Sentimental

Let’s first get the sentimental part out of the way: on the CNN website I found this picture of a 5-6000 year old young couple buried together just found in Italy, and thought it was beautiful.

Not that I lack sentimentality these days. Jacques’ children are going to be taken care of by a joint action at the office. Money will be kept out of the eager hands of Jacques' various brothers and 'friends' who are suddenly turning up. The question of his widow remains open, we’ll have to cajole her gently into undergoing an HIV-test and will take it from there. Being away from the family has made me slightly more obsessive about his children becoming orphans. The boss told me today that 'there are no orphans in Africa', referring to the supposed habit of family taking care of the children, but I beg to differ - I have so far seen remarkably little of the oft-praised African solidary. Homo homini lupus ('Man is a wolf unto man - Hobbes, if I am not mistaken) is more like it.

A colleague of ours (whom I didn’t know personally) was shot dead yesterday in his home in Ivory Coast. This comes just a few months after another colleague and his wife had their throats cut by an intruder in front of their 4 children in Morocco, a particularly gruesome case. I remember another colleague being beaten to death in Georgia several years ago. It would be exaggerated to say that these are regular occurrences, we are in general very well protected, but clearly there are risks.

My cotton arrears project seems to run smoothly - touch wood. I have put the people of a government agency to work on an implementation plan, and have so far been pleasantly surprised by their energetic way of taking things in hand. It's a massive undertaking, luckily they have the habit of distributing cotton payments and intrants (fertilizer, seeds) in these areas. I am enjoying leafing through the nitty-gritty of accountancy of the whole operation, and just think of the quantities of beer that will flow in the poorest parts of the country before long.

All joking about beer apart, this will really provide a lot of temporary relief to close to a million people, a quarter of the population. 4 millions euros will go to no less than 114.000 planter (each feeding between 8-10 people), the poorest of the poorest. Part of them live in an area that is presently being terrorized by rebels and Presidential Guard soldiers alike. I spoke to a humanitarian aid worker today, like I have been talking to several over the past couple of weeks, and they all tell stories about the national army burning food stock and killing livestock in the villages, as a supposed punishment for support for rebels.

In the meantime it is quite cynical that the President has made his peace in Libya with one of the leaders of the recent rebellion in the North of the country, who has now come home to the capital with him last week. This so-called rebel leader has so much blood on his hands that he is soon expected to be indicted by the ICC in The Hague. But instead of extradition he may soon face …. a lucrative ministerial post.

It remains difficult to really understand this country. Recently we have been very discouraged by the levels of mismanagement, corruption and other sorts of predatory behaviour at all levels of government. But today I attended the end of a workshop by the Ministry of Finance, some sort of an internal reflexion, not organised by donors or anything, as is usually the case, but their own initiative. Whatever the shortcomings of the Ministry, I was pleasantly surprised by the harsh self-criticism and the more or less decent level of the technical discussions. Even though the place is teeming with ‘pourris’, there are still people who seem to have a genuine will to speak out and try to move the country forward. Our public finance reform project starts next week. I am not very optimistic about it yet, mainly because of my doubts about the quality and motivation of the expert team we have recruited, and who are quite unresponsive at the moment as regards my requests for information, for instance on their late arrival without prior notice. This is the kind of country that attracts all kinds of oddballs… or no, wait, wait! It attracted me!

You will have noticed that I have been remarkably quiet about my MSc studies with CeFiMS ever since I came back. It’s been really difficult to motivate myself to pick them up again. Whereas I managed last year to merrily hit the books after a 9-10 hours working day last year, I have trouble doing the same right now. I have managed to muster a few hours after work over the past two weeks, but I am supposed to to 15-20 per week. Part of it is my feeling low about being separated from the family, even though things have cleared up a bit (I'll be seeing them againin 10 days). I prefer to spend my evenings talking to A. and the kids through MSN or Skype, or to read the ever splendid Dalai Lama. I am also investing a lot again in work, working late, and in building up my informal network in the evenings. It is also going to be hard to combine studies with the regular trips I plan to take to Europe between now and September: I will not study while I am with the family. What it boils down to is that I will probably, nay almost certainly, drop the ongoing module on Public Finance Management, which completely fails to excite me at the moment (as it did last year, when I dropped it for the first time). I will reconsider during the second half of the year, as there are some interesting modules on Project Impact analysis, IMF and economic policy, etc. But I might as well do nothing of the kind and decide to simply get a life again!