
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
869 words
30 April 2006
The Toronto Star
A12

RUHENGERI, Rwanda -- Only minutes into our visit with the world's only remaining mountain gorillas, a mother with a baby tucked under her arm ambled past, followed by a giant, cone-headed male nursing a mangled middle finger.

Altogether, they were 11 massive balls of kinky black fur, variously emitting low grunts, mock belches and real farts.

Before they slipped away - disappearing silently and all too quickly into the depths of the bamboo forest - we watched them snap off bamboo shoots, unpeel them with human-like dexterity and munch on the soft white insides.

We were bunched together, 15 of us moving in a group big enough to mask our puny individual size, following guide Olivier as he groaned and growled in an impressive mimicking of the gorillas' own comforting noises.

They were dark-eyed and vaguely curious but difficult to capture on film since the bamboo forest was too dark and flash was forbidden.

Before climbing up to meet the gorillas, Olivier had explained that we would spend only an hour with them. Whether they decided to spend the hour with us was another question.

A permit to visit them costs the equivalent of $420, the average cost of a four-day safari in nearby Kenya or Tanzania. Forty people can visit the gorillas each day, translating into $16,800 for conservation, park maintenance and Rwandan development.

There are no guarantees, but because they have been habituated to people for decades and are well guarded by anti-poacher patrols, it's virtually certain that visitors will see the gorillas.

They can sometimes be wily, though, and spend the entire hour hidden in bamboo. In the rainy season especially - from mid-March to mid-May - visits can be tricky, because the gorillas hate rain and will hide if it gets too wet.

Dian Fossey's bleak prediction that they would be both discovered and made extinct in the same century hasn't come to fruition. In fact, the gorilla population has grown from 650 to more than 700 in an area where conservation has not come easily and where guerrillas are one of the gorillas' main threats.

We were meeting the Sabyinyo group, which is led by the eldest male in the region, 45-year-old Gahonda, whose brother also helps protect the pack. There were four other adults, two juveniles and three babies, including an eight-month-old who hadn't yet been named.

Gorillas are organized in groups led by a dominant male - which can weigh as much as 500 pounds and stand upright between five and six feet - and including several females with whom the male mates.

Any other silverbacks, as adult males are known because of their saddle-shaped patch of silvery hair, are just in the group for companionship and protection, although Olivier said they will try to "cheat" with the females whenever they get a chance - and will be severely punished by the dominant male if they're caught.

We started up one of the hills in the chain of mountains and volcanoes that separates northern Rwanda from Uganda and Democratic Republic of the Congo shortly after 8: 30 a.m., taking a path that had been churned into ankle-deep mud by a line of buffaloes.

We slid and squelched our way upward, the suctioning plop of our walking sticks keeping a steady rhythm. There were squeaks from a few birds, but no other signs of life. Of course, with eight hikers, a guide, three porters and three assault rifle-toting soldiers, there was little chance we'd be quiet enough to see anything like a golden monkey.

After walking for about 90 minutes, Olivier's walkie-talkie came crackling to life and announced that the gorillas were heading our way. If we kept up our pace and they remained still, we'd rendezvous in about half an hour.

It seemed like only 15 minutes later that we were suddenly surrounded.

I had pictured us sitting quietly and watching from a distance for the hour, but we were constantly following the group. If one moved away, we moved toward another, then another.

The rule of staying back seven metres was definitely broken. We were often within a metre, closer if the gorilla decided to move.

At one point, they all disappeared into the dark undergrowth, only to reappear in a beautifully sunlit clearing, where a couple of them actually seemed to pose for the paparazzi.

We watched them build nests among the soft green plants and marvelled at their human-like ears, hands and eyes. A few dozed on their backs while two females nestled down and began grooming the toddlers. The babies were in full-on play mode, tumbling over their mothers as they wrestled, biting one another and occasionally beating their chests.

It was an amazing hour - and one of the shortest I've ever spent.

Mourning Person

2006-04-15T04:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve had lots of emails lately about my emotional state, very mixed emails, in fact. Some say I sound really up, like I’m having a good time and really enjoying myself. Others say I sound sad and depressed, like I’m seeing too much and not digesting it well.

I feel like I'm doing okay, better than okay, in fact. There's enough good to balance the depressing, but Rwanda's a tough one. For one thing, it's the worst month to visit, when there's rain virtually every day and the mist just wraps around the towns and makes those gorgeous terraced hills disappear and you feel not only like you'll never see the sun again, but that there may be nothing out beyond that mist but more mist.

I went to the genocide memorial on Monday. I was doing fine through the display about the history of the genocide. I've read lots about it and got some grounding from the weeks in Arusha. It's a really professional, western-style memorial, with lots of placards and information boards and little touchscreen televisions that show little short films and interviews.

One, all on its own, with no pictures around it, showed one scene after another of piles of bodies, skeletons in the river, massacre sites, church courtyards with bodies piled up against the walls, some with the skin deteriorating. Little kids with machete wounds to the head. It was only a minute, maybe not even that, but it was... terrible.

Around the corner was this picture of Ntaramara church, where there was a huge massacre, something like 17,000 dead and there was a picture of this corpse. It was taken with a wide angle lens and the photographer was right down by the hand. The corpse was on its back, its skull facing upwards, its mouth open as though in terror, as though it was in mid-scream when it fell. Most of the teeth had been knocked away. The decay had already taken its eyes, but the dark holes of its skull seemed somehow lifelike, like they were dark, dark eyes boring holes into you. Most of the flesh on its face, arm and hand was gone, but there was still enough to give it a mummified effect and there were still nails on the skeletal fingers. The photographer was a woman named Corinne, who once worked for Reuters. I met her in Dakar. She works for Human Rights Watch now and has a five year old daughter.

I watched the video loop through twice, shaking my head and feeling my eyes fill up with tears. But it wasn't until I went upstairs to see the display called "Stolen Tomorrows" that I really lost it. The exhibit was on children who died in the genocide. It was incredibly simple, just a few blown-up photos with some simple placards underneath, telling the viewer about the child's personality, their favourite food, maybe their favourite song or best friend. And how they died.

So right off the top you get this gorgeous 12-year-old girl whose last words were: "Mum, where can I run to?" and then you turn the corner and there are these huge blown up photos of kids with chubby knees and big, lightbulb-sized eyes, who liked to eat chocolate or rice, whose best friend was their dad or their sister, who liked to ride bikes or play hide-and-seek. One was stabbed through the eyes. Another was smashed against a wall. Sisters were killed when a grenade was tossed into their shower. One boy, 10-year-old David, had ambitions of being a doctor. His last words were: "UNAMIR will come." He was tortured to death.

And on one wall, on etched glass, a quote from Rose, aged 10: "When I am in the market, in the midst of a large crowd, I always think I might just find my brothers."

And so.

I had to go to the bathroom and get some toilet roll to use as Kleenex.

In 1994 I would have been finishing high school and heading to journalism school. I just kept thinking, what was I doing 12 years ago in April, when these little kids were hiding in attics, trenches, neighbours' outhouses, in the bush, in the dark, soaking wet and starving, freezing in temperatures that feel like Canadian fall?

What were any of us doing?

On the anniversary of the start of the genocide, some British women who I met at the hotel went for dinner with some Rwandans they know and I tagged along. The boys are all athletes, top tennis or squash players who’ve lived in Europe or the U.S., and were about 11 to 15 when the genocide began. As the night progressed, there were stories dropped here and there about one sneaking food through the roadblocks to his cousin. The cousin was the only one of his family to survive and as the night wore on and he got progressively drunker, his stories got less coherent and more emotional. He watched his seven year old sister, his only remaining relative, be killed by a friend. And now he sees that “friend” most days in town, roaming around free. The man whose house we’d invaded was sitting in the corner, staring morosely into a mug of tea. He’d walked all the way from Kigali to Goma during the war, which is more than 200 km. He was probably only 14 at the time.

At a certain point I wanted to leave as fast as we could. I knew the night was going to be melancholy, we’d been invited and warned that although they might have a lot on their minds, four Western women would be a welcome distraction. But we were pitiful. It was hard to know whether to keep the stories going or whether to simply try to gently change the topic to something less bleak. We all seemed to have different approaches. Two of the girls, finally succumbing to jetlag after arriving two days prior, fell asleep on the couch. The other tried to keep the radio cranked and the mood light. I just sat, not really making conversation, waiting for the guys to decide which direction they wanted the conversation to go. It was excruciating, not only to be surrounded by such raw trauma, but to feel so helpless in the face of it. It’s not a Rwandan culture or custom to show emotion or to dwell on the past and it was hard to know when you’d crossed the line from being interested and supportive into intrusive and voyeuristic.

Towards the end of the evening, when we’d definitely outstayed our welcome but were having trouble getting a cab to come to the door, one of the guys turned to me and told me that he wished he were a journalist and if he was, he’d stick it to the politicians. When I asked him what he meant, he essentially said he wanted to get people like war criminal Theoneste Bagasora in a room and demand to know what they were thinking, what they were doing. Essentially, he wants the war criminals to face the aftermath.

At a few times that night, I would certainly rather have been hiding in a cell in another country rather than facing a generation of distraught and damaged young men.

Rwanda

2006-04-03T02:30:00.000-08:00

There is a school of thought that the lucky ones are those who don’t know what they’re missing. After an idyllic month spent living the life of Riley in Uganda, I couldn’t agree more. Passing over the border into Rwanda was a rude awakening and I suspect it will only get worse.

The bus ride was blissfully uneventful. I don’t know why punctures and other mechanical failures are so rampant on the West side and so conspicuously absent here, but I won’t complain. The only thing that was irksome was my seat mates. I’ve got to master the fine art of draping myself over two seats and making it look like I cannot be disturbed. The first woman was a mountain of flesh and not long after she got on the bus, they turned on some music videos (at ear-shattering decibels) and she sang along. Or maybe I should say warbled. The next guy was deodorant deficient and so fat he spilled over into my seat. For some reason he had long nails – long, gross, girlie nails, filed almost to a point. And he kept putting his hand next to my leg, as though he was too fat to prop himself up otherwise.

I got totally shafted at the border changing money. I should have received 2,500, instead I got 300 francs. The thing is, when you don’t know the exchange rate, it’s hard to know that you’re being jacked. It wasn’t until I tried to pay for my cab that I realized I wasn’t carrying 3,000, it was 300. So Ugandans suck.

I’d forgotten, or maybe repressed, the usual arrival mish-mash at the bus station, which actually wasn’t too bad. It was no Arusha and definitely nothing like Dar. Then I arrived at my hotel. I’ve gotten used to guards, dogs, open kitchens, quiet, clean bedrooms with four-poster beds and bug nets, hot water showers, DStv at the ready and a DVD player for when there’s nothing on. At Rohini’s I became accustomed to wonderfully home-cooked meals, a bedroom with a desk, a feeling of home.

This place isn’t the worst place I’ve ever stayed, but it’s certainly a step down. The narrow single bed, the cold-water showers, the toilets that flush with a bucket, the power outages, the windows above the doors that let in every kind of noise. Sigh… This whole traveling thing is tough. I’d forgotten!

The great thing is that this place is full of backpackers – and when I say full I mean there are five other people here. It’s the rainy season in Rwanda, which makes it the worst time to visit. It’s cold and clammy – my feet are frozen, in fact. But the country is really pretty breath taking. It seems to be about 100 km from north to south; that’s stunningly small compared to some of the other countries I’ve been to and absolutely miniscule compared to hulking Canada. But every square inch of land has been used and luckily for Rwandans, the country isn’t flat, but bunched up with hills, mountains and volcanoes, which increases its surface area. They’ve terraced every available space, filling it with small plots of cabbage and grass and whatever else. I read that each year the national parks seem to get smaller and smaller as more people look for arable land. (That will likely be one of the stories I tackle in the next few days.)

I had the impression that Rwanda is fairly developed, probably because guidebooks and actual people rave about the roads and infrastructure. The kids here are far worse than anything I’ve seen yet on the East side, covered in rags and mud, with scabby knees. They remind me of Mali. But Kigali itself reminds me of home (although my memory of home is getting decidedly fuzzy) with big, modern buildings. No ATMs, though, which is a major pain in the patoot.

April's Fool

2006-04-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

For decades the source of the Nile was hotly contested, confounding scientists and geographers with its endless channels and springs. Half of Uganda is named after the English cartographers and explorers who lost their lives (or their marbles) in the search for the source. For a while the theory that held the most sway was that the Nile was in Zambia, connected somehow to the mighty Zambezi. Then explorers turned their focus to Uganda, then Tanzania. And yet it remained elusive, running nearly 7,000 kilometres, seemingly from nowhere.

Eventually it was decided that the river begins from Lake Victoria, which is bordered by Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. Nearly 7,000 kilometres from Uganda to Cairo. That’s a lot of water. Imagine how powerful that must be coming from the source… Imagine the whitewater. Imagine the tourist potential.

Jinja is the place to be if you’re interested in rafting, so I rode out on Saturday morning with Jason, an HIV doctor and avid kayaker, who was reading a book about hot-dogging moves that are popular on the “squirt boat” rodeo circuit. One contained a description about what can happen when the move goes awry: nasal flushing. By the end of the day, I’d become intimately acquainted with the term.

Whitewater rapids are graded on their degree of danger and difficulty. A one is flat, moving water, while a six is technically unrunnable, in the sense that you would be unlikely to survive it. Niagara Falls, for example, is a class six rapid. The Nile whitewater route in Jinja has three class five rapids and one class six. It’s one of the world’s wildest whitewater routes, but as our guide, Jane, explained, it’s also one of the most forgiving. It’s big and intimidating, but it’s not very rocky and has good, deep warm swells, meaning even if you get dumped, you’re unlikely to go into shock or bash against a rock in the process.

We were corseted into our lifejackets, had brain buckets snapped on our heads and started out, just a few hundred metres up from the hydro electric dam. Jane put us through our paces, teaching us how to paddle (arm straight, use your body, don’t twirl your paddle and whatever you do, keep your hand on your T-grip or you’ll end up knocking out someone’s teeth) and what to do on her command. Forward meant we paddled, backward meant we back paddled. Jump right meant those on the left leapt to the right side to stop us from hurtling into a rock. Get down meant crouch down in the boat, up on your feet with one hand on the rope and the other hanging on to your paddle. We were to stay on our feet or face bashing our knees or spines against the rocks. Stop was my personal favourite of the commands. It meant take a break.

Jane had me demonstrate how to get back in the boat in the event of a spill or a flip. The water was surprisingly warm, but my re-entry was pathetic. And not at all graceful. I was wearing my favourite pants, the black drawstrings that have seen me through half a dozen countries and all sorts of crazy stunts. I nearly lost them once or twice in water that had a curiously strong current.

We passed the first rapid without any problems, then faced our first class five. I must have been looking rather grim, as Jane told me not to worry, that even if we dumped, we would just get back in the boat. “Downtime,” or time spent churning under the water at a rapid, is usually no longer than 10 seconds, but imagine, for a minute, that you have no sense of up or down, you’re scared of hitting rocks, things are bashing into you, the water is pushing and pulling, your paddle is waving wildly and you’ve got water up your nose. Suddenly 10 seconds feels like an awfully long time. Don’t worry, Jane told us. Just curl yourself up in a ball (to save your arms, legs and feet from rocks) and wait for your lifejacket to do its job. You’ll pop up. Take a short quick breath and open your eyes. Figure out where you are and where you’re headed. If you’re near the boat, swim to it. If you’re near a safety kayak, swim to it. If you’re near vegetation, get away from it and get away quickly. It’s got a lot of roots underneath and they’ll gladly get you tangled up and before you know it, your downtime is dangerously long.

So. The first class five rapid. Massive. The only thing bigger is unrideable. Jane tells us all about it, how there’s rocks here and rocks there but we’re basically going to go right down the middle, hit the hole and surf out of it. We should be able to stay in the boat. In truth, I am not really listening to any of this and all of the rapids begin with this same speech, about how we’ll do this and do that. What happens is actually quite different, so whether I listen makes no difference. I am concentrating on not giving away the fact that I am Class Five Freaked Out.

We paddle forward, then power forward, water roaring and crashing and the turning and swaying. Then (apparently) we surf for a while and then the wave decides it’s had enough of us and flings us into the air. One minute we’re following the command to “get down!” and the next thing I know, I’ve got water up my nose and am being thrashed around. My brain is thinking: “don’t panic, don’t panic” but the rest of me is thinking: “I’m dying! I’m dying!” I sprang up – it was probably no more than three seconds but felt much, much longer – gasped for air, opened my eyes and saw a huge wall of water. Smash! Another snoutful of water, a few more seconds of thrashing around. Then… nothing. The kayakers came over, scooped me up (and by that I mean I wrapped myself around the front of their boat) and deposited me back by the raft. No fatalities. In fact, it was rather exhilarating, once I snorted and snuffed, got all the river water out of my nasal cavities and massaged my contacts back into place.

There was a nice stretch where the current was strong, but there were no rocks or rapids, and Jane invited us to hop out of the boat and swim if we chose. So over I went. We were already wet and the sun was blazing, so it felt good to get into the water. The banks of the Nile on the Uganda side are simply gorgeous: green and lush like jungle scenes, with lots of naked kids swimming and bathing and women doing laundry and men fishing, some with nets and a giant plunger that they use as a “fish scarer” to frighten the fish in the direction of their nets.

The trees were alive with birds: malakite kingfishers with iridescent wings and brilliant orange beaks, darters, who swim virtually submerged, spear fish on their beaks, then emerge snake-like to loosen the fish from their beaks and snap it up into their air then down their gullets. There were all kinds of birds skimming the water surface in search of fish, little birds using their long toenails to walk on vines and cormorants drying out with their wings spread like those salesmen who keep their wares tucked away in trench coats. We were even lucky enough to see red-tailed monkeys, which I’ve not seen before. So I was watching all of this, floating lazily on my back in my brainbucket and lifejacket. Down the Nile. I was floating down the Nile!

We got back in the boat, paddled for a long while and chatted over a snack of pineapple and biscuits. Before long we could hear the sound of the next Class Five. We flipped once more, again it felt like an overhand toss of the entire boat. The raft follows two kayakers and a “safety boat,” who are meant to rescue people who go over. The safety boat is merely a raft with all sorts of first aid equipment and amazingly, one person rows the thing down the river and through all the rapids. How they manage it alone, and perched up on water-proof boxes of pineapples, biscuits and bandages is beyond me. Moses, the guy who was rowing the safety boat, plucked me from the water after our second flip. And I do mean plucked. One minute I was in the water, the next thing there was this giant jerk on my lifejacket and I was half in the boat. (I was so surprised, I lost my balance and fell out again.) I got back in and managed to rescue my contact, sitting primly on my cheek below my right eye.

And away we went. We hit another rapid and managed to stay in the boat, giving ourselves a high five with our oars. We hit one at one point and I felt my thumb pop, but after a few minutes the pain went away and it was back to paddling. (There’s an awful lot of paddling, as the course covers 25 kilometres, so I feel a bit sore today. Actually, very sore. Like an out-of-shape 29 year old on an all-carb diet.)

We portaged the Class Six, walking over piping hot rocks and baked dirt to get around the worst of the falls. Then we were back in the boat, there was a final pep talk from Jane about “going down the middle” and hitting whatever came at us and we’d just see how we did. Not far into it, as we were crouched down in the boat, a massive wave came down on us and we were all popped out and into the air like so many pennies. I got caught up under the boat, which can be an alright place to come up, but is super scary, because you can’t see the difference between the dark of being under water and the light of being back in the oxygen, so it’s difficult to know when to breath. Plus, I was being knocked around quite a bit, as we all fell in the same spot and were bashing into each other with bodies, helmets and paddles. I was rescued by a kayak again and when I got back into the boat face-first, water came streaming out of my nose. Nasal flushing.

It was only later that I realized my thumb had been bent again and it’s still paining me. I think I sprained it, or my wrist, which also hurts a bit. My neck feels like I slept upside down and my arms are like little pathetic strings of spaghetti. (I was so shaky I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back to the truck. Too much adrenaline.) I’ve got a big, big bruise on my upper arm and another near my elbow and a third-degree burn from my friend, the sun, on my right arm.

But I’ve also got the memory of floating down the Nile. And that makes it all worth it.

A long silence...

2006-03-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since I updated this thing and despite eye-witness accounts to the contrary, I have been working. In fact, I’m providing photographs just to prove it.

I spent a night up in Lira, a northern town at the southern edge of the territory roamed by the Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army rebels. The town is home to Uganda’s first and only battered women’s shelter, where women who are being terrorized by their husbands or family can take a break, make a decision about what they want to do: leave, stay or send their abuser to court.

The most interesting part of the north was getting a chance to see the area that the UN has called the world’s most forgotten humanitarian crisis. For the past 20 years, the LRA has absolutely terrorized the region, abducting and conscripting children, burning, looting, raping, pillaging. They seem to have no political purpose, other than using their weapons to cause mass unrest. The government has forced hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and into internally displaced persons camps, ostensibly for their own protection. But then they simply left them to fend for themselves, without property, farms, businesses, homes, water, electricity or even basic sanitation. For the past 20 years, the children have undertaken “night commutes,” sometimes walking dozens of kilometers to reach night shelters that protect them from raids by the rebels. Their families have lived with the upheaval, moving in and out of camps depending on the security of the area. (This is often hard to gauge. At the moment the LRA is being blamed both for raids in southern Sudan and attacks in northeastern Congo.)

The problem lately has been the government soldiers stationed in the area: they’re not being paid, apparently, so they’re taking it out on the people living up there. Then there’s these red-suited volunteer groups, who are given a stipend of some sort by the local community and a very large weapon. According to Hellen, the police superintendent who runs the shelter, women and children are incredibly vulnerable to these soldiers. We saw one, off-duty, harassing a woman who was trying to pass a checkpoint with a basket of vegetables. Then we met 12-year-old Grace, who was raped by a soldier while she was out collecting firewood for her family. She’s now pregnant.

Then I spent a couple afternoons at “Reach Out,” an HIV clinic that’s being touted as the model for AIDS care by the good, hardworking people at UNAIDS. (SEE STORY BELOW) The clinic is run out of a Catholic church – presenting the obvious problem that they believe in treating the disease, but not preaching prevention by using things like, say, condoms – but it has a holistic approach that cares for virtually every area of a patient’s life once they’ve contracted the virus. Body, mind, family, community is their motto. On the body front, they run a clinic every day and make home visits one day a week. They give out drugs for free and can enroll patients on lifesaving anti-retrovirals (ARVs) for free. They also run a World Food Program feeding program that hands out a basket of food once a month to clients who have been identified as unable to feed themselves or their families. When clients aren’t eating, their drugs actually become more lethal and depending on their health, some are not able to work. Others are overwhelmed by caring for themselves and their children, who are often also HIV-positive.

On the mind front, they offer adult literacy classes and training programs for women and men wanting to learn tailoring. They offer microcredit loans to help set up small business and pay school fees for children who qualify under the “Operation School Fees” program. From a community perspective, they train volunteers to do home visits, have clubs and programs for HIV-positive adults and clubs for children or teenagers of positive clients. Like I said, it’s a holistic approach and costs somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2 million for some 2,000 clients. That’s a lot of cash, almost a thousand bucks per client per year. (Probably petty cash when we think about what we cost our Canadian health care system on an annual basis.)

We went on a home visit – five of us; I hate crowds when I’m trying to be a journalist – to see a young man who’d come to the clinic the previous day in such a stupor he couldn’t even speak. On the Saturday his baby daughter had died. On the Sunday his wife had left him. On the Monday he appeared at the clinic for an HIV test, which came back positive. When we saw him, he was at least speaking, but still seemed confused. He was literally wide-eyed and seemed to have trouble following what was going on around him. He was skin and bones: when he got up to walk for the doctor, he had to hold up his pants, as they seemed to be about four sizes too big. His clavicle bone jutted out and his cheekbones were so sharp they could have cut something. He had been fevered, suffering from malaria, diarrhea, dehydration. The clinic gave him four pills, we left him with three more, plus oral rehydration salts. I suddenly understood why some AIDS patients do not take their medications: they can’t remember to take them, can’t remember when they’re supposed to take them, can’t keep them down. It seemed like the man’s aunt was completely overwhelmed and confused: which one was taken in the morning, which was taken twice a day, which was for diarrhea and which was for the fever?

Then I finally got around to seeing a dance troupe made up of kids who’ve lost parents or been abandoned. One had walked all the way from Kenya after losing his parents to AIDS. Another had come to the dance troupe after her family’s hut was hit by lightning and her entire family burned to death. Others did not have such dramatic stories, but ended up on the streets in one way or another. They were actually incredibly talented, led by a 24-year-old who’d become fed up with being exploited as a musician and had gone out on his own. Now they live – 30 of them – in a government building. Unfortunately they have almost no money. He pays for their school fees, food, clothing and other basics out of the profits of private drumming lessons and the few thousand shillings they have left over from a weekly gig at a local hotel. Essentially they’re only a year old, but they’re in risk of collapsing.

So yes. I’ve been working. And in my final week, I hope to visit a home for abandoned babies, known as “thrown” babies, and finish up some interviews on “Memory Books,” scrapbooks written by parents dying of AIDS for the children they leave behind.

***

HIV patients care for others who have virus; Reach Out volunteers find simple ways to solve problems vexing larger clinics.

By Karen Palmer, UGANDA
Special to the Star
915 words
14 May 2006
The Toronto Star
A15
Copyright (c) 2006 The Toronto Star

On an unseasonably damp and chilly morning, most patients arrive breathless at Reach Out headquarters, weakened not by the virus in their veins but by the cruelly steep incline leading to the HIV clinic.

Nearly all clutch bags filled with pill bottles.

Annet Namayanja greets them with a smile, inviting each patient to step on the scales and see whether their weight shows they're thriving or sliding.

For these people, Namayanja is an inspiration.

After all, she weighed fewer than 100 pounds the first time she stepped into the clinic.

"I was almost dying. I was dying," she says, then giggles as she tells of gaining nearly 40 pounds since starting HIV treatment.

"What Reach Out has done for people living with HIV is beyond measure."

In a way, the clinic is run by patients for patients. Reach Out uses volunteers called CATTS - for Community ARV and TB Treatment Supporters - many of whom are themselves HIV-positive.

"With the number of people living with HIV in Africa about to eclipse 25 million, innovative programs like Reach Out are finding simple ways to solve some of the problems that plague larger, more expensive programs.

And as AIDS organizations gear up for the big August international conference in Toronto, Reach Out is being hailed by such organizations as UNAIDS and the Stephen Lewis Foundation as the kind of holistic service that works.

"Small is beautiful," says Dr. Margrethe Juncker, the Danish physician whose volunteer work got Reach Out rolling.

"It's important to keep close contact and a little bit of a family feeling, even with 2,000 clients."

Reach Out teams up with research programs to test patients' CD4 counts, which show the number of white blood cells in the immune system.

Local nurses receive intensive HIV training to become "medical officers" who work four days a week at the clinic.

On the fifth day, they sling backpacks over their shoulders, grab coins for the matatu bus and head into the community to aid patients too sick to visit the clinic.

"I've worked with the poor forever," says Juncker, who has hopscotched around the world, following her husband's rise through the ranks at the World Food Program.

"You learn that there's so much more to health than the physical problems."

In addition to offering free access to medication and life-saving antiretroviral drugs, the clinic operates a food distribution centre, a training workshop for tailors, a micro-finance program to help clients pay rent or set up small businesses and a school fees' fund to get their children into school.

Reach Out began humbly enough in 2001, when Juncker's husband was transferred to Uganda and she was looking for a place to volunteer while caring for their five children.

After being stymied by the rigid bureaucracy of most charities and non-governmental organizations, she teamed up with a group of nuns who were trying faith healing with destitute AIDS patients, essentially praying for them as they slipped closer to death.

She and her helpers rushed to get people the drugs that would save them and found more and more people turning up as they saw their friends and neighbours not only surviving but thriving. And right from the start, Juncker says, patients began gaining strength simply by seeing that someone cared about them and was looking out for them.

"It was a revelation, how much people can improve with a little TLC."

Dozens of patients offer testimonials to the power of the clinic, but the best evidence is sitting in the waiting room at Our Lady of Africa Church, where the clinic has taken over virtually every available inch of space.

Patrick Edamu, for example, has seen his CD4 count rise dramatically in the past year. Patients qualify for anti-retroviral therapy when their CD4 count drops below 250; they are considered to be very ill if it sinks below 100.

When Edamu first arrived at the clinic, his white-cell count was one. Now it is 137 and he smiles when medical officer Rosemary Atim asks whether he has any complaints.

None, he replies in Luganda. He only came to get a refill on the pills that are helping keep him alive.

The key with anti-retroviral therapy is keeping patients healthy enough to take their drugs and getting them to adhere to taking them on schedule.

The concern over adherence has kept many countries and HIV programs from distributing ARVs, because they fear patients on multiple medications will do themselves more harm than good if they're not carefully monitored.

Reach Out has an astounding rate of drug adherence: 80 per cent of the 618 clients on free ARV therapy have a 95 per cent adherence rate, thanks in part to CATTS counsellors who help patients sort out their medications and conduct home visits to ensure they are managing.

Meanwhile, start-up kits are being prepared to share with other clinics and Juncker is confident the Reach Out approach can be implemented almost anywhere.

"There's nothing really to it, except that it works," she says.

| Karen Palmer FOR THE TORONTO STAR CATTS adherence counsellor Moses Ogabe helps patients sort out their medications at the highly successful Reach Out HIV AIDS clinic. |

***

A mother's memories; The dog-eared pages of the scrapbooks may be smudged with fingerprints from repeated readings For young Ugandans orphaned by AIDS, they offer a precious link to the past

Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
1269 words
11 May 2006
The Toronto Star
A03

Kampala, UGANDA -- When Ivan Sekajjigo was a baby, he was so sickly with fever and convulsions his mother worried he would die.

With time, he grew into a precocious child who loved school so much he would happily set off for class seven days a week, but only if his best friend Henry accompanied him.

Yet what his mother remembers most about Ivan, now a strapping man of 18 and the eldest of five boys, is their shared love of local Ugandan music.

Whenever it came on the radio, Ivan would crank up the volume and belt out the lyrics, earning a reputation for his singing that caused neighbours to stop him on the street and request an impromptu performance.

Soon, these random memories, written in a spiral-bound scrapbook and decorated with a few faded photographs, are all Ivan will have to remember his mother, Betty Namubiru.

His father died of AIDS when he was only 5; one day the virus will claim his mother too.

These books, being written by HIV-positive parents across Uganda, said Jacquie Nabwire, who distributes the materials used to write the book through NACWOLA, a national coalition of HIV-positive women.

Known as "memory books," the scrapbooks not only have sentimental value, they often prompt HIV-positive parents to think about what will happen after they die.

Who will care for their children? How will they ensure any property meant for the children actually ends up in their hands?

Sometimes they even remind parents they have a lot to live for.

"They fear for their children if they die and leave the children behind. They don't want to give up on life," Nabwire said.

"We see more people seeking treatment for every opportunistic infection and joining campaigns for (access to) drugs."

The book's first chapter details the history of the parents' marriage, a subject that is not always the stuff of fairy tales in a culture where polygamy is still practiced and where men sometimes pay a bride price to a woman's family before marrying her.

The next few chapters are often the favourites among the children, their pages dog-eared and smudged with fingerprints from repeated readings.

The chapters outline their birth, the meaning behind their names, their days as a baby, then as a toddler, their school days and school chums, a fond or secret memory, and finally, their parent's aspirations for them as an adult.

Nazziwa Yudaya began writing a memory book for each of her four children in 1998 and has never stopped writing.

She was a co-wife, married to a man with a first wife who took most of his money and attention.

As she wrote, Yudaya began to realize that she had poisoned her children against his memory, blaming him in bitter tirades for bringing the virus into their home.

She also realized she knew almost nothing of the man who had fathered her children and infected her with HIV.

Now, she laughs, she uses every family funeral to collect up bits of information about the man she married.

Cousins sit in back rows, scribbling details about his days in nursery or elementary school, about his first jobs, about the lives of his ancestors.

The book has helped her prepare for the inevitable: the lifespan for a person living with HIV in Africa is about 10 years, but Yudaya is taking anti-retroviral drugs, which should help her live longer.

She has left a plot of land to her children, picked out a niece who will help them with their troubles or worries. She's even decided where she'd like to be buried.

"It was very painful," she said.

Her children were not surprised by her HIV-positive status, but they were upset by the book.

"At first, they cried," Yudaya said.

"I realized that they were thinking I was going to die, but I told them, 'I'm still with you.'

"I realized that they trust me, that I'm still useful. They're very supportive, asking after my health and whether I've taken my drugs."

Parents go through a special memory book training to help them decide first how to disclose their HIV status, then how best to communicate the memories, hopes and dreams for their children.

"This is not really a part of our culture," Nabwire said.

Ugandans rely on oral tradition to pass on the things they know, whether it's an old recipe or the story of how their ancestors came to live in one region or another, she said.

"Since the generations are not even existing - they're dying in the middle of their lives - we need to put it down," she said.

"It's a new culture we're trying to teach."

Many families delay writing the books, either because the parent doesn't read or write and needs help getting their memories on to paper, or because they simply don't have enough information to offer a child about their heritage.

"It's amazing," Nabwire said. "They really realize they know very little about their partner. Sometimes they know very little about their own family."

Some wait until they are sick before putting pen to paper; some wait a little too long.

"By the time they're ready, they're too sick. When you're not feeling well, you can't think of writing a book," she said.

"The major aim, even when you've passed away, is that when the child reads this, he sees you as a person who lived and had likes and dislikes, just like any other person," Nabwire said.

When a person is sick with AIDS, their final days are a slow misery of pain, and often leave a child with a skewed recollection of their parent.

That's a memory the book can help erase, Nabwire said.

"When you leave a book, it brings life to that miserable person that the child used to see all the time," she said.

"It puts life in a miserable situation that the child would otherwise remember for the rest of his life."

It also helps the child remember that there was a time before their lives were all about drugs and infections and extra chores and pitching in to replace a parent too sick to look after the home and children.

"They remember themselves as being involved in work throughout," she said.

"They don't remember whatever childhood they had."

For Yudaya, writing the book also made her realize that she can't wait until she's on her deathbed to pass on all of her wisdom to her children.

"For them, I have filled what I want," she said.

"Anything I think of for my children - every good thing I feel - I have to tell them."

Karen Palmer is The Star's stringer in Africa

Crouching Hippos, Sleeping Lions

2006-03-12T03:41:00.000-08:00

When I crossed into Uganda, the border guard asked me how long I would be saying and when I replied one month he said, "I'd better give you two months then. You'll need lots of time because there's lots to see. You won't want to leave."

So far Uganda has really rolled out the red carpet. My first week here they had three public holidays -- two for voting and one for international women's day. Now, I want to assimilate with the culture, so I resignedly took the time off too. On Women's Day, I joined a bus full of muzungus to check out some Bugandan kingdom sites. Tourism in Africa is obviously a little different than at home and instead of little plaques or videos or people in period costume, there is mostly just someone who comes running out of their kitchen when visitors arrive to point out the sights, like the lump of ground where the Bugandan king is crowned. The slab of concrete where he is coronated Western-style. The rusty shed where he spends his last night as prince and holds "council" meetings. The prison "ditch" where the king once held his marauding brothers and sisters (before setting them on fire.) A missed lunch means I was more grumpy than touristy, but once we got some matoke in our stomachs (steamed under ripe banana, mashed into dense balls and eaten with your hands) I was much more in the mood for singing and dancing.

I spent the last three days in a car, sometimes getting out periodically to pee or take a photo or feed myself. We went to Ichacha falls, over by the Congolese border, to see the tree-climbing lions. It was a long ride, but totally worth it. We slept in the park, in tents down by the hippo pools. They snorted and snuffled and groaned all night, sometimes sounding like they were searching for grass under our tents. The water buffalos were also pretty vocal and the baboons screamed every now and again. We managed to see seven lions -- a pretty good record considering many people go there and see none.

I'm thinking about working again this week. Thinking about it.

Dried up and Dying

2006-03-01T05:12:00.000-08:00

Today it pissed rain in the afternoon, while I was typing away at the Internet café, solving the world’s woes via email. Figures. I just got back from four days up north, eyeballing the worst drought to hit Kenya since the 1970s.

When we were touring around at Christmas time, things looked pretty dire to our Western eyes. There was little water anywhere north of Isiolo, the geographical start of the neglected northern territory where literally and metaphorically, the pavement ends. We saw dozens upon dozens of women carrying heavy jerry cans filled with water, donkeys laden with water, even small children carrying containers. There was no water at a few of the campgrounds and a couple dead goats at one of the missions.

People were waiting and waiting for the short rains to arrive. They’ve given up on the short rains and are now waiting for the long rains to begin. The forecasts seem to be mixed: Nairobi is showing fairly promising signs that the rains have come, yet they don’t seem to be extending very far north. Up there, weather readers are predicting a lighter-than-usual rains, when what they need is downpours to slake the thirst of the dry, dry land.

I arranged a trip north with CARE Canada, a non-governmental organization that works literally all over the world, in some of the least glamorous places. They have operations in refugee camps throughout Africa, are often the first on the scene at disasters like the tsunami, and help pick up the pieces in countries like Afghanistan. We hopped in an air conditioned four-wheel drive and headed some 400 km northeast. (SEE STORY BELOW)

The road was beautiful all the way up and as we got further and further from Nairobi, the scenery got browner and browner. The Del Monte crops seemed stunted. There were a few camels on the outskirts of town, which one CARE employee thought meant that things were so bad herders were heading that far south, while another felt they were simply being brought to market. It’s hard to know: there are markets and far more demand for camels in the north, yet there’s water to be found in the north as well.

As we drove, the digital thermometer on the car’s dashboard kept rising and rising, finally hovering around 38 degrees. The town where we were headed – Garissa – is the provincial capital of the northeastern province, which is bordered by the Tana River, a permanent body of water whose levels have dipped, but whose beds still hold water. (We passed at least 10 empty riverbeds on our way north.) The northeastern province is one of Kenya’s poorest, with a huge refugee population – at least 130,000 Somalis divided amongst three massive camps – a large Muslim influence, an astounding level of illiteracy, a stubborn refusal to give up female genital mutilation, a strong Saudi influence, pathetically low rainfalls (even in the best of years) and a total of 6.2 km of paved roads.

The day after we arrived, I turned up early at the CARE offices, where a tall Kenyan-Somali named Soulieman took me on a tour of some of their food distribution points. When we arrived in one village – a collection of round stick huts supplemented with bits of cardboard and plastic, plus a shiny white mosque – we pulled up under a tree and Soulieman announced that we had arrived. They’re no frills, for sure. He asked if I’d like to see a carcass and I crassly said yes, then commented that he obviously had some media experience.

We drove to a semi-permanent collection of stick globes called Jerirot, home to almost a thousand people and, at one point, 2,500 cattle. The men came to greet us almost immediately and I have to say, there’s something a bit frightening about these fierce looking men walking with determination towards you. I was happy to have Soulieman around. But of course, they simply laughed and talked, shook hands, were more than happy to lead me to a carcass and expressed sympathy when I’d land my heel down on a sharp thorn that had worked its way clear through my plastic flip-flops. (Some of them are strong enough and sharp enough to cause punctures in car tires.)

One of the men told Soulieman he’d spent the previous night out in the bush with his herdsman and a dying cow. The Somalis (and by that I mean anyone of Somali heritage, not necessarily someone with a Somali passport – even the Kenyans refer to the people in the region as “Somalis,” even though, like Soulieman, their grandparents were born in Kenya) have a strange and endearing affection for their cattle. They say the Dinka in Sudan write love poetry about their herds of cattle, and while the Somalis are maybe not that dedicated, they believe that their cattle are a gift from Allah and only he can decide when to take that gift away. So they very rarely slaughter their animals. They may sell them at the market when they need meat or money for other commodities, but in this time of drought, they have watched them die, rather than sell them en masse and put the money in the bank until the rains return. Banks are not something these nomadic pastoralists understand or trust, Soulieman said.

We drove on, passing more dry rivers and women and donkeys carrying water. We even passed a few dik diks, a couple squirrels, a few antelope and a family of reticulated giraffe. By late afternoon, when the temperature was dropping to almost bearable levels, we reached a village where the World Food Programme and CARE deliver rations for more than 500 people. The diet in the north consists mainly of meat and milk – herders, for example, will milk their camels, goats or cattle and live off that for days at a time. But in times of drought, the community is fed maize or beans. The village chairperson told us the children were suffering from this unfamiliar diet, complaining of stomachaches from the lack of milk. They were tiny and inquisitive, initially unsure what to think of me and shied away whenever I came close. Then they piled onto the bags of maize and I snapped a picture and showed it to them. They stuck pretty close after that, maneuvering into pictures as best as they could.

We had a pretty quiet drive back as the sun dipped lower and lower, Soulieman peppering me with questions about the Somalis in Canada, and Mohammed asking my opinion of things like the Ugandan election. I often felt quite bumpkin-y around these two: they’re incredibly literate and are devoted listeners of the Beeb in English and Swahili.

As we were passing a collection of homes near the road, Mohammed noticed a bunch of newly dead cattle and we stopped so I could take photos. At least three of the cows – some of them looking like they were born in the last few months – had died that day. There were other bits of skull and bleached out bones around, suggesting other animals had died in the past few days and been carried off by carrions like hyena. Their skin seemed to stretch over bony spines and ribs, little pools of blood surrounded different parts of their bodies. Their bowels had relaxed and maggots were squirming throughout the black liquid that was released. The smell was coppery and frankly, not overwhelming. I kept thinking of the Star’s former Latin American correspondent saying she raced out to a plane crash because she wanted to “smell” it, so I kept breathing deeply, which disturbed Mohammed.

While I was shooting pictures, an old wrinkly woman came to talk to Mohammed and Soulieman and she asked that I visit her cattle. She was cooking when we arrived and explained that she was cooking for her family of 10, plus some passing migrants moving in search of water, plus her collection of cattle. She’d once had 70 cows, but was down to three skinny cows and five calves and was feeding them from the family’s stores in an effort to keep them alive until the long rains came. If they lived, they’d be used as breeding stock to rebuild the herd. She had virtually no reaction to her own photo, but was positively tickled by the image of her skinny cow.

Imagine, Mohammed said. What will your viewers in the West think when they hear that Africans are sharing their pots with their animals? I thought about that from the backseat while we drove back. He would probably be sickened to learn that a lot of Westerners feed their animals from the same pots, that the amount spent on pet food and treats in the West could feed a mid-sized African nation for a long, long time, that there is enough waste that many animals live off table scraps and that some pet-owners are so crazed about their animals, they cook food specifically for them. I was once at the hairdresser when this woman from Woodbridge went on and on about cooking organic food for her Pomeranian. She looked like she hadn’t seen a green vegetable in years. Kenyans, in fact, were outraged when a woman from New Zealand offered to send a highly nutritious protein blend from her dog food factory. The papers were full of indignant copy about how whites treat blacks, thinking they could feed starving Africans dog food! She clarified her position, saying she eats the food herself and suddenly white columnists were writing explaining that people in developed nations are, well, nuts.

Anyway, after seeing all this, I retired to the Nomad Palace hotel, the only place of note to stay in Garissa, where rooms are all self-contained, air conditioned and come with satellite TV. It seemed wrong, somehow, to leave a village where a woman is cooking a pot of beans, maize and tomatoes for at least a dozen people plus her livestock, then tuck into a plate of rice and a plate of chicken so massive I was unable to finish it, have a hot shower, step into a freezing room and flip to a Kate Hudson movie.

The next day, I spent the morning at a conference on female sexual mutilation and gender based violence. Somehow all these terms seem so sanitized. They were basically talking about women who have their bits sewn together and how men beat and rape them and basically treat them like chattel. The attitude in this part of the world is backward and I know that’s not politically correct, but that’s how it is. There were 30 people invited to the conference, some people working with pastoralists, others working with girls who’d run away from home to avoid being “circumsized.” In the name of Islam, these girls have are sewn shut at the age of six, then married off, sometimes at the age of nine. Sometimes to men who are in their 70s! There were many, many Muslims there who shook their head at the notion that this is a religious rite and the group talked about organizing forums to educate people that this is not something the Koran advocates. They swapped stories of worst cases: the girls who suffered through the first 10 days of marriage as their husband tried, without success, to penetrate them. The girl who was tied to a post by her father and repeatedly raped by the man he’d sold her to for a couple cows. The 16 year old refugee who was sent to the hospital when her husband beat her with a pipe until her lower jaw was pulverized.

On Sunday, we were up at 6 a.m. – the extend-a-mix call to prayer would have ensured that anyway – and ready to head out to the Dadaab refugee camp, another 400 km north and closer to the Somali border. Dadaab is home to 130,000 refugees, the largest refugee settlement in the world. The UN demands vehicles travel in a convoy with a police escort to ward against bandits, so we were waiting for the vehicle that would carry the soldiers armed with rifles almost as long as my leg.

It was a long, bumpy drive and again the mercury kept rising, reaching 43 degrees shortly before 10 a.m. The aid worker compounds on the southern edge of Dadaab are surrounded by officious security officers and three layers of razor wire. After exchanging pleasantries with the CARE staff, we hopped back in the Land Cruisers and headed for a borehole on the other edge of town. The “town” was like something out of a Western, dusty streets lined with market stalls made of sticks, with women in flowing veils and darting children stepping out in front of the vehicle. Deforestation has stolen the home of the marabout storks, so they were crowded about, their ugly bald heads, fringed with fuzz, reaching almost four feet in the air as they sampled from the ample garbage heaps.

At the borehole, there were at least a hundred groaning camels with their ribs and hip bones pressing against their skin waiting for a drink. Their “bells,” hollowed out seed pods with sticks as clangers, gave a wooden knocking sound as they dipped their long necks to drink. Apparently they can take on 100 litres in one go, enough to last them 30 days, but because of the drought situation, they’re usually only healthy enough to take on enough water to last them five days.

That becomes an issue for people like Gala, who we met at the next borehole. She and another woman had risen at 4 a.m., tethered together six camels, loaded them with dozens of jerry cans and set out searching for water. They arrived at a borehole outside Dadaab nine hours later, having walked 40 km alongside their camels. (Somalis are baffled by the suggestion that camels can also be ridden. It’s just not something they do.) In seven days, Gala will set out on the 40 km journey again, since the water is spread amongst some 80 people and the camels will need to be watered again.

The CARE staff threw a party for the visiting senior vice-president that night, again making it difficult to believe that only a few feet away, people were going hungry. They invited all of their 100-or-so staff, plus a few dignitaries from the six other NGOs and UN agencies that work at Dadaab. The next day we visited a few of them on courtesy calls and I was surprised to hear the UNHCR and WFP heads ask CARE for money to support their projects. As Nancy Gordon explained, CARE is a privately-funded NGO, raising about $7 million each year through the generosity of donations from average Canadians. While the UN groups sometimes have access to hundreds of millions of dollars, it seems their budgets have been slashed of late because governments are not living up to their commitments, or are simply not making commitments in the first place. Things like the drought have to be paid for through “emergency appeals,” which means going to governments and asking for special cash infusions. With so many emergencies going on in the world, and an increasing sense of “donor fatigue,” few countries have donated anything toward the east African drought. WFP figures they need more than $500 million to feed the 11 million people who are facing famine, but so far they’ve only managed to raise about $130 million.

In the late afternoon I decided to leave CARE and head off with Carol, the new country director for Handicap International, which is not technically in Dadaab, but helps with the medical care of refugees transferred to the hospital in Garissa. We went to see a couple deaf classes, where the kids taught us some simple signs, and where the deaf students are mixed with the mentally handicapped children. I think this has more to do with space constraints than anything else, but it’s a bit stigmatizing to think that deaf children are somehow mentally handicapped. CARE has a deaf staff member named Stephen and he’s done wonders for drawing deaf children out of their homes, where parents kept them hidden for fear the community would find out they had a disabled child.

At the next school we met 12 year old Zainab Abdi Salam, who seemed to have been born with spina bifida. Her father was on the PTA and aftzer an intense campaign focusing on handicapped children, he confessed he had a daughter at home who couldn’t walk. They gave the family a wheelbarrow and for the first few months of her school career, she was wheeled to school and slid into the classroom. The children were mercilessly cruel, pushing her over, pushing the wheelchair she eventually received into corners or walls. Her father takes her to school and picks her up at lunch and spends many an anxious morning worrying about what he’ll find when he arrives. (Now, think about the values toward daughters expressed at the FGM conference versus the sacrifices this father was making and you’d understand that this man was a saint.) Carol suggested a few games the children might be able to play in order to instill a sense of understanding and I snapped a few pictures of Zairab, who smiled at the sight of them. I also asked the translator to tell the dozens upon dozens of children who’d crowded around the classroom windows that they should be nice to our friend. Who knows what effect that will have.

We visited another primary school, where the students were learning how to calculate percentages, but appeared to be in their late teens. One student was balding. They had a long list of complaints: they were failing their exams because the teachers were not proficient in both sign and Kiswahili and they needed those exams in order to get into the better deaf schools off the camp, in Mombassa. They wanted Islamic teaching materials and better textbooks, or at least ones not covered by newsprint. When we got in the car, Carol asked the administrator what he was doing to prepare these boys for the eventuality that they may not go to Mombassa, no matter how hard their teacher tries.

By noon, I was so hot and dehydrated that I sat out while Carol visited a workshop for handicapped people, where they learned a few skills that could translate to real jobs building shelters and other structures.

By 4 p.m., we were on the tarmac of the Dadaab airstrip, sweating through every pore in an un-air conditioned tin can that had been sitting in the blazing sun since 9.30 a.m. It was a short but excruciating flight and it was positively chilly to step out into Nairobi’s night air, where temperatures were a much more reasonable 19 degrees.

WORLD; BRIEFING: AFRICA
Killer drought rendering Horn of Africa bone-dry ; As cattle die off, so does region's hope
Karen Palmer, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
1192 words
16 March 2006
The Washington Times
A17

In the pre-dawn hours, with temperatures still in the teens and a gentle breeze blowing across the dry, dusty dunes where Kenya meets Somalia, Gala began walking with six tethered camels in a desperate search for water.

Not long after noon, as the mercury topped 105 degrees Fahrenheit, Gala - whose name means "camel" in Somali - finally reached a borehole where gas-powered pumps helped draw a steady stream of hot, clear water.

She walked for nearly nine hours, matching the pace of her groaning camels for about 25 miles, past dry riverbeds and small round huts patched with plastic and cardboard, sheltering nomads also moving in pursuit of water.

"Where is water? Where will we find it otherwise?" the woman asked in Somali as she struggled to control the lead camel.

All across the Horn of Africa's remote and barren regions, a crippling drought has pushed people incredible distances in a frantic hunt for water.

"We anticipate that the situation is going to get much worse because the rains have not yet come," said Evans Ktule, district officer for the Liboi Division on the border between Kenya and Somalia, where months without rain have produced severe drought.

Tied to Gala's camels were dozens of yellow 5- and 10-gallon jerrycans, meant to supply 10 families, each with at least eight children, with a week's worth of water for washing, cooking and drinking.

In seven days, as the skinny camels start complaining of thirst again, Gala's long walk will start over.

After three years without sufficient rain, at least 11 million people spread over five African countries face famine, according to the United Nations' World Food Program (WFP), which has begun a fundraising tour of the region in hopes of drawing attention to the plight of the most vulnerable people.

So far, $186 million has been donated by the developed countries, but the WFP expects it will need $574 million to meet the needs of emergency cases in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti.

"It's our top priority," said Umberto Greco, head of the WFP office in isolated Dadaab, where there are 130,000 Somali refugees.

If nothing happens to improve the food supply in the next couple of months, the drought's victims will find themselves in a "terrible situation," he said. Already, more than 40 people have died from drought-related causes in northern Kenya. Estimates suggest that by next month, half the cattle in Kenya and 80 percent of cattle in parts of Somalia will have died.

"If there's no rain, there's no pastures. If there's no pastures, the cows cannot feed, and therefore, they die," said Margaret Mwaniki, project coordinator for Caritas International, which groups 162 Catholic relief, development and social-service organizations.

"When a cow suffers," she explained, "the whole community suffers because they're the only source of livelihood."

Behind a thorny fence in Kamuthe, a dusty roadside village, Amina Sahib ran a wooden spoon through a large pot of bubbling tomatoes, beans and corn, a meal to be shared by her family of 10, a couple of visitors moving in search of water and Mrs. Sahib's remaining cattle.

Once the proud owner of 70 cattle, Mrs. Sahib's herd has been reduced to three emaciated cows and five calves too weak to stand, now corralled beside the house in an attempt to save them from marauding carnivores.

Just steps from her home, three newly dead cattle rot in the fading sun, surrounded by the bleached bones and skulls of animals eaten by hyenas.

The skin of the newly dead cattle had split over bony spines and ribs, releasing little pools of black blood.

"There are a lot of people desperate just like me," Mrs. Sahib said, explaining that she was feeding the cattle from the family's food, hoping to keep them alive until the long rains came.

If they live, they can be used as breeding stock to rebuild the herd, she said.

Rebuilding the cattle herds "will take them years," said WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon. "This is, sadly, the cycle. The number of cattle yo-yos according to the drought years. That's why it's such a complete waste."

In northern Kenya, the blazing sun brings temperatures that bake the ground and evaporate pitiful rainfalls. The landscape is dotted with wiry bushes and spindly trees, whose thorns are sharp and strong enough to puncture auto and truck tires.

The nomadic population has always coped by simply keeping on the move, shifting herds from one water source to a greener pasture to another water source.

"The natural area where anyone might go with his or her family and animals is no longer available because the area has no pasture and no water," said Mohammed Qazilbash, emergency coordinator for CARE Canada.

At Abakdera, a poverty-ridden collection of stick-and-mud huts, CARE Kenya workers patiently call out the names of dozens of families registered to receive WFP rations.

"The cattle is over," said Hussein Abdi, chairman of the relatively peaceful Abakdera settlement, about 28 miles from Garissa down the Tana River's eastern bank. "The cattle are the most affected, and they have already died."

Virtually all its cows and goats have perished, so the usual diet of milk and meat has been replaced by 22 pounds each of rice and beans, plus about 40 ounces of oil.

The allotment is meant to last each family an entire month.

Village women walk nearly two miles to the shrinking river to fetch water, though it's not considered safe for drinking. Mr. Abdi said the children complain of stomach aches on the unfamiliar diet and are suffering without milk.

"Just look at them," he said, waving his walking stick toward dozens of small children in filthy rags loafing on bags of donated corn. "They are weak."

Normally, the goats and sheep would go to market in Garissa, but Mr. Abdi said they wouldn't fetch much in their current condition, and most would die on the journey.

Caption: It has been months since the last rain across the Horn of Africa, and the severe drought has made it impossible for the grass that cattle feed on to grow. The cattle are starving to death. [Photo by Karen Palmer/The Washington Times]; Amina Sahib cooked a meal of tomatoes, beans and corn to be shared by her family of 10, her cattle and visitors passing through the area. She fed her cattle her family's food to try to keep them alive until it rains again. [Photo by Karen Palmer/The Washington Times]; Gala walked with her camels about 25 miles over nine hours in search of water before finding a borehole near Dadaab, Kenya. She was able to fill up the large jugs, or jerrycans, tied to her camels with a week's worth of water for washing, cooking and drinking. [Photo by Karen Palmer/The Washington Times]

News
On the brink of famine; 6 million face starvation as drought ravages livestock, wipes out crops in 5 East African countries Animal carcasses line roadways and there is grave concern for Kenya's wildlife, writes Karen Palmer
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
790 words
22 February 2006
The Toronto Star
ONT
A03
English
Copyright (c) 2006 The Toronto Star
Nairobi More than 6 million people across East Africa are facing starvation in a worsening drought that has already killed at least 80 people and destroyed nearly half the livestock in some areas.

Charities and non-governmental organizations working in five countries in the region are making a desperate plea for donations.

"At the end of the day, if nothing is done now, six months from now we'll start using the F-word, which is famine," said Mohammed Qazilbash, program manager for emergency operations with CARE International in Kenya.

Five cycles of failed rain have led to crippling conditions in northeastern Kenya and southern Somalia, as well as severe water and food shortages in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti.

"This is something I have never witnessed in my life," said Margaret Mwaniki, East African co-ordinator for Caritas Internationalis.

A farmer herself, she said she lost all of her bananas and the cereals she planted dried up so profoundly she wasn't even able to harvest enough seeds to plant again.

"If I was relying on that farm, what a disaster!" she said. "What would I be feeding my children?"

Water levels in Lake Victoria have plummeted to the point some Ugandan fishermen have given up their trade.

In Tanzania, low water levels mean there is not enough hydro-electricity to meet the country's needs.

Planned power outages have left cities without electricity for 12-hour stretches.

Across the region, nomadic herders have simply watched their animals die of starvation or thirst.

Carcasses line roadways and there is grave concern for Kenya's famed wildlife, struggling to find water.

The horizon is bleak and brown, with a few thorn trees and a type of plant poisonous to cattle providing the only green. Even cacti have wilted and withered.

Initially, hospitals began treating patients for dehydration and eventually reported a few deaths from the condition. Then malnourished children began showing up, usually coupled with other illnesses, like malaria or diarrhea related to drinking dirty water.

Agencies like Oxfam and CARE have attempted to help, using rations dropped at designated food distribution centres.

Serious malnutrition cases, caused simply by not getting enough to eat, are expected to hit hospitals now.

"There's just not enough support right now for (emergency) feeding centres," said Peter Smerdon, spokesperson for the United Nations' World Food Program.

In Kenya alone, the World Food Program is feeding 3 million people, plus another 500,000 schoolchildren.

That requires 395 million tonnes of food, at a cost of $225 million (all figures in U.S. dollars).

So far, only $36 million has been donated, including $17 million from the Kenyan government, $15 million from the U.S. and $1.3 million from Canada.

The World Food Program is already facing a food crisis in southern Africa, where 12 million people in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe are facing starvation due to poor rains.

The situation is only expected to get worse, since long-range forecasts predict that the usual rains in April will also fail.

"If that happens, it will be a disaster," Smerdon said. "That will mean an even larger number of people going hungry. Even if it rains, unless they're brilliant - which they haven't been for the past few years - everyone will have lost their cattle anyway."

Government estimates suggest 50 per cent of cattle in northeastern Kenya have already died and another 80 per cent in southern Somalia have starved to death.

A child malnutrition survey conducted in October found that up to a third of all children under five were suffering from acute malnutrition.

"Whole communities are entrapped within this whole circle of drought," Qazilbash said. "They cannot move out of this circle because the distances are so vast and there's a potential for conflict."

Alarmingly, aid agencies report deaths of donkeys and camels - two hardy animals accustomed to severe desert conditions.

"You start to imagine that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better," Qazilbash said.

Freelance-a-rama

2006-02-22T07:08:00.000-08:00

Back to Africa, the trip that’s been talked about, debated, mulled and otherwise decided for months now. Seems like I just got back, seems like I’ve been home for a long time. Seems like I didn’t get enough time to say good-bye, seems like with some people and some places, there wasn’t as much need to say good-bye as I thought there would be.

It’s been a struggle for the past few days to remind myself about why I’m really going. I’m excited to go, I’m anxious to go, I want to go. I’m scared to go. I’m nervous about what awaits, I’m afraid that I’ll be lonely or bored or broke or worse. I have no idea what awaits, I’m not really sure what I’ll be doing when I get there, other than scrambling for a few days. I know that it will be much different from Ghana. I’m just hoping it goes as well as I’ve been envisioning – which is pretty well.

These are the first words I wrote in my journal when I landed in Africa for the fourth time. Almost six months later, I can say with absolute certainty that journalism, Africa-style, has ruined me.

Last week I saw three movies. I had five naps, some of them for two hours. I read two books. I did three interviews, wrote two stories, planned an excursion to the slums and lined up an out-of-town trip. I spent an entire afternoon walking up and down the streets of downtown Nairobi looking to replace a pair of pants. (Without success. One shopkeeper, bless her, told me that she didn’t carry a single thing in my size. “You’re too small. I don’t even have anything for you in Italian sizes. If you fatten up you can come back.”)

How could I do all this with an office job? Bleech.

Until last week, I was $60 shy of having my earnings meet my expenses, including the $2,000 ticket over here. Then last week I spent nearly $400 on hotels, books, movies, postage, paintings, transport, a safari, food and phone cards.

It has indeed been very lonely, which I attribute 100 per cent to traveling. I meet people, but it seems like every one of my friendships right now is sustained via email. There have been definite periods of boredom. (Hence the three movies and two books – “The White Masai” and “Gorillas in the Mist.” Both excellent.)

There is a constant worry about running out of money. And as my parents can attest after a 4 a.m. phone call this week, there is a very real panic when I can’t access my money.

There is an intense longing for Kraft Dinner. And Doritos. And chicken peanut stew.

Of course, there are so many great moments. In Kibera, a slum of epic proportions, a little kid came running up and slapped me high five. He was so intensely adorable, I thought about snatching him. He thought I was Drew Barrymore, which, as you can imagine, happens all the time. Apparently when she was on a goody-goody tour at some point, she came with the World Food Program along the same goody-goody route I was following and had her picture taken with him. Several, in fact, until he accidentally scratched her and she dropped him like a hot potato, afraid that she’d contracted HIV.

Watching Rotarian Doug Cunningham do the hokey pokey for a bunch of kids at Mkuki, while they looked on stunned, mesmerized even, will likely stay with me forever. So will watching as the kids at the Kilema hospital got into the spirit of a game called “Doggie, Doggie Where’s your Bone?”

The kids here are really unbelievable, I mean, they sort of defy description. They have endless imagination, seem to take pleasure in the smallest of things, can turn almost anything into a toy. They’re well-behaved in an almost militant way. They seem to love cameras, break out into the most darling smiles at the smallest provocation, behave like little diplomats. (Kids at Kibera’s Kikoshep primary class sang “We welcome you!” when I stopped in, until they got a little too into the song and jolted one of the desks, sending a sleeping child tumbling to the floor, where she put her tooth through her lip. Then I had my own Drew Barrymore moment of alarm. Some 70 per cent of the kids in the school are HIV-infected orphans.)

It’s hard to watch what is happening to them. It’s hard to know that they are probably one of the biggest problem the world is facing: lonely, starving and parentless, with a loose moral grounding and a vulnerability that is almost shocking.

I suspect that if they continue to be ignored and neglected, in 10 years time, these sweet-faced children will have the street smarts to do something unspeakable about it.

Inured

2006-02-22T00:48:00.000-08:00

Inure (verb): to make somebody used to something unpleasant over a period of time, so that he or she no longer is bothered or upset by it.

In attempting to set up a visit to drought-stricken areas around Nairobi, the World Food Program suggested I visit their school feeding program, which aims to feed school-aged children who would otherwise not eat. (SEE STORY BELOW)

Literally. Some would faint in class, others would be too weak to play during the break. Most would spend their lunch hour scavenging like goats for scraps of food tossed away by their neighbours. Some would return in the afternoon. Most would not.

In Kenya alone, the WFP feeds some 1.1 million school-aged children in 3,800 schools across the country. Although they run similar programs in schools around the world, what makes the one I visited a little different is that it’s in an urban area. Traditionally, extreme poverty is thought to exist in the remote, rural areas, where the people are nomadic, without property except their cattle and their goats. But Nairobi has the largest concentration of slums anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa and the poverty defies description: it’s not just crippling, it’s not just abject. It’s unbelievable.

In 2004, WFP secured a huge grant from the International Paper organization – something I’ve never heard of and will have to Google – and they expanded the program in Kenya from two to six slums. Now, slum is an interesting word. In the Kenyan sense, it basically means high density housing without basic amenities, like running water, electricity or sanitation facilities. In practical terms, that means people living on top of one another in ramshackle buildings constructed from whatever is cheap and handy. Some “bathrooms” are plastic bags, tossed from the window or thrown on the pile in an alleyway when they’re full. At one point, near the railroad tracks that featured so prominently in “The Constant Gardener,” there was a little girl just pooping in the open.

The school we visited is the poorest of the 107 schools in the program. It is on the very edge of Kibera’s poorest district. Kibera itself is the largest slum in East Central Africa, home to more than a million people. Usually the WFP likes to have the schools that are part of the program equipped with a kitchen and pots and some basics that will help them run the program. St. Philips has none of these things.

The kitchen is merely a bunch of sticks nailed together. There are no walls and no roof. A giant pot provided by the WFP – large enough for a kindergarten student to bathe in – sits on top of three stones, which keep the pot up off firewood collected by parents or students. This is where, each day, a parent comes to cook maize and beans in oil. It’s hot work and there’s little praise for the menu. The mid-morning snack is corn-soya blend, a “high nutritious” supplement containing 43 vitamins. That is often all some kids have to eat: a mid morning snack and a margarine tub of maize and white beans. Some of them even snap a lid on their ration and take it home to share with their parents and siblings.

This school is being primed for a visit by the executive director of the World Food Program, Jim Morris. To get to the school, he will cross a river of sewage on a bridge that’s made of 16 sticks. Arrangements have been made so that he will be able to simply walk into the school, as opposed to walking around a partition made of junk that’s been fashioned for some unknown reason. Walking around the partition means jumping over the sewage river and then jumping back. The sewage actually smells quite nasty and is thick and black in colour, full of rotting vegetables, plastic bags, dirt and poop, both human and otherwise.

That smell wafts all through the school. (Lorna, the program assistant who is guiding this trip, tells me she has another school that is much worse off: it’s called Holy Unity but they’ve christened it “Holy Shit” because a river of human waste surrounds the school like a moat.)

Now, I’ve been around Africa, I’ve seen some pretty interesting schools, most memorable being the straw hut in the Dogon country in Mali. But St. Philips was a new and disturbing experience. A teacher gave me a tour, starting up a small hill where the kids and teachers gather for assemblies on Mondays and Fridays. It’s just a rocky piece of dry ground, with a tree off to one side. There’s a large, square, mud structure with gaping holes that’s now used for the nursery class. When I visited, the little tiny kids – nursery and pre-school aged – sat on a blanket in the middle of the bumpy floor. One of the older kids had a plastic red pointer and banged against the chalkboard, where there were five pictures hand-drawn with chalk. “What is theeeees?” she would scream. “Theeees is a cah-t,” the kids would answer. “Theeees is a geeraffe.” “Theeeees is a cow.” “Theeeees is a lie-on.” There were 31 children, most under the age of five.

The teacher, a born again Christian aptly named Hope, told me the kids were doing so well “through the blood of Jesus,” which is pretty gross. She had them stand up. (“We are standing up.”) Show me your head! “Theees is my head.” What are you doing? “I’m touching my head!”

This square of crumbling mud is where the entire school was once located. All nine classes were shoved into this one room, all the teachers talking on top of one another, all trying to hold onto the attention of their children.

In January, they moved into a new building, made of mud and sticks, a corrugated roof and, in some places, plaster. There’s no electricity. No water. No bathroom. The kids are called to school by a bell, rung by head boy or head girl. There are nine teachers and nine classes. Kids pay 100 shillings per month to attend, or 1,200 shillings per year, which is $20.

The floor of the school was a minefield chipped rock; I had to clutch the mud walls just to maintain my balance. There were only enough desks and thin benches for seven of the classrooms, so form one and the nursery sit on the floor. The chalk boards are actually just smooth plywood that the teachers write on. That’s it for ambiance.

At one thirty, when lunch was finally served, kids came from all over, some in uniforms for other schools, some not in uniform at all. The head teacher, Jacinta, is a thin and nervous woman, a mother who cannot bear the thought of turning hungry children away from free food. So things have slid. But the executive director of the WFP is coming, so Lorna wants things ship shape for his visit. She wants grateful parents, smiling children. And no strays. No kids who only show up for food. She’ll put the fear of God into them herself if she has to.

We are expecting the culprits to be street boys who hustle or work, but stop in at the school for the free meal. But while I was taking pictures, a tiny girl with a baby on her back showed up with a black plate and a chipped black cup. Her name is Wambui. She is 10 and has five siblings, including the baby, who is smacking her lips at the sight of food. Wambui is registered at the school, in the nursery class, but she lives alone with her HIV-positive mother and has to rush home to feed the other kids and look after her sick mother. She has sticks for arms, knobby knees and elbows and a little line of snot drizzling from her nose.

I sometimes wonder whether I will continue to be surprised, shocked and saddened by Africa’s conditions or if I’ll just grow cynical and jaded and become inured to the misery around me.

WORLD
AIDS orphans struggle to survive ; Charity groups rush to supply children with proper care, food
Karen Palmer, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
1080 words
23 March 2006
The Washington Times
A15

Kilema, TANZANIA -- Poking out of Patrice Mavia's purple plastic sandals are toes dark and swollen with blood, ragged and infected as if chewed by jagged teeth.

His fingers seem to be in a similarly painful state.

Adella Kessy, a nurse at the Catholic hospital in the foothills of Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro, said tiny sand fleas are to blame. Left unchecked, the insects form painful pustules and lesions, destroy fingers and toes, and eventually leave a victim crippled.

They come from walking barefoot on ground infested with sand fleas, drying clothes on the ground or poor hygiene. They are a clear sign of neglect, said Ms. Kessy.

Patrice probably doesn't bathe with any regularity, nor is he likely to hand wash his thin clothes, or know that he has to destroy bugs and parasites with a heavy, charcoal-powered iron. He is, after all, only 8 years old.

Patrice was orphaned by AIDS maybe five years ago - he thinks he lost his parents in 2001 and 2003 - and he is the only one around to remind himself to wash behind his ears and scrub between his toes.

"No one is helping him care for himself," said Ms. Kessy, shaking her head.

As communities across Africa struggle to cope with the growing number of children left parentless by AIDS - a number expected to reach 18 million by 2010 - the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said recently that less than 10 percent of AIDS orphans receive any form of support.

"Most are in poor, poor, poor environments. They're in poor houses, poor environments and have poor food," said Anna Anselm, a clinical officer at the hospital's patient resource center.

"They can't afford everything that's needed for the essentials of life. They're so limited."

Once a month, Ms. Kessy and her colleagues at the hospital's HIV/ AIDS counseling center invite orphans like Patrice to the hospital for "tea" - giving health workers a chance to know who the children are, where they live and who takes care of them.

More important, it gives them a chance to see the children. Are they skinny? Scraggly? Sickly?

Worrisome cases are followed up with a home visit, where volunteers will also drop donated food staples like beans, oil or flour.

Problem spans Africa

The problem of starving, orphaned children is not limited to isolated pockets of Africa. In the decades since the spread of AIDS, more than 100,000 children at 107 schools in six of Nairobi's sprawling slums get their only meal - lunch - through the World Food Program.

At St. Philips School on the edge of Kibera slum, Wambui, 10, materializes at the clang of the lunch bell carrying a baby tied to her back with a brilliant pink scarf.

Skinny and stunted, with bony elbows and knees, Wambui carries a metal cup and a chipped black plate as she waits for her share of the mixture of corn and beans fried every day for the school's 345 hungry children.

The baby on her back smacks her lips waiting for food as school officials confront Wambui.

They want to know why she's not wearing her uniform, and whether she's showing up for classes or simply arriving for the free food and then disappearing back into Kibera's crowded, dirty alleys.

The feeding program is not simply about a free meal, they say. It's a way to keep children healthy and in school so they can break the cycle of poverty.

"Words cannot explain how much this food has done," said Louise Masese-Mwirigi, a monitoring officer from Feed the Children, which runs the program.

Before the program was in place, children were scavenging like goats, she said - looking for scraps in the garbage thrown out by their neighbors.

Adults could exploit them by luring some children with the promise of a piece of chicken or a plate of greasy chips.

"This is protecting them in a way you really can't quantify on paper," said Mrs. Masese-Mwirigi.

In soft Swahili, Wambui explains that she lives with her mother and helps care for five other children. Her father is dead, and her mother is dying of AIDS.

She was in class, she insisted. Teachers were simply looking for her in the wrong place: though she is 10 years old, she is still in the nursery class.

Taking food home

About 20 percent of St. Philip's students are orphans. Some come from single-parent families. Almost all are destitute.

A few children snap a lid on their ration - a scoop and a half - and take it home to share with desperate parents and siblings.

"They cannot even have a meal. They will feed here today and they will come tomorrow and feed again. There won't be anything to eat at home," said Joseph Ndungu, a representative of the city education department.

A report issued last year by Human Rights Watch found that AIDS orphans are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to fall behind in their studies and less likely to see meager family earnings go to their education.

Dropping out means children are more likely to become trapped in poverty, exposing them to greater risk of abuse, sexual exploitation and AIDS.

Teachers at St. Philips say the offer of free food has turned that trend around.

Before the feeding program began two years ago, there were 212 students enrolled in the school. Now there are 346, about a 50 percent increase.

"It's important for their academic work, and health-wise," said the school's head teacher, Jacinta Katheu. "The feeding program is helping their families very much. They are jobless - their guardians are often jobless - and at the end of the day, they won't even eat a meal. There's no food at home."

Caption: Every day in Nairobi, Kenya, students line up to receive a free lunch of a fried corn and beans mixture. Often, it is the only meal the children eat, and many take the food home to feed their families. [2 Photos by Karen Palmer/The Washington Times]; Nurse Adella Kessy gives donated used clothing to children orphaned by AIDS at a hospital in Kilema, Tanzania, located in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. [Photo by Karen Palmer/The Washington Times]

All hail the Big Five

2006-02-14T23:45:00.001-08:00

The Leopard, Lion, Rhino, Water Buffalo and Elephant. Went to the Ngorongoro crater on the weekend, a collapsed mountain top that usually has a huge lake that attracts migrating animals from all over east Africa. Now, with the drough, the lake is more like a muddy puddle. There were only a handful of flamingos and usually there are thousands. Commence worrying. When I crossed over from Tanzania to Kenya yesterday, even the cacti had wilted and withered. I can only imagine what the north looks like.

I don't know why hippos aren't included in the big five. They can weigh up to three tonnes, which is much, much more than those scrawny lions or leopards. I have a feeling it has to do with their public relations: people think of them as overgrown pigs. You don't see any Disney movies about them, although I guess they played a small supporting role in Fantasia.

"Mr. and Mrs. Thurmond J. Bewildered-Beest regret to inform you that due to unforeseen circumstances, their son, Billy, will not be attending the annual migration."

Jiggered

2006-02-07T00:08:00.000-08:00

Once a month, the HIV/AIDS staff at the Kilema hospital in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro host a "tea" for the orphans in the area. On Friday, 129 kids showed up looking for a slice of bread and a cup of hot, tea-like water. The hospital started this little tradition in the early 1990s, as a way to eyeball the kids. It not only draws them out of the bush, so they can at least be identified, it also gives health workers a chance to see whether they're too skinny or scraggly or sickly. (SEE STORY BELOW)

It took nurse Adela three solid hours to register the kids, which consisted of collecting their names, ages, schools, parents, grandparents and the Kilema version of assemblyman. Adela also asks the kids when their parents died (or if their parents died -- she shooed away one kid was not an orphan) and who's taking care of them. The assembly man is so that they can find them again when they do home visits to assess their living conditions and sometimes deliver food or clothing or whatever they can spare. Adela says most of the kids lie -- whether out of fear or pride or simply not knowing the answer to a question -- so they like to go and see for themselves how the kids are living.

After the registration, the tea began. Plastic feed buckets were brought out and about 20 plastic cups. One bucket contained fried donuts, which two girls handed out. A bucket of tea was dished out by two more girls. The kids ate 20 by 20, while Adela and a Canadian CIDA intern named Sue handed out some banana cake and some treats brought over by a group of Rotarians. The kids should have been bouncing off the ceiling, but they were relatively well behaved. Out of 129 kids, there were only two who ended up in tears. Adela only lost her cool once, when she was handing out used clothing to some of the kids. When it came to the shoes, pandemonium broke out and we all thought Adela might get swallowed up by the kids. Instead, she started striking whoever was in arm's reach with the shoes and that seemed to bring things under control pretty quickly.

The needies of the needy orphans had a special Christmas dinner last Tuesday, even though it was the end of January. (Pole pole, as they say here, meaning slowly slowly!) The first child to arrive came around 10.30, even though the food wouldn't be served until well after 2 p.m. (That's Eric looking at the camera in the first photo.) He came charging through the blue gates and made a beeline for the HIV/AIDS resource centre, where he waited on the bench just singing and giggling to himself like all 6-year-olds who are left alone with their imagination. No one seems to know much about him. They think he lives with a grandmother but they're not too sure where and he never arrives with any other kids, so they're not entirely sure which direction he even comes from. He behaved a little like a small dog -- he seemed unaware of how little he was and kept taking on the big kids, giving them punches or just annoying them in that small yappy-dog kind of way. But he had dimples, so we all thought he was adorable.

On Friday, both Sue (the CIDA intern) and myself noticed this one child who had raggedy feet. They looked like they'd been chewed by something with jagged teeth and had been left to rot. He said nothing the entire time he was there, didn't seem to know the other kids and it took him about 15 minutes to start actually eating his donut. Adela called him aside at the end and told him to come back on Monday.

"Jiggers!" she pronounced to us in English, as the little boy stood there uncomprehending. An infection caused by a flea laying eggs in his feet. It's endemic in poverty-stricken areas and the biggest preventative is wearing shoes. Adela told us he lives with his grannie somewhere; they've never visited him so she's not entirely sure where. But he was obviously being neglected. Adela figures he's being left to clean his own clothes and take his own baths, and in the way of 8-year-olds, he's doing neither.

This is from a parasitic disease webpage on the treatment for jiggers. Like I said, she asked him to come back on Monday, but he never showed. I wonder if they'll ever see him again. He seemed pretty afraid when he left.

"Treatment consists of the physical removal of the flea by a sharp instrument. The residual cavity should then be surgically cleaned to remove its entire contents. Afterwards, an antibiotic ointment may be applied to prevent secondary infections. Certain chemicals have also proven to be effective, including 4 percent formaldyhyde solution, chlorophenothane (DDT), chloroform, turpentine, and niridazole. These treatments do not physically remove the flea from the skin, however, and therefore don't result in quick relief. They also carry their own risk of morbidity. Physical removal followed by antibiotic ointment and an anti-tetanus prophylaxis to prevent secondary infection (especially that of tetanus) is most effective."

So basically, they were going to take off all his nails -- fingers and toes -- and rub them down with turbo antiseptic wash then dig into them with sharp instruments to dig out the jiggers. They have to get them whole, Adela said, or they simply regrow.

If he doesn't get treatment, they will eventually burst, replicate (each one produces up to 2,000 babies) and eventually cripple him.

Imagine. All because he's eight and he's all alone.

News
So little money . . . so many orphans; TANZANIAGrassroots group must struggle with meagre funds to help AIDS orphans, writes Karen Palmer TANZANIA
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
1099 words
12 February 2006
The Toronto Star
A12

Kilema, TANZANIA -- Poking out of Patrice Mavia's purple plastic sandals were toes as dark and swollen as blood sausages - ragged and infected as though a small animal with jagged teeth had chewed them.

The tips of his fingers seemed to be in a similar state of painful rot.

"Chiggers," declared nurse Adella Kessy after a hasty consultation at the Catholic hospital in the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Left unchecked, chiggers replicate by the thousands, form painful pustules and lesions, then burrow further and further into infected skin until they reach bone.

The parasite can destroy fingers and toes - its preferred harbour - and can leave its host crippled.

The infection comes from walking barefoot on ground infested with sand fleas, drying clothes on the ground or poor hygiene.

Patrice probably doesn't willingly bathe with any regularity, nor is he likely to hand-wash his thin clothes in a stream.

He also doesn't know that he has to destroy bugs and pests with a heavy, charcoal-heated iron after the clothes come out of the stream.

He is, after all, only 8 years old.

But Patrice was orphaned by AIDS a few years ago - he thinks he lost his parents in 2001 and 2003 - and he is the only one around to remind himself to wash behind his ears and scrub between his toes.

He spoke Swahili in whispers when Kessy told him to come back to the hospital with an adult in three days for treatment.

"No one is helping him care for himself," she said with a shake of her head.

That's why, on the first Friday of every month, she and her colleagues at the hospital's HIV/AIDS counselling centre invite local orphans like Patrice to the hospital for "tea."

The program, funded by the Ottawa-based Canadian Africa Community Health Alliance, helps the aid workers identify orphaned children and sort out where they live and who takes care of them.

More importantly, it gives them an opportunity to see the children.

Are they skinny? Scraggly? Sickly?

At the hospital's resource centre, Anna Anselm says there are at least 265 orphans registered with the hospital.

There are probably just as many hidden in the dense banana fields that cover the region's lush peaks and valleys.

"It's going up, it's increasing," says Anselm.

At the most recent tea, 29 children turned up, some arriving as early as 9: 30 a.m.

Almost four hours later, two industrial-size buckets, a red one and a green one, emerged from the kitchen.

One contained fried balls of dough, the other dark, steaming tea. The children ate and drank in groups of 20, since there were only so many mugs to go around.

It took Kessy three solid hours to register the children, collecting their names, ages, schools and the names of their guardians.

Few remember exactly when they lost their mothers or fathers. Some have lost only one parent, but others were about to be left completely on their own.

Fifteen-year-old Emmanuel Deo's mother had been in the hospital for three weeks and Kessy expected the boy, his two brothers and a sister would be orphaned by the next month's tea.

The aid workers also arrange home visits, consulting community leaders to help them track down the children in the labyrinth of winding red dirt paths in a dense forest of banana trees.

"You see their food supplies and their caretakers and how they are managing," says Anselm.

But the visits are made only when there's something to give: a kilo of dry beans, three or four cups of coarse sugar, a bar of soap or a bottle of oil.

When the women visited 6-year-old Gifty Mosha at the mud-and-stick shack she shares with her grandmother, an uncle, a calf and three goats, she was barefoot wearing a cotton dress from the hospital's stash of second-hand donations.

There was not a scrap of food, other than some green bananas hanging in the surrounding trees.

Meeting her visitors on the rocky red path, the child with curly eyelashes and a nearly bald head offered her tiny hand first to Anselm, then to Kessy, then back again, as the women brought meagre supplies.

Her grandmother told the women that Gifty, who contracted HIV at birth, is coughing at night and is riddled with skin infections. Her mother died three years ago; within a week, AIDS took Gifty's father, too.

"They're missing out," says Anselm. "They're missing out psychologically, they're missing out emotionally and they're missing out physically."

"Most are in poor, poor, poor environments. They're in poor houses, poor environments and have poor food. They can't afford everything that's needed for the essentials of life. They're so limited."

Most of the children the hospital attempts to serve live with a grandparent or other elderly relative.

"These old people are beyond the age of caring for these little ones," says Anselm. "They'll be losing those old people soon, too, becoming orphans for a second time."

The local community can hardly afford to feed the orphaned children and the task falls not to big-name charities or United Nations' agencies like UNICEF or the World Food Program.

Rather, the job falls to small, grassroots groups that receive their funding in dribs and drabs from international donors.

It costs $1 to feed one orphan a balanced meal of rice, meat and cabbage - but the Canadian Africa Community Health Alliance has only enough funds to feed each child one such meal per year.

Back at the hospital, the appointed day for Patrice's chigger extraction has come and gone, but the boy has not turned up.

The treatment that awaits him sounds excruciating: first, all his fingernails and toenails would be removed and then his fingers and toes scrubbed with antiseptic bleach.

A nurse would have to dig into the fleabites and gingerly remove the parasitic larvae with a sharp instrument. The larvae must be removed with precision - even part of one left behind would simply regrow.

No one seems sure Patrice will be seen at the hospital again.

Lies, Lies, Lies

2006-01-28T02:51:00.000-08:00

So I lied about putting up the paragliding pictures. I have been to three different internet cafes now and chewed out three different internet cafe attendants and it still doesn't seem to work. It's hot. I'm hungry. I've gotta pee. I've spent a couple bucks now to have my time wasted and my hair torn out. Sometimes I really hate this place.

In Gil Courtemanche’s book, “A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali,” his main character implies that the Rwandan people are disingenuous, that they lie so beautifully and so often and so simply, the words dripping out of their mouths just as the listener wants to hear them. I think Gen. Romeo Dallaire talks about the same thing, about how loyalty was not a quality he would ascribe to the Rwandans he worked with during the genocide.

This week at the tribunal, the prosecution introduced a young woman who was the first “survivor” I have heard testify. She was giving her testimony from behind a blue curtain, but from what I could piece together from her answers to the prosecutor’s questions, she is a 29 year old mother of at least one small child, a Tutsi who was a 16-year-old school girl when the president’s place crashed and triggered the genocide. She hid in the bush to escape the Interahamwe with an aunt and her cousin, and her cousin was killed. She was beaten up at at least two roadblocks and she was stripped by Interahamwe who stole her fabrics and her skirt. She watched men and small boys be massacred at a commune office, was hit with a machete at another roadblock, saw a military man throw a grenade into a crowd of refugees at a church. She was walking with a huge group of refugees when two vehicles full of soldiers and gendarmes pulled up and started shooting and then was raped twice at a huge “internally displaced persons” camp at some place called TrafiPol.

We all went on break feeling absolutely wretched for this poor girl. Imagine three solid months of fending for your life in the bush, being shot at and beaten and raped. There seemed to be no safe place in the entire country for a Tutsi to go.

But then the defense began to question her. She was born in 1976, so she was 18, not 16, a fact that can be easily forgiven in a culture where birthdays are unimportant. But she couldn’t read – not French, not Kinyarwanda – making her story about being a school child somewhat unbelievable. The beatings at each of the roadblocks consisted of being hit on the back with a club and the strike from a machete was on the buttocks, with the handle, not the blade. In the course of questioning, she told the court her aunt was beheaded and one of her little girls was also decapitated and the other was hit in the leg with a spear. But then the story changed, so that the aunt was simply cut on the neck with a machete – was still alive, in fact – and the little girl was nicked in the heel with a spear. It was never clear whether the second girl actually existed. The defense counsel asked her if she showed up at the commune office naked, having had her skirts stolen by the Interahamwe. Well, no. She was wearing several skirts and they simply took the one they felt was most valuable. Was that the one on top? No, it was on the bottom, like a petticoat. So they stripped you and took the skirt on the bottom, closest to your skin? No. No, it was in the middle.

The vehicles with the soldiers in them, what did they look like? I don’t remember. (At least 10 minutes of questioning on this, even the judges were trying to get a straight answer.) She had said that one vehicle had soldiers, the other had gendarmes, but when asked which one she was closer to – the soldiers or the gendarmes – she said she was exactly in the middle. Then the soldiers and gendarmes were mixed in the vehicles. And even though she was traveling with at least two thousand refugees – according to her estimate, and to be fair, she can’t read so I’m not sure she would be able to visualize two thousand people – she saw all of this from the middle of the pack, yet still only about 50 metres away from both vehicles.

The most damning bit of evidence she gave was in response to the defense asking her to describe who was an Interahamwe. (The Interahamwe, by the by, were the Hutu militias who manned the roadblocks and herded people into churches. They were largely street boys and other thugs who grabbed whatever weapons they could and took full advantage of the chaos of war to indulge in a vendetta against Tutsis and the moderate Hutus who refused to fight alongside them.) Anyway, the girl responded that all Hutus were Interahamwe. “So let me ask you this,” the counsel responded. “What about a three year old Hutu child. Is he an Interahamwe too? Are you born an Interahamwe?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Of course he is Interahamwe. His father was Interahamwe and was hunting Tutsis and he was probably following his father, so yes. He is an Interahamwe.”

So much for this tribunal spreading tolerance and understanding.

I have done interviews with both sides now – the defense and the prosecution – and they both lament this tendency for stories to shift and change, for details to emerge and disappear. The prosecution explained that from their perspective, these kinds of impartial eye-witnesses are the perfect kind of witnesses, since they don’t have blood on their hands. They rely also on “insiders,” who give testimony against their former colleagues in exchange for a cushier sentence in a European court and assistance for their families. Their third option is to put the young boys who did the killing and raping on the stand, to show that they received direct orders from the men on trial for genocide. But Rwanda has the death penalty and for the most part, the defense paints these witnesses as scared boys who will say anything to save their skin.

Part of these ever mutating stories is culture, but some of it is time. Almost 14 years have elapsed, afterall, and with so much happening, there is a tendency to get dates and events confused.

But it leaves a question in the viewer’s mind. An Irish woman and a Brazilian woman were in court yesterday and when we talked on the break, they were both saying how horrible the evidence was. But when we broke for lunch, their minds were changed completely. “At one point I wanted to tell her to shut up, that she really wasn’t doing much to help herself,” the Irish woman said.

A few days ago, one of the Quebecois counselors lost his cool with a witness who was a former soldier, a marksman to be precise, assigned to protect a top-ranking military man. He asked if he was briefed before he took the assignment. “No,” he answered, and he stuck to it. I think the defense was trying to show that the RPF were far more of a threat than most people realized, that that’s why this man needed protection. Or that this man was actually a spy. Who knows? He couldn’t ask the question. You could see him getting increasingly frustrated by what he saw as an obvious lie. It led to the defense counsel saying to him: “Do you think I’m an imbecile? Do you think this whole court is full of imbeciles?”

My favourite quote from the testimony so far belongs to a woman who is a top-ranking police officer who was asked about why she was transferred before the war from active duty to an administrative job. Because she had given more than 10 years of exemplary service, she responded. The defense pointed out that military people might characterized the move as a demotion. She disagreed, said she saw it as a promotion and never asked anyone anything about it. Then the defense asked if her transfer had anything to do with allegations that she was a spy working for the Tutsi-led RPF.

“Oh,” came the translation. “What the counsel has said has jolted my mind.” And then she proceeded to talk about how, yes, she had been found in possession of some very sensitive documents, but it was all a mistake and she was never reprimanded. And besides, look at her how she had climbed the ranks since then. She was now a top-ranking police officer. Under the RPF government.

FF Features
It's a lying shame War criminals are being offered cash, plastic surgery and parole to appear as prosecution witnesses at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, writes Karen Palmer
1250 words
22 March 2006
South China Morning Post
14
English
(c) 2006 South China Morning Post Publishers Limited, Hong Kong. All rights reserved.
Clandestine interrogations between investigators and an alleged war criminal come to an abrupt end when his naked body is pulled from a Belgian canal, his hands so mangled that they are initially reported as missing. Then a letter surfaces - seemingly from beyond the grave - suggesting the very people charged with finding the truth behind the massacres in Rwanda may be on a one-sided witch-hunt, writing a script dictated by western powers and pressuring witnesses to follow it.

It sounds like a racy publisher's blurb on the back of the latest paperback thriller, but the courtroom drama is playing out for real in Arusha, Tanzania, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where defence lawyers are crying foul over tales of witnesses paid to testify, plastic surgery for convicted war criminals and testimony created by survivor groups.

"The sad fact is that a lot of people have been convicted on very questionable evidence," said Canadian lawyer Peter Zaduk. Both sides at the tribunal seem to repeatedly fall victim to lying witnesses, said Peter Robinson, a defence lawyer from California.

"Here, it's just rampant," he said.

"I don't know exactly why. Maybe it's a character thing, it may be the culture of Rwanda, maybe the witnesses need to incriminate authorities of the previous regime."

Rwanda's Hutu majority was in power in 1994 when the president's plane was shot out of the sky, triggering a three-month killing spree. International journalists reported on a Hutu campaign of hate, one that included lists of every Tutsi in the country, who were labelled "cockroaches" in radio broadcasts and marked for extermination.

An ex-Tutsi rebel witness known as "BBB" signed an affidavit saying he attended at least three meetings orchestrated by a Rwanda-based survivor's group, Ibuka, where witnesses plotted false testimony.

Another says he listened from his living room while an Ibuka representative dictated the evidence his wife was to give. In some cases, the prosecution paid witnesses, ostensibly for travel-related expenses.

"Witness G", a former leader of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias blamed for carrying out the killings, admitted in court on October 24, 2005, that he received US$30,000 in cash from the prosecution, explaining it was a reward from the prosecution for helping build cases against Hutus.

Another Interahamwe leader, known as "Witness T", admitted he received US$16,000 in cash.

"These payments were laundered through the United States government and were subject to approval and review by lawyer Neil Karbank of Aspen, Colorado," states a motion filed by Mr Robinson asking the judges to order prosecutors to disclose payments they made to witnesses. The motion was rejected in August, when three judges decided "an oral hearing to investigate these allegations would be no more than a fishing expedition".

Stephen Rapp, a state prosecutor from Illinois who joined the tribunal in 2001 as its chief of prosecutions, admits prosecutors have a very difficult job unravelling the web of political influence in a demure culture with deep ethnic roots and tensions, where lying is not only tolerated but sometimes encouraged.

In Rwanda, as in most of Africa, time is not important, language is imprecise and familial relationships are confusing, making court testimony difficult.

"If you read the accounts of these individuals, it's not the kind of thing that any of us would know enough about to put words in people's mouths, about what really occurred, who was there and how this worked. This is a really Byzantine political situation," he said.

To understand it, prosecutors rely on "insiders". In exchange for their testimony, prosecutors have promised to provide at least five "insiders" - who each admit to war crimes, committing murders or ordering executions - with a new identity as well as at least two years of financial support for the war criminal and their families once they've been relocated somewhere in Europe.

All will serve their sentences in a European prison and enjoy European guidelines on parole. Some have even been promised plastic surgery once they've finished serving their sentence.

Mr Rapp admits Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, the former Rwandan agricultural minister and one-time minister for national parks and tourism, would have received a similar deal if he'd signed a statement and agreed to testify against his former colleagues.

Instead, on November 21, he disappeared. A month later, his badly decomposed body was pulled from a Belgian canal. Two weeks before he went missing, Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote a letter to the prosecutors at the international court. In it, he spoke of threats levelled at him by two Canadian investigators working for the court, of pressure to provide false testimony that would "demolish" key members of the Hutu government believed to be the masterminds behind a plan to wipe out the country's Tutsi minority.

"I do not wish to lie to please the investigators," Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote. "I am prepared to assume all of the consequences set forth in detail by the investigators [Rejean] Tremblay and [Andre] Delvaux: I will be lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the street and the dogs will piss on me [the terms used by the investigators]." Mr Rapp dismissed the letter as a fake and said investigators deny making any threats.

Uwilingiyimana was secretly indicted last summer for his role in helping prepare for the genocide, in which peasants took up hoes and machetes to kill more than 800,000 people in 100 days.

For nearly three months, Uwilingiyimana staved off arrest by travelling each weekday from his home in Brussels to Lille, in France, under the guise of attending a university course. In fact, he was being interrogated by tribunal investigators and was on the verge of landing a sweetheart deal in return for signing a 92-page question-and-answer-style statement that would be the basis for his insider testimony against key purported war criminals.

That is motive enough for desperate defendants to make him disappear, prosecutors say. But more than one defence lawyer claims Uwilingiyimana was going to testify on behalf of their clients.

Montreal lawyer John Philpot expected he would take the stand and help exonerate his client. Investigators working with Mr Robinson met with Uwilingiyimana on November 26, 2002, and December 4, 2003, and expected him to testify in Arusha refuting evidence given by one of the tribunal's "insiders".

"His death actually does more harm to us than the prosecution," Mr Robinson said. Mr Rapp is adamant his investigators are neither building false cases, nor pressuring witnesses to lie.

"You don't gain anything if the insider sits there and tells you a whole pack of lies about what was going on. It's gotta be stuff that's consistent with the human rights reports that were happening at the time, with the people on the inside and the outside that you've had information from," Mr Rapp said.

He also dismisses the fabrication allegations as a diversionary tactic by desperate defence lawyers.

"Those aren't legal arguments. They don't excuse murder, they don't excuse mass murder," Mr Rapp said. "It doesn't win the case. It may make some accused persons feel better to have that sort of argument, but it doesn't make the case."

***

JUSTICE IN JEOPARDY; Clandestine interrogations between investigators and an alleged war criminal come to an abrupt end when his naked corpse is pulled from a Belgian canal, its hands so mangled that they were first reported as missing. Then, a letter surfaces, seemingly coming from beyond the grave, suggesting the very people entrusted with finding the truth behind the brutal massacres in a tiny East African nation could be on a witch hunt, writing a script dictated by governments in the West and pressuring witnesses to follow it.
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
2087 words
26 March 2006
The Toronto Star
ONT
A10
English
Copyright (c) 2006 The Toronto Star
The accusations read like a racy blurb on the back of a paperback thriller, but the twisting plot actually comes from a handful of Canadian lawyers defending politicians and businessmen blamed for one of Africa's darkest moments.

In real life, the courtroom drama goes something like this:

Last Nov. 5, Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, Rwanda's former agriculture minister and one-time minister for national parks and tourism, allegedly wrote a letter to the ICTR - the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is prosecuting alleged war criminals in the 1994 genocide.

The letter spoke of threats levelled at Uwilingiyimana by Rejean Tremblay and Andre Delvaux, two Canadian investigators working for the tribunal, of pressure to provide false testimony that would "demolish" key members of the Akazu, the kitchen cabinet of the Rwandan Hutu government that allegedly masterminded a plan to wipe out the country's Tutsi minority in the spring of 1994.

"I do not wish to lie to please the investigators," Uwilingiyimana allegedly wrote.

"I am prepared to assume all of the consequences set forth in detail by the investigators Tremblay and Delvaux: I will be lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the street and the dogs will piss on me (the terms used by the investigators)."

The last words, including the brackets, are the letter writer's, emphasizing that the words used in threats were not of his choosing.

Uwilingiyimana was secretly indicted last summer for ordering executions at roadblocks, for allowing the training of Hutu militias in Rwanda's dense forests and for his role in helping prepare for the genocide, which saw peasants take up hoes and machetes to kill more than 800,000 people in the span of 100 days.

For nearly three months, Uwilingiyimana staved off arrest by co-operating with court investigators.

Each weekday, under the guise of attending a university course, he travelled from his home in Brussels to Lille, France, to be interrogated by court investigators.

Uwilingiyimana was on the verge of landing a sweetheart deal in return for signing a 92-page question-and-answer style statement that would be the basis for his testimony against key war-crimes suspects. Then, on Nov. 21, he disappeared.

Almost a month later, his badly decomposed body was pulled from the Brussels-Charleroi canal.

The United Nations-backed court in Tanzania, already widely dismissed as poorly designed, ponderously slow and lacking in authority, released a statement saying it would review security measures provided for tribunal witnesses to ensure they were adequate.

Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow said Uwilingiyimana had "voluntarily agreed to co-operate in the search for truth and justice."

The prosecutions office rejects Uwilingiyimana's allegations against its investigators and suggests the letter is a fake, written by people who feared the Rwandan was about to testify against them.

But defence lawyers - including some prominent Canadians - are convinced the mysterious death lends credibility to what they've been alleging for years: that tribunal staff is making up evidence and strong-arming witnesses into supporting it.

"The sad fact is that a lot of people have been convicted on very questionable evidence," says Toronto lawyer Peter Zaduk, best known for his successful defence of O'Neil Grant in the 1999 Just Desserts murder case.

Rwanda's Hutu majority was in power back on April 6, 1994, when President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane exploded while landing at Kigali airport, triggering a killing spree that lasted three months.

International journalists reported on a Hutu campaign of hate, one that included lists of all the country's Tutsis, who were labelled "cockroaches" in radio broadcasts and marked for extermination.

Video footage documented the aftermath of bloody attacks carried out by Rwandan peasants wielding machetes and farm implements.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led rebel group that invaded from Uganda, emerged the winner of what is now seen as a vicious civil war.

The group's founder, Paul Kagame, took over the presidency and still leads the country today.

As Rwanda's prisons fill up with farmers, clergymen and ordinary folk convicted in Rwandan courts of lesser offences than genocide or crimes against humanity, the UN tribunal in Arusha, near Tanzania's border with Kenya, has completed only 26 cases. All but three ended in convictions.

Most of the convicted genocidaires will remain in prison in Mali, a French-speaking desert country in West Africa, until they die. Another 26 cases are currently before the ICTR court, 19 indictees still at large and at least 20 detainees are waiting for their trials to begin. The tribunal's mandate is set to run out in 2008.

Stephen Rapp, a state prosecutor from Illinois who joined the tribunal in 2001 as chief of prosecutions, admits prosecutors have a difficult job unravelling the web of political influence in a closed culture with deep ethnic tensions, where heavy-handed political regimes have made lying not only tolerable but sometimes encouraged.

In Rwanda, as in most of Africa, time is not important, language is imprecise and familial relationships are confusing.

Defending his staff, Rapp says: "If you read the accounts of these individuals, it's not the kind of thing that any of us would know enough about to put words in people's mouths, about what really occurred, who was there and how this worked. This is a really Byzantine political situation."

Since opening its first trial in 1997, the tribunal has issued nearly 90 indictments. Those charged are virtually all Hutus, leading many to complain the tribunal is nothing more than a theatre of victor's justice.

"The civilian deaths on both sides were roughly equal and substantially less than some of these wild estimates that are out there," says Toronto lawyer Zaduk, adding that human rights groups have blamed the Tutsi-led RPF rebels for 200,000 civilian deaths during raids in neighbouring, resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo.

Another Toronto defence lawyer, Christopher Black, says the RPF has used the tribunal to finish the annihilation of the Hutu political elite, when it should shoulder the blame for the country's mass killings.

In fact, a high-ranking Tutsi military police officer testifying against Black's client, the former chief of staff for the Rwandan military police, told the court that Tutsi rebels had infiltrated virtually every segment of Rwanda's security forces blamed for the killings.

When she deserted her military unit to join the rebels, the Tutsi officer was initially confused because some were dressed like the unit of the Rwandan government forces she had just left, others were wearing gendarme uniforms and some had berets that suggested they were part of an elite fighting force.

"They were wearing military uniforms when they came toward me," she told the court. "At first, I did not know they were RPF."

While the genocide has always been portrayed as the majority Hutu eradicating the minority Tutsi, an ongoing, controversial University of Maryland study, "GenoDynamics: Understanding Genocide through Time and Space," notes that since 500,000 Tutsis were likely killed during the genocide, that means at least 300,000 also must have been slaughtered.

Chief prosecutor Rapp says the numbers are not the question. What concerns the tribunal are the men and women responsible for three things: the alleged hit lists, the hate propaganda and the training of Interahamwe Hutu militias to ensure the efficient murder of up to 8,000 Tutsis and "Hutu moderates" a day.

"There's no question that a break was crossed and it was decided that the Tutsis were the enemy and then major efforts were then made to create a killing force who would win a total war if that became necessary," says Rapp.

"Not that that was always Plan A," he allows. "But it was Plan C and it became Plan B and eventually became Plan A - and there were a number of people working to make it Plan A.

"It needed a moment when it would be kicked in - and that was going to occur as sure as God made green apples because the peace process was aborted."

(The downing of the president's plane ended UN-mediated talks between the Rwandan government and the RPF, and is widely seen as triggering the genocide.

A French inquiry, partially leaked to Le Monde newspaper but never officially released, found the RPF responsible for shooting down Habyarimana's plane. But his death is outside the tribunal's scope.)

Figuring out who devised and implemented the genocidal plan is where "insiders" like the late Juvenal Uwilingiyimana come in.

In exchange for their testimony, prosecutors have promised to provide a new identity to at least five insiders - each of whom admits to committing murders or ordering executions. All will serve their sentences in Europe and enjoy European guidelines on parole.

Their families will be eligible for at least two years' support once they've been relocated in Europe and some of the men have even been promised plastic surgery once they've finished their sentences.

Rapp admits Uwilingiyimana would have received a similar deal if he'd signed a statement and agreed to testify against his former colleagues.

That is motive enough for desperate defendants to make him disappear, prosecutors say.

But more than one defence lawyer claims Uwilingiyimana was going to testify on behalf of defendants.

Peter Robinson, a defence lawyer from California, says investigators met with Uwilingiyimana on Nov. 26, 2002, and Dec. 4, 2003, and expected him to testify in Arusha refuting evidence given by one of the tribunal's "insiders."

"His death actually does more harm to us than the prosecution," Robinson says.

Montreal lawyer John Philpot, who expected Uwilingiyimana would take the stand and help exonerate his client, says the former minister became an embarrassment to prosecutors when he refused to lie.

"This process is very damaging if he came and testified here about how they are trying to string up (defendants)," Philpot says.

Rapp, however, insists his investigators are not building false cases or pressuring witnesses to lie.

"You don't gain anything if the insider sits there and tells you a whole pack of lies about what was going on," he says.

"It's got to be stuff that's consistent with the human rights reports that were happening at the time, with the people on the inside and the outside that you've had information from."

Toronto defence lawyer Black has called for the tribunal to be suspended pending an investigation into the tactics Uwilingiyimana alleges were used by the prosecutor's office.

"How can this tribunal continue to operate when this may be true, when these allegations are happening all the time," he asks.

But the chief prosecutor dismisses the fabrication allegations as a diversionary tactic by desperate defence lawyers.

"Those aren't legal arguments," says Rapp. "They don't excuse murder: they don't excuse mass murder.

"It doesn't win the case. It may make some accused persons feel better to have that sort of argument, but it doesn't make the case."

Karen Palmer is the Star's freelance writer in Africa.

Ah-ha...

2006-01-24T23:11:00.000-08:00

From my little bro, who is concerned that I am uncool, the definition of Crunk:

"The creation of beats and hooks so powerful that the audience is instinctively moved to sway, dance, and lose themselves in the moment, gave birth to crunk music. Crunk identifies music so powerful a word hadn't been produced for such a reaction until the imprint of crunk on the American consciousness."

Yah. Um-hmm. A word did not exist to describe it. So they came up with crunk.

And now, for a history lesson:
Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz often claim to be the Kings of Crunk, while Lil Scrappy is referred to as the Prince of Crunk. Shaina is sometimes known as the Queen of Crunk, and Ciara (or Sierra as I would spell it) is often referred to as the Princess of Crunk. While these artists have embodied the term in the hip hop industry, the term was more widely exposed when Lil Jon named his albums Kings of Krunk and Crunk Juice. Serious, the Founder of Crunk Incorporated is known as the Lord of Crunk. Serious Lord discovered both Lil Scrappy and Crime Mob.

Serious Lord. Like Bob Marley, but a different kind of Lord and Saviour.

To "get crunk" means to have an extremely good time, usually at a party.
While the word "crunk" is presumed to be a blend of the words "crazy drunk," being crunk does not necessarily include being intoxicated, but there is a good chance that if one is crunk, he or she is, indeed, intoxicated as well. Crunk artist Will to the E describes getting crunk as "bein' up in the club, maybe havin' a few girls up on you, and feelin' in the zone."

Yep. That's pretty much me here in Africa. Crunked. K-to-the-P

Honouring the dead

2006-01-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

“I saw backless pews, just like those in Kibuye church, but these were draped with the mummified and decomposing remains of a lot of people, their clothes both sticking to them and falling off, and everything sort of melting down onto the floor between the benches. It was difficult to see where the bodies ended and the floor began. It was difficult to see the floor at all.” --Clea Koff

In her book, “The Bone Woman,” forensic anthropologist Clea Koff pairs a big, soft heart with a smart, scientific brain to write about her stints in Rwanda digging up mass graves and analyzing the remains. The way she writes with clarity and simplicity is, in a way, more haunting than some of the flowery prose that the genocide evokes – and through her recounting of the way the hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were found and the injuries their skeletons retained, she lets the victims of the country’s 1994 killing spree speak for themselves.

She writes about finding a baby with a plastic pacifier still clamped in its skeletonized jaw; a woman with pink beads looped around her neck; the gouges at the back of hundreds of distal tibias, a sure sign that someone had nicked the Achilles tendon in an attempt to immobilize their victim; the man obviously stomped to death, with a fractured mandible, fractured clavicle, fractured sternum, two fractured ribs, both humerii fractured and his right foot shattered; the rows and rows of skulls lined up in the analysis tent, all with identical smash marks, as though they had been killed on an assembly line.

These images float up as I sit in the back row of the public gallery at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, where lawyers, prosecutors and judges have toiled since 1997, supposedly in an effort to shine a light on the truth of what happened in those horrible 100 days of 1994.

When I arrived here, I thought even the building itself would be pregnant with meaning, that everyone I encountered would walk with a certain stoop under the weight of working for so long on such a difficult subject. I fully expected the hallways and chambers to be hushed, reverent, hallowed, filled with a sense of history for the job that is being done here.

But it is not like that at all.

The chambers are so modern and brightly lit, filled with whites, blacks, Indians, Hispanics, Chinese and everything in between that it’s almost possible to forget you are in Africa. (Of course, just to bring you back to the continent and its quirks, the defense lawyer stood up yesterday to announce he had just lost his senior sister while she was undergoing heart surgery in “Tuck-son, Arizona” and he would have to leave the court for several days while he went to retrieve the body. “I am a chief, she is a princess and she cannot be buried anywhere but Cameroon. That is just how things are.”)

The ITCR building is loaded with security, translators, interpreters, clerks and lawyers – half of the tribunal’s budget goes to safety and administration. It sits at the foot of Mt. Meru, a lush green bump of a mountain, perennially shrouded in wispy clouds, which is appropriate considering Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills. But the courtrooms have no windows; you can’t even see it.

The tribunal is an odd tourist magnet, drawing visitors killing time until they leave on safari to see the rhinos in Ngorongoro or the cheetahs of the Serengeti. They come for the same reason I did, outwardly drawn to history, but secretly hoping to hear the gory details, to feel placed among the panic and chaos, to re-live those terrifying moments as the survivors lived them, to hear something, anything, that makes sense of the unimaginable.

But these are not those kinds of trials. These are not the men who slashed people to death with machetes. (I passed a man using a panga, as they’re called, to chop down a tree this morning on my way to the tribunal and could only think about the thud it was making compared to the sound it would have made pounding into human skin, fat, muscle and bone.)

They say that between 800,000 and a million people were killed in the space of three months in those gruesome days, often with tools no more sophisticated than a machete, a club or a sharpened hoe. That’s about 8,000 people a day and those numbers alone are enough to suspect someone somewhere formulated and implemented a plan to keep up a pace of killing that could only be described as a frenzy.

These are the men who are thought to be the genocide’s masterminds. In the proceedings I am watching, known colloquially as “Military II,” two of the defendants were the chief of staff of the Rwandan army and the chief of staff of the military police. It took me at least two days before I realized the defendants were in the room; they come to court so smartly dressed and look so innocuous I mistook them for lawyers. (Talking to their lawyers has made them oddly human – one of them lost his 15-year-old son to leukemia last year and was denied bail to attend either his final days or his burial. He has been detained in Arusha since the boy was 10. I watch him often during the trial and he looks my way frequently, as there is little else to look at. One of the witnesses testifying for the prosecution described him as “not thin, neither dark nor light, but a kind man who did not take things out on his subordinates and earned the respect he received.”)

The police under this man’s command are thought to have encouraged scared citizens to seek refuge in the churches, which they then used as a convenient killing chamber, hacking and slashing until all was quiet. Then, just to be certain they had thoroughly accomplished their goal, they’d push a few bricks out of the structure, toss in some tear gas, wait for the tell tale coughing and then go straight to the sound and kill the survivor.

This man and his co-accused are not the men who did the actual murder, those men are being tried in Rwandan courts and housed in Rwandan jails. These men are accused of writing the script, then pumping up the actors. They are suspected of creating lists of enemies who needed to be killed, of creating a campaign of hate where the enemy was akin to a cockroach awaiting extermination. They are accused of lighting the match, then fiddling while Rome burned.

The testimony – especially about something so horrifying – is neither fast-paced nor gripping like the courtroom dramas shown on TV. Instead, it’s like hearing the cryptic crossword read aloud, a jumble of acronyms and multi-syllabic last names, poetic-sounding place names. (When not called “Military II,” this trial is known as Ndindiliyimana et al, which is pronounced exactly as it’s spelled: n-di-n-did-ee-imana.) Some of the witnesses cannot be identified, apparently for their own protection. (At least two people connected to the tribunal have been killed since it began.) If the public is allowed into the proceedings at all, then the witnesses sit behind a blue curtain, their disembodied voice coming out through the headsets, in snippets, between translations. There are moments when someone is being talked about who cannot be mentioned for some reason that is never explained, so the courtroom sounds like a Harry Potter book, where everyone refers to the “man who cannot be named” as though he were Lord Voldemort. There are very few witnesses that I would consider survivors. In seven days of visiting the tribunal, I have seen a Spanish priest who was best buddies with a mayor now accused of using the church as a death chamber, a British physiotherapist who was evacuated before things escalated, a high-ranking police officer who the defense made sound like a spy and a soldier who apparently survived the genocide without any blood on his hands – a virtual impossibility.

The testimony is never linear and for the most part, the tourists leave completely confused, not entirely sure what they just saw, although all are certain that in the end, the men will be convicted. They remember well the pictures of 1994, the bodies stacked up like cords of firewood, the streams of refugees carrying nothing more than a fabric-wrapped bowl on their heads as they walked, forever damaged, to the refugee camps of the Congo (Zaire), where thousands more died in a devastating cholera outbreak.

The questioning is like listening to someone read aloud a manufacturers warrantee; it is so sanitized with legalese, so seemingly inconsequential. It isn’t about psychology or hatred, sinister plots or murder most foul; it’s about who was where when and what orders were given to do what and whether someone saw someone do something or just heard about it.

An all-too-typical exchange: “Do you remember telling the investigators at your meeting on 27 May 1995 that after you heard the radio announcement that the president’s plane had been shot down at 10 p.m. you went to Kigali camp on foot?” A pause, while the question, spoken in French, is simultaneously translated into Kinyarwanda and English. “Well, it has been 10 years and I am not a computer…”

Instead of reverence, there is open animosity between the prosecution and defense lawyers, who snipe at each other, answering questions posed to witnesses as though that were standard procedure or giving a disdainful “Oh, sit down!” when an objection is made. There is condescension from defense lawyers who have come to the conclusion that their clients are getting a raw deal. A typical exchange:

Lawyer: “She can’t say that! She can’t say what she heard. She can only say what she saw. She’s saying, ‘I heard they got Kalishnikovs, they got guns.’ That’s hearsay and I want it struck.”

Judge: “It will be evaluated within the scope of its context. You have been hearing that throughout the trial. Are you going to do this every time?”

Lawyer: “Yes, because that’s not justice.”

Judge: “Well, I’ll continue to rule the way I have.”

Lawyer: “And I’ll continue to object; I don’t care.”

Judge: “I don’t care either.”

Lawyer: “I know you don’t.”

In seven days, I have met only one Rwandan, an investigator working with one of the defense lawyers, who cannot sit in the chamber for fear he will recognize and endanger a witness. Instead, he sits in the public gallery, the only man who has his headset on ‘0’ since he understands all three languages and has no need for translators.

News
Accused boycott Rwanda tribunal; Slam prosecution's 'mafia-style' methods Toronto lawyer seeks suspension of trial
Karen Palmer
Special to the Star
459 words
24 January 2006
The Toronto Star
A18

Arusha, Tanzania Prisoners charged with planning the Rwandan genocide boycotted trials at an international tribunal yesterday as a protest against what they called "mafia-style" methods used by prosecution investigators.

Defence lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda claim investigators collecting evidence against their clients are coercing witnesses into providing false testimony or threatening them with indictments if they don't co-operate.

"We renew our oft-repeated request to assure some transparency filters into these interrogations ... so that the habit of fabricating evidence and influencing witnesses will forever disappear," said a statement signed by the detainees.

"We are requesting that these trials be suspended pending an investigation into what's going on," said Christopher Black, a Toronto lawyer defending a general who was chief-of-staff for Rwanda's military police at the time of the massacres.

The allegations come in the wake of the disappearance of Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, a former Rwandan minister whose body turned up in a Belgian canal before Christmas.

Although an indictment was issued against Uwilingiyimana in the summer, he had apparently been co-operating with tribunal investigators, crossing from Belgium into France each day for almost two weeks to meet with investigators until late November, when negotiations over his testimony broke down.

Uwilingiyimana was believed to be a member of the ex-Rwandan president's inner circle. He disappeared on Nov. 21. On Dec. 17, his naked body, its hands missing, was pulled from the Charlebois canal in Brussels.

A letter written by Uwilingiyimana before he died and released by his wife turned up on the Internet a few days later, claiming investigators - including two Canadians - had told him that if he did not provide testimony against "certain persons," he would be "lynched, crushed, my body will be trampled on in the streets and dogs will piss on me."

The letter has not been authenticated.

The prosecution, meanwhile, claims that Uwilingiyimana wrote a letter stating he was fearful of other Rwandans living abroad.

"How can you ask for these proceedings to be suspended on conjecture?" asked Cire Ba, prosecutor for a group of four high-ranking military men. "We should see who has benefited from this crime. We would not murder our own witness. Up to now it is our witnesses who are being killed, our witnesses being pulled out of canals," he said.

In 1994, between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans died during a three-month killing spree. At least 50 former army officials and community leaders have been indicted for war crimes; the Rwandan government claims there are hundreds more living in exile.

Random thoughts...

2006-01-20T06:39:00.000-08:00

My pen drive has literally changed my life. Why didn’t I twig to this little do-hickey before? No more scuttling home with my laptop clutched under my arm, giving the hairy eyeball to anyone my paranoid brain suspects as a thief. Really, everyone should have one of these.

***

I bought a book in Zanzibar, but have read it roughly 23 times now, so I’ve begun reading the guidebooks cover to cover. According to the alarmist folks at Lonely Planet, Internet costs between $8 and $13 US an hour in Malawi. Please tell me this is a typo. (I suppose it goes without saying: you’ll not be hearing from me when I’m in Malawi.)

***

I admit I’ve never really been plugged in; I say things like plugged in, for example. There are reams of movies I’ve never seen, bands I’ve never heard of, whole genres and movements of literature and pop culture that I’ve yet to experience.

Africa is only furthering my cultural retardation.

On Saturday I popped some new batteries into my wee shortwave and found an English-language radio station that played several hours of reggae (which I hate, due to its affiliation with the Rastafarian movement and my rather pathological hatred of virtually every Rasta I’ve met) but it was mitigated by the news every hour on the hour. (Ah, the Beeb. How I miss the trumpets blasting at the beginning of “Focus on Africa.”)

Even though it’s mid-January, the station aired a pre-Christmas American Top 40 countdown on the top 100 songs, hosted by Ryan Seacrest, who was that boy with the bad highlights from American Idol last time I checked. Did Dick Clarke die?

Anyway, Ryan had the lowdown on the “hook up” between someone named Bowwow and Sierra and the dirt on whether Ryan broke up with Ashlee or whether she dumped him. Who are these people and why don’t they have last names, or even proper first names? At one point he introduced a song by some woman who is a pioneer in the “Crunk and B” movement, a woman who has a much-anticipated second album coming out. At the risk of sounding like my mother, what is Crunk?

Approximately 78 of the top 100 American songs (two belonged to Avril Lavigne, so maybe I should say North American) of last year were completely new to me, and totally annoying. What has happened to the music industry that 50 Cent is considered good? The sad thing about it, to me, is that this continent is being inundated with American poppy, rappy, crunky crap. The kids dress like Eminem, in baggy jeans, twisted baseball caps, oversized T-shirts. Some wear band-aids like Nelly. All the 50 Cent styles that don’t sell across the pond end up in market stalls here, so every fifth kid has 50 Cent’s ugly, bullet-riddled mug on their T-shirts. And the radio stations fill up hours with bad music, when their own musicians are producing far superior sounds and starving while they do it.

After Emily left to go back to Ghana, I did a story on a music school on Zanzibar island whose sole purpose is to save the island’s unique music, a style known as taarab, which has never been transcribed to sheet music and was in serious trouble, since there were virtually no kids interested in learning it and few musicians still playing it. (SEE STORY BELOW) I spent an afternoon at the school, sitting in on a drum lesson while a violin lesson went on right outside. I had the presence of mind to bring my recording equipment, so I could go away and appreciate how amazing the violinist was, how complicated the percussion was. All across Africa there is amazing music, some of it an acquired taste, but all of it complex and socially important, with messages and heritage and roots. This is dying, killed slowly but surely by stupid rap “songs” about spending 50-Gs on the timepiece? As they say on the West Side, “Oh why?!”

***

In the continuing East v. West debate:

• The food over here is soooooo bland. I miss spicy peanut sauce. Even a little “tasty shitor” would be good right now.
• People the continent over say “sorry!” when you trip, stub your toe or otherwise hurt yourself. (Smashed my elbow on the bus window the other day, hard enough to draw blood, and everyone around me was like, “Gasp! Sorry!”)
• Nose picking seems not to be quite as socially acceptable as it is in Ghana, yet still not quite the taboo it is at home.
• I heard someone hiss to get a waiter’s attention today, but the woman seemed rather ill-mannered and uncouth, so the jury’s still out on whether East Africans hiss like West Africans do.
• The ice cream boys announce their presence with a bicycle horn in Ghana; the Tanzania ice cream men – rarely boys – have an electronic thing that goes off and sounds like a siren.
• The incessant horn honking of the West Side Taxi Drivers is replaced with the incessant car alarm triggering of the East African Idiot Car Owner. Jury’s still out on what’s worse. (Can you tell I’m sitting in on legal proceedings? Everything comes down to what the jury thinks.) On the one hand, at least in West Africa it’s just the taxi drivers, but in West Africa roughly four of every five cars on the road is a taxi. That’s gotta be about equal to how many East African cars are equipped with an alarm.
• No one is impressed with my limited Swahili like they are with my limited Twi.

Arts
Zanzibar reclaims its rich musical tradition; Once beloved by sultans, taarab nearly vanished Women, youths and foreigners are reviving genre
Karen Palmer
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
1142 words
28 January 2006
The Toronto Star
H04

Stone Town, ZANZIBAR To see Zainabu Athmani on this island's narrow, winding streets is to see a diminutive woman wrapped head to toe in a brilliant orange buibui.

To see the 27-year-old behind the closed doors of the Dhow Countries Music Academy is to see that those scarves hid a shoulder-baring tank top, huge hoop earrings, bleached jeans and black platform boots. To see her wail away on a three-piece drum kit is to know there is nothing diminutive about her.

And to hear her talk about a musical future teaching children to play the traditional instruments she has come to love is to know that Zanzibar's unique musical style - on the brink of extinction as little as three years ago - is undergoing a renaissance at the hands of the island's women and unemployed youth.

"We need to give our culture, our traditional culture, from our school," she said in halting English. "I (would) like to teach little children drums. I'm going to be a strong woman."

"Some of them are playing instruments that have never been played by a woman before," said school administrator Kheri A. Yussuf, adding that about a third of the school's 100 students are female, mostly in their late 20s like Athmani.

"The idea of musical education in Zanzibar is very new. Some parents are not sure it's very useful to their kids," Yussuf said.

Zanzibar, a conservative Muslim island with medieval architecture and white sandy beaches, is a 90-minute ferry ride from the eastern coast of Tanzania. Its musical heritage was shaped by the cultures that visited its shores back in the days when it boasted legendary markets for both spices and slaves.

The roots of the area's traditional taarab music can be traced to the late 1800s, when Zanzibar's ruling sultan imported an Egyptian taarab group, then sent a local musician to Egypt to learn the musical style. When the musician returned, he established a club to teach and share the music.

But the island was also influenced by the musical styles of the visiting traders and explorers from India, Europe and the Middle East, resulting in a taarab with a slight Hindi flavour and a huge African percussion section.

Done well, Zanzibari taarab features huge orchestras offering a harmonious mix of violins, fretless lutes known as ouds, the accordion, a recorder, dozens of drums, a zither and, over it all, a voice singing an epic love story.

Taarab done not so well, however, comes across as depressingly screechy and shrill, with a voice that assaults the ear with its warbling and wavering.

In either case, it rarely appeals to teenagers more comfortable with rap and hip hop.

"It's the kind of music where you sit and listen and ... how can I say this? You sit and listen and you respect it," said Kwame Mchauru of Busara Productions, a non-governmental organization devoted to preserving the island's music.

"You can see in (the players') faces some of the sadness and that reflects on the audience. They start to think, 'Maybe we should go to the disco.'

"They want fun and excitement. It's hard for them to inspire other young people."

Mchauru pinpoints the beginning of taarab's demise in Zanzibar to the advent of breakdancing. When tapes and videos of the Western craze began appearing on the island, Zanzibari kids lapped it up.

"They were excited they could actually take part," Mchauru said. "People wanted something more exciting, they wanted to try new flavours."

Plus, the Western videos showed fancy homes, expensive cars and flashy clothes - things any teenager might covet. "They wanted to be that, they wanted to have that," Mchauru said.

So taarab music, once the preferred entertainment of sultans, faded quietly. The number of taarab orchestras dwindled and at one point the island had only one trained oud player left.

Since taarab was a largely oral tradition, passed on from player to player and rarely transcribed to sheet music, it was in serious danger of dying out.

"Mostly people abandoned their music purely because of economic reasons, because they couldn't make money making this kind of music."

While West Africans were busy cementing a solid musical reputation with the genres of mbalanx and highlife, East Africans were struggling to support a signature musical style and seemed content to import pop tunes from the West or copy the brash dance music of their central African neighbours.

For a time, it seemed the only people willing to sit through a taarab performance were tourists eager to soak up a slice of Zanzibar's unique culture.

"They demand it and they pay well for it," said Yusuf Mahmoud, executive director of Busara Productions. "It's like every place wants us to perform."

Tourist interest became so strong that traditional musicians found themselves once again in demand. In fact, over this past holiday season, there were too few musicians to go around, Yussuf said.

Foreigners also seem to be leading the campaign to save Zanzibar's unique style of taarab. A German woman registered the NGO that funds the Dhow Countries Music Academy. The Ford Foundation, UNESCO, the American embassy, a Belgium-based funder and the Norwegian government provide money for the instruments, education for the teachers and equipment needed to transcribe the taarab melodies.

Even Mahmoud is originally from the U.K., although he now makes his home on the island and is a regular headliner at beach parties.

His NGO organizes an annual Swahili music festival that showcases talent from across East Africa. This year's event begins Feb. 13 with bands from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Swaziland and Kenya, as well as three taarab bands, including a group featuring 93-year-old Bi Kidude, a Zanzibari institution.

Taarab's champions figure if they can get Zanzibar's children to listen to and pick up an instrument associated with taarab, they'll soon find themselves playing - and enjoying - the complex music.

It happened to Mchauru, who grew up in southern Tanzania listening to mostly to traditional drumming, but began violin lessons at the music academy when he came to Zanzibar to supervise a hotel kitchen a few years ago.

"It changed my feelings because I enjoyed it," Mchauru said. "It's the music that taught me to explore other musical styles. Every music has its beauty somewhere."

"Our music is recognized the world over and we need to keep it alive," Yussuf adds.

karen palmer for the toronto star Julieta Stephan (left) and Zainabu Athmani practice traditional Zanzibari music with teacher Harry Kombo at the Dhow music academy. | ;

Backpacker

2006-01-13T04:13:00.000-08:00

Had my first “backpacker” experience on Tuesday night, the kind of experience that they write about in all the guidebooks, but never seems to happen to me. I decided after a tough day of fighting a one-woman battle against cretins and low-lifes to retreat to my room, where I spent the afternoon reading my journal – trying to remind myself why this was such a good idea in the first place – and writing a story I am planning to file for the Star. By the time I was finished it was 7.30 and my stomach was rumbling, so I decided to eat dinner. (I have given up dinner since Emily left and reverted to my old ways of eating something snack-y in the morning, having a big lunch around 1.30 or 2 p.m. and then going to bed early, as this entire continent seems to rise at the crack of dawn.)

Anyway, there was an English woman named Kate who’d stayed at the dorm with us in Kendwa and by the time my dinner arrived, a German girl named Marie and an American guy named Dave had joined us. Kate had come up from Jo’burg via Mozambique and Zimbabwe and was looping through Tanzania and meeting up with her mom, where she is volunteering in Malawi. She made me feel much better about the route overall, as she said people were amazingly friendly and she had no problems at all, but warned me that crossing into Zimbabwe takes hours and hours as they check each bag individually. Marie had just left 15 friends who’d traveled to Tanzania to celebrate two birthdays. They’d left on Sunday and the next day she freaked out about traveling alone and changed her flight from three weeks hence to Thursday. By the time we were finished with her, she’d been convinced to spend the $65 and change the ticket back. Dave spent New Year’s on top of Kilimanjaro, summiting as the first sun of 2006 rose. He was still on the mountain when three Americans asleep in their tents were killed by falling rocks. He said the whole mountain has the atmosphere of a cakewalk, even though parts of it can be quite arduous and dangerous. The fees are outrageous and the safari companies seem to justify the cost by promising things like luxury tents and candle light dinners, so at times Dave said he was passed by a porter carrying one dinner chair, another carrying 10kg of meat, another carrying a kg of salt, a kg of ketchup and on and on. All that foot traffic cannot be good for the environment.

Anyway, we swapped stories while commiserating about Dar’s serious lack of beer. I left the next morning on the bus, slightly sad that just when I’d met people I’d like to travel with – who were actually heading in some interesting directions – I was heading back.

I’m now in Arusha, safari capital of Tanzania, where the number of touts outnumbers the number of tourists three to one. I spent my first night at the Meru House Inn, where a couple of French girls Emily and I met on our first trip here were staying. What a dive. When I checked in the guy kept stressing that I needed to lock up my valuables. In the safe. Behind the counter. It was on signs on every floor, behind the door, on hand-outs they gave you at check-in. (It’s fairly common to see signs and things, but I thought this was a bit excessive.) Anyway, I went out in search of Internet and decided I better figure out where the Rwanda war crimes tribunal was being held, as this was my main purpose for being in Arusha. The guy behind the counter assured me I could walk, but after 45 minutes I gave up, as I was just in view of the sign. I ordered dinner (I was on the bus all day and had no lunch) and had to ask the waiter to keep the guys drinking three tables over from bothering me. One went so far as following me to the stairs, calling “Excuse me! Excuse me!” as I left. The hotel is about three blocks from the bus station, but there must have been a dalla dalla stop right outside because all I could hear for the first few hours was the call of what must have been the routes and the sounds of horns. Clearly the drivers think that whoever honks longest and loudest has the right of way. And whoever invented that car horn that goes “be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-beep” should really be rewarded with a looping soundtrack of that to listen to each and every single night. Thankfully it started pouring around 8 p.m. – and I mean pouring, I had earplugs in and a pillow over my head and I could still hear it bouncing off the metal roof – so the streets cleared out pretty quickly. It rained once in the day and twice during the night, so I hope this means the rains have finally arrived.

I got up in the morning, dropped my key at the front desk and slunk out the front door. (I’d told them I was staying at least five days – before realizing how crappy the place was.) I started trudging in the direction of the tribunal, figuring I could pick out a hotel nearby. Luckily – and I do mean that in a serendipitous sort of way – a taxi driver stopped and I quite happily paid the buck and a half to be driven to the Lutheran centre, where the driver is well known and helped me convince the guy with the keys to come in on his day off and give me a room. For five bucks! It’s just like Obruni House, but cleaner and with more God and less Auntie C. Of course, I can only stay until Tuesday. Then the guy told me I have to move to the Roman Catholic guesthouse, as the Lutherans are having a conference. God bless Missionaries.

In fact, there were 33 Ugandan kids at the tribunal this morning, all of them missionaries in training and all of them super-friendly and sweet. Orla told me Ugandans were amazing and it turns out she was right. They were about the highlight of a very boring day, although getting to know some of the other journalists has been pretty interesting too. Finally! Colleagues!

The backpacker trend continued through the tribunal; in the morning I met Matt, an American who had been traveling for four months, starting in Moscow and overlanding it to Indian, then flying to Jo’burg. He’d spent the past seven weeks blazing through most of the countries I intend to hit on my way to Cape Town and he made me feel so much better about my perception of Tanzania, since he compared the touts and annoyances to what he experienced in India.

In the afternoon I went for lunch at a cafÈ and met with an Austrian woman who was traveling with a friend through her old stomping grounds. She worked for almost a decade in Uganda, Tanzania and northern Kenya as a physician. We met up later that night for a drink and she and her friend proved to be really interesting company.

Then back at the tribunal, I met Suzanne, a fellow Canadian who was traveling from Zambia through Tanzania and down through Rwanda and Burundi, and Leslie, a defense attorney from Alaska on a four-month break. They both made great company, which was fortunate, since all but an hour of the day’s testimony was spent waiting out in the hallway for the lawyers to break from closed session.

Tanzania

2006-01-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

Initially when we landed in Dar, I thought it was a city I could really learn to love. It has some great architecture and in some ways a nice, laid back feel to it all. There are lots of men and women out in the streets, including rather liberated South Asian women who dress in beautiful saris and wraps. But now I’ve decided I hate this city and can’t get away from it fast enough.

Traveling alone is such a chore.

First, Dar is ridiculously humid, almost as humid as Ghana. The drought means that Tanzania’s hydroelectric system can’t provide all the power the country needs, so power cuts are common. Yesterday there was no power during the daylight hours and the entire city roared with gas-powered generators. Men flex their idiot muscles to their fullest potential when they see unescorted white women. I’ve had it with being yelled at, even if it’s just “jambo!” the muzungu word for hello. At times it would appear that I am invisible, like when I’m standing in queues or sitting at restaurant tables waiting for a waitron to appear. At the post office, a man managed to squeeze himself in the tiniest wisp of space my Canadian sense of spatial distance demands that I leave between me and the person in front of me. When I cleared my throat and cocked an eyebrow, he had the audacity to act as though he literally hadn’t seen me.

This morning I woke up from a completely restless night determined to get the hell out of Dar. I’ve been here three nights already and was spending money needlessly in a city that had no interesting stories to tell. (As strange as that seems, it’s true. Tanzania is lovely but boring.) I decided to go out to the bus station and buy a ticket for the next day’s bus, using a company that a woman at the front desk recommended. Getting out to the bus station is no mean feat, since the station is 11 km from the downtown. I decided to spend 20 cents and take a dalla dalla, saving myself roughly $5 in taxi fare. The front desk guy told me to walk down to the Starlight hotel and get on a bus heading to . I just nodded my head and hoped for the best. I never found the Starlight, but I found a bus stop and after waiting for a while and not recognizing the unpronounceable Swahili word on a single dalla dalla, I went for one beginning with a ‘U’ and asked if it was for the bus station. Of course. But I considered that dalla dalla full, so I stood back. I am so naïve.

I got on the next one, up in the front seat next to the driver, who spent the majority of the ride alternately adjusting himself, picking at his teeth with a chewed up toothpick and lifting his shirt to rub himself around his waistband. Occasionally he would look over to see if I was enjoying the show. Much eye rolling from my corner.

About halfway there, the young guy next to me got out and an old ornery dude got in, gave a throaty “Jambo” that was probably meant to be sexy but just freaked me out. I got out at the bus station and he followed me. Of course, there were about 30 men following me, all touts looking for a few thousand shillings for the exhausting, backbreaking, labour-intensive, college-degree-requiring work of escorting me to the ticket window of the bus company with the highest commission rates.

In Zanzibar they call these men “papaasi,” Swahili for tick, since they leach on and won’t let go until they’ve got themselves good and bloated on your blood. I was in no mood for it, but I couldn’t find the ticket window I was looking for, so eventually I gave in and told one of them what I was looking for. The ratio, by the way, of papaasi to actual ticket-buying passengers appeared to be 380 to one. So of course a fight broke out because there appeared to be some discrepancy over who had been following me for the longest and who should actually collect the commission from my sale.

Well, well, well. I had already decided that there would be no commission from my sale.

The bus was full, so down to another ticket window, where a guy in a tie who at one point made some nasty remark about how I didn’t speak Swahili (to which I sweetly responded in English, “I speak enough to know you’re insulting me. I’ve only been here a week. Did you speak Swahili fluently a week after you were born?”) and suddenly he was a little more contrite. I was in full-on bitch mode, though. Hot, tired and fed-up. I made it clear I didn’t want any buses that stopped along the way. I didn’t want a bunch of people getting on at dusty corners and I definitely didn’t want any people standing in the aisles. Of course I was assured this wouldn’t happen. The ticket price? Oh first, let’s talk about the bus and where you want to sit on the bus and how the bus only has seating for two passengers on each side of the bus. And the price of the ticket? Oh, 25,000 shillings. Ten bucks more than I paid to get here. “Oh my friend,” I said as I turned away. “Forget it.”

Oh, I didn’t realize you were a student or something. Fine, okay. But the bus only takes two and two passengers, there is only room for 56 passengers, so you pay 18,000 – 3,000 shillings more. Three thousand, that’s all.

Did I mention I was hot, tired and fed up? I paid 15,000 shillings, a third of it with coins.

When Emily and I made this journey a week ago, we arrived at the bus station at 5.30 a.m. and were immediately surrounded by touts. (Who will no doubt be waiting for me when I arrive late tomorrow.) Anyway, they demanded to see our tickets, wanted to know the name of the bus company we were using. We didn’t respond. We’d checked the name on the ticket before we left and besides, we had a guy from the hotel with us. I had a Nakumatt receipt in my pocket, but my ticket tucked into my bra strap. When I pulled out the receipt, a guy grabbed it and took off a few feet ahead of us. When he presented it to the guy at the bus door, the guy just looked at it and handed it back. The tout threw it on the ground in disgust and I managed not to snicker. While Emily loaded our bags on to the bus, the guy at the door told me we would have to pay for our bags and he would issue a receipt, you know, for insurance purposes in case anything happened to the bags. I just smiled and said, “No, thank you.” We got on the bus and sat down and about five minutes later my friend from the door sat down opposite and, with sincere bureaucratic officiousness, proceeded to write out a receipt for bags. Under amount: 5,000 or $5 US. I started laughing. “Oh my friend,” I said. “I don’t think so! Five thousand. That’s too much. Very funny!” He started to say something about how it was 2,500 per bag (that’s all!), but I kept shaking my head no and he ended up muttering “You don’t say no” as he headed for the door.

Anyway, as I was marching away from the ticket stall, a man facing away from me slammed into me with his elbow, smack right into my boob. I just kept walking, but apparently he felt this was rude, as he started yelling at my back, “Hey! Fuck! Fuck you! Don’t push!” For the next forty minutes, all I could envision was me wheeling around, landing a well place kick to his groin, then walking away. As opposed to what I actually did, which was just keep walking.

Now, here’s the thing that really gets me about beach boys, touts and other slovenly morons who make their living by scamming: Africans are keenly aware that they’re perceived as the world’s charity case. They know that no matter how much aid money goes to Latin or South America, or Asia for that matter, everyone always thinks of Africa as the place that can’t manage on its own, the continent of lazy beggars who need a hand up and a handout if they’re going to survive. And it’s unfortunate that the extension of that is that people believe that Africans have become dependent on handouts, that they couldn’t function if the funding dried up. That may be true of corrupt politicians and the district commissioners who see foreign aid as their personal chequing account, but the majority of Africans I’ve met don’t see a penny of foreign aid or NGO dollars and are intensely hardworking. Think about the men of Turkana, digging through solid rock in the blazing heat of a desert sun, all to get food stamps. The women who spend all day on their feet, tending a charcoal fire in the humidity of Accra as they grill plantain. The shoeshine boys, the girls who sell satchets of water, the boys who suck diesel fumes all day as they sell packets of PK chewing gum. They work insanely hard, usually for just enough to survive.

If anyone lived up to the notion that Africans are lazy, that they expect something for nothing, it’s these touts. They think there’s no harm since they’re skimming from the rich whites, but the rich whites lead lives that have nothing to do with them. They stay at fancy resorts and upscale hotels, where all the arrangements are made for them and the transportation is arranged in advanced. They don’t take the bus: they take airplanes, or their companies and NGOs provide cars and drivers. The sad reality is that the only whites who get ripped off by touts are the ones who are volunteers, Peace Corps, the ones who are trying to explore Africa and get an appreciation for the continent and its people. And the only thing they can conclude after visiting any bus station is that Africans are, in fact, corrupt cheats who expect something for nothing.

I walked up to the dalla dalla station where a little more than a week ago Emily and I had hiked with our giant packs and flagged down a vehicle whose driver said it were going somewhere in the vicinity of Libya St. In West Africa, you almost can’t go anywhere without someone demanding to know where you’re going, usually because they figure there’s no way you can get there on your own. For the most part I take it for the gesture that it is: an extension of their unbelievably courteous and generous culture. There are no touts in Ghana and I think this is because people think of it as their moral and civic duty to take care of their visitors and guests, not to leave them to fend for themselves amongst a pack of untrustworthy, thieving bastards.

But here in Tanzania, English is not common and for the most part, no one has spoken to me except to shout “Jambo” or to “hey baby” me – including one idiot who, two days in a row, walked up and demanded I pay for his college, then told me it was very “lude” not to talk to him and that he felt very sorry for my attitude.

Anyway, since I’m an old hand at this dalla dalla stuff, I don’t need any help, right? But I was completely confused by why the vans kept stopping when they were so clearly full. Then I realized that people were actually getting in, standing up, hunched over with their bums hanging out the window. Unbelieveable. I thought matatus were bad. So after 20 minutes, I just climbed in, leaned over a woman and a man, stuck my hand through the “holy shit” bar and held on for one of the most painful half hour rides of my life. Now I understand fully why the women wear conservative clothing: imagine riding like that with a low-cut top!

Mobile Home

2006-01-07T02:20:00.000-08:00

On the road again, alone, living like a turtle, my whole house on my back. I expect to be traveling non-stop for the next nine months (sorry, Rose, it’s true) as I work my way from Kenya through Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and South Africa. (You’re my last stop, Geoff.) My backpack, day sack and rucksack are too much altogether, but I’ve tried and tried to downsize without luck. Herewith, the contents of my mobile home:

1 to-the-knee black skirt
1 green tank top
1 blue skort (yes, I said "skort")
1 yellow tank top
1 pair pink pajama pants
1 pair drawstring black pants
1 pair black pedal pushers
1 red shirt
2 blue T-shirts
2 navy T-shirts
1 navy T-shirt (with buttons)
1 black T-shirt
1 long-sleeve tan blouse (thanks, Mom!)
1 pair navy socks (thanks, Mom!)
7 pairs underwear
3 bras
1 ball cap
1 bikini
1 conservative black one-piece bathing suit
1 package laundry detergent
1 Ziplock baggie clothes pins
1 Masai blanket
1 wrap/towel
1 scarf/wrap/sleeping mask
1 sewing kit
1 iBook
1 Mac to PC converter
1 Mac charger
1 128 MB pen drive
1 English voltage adapter
1 French voltage-to-English voltage adapter
8 pens
1 Highlighter
1 mobile phone
3 mobile phone chips
1 digital camera
1 camera charger
3 USB cords
2 digital camera batteries
2 memory cards
1 telephoto lens
1 lens brush
1 (useless) wide-angle lens
1 notebook
2 spare notebooks
1 day planner
100 business cards
1 Africa guidebook
1 East Africa guidebook
1 digital radio
6 Duracell batteries
3 blank CDs
1 Sharpie
1 Minidisc recorder
10 blank minidisks
1 Minidisc charger
1 microphone
2 sets earphones
1 passport
13 passport photos
26 US dollars
40 Liberian dollars (50 = $1 US)
12,000 Ghanaian cedis (9,000 = $1 US)
1,000 CFA (500 = $1 US)
1 wallet
1 debit card
2 credit cards
1 plane ticket
3 post cards
1 box Ziplock baggies
2 cans bug spray
1 pkg BandAids
1 tube antifungal cream
1 tube polysporin
1 packet oral rehydration salts
1 package Mylanta
1 digital thermometre
1 spare contact lens case
1 pkg condoms
2 bottles contact solution
20 tampons
3 pkg Kleenex
1 roll toilet paper
6 pairs contact lenses
1 Ziplock baggie artesunate, Malarone, mefloquine, imodium, ibuprofen, birth control, ciprofloxin
1 bottle crème rinse
1 bottle body wash
1 stick deodorant
1 Altoid container of jewellery (one silver necklace, one gye nyame pendant, one brass earrings, two silver earrings, one silver bracelet, one sparkly earrings, one cowrie shell necklace, one jade ring)
1 silver “wedding ring”
1 pair nail clippers
1 pair scissors
2 pair earplugs
1 pair glasses
15 elastic hair bands
1 ear funnel
1 pair tweezers
1 Ziplock baggie “feminine products”
1 brush
3 lip balm
1 toothbrush
2 tubes toothpaste
2 containers dental floss
2 tubes hand sanitizer
2 bottles nail polish
1 bottle sunscreen, SPF 30
1 digital watch with alarm
1 Nalgene container
1 travel fetish
1 Ziplock baggie old watches
1 package Canada pencils
1 bag sharpened pencils
1 pair black sandals
1 pair red flipflops
1 flashlight
1 Swiss Army knife

What’s missing? Shampoo and a cell phone charger. A good book, bag of trail mix, a bag of M&Ms and a jar of American-style peanut butter. Other than that, I’m good to go.

Snorkeling for Muzungus

2006-01-05T03:56:00.000-08:00

There’s something evil about the watery route from Kendwa to the coral reefs at Mnemba Island. Last time, rolling waves, severe sunburn, dehydration and diesel fumes combined to create motion sickness that left me barely able to crawl out of the boat. I managed to drag myself a few feet to a hammock, where I laid as still as I could until my stomach stopped roiling. This time, we waited in the rocking waves for some really boorish tourists and rode in even rockier waves to the midway point. Emily had turned green and I was afraid to open my mouth to ask about her, fearing what might come out of it. The snorkeling itself was a bit of a bust – so many fat, hairy muzungus you got karate kicked by a flipper in the face a half dozen times. It was murky and half of the coral was dead, so there was a lot less aquatic life. We still saw some zebra, angel and parrot fish, as well as some starfish and lots of sea urchins. (Boo…)

On the return trip, Emily and I decided to get out at Nungwe, the town next to Kendwa and simply walk back to our hotel. I asked someone on the boat if it was possible and they said we might have to wade near the rocks, but it was doable. So, like two sailors without sea legs, we stumbled off in the direction of home, rounded the first set of rocks and realized we were in trouble. There was a good quarter-kilometer of rocks and waves, and with the tide coming in it was harrowing. The surf pounded into us, then into the rocks, then back into us on the rebound. Both of us lost our balance at least once. Emily got pounded a few times and emerged with scrapes on her knees, shoulder and elbow and blood coming out of her toe. She also bonked her head. I lost my wrap, then caught it on the rebound wave.

We emerged about three minutes later, hearts pounding and soaked through. It was the most exhilarating three minutes either of us had had in a long time.

In Praise of Papaya

2006-01-05T03:55:00.000-08:00

To me, papaya tastes like dirt, even when doused in lime, whose tartness is supposed to bring out its sweetness. But when I got vicious attacked by a sea urchin, the papaya grew in my estimation – even if only as an herbal remedy.

Swimming in Zanzibar’s uniquely brilliant blue water, murky with waves, its temperature refreshingly warm, I put my left foot down and withdrew sharply, hobbled to the beach and got a trunkload of sand while popping a sliver of something out of the ball of my big toe. It calloused almost immediately and I had thoughts of suddenly emitting a death gurgle as some weird fish-related poison took affect and I slipped below the turquoise sea and floated paralyzed or worse toward Mozambique.

Instead, I walked back into the water and bobbed for another hour or so, drifting with the current. I put the same big toe down on something sharp, like the jagged edge of a conch, then seconds later, ran into a spiny urchin who lashed out with the temperament of a surly porcupine. I swam away like an injured dog, howling, then lifted my right foot above the surf and had Emily pluck out an inch-long spike from my insole. Three black specks, immoveable by tweezers, and two slashes embedded so far under the skin they were only shadows, bore witness to the utter savagery of the attack. (Not to be too dramatic about it.) I hobbled once more up to the beach, then up to our banda, where I broke out the scissors, tweezers and some needles in a fruitless attempt to get rid of the creature’s little gifts. There was only one thing to do: I hobbled down to the bar.

Emily chatted up the locals, who suggested coating the spikes with papaya milk. Neither of us knew papaya had milk, but local small boys were dispatched and arrived about 15 minutes later with two small papaya. With my Swiss Army knife, one of the boys nicked the papaya half a dozen times, causing blisters of milk to form on the surface, then smeared the fruit against my foot. Nothing happened. No burning, stinging or itching and my foot didn’t fall off at the ankle. He nicked some more and then some more, creating a thick paste on my foot. He collected a rather hefty fee – $3 for the papaya and the delicate application; health services here ain’t cheap – and scampered away. I ate some octopus as revenge against the sea, then went to bed for a couple hours and awoke to see that all that remained were two pink marks on my foot.

A Christmas miracle.

The New Year's Curse

2006-01-05T03:52:00.000-08:00

New Year’s Eve, circa 1989, would see our family at the monstrous home of the Doanes, family friends who had children our age, a wealth of snacks and a love of board games. One year we watched the Gremlins, ate ourselves nearly sick on snacks scooped up in a paper napkin and set down the dice only when Dick Clark demanded we pick up a glass of something else. New Year’s then was a lot less pressure than it’s become now; more about friends, family and neighbourliness than splashy displays of good cheer.

From a single girl’s perspective, the intense pressure to do something spectacular to bring in the new year makes it worse than Valentine’s day. At least on Valentine’s day there’s a prescribed role for single girls: they’re expected to be miserable in their aloneness, to rail loudly in a post-feminist sort of way about the tyranny of coupledom, the corporate take over of love and romance, to shout in a desperate seeming way about the relative merits of being single.

But New Years Eve is seen more as a bellwether holiday, as though the way the evening progresses cements a pattern for the year and if you were alone knocking back a thimbleful of champagne, or found yourself amongst drunken strangers without someone to kiss meaningfully at midnight, then every other night of the 365 that remain will go exactly the same way.

I have mostly avoided the holiday by working, finding myself freezing in Nathan Philips Square or taking copy from the “warmth” of the newsroom. My best New Year’s to date, ironically, was the night of the Millennium, which started out at the Toronto Hydro offices and carried on to the splashy but poorly attended Star party. Around 2 a.m., after smoking clove cigarettes and talking about nothing, a group of us stole a giant Toronto Star cake and hauled it uptown in a taxi to Renata’s place, where we drank, ate cake and swung on the swings at the park next door until the sun came up.

My worst, hands down, was the year a group of us got rather expensive tickets to a big, faceless party at the convention centre in Hull. We promptly got separated, then spent the rest of the night trying to get the group all re-assembled. When the countdown began mercifully at midnight, we smashed our plastic glasses full of something like champagne with vehemence worthy of the night’s frustrations, shouted “Vive le difference!” and headed straight for the door.

This New Year, Emily and I were in Stone Town, Zanzibar and the evening started ominously enough: on our way to dinner at the waterfront we watched a man on a scooter get mowed down by a car pulling out of a parking lot.

It’s actually amazing that I have lived here this long and not seen a road-related fatality, given how insane the driving is and how poor the road conditions are. I guess I repressed how grueling the travel here can be. Take a routine trip to the refugee camp in Ghana: first the tro-tro to Circle, then fight your way across to the “O’Donna” part, find the Kaneshie bus, listen to the loud-mouth moron shout in Twi as he sells his bright orange “vitamins” on the bus, then get down and fight your way through the market at Kaneshie to where the van should be waiting for the ride to Buduburam.

Wait in the mud for the van. Fend off water, biscuit, PK and FanYogo sellers. Get on bus, valiantly guard arm and leg space as though life depended on it. Shoot ugly looks at two Liberians who are obviously traveling together but chose not to sit together and are now speaking at decibel 45,000 about their devotion to Christ across all other passengers. (Liberians have this way of speaking, their accent is like a more ignorant-sounding version of the Alabama drawl and they have a tendency to drop the last syllable of virtually every word and they often talk as though they are only allotted 13 seconds and they’ve got to fit it all in.) Sigh, often, at the state of traffic. Repeat until arrive at destination.

In an unparalleled stroke of urban planning genius, someone in a cushy office at some ministry in Ghana decided to spend Japanese aid money on upgrading the three roads that lead out of Accra. All at the same time.

Ostensibly, this has something to do with forming a trade alliance with the other English-speaking countries of West Africa and the final product will not only see them upping their imports and exports, but sharing a common currency known as the Eco. The deadline for introducing this new currency has long passed; the billboards announcing it have all been replaced by hair-care and skin-bleaching products.

But the road upgrade continues. When Rhonda and I traveled together a year ago, the road out west, to Cape Coast and beyond, moved at a snail’s pace. Frankly, all the roads out of Accra move at a snails pace. Actually, that would be an insult to the snail. He can move faster than that. Today it’s no different. It’s mind-boggling: at one point in the trip to Buduburam, we were driving four abroad on the shoulder of the road while next to us unraveled two perfectly flat, gorgeously paved strips of highway. When we got a chance to get on it, we did, driving on the right strip at some points and on the left strip at others. Sometimes the cars, trucks, tro-tros, vans and bikes would just swerve all over the place, as if they were a bunch of drunken greyhounds fighting for the top spot in the pack. Everything was a legitimate driving surface so long as it was within the boundaries of the deep ditches. Of course, at one point, we just nosed down over the ridge leading to the ditch and drove down there for a while. It was insane, really. We were stopped for ages: it took nearly three hours from the time I left my door to the time I emerged from the tro-tro out into the brilliant sun of the refugee camp, which is probably less than 40 km away.

Mom and Dad, having survived the “road” north in Kenya, can attest to the uniqueness of African highways.

Anyway, this time, the scooter driver swerved defensively, but still managed to slam into the driver-side (passenger side at home) and go skidding, careering and finally bouncing to a stop on the pavement. One tire was ripped to shreds. Everything that could shatter did: lights, mirrors, windscreens. The bike was in two pieces. The poor guy, thankfully wearing a helmet, lay face-down on the pavement. He looked up, then fell back again. He tried several times to get up. Emily and I started to approach and so did a half dozen other men, appearing out of nowhere in the night. No one seemed to know what to do, although the driver managed to get himself up and off the road, in a gingerly way that made me think he’d broken at least his wrist. Emily asked the obvious question, what should we do? Call the police? The police, however, were already there, standing on the other side of the road with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. They were the other drivers. They were driving their car out of the police parking lot without the headlights on and hit the scooter.

I’ve often wondered what I would do when faced with a car accident in Africa and it’s stunning that I haven’t had to face it before this. Turns out I would do nothing. Neither of us speak Swahili well enough to find out what’s wrong medically, and even if we did, there’s little we could do about it, other than offer money for a hospital. Because the cops were involved, no one seemed to know how to respond. (They stood on the opposite side of the road and just watched the man.) We’re women in a Muslim culture and were unsure how the man would respond if we went rushing in, touching him and speaking in a language he might not understand. In the end, we simply walked away.

Happy New Year indeed.

Larium!? Why!?

2006-01-05T03:43:00.000-08:00

Watched Mom and Dad pet a giraffe today, then stood amazed as each of them let the giraffe lick their faces. Wonder if their malaria meds are acting up, but so glad that they’re both so into that they’re making their own weird adventures. I can only imagine what they’re telling their friends back home…

Travel
Necking with a giraffe; Okay. What's the one thing that's more disturbing than watching your parents kiss each other? The answer, according to Karen Palmer, is watching them smooch a gentle Rothschild giraffe.
Karen Palmer
Special to The Star
719 words
18 March 2006
The Toronto Star
K05

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Are my parents having an unusual reaction to their malaria meds?

There's my mom, her eyes closed as though waiting for a kiss from a schoolboy crush, while an astonished-looking guide looks on.

And there is my dad, his face squished and mostly obscured by the full, 18-inch-length of a dark grey giraffe tongue eagerly searching for the pellet of maize and sorghum clamped between dad's teeth.

All I can say is: "Eww!"

My father, usually a mild-mannered accountant, compares a kiss from a giraffe to having a warm cloth placed gently on your face. Apparently its tongue is so soft, you barely feel it at all.

My mom agrees, in her retired kindergarten teacher way.

"The tongue is so soft and supple that the giraffe didn't actually lick or kiss me, just happily curled the tip of her tongue around the pellet," she says. "No wonder they can get leaves of the acacia tree without eating thorns!"

The giraffe park, run by the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, ( www.gcci.org/afew/afew.html ) is a unique way to satisfy a safari junkie's curiosity about the long-necked creatures - and maybe even show them a little affection.

Started in 1980 as an urban home for the endangered Rothschild giraffe, the centre has grown to include a hotel where guests are often visited by the giraffes while they're taking tea and where the giraffes deliver the wake-up call to rooms set on the second-storey.

Its main job, however, is protecting the Rothschild giraffe while building an appreciation for them among Kenya's school children, who visit the park for free.

When Betty and Jock Leslie-Melville created AFEW in 1977, there were only 130 Rothschild giraffes left in Kenya. The giraffe differs from the country's plentiful Masai and reticulated giraffes, thanks to its brown splotches and white socks.

Moving the first two giraffes to the stately Leslie-Melville manor on the outskirts of Nairobi was as much a publicity stunt as it was about conservation.

The couple turned their adventures raising the two giraffes into a book, which was later made into a movie. Interest in the giraffes spawned a school program that now sees thousands of Kenyan schoolchildren visit the giraffes each year for free.

And it has nearly doubled the giraffe population. Now, there are more than 350 giraffes, which share the parkland with a half dozen warthogs.

Standing eyeball to eyeball with a giraffe, there are a couple of things you notice: They look like Muppets, with sweet brown eyes and beautiful long eyelashes most women would kill for.

All this gentleness is good for garnering handfuls of treats, but one well-placed kick from these doe-eyed darlings can kill a lion.

Their coats are somewhat bristly, like a short-haired dog. To show their exasperation that your hands are empty, they're likely to deliver an insistent head butt. And when they snort, it blows your hair back.

To soothe the offspring of tourists getting fresh with the giraffes, the guide tells us their saliva is actually antiseptic, due to a diet of leaves plucked from thorn trees.

That's all well and good, but the only thing more disturbing than watching your parents kiss each other is watching them smooch a giraffe.

Karen Palmer is a former Star reporter travelling through Africa.

Carnivores

2006-01-05T03:39:00.000-08:00

Have successfully managed, for the second year in a row, to spend the “holiday season” outside of North America and find this ducking the holidays thing to be habit-forming. Thinking about Christmas back home largely makes me itchy, mostly because Canada is so dry and overheated in December that I’m invariably suffering from dry skin and static-y hair.

Last year on Christmas, my family moved en masse to a time share in a touristy village in Portugal where the television sucked, there was an insufficient number of beds and my mom snapped at me about having too much luggage, which I took to be a richly ironic comment considering the source and stayed surly for hours afterward.

But we were treated to a holiday spread by a friend of my parents who were holidaying in the same village. We swapped driving horror stories, complained about the quality of the television, marveled at the stupidly cheap price of booze, compared a few of our favourite souvenir purchases and swapped ideas for filling the rest of our holiday days. It was, in the end, a restful and somewhat rosy way to spend the day.

The holidays at home are rarely so peaceful. By the time the 25th has arrived, I’ve usually behaved in astonishing Bridget Jones fashion, sluttishly accepting every Christmas party invite that comes my way and eating and drinking and making merry as though the start of January signaled a coming drought. Getting home is usually a hassle; there’s too many people all suffering from dry skin and static cling crowded into too small a space in weather that’s not really befitting Christmas. (In our neck the woods, there’s slush on Xmas day far more often than snow.)

Once I get home, it is rarely serene and relaxing. It’s never enough time to relax properly or catch up properly or sleep properly. It’s usually a mash of running from one place to another: getting last minute supplies, eating in drafty basements, ferrying olive trays to one house or the other, putting up decorations, staying out of the way, fighting over what television shows to watch, fighting in general. On the day of, I’m usually hot and tired and itchy, dressed in too hot a sweater and too tight pants and generally feeling out of sorts that everyone around me seems comfortable and well put together, while I’m dandruffy and big bottomed.

This year, we woke late, five floors of hotels separating me and my parents and 5,000 miles and eight hours separating me from my siblings. Although I’m about to turn 30, “Santa” came with batteries and chocolates and a new, stain-free T-shirt. We watched the Muppet take on the Christmas Story, then my parents made out for a walk (they made it as far as the pool, since the security guard refused to let them roam alone in all their Muzungu glory on a day without police) and we gathered later around the pool.

In the late afternoon, we called home to talk to my sister and brother and my Dad chattered away in a manner I’ve rarely seen before – either he really missed home or really wanted to talk about his African adventures – and then we headed off to Carnivore, to sample some of the very animals we’d paid good money to spot on safari.

I spoiled the Christmas spirit by pulling a Mary Kate in the bathroom almost immediately after wolfing down ham, turkey, spareribs, lamb, beef, chicken wings, camel, ostrich meatballs, a potato, crocodile and some sweet potato soup.

Merry Christmas!

Lake Turkana

2006-01-05T03:37:00.000-08:00

We climbed back into the truck and pointed it in the direction of Lake Turkana, making a brief stop in some dusty town where the five us wandered down the street, half of the town’s raggedy children trailing behind us making half-hearted pleas for sweets. It felt awful to leave without leaving anything behind, like we were just a flash blowing through town offering regal waves and little else, but these towns had little to offer. We’d just had breakfast, so none of us wanted anything to eat or drink and other than a few tacky beaded necklaces that looked like they’d been strung together at Bible Camp, there was nothing to buy.

The roads got worse, if that’s possible, climbing higher and higher toward Turkana and Daniel had to switch on the four-wheel drive a few times. We came upon a work crew, being watched by a man with an assault rifle and they waved us down and asked for water, then went running in all directions to fetch dozens of bottles and cans. They seemed harsh and intimidating, yet smiled into the cab, asked us how we were doing in Swahili and waved us away when we’d filled up their water bottles. Mom’s initial guess that they were a prison crew turned out to be untrue, although it was an exceptionally good guess. They certainly looked like a ragtag band of criminals, and that would explain the presence of the man with the large gun. Daniel explained that it was an NGO that offered food in exchange for work and that their work was to rebuild these roads, but the only water sources was the lake, so they often went all day without food or water as they dug through rock and reshaped the road. (The lake was about 10 km at least away and I have no doubt that the road crews would drink all their water during the blistering walk to the job site.) The NGO turned out to be the World Food Program, the UN’s answer to hunger. This “food for” program is an interesting idea, but like the “food for oil” program, seriously flawed in practice. The working conditions were inhumane – I mean, we’re talking serious human rights violations; I wouldn’t want a prison crew working in those conditions – but Daniel said it at least kept the men occupied and away from their stills, which is how they used to dull hunger pains and make their living.

The lake came into view as we crested a rocky hill, a deep shade of green that gives the lake its nickname, the Jade Sea. We could see whitecaps and feel the push of the wind. The colours were muted: deep brown of the dirt and rock, small bits of thorny yellow trees, the deep green lake, the sliver of white caps, the faint outlines of hills and mountains in the distance.

We drove though a town of straw huts, each looking like it could roll away in the breeze and drove on and on toward our camp. We stopped to pick up the boat captain who would be taking us out onto the lake and drove and drove and drove and we all marveled at the thought that this man would have WALKED to camp. It was miles!

Turkana is a lot like its people: beautiful to look at but harsh and cruel up close. Desert -like temperatures rocketed to 50 degrees or more, and the lake sparkled, mocking our discomfort since its infested with crocodiles and only the foolhardy swim in it. (Two of our guides went for a quick dip – and I do mean quick – hurling rocks around them the whole time.) The showers were blistering hot and salty. The wind could literally drive one crazy with its non-stop screaming and pushing. The place was full of sharp objects and jagged edges, even the grass seemed to be made of knife blades, sticking like quills on tender feet.

After a quick lunch and a peek around camp – Mom and Dad walked around until they started to be followed by a woman – we climbed into the boat and headed out for a rather wet ride on the waves to watch the sun set. The night was a restless one, as the wind was relentless and none of us slept well over the sound of it. I got up in the night to use the bathroom, took a few steps and realized I wasn’t alone. There were a dozen donkeys staring back at me. The sky was stuffed with stars, the moon having yet to rise. It was incredible.

In the morning, we trudged back over to the boat and were intermittently soaked as we made our way to the south island, where we were hoping to spot some crocs. We were rather quiet on the way there and back, probably exhausted from too much time on the road and in desperate need of a comfortable bed, a temperature-controlled shower and a toilet that flushed. We stayed a second day and sought refuge from the heat at a pool in town that’s fed by a hot spring. On our way back, we picked up two little Turkana kids who belonged to one of the guys working at our camp. They climbed in through the window to the back seat and I slipped them each a granola bar. As we made stops around town, more children gathered and soon the Turkana kids were being treated like Muzugus, being stared at and having kids beg them for a bite or a sweet. A couple kids reached in to take the granola bars and eventually the little boy relented and tossed out what he hadn’t finished. To the rest he simply stuck out his tongue. Emily saw this and parroted him and before long it was a game, complete with song. Along the way to the camp, the little girl realized that low humming combined with bumpy road produces and interesting song. Soon we were all doing it. By the time we got to where the kids were supposed to get out, they refused. We’re just too much fun. Overall, it was a pretty relaxing day.

By this time our meals were getting a little interesting. We were eating vegetarian, as there’s no meat worth eating that lasts longer than four days without refrigeration, and breakfast was heavy on toast, as the loaves would dry out almost as soon as they were opened. And we were running out of fresh fruit.

The journey back was quick. We stopped overnight at Maralal, home of the world famous camel derby. The temperature plummet at night, to the point that I could feel it in my frozen little bones, despite being wrapped in a Masai blanket, Dad’s fleece, two shirts, PJs, my wrap and mom’s socks. We were all desperate for showers, pizza and comfy beds, but first we had to survive the AutoBahn that is the highway into Nairobi. The journey was hair-raising, as we skirted donkey carts and roadside markets and watched as crazy Kenya drivers pulled out to pass into oncoming traffic and seemed to play chicken with each as they drove around hairpin turns while climbing up from the Rift Valley.

Travel
The cruel paradise of Lake Turkana; Area scorched by searing heat, wind Receding water infested with crocs
Karen Palmer
Special to the star
852 words
13 April 2006
The Toronto Star
H02

Loyangalani, KENYA -- Standing on the shores of Kenya's brilliant green Lake Turkana watching its white caps crest, is like finding yourself a nickel short of an ice cream cone.

Temperatures at the world's only permanent desert lake can soar to an astonishing 50C, but the deep turquoise waters hold false promise of relief.

They are infested with crocodiles.

The relentless breeze carries warm air and no escape from the African sun's rays. Any hopes that it will bring cool reprieve at night are outweighed by the whine of the wind. Its ferocity means a constant howl blows through our round, palm-frond sleeping huts known as bandas.

The sunsets are spectacular and best viewed from the water. But the waves are so strong they wash the boat - and its passengers - in a near constant spray, making the entire enterprise a wet and rocky one.

Even the grass bites here, shooting sharp blades into tender toes just like a surly porcupine under attack.

Call it a cruel paradise.

But the night skies are stunning. A late-rising moon means the abundance of twinkling stars have no light competition. They seem to multiply the longer you look up.

Lake Turkana's harsh but breathtaking landscape is a geographical anomaly and difficult to reach. It's unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Once a freshwater lake that stretched from modern-day southern Ethiopia into northern Kenya that was fed by the White Nile, it was gradually separated from the great river by tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions.

Those volcanic blasts produced the tableaux of rocky black sand that surround the lake region, including the Chabli Desert you have to pass to reach the lake.

The desert is an array of blacks, whites and ochres, produced by lava rock and silty salt and iron deposits. Across its great expanse, shimmering waves of heat make camel trains look like a mirage.

Its unusual beauty provided the backdrop for murder and suicide in last summer's The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weiss.

But it may not remain for long thanks to intense evaporation that is shrinking it. In fact, villages that were once on the water's edge now find themselves several kilometres away as the water recedes.

Isolated locals seem to have been toughened by years living with the wind, barren lands, hunger and poverty. We round a bend in the rocky road leading to Lake Turkana and see a group of men working under the watchful eye of a foreman with an assault rifle as part of a World Food Program "food for work" scheme.

Fish pulled from the lake are not part of the traditional milk and meat diet and there are concerns about whether they are healthy to eat. The surrounding land has never been able to support more than the occasional twiggy bush or thorny trees. Goats, camels and donkeys hide in rocky ledges, but food aid has been delivered to the area virtually since the time Kenya received its independence in the 1960s.

We slow down and the wizened, stone-faced men approach the truck with a fierceness almost as black as the landscape.

Turns out they are exhausted from rebuilding this road under the blazing sun and just want to refill their empty canteens, jerry cans and bottles.

After an afternoon spent searching in vain for relief from the heat, we settle on a swimming pool fed, ironically, by a hot spring. We bring along two children whose father lives and works at the Gametracker camp where we're staying.

As we bounce over the rocky road, a low hum comes from the backseat of our modified Land Rover. The little girl, who's about nine and speaks no English, has discovered that a bumpy road, combined with a low noise from a loose throat, produces a strange melody. Soon we're all doing it, much to the delight of the children, who are dressed in traditional red cloths and adorned with hundreds of loops of beads and dozens of aluminum earrings.

When we stop to let the children off near their hut, they refuse to get out of the truck. They're having too much fun.

Turns out they're just as curious about us as we are about them.

Karen Palmer is a former Star reporter now living in Africa.

| karen palmer photo Crocodiles prowl the waters of Lake Turkana, the world's only permanent desert lake, although that may not last as the area's intense heat often reaching 50C is causing relentless evaporation. karen palmer photo Bandas (huts) sit near the shore of Lake Turkana. The landscape is harsh, but also beautifully resplendent with colours from the lava rock, silty salt and iron deposits. - karen palmer photo Bandas (huts) sit near the shore of Lake Turkana. The landscape is harsh, but also beautifully resplendent with colours from the lava rock, silty salt and iron deposits.