ADSL = more pics

As of today I am the prowd owner of an ADSL connection at home, in the heart of Africa. Not superfast, but better than the V-Sat connection at work. This finally enables me to post pictures more often. Too bad A. left with the camera, but I have spruced up some of the older postings below (Johannesburg, Sammy, etc.) and others so if you're interested go and have a look. Here's a nice one of R. our youngest, taken just a few weeks ago when they were still in Africa. People say he resembles me a lot.

Balls of steel

Today I was on ‘special leave’, granted by my employer for exams, which includes obligatory assignments such as the one I have been working on over the last couple of days. In fact, I had advanced so well over the weekend (yesterday evening I was too tired to do anything) that by noon I was able to send the essay, go for a swim and take a nap. Spent the rest of the day planning the next four weeks of study and reading ahead. Hardly exciting stuff, but quite enjoyable to me.

I am back into the routine, and drafting the assignment took me back into the creative flow and intellectual buzz of the writing process that I enjoyed so much when working on my PhD thesis on Ancient Philosophy between 1994 and 1998 (yes, I know, without ever finishing it, a thorn in my flesh for the rest of my days…). At work I draft a lot too of course, but it’s different with the constant stress and the constant little and big distractions interrupting any creative writing flow one may experience (apart from writing nasty letters and e-mails, which remains my favourite and for which I would claim, with all due modesty, to have beyond average capacities). I used to think that studying and writing a thesis was, while enjoyable, difficult and tiring, but right now I am doing it in my spare time and find it …. relaxing and refreshing! How things can change.

There was a bit of a nuisance yesterday when I received an e-mail from the UK Embassy in Brussels curtly informing me that they would stop renting our house as of September. And we let the house to them because we thought they would be such reliable lessees, only to see them b… off after less than two years. Great. In order to avoid a major financial millstone around our necks we’ll have to get it rented out to someone else quickly or otherwise sell it. In short, just the kind of things you want to do when you are thousands of kilometers away in some godforsaken place where even telephones don’t work properly. Anyway, enough very greedy real estate agencies in Brussels to take care of it, so perhaps it won’t be so difficult after all.

A. and the children are doing just fine in Lith. A. sounds rather happy to be in Lith. M. and T. love their school, which is an unspeakable relief especially in M.’s case. It’s still not clear whether he will be in Group 4 or 5 next year, which annoys us a little bit. I can tell the children are doing fine as they were way too busy playing yesterday and today to talk to me on the phone for longer than 20 seconds, their only concern being the wellbeing of Sammy the dog. T. is being a handful to A., and doesn’t listen to her these days. When I make an attempt at exercising some paternal authority over the phone she pretends not to hear me or starts talking about something else. She’s getting way too smart for a four-year old….

A. and I are running up phone bills of hallucinatory proportions, and the phone company here is dragging its feet over my ADSL connection, which would allow me at last to pass to near-free calling over the Internet. I called them again time this morning, even the field guy doing the installations, but it’s really like kicking a dead horse.

Bernard, my friend with the diamond cutting factory, just called me in distress. He had paid his fake penalty of 1500 euros yesterday, paid another 750 euros bribe to the officer ‘helping’ him out, only to find the same people of the Ministry of Mines this morning at his factory. They told him his diamonds had been seized definitively by the state and asked him to also hand over the keys to his factory, which had also been ‘seized by the state’. The poor guy is basically out of business now, with no realistic way of legal recourse. Judges are equally corrupted and extremely unlikely to rule in favour of a foreign investor, unless of course the latter substantially outbids the national side. This was the case recently when a Syrian sugar trader, a real fraud apparently, won a case against the state…. If Bernard ever wants to see his belongings back it will have to be by pulling more high level strings, paying more bribes, etc. There is a real risk of losing one of the few foreign investors that would actually be able to provide training and well-paid skilled jobs for local diamond cutters, bringing back some value added activity back into the country. He told me yesterday that one of the diamond purchasing bureaus literally fled the country leaving everything behind, cars, buildings, equipment, etcetera, just dropping their business like that, after similar, quasi-legal measures had been imposed in the form of impossibly high diamond exporting thresholds below which penalties apply that eat away the margins of the smaller bureaux, which is driving them out of business one by one (six out of nine and counting). As I said earlier, this measure may also have been instigated by the big monopolist from South Africa.

So, that’s rule of law for you here. And I thought that in this country we, in the development industry, needed a thick skin… It really takes balls of steel to set up anything commercial here, not only for foreigners but also for the locals, who are subjected to similar racketeering schemes by tax and customs services, police, etc. Anyway, it makes little sense for us to set up big reform projects if predators like those mining people are left to do their dirty business with impunity, thus strangling the life out of economic activity. So much for pointing out the obvious today.

Yesterday’s events in the North led the President to call an emergency meeting with the boss and a number of other high-ranking diplomats to give them his view on the situation. It seems that this view is no longer quite accurate and perhaps beginning to be somewhat out of touch. In spite of his being the Commander in Chief and his own Minister of Defense, he has no longer any trust whatsoever in the army, and rightly so. But this being the case, the chances of him achieving anything else in the field of law and order begin to look very slim indeed. Well, I did it again (pointing out the obvious), so I better stop now.

First week as a geographic bachelor

I have hardly had time to write these weeks. A quick write-up then, not very coherent:

A. and the children left a week ago, and I have since been living the life of a monk: studies are taking up all of my free time. I don't mind as I am actually enjoying my studies a lot. I get up, go to work, go to home, study and sleep. Weekends: study, swim a bit, siesta, study, watch soccer (bye bye Holland), sleep. Five more weeks to go until I see them again.

I am working hard to get my first assignment ready for tomorrow, it's due date. It's a fake consultancy report advicing the Oss (my native town) city council on how to evaluate their local security policies. Full of rubbish, but fun to write.

Before A. left we undermined my employer's (and therefore my own) efforts to bring good governance to this country by purchasing a local driver's license through the services of the local Belgian honorary consul (a beer factory director), who mobilized his contacts at the Ministry of Transport. We're getting desperate about the difficulty of replacing her stolen one in Holland or Belgium, which has turned into a real bureaucratic nightmare, and I didn't want A. to drive around without any papers at all in Europe, so there we are. I paid through the nose for the service, as there seemed to be quite a few middlemen involved. Final delivery at my home looked a bit like a sleazy coke deal, with a dark-suited guy jumping out of a fourwheel drive, money changing hands quickly, and the car racing off again...

A. has started eating guinea pig food at a friends home, yet another pregnacy craving. Still better than the washing powder (yes, washing powder!) she ate during her previous pregnancies...

I attended a meeting with the government in full session last Friday, accompanying the boss who made a presentation on a programming idea of ours (integrated development of secondary centres) and who was violently attacked by a few Ministers who through he was cutting their programs, which they seem to hope to benefit from in a larger sense than is desirable...

Bernard, a Belgian friend trying to set up a diamond-cutting factory here, had the mining police (heavy handed and greedy thugs, on the whole) over at his house a few days ago, clearly on an intimidation mission. They harassed him for hours on missing paperwork and seized all his diamonds plus some equipment. He had to call friends at the Presidency to get them back, against payment of a completely nonsensical 'fine' of 1500 euros, plus 750 euros for the officer who 'helped' him out. The day after however his guard was driven off by the local gendarmes and beaten senseless, without any explanations. It seems that a major diamond monopolist from South Africa (won't name them here) who are setting up shop here, are involved in the intimidation through government services, as they have also driven out of business already 6 out of 9 legal diamond purchasing bureaus. Smells very bad, and it gave me look at the very unsavoury aspects of doing business in this country.

Last but not least: in spite of the rainy season, which usually gets rebel movements stuck in the mud, heavily armed rebels have captured an army garrison in the North and killed all of their their 11 prisoners.

Meat prices in the capital are rising dramatically, as all cattle breeding nomads have either sold their cattle to pay ransom and liberate their children kidnapped by bandits and rebels (the latters' favourite way of earning an income for well over a year), or have fled the country along with their herds. The few who remain and try to sell their cattle in the capital are harassed for money at every checkpoint by police and army.

So, not a pretty picture, and very few people in the world know. I have stopped making predictions as to when things will really go wrong, but go wrong they will.

Chicken shit

Our house is close to the capital’s cathedral, a big church in local red brick. Yesterday evening the President went to Mass, just about the time we left. Members of the Presidential Guard had sealed off the roads around and towards the cathedral and stood guard. We met two of them near our house as we went out. Their behaviour, slowly walking up to the Several people who did not have the privilege of diplomatic license plates as we do were harassed by them and were made to pay their way out.

M. and T. went to their playmates this afternoon while I was off to a friend’s house to watch Holland play the Serbs (Robben was awesome!). When they came home they told us how at their friends’ place they had seen a couple of chicken butchered which they subsequently had for lunch. They seemed not in the least bothered by the experience, and had found the sights of headless chicken running around aimlessly, or the cook pulling out the intestines, thus splattering himself with chicken shit, quite hilarious. A., ever the educator, seized the occasion to explain the Dutch expression ‘als een kip zonder kop rondlopen’. They found that very funny too.

The children are looking forward to leaving for Holland next week, and so is A. I am much less looking forward to being without them obviously, but on the bright side I’ll be able to devote more time to study without any feelings of guilt. I am doing what I can right now, but I am starting to get behind. It really requires a solid 15-20 hours of concentrated reading and writing a week, full stop. First written assignment, a 2500-word essay, due in two weeks time. But it’s fascinating: most of the material is on developing countries, so it’s all highly applicable. Italy under Mussolini can be counted as a developmental state, and the most successful developing countries over the past three decades (China, Thailand, South Korea, Botswana, Singapore, and others) have had powerful, dedicated and talented bureaucracies and ample state intervention in their economies, and have not been particularly tender as regards human rights. Food for thought…. Next week: the ins and outs of the Chinese imperial bureaucracy, among much else, yummy!

Sammy the dog is doing fine, getting something of an education, and seems quite at ease with people around him. He’s started eating meat.

A time of parting

These days are to us a bit like the weeks following my high school’s final exams. Many expat friends are at the end of their contracts and are preparing to leave. Farewell parties, without exception bien arrosées, abound, and we feel sadness about several people who have become really good friends over the almost two years we have been here. George D., brilliant project manager, and his Philippine wife Manel, with whom A. has gotten really close; François B., no less brilliant, with his big mouth, arrogance and irresistible personal charm, mon emmerdeur favori, who during his last year had to deal with a Minister who had a complex about white counsellors, realised in the end that he couldn’t do without them and who has now created an incredible mess for our aid programming by not renewing a demand for a support unit in time. Then there are Myriam and Jean, my bush buddy, and their children who are close friends of our kids. There are many other people, a bit more in the periphery, but much liked too.

We are almost halfway our own four-year assignment too. A. and the children leave next week, and by the time they come back we will have less than 1.5 years to go. Moreover I am supposed to know more clearly by early 2007 where my next posting, as of summer 2008, will be.

Our second year has been very different from our first. Apart from M.’s surgery and my subsequent illness at the end of 2005, I think the second year was better than the first. Expat life here became much livelier, and consequently our social circle much extended.

Today we had organised an information session, in the local language, by the local Crédit Mutuel for all our staff (9 in all, including five security people who are really employed by an outside contractor) at home in the garden. It was about saving and eventual micro-credit possibilities. They were much interested, there were many excellent questions, a few good laughs, and when I announced at the end that we would pay inscription costs for all of them (about 18 euros a head) as A. parting present, they were over the moon. We had drinks and sandwiches afterwards, and we took pictures, this being one of the very rare occasions where all where present. The staff was enormously appreciative of the whole initiative, and one of the guards, Alexis, whose rhetorical talents I had noticed before, even made a spontaneous speech. We try hard to be decent and kind to them and to help them, without being patronizing. It’s not always so easy, as most of them tend to show the kind of almost submissive behaviour that must date back to colonial times, and that seems typical for this country. If you don’t pay attention you slide into the patronising, colonial mode of behaviour very easily, and I have seen many expats who actually don’t mind at all. It was much less salient or non-existent in the few other African countries I have visited. One example: the fact that a white man here is almost invariably called ‘patron’ (boss), not ‘monsieur’.

(By the way, the title refers to a famous Bulgarian novel, Vreme razdelno, (A time of parting) by Anton Dontchev.

Bullshit bingo for aid workers - part 1

We had the umpteenth World Bank mission this year over today at the office; this time for an initiative they call the Integrated Framework, which is supposed to put trade as a central concern in the country’s development program. Talk about pointing out the obvious. But before there is anything to trade, let’s first make sure this country’s production gets back on its feet. I am just worried they are setting up another usine à gaz, with their overstaffed missions, mobilizing scarce donor and government human resources for yet another initiative they dump on others. Their Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers usually turn into large shopping lists (strategies imply strategic choices –PRSPs rarely make any) and often don’t have much added value if you ask me, but, hey, it feeds a lot of consultant families.

I am only in my second year in the development business, way too early to be cynical, you will say. Let’s say it helps me cope with various frustrations of the work. In the same vein I am also the proud inventor of two applications of two much abused terms in the development jargon, ‘synergy’ and ‘complementarity’. I am offering this advice for free to all those suffering in inane meetings in the development business, and I guess in many other businesses as well. It goes as follows:

• When another donor/department/institution/Ministry/company does, or proposes to do, something that is basically a complete waste of time and money because you or some other donor/etc. is already doing it (and better) than you say that you expect there to be a great deal of synergy between your respective activities...
• If on the other hand what they propose has nothing to do whatsoever with what you are doing (or what you think they should really be doing), then emphasize that you see tremendous scope for complementarity between the two of you....

Believe me, this works, and it will get you through any meeting! (And why not produce a bullshit bingo game for development workers...). Pity I didn’t try it today on the WB people, but that would have kept them (and the boss, who was in shape today) talking even longer.

On a more cheerful note: I did one of my very rare field trips today, 2,5 sweaty hours to have a look at a fish farm cum hatchery run by a collective applying for a small subsidy from our micro-realisations project. This is the real thing. Providing real opportunities for real people doing real work. It’s small, but it can work, and there’s a beautiful quiet dignity in these people which only work and a reasonable income can provide.

The Americans killed Al-Zawahari today, which is a good thing. It wasn’t subtle: two 500-pounders on one house. Amazing though how they can’t seem to get hold of the other Al Qaida baddies. There was a 25 million dollar prize on Al-Zawahiri’s head, bingo! I wonder if there is now a jihadi snitch taking an advance on paradise, getting into a CIA witness protection programme to go and live in the American countryside with 70 virgins and a massive bank account.

Sammy

Rebels massacred 7 local people on an environmental protection project of ours in the North of the country last week, and took off with a few vehicles. I was informed of it today. It’s still far away from the capital, but some of the provinces are becoming no-go areas. Apparently people from a tribe that felt it got short-changed during the last elections and subsequent distribution of government posts, are ‘moving about’ (‘ils bougent’), whatever that may mean. Against this background we re-sent today, for the fifth time this year, a request to HQ for much needed additional radio equipment, with a rather undiplomatic accompanying note this time.

I had invited two humanitarian workers from Médécins sans Frontieres Holland to come and brief us on the situation in the North West part of the country, where the ex-president’s electorate lives and where they are involved in humanitarian actions. They spoke of emptied villages, people having fled to Chad, after rebels attacked army posts and the army responded in its usual ruthless manner. The commander in charge was afterwards sent to the North-East with the Presidential Guard, where rebels killed a much feared brother in arms of his in an ambush (see my previous post). The Presidential Guard is still in the North East, and one can only wait for the excesses that will be reported back. On the other hand one cannot argue with the fact that the state needs to take back control of its territory if it is to survive.

There was clearly little love lost between the MSF people and the boss. The former: tough young field people, committed, impressed by the misery they personally witness; the boss no less committed but somewhat on his high horse, referring several times to his 35 years of experience in Africa (and the youthfulness of his interlocutors), a theme a little too recurrent to my taste.

Next time I’d better invite these people for an informal discussion over a drink. I sympathize with them, although I would like them to understand the constraints we have to work under, with unworkable rules and procedures imposed on us by our Member States. I also envy them for the fairly straightforward nature of their humanitarian work, which is direct, fast, visible, and which sounds certainly a lot more attractive to the general public that the less visible – but, I maintain, no less necessary - reform programmes we try to implement with often half competent, unpaid, demotivated and more often than not corrupted government services. Sometimes it’s just humiliating: our ‘urgent’ actions, like that recent 4 million euros package in budgetary aid I have mentioned several times recently, take almost a year from decision point to actual action in the field. To-and-froing with HQ on details assume sometimes hallucinating proportions, not to talk about the crushing burden of reports (mid-term, final), audits (ex ante, mid-term, ex-post), evaluations (mid-term, and end of term), and monitoring (halfway, ex post). This is without the mid-term and end-of term reviews of our overall cooperation, pre-programming documents, programming documents, consultation exercises with government, Member States, non-state actors, etc. If we have one or two perfectly valid offers for a tender above a certain amount, as we did two months ago for a microprojects programme in a difficult area, we have to relaunch it in order to have three, which costs months extra, post-crisis country or not. The only thing that makes it all more palatable is that we have serious budgets to work with: 109 million euros for the 2008-2013 cycle.

A. was invited to M.’s schoolteacher for a talk. She finds that M. has never descended from the pink cloud she claims he is on since his return from the Netherlands a month ago. We have been stricter with him for some time now, make him do his homework and tell him to pay attention, but he is often dreaming his time away in class, not disturbing anyone, but simply absent minded. His teacher claims he is missing out on lots of information, but when I did his homework with him last weekend, French grammar, he seemed to have absorbed it rather well (nom, adjectif, groupe nominal, and so on; not bad at all for that age) . His handwriting is terrible indeed, especially when compared to the beautiful écriture of some of his class mates. On the other hand he did some fairly decent writing last weekend when I was with him alone, and when I showed amazement he told me with a smirk that he ‘kept it a secret’…. I also noticed during our latest stay in Holland that he was all of a sudden quite capable of more or less decent handwriting when he wrote a letter to the Tooth Fairy, who had forgotten to take his tooth from under his pillow at night…. Se fout-il de notre gueule?!

Anyway we’re just seeing this through its last two weeks, and we’ll then see if he will be more motivated at his Dutch school in Lith. Several people - among whom the boss’ wife, who has taught him on occasion when replacing his teacher and who is très critical of the French system herself - tell us they believe that he is very intelligent and simply bored at school. As much as I would like to believe this, I am not so sure anymore. And even if it were true, something has to be done about it. It would be such a waste for him to be bored for all those years and, even worse, to lose the pleasure of learning.

We did get a dog last weekend! It’s not the half-blood hyena I talked about but a cute little puppy (6 weeks only) from a Boxer mother and a German shepherd father, raised by a tough old French nun who also runs a local school and who charged me a hefty amount of money for the dog. My Italian colleague (a vet), all smiles since I generously allowed him last week to use my budget for an unforeseen training mission of his, came along with us to advise us. After a two-day dispute with the children we’ve called it Sammy, even though it’s a female (but then again, so is Sam Fox…). Mixed feelings so far. I am the most experienced among us with dogs, and I sure don’t know much about them, apart from the importance of being firm and consistent when correcting them. M. seems slightly disappointed that he can’t take the dog for walks yet, and T. is a little afraid of it. R. likes it but is way too rough with it and has to be called to order all the time. I wonder - a little late, I know - if the children aren’t perhaps too young for the dog, and whether they are really ready for the experience yet. A. has been a good sport and, in spite of her initial reserves, doesn’t even object to the dog being in the house (where it does what young dogs do about 15 times a day – just amazing how much piss such a little dog produces on a daily basis.) But it’s clear that her heart is not in it yet.

In May my brother’s wife gave birth to their second child, a beautiful, healthy boy, and we went to see them last time in Holland. The children liked being with their cousins, my sister’s children and A.’s brother’s children, and are looking forward to seeing them more often as of next month. The distance hasn’t affected at all their attachment to their relatives in Holland. M. and T. refer to Lith as if it were heaven on Earth (never went to school there…) and are definitely developing a ‘roots’ feeling about it, which is as we had hoped. In anticipation of A.’s stay with the children there, we’re having our holiday cabin spruced up, with my mother’s help for logistics. We are also getting an ADSL connection there, as we are here in Africa (amazing, but it is possible to get ADSL even here), so we will be able to talk to each other through Skype.

Time for writing this post was taken from my study time this evening. I just couldn’t bring myself to it, too tired, I’ll catch up later.

Resurfacing

It’s been a month since I last wrote, which is way too long. I feel flattered that some readers have actually written to me to ask me when I would resume blogging. I’ll do my best.

After the public finance training course in Johannesburg I spent one more week at work, went to the Netherlands to have a week with the family (short!), came back to Africa with M., our eldest, so he could resume school, and A., T. and R. joined us last weekend. A. had undergone some tests in Holland, and we’re very happy that everything seems to be all right with the baby.

Being alone with M. for two weeks was fun. He enjoyed being the sole focus of my attention, and I enjoyed our long nocturnal discussions. A. did OK in the Netherlands alone with the children, and seemed actually relieved not to have all the ‘help’ around that we have in Africa. The change of climate did her a lot of good too and she looks as healthy and beautiful as ever, her pregnancy showing quite clearly now. In just a few weeks T. seems to have regained some of her former sharper edges after a long period during which she was extremely affable and sweet. R., in his terrible twos, is a real riot, and becoming the family’s clown, pulling faces and so on. Just irresistible. He has at long last started talking a little more.

My short stay in Jo’burg has triggered an interest for South Africa. I am reading Alistair Sparks’ magisterial ‘The Mind of South Africa’. Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’ was not as impressive as various raving reviews made me expect.

I had a bit of a fall-out through e-mail with the boss when I came back from SA and didn’t like the way he had organised, or rather had not organised, things in his absence (won’t elaborate here). I foresee that this will continue until the end of my tour here, and hope that frictions will remain manageable, as they have been so far, fortunately. Our styles and expectations in terms of organisation and management simply differ too much. From my studies on Public Policy and Management, I have learned that I am more Weberian in my outlook.

The state of the nation these days: ever more insecurity in the north. The wild reserve we went to in February is now completely off limits, teeming with rebels. A good thing is that they ambushed and killed one of the most feared and sadistic elements of the Presidential Guard (involved in the incident I wrote about on 12 January) last week, which must have relieved a great deal of people here in the capital. But instability in Chad and Sudan is now having a direct and very dangerous impact on the situation in the North. An indication of dangerously low morale in the army: all military personnel (about 55) based in a key Northern town close to the Sudanese border simply packed up and left their garrison last week to descend, heavily armed, on the capital to come and ask for their wages. They were stopped and disarmed outside the capital. The president was furious and used the occasion of his Mother’s Day radio speech last Sunday to praise this country’s women (and rightly so) and lash out at its men, who he said were lazy and too cowardly to fight.

As I said, my MSc studies in Public Policy and Management have started two weeks ago. Not easy to study virtually every day after work for two to three hours & weekends, and quite tiring, but gratifying too. I realise how much I have already learnt on this posting, and my previous job in Brussels, and it is interesting to review those experiences in a larger, more academic framework. Through the CeFiMS online study centre I have learnt that I am by no means the only one stuck away in the middle of nowhere. There are people doing the same program from Pyongyang, out in the field in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Bosnia, etcetera.

A very unpleasant consequence of the fact that A. and the children will leave for a long time as per 17 June is that we will have to let go our two nannies, Amour and Odile. I had to tell them upon my return from Holland, and it wasn’t pretty: being without a job in this country, especially for single women with families, is a terrible perspective, and especially Amour was in tears, whereas Odile reacted more stoically. I am now trying to get them placed with other expats, but more foreigners seem to be leaving than returning after the holidays.

Another idea is to get them to join a Credit Mutuel to have access to microfinance. Especially Odile has some experience in the retail selling of palm oil in the quartiers. I’ve organised an information meeting with a representative from the local Crédit Mutuel at our house for all the people working for us on Saturday 10 June. We’ll offer to pay their inscription costs and a little something to get their savings started. The only thing that worries me slightly is that people will be too much focused on the credit part, and less on the savings part. There is very little financial awareness among local people here, which is understandable: first of all there is very little to save, and secondly, saving is seen as unsocial: any surpluses are to be shared with extended family and friends. The consequences of not doing so can be very severe, ranging from social exclusion to - rarer - cases of poisoning. Those who do have bank account make sure to have them at agencies in another part of town. In fact this is one of the many factors holding back development here, but this forced solidarity is also what has helped people get through meagre times.

I am tempted these days to get a dog, but I am still hesitating. I have been offered a cute puppy of indeterminate race (at some point a hyena must have put in his bit though). A. is horrified by the idea of having a dog in the house, but it would be great for the kids. Plus someone for me to talk to during my long lonely evenings the second half of the year of course ;)