Our Hindu wedding anniversary

Today, 28 december, was our 10th wedding anniversary. We got married the Hindu way, something we didn't do ten years ago as someone close to A. and essential to the ritual wouldn't attend. She wouldn't attend this time either, but we now decided to go ahead with it anyway, albeit with some sadness. For A. this ritual had been a missing part of our marriage, whereas we both liked the idea of renewing our marital vows.

The complex Hindu wedding ritual, performed by a pandit who has known us for years (in fact he was A.'s family priest and he attended our civil marriage ten years ago), lasted about 3 hours and took some 5 hours of preparations (cleaning and cooking) and an afternoon of shopping. We did it completely in private. Apart from ourselves and the priest there were A.'s brother and his wife, plus the children.

The first part was a cleansing ritual to wash away the 'sin' of having lived together and having children without being 'properly' married. This sounds more severe than what it felt like. These ancient rituals (going back more than 2500 years!) have a strict logic of their own, and if you do them, you better do them properly. It was done in a serious but pleasant way.

The second part was the wedding ceremony proper. As I said, the ritual is complex, and I am not sure I grasped the full meaning of each and every aspect of it.(*) The main elements consisted of asking the blessing of the gods, in particular Ganesha and Lakshmi mata, and sacrifices of food, flowers, and money. The Hindu faith does not beat about the bush as regards the importance they attach to material wealth, I have noticed on several occasions. Western traditions are more squeamish, or at any rate less explicit about it.

A real fire, representing everlasting fire as against our passing existence, 'bore witness' to the ritual. It caused a lot of smoke in the apartment of my brother in law and his wife. As it has a state of the art fire alarm which could cause the whole apartment block to be evacuated if set off, we anxiously tried to keep the door to the central hall, where the sensor is, tightly closed...

The children behaved OK, in spite of the length of the ritual. M. was fascinated, whereas T. and R. seemed mildly bored, as you can see in the pictures.

Yesterday we had gone to the notary to sign our wills. Preparing one's will seems such a gloomy thing, but I actually found it relieving. We're all set and ready for the rest of our lives now.

(*) This seems to be a characteristic of many Hindu rituals, and I am sure of rituals in many other traditions as well. I remember that Frits Staal spent 10 years analysing the Brahmin fire (Agni) ritual, which is still performed in India but understood by few. I discovered there's a whole academic discipline devoted to the study of ritual. Staal even thinks that ritual is at the origin of language itself.

Pics at last!

I finally managed to upload pictures into this blog. Very simple, but it turns out that you need a better connection than the one we have in Africa. It works with my brother in law's fast ADSL connection. I have spruced up previous entries with pictures and will try to insert new ones regularly. Here's a very recent one, taken yesterday evening, of the children as they watch television at Helma and Michael's place, one rehearsal for a toothpaste commercial in the cabin (R. with a big lump with Arnica ointment on his forehead), and a particularly pretty one of T. all solo.

Where's home?

(We’re back in the Netherlands, arrived last Sunday night after a not very eventful journey, although the children, and especially R., our youngest, proved quite a handful.)

Where’s home? A question we continuously ask ourselves. We’re curiously watching ourselves as we manage to root in three different places.

Brussels is definitely home. We have our house and were very happy there from 2001-2004. We will, after this and hopefully one more posting abroad, return there.

Our host country, too, has, willy nilly, become home. All three children are now at ease and happy there, and we’ve grown accustomed, even committed, to the country and its people, warts and all. We’re attached to our friends there as well as to the local members of our extended household. But of the three places we call home, this one will definitely be the easiest to move on from, as it is not an easy place to live in.

The third place, then, is Lith, Dutch author Anton Coolen’s ‘Dorp aan de rivier’ (Village on the riverside), where our cozy little holiday cabin is. This picture was taken yesterday from its kitchen window.It’s only 10 km away from my place of birth, Oss, where my mother lives. It is a nice paradox that, after having been away from it for more than twenty years, moving to Africa has actually caused me to call the region home again when we bought the cabin in the summer of 2004. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that I had an emotional attachment to the region, its polders, the Maas river, the Teeffelse Wetering and so on, places where I went fishing and biking as a kid and as an adolescent. I automatically and inextricably associate Dutch romantic poet Herman Gorter’s poem Mei with the polder landscape between Oss and Lith.

I feel a tingle when I hear authentic speakers of the local Brabant dialect, which is the dialect I grew up with. I never spoke it myself, even though I can imitate it pretty well and can sort of adapt my language to it (I managed a fluent "ennenu schup, heddedie ok?" a year ago in a Lith tool shop, when I sought to buy a spade). The decade I spent in Nijmegen (1984-1995), among a mixture of people from Limburg, Brabant and the town itself, blurred my distinctly Brabant accent into a broader Southern drawl that I still have.

We did a good thing when we bought the cabin in 2004, just before our departure to Africa. We thus made Lith our place of refuge for a long time to come. We decided that we, and most of all the children, needed a place they could call home throughout their youth (an advice that was also given to us by other expat colleagues).

All the above Blut und Boden stuff may sound a little tacky, but the emotion was and is real enough, and I feel enriched by it.

A few things that have struck me since our return last Sunday:

1. the strong Wassenaarian r-sound (*) that seems to be ever more fashionable among radio dj’s.
2. a giant golden Buddha right next to the highway in Amsterdam, a promotion for a new Buddhist broadcasting agency in the Netherlands, the Boeddhistische Omroep Stichting (BOS) (**).
3. Wouter Bos, the Dutch social democats leader, has published a book called ‘Dit land kan zoveel beter’ (This country could be so much better). That may be true, and his job as a politician he should look for further improvements. But it could be a lot worse too, see my next point….
4. in a snack bar, a sheet of paper from a regional volunteer organization for ‘terminal homecare’ asking for volunteers to come forward to accompany and help dying people and their family members. You can even get volunteers for that in Holland, that’s beautiful! Little by little I must have been lowering my expectations to the conditions I observe in my host country. Such volunteering there often results in predatory behavior. Isn’t volunteerism, like the absence of corruption, a measure for the degree of success of a society?

The cold feels good. It’s giving me more energy, and reminds me once again what a physical burden the heat and humidity of the tropics are, even if we have gotten used to it. One can just get a lot more done in a moderate climate.
Another sign that my old energy is coming back to me: I am seriously considering taking up studying again through distance learning. London University offers a MSc program in public policy and management with lots of solid economics, all very useful in a development context. I could do just one or a few certificates first. There seems to be more added value in spending the hours of the overtime I usually make after 5.30 pm on family life and a new intellectual challenge instead.

(*) A highly resonant, vocalized r-sound. Hard to explain, but a very distinctive sound. As I recall from my days in linguistics, the only thing that comes close to it is the Albanian rr-sound, like in Rröfte Enver Hoxha – Long live Enver Hoxha. It’s a phoneme not liked very much by Southerners, for completely socio-linguistic reasons as I happen to know from close childhood observation. At my very local catholic primary school, the local Oss dialect was the norm. Even I - with my distinctly Brabant, though Western Brabant (where my parents came from – proud to say that I can still do some imitations of that dialect too), accent - didn’t live up to the norm and was still considered a ‘stadse’ (city boy – a qualification that was enough to put one at serious risk of bullying - 'afslaan'). Those with the Wassenaarian ‘r’ were invariably ‘imported’ from the north, usually protestants, very often children of managerial staff in some of the more advanced industries in Oss (Organon, Akzo-Pharma). My primary school neighbored a public (non-confessional) one, and I clearly remember a catholic ‘raid’ on the 'protestant' children during playtime at least once. As far as I can tell, these sentiments have worn off, and a good thing they have!

(**) I looked up their website, www.boeddhistischeomroep.nl. They have only recently started, don’t broadcast a lot but get 4 millions euros in state subsidies, which have apparently raised questions in Parliament. One can download the documentaries they have broadcast before. One of those amused me. It showed a grumpy old Tibetan monk at a seminar in Amsterdam who declared that many Westerners were a little too ‘creative’ in interpreting Tibetan Buddhism, and that that was why he was at the seminar in the first place, to preserve the purity of the tradition. It was obvious that he preferred his calm monastery life to keeping New Age zealots from mixing Buddhism with tree-hugging and Madame Blavatsky…

Bonnes fêtes!

The previous post was actually written the 13th, but I no longer seem to have the possibility to adapt the dates of entries.

A. did indeed get another haircut, bob style, and she looks quite spectacular now (again). I got one too yesterday, but the effect has not been quite the same... The hairdresser, a Korean lady who has settled down here, told me that she saw a lot more grey hairs than before. Just to put me in the mood, I guess... :-(

The 15th yesterday was the last day for two projects to be 'introduced in the system' (again I'll spare you the details) or else they would have been delayed for at least two to three months. I worked, for the first time in five weeks, a very full day to crack the whip and help out where I could. We managed. I feel quite relieved and gratified, it was worth the extra effort in spite of the inevitable fatigue the next day.

Off to the Netherlands tomorrow morning. We're all looking forward to see family and friends, to feel the cold, to do our own cooking, eat Dutch bread, cheese and vegetables, to sit and watch Dutch television and to read Dutch newspapers while the cold rain, perhaps even snow, hits the windows of our little holiday cabin with the beautiful view on the river Maas that we've all come to love. Some medical stuff to run after as well. Even though my illness has been relatively minor compared to what many other people experience, I hope I'll be able to keep it from happening again for a long time to come.

Shouldn't we meet and shouldn't I be able to post new entries the next couple of weeks, I wish you all, also on behalf of A. and the children, a merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy New Year. Thanks for visiting this blog - and for putting up with it... ;)

Black pig

Gee, we’ve had a calm week in terms of ‘event density’.

This being said, I thought for a moment last Saturday that things were going wrong: a plumber came in the morning to fix some sanitary problem. He told me not to leave home as ‘there [were] military all over town’, ‘because of salary problems’. For a moment I thought they had left their barracks over their own salary problems, as they have on numerous occasions in the past. However, it turned out that they had been posted on a major boulevard to prevent a trade union demonstration over, indeed, unpaid salaries in the state sector (9 months and counting since March 2003). The government, in yet another triumphant attempt to establish its democratic credentials, had decided to forbid the demonstration and to enforce its decision manu militari. As far as I know there were no incidents, the demonstration was broken up peacefully. I haven’t seen any such big demonstrations before since our arrival here though. Somebody told me today that Christmas time is putsch time in Western Africa. With Christmas approaching and prospects for payment of salaries continuing to be dim for the time being, I, uh, well let’s say I do not regret leaving for a few weeks.

Little by little we are getting ready for our departure to the Netherlands on Sunday. M. and T. received their school reports today, no surprises: M. kept up the good work and pays a lot more attention than before; T. is all over the place, easily distracted, but very sociable and ‘mignonne’. A. had her hair done with hair extensions. Unfortunately she looks like an ageing hippie with them (that makes two of us, as I badly need a haircut too. During my illness I grew a two-week beard and my boss’ wife thought that I was beginning to look like Jesus Christ…) and she will have them removed before we leave I think.

M. and T. had a friend sleeping over last Saturday evening, the seven-year old son of a young couple running the restaurant where we went for karaoke recently. The boy, always quite a handful, now misbehaved completely. We left the four children for a few hours with Odile, yet another member of our feudal household. When we came back she was furious, which is a very rare experience with people here. M.’s friend was still up, bouncing up and down on his bed. He had woken up the other three children and, worst of all, grievously insulted Odile by calling her a ‘gros cochon noir’, a fat black pig. A. and I were quite upset, as we always make a major point with the children about showing respect to the people who work for us, correcting them quite severely on the occasions (rare, I must say) where they try to take liberties with them.

I’ve never put somebody else’s child straight in such a harsh manner, telling him to apologize to Odile and not to give a peep again. The next morning I took him back to his parents and told his mother what had happened. She was utterly embarrassed, and uttered something about ‘kids picking up things at school’.

Why am I boring you with such a tedious and perhaps quite trivial story? Because I think, hope, that it’s been a defining moment in M. and T. upbringing. That’s also why I put up such a show, though my anger was real enough at that point. Later I sat Milan down and we talked about it and he understood very well that his friend had been way out of line.

I am not sure though about telling the boy’s parents the way I did. Even though I did my best to tell them in a neutral kind of way about the incident, my annoyance must still have been perceptible. I’m afraid that it may have struck them as an implicit reproach of poor child-raising skills, or even racism, on their part. He’s actually a nice kid, but very dominating as he tries to make up for a lack of parental attention. Due to his parents’ livelihood he is most of the time in the company of local nannies and other personnel, who tend to be far too permissive of kids’ - especially white kids’ - bad behavior. (Ours are no exception, we have had to instruct them explicitly that it is them, and not the children, calling the shots in our absence.) I’m sure that his parents, and certainly his mother, feel terrible about this and that they don’t need any high-horse reminders from anybody. So I’ll make sure I see them again to reassure them before we leave.

So, as you can see, there’s no lack of opportunities big and small for ethical nitpicking if you’re going soft like I am these days ;). Is it the malaria that has forever deep-fried my brains into a permanent state of sentimentality, or perhaps my forthcoming fortieth birthday and a looming midlife crisis? Life in this country, and not least our experiences of the last couple of months, are changing us, that’s for sure.

Good stuff is happening too. The mood is up and we’re seeing the bright side of things again. I am picking up strength and am now working reasonably productive half days. As I know I will only be effective for a few hours, I actually concentrate much more on what is essential and I delegate more. (Is this the birth of an innovative management idea for a bestseller that will make me rich and ensure me retirement in my early forties: work less and be a better manager? Sorry...)

One of the other pleasant discoveries I make here is also how beautiful project management can be if it is done well. I realized this today while in a steering committee meeting of a complex project of micro-realizations in mainly rural areas (I admit I do get my flashes of enlightenment at odd places these days). I’ll spare you the details on procedures, contracts, budgets etc., but the head of the project, George D., who has actually become a good friend, presented the project as an Excel-based work of art presented through Powerpoint. The man has single-handedly, and with a clarity of mind for which I envy him, turned a project that was in deep trouble when I arrived into one of our success stories, potentially offering hundreds if not thousands of people a perspective out of poverty. Occasionally you come across such project managers, and the quality of their work is a pure intellectual pleasure. This kind of experience makes me almost wish I had started working in Development earlier. I just hope the public finance project I am involved in will be equally well managed.

Sinterklaas, salary arrears and a rape kit

Sorry for the title, but it is a fitting way to describe the multi-track, or schizophrenic, mindset you need (well, at least I do) to function properly here. Just read what follows.

As for health (thank you for asking): morale is up, but my body is not following suit. I am getting better, but I am still not well. Again I expect it to take a while tonight before I'll be able to sleep, helped by half a Lexomil and a generous serving of Scotch. Last week my morale was greatly boosted when my brains appeared not to be definitively fried out of working order by malaria, and I was able to digest information again. Then came last weekend, where we were invited to two parties, and where I felt, at least at the first one, in great shape.(*) Sunday we took it easy, so yesterday morning I entered the office as a born again public servant, ready to perform great and noble things. I tried, for the first time in three weeks, to do a full day's work, i.e. the morning plus an afternoon working session on the public finance project.

How wrong I was, again. I came home completely exhausted, depressed and, paradoxically, not able to sleep until 2 in the morning or so. This morning I failed of course to do much of substance, apart from whipping up Puppy Dog (needs to be kept on a short leash, but he's becoming more operational) and paraphing a few payments and letters. Slept very deep all afternoon.

So that's it, no more of this. I'll faithfully stick to my few-hours-of work-a-day regime, as PYL told me, until we go on leave to Holland on 18 December. My principal objective, to send out for approval the public finance reform project proposal before then, has advanced really well, so that's safe, and my boss claims he will need me in Olympic form upon my return in January, when we will have a couple of infernal weeks of reporting and programming to do.

My brother (34) is a doctor-to-be - started his medical studies at the age of 29, and just got his Masters, cum laude, yes sir! A model of determination and discipline, and as such a source of genuine fraternal pride on my part (I fear he may find this embarrassing). He's now doing his internships. His medical network has proved quite useful as he and his wife have managed to organise a check-up for me with a malaria specialist during our leave in Holland. As one of my wealthy native country's claims to international fame are its long waiting lists in the health sector, I am very grateful for that.

It's evening as I am writing this, the kids have just been put to bed. We put them through the full Dutch Sinterklaas routine last night, having them put their shoes outside on the terrace, make them sing 'Sinterklaas kapoentje' , add some fodder for Sinterklaas horse etcetera. The guards looked rather amused... In the morning M., T. and R. woke up excited to find real Dutch chocolate Sinterklazen and chocolate euro coins in their shoes (found here in Bangui, in a Lebanese shop! With the logistical problems they have here, one can't help but admire these people; of course they made us pay through the nose for the stuff). Furthermore they all three had books (Harry Potter volume 5 for M., we're all hooked on it), clothes and some further small stuff. A. and I had treated ourselves to a beautiful hand carved chess set. A good occasion to get M. back on chess too, which he had started at his school in Brussels. I'll first have to relearn it myself though.

Compare all this familial bliss with that of the secretary whom I mentioned recently and who spent a night under her bed with her family, terrorized by heavily armed robbers that were systematically and very violently pillaging houses in the street where she lives. I learned today that the robbers were national army people, who had put on masks and taken off the licence plates of their cars, but had not bothered to change their army attire! It also turns out that a woman was raped during the two-hour ordeal. The secretary's children are deeply traumatized by the experience and get anxious at night-fall.

Equally traumatized by her recent experience with the army is Amour, our nanny. Apart from her physical bruises, she's living through some very difficult moments. Apart from the Military Tribunal, she also went to the military police, who are giving her a hard time. They are pestering her for money for fuel for their cars to do the necessary 'investigations', i.e. go and arrest her attacker, whose whereabouts are known or easy to find out about. He isn't showing up for work any more (**). The military police told her in all seriousness to go and find him herself!

All too understandably, Amour is at the end of her tether (I actually gave her most of the Lexomil I was prescribed so she is at least able to get some sleep - but what she really needs it seems is therapeutic help, which to my knowledge doesn t exist in this country). She had told the military police commander that she wasn't afraid to go on radio or to the newspapers to tell her story. We talked to her today and told her we would do whatever we could to support her morally and practically in her judicial fight and her healing, that we admired her courage, but that it was ill-advised to provoke the army, who operate with virtual impunity in this country. So we have now put her in contact with a lawyer linked to a human rights defence organisation, see what they can do for her. It's so hard to stay backstage, although A. is getting more inclined to do so as she is warned by friends for the army. Diplomatic immunity is not bullet-proof.

And all this during a period when the country is considered relatively stable by the international community. Imagine the misery when all hell breaks loose again, for instance over ... unpaid salaries (present arrears for state salaries under the present regime: 8 or 9 months, I have lost count). This has been the most frequent reason for mutinies and coups d'état in the past. International financial institutions and other donors won't cough up financial aid until public finance management performance improves - the famous conditionality of aid. There's lots of good reasons to put that kind of pressure on governments, not least the one of our host country, and I agree with them wholeheartedly. But improving public finance management is a slow process, which is also why I am so anxious to launch our public finance management project as soon as possible. In the meantime social tensions keep rising and rising.

The head of a large development agency (also a devoted atheist with a profound knowledge of early Christianity - you get them in all sorts and kinds here!) said to me in private last weekend that what it boils down to is that donors are telling this country to improve its own health first using traditional medicine before they send in real medical aid. I do not agree entirely with him. It's not, I think, a blank cheque for financial aid but technical assistance that constitutes real medical aid. Cash money to pay salaries is more like an emergency bandage to stop the bleeding and to prevent the patient from dying.

And yet I can't help but share some of my colleague's bitterness. It's all fine to be orthodox on conditionality for disbursing financial aid, but if we do not help this relatively new government, imperfect as it may be, to maintain stability for at least a minimum period of time so it can get its act together on public finance, security etcetera, the ensuing anarchy of a possible new mutiny or coup d'état will make the financial bill for rebuilding the country infinitely higher than the amounts of financial aid presently under discussion. And that's without counting the added human suffering, an element I have not been hearing often enough to my taste in recent discussions on the issue ...

So now for the rape kit. At the office we have a 'social budget' which never fails to generate tensions between expats and local personnel, the latter of whom would love to have this money cash in their pockets, and if not, in the form of presents for their families for Christmas. Given the medical insecurity here, and also to put an end to the endless quibbling, the boss has quite sensibly proposed to use the social budget this year to buy medical equipment and install a small medical cabinet for urgent interventions by PYL.

A new expat colleague, who has spent time in South Africa and Ivory Coast, both countries with lots of violence and terrible rape figures, then proposed, also with a view to possible future events, to include a rape kit , i.e. a set of medical equipment and anti-HIV/Aids drugs to treat rape victims. I'm afraid that that is an excellent idea... (***)



(*) PYL's advice was to rest and relax, and a good party is very relaxing, no? Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I met a newly arrived Frenchman, an ex-army man with much experience in the Balkans, so we exchanged experiences, quipping half of the time in Bulgarian (me) and Serbian (him). Amazingly gifted in languages (especially for a Frenchman ;)): his Serb accent seemed impeccable to me, and he spoke excellent English, with a Cockney or Scottish accent upon request. We agreed, only half-jokingly, on the rich perspectives to revive this country's economy by transferring Balkan lore on the production of plum brandy (slivovitsa), using cheap and plentiful mangoes instead ('mangovitsa'). I have a feeling there may be a follow-up to this...

(**) for fear of being arrested, which I hope, or else simply because he hasn't received his salary for months and has to do various odd jobs to survive - which is what most army men do, and which is also why they are very hard to motivate to go do their job in the provinces, leaving whatever business they have in the capital unattended to.

(***) For friends and family who are now getting completely horrified and who are wondering what dangers I am irresponsibly subjecting A. and the children to: tensions are always carefully monitored, and real trouble rarely comes as a complete surprise. We're included in an elaborate evacuation scheme by the French military here. All our office's expat workers live in secured, walled and guarded houses. As I've said before, it's the locals in the quartiers who invariably suffer the most during unrest. Thus the kit I mentioned would first and foremost benefit our local personnel.

M.'s birthday

Today, 1 december, is a national day and a day off in our host country. It's also M.'s birthday: he's turned seven. As of 4.30 in the morning he kept storming into our bedroom, we could hold him off until 6 am, then we had to give him his birthday present: part 4 of the Harry Potter cyclus, which A. and I enjoy ourselves a lot too (we have some of the films on DVD too, but they are not nearly as good as the books, as usual).

M.'s birthday party yesterday was fun too, with all the classical ingredients: his best friends, cake, lemonade, lots of presents, lots of laughter and a M. in tears at the end of the day to release all the built-up tension. He went to bed a happy boy though.

Morale's still up, especially after I had a relatively productive 2 hours at work yesterday in which I managed to truly concentrate on what I was doing, for the first time in almost three weeks. We're preparing a file for a 6 MEUR project to help the Ministry of Finance through technical assistance manage the country's dismal public finances better. This may not sound as sexy as building hospitals and saving lives in the bush, but if this projects works (a big if, as always here) then it will actually save a lot of lives, indirectly, and improve the quality of even more lives. It's a file close to my heart that was getting ready to be submitted for approval to HQ when I fell ill. I got very worried that we wouldn't make an internal deadline of 15 december, which would have delayed the thing by at least 3-4 months, which is a lot in a country with a deepening social crisis on its hands. Now I am more confident we will make it.

The point is now not to overdo it and to stick to just a few hours a day: 2,5 hours is my present maximum, then my brains give up on me and I have to rest. But rest is so much more pleasant wheen you've actually done a bit of work.

Eventually we'll get there.