Think On

Travels, close to home

CIMG0346
Originally uploaded by faithmclellan

This photo was taken in Bern, Switzerland. More in latest photo set on Flickr. 

Strange weekend

In Paris. Roared around the city on foot on Friday for 14 hours straight. So tired when I got in bed that I couldn't sleep at all. Early Saturday morning I was certain I was coming down with the flu. Spent all day in bed (in bed! in PARIS???!!! Aaaarrrghhhh.) Herewith, where I spent most of my time.

Would rather have been here:

 

Or, somewhat less piously, here:

 

Ah, well, next time!

Brazzaville Journal, Part 1

It is a grey, overcast morning in Brazzaville. I am sitting outside on the hotel grounds, the nice part where there is a nice pool—there is another, depressing part, where of course I am staying. Why could I not stay in this nice part? I ask you. But of course I didn’t know it existed until after I’d already moved rooms once and almost went into the deeply inferior, sad and dirty little pool. Very odd layout.

I arrived at 6 am yesterday. And then the challenges began! I descended from the plane and got on the bus, which just took us a little ways over to the terminal. People immediately began to go in all directions, and I couldn’t understand what the difference was. Then I found myself beneath a doorway reading VIPs only, so I just stood there (and stood there and stood here)—there was obviously a protocol for Big Men, who went right in front of me.

Nick Kristof, who is one of my heroes, met us on the Jimma leg of the trip. Here's what he wrote in yesterday's Times:

February 18, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Torture by Worms

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

JIMMA, Ethiopia

Presidents are supposed to be strong, and on his latest visit to Africa Jimmy Carter proved himself strong enough to weep.

The first stop of Mr. Carter’s four-nation African trip was Ghana, where he visited his projects to wipe out the Guinea worm, a horrendous two-foot-long parasite that lives inside the body and finally pops out, causing excruciating pain.

Mr. Carter was shaken by the victims he met, including a 57-year-old woman with a Guinea worm coming out of her nipple.

“She and her medical attendants said she had another coming out her genitals between her legs, and one each coming out of both feet,” Mr. Carter added. “And so she had four Guinea worms emerging simultaneously.”

“Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain” because of the worms emerging from their flesh, Mr. Carter said. “I cried, along with the children.”

We tend to think of human rights in terms of a right to vote, a right to free speech, a right to assembly. But a child should also have a right not to suffer agony because of a worm that is easily preventable, as well as a right not to go blind because of a lack of medication that costs a dollar or two, even a right not to die for lack of a $5 mosquito net.

As president, Mr. Carter put the issue of human rights squarely on the national agenda. Now Mr. Carter argues — and he’s dead right — that we conceive of human rights too narrowly as political and civil rights, and that we also need to fight for the human right of children to live healthy lives.

He has led the way in waging that battle. Because of Mr. Carter’s two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977, and it has become a race between the worm and the ex-president to see who outlasts the other.

“I’m determined to live long enough to see no cases of Guinea worm anywhere in the world,” Mr. Carter said as he walked in blue jeans through a couple of villages in a remote corner of southwestern Ethiopia, the third country of his African tour.

After leaving the White House, Mr. Carter ended up “adopting” diseases like Guinea worm disease, river blindness, elephantiasis, trachoma and schistosomiasis that afflict the world’s most voiceless people. These are horrific diseases that cause unimaginable suffering, yet they rarely get attention, treatment or research funding because their victims are impoverished and invisible.

When Mr. Carter met with Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, then Pakistan’s president, President Zia had never heard of Guinea worm and didn’t know it existed in Pakistan. Nor did his health minister. But after Mr. Carter put the issue on the agenda, Pakistan worked energetically with the Carter Center to eliminate the parasite in that country.

The villages here in Ethiopia that Mr. Carter visited cradle a fast-moving creek, making a lovely image of thatch huts and bubbling water. But the creek is home to the black flies whose bites spread the parasite that causes river blindness, leading to unbearable itching and often eventually to blindness.

“It’s almost impossible to imagine the suffering of people with river blindness,” Mr. Carter said as he traipsed through the village beside his wife, Rosalynn.

Already, Mr. Carter’s campaign is making huge progress against the disease.

Kemeru Befita, a woman washing her clothes in the creek near Mr. Carter, told me that two of her children had caught river blindness in the last couple of months. After a visit to the witch doctor didn’t help, she took them to a clinic where — thanks to Mr. Carter’s program — they received medicine that killed the baby worms. They are two of the nearly 10 million people to whom the Carter Center gave medication last year alone, who won’t go blind.

At the end of the day, this one-term president who left office a pariah in his own party will transform the lives of more people in more places over a longer period of time than any other recent president. And I hope that he can also transform our conception of human rights, so that we show an interest not only in the human rights of people suffering from the oppression of dictators, but also from the even more brutal tyranny of blindness, malaria and worms.

Check out the video that accompanies this column, "Carter vs. the Worms." Please leave your comments about this column at Mr. Kristof's blog at www.nytimes.com/ontheground

African dreams, part 1

I've been back in Brooklyn for about 3 days, and my African journey seems like a dream. Especially after what I've just seen, it's even harder than usual to understand why one of the lead stories on the Today Show this morning was a psychiatrist's analysis of the meaning of Britney Spears shaving her head. . .

I haven't written about the Nigerian leg of the trip. We left Addis last Wednesday and flew on a charter flight to Abuja, which is the newish capital of Nigeria.

The flying time was reported to be 4 1/2 hours, but it actually took us about 8 hours to get there, as we had to stop twice for refueling. Those were 2 moments of interest in an interminable trip: we stopped in Juba, which is the capital of Southern Sudan (!), and in Garoua, Cameroon.

I tried to get off the plane in Juba, but was sent back by the Secret Service. I suppose, from the number of guys standing around with machine guns, I should have guessed it wasn't really a pleasure destination. The dust there--a dirty red thick cloud--was astonishing. It's from something called the Hamatan wind, which blows in from the Sahara. The pilot had to make a couple of attempts before finding the runway--but apparently this is standard-fare flying in this area.

On to Cameroon, where President Carter gave a short press conference in an airport conference room. A reporter asked him about Barack Obama. He said, not surprisingly, that Obama had a lot of strengths, and that he would be supporting the Democratic nominee (this said with the big trademark grin). We returned to the plane, but the refueling hadn't even started by then so a few of us ventured into the airport to "shop." There were perhaps 6 people working in the airport, and there were 2 tiny shops and a Coke stand. The prices were ungodly in the shops, and they only took Cameroonian francs, which there was no way to obtain--no ATM, no exchange, no nothing. One of our party paid for a Coke with 2 dollar bills, hoping to get back some local currency for her grandson. The guy who took the money spent a long time examining it up to the light, and I energetically practiced my French to try to get across the change idea, but alas, no luck. It didn't help that I couldn't, at the moment, remember the words for 'change' or 'exchange' or 'souvenir'. We ended up making the exhange with somebody out on the tarmac. "Vous etes une banque!" I said, much to the general amusement.

Finally, we arrived in Abuja. The road from the airport was named Bill Clinton Drive. . . . The Abuja Hilton (where regular rooms go for $328 a night) was even more of a contrast to the surroundings than the Sheraton was in Addis.

Nigeria is the most popular country in Africa, with a population almost half that of the United States, in an area one-third larger than Texas. There is reportedly no system for garbage collection or sanitation in the whole country, and boy, does it ever look that way. Every square inch of ground is covered in trash, garbage, plastic bags, and general filth. And everywhere there are piles of burning trash. People living along the sides of the road, in metal shacks, lean-tos, shipping containers with only 2 or 3 sides, and obviously, almost no possessions. But, as all over Africa, there is a bustling trade in everything you can imagine: plastic everything--chairs, buckets, water bottles--newspapers, clocks, bananas, Coke and Sprite, tap water in plastic bags, pile after pile of cheap clothes, T-shirts, flip-flops, phone cards, lottery tickets, and kerosene in tiny bottles. I've never seen the like of buying and selling. Oh, and caskets for the sale by the side of the road! ("Why not?" said my driver. This may have something to do with the number of traffic accidents! Near the hotel there was a bridge over some kind of stream or gulley, into which a car had plunged earlier that day. There were dozens of cars pulled over and people standing along the sides of the bridge to gawk.)

Just discovered I have no photos of Abuja, except for the Hilton. We were always zooming around in a car, so I didn't get any shots of the city--nor of the famous airplane house. The Lebanese guy who built it apparently wanted his wife to stop traveling (read the story here). Aha, I've just found a photo of it online.

Part 2, coming up.

Kids, outside Abuja, Nigeria

Here are some of the kids I met in a village in NIgeria--the name of which I will come up with shortly!

A couple of great things about Ethiopia: coffee and popcorn. Ethiopia, as those of us who routinely buy Ethiopian Sidamo at Starbucks know, is a major coffee producer--of excellent coffee. And there's a coffee ceremony, which takes 2 hours and involves drinking 3 cups of espresso for fear of insulting the host. They roast the green beans, then grind and prepare the coffee, which is served, gloriously enough, with popcorn. On Sunday I went to a much truncated version of the ceremony here at the hotel. What I most enjoyed--the coffee was great, and so was the popcorn--was talking to the young woman who prepared the coffee. She is a member of the hotel's "casual staff," and studies accounting here in Addis. I asked her what she would do when she graduated, and she said, nothing, there are no jobs. Ethiopia is very poor, she said, and the economy only gets worse.

Other observations from our trip: traveling with a former President of the US is nothing like a regular gig! There are about 15 Secret Service agents and too many advance people to count. A PR firm from Chicago runs the show, and it is unbelievably well organized. The guy who runs the firm used to work in the White House, and he's organized a lot of high-powered meetings. I am so impressed with him and his team. Everything is very unpretentious and down to earth. The President came into the lounge this morning, wearing khaki shorts and sandals. (He swims every morning, and Mrs. Carter told me she would also swim here, since she does at home, but redoing her hair all the time is a real problem!) He gets his own toast and coffee and takes breakfast back to Rosalynn. He introduces himself to others in the lounge by asking where they're from, and saying, "I'm from America." Indeed.

We travel in a motorcade, streets cleared, sirens blaring, so we never have to worry about traffic. We flew today on a charter flight, which meant we pulled right up to the airport--sometimes on the tarmac--and immediately get on the plane and take off. No screening, no luggage issues. We are accompanied by sharpshooters on roofs and guys with machine guns lined up along the runways. The Secret Service carries some fearsome-looking cases, which I'm sure are full of weapons--this, in addition to the ones they are wearing!

The flight attendant begins the routine safety announcement with, "Good morning, Your Excellency President Carter, and guests." And praise be, then she served me a Diet Coke, the first I've had in this country. (Pepsi has the Sheraton contract.)

I am so glad I read some books about the history, culture, and politics of Ethiopia, because there are constant references to things I wouldn't otherwise understand: the Mengistu regime, the DERG, the liberation armies, etc.

Oh, and hey! Guess who turned up at the village today, but Nicholas Kristof, of the New York Times. One of my real heroes, with all his writing on Sudan. I was nearly as thrilled to meet him as President Carter! More to come on the village visit. Tomorrow we go to Nigeria!

Strange and mysterious

I've been learning plenty about Ethiopia while I'm here. Some of the oddities:

• It's 1999 in Ethiopia, thanks to some quirk of the Orthodox calendar. New Year's Day is, I think, on September 11.
• Clock time is different, too, running from 6 am to midnight. So 7 am is 1 o'clock, etc. Apparently the way you're supposed to cope with that is by asking whether appointments are on Ethiopian time or "foreigner's time." And then there's something about how they only count time in 5-minute increments, so it can never be 11:03, only 11:05, and so forth.

Lots of other interesting things, many of which I've seen elsewhere in Africa. One of the most startling things is the way you have to pass through a metal detector to get into all hotels. Just like the TSA, only without the barking and bellowing.

Interrupting this entry to say that President Carter has just unceremoniously walked into the lounge, alone (where are those Secret Service guys?), announced that he couldn't sleep any more (who can?), said good morning to me while I tried not to seem startled (it is about 7:30, and here I sit in my bedroom shoes, with no makeup on), and is pouring himself a glass of orange juice! You're not able to say that just every day. . .

Ah, I've just espied the men with the clear plastic cords behind their ears. Secret Service is on the case. Actually, they're digging into scrambled eggs, but I'm sure they keeping an eye on everything.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Like every African city I've been in, Addis Ababa is crumbling and dirty, filled to overflowing with people on the broken/absent sidewalks, children running around, garbage everywhere (though there is actually less than I've seen elsewhere), and gazillions of corrugated iron shacks/lean-tos that most people live in. Life is lived out in the open, from buying and selling anything you can imagine (including lots of plastic and broken junk), laundry, cooking, etc. There are plenty of beggars and limbless people--yesterday I saw a one-legged young man crawling along the sidewalk, wearing pieces of old tires for shoes. I had read in my guidebook that kids here seem to enjoy throwing the occasional stone at foreigners (more as a game, so the book says, than out of real hostility), so I wasn't too surprised when yesterday one was thrown at the window of the car I was riding in. Interestingly, it didn't even make me angry--I immediately thought, wow, just like the book said!

Addis is the third-highest capital in the world, surrounded by mountains, and with a cool-ish temperature right now, especially in the mornings. It does get fairly hot in the afternoons. I'm bracing for Nigeria, where it is about 100 degrees and 100% humidity.

Ethiopia is an old Christian (Orthodox Christian or some version of Coptic, and related to the Greek Orthodox Church) enclave, unique in this part of mainly Muslim Africa. But at dawn and dusk you can hear the calls to prayer blaring from the mosques. Yesterday I toured Holy Trinity Cathedral, where the Emperor Haile Selassie was finally buried, some 25 years after he was smothered under a pillow by his successor. (For most of that time, his body was either stashed underneath a toilet--the guy who killed him wanted to make sure people got the message about his status--or waiting around in some church for the government or his family to come up with the money for his funeral.)

I can't say anything about the food yet, since I haven't had any Ethiopian dishes here, only in New York (there are essentially two main dishes--injera (in the photo) and hmmm, something that has now escaped me, wot? or close enough--more on this after I've tried some). There's plenty of good Indian and Middle Eastern fare. The water is not, of course, drinkable, so I've stuck to bottles of the fizzy type. Yesterday I read this great note on the label: "bacteriologically, the water is potable." Well, I should hope so.

 

5-star views of Addis

Some photos of the hotel I''m staying in. I am about to head out to the REAL Addis. . . .

Ethiopia!

Oh, the magic of the name: Addis Ababa! Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries on earth, but the capital--at least the route from the airport to the 5-star Sheraton--looks prosperous and clean, compared with all other African cities I've seen. So far.

The Sheraton has a desk at the airport, and the guy there was expecting me--but 5 hours earlier than I actually arrived, thanks to a light dusting of snow at Heathrow that apparently brought the United Kingdom to a halt. I was driven to the hotel, the only passenger in the Sheraton's 30-seat van. Curiously, a "welcome to Salzburg" video was playing on the TV screen. I was cheered to see Mozarts Geburthaus, where I once made a pilgrimage, not knowing there are about a zillion Mozart houses in Austria.

The usual tiny shops and stalls line the streets, but there is far less trash and debris than other places I've been. I don't think I've seen one of the ubiquitous blue plastic bags that litter Africa. I have, however, of course seen the $5 white plastic chair, without which there would seem to be no seating whatever on this continent.

Two fabulous sights: what appeared to be a (dilapidated) apartment building, with a life-size replica of an Ethiopian Airlines jet coming out of it as the long jetway-like entrance ramp to the building. Or like a very weird plane-crash-into-a-building incident.

And a great drinks stand in the shape of a very large Coke bottle, complete with enormous bottle cap and a kind of large hinge that serves as the "door" to the shop.

Must head out shortly--more later!