Trouble brewing?

To say that something's brewing in this country would be stating the obvious. With, as I've said earlier, almost one attempted coup d'état per year on average over the past decade, people here seem to have turned cooking up trouble into an art.

There's plenty of things to be dissatisfied with for each and everyone. By far the most destabilising factor is the fact that total arrears of state salaries built up by all regimes together over the past decades have now mounted to some 40 months, of which seven by the present regime since it came to power two and a half years ago. The thing that worries me most is that the military haven't been paid either...

With unsufficient reesources and a demotivated army, the central government does not really control the hinterland, where highway banditry runs rampant and may hide other, more politically motivated activities. The losing parties to the 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections have been quiet, perhaps too quiet. In the winning coalition many are dissatisfied as the jobs-for-the-boys game has its limits too... This is a country where politics is seen as a zero-sum game, with the winners counting on taking it all after victory and the losers not inclined to acquiesce in their defeat. I am not talking about the population at large: they are at the end of their tether after years of civil conflict and the misery of deep poverty.

A few weeks ago a gang of some 40 well-armed bandits attacked an army post far away from the capital, and the neighbouring country's army had to step in to pursue the gang, where the national army wouldn't go any further. As the neighbours then had victims to deplore in an ambush subsequently set up by the bandits, they were furious with the national army, and let this be known in no uncertain terms, which led then to a diplomatic demarche by the Foreign Minister to the neighbour's diplomatic representation here. For me the big question is: why would a few highway bandits attract all that attention to themselves if they could have been comfortably robbing people on a nearby major (well, for this country) traffic axis with very few chances of any armed force interfering? They were also surprisingly aggressive and able, attacking trained soldiers and laying ambush to them...

Anyway, I don't want to go beyond information that is already in the public domain. The point I want to make here is that at some point, and most probably long before the end of our posting here in 2008, some serious shit will hit the fan, the most likely scenario being the umpteenth coup d'état, either by dissatisfied military or by people from outside (who used to be insiders once). Things have been calm since we arrived here a year ago. But colleagues and friends who have been here before had troubling stories to tell about the events in 2003. I feel relatively safe as regards A. and the children: no foreigners got hurt here the last time it blew up, although many lived through some very anxious moments. (The situation for local people was, as usual, infinitely worse: there were hundreds, if not thousands of the locals here that got wounded - or raped -, and killed.) But there's so much at stake for the country itself. Without their donors they are lost. One more coup d'état and many donors, including the biggest one the European Union, will pack it up for good. All that time, work and money wasted, and so much more suffering...

Well, let's not jump to conclusions yet. One of the proud traditions of this country is also the change of minister or of government, in a never-ending blame game that leaves the no. 1 scot-free as the good father putting back some order in the house. Radio trottoir carries some interesting rumours these days ....

Cold sore

I feel I am entitled to a little hypochondria here.

All that stress with M. being hospitalised etc. (see posting below) lowered my resistance. In the days that followed I developed, with no other symptoms and for the first time in my life, a labial herpes also known as a cold sore.

So this is a herpes on the lip, in the right hand corner of my mouth (so this picture is not me; thank you Stanford University). Basically I have a venereal disease without having sinned (honestly!). I don't even want to think of this thing being on other, more private parts, yuck (lots of pictures to be found of that too, but I won't turn this blog into a freak show, at least not yet).

I never knew these things could hurt so much. I thought they only look disgusting. So now I know they look disgusting, radiate pain to the rest of one's face, and are contagious, which has a marked effect on people's willingness to cuddle. As we're in a very French context, with women kissing you all the time to say hello and goodbye (lots of lovely women here, so this is a cultural thing I've taken up with some zeal), I have been feeling like a social outcast for two weeks now.

This cold sore won't heal properly, like any wound out here in the tropics (eg mosquito bites). The good doctors of the same local clinic where M. had his surgery prescribed me antibiotics (flucloxacillin) and a cream, Niflugel, that burnt like hell (when I read the information leaflet it said it was to be applied on sprained ankles and tendinitis?!). All utterly useless, the sore remained.

Another doctor has now prescribed aciclovir cream. But that sore's still there, and A. won't touch me with a barge pole. I'm a modern day leper.

The beginning manager

Argh!

What I didn't tell you yet is that, at 39, I am on my first more or less serious management post, that is, managing people instead of files only (I still manage those too, though, and plenty of them). Apart from occasionally standing in for my boss (which means managing about 35 people, expats and locals), I am permanently in charge of 3 expat project managers (soon 5) plus a local secretary.

I am tired today and in a foul mood, and I just lashed out at my section's latest acquisition.
She's a french project manager in her late twenties, great woman but very, eh, well, young française as they come. I had made corrections in a document she had drafted, an urgent assignment at that, and SHE JUST HASN'T TAKEN THEM INTO ACCOUNT! (I'm your boss for God's sake -ouch, very primary reaction, good that I didn't actually say that.) I told her to redo it, with all the patience I could muster, which wasn't a whole lot: for the first time I told her that 'je commence à m'énerver' - which is strong language in this otherwise fairly harmonious environment.

OK, cool, that's off my chest now. The reason is that she just hadn't noticed those corrections, she says, as she hadn't gone all the way to the bottom of it (now how smart is that?). She's working on them right now.

Just as I am writing this, she sends out the 'corrected' version, again with half of the modifications ignored.... (heart rate up). I give up...

And it's not that she's not intelligent, quite the contrary. Smart, very good communicative and social skills (a lot better than mine anyway). Won't take crap from anybody (well, perhaps a little from me just now). Good looking and charming too, and ever more self-confident. Is this the beginning of consistent smart-assing, passive resistance, or just sloppiness? The fact that my boss is making organisational changes which leave her under my as well as his direct authority (and thus basically only his...) is not helping things either I'm afraid.

OK, I rehearse what I've learned at those fancy management courses headquarters provide us with: no primary reaction, breathe, wait and explain. I'm actually not even sure they said that, but that's sort of what I know I should do on a good day.

The problem is, this is not a good day. I'm tired. M. was making an ass of himself as I was leaving home to return to work. A. was masterfully applying her silent reproach technique for my choosing to go back to the office instead of staying home to watch a movie together with her. And then there's the nagging doubt of the aforesaid organisational change, which must in some way have triggered subsconscious territorial or alpha-male reflexes on my part.

It's late, there's nobody left at the office. Perhaps I should go and pee up against some doors to make me feel better....

The pleasures of slow progress

No, this one's not about justifying any working habits I'm picking up down here...

I just discovered a good explanation for my deep love for my old field of expertise, Classics and Ancient Philosophy, even though I am not terribly active in it anymore.

The explanation is bit sobering as well. It is from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance, p. 101: '[...] the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort.'

It's simple: the more people you have working in an academic field the faster it will change. A solid article or book in Classics thus goes a long way in time nowadays. My favourite example is the field of doxography, esp. Diels Doxographi Graeci (too much work to explain, but you can google it up for yourself), but there's plenty of other examples. Thus one's work in the field of Classics seemed less ephemerous than studies in other fields, where work could be outdated in a matter of months, of course simply because there s such a massive academic effort going on there. A cynic would add: that's right, and because so few people bother to take isssue with results in the field of Classics. Well....

Urgent surgery for M.

M., our eldest son (6), was relieved this Friday afternoon when I told him that the stitches of his wounds (he suffered a hernia (liesbreuk) a week ago) didn't have to be removed after all, but that they would fall out all by themselves in a couple of weeks. The little man even gave me two hard hugs straight from the heart, which I found moving, but then again, I have been easily moved these days.

That was one hell of a scare. Wednesday 28 september 12.45 A. dashed into my office with M., telling me that M. had been diagnosed at a local clinic just aa moment before with a torsion of a testicle which he had to be operated on right away, within the next few hours or so, or he might lose the thing. After a second opinion from a French Embassy doctor (the arsehole had to be begged to do his Hippocratic duty, as we're not French citizens working in the Embassy. He had to be begged and cajoled into giving a simple second opinion), we rushed the boy back to the clinic. Mind you, this is probably the best clinic in town and in the country for that matter, but sanitary conditions and the professional level of the nursing staff are not up to European standards. I know, this is what we signed for when we came here, but gosh it feels different when it hits you. The local surgeon, who has an excellent reputation here (...well, OK, I know, for what it's worth) seemed competent and decisive, and so did the anesthesist we met before the operation. We were a bit troubled though when towards the end of the operation someone came over to ask us what M.'s weight actually was: he was knocked out solidly on the drugs dosis he had been given until several hours after the operation....

The most difficult was the stress of the decision that we had to make on the spot: normally for such surgery, under general anasthesia, the child would have been evacuated by plane to Libreville, Gabon. But the delay would have meant, with the knowledge we had at that moment, that he would have lost his testicle. So the choice was to have him operated under less than perfect medical and sanitary circumstances, or to live with the knowledge that his fertility later in life could have been compromised. We chose for the former, and have been proven right it seems as M. was up and (literally) running again in a few days. It proved not be a torsion of the testicle that caused the pain and the swelling, but something involving a hernia and a cyst. His offspring - and ours for that matter- seems to be safe...

M. thinks the scar in his groin is really 'cool' and wants to show it off to all, proudly dropping his pants without prior notice. .. A. and I on the other hand felt quite down the week after, a bit of a post-traumatic dip I guess.

In a way the experience motivated me as well. This private clinic is the best the privileged in this country can get (unless they travel abroad for treatment of course). State health care here, which we try to improve, is just terrible, to the point where people prefer to go back to traditional medicine or to just, well, nothing, for lack of means.

Life expectancy at birth for men in this country has now dropped to 40,0 years, 45,7 for women. Downright nauseating is mortality among children: 220 in 1000 children here don't make it until their fifth birthday, that's almost 1 in 4. I had heard of these figures before coming, but they have been taking on a new and much more vivid meaning these days...

The point of this blog

Here's what I aim at with this blog.

First of all there's our family and friends I want to keep informed of our life. There's so little time to write to each of you separately on a regular basis, and I find this no less painful than you do. Also, producing little bits and pieces every couple of days will hopefully prove to be less time consuming and less strenuous than the synthetic efforts required when you try to summarise your life over previous weeks or months over and over again for different sets of friends and family in different languages.

Obviously there's also the wish to record our experiences, not least for ourselves and the children. Little by little, my wife A. and I have managed to have the life abroad we wanted, which we find interesting and fulfilling, never dull, although with its difficult moments as well (see our recent adventures with M.). What adds to this urge to record our life is the very peculiar context we live in, an African country as poor as can be and, with about a dozen attempted coup d'états over the past decade, politically not stable at all. The last one, which brought to power the present Head of State, was in March 2003, so statistically speaking we should have one again before long....

And then there's the simple pleasure of writing, which I have always cherished. I will abuse this blog to produce the occasional pseudo-intellectual reflection, just to keep myself happy. Nevertheless I hope that writing a blog instead of a personal diary will help me put some discipline in my rants and musings and make me try to produce something of slightly more than purely personal interest.

As our family and friends include people from several nationalities, I will probaably continue to write in English in order to avoid double work. I feel sorry for those who would prefer me to write in Dutch, my mother tongue. Actually my mother is among those, maar ik hou je natuurlijk ook via de telefoon op de hoogte mam! It's also a disadvantage as I can't be as eloquent/funny/piercing etc. as I hope I am in my native language. In fact, since I have started to work almost 100% in French a year ago I can just feel my English is going downhill. Perhaps a bit of daily practice will push it uphill again. But it will continue to be marred by batavisms and the typical direct coarse Dutch loudmouth style. So be it...

Emilian