Per Africam ad astra

Sentimental

2007-02-08T00:46:00.000+03:00

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!

Jacques N.

2007-02-03T01:57:00.000+03:00

A week ago I spent a weekend on a half private, half professional mission into the provinces. Our microrealisations project was to send a car to a town called B. near the Cameroonian border where a so-called ‘antenna’ run by a a local NGO accompanies local community based organisations in realising their ‘micro-projects’. My colleague PYL, the doctor who took such good care of me when I was sick in November 2005 and whom I have come to like ever more as the committed and selfless colleague he is, came along with me. I have come to believe that this microproject approach is key to whatever else we try to do in this country: get grassroots organisations involved, make sure that local initiatives are rewarded. The microprojects program finances both economic and social projets. So on our way to and in and around B. we visited: a school in the process being built, a pork farm, a carpenter’s workshop, a joint storage space for traders. Inevitable I had to meet the mayor and the prefet, both remarkably unimpressive.

One should not idealize the programme: it is not always easy to get the counterparts into mobilizing their share of the cost (in the form of construction materials, local labour, etcetera). In some cases it turns out that they have turned to other locally active donors to get that part financed by them, which to me undermines the whole concept of ownership. Furthermore, decades of development aid have had their effect on mentalities: I was quite irritated to hear the leader of the carpenter’s workshop under construction complain about a poorly manufactured door that had been purchased centrally for him by the programme’s management unit. A carpenter saying a wooden door (a gift one at that!) poses a problem for his project! I bluntly told thim that this should be the least of his worries.

We spent a few very pleasant hours in a local woman’s backyard being served homemade rhum. For a moment I had visions of myself getting killed by illegal alcohol in literally the middle of nowhere, but we were fine. Thinking back though, we must have taken a risk: the difference in destilling temperatures between methanol (poisonous, can kill/blind you) abnd ethanol is only 20C or so, and I am not sure the women, with her ramshackle destilling installation, was even aware of the difference.

Upon our return to the capital on Sunday , I heard that Jacques N., one of the drivers at the office had died of ‘fever’ after a long walk while on leave. I don’t think he was even 45, leaving behind no less than 10 children (among which 4(!) pairs of twins) with his wife, and an unclear number (between 1 and 4) of illegitimate children. Sure enough, I learnt soon afterwards that he was suffering of AIDS and had resisted treatment…. So his premature death could have been avoided had he taken his antiretroviral drugs. I also suspect that his wife must be infected, putting their children at risk of becoming orphans within the next couple of years.

I can’t say I was particularly close with Jacques but the story of his wife and children is affecting me, and I am trying to see what can be done to help them. Jacques being one of the rare locals with a relatively wellpaid job, all sorts of people are already hovering over the family in the expectation of money (his widow will receive a few months of salary). Raising money to give to the widow (hich e have already done) will not help much, she would be under tremendous pressures to ‘redistribute’. I have already decided that I will probably pay for one or two years of primary school inscription costs for the children, and I will try to mobilize colleagues to see if we cannot pay for his wife to undergo HIV testing and then establish some sort of trust fund to pay for ARV drugs for a couple of years to come so her children will have a mother for a few more years. We’ll see.

Rachel B.

2007-01-21T18:33:00.000+03:00

Yesterday we buried Rachel B., a local woman who was until July 2006 part of a support unit to the Ministry of Economy to manage European aid. She then left for Libreville in Gabon for a job with the Economic Community of central African States. She died lonely and far away from her friends and family from a burst bloodvessel in her brain at only 48 years old. After George Ng., whom I wrote about on 16 october 2005, she’s the second of the three local members of that unit to die prematurely, and her death presents another blow to the few competent national cadres of integrity this country has. She was much respected, as the massive turn-out for her funeral shows.

Last week was very difficult. The first week after coming back had been fine, it was fun to get into the routine. But tension built quickly after a few run-ins with the boss (one on me recruiting a local agent whom he did not want to manage european experts – not the first time he displays doubtful prejudices; one on the upcoming assessment and promotion exercise: I told him I saw room for improvement for its conduct, which had been far from perfect last year.) These would normally have been fairly trivial incidents of everyday office life, but the absence of A. and the children was getting the better of me for four or five days and didn’t do much good to my tolerance to other, work-related irritations, and I felt terrible. Part of the hardship of this post, I'll just have to live with it. I am feeling better again.

Good things happened as well though. I’ve started walking Sammy more regularly. Today I lost its leash somewhere high up on the hill, it must have fallen from my pocket. This meant that I had to allow the dog to walk free for the rest of the hike. I was initially nervous about him and harshly corrected him whenever he so much as looked at passers-by. Two office colleagues who had come along told me to take it easy and just let the dog do its thing, and they were right. Sammy actually listens quite well. It was a nice walk. Furthermore, yesterday was a nice and lazy day: spent all day reading Jan Siebelink’s ‘Engelen van het duister’, the sequel to ‘Knielen op een bed violen’, and equally a masterpiece on moral decay and the vagaries of human nature. Dutch literature really has a lot to offer. In the evening a colleague had arranged for dinner in the capital’s only Chinese restaurant, and we had a lovely, light-hearted evening with nice food and some good laughs among colleagues who get along well. A group of French soldiers accompanied by guitar were singing melancholic Breton and other songs, and did so quite beautifully.

Amour, the nanny who was with us for over two years, went to work with a colleague of mine after A. and the children left in June. She was fired for theft, caught red-handed, within two months. She was accused of theft very early on during our stay here, when A.'s necklace was stolen. All fingers pointed at her, but as we could not be sure it had been her (outside people had been in our house as well), we didn’t want to fire her. Maybe we should have: her reaction after having been caught by my colleague’s wife eerily resembled her behaviour two years ago with us.

I’ve started working with people of the Ministry of Rural development on a plan to pay two years of arrears (2001-2003; the cotton firms owing the money went bust) to small coton producers out of our budgetary aid. It’s a problem that I first learnt about two years ago. I immediately suggested we include it in our budgetary aid, and suffered some ridicule over it, as it had never been done before. Usually we just pay the money into the Treasury after certain conditionalities have been met (or waived…), and the government is then free to spend it, which is usually on salary arrears for its improductive state officials. These cotton producers have actually worked hard for their money and truly produced something. Moreoever the money (4 million euros) will go to the provinces for once instead of to the capital. It will not save the country, but will give some encouragement to almost 100.000 rural families in extremely poor conditions. I am happy and, silently, a little proud that I managed to push the operation through in spite of initial scepticism. It'll be a hell of a job though to actually get the money to those families, in a country riddled with corruption and highway banditry.

Sammy is getting an education

2007-01-14T14:53:00.000+03:00

Before I left for Lith in November I was getting desperate about Sammy our dog. It seemed it was uncontrollably enthusiastic, jumping up against people (thus ruining three pairs of pants of mine), and territorial in the extreme, barking and gnarling at anybody passing our entrance. Taking the dog for a walk was impossible, as it would resist going any further than 50 meters from home.
But things have changed. Sammy is coming of age, and I managed to take him on a beautiful two-hour walk. He can't be trusted yet with passers-by, so i had to keep him on the leash much of the time. Once we were on the hill behind our home I let him off the leash for an hour or so. Here's a few pictures:

Furthermore, a view fro; the hillside over the river. On the other side is the Democratic republic of Congo.
Then one of the major achievements of Chinese development cooperation in this country is ....... a soccer stadium (the eyesore in the middle of the picture). Brand new, cost about 15 million USD, no money to pay for maintenance, no soccer league to speak of. An example of supply-driven assistance if ever there was one. Very few Africans were involved in its building, plus the project made cement prices rise sky-high in the country. But hey, no strings attached, which president would look such a gift horse in the mouth?

G.

2007-01-13T15:09:00.000+03:00

First things first: here's a long overdue photo of our youngest, G. It was taken with my new toy gadget, a Nokia N73.

I add another with the three eldest taken in November. The weather was amazingly, frighteningly warm for the time of year.

My first week back on the job was not bad. I had feared that having been away for 9 weeks I would be completely out of the loop, but I feel mentally refreshed and managed to get a grip back on the major files quickly. Wrote several sour letters for the boss to our pain-in-the-butt Minister, which i enjoyed as always. Managed also to do some fairly clear thinking on a few other files. Put a few dots on i's as regards my being better informed of things, which included some friendly but straight talking to the boss, which he accepted.

Obviously, the family being split up we are now counting the months towards the end of our posting here (Summer 2008), even though A. and the children will normally come back in Summer to do our last year together. Soon we will hear more about available posts for 2008-2012. Given A.'s Hindu background, our determination to get out of the french school system and back into the Anglo-Saxon tradition, India tops our list, but we will see.

It's actually good to be back, without wanting to be euphoric about it. This is a very good time of the year: nice dry heat (up to 40 degrees Celsius) with cool nights. Apart from setting up a new study scheme for my next CeFiMS module I haven't really started studying yet; took this first week to concentrate on work and getting in touch with developments in the country again - more on those and on how the family is faring in my next postings. I have also started reading again, Peter Hoeg's 'Smilla's Sense of Snow', which is particularly good reading in the central African heat!

On second thoughts..

2007-01-11T12:04:00.000+03:00

Forget about the roots stuff I wrote. I tried in Dutch for some time, and strangely enough it was not nearly as much fun as I thought. Of course this led to procrastination, preventing me from writing neither in Dutch nor in English.

Then I left in the beginning of November to spend 9 precious weeks with A. and the children (now four!), during which time I was not able to do anything even mildly intellectual, while quickly regaining my skills in changing diapers, cooking and cleaning and trying to give my three eldest something of an education.... And here we are, back in the bush, after a four month gap.

I feel quite flattered by the fact that several friends have inquired as to why I had stopped writing and suggested I should take it up again. I feel that after four months I have lots of things to tell, and I'll try to be writing more or less regularly again.

Back to my roots

2006-09-10T17:28:00.000+04:00

Just to inform you that I have decided to continue my blog on a different site and in my native language. It is now called:

Per Africam ad astra - het vervolg

and has the exciting URL: http://www.volkskrantblog.nl/blog/5339

Why? For one reason or the other (the family's temporary move to Lith has probably everything to do with it) I feel ever more inclined to comment on or refer to things pertaining to the Netherlands. The second, and more important, reason is that after years of working and drafting in French and English my written Dutch hasn't been getting any better, or that is at least what it feels like. I may occasionally post the odd entry on this site as well, though for the time being I enjoy writing Dutch again.

Thanks for having followed this blog, and see you on the new one!

Stepping on the brakes

2006-08-27T03:41:00.000+04:00

After yesterday's post I had an extremely unpleasant night, feeling ice cold and very hot, fever, aching joints, headache, nausea, diarrhoea, and then, miraculaously, this morning the worst seemed behind me. The Coartem had worked. I had some real sleep during the day, and even ventured for a light meal in the evening with some colleagues, also to get out of the house. Take it easy tomorrow, and I should be fine by Monday, as far as I can tell. What a difference with the previous malaria episode.

Meanwhile my uncomfortable night gave me some time to think as well: after the delayed delivery of study materials, further delays because of work load at the office and now this bout of malaria I don't feel like making the extra effort of catching up in the weeks to come. Next weekend I'll leave for another four days with A. and the children, and, unlike in August, I don't want to cut back on the little time I have with the children and A.

One notion I've learned in my studies is useful: sunk cost (costs that are not retrievable whatever the decision; in this case: course fee, hours already invested) should not influence future decisions. And what's the hurry anyway: I study for pleasure. I'll prepare the 'Perspectives and Issues' exam on 29 September at leasure, and suspend this Public Financial Management course, to resume studies in February.

I decided all this after I realised that my 3rd malaria seems, again, to have been triggered by intense stress, in this case caused by the hubbub at the office last week combined with considerable work load, all on top of a certain fatigue that had set in after months of work and study. Malaria makes one aware of the importance of stepping on the brakes on time when needed. So that's what I'll do for now.

Sick

2006-08-26T00:45:00.000+04:00

Feeling miserable, aching joints, banging headache. I presume it's malaria, though a mild one (I take prophylactics every day now since my experience in November last year). Absolutely nothing interesting to tell you, I'm idly surfing the time away, too miserable to do anything useful. Thought I should let you know.

Keileuk ruften

2006-08-22T22:39:00.000+04:00

Another news clipping: CNN carries a story of people claiming that cows moo with a regional accent- cow dialects so to say. I had heard about birds, dolphins and I believe whales developing group languages, but cows actually imitating the human local dialect when mooing?

As for absorbing local language, M. and T. are also getting more streetwise at their Dutch school. Among the new words they have picked up

'kut' (one of the rudest words in Dutch meaning female sex organ; T., 5 years old, used it at home. Milan in his innocence told me he thought it meant 'middle finger', so I suspect she made the 'up yours' gesture as well - isn't that girl getting some fine education...)
'ruften' (slang for 'to fart') ;
and that most typical of Brabant words: 'keileuk' ('very nice', 'great fun') . M. used the latter two words spontaneously while talking about school with me on the phone today.

The IMF and the World Bank are in town again to check on the country's economic and financial state (improving from catastrophic to merely disastrous). In the meantime the President buys a military transport airplane and it is not quite clear where the funds have come from. We can understand however that he feels he has to do something to get his troops in the North to control the rebellion. We are also hearing about enormous signing bonuses for government members on diamond and gold exploration contracts. Now that the country has been stable for some time all sorts of investors are coming in, and many play by their own rule-book.

A most unpleasant incident on Monday: my Italian colleague, as always difficult to handle in his last week before leave, completely blew his top and chose me as his target. I had organised the drafting of our next programming document, something to which all sections have to contribute, but mine (Social-Economic section) most of all. He complained by e-mail, cc. to all, that it was late (it wasn't, but he leaves soon and finds it impossible to delegate anything to his section members), and that his section would not be able to contribute etc (his section would have to draw about 3-4 pages out of a total of appr. 70), and that he should have gotten it sooner. He got a rather sharp public rebuttal by the boss and a one-on-one by me, saying that I didn't need my professional conscience to be chaperoned by him (his remarks had been preceded by numerous similar incidents in the past). At that point he went nuts, wrote back that I didn't have any conscience at all nor respect for others etc. I was seething with anger because of the completely unjustified personal insult. After that he received a message from the boss that was as close to an official warning as one can get, telling him to behave and to go home to calm down (which he didn't). The boss, very angry himself, showed it to me later.

I did what any aspiring Buddhist should do in such a case and tried to put myself in his place. He's tired, becomes completely impossible when tired and under stress, and has a fairly lonely life as far as I can tell so no way to take some distance from work. I actually think he has a bit of a mental problem, the way he went completely out of control, screaming and apparently close to tears in his office, over something utterly trivial; I've always found him rather on the paranoid side, seeing complots, frauds and hidden agendas everywhere. These thoughts were enough to calm me down, even though the incident continues to be on my mind. It was not enough for me to get over the insult, for which I want an apology which I know I will never get. Unnerving, but on the other hand something beyond my control, so I'd better forget about it.

It is now official: I am not very happy with my CeFiMS course on Public Financial Management, which is way too hung-up on public (financial) management methods (or fads?) (accrual budgeting and accounting, budgeting by objectives etc.) which are fine for New Zealand and UK city councils but completely impossible to realise in countries at the every bottom of the development ladder. Getting the basics of public financial management right is hard enough as it is, and the basics are given short thrift in this course. I'll just try to put up with it, it's only one of the seven courses needed for my degree. Pity though, I had expected more of it. I'd better check the remaining courses for their applicability.

Having said this, I'd better hit the books again. All this blogging is mere procrastination, an art I thought I had forgotten about, but on which I am rediscovering my considerable talents.

M-a-a-a-rital bliss

2006-08-19T23:20:00.000+04:00

On BBC online: A man in Sudan was caught abusing his neighbour's goat in the middle of the night. The village elders decided that as he had used the goat as his wife, he should marry it and pay the neighbour a 50 dollar dowry. Who said there's no humor in sharia? Some way to eternal fame too.

Here's another attempt at eternal fame, also on BBC: Rule of law takes on a curious turns in the Philippines where a judge lost his case in the country's supreme court: he is not supposed to concult three mystic dwarfs in his office. 'In a letter to the court he said: "From obscurity, my name and the three mystic dwarves became immortal."'

Hail the Libyans!

2006-08-14T16:48:00.000+04:00

Somewhat less than two weeks in Lith haven’t been enough to make me return completely refreshed. Obviously it was great to be with A. and the children again, we had all missed each other a lot. R. is going very fast now, talking, mischievous. T. was difficult to handle, sweet but won’t listen and has to be put right quite harshly at times. M. doing OK. He may not be changing physically right now, but last night when we went out together for a walk I was amazed how he is maturing at the age of 7. M. and T. are looking forward to going to school on Monday, but start missing Africa too, or at least that is what they say.

We decided I would come back for one week in three weeks in September, and not wait until October. I am a bit worried about the amount of domestic work A. has to handle on her own, even though she is the last to complain and, as I said earlier, seems to be happy to be on her own. But leaving her on her own with four children as of January for M. and T. to finish the school year in Holland doesn’t seem to be such a good idea to me anymore. We’ll see.

The roots issue, or the question where we will settle down eventually, remains. We like our two-bedroom holiday cabin in Lith, but a real place for the next decades and possibly to retire with A. eventually (there, I said it: the R-word!) remains on our minds. Last Thursday A. and the children had gone to Amsterdam to the circus and I went with Peter, my friend in Oss, for a meal and a chat to Megen, a lovely old village not far from Lith. Got very excited when I saw a beautiful 3-bedroom house for sale, new but built in old style, located at pittoresque square, with a lovely view over the polders. A. talked sense into me in the evening. Moving house during a pregnancy is not her idea of a good time. Plus she wants a place big enough to host several generations in the future. Fair enough.

I did study in Holland (in libraries in Amsterdam and Oss), but not nearly as much as I should have. I remained tired throughout my time in Lith, and didn’t feel much like studying anyway. Slightly disappointed this time with the course, Public Finance Management, which is much less applicable in a development situation,or at least on my host country, than the previous one.

Tripoli on the way up to Europe wasn’t a big deal, as I only got to see the airport. The way back has been quite different though. The major disruptions which I expected due to the foiled UK plot did not affect the Libyan air company I was flying with (perhaps the fact that they used to be in the plane bombing business themselves made them less nervous? Sorry, couldn’t let this one go…) I enjoyed my 24-hours stop-over in Tripoli, even though struck by some kind of flu. I went for a walk Saturday night in the old part of town, and then to the beach front the next morning. Some impressions: big brother Khaddafi everywhere on walls and TV; almost no commercial advertisement; Hezbollah lader Nasrallah on television; clean streets; people more or less friendly, with none of the ‘hello my friend’ harassment of other Arab countries; well stocked shops, or at least where I went; lovely sweet tea with fresh mint; the sweet smell of hookahs (waterpipes) everywhere. The most impressive thing came at the end, Sunday afternoon. My hotel accepted only cash payment, and ATMs refused my credit cards. I needed another 50 euros or so to cover hotel bill and taxi ride to the airport. At just 2,5 hours before departure, and with the airport still 35 kilometers away, I was in a very difficult situation. The taxi driver, Abdurrauf, then spontaneously offered me to advance me the missing money for the hotel bill, and take me to the airport, all without even being sure my credit cards would be accepted at the airport. Of course they didn’t, and I, deeply embarassed, offered him the choice between taking some newly bought clothes or other items from my luggage, or to double the amount I owed him which I would then send to him. Without knowing me, he chose the latter. It got even more incredible when a bank manager turned up, offered to pay the driver from his own pocket and I could then send the money to him through Western Union. Apart from immensely grateful, I felt quite ashamed as well: on Saturday I had viewed the taxi driver, who had approached me at the airport, with suspicion, and now he and the bank manager were bailing me out from an impossible situation.

Even though I came back with fairly low morale, it was nice to resume work at the office this Monday morning. In spite of the inevitable frictions, we do have a pleasant team at the office. No friendships for life as far as I am concerned, but lots of good laughs, and all with a willingness to work. This being said, the boss remains his old dominant self, and I can see my role will remain under pressure. I will inevitably have to put my foot down once again before long. But that seems to become part of the routine. As long as frictions continue to be handled in a relatively good humoured way by all, I guess it remains manageable.

Homework

2006-07-30T22:30:00.000+04:00

A few hours before take-off . I will fly to Bruxelles with a stop-over in Tripoli, see A. and the children tomorrow afternoon. (even though I have just been informed that the flight is two hours late and that I will probably miss the connecting flight. O Africa!)

All in all A. and I agree that the time we were separated was easier than we expected. We talked extensively over the phone every day, and she and the children were happy in Holland. A. seems to keep up well, happy to run things on her own it seems. As for myself, I struck me recently that now I have the kind of ‘sabbatical’ I have always wanted: studying full days would have been tedious, but the combination with work is good, and I have truly enjoyed the past two months and my quiet evenings and weekends.

A productive week, and an improductive weekend. Tired as a dog, I have mostly slept since I came home Friday afternoon. The workload of the past couple of weeks together with studies are weighing heavily on me, and I don’t feel (nor do I look) particularly healthy. But I am leaving gratified and with peace of mind, which isn’t always the case when I’m going on leave.

The few remaining illusions I cherished about the diplomatic luxury life I was going to lead in Africa are now chattered: over the past seven days, I have been washing myself with a bucket of water and a plastic cup. We’ve had no running water in the morning, and only sporadically during the day. Power cuts are becoming ever more frequent, and it’s clear that the hydroelectric plant providing the capital with electricy is soon going to break down. All donor’s have known about it for years, there have been studies and more studies, but no one will move until it breaks down, causing massive humanitarian (sanitation breaking down!) problems.

I finished reading General Romeo Dallaire’s account of the Rwanda genocide. Apart from the horrific events, what struck me also was that all working for big multilateral institutions face the same problems and frustrations. The ‘we’ against ‘them’ feeling he describes when talking about HQ (as opposed to him and his team on the ground), administrative procedures, and politicians far away not taking into account the views from the field, has clear parallels with what we experience, though not with the same devastating consequences of course.

Last Friday saw another important political event in the country: Thursday late afternoon I received a phone call from State Protocol: the Head of State was to have a ‘dialogue’ with the country’s opposition, and it was imperative that all diplomats attend. In fact this ‘dialogue’was something that a committee of opposition people (= the previous regime) working all diplomatic reprsentations last week, had insisted on. They came to see us as well, and I didn’t like what I heard: they seemed to regard the armed rebellion in the North as a legitimate alternative to democratic opposition, and insisted that the President had to talk to the armed rebels. Very worrying. I told them quite sharply that a democratically elected government can only be expected to talk to those who play according to the same rules. They said that the fact that the President had been democratically elected ‘ne veut rien dire’. Imagine then that these people, when they were given the chance last Friday to speak their mind to the President in the National Assembly, in front of the nation as everything was broadcast live on radio, didn’t even show up! They had the chutzpah to declare that ‘proper protocol’ had not been followed in inviting them. They are, like the President, not in it for the sake of democracy, but for power, and they are hell-bent on getting it back, one way or the other.

To the President’s credit, it must be said that the session had real value: he spoke his mind (and confirmed that he is out of touch with some of the real problems, such as the behaviour of his army). On the other hand, he let everybody in the hall speak their minds too, and there were some very vocal critics from all walks of life who jumped at the occasion. But much of the criticism was also constructive. Again I admired the amazing eloquence of people here, in French or in the national language, no paper, straight from the heart. Following up with substance may be another matter, but they sure know how to put their thoughts to music.

I had gone to the meeting with the young French lady colleague I talked about in one of my first postings, who has become quite a presence and a much appreciated colleague at the office. We found ourselves trapped. We though we would go for at most two hours, but instead the President invited those present to intervene. The proceedings were only interrupted for ‘refreshments’ (soda and peanuts) during two massive power cuts when the lights and microphones went out. There was no programme or agenda, and we weren’t sure whether the event would go on until deep into the night, as people kept talking and talking. After 6,5 hours we simply got up left, after I saw the President yawning as well… I nodded to him in an apologetic manner, and he nodded back undertstandingly.

The two refreshment breaks in the VIP lounge of the National Assembly gave me a good opportunity to observe the President from very close up. He does not seem a very sophisticated man to me, no great talker, not much charisma. At some point I could seem him standing all alone in the middle of the room with nobody paying much attention to him. Weird for a head of State, who should really be the center of attention. He turned to me for lack of anybody better and as I was closest to him, and little of substance was exchanged. Since I had last met him he had grown a bit older and somewhat fatter, and looked tired, with bloodshot eyes (now that I come to think of it, he must have thought the same of me…). He asked who the lady was whom I had come with, and when the boss would be back from leave, that’s all.

A week ago, a new colleague arrived, a Belgian, to take over from our dysfunctional Head of Administration. Seems a nice guy. His wife has come along, and as they are Dutch speaking, she was a bit disappointed to find out that A. had left for a long time.

With more time for reflection and in-depth reading, the continent is getting under my skin little by little. That is to say, I am ever more fascinated by its problems, but also more skeptical as to solutions. Scaling down ambitions as regards the state, and stimulating things at grassroots level seems to be part of the answer. In the assignment I did for CeFiMS last Tuesday I actually wrote about the specific constraints of institution building in the context of our host country. After some hesitation (it's only a student paper, homework, after all) I have decided to share it with those interested among my readers, as it sums up quite well my own thinking on the country so far. Happy reading if you choose to, and talk to you again in a couple of weeks time.

(References to our host country have been replaced by XYZ.)

Advice on Institution Building for the XYG

1. Introduction

Background
In March 2003, the regime of President PXX, the leader of the XYZ for over 10 years, was overthrown by a rebel army led by former army general BZZ. The ensuing transitional phase, accompanied and financed by the international community, in particular the European Union, France and the United Nations, saw the drafting of a new constitution which was subsequently submitted to and approved in a popular referendum in December 2004. Legislative and Presidential elections followed, and in May 2005 Mr. BZZ was elected president in elections recognized by the international community as being free and fair. The EU resumed its aid, suspended in March 2003, in July 2005.

With some of the worst socio-economic indicators in the world, the XYZ ranks 171th among the 177 nations in the world for which data is available[1]. Most of the country's institutional infrastructure is in tatters, following years of mismanagement, corruption, under-investment, and, as the final coup de grâce, the mass pillaging of Ministries and other state institutions following army mutinies and a coup d’état between 1996 and March 2003. Public finance management is in almost complete disarray, with no expenditure controls worthy of the name, and state revenue levels from taxes and customs insufficient to even cover state officials salaries, let alone basic capital expenditure. Salary arrears since March 2003 are now at 9 months, but 40 months when arrears of previous governments are included. Graft is pervasive at all government levels, and the rule of law is poor and for many simply non-existent. With an unpaid, demotivated and increasingly undisplined army, the present government also has to face growing security problems in the north of the country due to rebel movements and fall-out from the crises in Darfur and Chad.

As things stand, few countries in the world provide as vivid an illustration as the XYZ does of Thomas Hobbes' dictum[2] that life without an effective state to preserve order (and, it should be added, the enabling framework for the provision of the basic amenities of life) is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. However, whereas the previous regime received ever less international assistance, the successful transition to a new constitutional and democratic order has won the present government much international credit. It is determined to use this momentum to address the many challenges the country is facing.
Subject and set-up of this paper

The near-total delapidation of state institutions in the XYZ provides at the same time a unique, albeit sad, opportunity for an in-depth reflection on the types and designs suitable for rebuilding the institutions of the country. The local context is to be emphatically taken into account. The present reflection is to be a necessary input for any government efforts in the domain of public sector reform, and for donors seeking to target their assistance, not least the European Commission itself.

After a reflection on the role of the state (ch. 2), the paper discusses available options for change while considering local constraints on capacity building and public sector reform (ch. 3). A set of recommendations will conclude this paper (ch. 4).

2. What (not) to expect of the state
With the present disarray of the state in the XYZ in mind, it is important to go back to the basic question of statehood and what to expect of the state and its institutions

The World Bank's 1997 World Development Report (henceforth: WDR) provides a useful starting point for the present reflections. After decades of emphasis on a more pronounced role for the market in roles and functions traditionally assumed by the state, the publication marked an important shift in the international donor community's thinking about the role of the state by giving the state a renewed importance. It quotes market failure and equity concerns as the major reasons for state intervention. The two-pronged strategy it proposes for rethinking the state is to
a. match what the state tries to do by what it can do, and
b. increase the number of things it can do capably by reinvigorating public institutions.[3]

Among the things the state can do, the WDR distinguishes between minimal, intermediate, and activist functions. It advises that countries with low state capability focus first on minimal or basic functions, that is, the provision of pure public goods such as defense, law and order, property rights, public health, macroeconomic management, and protection of the destitute. Among the intermediate functions of the state the WDR counts basic education and the provision of pensions and family allowances, functions which the present author would also recommend for inclusion in the short term reform objectives of the XYZ.[4]

Thus, it is recommended to limit the functions of the state to what it can do, which means in the case of the XYZ the basic functions mentioned above. Scarcity of qualified human resources and financial resources in the XYZ put major constraints on efforts and viability of ambitions. Donor aid, in the form of targeted budgetary aid and technical assistance, may to some extent alleviate these constraints and enable a minimum functioning of state institutions in the above key areas, but this will not be enough. At the same time, donors and government should focus a significant part of their efforts on the second of the World Bank's recommendations: the reinvigoration of public institutions, through reforms to make them work better. To see to what extent a reformulation of the types and designs of state institutions is viable is part of that effort, and the subject of the next chapter.

3. Options for change

Local context and constraints
When considering options for reform, it is essential to analyse, however succinctly, the specific context in which the intended reforms are to take place. There is a wide consensus on the importance of taking (national, cultural) context into account when introducing reforms.[5] Donors’ experiences with the XYZ appear to confirm the different set of rules to which African politics seem to play compared to many other countries in the world, especially in the West. It is useful to look at some scholarly work done in this area.

David K. Leonard[6] distinguishes two premises underlying western policy analysis and management techniques: purposive rationality (the commitment to collective, formal, organizational goals) and economic rationality (the assumption that economics is the fundamental social process and that all other human transactions can be understood in terms of it). He claims that their applicability is more limited in Africa than in the West for several reasons. One of them is the fragility of most African states, which means that for a leader, government or manager to survive, political reasoning rather than purely purposive or economic rationality may take the upper hand far more easily than in other parts of the world. This observation is closely linked to his argument that, due to the egalitarianism of pre-colonial African societies and the relatively meritocratic upward mobility in the late colonial and independence periods, African elites are more likely than other elites elsewhere in the world to have extensive patronage obligations to poorer peoples and to undergo stronger moral pressures to fulfill them.[7]

Chabal (2000: 453-4) develops the point further and blames 'neo-patrimonialism’ - clientilism in which politicians assume an as it were fatherly role to the population - for the persevering absence of development on the African continent: resources are not distributed on the basis of economic effectiveness or efficiency, but between patron and client according to non-economic norms serving only to strengthen the patron's political legitimacy.[8]

Taken together, the above elements provide an adequate description of the situation in the XYZ - one could add the further complication of different ethnic constituencies which XYZ leaders have to satisfy. They explain a number of issues such as the problem of parallel structures (the Presidency, the Prime Minister's office, individual Ministers' cabinets) all interfering with work of technical sections of Ministries; the often astoundingly 'soft' approach in proven cases of corruption and embezzlement; the tolerance of conflicts of interests of high level state officials in the sectors they work in; et cetera.

Other constraints are of a geographical nature. The XYZ shares its borders with some of the continent's most instable countries, such as Chad, Sudan/Darfur, and the RDC. Furthermore, the size of its territory (the size of France, for barely 4 million inhabitants) is almost impossible to control for its underfunded and poorly equipped army. A landlocked country, the XYZ has only one, barely viable, passage to the sea, which is a major hindrance to its economic development and adds to the isolation of the country.

Decades of salary arrears and underinvestment (see ch. 1) have undermined to a catastrophic degree morale and capacities of the various state institutions, where absenteeism, laxism, rent-seeking and corruption have become the norm. Not unlike their French counterparts, state officials are also extremely aware of their acquired rights ('acquis social') and very much prone to collective action such as strikes, which can be - as it is in France – an obstacle to reform efforts.

Options
The above caveats limit the number of viable options for in depth reform of the XYZ's state institutions.
Leaving aside options dating back to the Chinese Mandarin Empire[9], there is an academic consensus on a number of modern times 'ideal types', which include the following: rule by bureaucracy (Weber); rule by ‘scientific management’ (Public Administration - Progressivists); rule by special institutions and regulation (New Deal); rule through entrepreneurial spirit (Reinventing Government); and rule by a combination of markets and managerialism (New Public Management).[10]

Except for the already existing, though dysfunctional, system of rule by bureaucracy (on which more below), these ideal types, if applied in their entirety, do not seem viable because:
--> either the method requires high quality human resources (e.g. monitoring, evaluation, contracting skills) that go far beyond the human and institutional capacities situation in the XYZ’s state institutions; or
-->the method as a whole presupposes a market environment infinitely more functional than is the case in the XYZ, which counts at the moment no more than about 30 registered (and tax paying) commercial enterprises on the whole of its territory.

Instead it seems more useful to take the present situation as a starting point. As a former French colony, the XYZ has a state apparatus very much based on that of its former colonizer. Its organisation is, on the surface, strictly Weberian[11]. However, procedures serve more often than not as mere opportunities for rent-seeking. Senior officials are replaced on a continuous basis, which makes hierachy a fluid concept in most state institutions: many ex-Ministers take up lower ranking posts after a regime change or government shake-up while often informally retaining their previous authority among colleagues and even with the new Ministers they are supposed to serve. Officials close to the President and his circle are most unlikely to be subject to the same disciplinary pressures as their peers.

These elements concur with Peterson, who finds, as did Leonard (1987), that hierarchy is ‘simply not effective’ in African bureaucracies, organizational management being limited to the span of personal rather than procedural control[12]. Instead he proposes, as did Leonard, to turn a weakness into a strength by using the imperfection of Africa’s vertical structures for the promotion of horizontal networks or ‘microhierarchies’. Evidence from Kenya suggests that such horizontal networks, ideally reinforced with appropriate information technology, can help create ‘pockets of productivity’ by uniting motivated and competent individuals from different services.[13]

Whereas purely market-oriented solutions are not easily imaginable in view of the poorly developed commercial sector of the XYZ, some elements of the above-mentioned redesigning options (as opposed to their wholesale application), in particular especially the contracting out of activities such as envisaged under New Public Management, may hold some promise[14]:
--> For the social sectors it would be conceivable to outsource activities (from the provision to the oversight of certain public goods such as health care and education) to non-profit non-state actors. In practice these will often include international non-governmental organisations, but the inclusion of local NGOs in partnerships should be encouraged to build local capacity.
--> Other activities could be contracted out if they are labour-intensive (labour is cheap in the XYZ) and do not require high levels of skill. For these the market situation in the XYZ may actually be sufficiently developed or it will be able to adapt to it relatively quickly. Examples of appropriate activities for contracting out which are now undertaken (or not…) by the state, include rural road maintenance and urban sanitation.
--> Finally, if proper tendering procedures could be guaranteed, one could envisage contracting out certain state activities particularly prone to rent-seeking and corruption, the correction of which would have immediate significant effects on the State's coffers and hence its capacity to honour its internal (salaries and pensions) and external (debt servicing) financial commitments. Examples customs operations in the XYZ, or inspections in the diamond producing and trading sectors.

The most logical approach would seem to be to set out by addressing those sectors and area's where positive results will have an immediate result for the population at large, thus strengthening the government's credibility and hence improving political stability[15], while at the same time strengthening the state's financial health and thus operational capacities, as well as its international credibility – not least with international financial institutions - in terms of governance. Proper care should however be taken right from the start by government and donors alike to reinforce institutional capacity for the contracting and monitoring of the different activities.

Incremental change
In view of such characteristics as the country's political instability and the perceived need for consensus, it does not seem feasible to introduce radical changes across the board at once. Experiences from countries as different as New Zealand and China suggest that ‘big bang produces change, but, beyond change, results appear unpredictable’[16], and that far reaching reforms have a better chance of acceptance and hence success even in authoritarian states when introduced incrementally[17].

4. Conclusions and recommendations
It seems evident that the XYZ, in the delapidated post-crisis state it is in, does not easily fit any of the historical ideal types of governance and their respective recommendations. Realism, perhaps modesty, as to the possible extent and speed of reforms, and at the same time a firm determination first and foremost to get the basics right, seem of paramount importance. In line with one of the recommendations of the WDR, ambitions as to what the state ought to do, should be adapted to what the state can do.

Given the the country's tumultuous recent past and it present fragility as a nation, the leadership is as yet in no position to jeopardize political stability and social peace. Experience in other countries suggests that one should have no illusions about breaking up neo-patrimonialism and informal networks that go across institutions and hold back the development of the Central African Republic as they do in so many other developing nations.

Nevertheless measures can be taken to contain some of its most detrimental consequences, by applying, in an incremental way, some of the market-oriented solutions propounded by the New Public Management philosophy. These could be applied to certain government services where reforms can be expected to have an immediate impact on the population's wellbeing and the State's financial health (we mentioned the example of customs services and the public health sector).

In the meantime, government and donors should strenuously work on the second of the WDR recommendations: increase the number of things the state can do by reinvigorating public institutions through investment in human resources and institutional infrastructure. In this context, it is suggested to seek the creation of productive horizontal networks involving known competent and motivated individuals within the existing bureaucratic structures.

Sources

Literature

Chabal, Patrick (2002) ‘The quest for good government and development in Africa: is NEPAD the answer?’ in: International Affairs, Vol.78, No.3, pp. 447-454
Cohen, Theodore (1987) ‘‘Defeudalizing’ the Civil Service’, chapter 20 in Remaking Japan: The American Occupation as New Deal, New York, The Free Press, pp. 378-397
Flynn, Norman (2002) Explaining New Public Management: the Importance of context, Chapter 4 from New Public Management: current trends and future prospects, edited by Kate McLaughlin, Stephen Osborne and Ewan Ferlie, London, Routledge, pp. 57-76
Flynn, Norman (2004) ‘Public Policy & Management - Perspectives and Issues’, course reader for the MSc programme Public Policy and Management, London: The Centre for Financial and Management Studies (CeFiMS), University of London
Gauld, Robin (2000) ‘Big Bang and the Policy Prescription: Health Care Meets the Market in New Zealand’, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Vol. 25, No. 5, 2000, pp. 815-844
Larbi, George A. (1999) ‘The New Public Management Approach and Crisis States’, UNRISD Discussion Paper No. 112, September 1999
Leonard, David K. (1987) ‘The Political Realities of African Management’, in: World Development, Vol. 15, No. 15, pp. 899-910
Peterson, Stephen (1997) ‘Hierarchy Versus Networks: Alternative Strategies for Building Organizational Capacity in Public Bureaucracies in Africa’, chapter 6 from Mirilee Grindle (ed.), Getting Good Government: Capacity Building in the Public Sectors of Developing Countries, Harvard Institute for International Development, Harvard University, pp. 157-176
Schick, Alan (1998) “Why Most Developing Countries Should Not Try New Zealand’s Reforms.” World Bank Research Observer 13(1):123-131
N.N. ‘The Evolving Role of the State’, Chapter 1 of the World Development Report 1997, Washington D.C: World Bank (referred to as ‘WDR (1997)’)
Weber, Max (1922, translated 1968) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, part III, chap. 6, pp. 650-78
Wei, Shang-Jin (1995) ‘From Marx to Markets: China’s Economic Reforms as a Megapolicy’, Chapter 9 of Great Policies: Strategic Innovations in Asia and the Pacific Basin, edited by John M Montgomery and Dennis Rondinelli, Westport, Praeger, 1995, pp. 151-159

Website
Human Development Index for the [XYZ] (2003 figures): http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/cty/cty_f_CAF.html

[1] See UNDP Human Development Index figures (Sources).
[2] in his treatise Leviathan (1651), quoted in WDR 1997, p.19.
[3] WDR (1997) pp. 25-28
[4] The other state functions formulated in the WDR (1997) pp. 26-27 such as environmental protection, regulating monopolies, financial regulation and consumer protection (all classed as 'intermediate functions’) as well as coordinating private activity (an 'activist state function') seem for the moment less relevant, or at any rate unfeasible in the context of the XYZ (apart from some isolated cases such as a recent successful initiative by the Ministry of Agriculture to revive parts of the cotton sector). They should however be retained as objectives in middle and long term planning and programming by government and donors.
[5] To name but a few: Flynn (2002); Leonard (1987), Peterson (1997) and Chabal (2002) for Africa; Larbi (1999) for NPM in crisis states in general; Schick (1998) for NPM (in particular in a health sector reform context) for development countries,; and Cohen (1987) for the transposition of Progressivist Public Administration to the post-WW-II Japanese context.
[6] Leonard (1987), pp. 900-1.
[7] The same point, ‘social pressures’, is made by Peterson (1997) p. 159, who quotes Robert Price’s work on Ghana. But in fact, the phenomenon can be testified to by almost anybody working on African public sector reform, including the present author.
[8] Chabal (2000) pp. 453-4.
[9] Confucius’ virtue and trust based rule as opposed to Han Fei Tzu's rule by incentives and punishments according to measurable criteria, cf. source texts in Flynn (2004), Unit 3, pp. 4-8. The reason why these ancient types are left aside is the lack of documentary evidence as to their precise application and effectiveness, rather than for a supposed lack of usefulness. In fact, several elements in Han Fei Tzu’s philosphy, in particular the measurability of performance, can also be found in more modern practices, in particular the Progressivist Public Administration of the 1920s, and more recently, in the managerialist elements of the New Public Management philosophy.
[10] As summarized by Flynn (2004) Unit 8, p. 10.
[11] As expounded in Weber (1922) pp. 650-78.
[12] Peterson (1997) pp. 165-169.
[13] In fact, this practice can also be witnessed in the XYZ, where such informal networks are at the basis of the few ministerial initiatives that do produce results. Examples include the Ministry of Agriculture’s recent successful efforts to breathe new life into the XYZ’s ailing cotton sector; and the informal working group preparing monitoring missions of the WB and the IMF. The examples are not many, though.
[14] But see Larbi (1999) pp. 27-31 for a clear view of the risks involved in contracting out in developing and transitional economies.
[15] This coincides with Leonard's advice (1987, p. 904) to donors not to ignore African leaders' need to honour commitments to their constituencies but to put it to good use instead.
[16] Gauld (2000) p.836 on the New Zealand health sector reform experience.
[17] Wei (1995)

Gratified

2006-07-25T23:29:00.000+04:00

I've just submitted my second assignment for my Public Policy and Management course, 46.5 minutes before the 25 July midnight deadline (yes, I've been cutting it a bit thin this time). It's an 8-page (2688 words, excl. bibliography) piece on institutional reform in my host country, taking local conditions and most of all local constraints (corruption, weak institutional capacity, hopeless public finances) into account. Whereas I considered the previous assignment as a bit of a joke (turning my home town into some sort of a criminal area), I felt quite serious about this one, even though learning objectives formed a sort of straight jacket when writing: I had to use 'ideal types' for institutional reform, but as the 7th poorest country in the world, our host country doesn't really fit any of them. But it was an excellent day, pure concentration and intellectual flow.

I am now tapering off with a well-deserved glass of whisky, still feeling the adrenalin of getting the piece ready before the deadline. Pure bliss, deep satisfaction. I actually think I did allright. The good mark for my first assignment has whetted my appetite for more.

The next course has already started: Public Financial Management - Planning and Performance., which will be less philosophical and more 'hands on' I guess than the course for which I have just submitted my second assignment, Public Policy and Management- Perspectives and Issues.* It is based on the work of that great teacher whose course on PFM I did in Johannesburg, and whom I am still in e-mail contact with (hi Perran!).

Puppy Dog, the young colleague working in my section, is also taking the Public Financial Management course. He has become something of a social problem among colleague since his arrival. No social capacities whatsoever, an oaf. Whereas he irritates the hell out of me as soon as he comes into my office, I actually find myself sometimes defending him in front of my Italian colleague, who is really pretending to be the professional and moral conscience of the Delegation, it seems. F... him.

I talk to A. and the children every day. Yesterday was the first time that both M. and A. were crying over the phone because they miss me. It's been six weeks since we last saw each other, and that's too long. I'll see them next Monday, two weeks off (apart from studies), lovely. Little by little A. is making progress in her battle with Dutch telecom company KPN. She finally managed to get a fixed telephone line to our holiday home, next week ADSL I hope. And then we should be able to talk to each other face to face trhough Skype, even though nothing beats cuddling the kids and A. Just a few more days.

* I honestly think CeFiMS should do something about the titles of its courses. Who would ever take a course with the utterly nondescript title 'Perspectives and Issues' on a MSc transscript seriously?!

A Pyrrhic victory

2006-07-22T14:00:00.000+04:00

The combination of being in charge of the office and having my normal operational duties produced some insanely busy days, which culminated in high tension yesterday and utter exhaustion afterwards. Never a dull moment indeed. Just to give you an idea of the daily nitty-gritty of my work here, I’ll give you a description of the past few days:

On Thursday, apart from signing off at 50-centimeter pile of payment orders and assigning another half meter of incoming correspondence, I
- received our two ‘field customs officers’ who are at the end of their mission and who in four months have been able to identify a veritable Augias' stable of mismanagement, incompetence and blatant corruption in the country’s customs services. It will take more than one Hercules to clean it up….
- negotiated in a long intense phone call support from HQ in our standoff with the Minister who was still blocking the cooperation management unit, and who had tried to bypass us by directly calling our political desk in Brussels. I was to have a meeting with him the next day on the issue, following the tough letter I wrote to him earlier this week. A good thing that our desk has finally woken up, but how sad that it took the Minister’s call, rather than our own earlier urgent messages on the matter, which basically met with a ‘sort it out yourselves’on his part;
- finished slogging through the 57 CVs sent by HQ to choose from for the recruitment of an extra staff member for my section. The first 50 candidates had been ‘shortlisted’ through panel interviews by Brussels colleagues, which had produced some curious results – one of the examples being a Czech candidate with 6 years experience as a tourist guide for foreigners in Prague, who had qualified this activity as experience as ‘external aid management’, and who had gotten away with it at his panel interview! Only 4 had actually indicated to be willing to work in our host country, and only 16 out of 50 had any sub-Saharan countries at all on their list. Using these examples in an e-mail to HQ helped secure us another seven CVs, among which the one we had hoped for, the perfect candidate, in fact the person who had worked on the job before. But I’ve lost a lot of time on this. I think my employer has a recruitment issue (oops, it recruited me as well…. Somehow Groucho Marx comes to mind, or was it Woody Allen: ‘I would never join a club that would have me as a member’).
- had to call to order a local staff member who had thought it was OK to declare through internal e-mail his comprehension for Hitler’s crimes against the Jews after having seen photos on the Internet of what Israeli bombardments have done these days to the Lebanese population on the ground. (I watched the pictures myself on the website in question and they are indeed horrifying. On the other hand I am sure Israelis will be able to show you similar pictures of the effects of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rockets or Hamas suicide bombers on their citizens.) The man, whom I value quite highly, had clearly not quite understood the extent of the Holocaust taboo in the Western world. I guess it figures a lot less prominently in African school curriculums, the continent having its own fair share of genocides large and small. After a very harsh going-over he apologized profusely to all by e-mail and I believe he was sincerely sorry for what he had written.
- tried, rather unsuccessfully, to calm my Italian colleague, who said he was personally aggrieved by the incident claiming he was half Jewish (there was a bit of auto-victimisation in that, I you ask me), and went to throw a wobbly in the local colleague’s office, said he would denounce him to HQs if it happened again, etc.

- discovered with the contracts and finance section that a project’s bank account requiring the double signatures of the government and the head of our office, had been emptied into the National Treasury account and closed, without us knowing , let alone approving it! Technically an act of embezzlement pur et dur. We formulated a letter that would serve as ‘small change’ for my talks with the Minister the next day.
- organised an informal welcome lunch – Dutch treat - in a restaurant for a newly arriving colleague on Saturday; had to fend off attempts by our local trade unionist, who confirmed his well-deserved reputation of a ‘bouffeur’, a free-loader, to get this financed on the office’s ‘representation costs’ rather than make people pay themselves (even though I had told them drinks would be on me, and I had chosen the cheapest sanitarily viable restaurant in town so that local personnel could afford it too). I then had to intervene in the internal e-mail row that ensued when the fiery French lady from my section seized the chance to lash out at the trade unionist, whom she despises and is ever happy to pick a fight with, which caused the trade unionist to come to me to complain about her. I laughed it all off, telling them how I loved the broadness of my job description, which ranges from doing high politics and tracking down suspected fraud, to managing a kindergarten all on the same day!
- Managed to get home before 1900, called A. and the children, procrastinated, procrastinated some more, managed to do an hour and a half of half-hearted studying. Read some more in Romeo Dallaire’s book on the Rwanda genocide, went to sleep at midnight, very tense about the upcoming meeting.

On Friday
- got up utterly spent. Couldn’t get out of the driveway as a rickety old removal truck had chosen to break down and block the road right there. The people repairing it seemed in no hurry whatsoever. A driver came to pick me up to go to work,
- the usual signing off and assigning correspondence. Prepared my meeting with the Minister,

- talked with our Head of Administration who, in his one-but-last week before his departure and clearly inebriated (with a happy smile on his face) at 0830 in the morning, came to inform me that his army friends had seen not hundreds but thousand of rebels in the North,
- went to the Minister at ten o’clock with my Italian colleague, to find the Minister with the new French Embassador: my secretary hadn’t passed the message…
- went back at 11 alone (Italian had another meeting, and didn’t feel like going to battle anyway, I suspect). And lo and behold, two hours later I came out of the meeting and basically had made him swallow almost everything we wanted! It took a lot of cajoling, to-and-froing, complaints from the Minister, but the atmosphere remained mostly friendly and polite, though tense. The cooperation management unit can go ahead along the lines we insisted on. A Pyrrhic victory, as it took us 11 months to make him give in, thus delaying the project by almost a year and cause serious trouble for our cooperation during the next year. Also, I am sure the Minister will try to come back on his word in the subsequent formulation phases of the project. But so far I am rather pleased to have pulled it off, and about the fact that it was my hardline advice to draw the line here that had paid off.

By the way, the suspected fraud turned out to be more innocent than it looked, or so we hope. Upon the orders of the IMF to unify all government funds into a single Treasury account, the Minister had made some phone calls to the local banks and told them to make a blanket transfer of all accounts. Lots of double signature accounts had thus been emptied and closed. WE've given them until next Friday to clean up the mess.
The rest of the day I paid the price for all the tension of the last couple of days. I barely managed to write a short report on the meeting and debrief the boss by phone. I was told that I looked like a living corpse, and I certainly felt like one. Perhaps that explains the successful meeting: I must have looked to him like somebody with nothing left to lose ... :-) Went home at 1530 and crashed, like the Friday before. Slept until 2000 got up to go and have a bite with Jean (my bush buddy) in a restaurant together with other friends, went back home at 2230, read some more Dallaire, fell asleep around midnight and woke up at 1140 this morning, still feeling very tired. The new colleague, whom I had organised the lunch for, missed his plane, so I’ve got the day to myself.
My second CeFiMS assignment, due Tuesday, is staring me in the face. Right now I do not feel quite capable of producing an intelligently argumented and well-referenced 8-page piece on ‘policy transfer on building organisation capacity to the leadership of a country just having gone through a relatively bloodless coup’. I hope last-minute adrenalin will help me through it this time.
Tired, but gratified. One more week and I’ll be with the family again.

Why I will go to heaven

2006-07-18T03:04:00.000+04:00

My studies are progressing. It’s a tough call, studying evenings and weekends, and easily 20 hours a week outside working hours, but so far I have only skipped study due to a few days of illness. Most of the time it is interesting, and often just fascinating. A lot less blabla than I feared, although some articles inspired me to set up a P.O.T.O (Ponting Out The Obvious) and even a BS (male bovine excrement) ranking. Furthermore there are limits to the volumes of reading on New Zealand’s health sector reforms (not such a great success if you ask me) one can stomach, but on the whole the material is very rich. It acquaints me with some absolutely fascinating issues, such as the cultural issues behind African governance issues (a polite way of saying: ‘why is Africa so corrupted’- oops sorry!). I used to think (let’s say 10-20 years ago, when I was still high up in the arcane fields of Classics and Ancient Philosophy (which I still long for, don’t get me wrong) that public administration (in Dutch: bestuurskunde, I guess) couldn’t possibly be interesting. I was wrong, as I was about economics. I now find that understanding the world one lives in through economics, political sciences, public management, etc., is just fascinating. It is ephemerous though: an article written 20 years ago must be very good indeed if it is not to be regarded as obsolete. When I was working on the PhD-thesis-that-I-never-finished-thank-you-for-reminding-me, one of my main sources was a book (Doxographi Graeci by Diels) published in 1870! At some point I will go back to it or something like it (Sanskrit, or Buddhist studies), but right now I enjoy studying and getting a bird's eye view on what I see and experience every day.

Africa figures a lot in this course. Small wonder: the continent seems to be one big ‘how not to’ guide to public management, although this means that there is a lot of scope for improvement too (not such a bad attempt at optimism, is it?). Perversely, it makes me kind of sceptical as to what we are doing in public finance reform here. If there’s one thing we haven’t taken into account it is the cultural factor, apart from more pressure and more tough talk on the ‘fight against corruption’. One fascinating insight I have learnt is that actually, whereas Westerners tend to see corruption (the abuse of one’s official position for personal gain) and nepotism as something immoral, for Africans it is absolutely immoral not to help your friends and family when you’re in a position to do so. It all depends on context. It is very dangerous not to look after your friends especially in fragile states, where one’s only basis to fall back on are the people you help and have helped. It is easy for us to be principled when there are massive safety nets to catch us when we fall. Right here you can simply die. When the President of this country declares his desire to fight corruption, while his relatives and friends are helping themselves lavishly to the country’s resources (diamonds mainly), he may not be completely faking it. He might actually have an idea of the bigger picture while having to keep an eye on his personal survival as well. As I have said before, we should perhaps not look at the issue of corruption from a strictly moral viewpoint (although most people here also agree that developing too big an ‘appetite’ is wrong) but mainly from the economic point of view: corruption and nepotism are economically inefficient, and are therefore to be fought against as ruthlessly as possible (excluding perhaps, at least for the time being, the Chinese option: public execution). Unless you don’t even buy into the maxim of economic equity, or the right of all not to live in poverty.

The above should have sufficed to bore you witless. However, should you still be reading this, I can inform you that Bernard, my diamond cutting and trading friend, was given back his diamonds and his diamond cutting factory was unsealed again. He didn’t have to pay his 1500 euro fine. Instead, they raised it to 6000 euros....

I listened to Bush’ glitch to Blair during the G8 meeting (remember I have ADSL now). They’re all taking about Bush’ comments, using the s- word. We knew that Bush was and is a straight talking hick of limited academic capacities (though no fool, far from that), and his blind support for Israel comes as no surprise whatsoever. His comments on Syria being able to stop Hezbollah in their tracks actually made sense, I think. However, I thought Blair’s grovelling and submissiveness were so much more embarassing, and the real revelation of this open mike incident.

The French have sent jet fighters to this country to help out with the fight against the rebellion in the North. Or so I thought, and so the Ministry of Defence declared. But apparently all they did was make a 20-minute detour from their flight from N’Djamena in Chad, where they are stationed. Last Friday they flew low over the capital making a lot of noise and messing up our electrical equiment, then flew back to N’Djamena. But hopefully the message hit home with some that the French will support the government.

I am in charge of the office for three weeks, the boss is on leave though he checks his e-mail twice a day. I decided last Friday not to go to the Quatorze juillet reception at the French Embassy to represent my employer, as I didn’t feel particularly well. Instead I went home, completely exhausted, and crashed for 6 hours straight, in a deep sleep full of unpleasant dreams. Work and studies taking their toll, plus being away from A. and the children. I hope there won’t be any fall-out from my absence at that reception, us being the biggest donor in town. But I just couldn’t bring myself to wait hours and hours in the sun doing small talk. The President had been invited, and that’s usually a guarantee for hours and hours of waiting. This time it wasn’t so bad apparently, he arrived only 40 minutes late, and the ceremony took only 1,5 hours longer than expected… I think I did the right thing, but I may not be the stuff true diplomats are made of.

The weekend wasn’t great. I continued to be tired, studied nevertheless, went for dinner Saturday night at a colleague’s place, had a very good time & too much of his Albanian’s father in law's homemade plum brandy & a hangover the next day. More study, pouring rain all day, missed A. and the children. Two more weeks to go. Then there were constant power cuts, and no running water – I went unshowered all day today, and I wasn’t the only one at work, as far as I could tell (and smell..).

As regards my self professed talent for writing nasty letters, there’s a big one coming up: our main interlocutor, Minister of Planning etc., keeps resisting a simple project management unit to help him, and us, in managing the major aid flows we’re trying to direct to this country. I have written a letter that, if approved by the boss, will lead us into a new fight. It was coming anyway, so better have it now. Raz-le-bol, plein le cul. Amazing how the bloated ego of one man can do so much damage to a country.

Now, as to why I will go to heaven:

I seem to have managed, indirectly, but by hammering on the issue internally, to force our security firm’s director to sort out his employers’ pension rights, on which he was cheating. One of our guards came to thank me personally for that.

Ever since I arrived I have always had a hunch that the belief in sorcery and witchcraft in this country is an enormous problem in terms of human rights, gender (mainly women are affected) and the rule of law (almost no proof required to get somebody in prison, hearsay suffices). I told a recent mission of judicial reform experts about my concerns (not shared by the boss, ‘qui a trente ans d’Afrique’, and doesn’t think this is something worth pursuing, Africa being what it is). But upon their return from the provinces they confirmed that in fact the witchcraft issue is one of the major problems in the country’s judicial system. They brough back some shocking stories, and pictures, of clearly mentally retarded people in prison having ‘confessed’ to having eaten their victims’ hearts etc. The experts said they were going to make a big deal of it in their final report, which will serve as a basis for judicial reforms in the near future in this country (or so we hope). I should have no illusions though: many of these women are better off even in the infernal conditions of the local prisons here: there are numerous and recent cases of villages where they buried such women alive…. But perhaps, just perhaps, it sets in motion an awareness, a doubt. If only we could get witchcraft out of the Penal Code, that would be a start. And I do believe that I have had a role of sorts in getting the issue on the agenda.

Morale's up again

2006-07-04T21:21:00.000+04:00

Morale’s up again. Still the occasional cramp, but it helps when you’re no longer spending significant parts of the days on a toilet or in bed feeling miserable and feverish. I’ll have some considerable catching up to do as regards studies, but it may make me a little more efficient as to digesting the materials: I’m trying to do it all perfectly, perhaps I should aim for just OK. By the way, I got my first assignment back, with an excellent mark ('Distinction'). Feels good.

Don’t worry about me. In spite of all the ranting recently I am fine. In my own way, I do enjoy the experience of working here. The things that happen are sometimes larger than life, and require considerable amounts of cynicism and black humour to cope with, but there’s never a dull moment, and that in itself is enough to keep me feeling privileged to do what I do.
This being said, it looks like the financial reform programme which I consider essential for anything else in this country, went up in smoke today, at least for the time being, due to incompetence in the Ministry.

I am still involved in a heavy debate through e-mail with perfidious Albion trying to wriggle its way out of the penalty clause (2 months rent) in the rental contract for our house. They are clearly uncomfortable with the fight I am putting up. Little by little things are moving, moving my way that is. Once we have a decision, I may publish some extracts from the correspondance. Either they pay up, or we go to court. Or, well, perhaps, nothing happens, they don’t pay penalties, I don’t sue. If push comes to shove, I actually don’t think I would really press the matter as far as going to court. I merely enjoy the verbal fight and the subtle psychological and diplomatic game.

Pity me!

2006-07-02T21:21:00.000+04:00

Here's a picture I took in 2004. I like it. It's optimistic somehow.

Personally I am in a slightly less optimistic mood. I have been struck by a stomach flu since Thursday afternoon, so for four days I haven't ventured any further than a 10-second dash from the nearest toilet. It's quite a nasty one, including massive headaches and aching joints. A test on Friday for malaria, my biggest fear, was negative, fortunately. For four days I haven't been able to do much, let alone anything of use. Not very good for studies, and I can hardly afford 4-day gaps in my study rythm.

At first I though the stomach cramps were stress related. I feel we're trying to do too much with too few human resources at the office. For months I have had the feeling of running after things instead of being fully in control. Things have been so busy that last week I didn't even have time to sift through some 50 CVs for candidates for a vacancy in my section, which would help us cope more easily with the workload.... I try to be firm and not to give in to the pseudo-solution of making longer days, but that isn't exactly helpful for one's peace of mind either. Add to that my continuing unease with the way some things are run at the office and a sense of frustration with the blockages we experience with our government interlocutors, and you have a pretty complete picture. The boss told me last Friday to be more cynical in these things: if things don't work, too bad. He is probably right, but I haven't reached that stage yet. Here you see a country going down the drain, and yet a Minister with an ego that doesn't quite match his capacities, is holding up for almost nine months a project crucial for the implementation of a host of others, for some ego-related reasons.

So far, being away from the A. and the children has been bearable, as they are doing fine. But being home alone sick is not great for morale. I talked to my friend Peter today through Skype (works perfect) and he told me to write a bit on my blog to make me feel better. So here I am, wallowing in self-pity.

Just finished a book by Ahmadou Kourouma on a child-soldier in West-Africa. Harrowing. I wonder if things could get as bad as that here. Started reading I am Charlotte Simmons, by one of my favourite writers Tom Wolfe. I haven't read much on Buddhism recently, apart from something by a Western author a little too self-important to my taste. I have found it difficult to concentrate on spiritual things lately, too much stuff going on. It'll come when the time is right again. The Dalai Lama was in Brussels recently, gave lectures and all. I regretted not being there.

ADSL = more pics

2006-06-29T00:44:00.000+04:00

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

2006-06-27T22:28:00.000+04:00

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

2006-06-26T22:29:00.000+04:00

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

2006-06-12T13:05:00.000+04:00

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

2006-06-10T19:53:00.000+04:00

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

2006-06-08T12:41:00.000+04:00

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

2006-06-06T21:24:00.000+04:00

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

2006-06-01T21:30:00.000+04:00

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 ;)

More on Johannesburg

2006-04-30T08:06:00.000+04:00

I am on my way back after a long week in Johannesburg, writing this post from the business lounge in Nairobi airport, killing time on a 5-hour transit. The course on Public Financial Management was pretty good, with an entertaining and highly iconoclastic (anti World Bank) trainer. Quite difficult subject matter. I don't understand how colleagues can work on budgetary aid and institutional capacity building without specialized knowledge of PFM. We keep repeating the mantra of 'good governance' to our partner countries, but few of us know exactly what we're talking about. It's not only about democracy and anti-corruption.

A. did indeed arrive safely in Holland, but had her driver's license stolen on Schiphol airport, which meant no rental car. Her brother, as so often, helped us out by lending her his own car for two weeks. She told me she feels much better now that she's out of the oppressive heat of our host country.

Even though Jo'burg is said by some to be the most unpleasant place in South Africa, I was still quite impressed by it. Clearly there are massive social problems (unemployment, AIDS), resulting in horrendous crime and crime rates. But they have come a long way since apartheid. I enjoyed talking to black South Africans (taxi drivers for instance) who often are amazingly multilingual, as South Africa now has 11 official languages. Soweto was surprisingly middle class in some parts, apart from the misery of the squatter camps of course. Other parts, such as Sandton and others, are simply filthy rich and very beautiful. Definitely a country to come back to.

I just finished reading a book by an Australian woman Susan MacDonald, Holy Cow, about her adventures in the spiritual supermarket that is India. I liked it a lot. Bought some other books in Sandton as well, one of them Coetzee's 'Disgrace' & a history of South Africa. In the meantime we have started shipping books back to Holland. We don't want them to end up in looters' hands, something that happened to the belongings of several expats during troubles in 2002 and 2003.

Jo'burg for friends

2006-04-23T20:15:00.000+04:00

I left yesterday morning on an eleven-day trip to South Africa for a training course on Public Financial Management. I had been looking forward to it, even though I played it cool with colleagues, saying that a course in Brussels would really have suited me better… In the meantime I was having visions of fine dining, South African wines, safari day trips…. I landed safely with both feet on the ground the day before my departure when I received an e-mail with a massive package of ‘light reading’ for the weekend, to be discussed on day 1 of the course. So I have spent several hours now slogging my way through a curiously passionate article about the pros and cons of traditional line-item budgeting… This, by the way, is the stuff I will spent four full months on in the course of the MSc degree studies that will start end of May.

I arrived in Johannesburg (Jo’burg for friends) this morning, after the usual torture of a sleepless night flight. It’s been quite a trip from our host country’s capital. First a short flight to Douala, Cameroon, spent a day in a hotel, then night flight to Nairobi. Kenyatta Airport struck me as quite sophisticated, but then again, I am easily pleased. I marvelled at the phonetics of the Swahili that I heard spoken on the airport intercom, until I realised it was a Kenyan lady doing her utmost on some flight announce;ents in French. But I ded hear real Swahili too, and thought it sounds quite beautiful. It was great to see it written everywhere, also in the plane: choo - lavatory; inatumika – occupied; kutoka – exit; kwa usalama wako – for your safety.

In fact I am always relieved to see any place in Africa that seems more dynamic, organised and self-confident than our host country. Douala fits that bill, and so does Nairobi. But South Africa seems in a different league altogether, something I knew of course, but the contrast is particularly stark when coming straight from one of the least developed countries in the world. I will write down some more impressions in the days to come.

A. and the children will leave tonight for Holland. I hope she’ll be all right.

Update on kids

2006-04-20T23:15:00.000+04:00

M. and T. received their Easter school reports. Progress for both, but nothing spectacular. T. is happy, social, not particularly concentrated or paying attention. Well, she’s only four after all. I am happy with her progress socially, it is indeed remarkable how much she has changed over the past year, from slightly obstinate and very bossy to much more attentive, also to her brothers, especially R. (she will of course duly tease, harass, pinch, and hit her elder brother..). I had expected much worse for M. given his recent obstinacy, but he is doing fine, apart from his atrocious handwriting and occasional lack of interest. Strange: he doesn’t copy words or sentences correctly, even when they are straight in front of him, but continues phonetic spelling. I don’t think he’s dyslectic or anything, as he is quite consistent in his phonetic spelling. I rather think it is a consequence of being confronted with several languages at a young age. Or, quite simply, he just couldn’t care less. I feel reassured by his lively interest in various subjects though and his creativity in thinking up ideas. Recently he created his own scuba diving equipment – a plastic bottle with a hose in it and a rope to attach it onto his back. Of course, like any father when thinking of his children, I would love to believe that he is a budding genius waiting to be discovered. But perhaps we should more realistically face the distinct possibility that he is just lazy, full stop. Time will tell. Right now we want him first and foremost to be bien dans sa peau, and apart from his very mixed feelings about school he is a healthy and balanced kid, with a bit of a temper. Last anecdote in this kids’ catalogue: A. got angry with M. and T. recently and gave them an earful. T. was in tears. R. walked up to A., gave her a very angry look (he still doesn’t really talk) and a big slap on the knee, then walked to his sister to hug and comfort her. I was so proud of him when A. told me!

Crisis management the French way

2006-04-20T21:54:00.000+04:00

As the office’s security coordinator, I went to a security meeting at the French Embassy yesterday. A right mess, chaotic, no agenda, long anecdotes from expats who have lived here for a longer time about earlier evacuations. N’importe quoi. In spite of his wise words on the occasion of his departure last week, the Ambassador was his old unpleasant self on one of his last working days, interrupting his Embassy colleagues, telling us all not to count on the army for evacuating our families, concluding after a long monologue that “there really is no solution” and that those around the table (evacuation group heads) should really ‘start reflecting’ about solutions themselves. When somebody asked the ambassador the perfectly reasonable question how, as a group head, he was supposed to call about 60 people if trouble occurred and the mobile phone network was almost sure to be either down or saturated, he told him curtly not to ‘polemicise’.

I have nothing against self-reliance, and in fact feel more comfortable in this situation not to depend on others’ lousy planning. Nevertheless I was dumbfounded by the whole thing. The Ambassador’s attitude was almost cynical, and with plentiful military, military police and police staff around the table, I found the conclusion to leave it all to non-professional civilians, almost obscene. The actual evacuation scheme dates back to 2002, and I am sure it needs updating. One of the longer standing expats I referred to, a lady restaurant owner, started waving her 2002 papers in my face to show me that instructions did exist, so if I didn’t have them I could only blame myself for it. Silly cow, I won’t dine at her place again.

So whether I like it or not (I am beginning to like it a bit, actually), my security tasks are becoming ever more serious. I made an inventory of our radio needs: we’re 90% undersupplied, with an overburdened colleague at HQ single-handedly dealing with demands from more than a hundred representations all over the world. The situation between Chad and Sudan does buy us some credibility at HQ though, and I am shamelessly exploiting this fact while cajoling them into sending us the bloody radios for which we have been asking for more than a year.

Very embarrassing: our security measures only apply to expats, not to local colleagues, apart from the rape kit I talked about in an earlier post. I actually think we should change this and provide at least for some security measures (e.g. right to seek refuge within the walled premises of the office), but the boss seems adamant on this point. I’ll raise it again in the near future.

Speaking about local colleagues: A. and I invited three of them to dinner last weekend. It was one of the most pleasant dinner parties we have had recently. My three colleagues said this was the first time they had ever been invited on an individual basis at home at a senior expatriate colleague’s home, and they were very appreciative about it. There is something unhealthy about the invisible divide between locals and expats in our office, even though on the surface relations are normal. But scratch a little further and there’s considerable mistrust. Not always because of the expats though, some local personnel are very quick indeed in claiming infringements, real or perceived, on their rights or dignity. On the other hand I’ve always found my Italian colleague overly suspicious of many local staff.

My tailor-made manual to our budgetary aid has taken weeks to trickle through to the government. Then, yesterday, the boss was invited by the Prime Minister, and I myself by the Vice Minister of Finance (the Minister is on mission of course, though apparently for better reasons that I thought). We both had to explain the letter from beginning to end, and I was certain that the Deputy Minister hadn’t even seriously read it…. We’re talking about a 12 million euros gift, for heaven’s sake!

On the other hand the Deputy Minister did have a good reason for the late arrival of the payment file for the 4 million euro disbursement we are preparing. Tthe man normally in charge of it at the Treasury had just been put in prison for embezzlement of state money in 2004. This was his third time, by the way. In the past he had someway managed to get his job at the Ministry back at least once after similar crimes. Employers here are a lot more forgiving when you’re a relative of the Head of State…

Corruption

2006-04-18T12:55:00.000+04:00

I am thinking hard these days about why this country, and more in general, this continent, can't seem to manage to get its act together. There are many explanations. Poor governance and corruption are part of it, but they can't be the only reason. Moreover I can't say I find this country more ccorrupt than others that I have seen in Central Asia for instance. There are countries in South East Asia with equally weak governance, but strong economic growth. I read something interesting in Jeffrey Sachs' The end of Poverty yesterday: it's not poor governance that creates poverty, but poverty that creates poor governance. I am not sot sure if one excludes the other, it may of course work both ways, but it's certainly thought provoking. Good governance, including strong institutions, civil society involvement and media in a watchdog role, costs money and a situation where basic needs are met.

I condemn corruption (small scale corruption, that is, the big scale greed of some leaders is another matter) as an economic problem, but am I, with the very secure material conditions I enjoy, in a position to morally judge a customs officer with nine months of salary arrears and 5 children - the average family size here, not counting the AIDS orphans and other children (from poorer family members for instance) often at the charge of whoever is lucky enough to have a job - at home when he accepts a bribe?(*) I honestly don't know. I would like to develop some clearer ideas on it (and how to remediate the problem) before I leave here.

Having said this, it seems that we are getting closer to some big fish through our technical assistance. Our two customs experts received mysterious phone calls and were pursued by a car without number plates two days ago after a little sting operation to purchase illegal diamonds had gone wrong (somebody from within the Customs services apparently informed the selling party).

While Chad and Sudan exchange niceties these days, our host country has closed its borders with Sudan in an act of solidarity with Chad. First of all good luck to them finding these borders, as they are unmarked. Secondly I don't think they stand much of a chance with no more than fifty unpaid and utterly demotivated soldiers supposed to keep an eye on hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of border and to keep out very bloodthirsty Chadian rebels, armed to the teeth and with a Janjaweed mindset.

(*) This is a dramatized picture of course, and Customs is actually not a very good example: as in many countries, these jobs are for sale and require a quick return on investment before the job is passed on to somebody else. I was told today about a local customs officer running 20 taxis and owning several houses. Apparently it's a girl's dream here to marry a customs officer...

African protocol

2006-04-14T11:31:00.000+04:00

African protocol is all about waiting. About making YOU wait, more precisely. I will show you what an important guy I am by shamelesssly claiming your time and make you sit and wait until such time as I choose to show up and get on with whatever it was I called on you for.

I guess we were lucky yesterday. It took the President and his wife, accompanied by the French Ambassador and his spouse, an hour and fifteen minutes to arrive, which wasn' so bad after all. My boss was once made to wait four and a half hours on a similar occasion: he sneaked out, had lunch at home, and came back again.

I had arrived in a slightly rebellious mood (as may have been clear from my closing lines in yesterday's post) 10 minutes late at the ceremony for the French Ambassador's departure, and was ushered into a 'waiting room' at the presidential palace. This turned out to be a large cinema-like space, and here I found some 150 people, diplomats, business people, government ministers, the lot, rather sheepishly waiting in long rows of theatre seats for what would come next. We were kept waiting for another 40 minutes (...), then herded to the place where the banquet would take place (they hadn't been able to set the thing up on time).

I was seated between the capital's mayor, and a parliamentary deputy. The latter started bitching right away about the smallish sum of money (4 million euros) we were going to disburse at the end of the month, saying it would only pay a month of salaries. I've been a good boy, explaining politely that what we are trying to do is provide sustainable aid, for instance make the country earn its own money for a change (he seemed to sort of agree that thjat was not wholly unreasonable), while doing doing the occasional financial dépannage to help to keep the country stable.

To the host government's credit I must say they hadn't turn the occasion into some lavish extravaganza. Good plain food (homecooked in the presidential kitchens), soft drinks, a few bottles of wine, a petit glass of champagne for the toast, but nothing excessive (I noted that the President toasted with a glass of Fanta; his predecessor was a notorious drunk). Even better were the speeches, something I didn't really expect. It was one of the rare occasions that I have enjoyed official speeches, and they made up for the boredom of the first two hours of the event. People in this country, in Africa in general I guess (a consequence of oral culture?), are often very, very eloquent, and wise things on the country's present and recent past were said by the Foreign Minister and the Ambassador. The events in Chad and the painful memories of the country's own recent violent past added charge and drama to the occasion.

Trouble next door

2006-04-13T12:50:00.000+04:00

Three days ago on a road only 200 km away from the capital two doctors, local aid workers on a child vaccination mission in the provinces, and their driver were stopped, pulled out of their car, ordered to lie down and shot dead in cold blood by a group of armed, arabic speaking elements, believed to be from the neigbouring country Chad. The bodies of two peuhls (local nomads) also shot dead were found nearby. We are no longer talking about 'ordinary' highways bandits ("coupeurs de route") who usually only rob, sometimes roughen up, but only rarely actually kill people, but who they really are is not clear.

Rebels have attacked the Chadian capital N'Djamena, where fighting broke out between them and government troops this morning. Right now the situation seems to have calmed down. These rebels came from Sudan (Darfur) but passed (about 200 men in 21 pickups) through the northern part of our host country to enter Chad. In fact they must have passed through the nature reserve where we went recently: there are no other passable roads in that area.

Yesterday and today we have been following the situation in Chad very closely. In fact, our host country's President came to power in 2003 with the help of Idriss Deby, and the latter's fall would have immediate consequences for stability here. As the news about the doctors makes clear, that stability is in ever greater jeopardy anyway.

Because of the fighting in N'Djamena the boss, who is on a mission to Cameroon with another colleague from the office, didn't have a return plane this morning as he was flying with a Chadian company. I have just arranged for a private plane to go and pick him up this afternoon.

As always, I wonder where we are heading. The situation in the country is tricky enough as it is, and external developments like in Chad and Darfur can tilt the balance suddenly.

I have been quite pessimistic these days about our chances to get anything done with government services. Here we have a country in dire need of among much else public finance reform, and instead of whipping up his people to work on these reforms, the Minister of Finance spends most of his time abroad on long missions the purpose of which nobody can explain to me, apart from the apparently fat per diems... We're hoping to disburse long awaited budgetary aid soon. All we need is for the government to prepare a certain disbursement file, and we have send them a reminder the 22 of March. I called the Vice Minister last week, the boss brought it up with the Minister last friday, and in the end it was one of our experts who put the services concerned to work on it yesterday... Incompetence and lethargy know no limits here. Right now we have three customs experts on the ground with a total of more than a century of experience between them, and they are stunned by the mess they are discovering.

So I would like to do a lot more with the population itself. We have a big microproject programme coming on steam, and guess what: it looks like it will be hard to actually do things if security on the ground continues to deteriorate like this and even doctors are not safe anymore.

As the boss is stuck in Cameroon, I will have to take his place at an official state dinner for the corps diplomatique this afternoon offered by the President to the departing Ambassador of France. Sounds glamorous, but I can assure you that I am in for a few hours of utter boredom. Just for fun I could pick a fight with the Deputy Minister of Finance, tell him that his services are as useless as I told him recently....

Moral support

2006-04-11T16:49:00.000+04:00

Yesterday morning I was in a meeting at the office when A. called: she had just heard five shots being fired. We thought it was a student demonstration, and that police had fired in the air. The office meeting wasn't even interrupted. But this morning it turned out that they were high school students, and that about a dozen of them had been wounded by live ammunition. A small miracle nobody got killed, yet. It was about money, as usual: almost two years arrears in scholarships and teacher bonuses. Yet another piece of evidence for the link between good financial governance and political stability, if further evidence was ever needed (auto-peptalk: I just paid the first outrageously high fees for my distance learning course).

At work things are getting slightly more relaxed. We'll be able to get the report out before the end of the week, and I will have time tonight to go for a beer and a meal with a friend whose wife has just gone home to the Philippines. Among theclose community of expats here there is a rather nice habit of taking care of anybody whose partner has left on vacation etc. 'On va s'occuper de toi', which often means dragging the guy (sometimes the woman), now called a 'célibataire géographique' from one night club to the other (and back, as there are only two here worthy of the name), or in the more moderate version inviting him or her to dinner all the time. Friends already noticed my upcoming status as a 'geographical bachelor' for most of the second half of the year and have announced solid moral support...

Haiku

2006-04-10T09:07:00.000+04:00

My blog now has the colour of sand.

Very appropriate,

because

there is a lot of sand in Africa.

Poaching, poker and press

2006-04-09T12:58:00.000+04:00

Yesterday we had our Swedish friends from the wild reserve who were on a foraging trip to the capital over for lunch.

We had a good laugh as they told us about a priest in one provincial town who had managed to build a beautiful church. He had raised the money by …. playing poker in the capital, something which he apparently did with great skill. I am not sure how this fits into Vatican orthodoxy, but this country does not seem one to make priests - nor anybody else for that matter - stick to orthodoxy anyway.

Much less funny was their account of how they see wildlife vanishing under their very eyes. Sudanese poachers have recently (after our departure a couple of weeks ago) ventured into the park itself, and of the two elephants we saw close to the base camp, one has already been killed, leaving the other very restless and aggressive, traumatised I guess. Elephants are apparently not only social, but quite emotional animals. High up in the air from their ultra light airplane they had seen camels carrying large amounts of freshly (red) smoked meat of poached game. I don’t see how this country will be able to preserve its wildlife. Pressures are enormous, and the way things are now, the country doesn’t have sufficient appeal for tourists to generate the kind of income you need to finance permanent anti-poaching brigades. Donors do not seem particularly interested in the issue. This country is so invisible internationally...

Last Friday the boss went to sign a financing agreement with our favourite Minister for a budgetary aid of 4 million euros, to be disbursed very soon after a long long wait (procedures, procedures ....). He was interviewed afterwards by, get this, a hostile press, who asked him why we gave so little, and why we bothered the country with all sorts of conditionality for our budgetary aid, etc. Not very much unlike government ministers sometimes by the way, I refer to that recent meeting that triggered my finest diplomatic instincts. It often bothers me how it’s all just taken for granted and as an entitlement.

Kids' stuff

2006-04-08T14:40:00.000+04:00

A. and I went to the only doctor here with the material to make echoes. It was as beautiful as ever: for the first time we saw and heard the baby’s tiny little heart beating!

Nevertheless the pregnancy hormones are wreaking havoc on A.’s wellbeing right now. She’s feeling sick, more emotional, more impatient with our staff (I have managed so far to escape her wrath), very annoyed with M. incessant troublemaking when it comes to doing his homework, and longing to go to Holland soon and see family and friends. We hope (and I expect) that she will feel better once the first three months have passed (one more month to go).

My idea to make M.'s homework a little more attractive seems to have worked brilliantly for ... exactly one day. He quickly found out that doing his school home work took less time than doing creative writing on 'interesting' topics. So, while we still don't like the idea of young children spending so much time on homework, we're now getting tougher with him. He'll be grounded for as long as he hasn't done his homework, and that seems to sort of, uhm, well, work, I guess. It must be amusing to watch this struggle from afar, it's trial and error really. He's smart enough, but had no qualms telling his teacher, rather frequently it seems, that 'he hates work', thus boosting our family's reputation even further...

Garp's way (for B.)

2006-04-04T21:20:00.000+04:00

I arrived back home this morning after an exhausting trip: spent 4 hours enjoying the delights of the waiting room of N'djamena Airport. No foie gras de canard on the way back Paris-Ndjamena, just champagne, things are rapidly going downhill at Air France....

Lovely to see A. and the children again, I should seriously worry about the second half of the year.

Yesterday I had a very nice lunch with some further ex-colleagues (translators) that I have remained good friends with after I left that service. One of them will also be a father soon. His story of the conception bore a near perfect resemblance to the story of Garp in the book by John Irving (you can look that one up, B.!).

Origins, fundaments, root causes

2006-04-02T23:42:00.000+04:00

When A. and I bought our first property, a flat in Leiden, I started by completely fixing up … the cellar, our storage space, before even touching the living quarters. I liked Classics as the root for Western culture. I was interested in pre-Socratic philosophy as it provided the basic materials for so much that came afterward. I thought it was essential to comprehend the hellishly complicated and t the same time quite boring history of doxography which transmitted the few bits and pieces of pre-Socratic philosophy we still possess. I liked the Whorf-Sapir thesis (linguistic structure determines thought structure; I tried to show that philosophical thinking was also determined by linguistic structures, but didn’t really manage. Nevertheless it made me deeply suspicious of the universalistic claims of what I think are completely language-based thought systems, such as Heidegger’s). I was thrilled to discover Indo-European linguistics, then Nostratics (supposedly the roots of Indo-European, Ural-Altaic and Finno-Ugric language groups). I enjoy the mother of sciences, mathematics, and its history (without being a star at it I hasten to add). I strongly believe that a 100% legalisation of drugs (hard drugs, soft drugs, glue, nutmeg, you name it…) is the only fundamentally realistic way (apart from the tiny detail of political feasibility) to make the drugs trade chain (including Colombian mafia, terrorist financing, undermining of productive sectors in developing countries, etc.) collapse, which would make prices collapse, and give drug users a perspective to have a fair chance at a more or less normal life (this is the fast explanation, no time for subtleties here).

All this, of which the common denominator is origins, fundaments, root causes, came to mind when I thought today about my relatively recent interest in economics, governance, especially financial governance, and public finance management. I have become convinced (I guess it is obvious anyway to the real experts in the field, but I won’t believe it until I see it) that these are among the root issues for understanding and mending development problems, most certainly in our host country. OK, so much for pointing out the obvious….

I had quite a productive day today: in the peace and quiet of my hotel room I managed to draft a tailor made manual to our budgetary aid for our government. If we manage to disburse, against all odds, the 14 million euros reserved for budgetary aid, I will have reason to consider my four-year stint in Africa a success.

This evening I went to see one of my few colleagues who is also a friend to meet his family and some friends of his. They live in a beautiful house in a beautiful part of Brussels, Uccle. Nice family dinner atmosphere.

One more meeting tomorrow morning, then back to Africa in the evening. Not looking forward to the tons of reporting to be done the next couple of weeks.

Grey

2006-04-01T01:03:00.000+04:00

Exactly five years ago my career took a turn for the better when I started my first job in the foreign relations field, and I haven’t looked back since. Today I paid a visit to my boss at the time, to whom I am still grateful for having recruited me.

My third day in Brussels. We had an intensive and sometimes tense five-hour meeting with the World Bank and other donors to our host country yesterday, and it is beginning to look as if we might pull the arrears clearance scheme off if all the details work out. I have started to work on a budgetary aid project proposal for 14 million euros which would be the basis for the rest of the multidonor scheme. I will work on it this weekend in this comfortable hotel room of mine.

Workwise it is good to be away from the office for a few days to concentrate on this particular issue of budgetary aid. It is also good to see colleagues I am usually only in e-mail contact with, things work out a lot better when you talk in person. Over the years I have found out that especially in tense situations e-mail is a lousy means of communication, and my Dutch bluntness doesn’t necessarily help when communicating with all those sensitive French and Italian souls..

I haven’t been feeling all that great these days. The grey skies of Brussels are having their way with my serotonin levels, or is it being away from A. and the children? I am not very good at the latter, in fact ever less so, and it has made me think of the second half of the year, when the family will stay in Lith. We knew that, planned that and accepted being separated as an acceptable price to pay for yet another baby. Having said all this though it won’t be easy on any of us. I am particularly worried about M. and T., who are very attached to me. Another thing that’s weighing down upon me is that I found out here that the boss has tried to revise my staff report downwards. I was informed of it by his boss, a Dutch director. The surprising thing is that my position in Brussels is apparently strong enough that the latter wouldn’t accept it. What bothers me the most is that the boss hadn’t even discussed this downward revision with me. I wonder if I should talk it over with him once I am back, or just let it rest.

It is good to see that there are still some ex-colleagues I remain friends with, that I am happy to see after a long absence, and who, they too, seem genuinely pleased to catch up with me. I have seen and had drinks or lunch/dinner with several of them. Nevertheless on the whole this big organisation I work for is not the right place to look for personal happiness (professional gratification is another thing). The stakes, also personal, are too big. I may be looking for the wrong things of course. I would probably be bored stiff within a month without the thrill and adrenalin rushes my present line of work gives me, but a slight sense of estrangement is always just around the corner. Walking through Brussels there is something depressing about all those worked-up self-important suits (of which I am one of course). I consider myself privileged that I can do what I do, but a nagging Weltschmerz remains and strikes especially when I am away from my loved ones.

After meetings yesterday and drinks with an old colleague, I spent some time in Brussels’ biggest store for books, music and computers, the FNAC, then went to see a movie on Truman Capote and his writing of In Cold Blood. Not bad at all, and inspiring in a way (as far as writing is concerned….).

On the road again

2006-03-29T16:29:00.000+04:00

And suddenly I find myself at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, waiting for the 7.44 am train to Brussels

Yesterday morning I was still in yet another meeting at the office, discussing the agonisingly slow progress as regards our budget support. HQ is calling a meeting with several donors to discuss options for the acrobatic set-up for debt relief for our host country, and didn’t even think of suggesting that our presence might be useful. We did the thinking for them. I told the boss that we should have been there, and off I was that same afternoon.

I changed planes last night in N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, which has been described to me as a living hell for expatriates, but where officials seemed relatively friendly and more efficient than in our host country. Incredibly dusty place by the way, but the dry Sahel climate is nice compared to the humidity of our host country. Business class to Paris with Air France. I enjoyed the champagne and the foie gras de canard (eh, eh, eh…), but I just can’t sleep if I am not perfectly horizontal and stretched out, so I feel like a living corpse this morning, as usual after night flights.

I’ll come back Tuesday next week, hopefully with a concrete project proposal and a sense of moving forward again. It’s good to get out for a few days, changer d’idées. I was getting somewhat bogged down the last couple of weeks in demotivating thoughts about the state of the nation we’re working for, which is really hardly a nation at all.

Fin de régime

2006-03-26T20:00:00.000+04:00

Our bush trip is quickly fading away, apart from the fact that my Toyota is still in a repair shop as we’re waiting for spare parts from France or even Japan to arrive. It’ll cost me at least 2000 euros, and I guess I should consider myself lucky: an evacuation by plane and recuperating the car would have been much more costly. But what the heck, it was a tremendous experience and we had fun.

The last couple of weeks have been much less enjoyable. I felt débordé, literally swamped in work, without feeling I got much recognition for it. We missed an important reporting deadline and I was held responsible for it, something that still infuriates me. I certainly carry part of the blame by simply not paying attention to it (lots of other urgent stuff), but not all of it: I ascribe a big part of it to the boss’ way of managing things, which makes that you’re never completely sure whether it’s him or you in charge of a file. He himself was actually quite relaxed about missing the deadline, but my Italian colleague started sending me a series of e-mails whining about how the belated reporting effort messed up his section’s work. I tried a conciliatory tone, admitting that I carried part of the blame, but that Nordic openness doesn’t work with all: some enjoy kicking a man when he’s already down. Five days later I’m still angry, even though I am applying all sorts of ways to manage the anger.

Apart from the reporting stress there were intensive talks with the World Bank: this country is up to its neck not only in debt, but also in arrears on its debt repayments to various multilateral creditors, which blocks all sorts of possibilities for much needed aid. We’re now trying to see how we work out a scheme using our budgetary aid to repay one creditor, which will open the way for debt forgiveness from the World Bank, which in its turn would unblock much bigger budgetary aid disbursements from various donors than our single shot of 12 million euros. Capisce? And this is the simplified explanation. In fact the financial acrobatics required to pull this one off are hellishly complicated (coordination between five different donors), and the political and security situation in the country is deteriorating fast, putting enormous pressure on the government to look for quick financial fixes rather than more sustainable solution that take a bit longer to achieve (end of the year).

I can’t deny that I am feeling slightly discouraged these days. There's a fin de régime feeling in the air, even though it could last a while. The rebellion in the North (there’s actually three of them, all of limited scope so far, but creating unrest nevertheless) is gaining force, social instability remains, the Presidential Guard has fouled up a few weeks ago badly by killing dozens of civilians in a suspected rebel zone. The most worrying thing is that the rebellion and government action to suppress it is getting an increasingly ethnic twist: last week, at the funeral in the capital of a government appointed mayor from the provinces murdered by bandits or rebels, people were carrying an enormous banner saying that ‘the [name of a tribe, namely the President’s] people won’t let themselves be messed around with’. It's the first time that the ethnic aspects of the unrest were so clearly brought out. Newspapers too have started carrying articles with ethnic over- and undertones. Furthermore, a friend working in the forestry sector told me he had seen massive movements of nomads, peuhls, quite far South on their way out of the country with their families and all their cattle and other belongings. As it is them who provide the capital with fresh meat, prices will rise, putting new poaching pressures on wildlife.

In the meantime the government has been slowly suffocating the legal diamond sector by imposing exporting thresholds carrying enormous fines if they are not met. Several bureaux d'achat have already been pushed out of the market: less legal diamond buying, so less income for the state. Cui bono?, one wonders. The answer may be found in the fact that people close to the head of State, and the HoS himself I guess, seem to have started handing out diamond exploration and forestry licenses even in nature reserves (it seems that the fee for obtaining a forestry permit is about 750.000 euros). It took me some time to see how corruption works in this country. You will find considerable weak spots and ‘bad habits’, as they call corruption here, in state finances, but the real rot is before money even reaches the State’s coffers. And all thinking is short term, from the head of State downwards. Of course, the short term is important: we managed to convince the World Bank that if they didn’t pay heed to government concerns about the short term (paying salaries, especially the military’s), there might not even be a long term to worry about, as the present regime wouldn’t last and anarchy would ensue. But with such a lack of long-term thinking among it’s leaders it is hard to see where this country is heading. Continuing misery, I guess. With all this rot and increasing insecurity it is not easy to continue to work on projets as if nothing happens and we will actually have the time to implement them. I think again of my darling project on public finance of course.

So, professionally very challenging times. On the private front, M. has started again to revolt against his homework. While trying not to give in to his every whim (even though this struggle has been going on ever since we arrived), but also in order to do everything not to make him lose his interest in learning, we’re trying something new: we won’t oblige him to do his school homework (which I agree is extremely uninspiring) if he reads from a book of his own choice, then writes us a little essay on it which we will correct together. If he doesn’t want that, he’ll do his school homework. First try yesterday: I had invited a friend who is also a diamond trader, Bernard, and had asked him to bring some material to explain to M. the origin, mining, cutting etc. of diamonds, and to show him some stones. M. was thrilled. In the evening he wrote a five-line story, in Dutch. I corrected it, made him rewrite a few misspelled words, and it seemed OK. See if this lasts. My main concern now is not to make him a model pupil, but to do everything we can to make sure that the rigid French school system does not kill his interest in learning, which he obviously has (right now it’s diamonds, mummies, and the ever persisting dinosaurs). I had announced this new approach to his teacher, who was not thrilled, and almost told me I was an irresponsible parent: ‘they must understand they have obligations, even at this age’. Yeah, I guess, but they’ve got the rest of their lives for that. He’s only seven (and started doing homework at the age of five!) Making a child lose half an hour to an hour a day of precious playtime seems too big a price to pay right now.

Splendid news

2006-03-25T23:30:00.000+03:00

A. is expecting our fourth child!! We’re over the moon! It’s still very early, not three months yet, but we are announcing it to friends and family nevertheless as it will have major implications for our life as a family in the year to come. Medical facilities here are such that A. and the children will leave the country at the end of June to stay in Lith until at least January 2007, possibly March (baby is due for early December). I am saving up most of my leave for the second half of the year, and although it will not be easy, we’ll be able to limit my absences from the family to three periods of about six weeks each over seven months (June-December). That seems doable. We were very relieved to find out that it was no problem at all to place M. and T. at a local school in Lith, which will give them a true ‘roots’ feeling and playmates for our future stays there we hope. Given the increasing threat of instability out here I am actually not too unhappy about the family going back to Europe for a while. We wouldn’t be immediate targets, but it is one factor less to worry about.

Forty

2006-03-09T14:26:00.000+03:00

So I turned forty yesterday. I didn't like it very much. It's official now: I am middle aged. (Time to start acting my age, I guess.) Having indulged in bottomless self-pity all day, it was good to have a drink in the evening with some friends. I'm glad it's over. Thanks to those of you who send me their birthday wishes.

By the way, his blog continues to attract strange visitors. After the hit on search terms military + husband + unfaithful that I wrote about recently, there was a visitor from Tehran, Iran, yesterday who hit upon this blog through a search on rape + woman + bandage (he - I presume it's a man - probably meant 'bondage'?), which yields this weblog together with some hardcore porno-sites who can't spell...

A sinning priest

2006-03-07T19:00:00.000+03:00

Yesterday evening something occurred which had me howling with laughter. There's a mission over from HQ this week. One of them returned to their hotel yesterday to find her room occupied by .... a clergyman with a women, who had rented a room for a few hours! We knew he was linked to the church as he threatened, not very intelligently, to call the nunciature in the ruckus that ensued. I was called in as the office's Security Officer by my colleague accompanying the mission. It turned out that the hotel clerk had erroneously given the wrong key to the couple. I don't think they had any bad intentions (apart from sins of the flesh for which they will be held to account by their Creator alone...), but the women had been leafing through our HQ colleague's personal affairs, using her beauty creams and make up. I had a hard time keeping a straight face. Just imagine being called out of the blue by an excited and angry colleague with a heavy Italian accent telling you that our colleague entered her room to find 'un prêtre en train de baiser une pute'. At first I was roaring with laughter, which angered my colleague even more, so as a matter of courtesy I went to the hotel and did a stern act with the man of God (who said he came to the hotel 'regularly') and the hotel management. We didn't report the incident to the police, as this could have meant torture and extortion for the priest. When I debriefed the boss afterwards by telephone we were both howling with laughter. A classic anecdote has been born.

Bush trip

2006-03-07T17:00:00.000+03:00

A lot has happened since my last posting on 23 February. We're just back from our trip into the bush, on which I will say some more later on.

First of all it's R. second birthday today. he'll have a party tomorrow, when the children have a day off. We gave him a set of handcarved wooden animal figurines, and he was shrieking with joy, quite a success. he is of course no longer a baby, but a big and beautiful two-year old, naughty and self-confident.

Tomorrow I'll turn 40. Definitely not looking forward to it, best to get it over and done with. Still nothing prepared for a party, we'll do one in a few weeks' time I think.

Now let me continue where I left off.

Just when I thought I would be tapering down at leisure towards my trip, all hell broke loose on Thursday 23 february: right after I received a furious and most undiplomatic letter from the Minister who is our interface for the government, I got the same Minister on the phone, in a rage, complaining about, well, us, in particular the boss (I can't go into too much detail). I was to be called by the Prime Minister's office the next day, Friday (thus ruining a timely start of our trip). I went there with a colleague and took note of the government's griefs (which I thought were unjustified), then reported to the boss, who is on leave in his home country. Then I left the capital for my trip to the North with Jean, relieved to leave work for a week, but quite bitter too. This country's government needs a reality check: unrealistic expectations towards donors, and . Relations with 'our' Minister are now at an all time low, they couldn't be worse.

After our return from leave Sunday the 5th of March, the situation has evolved in the sense that the whole thing has now become a high level diplomatic issue because of the insulting content and vehement tone of the aforementioned letter. The boss' position has become slightly precarious. Even though I am not directly in the line of fire, this is clearly not the best period of my time here, but it must be said: never a dull moment.

Now a few words about our trip. It was a beautiful experience. Jean and I passed through places we normally never see, spent a night in an African auberge, had lunch with Senegalese nuns who received us most hospitably in a far away town in the North which is hardly under government control. After two days of travel at a leisurely pace we met our families in a wild reserve in the North (they had come by plane) and stayed there for three days. We saw all sorts of animals, including a lion, elephants, baboons, giraffes, buffaloes, wild boars, and lots of antilopes. We were also made aware though of the terrible consequence of large scale poaching by Sudanese invaders, which has all but decimated the elephant population. It has made me quite pessimistic about the future: the area isn't controlled by the government.

The children were extremely happy to be there, enjoyed every bit of it and want to go back as soon as possible. We got to know a Swedish couple there living a dream life. After having made a fortune by drilling wells in this country for development agencies, the man had retired at age 51, giving away for free his well drilling company to an Amercian NGO. He is now spending half of the year on his farm in Sweden, the other half in this country helping guard the wild reserve, hunting (outside the park) and fishing. His wife studies a local language, Gbanda. Their son, only 20 yrs old, was out exploring a hunting concession in the east of the country. Sophisticated: e-mailing and internetting through their Thurayas. Free as birds, and not a worry in the world it seemed.

Our way back was less fortunate. Seventy kilometers from base camp we first got stuck in the sand. We had to dig out the car for two hours in 43° Celsius. Jean was absolutely amazing, frantically digging away like a rabbit half hidden under the car. Then 2 kilometers further on we got in much more serious trouble, as we hit a pothole in the road. The shock bended a solid metal rod connecting the wheel and the carosserie (I know how technically competent this sounds...) so badly that the tyre touched the rod and would have exploded if we had continued. So we stopped, and used our satellite phone (Thuraya) to get in touch, with some difficulty, with the base camp. We stayed out in the bush near a campfire (to keep the flies away- works perfectly) that night, dirty as coal miners, very tired too. In the meantime Jean's wife called us to warn us to sleep in the car: a thousand kilometers further to the east somebody had been attacked by a lion. As most lions in this park had been poached by the Sudanese, our chances of being eaten were very slim, but we slept in the car nevertheless...

The Swede came with a team of local mecanics early the next morning to pick us up. They managed to get the car back in working order at the base camp (with one wheel remaining in a tilted position) so we could drive back to the capital the next day, quite slowly. This we did, driving all night and arriving Sunday at noon, to everybody's great relief. Tout est bien qui finit bien.

I have been bitten by the bush bug. I feel stimulated to go again, with a much clearer ideas on what is neeeded for the trip. We were OK as far as fuel, water and food and most tools (especially a spade and a machete) were concerned, but the car, a nice and shiny Toyota Prado with shiny aluminium wheels needs to be adapted: bush wheels (steeel) and bush tyres (high, standard mesures). And I need to get hold of a winch.

Some further observations:

I always thought that big game hunting was a menace to the wildlife; it may however be its best chance at survival, as the sector is strictly regulated and preserving the wildlife is actually in the best interest of the license holders; it's poaching, and especially large scale poaching in large well-organised and heavily armed groups mainly from Sudan that are exterminating wildlife here.
seeing the Swede, a professional mecanic himself, and his team at work was a pleasure in itself: calm, logical reasoning. Car repair is not a menial job, it is for a large part a pure intellectual effort, and it is quite beautiful to watch. See Robert Pirsig, by the way;
I have never seen such rotten roads in my life, some had holes a meter deep; no way you can get past them during the rainy season, and no way you can have a functioning economy with such roads. Well I knew that already;
there seems to be no better way to get to know a country like ours than to to drive around it, talk to villagers, expats, missionaries. But that's hardly surprising either, is it? Anyway, it sure beats talking to government officials.

Hornswoggle

2006-02-23T10:24:00.000+03:00

I learned a new word recently: hornswoggle, as in '"This is some high-risk behavior. They need to think about that," he said. "We're not trying to hornswoggle them on this." (CNN on Alabama church fires). It seems that the origin is in cattlebreeding: cows caught by a lasso trying to wriggle themselves free by shaking their head and horns. Interesting.

We've had two very full and busy weeks, socially speaking, varying from A.'s birthday the 13th of February in a restaurant with all her friends and their partners, to a dinner with two Ambassadors, a squash tournament for A. after which she had trouble walking for days, an 'grilled pig' evening, a farewell dinner for a colleague, and so on. All this socializing isn't doing my waistline any good, and I have given up all hope to look lean and trim on my 40th birthday. Time to do something about it though.

I had been feeling a bit uncomfortable with a few things at work, but one long talk with the boss last week cleared the air completely, which was a relief. It's clear though that I am more Teutonic in my habits than him: I like clarity, clear lines of communication and information, clear task descriptions, who does what etc. Hardly unreasonable demands, I should think.

A difficult moment occurred last Friday when my boss decided that we would have to exclude one of the experts whom I had been working with on the public finance project's terms of reference from participating in thjat same project. He had hoped to be working on that project in the future, and would have been a very good choice, but to avoid any conflict of interest our rules forbid that those who work on terms of reference of a project play any role in it later on. I think it is a perverse rule: experts on public finance willing to work for a long time in this kind of country are hard to come by, and you usually come across the same people time and again. He's also a very able expert, so he was quite indispensable for the ToR, which can make or break the success of a project. It was also personally difficult for me: as this is a small place, one changes roles all the time. Somebody you have to be tough with during the day may be sitting next to you at a dinner the same evening. The expert and his wife had actually become very good acquantances of ours, and I took some heat personally when I told him of the decision. He felt he had been trapped into this on purpose, which wasn't the case. Another lesson learned the hard way.

A week ago I had a meeting with the security company we hire. Mainly to be nice to our Head of Administration, who used to be in charge of security and who didn't seem to take well to his demotion in this respect, I had invited him to the meeting to 'profit from his experience'. He barged into the meeting 20 minutes late, drunk (when I say 'dysfunctional', I mean it) He kept smiling and shaking his head disapprovingly while I was explaining the new security procedures to the company, and then started interrupting the conversation, confusing the security people. When he also took issue with the instructions I had just given to the security people, I had had enough: I simply threw him out of the meeting, holding the door open for him. Time to put back some order in the house. It didn't feel great, kicking out an older colleague like that and humiliate him in front of the people he used to deal with (which is even more ironic when you realise that I had invited him to alleviate his sense of humiliation), but it was him or me. The message hit home with the security people as well: they were very meek afterwards, even though I hadn't even raised my voice during the incident. Speak softly but carry a big stick (Churchill). I can be tough if I have to.

Right now I am very excited about the adventure we'll embark on as of tomorrow afternoon. I'll drive up to a wildlife reserve in the North with my friend Jean, 2,5 days. The wives and children come by airplane. We'll stay there for 3,5 days. Then the women and children will fly back to the capital and Jean and I will descend in a 4-day drive back to the capital through territory where few Westerners, except hunting parties and aid workers, go. There is some risk involved, as there are Sudanese poachers and highway robbers in the area (an area as big as the Benelux though), but not an excessive risk we believe: we will be in contact with the French military for the latest information and will change plans if need be. There have been reports of people being made to pay, even rarer cases where they were robbed of their car (strangely enough, many bandits are said not to be particularly interested in cars as the fuel and maintenance is too expensive), and no cases of people killed, at least no Westerners. So while there is risk, it seems acceptable: if we were to avoid all risk we wouldn't ever see anything. We've also talked through the more difficult stretches of the trip with people who have been there. All in all a 2100 km trip over unpaved roads, rickety bridges etc, savannah, rainforest, dusty towns in the middle of nowhere,... We'll be travelling with almost 300 liters of fuel, lots of water, food, 2 spare wheels, machete, malaria medicine, and a satellite telephone. A big boy's dream. I'll tell you about it in two weeks or so.

Now breaks my wooden shoe!

2006-02-07T19:20:00.000+03:00

Last week I was promoted, forcibly, to become our office's Security Officer. Quite a big responsibility, which I guess has mainly been given to me because doing a sloppier job than my predecessor, our friendly but alcoholic and utterly dysfunctional Head of Administration, seems a tough call.

I had a look at the things involved in the new task, and I'm afraid this new responsibility is going to be a major headache. It involves for instance dealing with our local security company... It is an ironic twist of history that this post was given to me: I am extremely absent minded, forget my keys, leave lights on, cupboards open, money lying about, and most gloriously of all leave my personal organiser (in a wallet with passport, credit cards etc. on the top of my car and drive off, with the organiser falling off the car somewhere on the highway (I managed to pull this one off twice in Luxembourg, plus left it once on the shelves in a giant DIY store: it took me 30 minutes to find it). In short, just the man you need to be in charge of your security!

On the other hand it's quite interesting, a wholly new domain, so a 'challenge' to use the usual cliché. And it may very well force me to change my ways. So there I was yesterday early morning, putting in place tighter security procedures and telling (even showing!) security guards how to check people for weapons etc. Hilarious, really. Fortunately there's competent back-up from HQ.

In the meantime my local reputation as a subtle diplomat is reaching dazzling heights ... Last week I was in a meeting with the boss and no less than three Ministers. They complained rather violently about the fact that our budgetary aid is not forthcoming quickly enough, as it is tied to all sorts of financial management performance indicators. Obviously they prefer blank cheques. The Vice-Minister of Finance said at some point that the fact the IMF had now agreed to a (rather modest) programme for the country, was proof that public finance management in the country was good enough to warrant our budgetary aid. That just did it for me. The lack of understanding, or unwillingness to admit it in public, even at the highest level, of how disastrous their situation is drives me up against the walls. So I sort of lost my patience at that point and snapped that if public finance management was really that good, we would not be working on a 6 million euro technical assistance effort to remedy just that. Ouch, that hurt! He was extremely unamused. I was right of course (with all due modesty...), but telling him so in front of two senior colleagues was probably not the most judicious thing I have done so far in my career.

On the other hand, I am what I am, and people here tell me that I am widely known as a straight-shooter. Some even appreciate it.... Anyway, it probably saves me lots of time and energy. This pertains to the work side though. Whatever my shortcomings (many), I do believe that I am more considerate with people's personal feelings, even though the Vice-Minister will not necessarily agree... I will meet him on Monday, see if we can kiss and make up.

To end on a sad note: the husband of Odile (one of our two nanny/maids) is dying. He had his milt removed a few months ago and has been going slowly downhill ever since (not surprising given the lamentable medical care available here). He went into coma yesterday. Odile was on the phone today choking with tears telling me that she couldn't come to work as her husband was getting worse. Heartbreaking, I don't even want to imagine what she's going through.

* "Now breaks my wooden shoe" = Nu breekt mijn klomp!: an utterly Dutch expression meaning 'that's the bloody limit!'.

Screwing up: some fine examples

2006-02-06T19:23:00.000+03:00

My boss and other colleagues came back last Thursday from their regional seminar in Brazzaville. All frustrated with what passes for ‘policy making’ in Headquarters, but looks suspiciously like arrogance, ignoring advice from those in the field and imposing priorities and programs on partner countries we’re supposed to conduct a dialogue with and whose national priorities we are supposed to take into account (the answer to the latter is probably: “Oh, we do, but first we tell them what their priorities should be!”).

My boss returned quite depressed, as he and our aid program had taken a beating, yet again. I felt sorry for him, as he is undeniably very committed to his job. Nevertheless he is not completely free from blame: full of far-reaching new and often fairly wild ideas, he keeps coming up with them at the last moment, driving people in HQ mad (not to mention me and my colleagues here). He has a long field experience, he has a good intellect, he’s usually fun to work with (although I’ve come to see his limitations, which is only normal when you work together intensively), but his sense of internal diplomacy and ‘salesmanship’ is not great, and it’s harming us. A consensus seems to be arising among the heads of section that, whatever his human qualities, we’re not always happy with his go-it-alone approach, which often leaves us, his counselors, out of the decision making process.

On the other hand, he is what he is, and can be a quite inspiring boss at times – even if it’s wearing off a bit, given that his credibility in Brussels seems to be close to nil now. This would be a bad time to turn on each other, though. But when I see the amount of time we’ve spent on preparing ideas for this seminar, reprogramming etc, just to see it ignored or wiped off the table by HQ on very dubious arguments, or no arguments whatsoever, I feel strengthened in my newfound conviction to cut back on overtime.

My friend Hans B. was right some years ago when he told me, when we discussed the importance of family life, that “it won’t be your colleagues standing around your grave”. Simple, but how true.

This being said, I also have a firm intention to supervise projects managed in my section more closely than before. There are a lot of them, so it’s not easy, and to be honest I am not one of those natural born project managers either, to my regret. Especially mastering all the fine details (especially contracting and financial) takes quite an effort. To prove the point: my section screwed up last month when a contract with a local non-governmental organization (NGO) to accompany micro projects in the field hadn’t been signed on time, which has caused them to incur costs we may not be able to reimburse to them (we’ll try and see how we can work around that, bending the rules here and there). I am still trying to find out where things went wrong (I suspect a secretary put the contract in the in tray of a project manager who was absent for five weeks), but it doesn’t really matter: it’s my section, hence I’ll assume responsibility. The painful thing is that the project itself is managed impeccably well by that friend I spoke about some time ago, George D., the perfect project manager, who was a bit cool about it, and rightly so. A lesson learnt the hard way.

We had him, his wife and three other couples over for a dinner party last Friday. It’s nice to do dinner parties as we have staff to help us with it. On the other hand, I actually think we are no longer just employers: a part of our employing people is becoming plain charity. We have two nannies/housemaids (Amour and Odile), where one would suffice; however, Odile worked for a Dutch family who left last year, and were (rightly) worried about her future, so she came to work with us. Then there is old Alphonse, our taciturn but reliable cook and the ‘papa’ of the rest of our personnel. He won’t be able to work forever (he has a bad leg and a limp ever since his traffic accident a couple of years ago; we’re paying a physiotherapist for him to relieve the pain), so we offered him to bring one of his ten or so children as a ‘trainee’ so we could recommend him or her to other expatriates. He brought Ines, his 20-year old daughter (like Amour with a child she had at the age of fourteen, possibly thirteen).

With all these people around, I am not so sure we run a more efficient household: three ladies out there to help us and yet A. and I were still running about, opening winebottles, telling them what to serve to whom, etc. But it doesn’t really matter; we’re all getting along fine, the children are quite attached to them (and in fact so are A. and I), and we’re supporting them and their families.

I haven’t mentioned Désiré yet, who started out as our gardener, claiming he could also do pool maintenance. We paid for him to get a driver’s license so he could help us out with shopping etcetera. At the moment he’s failing us on two of his three supposed duties. It turns out that his competence on pool maintenance is patchy at best, often leaving us with a bowl of grey soup in our garden. And whereas he was doing alright as a driver at first, he soon became overconfident and started speeding when we were not with him. A friend told me so recently, and I put Désiré right rather harshly. Last week then he finally had the long feared accident, although nobody got hurt, thank God: he crashed into a parked car while driving in reverse. I was deeply annoyed, not least because of the damage (almost 500 euros), but also since it was such a stupid incident.(*) What annoyed me even more was that he subjected himself and us to harassment from the local police, who took his driver’s license, and made him pay a fine, so that A. and I felt obliged to intervene on his behalf. They charged A. 30 euros (a small fortune here) for doing their job, i.e. writing a report on the accident; they also tried, to no avail though, to make us pay about 25 euros for their déplacement to the crime scene, about 400 meters down the road…. I had, as often in these situations, trouble to remain calm, although I managed. Right now we’re trying to get our African insurance company (picture that!) to cough up the money for the repairs to the other car. In the meantime Désiré is only allowed to touch his spade, broom and lawn mower…

Yesterday morning T. fell suddenly ill with high fever and a bad headache: malaria. She is taking Malarone as a profylactic, which proves that the stuff does not make you immune for the illness. It does make a big difference though: at 'only' 39,9° her fever was not as high as the first time when she had malaria, and she recovered remarkably quickly after we started treating her with Coartem. Already this morning she was happy as a lark again, lively, no fever, great appetite. Ouf!

My sister turned thirty-nine last week (we differ only 10 months in age, which has always been a source of hilarity as to my parents productivity at the time). My friend Peter P. turned forty. Five more weeks to go for me. I’ll be happy to get it over and done with and to have again a decade ahead of me before the next milestone, 50, comes up. Completely irrational of course, but I don’t think I am the only one who’s not particularly keen on celebrating his fortieth anniversary.

(*) To be honest again though, two weeks earlier A. had done exactly the same in front of our house, crashing our car in reverse into a huge 4Wdrive I had brought from work (‘I hadn’t seen it’), leaving us with a bill of 350 euros for repairs...

At your service!

2006-02-01T13:19:00.000+03:00

In order to have an idea of the number of hits I get on this blog and to have a broad idea of where readers come from, I have linked this blog to a tracking site, SiteMeter.com. Very convenient and quite interesting: a readership as far away as South America, Portugal (quite regularly), United States, Canada, Singapore, etc. and of course friends and family from the Netherlands and elsewhere. (Don't worry, the tool doesn't identify individual readers or their computers, just their service providers.)

I tell you this because Sitemeter sometimes also provides information on how people come across your site: a vexed soul somewhere in Michigan was directed to my 30 January posting 'Silly through a search on the keywords "military + husband + unfaithful". One wonders what the story is behind this search? A soldier looking for inspiration? A suspicious wife looking for clues? Anyway, glad to be of help, folks! ;)

Government overhaul

2006-02-01T12:44:00.000+03:00

The long expected changes in the government have been made. I don't know what to think of them. They're not the big bang some feared: the Prime Minister remains. A Minister who seemed to do well, and a vocal critic of the Head of State in the past, has been removed from her post, which is not very good, and will be a 'special counsellor on reform' to the Prime Minister, which could be good if it doesn't mean she's simply promoted out of harm's way. Furthermore the Minister we would love to see fired will remain, which is very very bad news indeed. It will cause us some major headaches in the near future in terms of implementing our projects.

Continuity is a big problem in this country, largely because of the jobs-for-the-boys game I mentioned earlier. As Ministers and high officials get changed all the time, there's little experience and little corporate memory in key services where these are needed most.

Silly

2006-01-30T09:45:00.000+03:00

Friday night A. had a ladies' night out with her crowd of friends. I went for a drink and a meal with the husband of one of these women, who's also the head of a French development agency here (the militant atheist and expert on early Christianity I have mentioned before). We ended up in the same restaurant as A. and her friends, though they were in a different room. We set up a little prank: we asked two of the barmaids to come and walk with us into the room where A. and her friends were, hugging and cuddling us, doing the deuxième bureau act. And so it went. A. was sitting with her back to the entrance, so didn't notice us immediately, but two of her friends in front of her looked very shaken, especially as the atheist and I pretended to be shocked at seeing them, and acting as two unfaithful husbands caught red-handed. A silly joke, I know, I know, but a good laugh nevertheless.

Another quite amusing incident took place yesterday. We had been invited to join a picnic in the countryside by the French club (a feat of successful integration!). We drove out in convoy. In front of us was A.'s French teacher, a pretty woman in her twenties at the Alliance Française, whom I had just been introduced to. She was standing in the back of a pick-up truck with some friends. When the convoy picked up speed the wind blew up her skirt, exposing her two very well-formed buttocks only nominally clad in an exquisite string you would not normally expect out in the bush. She had great trouble restraining the skirt during the rest of the ride to the picnic. Of course I thoroughly enjoyed the view. The teacher looked quite embarassed afterwards and didn't come near me during the picnic...

There seems to be a sudden surge in journalistic interest from abroad (well, France..) in the country. We had a journalist from Le Monde a week ago, and I was interviewed yesterday at the picnic by two other journalists, one for RFI radio, the other for La Libération. Must be because of French military involvement in addressing armed bandits in the North of the country.

Alea iacta est

2006-01-27T09:46:00.000+03:00

I have finally sent in the application for that MSc study. A.'s supportive attitude helped a lot for me to actually do it, and so did my boss', who offered to be 'lenient' during exam periods. Puppy Dog, who considered doing one of the programme's courses himself, has decided not to, and has subsequently been a complety tactless oaf by depicting CeFiMS as an obscure and overcharging (well, I could agree with that) establishment nobody's ever heard of ('why don't you take a MSc with a more reputable institute, like the London School of Economics'). Just the kind of thing you want to hear when you're about to spend a small fortune and to commit yourself for more than 1100 hours of precious private time...

The application is not completely final yet: CeFiMS first need to make me an 'offer' on the basis of the information I have provided, and then I'll have to send them a ton of certified copies and certified translations of diplomas, plus a ton of money of course. Not sure where I will get the paperwork certified in the middle of nowhere, I will probably have a go at it myself with a few impressive looking stamps we use at the office...

The nice thing is that my plans have inspired A. to start some distance learning herself, so we would be cosily studying together in the evenings. She is still looking at the various options available.

Things have calmed down politically for the moment, we've had no mention of further incidents over the past week. Part of that is also due to a lack of information on what is going on in the hinterland. The country keeps happily endebting itself ever further, paying state salaries with money borrowed at completely unsustainable rates (between 10% and 18% on an annual basis; you can get your car financed cheaper than that!). The IMF should decide today on a new post-conflict program for the country, but even that will not substantially change things (just 4 million dollars or so, and a loan at that. We may be slow in disbursing but what we give is aall grant money.). The only way out is for the country is to get its act together as regards running their own public finances, in particular in raising revenues. Which is one of the reasons why we are here. Another reason is public health: I attended a seminar on the AIDS problem this morning, and heard some ghastly new figures: in our host country, on a population of only 3,5 million, in 2005 alone 274 000 children lost one or both parents to AIDS.

I am in charge of the office these days, as the boss and three of the other heads of section have left for a seminar in Brazzaville to discuss programming for 2008-2013.

I shouldn't forget to mention the latest thing that is making our life more comfortable: we are among the first people here to receive have South African cable television, including a host of English and Hindi TV channels. It's nice to be watching BBC out here. This afternoon we had our first little argument with M. over Cartoon Network.

All in all a good week then.

Hesitating...

2006-01-20T09:29:00.000+03:00

Still tergiversating about that study. Inscription time is now.

I have passed all week studying in the evenings, using a book on Public Expenditure Management available for free online, just to get a taste of what it's like, after all those years, and to see whether this ambitious plan of mine is feasible. The easy part is going home earlier and spend the extra time with the family. But then: sitting down to study for two more hours, plus a lot more during weekends, is OK when you're just back from a refreshing holiday, but I guess it will be something different during the times of year when I am at the end of my tether. On the other hand there is no doubt in my mind that it is going to be tremendously relevant to my work, and it will be fun to be much more knowledgeable in something as omnipresent as public administration (I still can't believe that I find something I would have found utterly boring ten years ago, so fascinating right now). It's the intensity that bothers me a bit, given the fact that work is intensive enough as it is. I should probably lower my ambitions and take longer than just two years to do the whole program.

I'll turn forty in less than two months, jeez! I should start thinking about how to celebrate it. Don't hide, but face it, throw a big party.

We're most probably going on a one-week tour to a game reserve in the north of the country, with our neighbours and their two children, who have become good friends of ours. The idea is that The women and the children would travel there by plane, whereas jean and I would rough it out in our fourwheel drive, 2 days up and 2 days down, security permitting of course. I am all excited about the prospect of a full four days on the road in the provinces, as my job normally does not involve much travelling in country. In my more sarcastic moments I sometimes joke that for me a field mission here means getting out of my office to visit a Ministry 3 minutes away.

A. is getting enviably fit, as she has running at least 4 times a week with a friend of hers. And it shows, she looks taut and trim. I really ought to get moving again myself...

Out of the blue

2006-01-18T11:00:00.000+03:00

Yesterday, all of a sudden, an interview in a local newspaper with a rebel leader we had never heard of. He turns out to be the son of a general and minister who served under the previous regime a decade ago. And yes, he wants the president to step down and will use armed force if need be. No idea yet how seriously to take this guy, we've had fakes in the recent past.

On good intentions and past lives

2006-01-16T20:36:00.000+03:00

Last week I managed to stick more or less to my good intention to cut back on excessive overtime. Not giving in to real or perceived peer pressure is the hardest part. However his first week I have been able to stand my ground, and as a result I have been putting the children to bed and playing chess with M. in the evenings a lot more than before. The chess playing may actually turn into a source of embarrassment for me before long, given the quick progress M. is making and the poor player I have always been.

Another reason why I try to cut back on overtime is to see if I can actually reserve time for studying in the evenings and weekends. In spite of the worklaod I read quite a bit here, certainly a lot more than in Brussels or Lith, and I am now seriously considering using that time for going back to university, through distance learning. The Center for Financial and Management Studies at London University offers a MSc program in Public Policy and Management that looks interesting and extremely relevant to my present line of work. It’s becoming ever clearer that good (financial) governance is the condition sine qua non for any way out of the misery developing countries are confronted with. This is especially true of our host country, where the rot of corruption, nepotism and incompetence has been eating away at the fabric of society for decades. The poor management of their public finances will probably even disqualify them for budgetary aid from most major donors in the near future, including us, which would send them into a terrible downward spiral. So the need for better governance is obvious, and so is the need for solid expertise on governance, especially financial governance.

Public Policy and Management is a long haul away from my original academic interests, and if I ever won the lottery I would probably return, sooner or later, to studying utterly useless ancient languages and their literatures for the rest of my days. But my present job has been an eye-opener in that I have developed a sincere interest, have even grown passionate, about governance issues. (Well, OK, I also long to be studying again, just for the pleasure of it. I’ve always been bookish; I guess that taking up an extremely practical study like this, with a very heavy economic component, is a good way to satisfy this need and to make myself useful at the same time.)

Not that it will be easy: as a humble classical philologist, I don’t think I can claim to be particularly gifted in such hard-core subjects as economics, accountancy, budgeting, etc.. (The latter is a euphemism that will cause roaring laughter among friends and relatives who know me well…), and it will be very hard work for me. It won’t be cheap either: 11.000 euros, blimey, for about two years of study, not including travel expenses for exams etcetera. But what makes me hesitate the most is the investment of time that is required, about 20 hours a week for a series of seven intensive 2-month courses spread over 2-3 years. A. is supportive of the idea, though of course with some reservations as to possible intrusions on family life. My boss (sober again…) was quite positive and supportive, and so are some other people whose advice I asked.

On a different note: I recently said that my only hang-up with Buddhism was my incapacity to believe in reincarnation, even though this does not upset my belief in the usefulness of leading an ethical life. Soon after, I started to read a general academic introduction on Buddhism, which mentioned in its discussion of reincarnation the work of a professor Ian Stevenson, a medical doctor and psychiatrist, on cases ‘suggestive of reincarnation’. I have purchased two of his books and a book by a sympathetic but critical journalist, Tom Shroder, who followed Stevenson on two of his travels to Lebanon and India. After reading the latter book and a preliminary perusal of the other two, I haven’t suddenly become a 100% believer, but I guess it is only a matter of intellectual honesty to at least suspend my judgment on the matter. Over four decades, Stevenson has collected about 2500 (!) cases of children in different parts of the world speaking in detail of previous lives. He was able to track down details about the life of the claimed previous personalities, and in hundreds of cases the children had birthmarks that could be linked to the reported death of the previous personality. He argues that rebirth is probably the best hypothesis to explain such phenomena. Food for thought, to say the least.

I briefly brought up the matter of possible native beliefs in reincarnation in the country with a native person of our host country at a lunch we attended today. He explained to me that that there are over 150 different ethnic groups in this country, and that even within and the same ethnic group there are varieties. He thought there were indeed also beliefs. There are also interesting food taboos among some groups, such as a taboo on eating … chicken (first time I have ever heard of it). And then there’s the omnipresent belief in sorcery and witchcraft, on which I am collecting a file of newspaper clippings which is already growing quite fat. We are sitting on an anthropological goldmine here; I really should do something with it. Perhaps I will tell you one day about a few salient cases in this blog.

Mayhem and booze

2006-01-12T13:22:00.000+03:00

'I was wrong when I said in my latest entry that the 'rogue elements of the Presidential guard came to the police office, took the man out of his cell and without much further ado killed him on the spot'. It turns out that there was considerable further ado, in that they invested time and effort to beat the man senseless, stab him repeatedly, cut off his private parts, and finally shoot him to a pulp with a Kalashnikov. A newspaper picture showed the corpse in the morgue, brains bulging out of a crack in the skull. Sorry for adding these disgusting details, but it shows the bestiality of the people involved.

If the above is hard to read, just imagine what it must have been to actually witness the scene, as did Amour, our nanny. She happened to be at the gendarmerie to follow up on her own trouble with the army when the Presidential Guard people came storming in. The policemen inside were so scared of them that they fled the precinct and ran onto the street barefooted. Amour was deeply traumatised about what she saw. Yet another element in this dense African life of hers.

So much for the rule of law in this country. The government has remained as good as silent on the incident. It shows that no-one really controls these murderous and, as it now turns out, sadistic elements, and that the population is rightly scared to death of them. I cannot yet foresee the consequences of the incident (which comes on top of many previous incidents), but they may eventually be severe in terms of our assistance. A dilemma I have talked about before: a whole population taken hostage by a few.

Something unpleasant happened yesterday afternoon: my boss, myself and other colleagues had a meeting with the representatives of the major French development agencies in town, and I noticed that there was something odd to my boss's behaviour. He turned out to be quite tipsy after a lunch that according to a colleague who had been there had been 'bien arrosé'. I had noticed before that he is a heavy consumer, but he never seemed affected by it. This time he definitely was: he spoke with a noticeable slur, repeated himself and he lost his balance once while seated (!) as he gesticulated with his hands. He also nearly tripped over a chair when he got up to answer the phone. Furthermore he made an important factual mistake in his presentation.

It sounds funny, but it really wasn't. He's someone I respect and sympathize with, even though I have been disagreeing with him on certain issues lately. The situation got embarrassing as the guys in front of us seemed to understand exactly what was going on. Word will get around on this, and it will not help our credibility. Perhaps somebody should cautiously raise the isssue with him (like 'please get pissed in your own time'). Let's hope this was a one-off incident?

Welcome home!

2006-01-07T01:55:00.000+03:00

What a great holiday we've had, with a very full schedule. Highlights: our Hindu wedding ritual of course, but also some great get-togethers with friends and relatives. Too bad we didn't manage to see all the friends we had hoped to meet.

All my mothers children and their families were together for Christmas, a rare occasion. The New Years Eve party we were invited to by friends was heartwarming, especially when some other friends, who to my initial disappointment were supposed to go elsewhere, came party-crashing on us. Meeting with my old teacher and friend from Nijmegen was great. I also caught up with some ex-colleagues from Leiden University. One of them had made a far-reaching, extremely courageous personal decision, that seemed logical and natural to me once I met her.

We're back in Africa since yesterday after an uneventful but most uncomfortable trip. R. is becoming ever bigger, but as he is not yet 2 years old, he can’t have his own seat. The plane being full to the brim, we had to hold him all night, duh! We almost didn’t sleep, something I don’t take well at all, it’s real torture to me. Put me in Guantanamo Bay with sleep deprivation for 48 hours and I’ll confess to being Bin Laden himself!

This time the family is divided in its feelings about coming home. M.’s sentiments against our stay in Africa and for our staying in Holland forever have flared up over the past week. I am afraid that his idea of life in Holland is a little out of touch with reality. Our efforts to make him understand that children in Holland have to go to school too and that they do not have unlimited access to the Nickelodeon and Jetix kids TV channels, have been a conspicuous failure ;). A. too is lukewarm about returning this time, although she thinks it will pass. T. on the other hand is as happy as a lark, and so is R. I myself came back reinvigorated, but the news of new trouble in our host country has dampened some of the enthusiasm.

In the night of 2-3 January an army officer from the President’s tribe (Gbaya) was killed in a fight over a woman with a fellow army officer from the tribe of one the president’s most hated personal enemies (Mandja). The latter sought refuge with the UN representative (the Senegalese with the reproductive prowess) but was denied access and instead handed over to the police. Some rogue elements of the Presidential guard came to the police office, took the man out of his cell and without much further ado killed him on the spot. The Mandja quartiers of the capital have since been in turmoil.

The episode brings to the fore deep divisions within the army. If the tensions take an ethnic twist, an element that was so far lacking or in any case not very prominent, then that is definitely a turn for the worse, as ethnic conflicts in Africa are so much bloodier than others. But let´s not jump to conclusions and wait.

In the meantime however A. and I have started preparing emergency stocks of water, pasta, canned fish etc., just in case things turn nasty and we can't leave the house for some time.

I have come back with the firm intention (as usual, I hasted to add) to cut back on overtime and spend more time with the family and on evening reading. The firmness of this intention will be put to the test this week as we are drowning in all sort of internal reporting obligations to HQ, deadline end of the week.

Our Hindu wedding anniversary

2005-12-29T00:42:00.000+03:00

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!

2005-12-23T03:18:00.000+03:00

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?

2005-12-23T02:38:00.000+03:00

(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:

the strong Wassenaarian r-sound (*) that seems to be ever more fashionable among radio dj’s.
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) (**).
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….
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!

2005-12-16T11:09:00.000+03:00

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

2005-12-16T10:57:00.000+03:00

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

2005-12-07T15:54:00.000+03:00

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

2005-12-01T13:05:00.000+03:00

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.

Back at work

2005-11-28T12:52:00.000+03:00

Spent some three hours at work today, I am about to leave to go and have some sleep. Tired, but in a better mood. Colleagues' reactions were heartwarming and very supportive. My boss even thinks that I am paying the price for all the overtime I have worked in the past, before the Summer holiday. I am pretty sure that is not so, I came back extremely well rested in September, but I must admit this martyr status he's ascribing to me is almost irresistible! ;)

Also in a better mood because David, an old but very close friend, send me some of his latest. Thanks David, and my warmest greetings back to your family and parents too.

Event density

2005-11-26T23:44:00.000+03:00

It's almost midnight and I can't sleep. Had trouble falling asleep last night as well, and a number of nights before. This afternoon I rested but didn t sleep, even though I was tired enough. In spite of the one Lexomil I took, which PYL prescribed but which I try to avoid, is there yet another sleepless night looming?

We were struck this evening, already in bed, with sad news from Holland, or rather from Suriname, when word reached us that A.'s nani, her mother's mother, had passed away the day before yesterday, well into her eighties.

Another reason might be that my father would have turned 66 today. He died almost ten years ago, 9 April 1996, aged 56. I believe his untimely death, of a brain tumour, extended over a year and a half between hope and fear and with his personality affected, has been the most traumatic experience in the lives of all of his family members, and certainly in mine. It sure has dampened my own expectations as regards a long life. After almost ten years, you talk about it less, but he remains present, especially when you realise he hasn t known any of his now seven grandchildren.

When I met PYL yesterday he said he was convinced that my malaria attack had everything to do with continued lowered resistance over our recent concerns over M.'s surgery. I don't know, although that cold sore I made such a silly fuss about at the time was directly related to it. But in fact he must be right: we're still digesting those days, and we were probably naive in thinking that a week at the seaside in Cameroon would help us put the thing behind us. And now the realisation that my malaria was not so innocent has been added to it.

M.'s recent object of intense affection, Sharlene, is sleeping over today, but for a sad reason. Her mother had been courageously trying to set up a little commerce here and found out today that the container she had had filled up back in Europe with various stocks had arrived and been pillaged empty while still in customs here. Just a little fait divers.

Another fait divers I happened to hear today: a new local secretary in the office had been hiding under her bed with her family one night last week after heavily armed bandits had gone through her street in the quartiers robbing one house after the other. In her case only the door had been blown out by a salvo from a Kalashnikov, nobody got hurt.. There had been heavy shooting for two hours in the street, but police and the army showed up only hours later.

Honestly, I am not making this up. There is the general fact that events come in such density here, not only to us (just look at the freak event catalogue this blog is becoming) but to so many others. I think all this plus the malaria on top has made my nerves ends rawer, or am I just getting more sensitive these days? Sitting around all day doing the obligatory resting does not help a lot of course.

Even rereading Tom Wolfe's The bonfire of the vanities (can anybody tell me about a more masterful novel written in the last twenty years?) was almost too intensive, too rough on the nerves, which is also due to the man s awe-inspiring writing talents of course. I am now in much safer, balmier hands with The history of Tibetan Buddhism by the Dalai Lama, and believe it or not, I can actually feel a physical difference inside between reading one and the other!

Thanks for listening. The Lexomil seems to be kicking in finally. I ll try to go and sleep again.

Amour

2005-11-25T22:38:00.000+03:00

Just when I thought I could finally start serving you some lighter fare, another event raises its ugly head.

In fact it took place one evening already a week ago: on her way home our nanny, Amour, escaped an attempted rape by a drunk army officer well known in his quartier by fighting him off (kicking him where it hurt) and running. She was however badly beaten up by him with the back of a pistol, but the poor thing wouldn't tell A. at first about what had happened because I was laying ill.

Anyway, she has been amazingly courageous and has now filed a complaint with the Permanent Military Tribunal, set up mainly to please foreign donors because of the constant misbehaviour of the army, and it has actually punished army people every now and then. We ll see how long it lasts...

A. has gone with her and paid for her to get a decent medical check-up and a medical report to file with the complaint, but of course almost a week after the facts the swellings etcetera had abated. A. will also help her to get professional legal counsel. So we've found a way: I'll be a good boy and not trespass my professional boundaries, but of course my wife is free to render assistance to whomever she likes.....

I have been thinking about what Amour has been going through in the mere 15 months we have been here (this is not counting the fact that e.g. she gave birth to a daughter at the age of 14): a relative ( 'sister') died in her arms a few months ago apparently poisoned by a jealous rival over a man; she suffered a very heavy malaria attack, in hospital for days; her son (11) fell very ill but recovered; she was accused of theft of a piece of jewellery in our house by her colleagues, but we wouldn t believe it had been her so she stayed - theft never resolved; her now adolescent (15) daughter got almost kicked out of school for repeated absences, A. was wonderful and managed to talk some sense into the girl; her ex-husband pursued her once with an axe; she had to dump a new live-in boyfriend after he started beating her; her house got inundated a few months ago once during very heavy rains; she had to sleep on the street with her daughter and son after she was kicked out from her sister s house, all her stuff stolen; she has moved house at least four times with her children; her brother ended up in jail and received death threats. And now this attempted rape, and this was certainly not the first attempt, I think; she's still young, attractive and as such considered fair game, especially by the military.

And when you see her: she is serenity itself (that's why we didn't, couldn't hesitate the time she was in agony over her relative in jail), an angel for the children, especially R. Talk about a survivor... The fact that she's a single woman makes it extra hard for her in this country, but many married woman are not much better off, doing all the work for often unfaithful and often abusive partners. She commands a lot of respect, and that's probably why we tend to be more protective of her than of our other personnel (in total eight, of which four guards. I'll tell you more about the feudal household we re running here some other time...).

Boobs, and other titbits

2005-11-25T19:36:00.000+03:00

The local Internet company we had a home subscription with, Lebanese guys, have given up on us completely now. After our home connection died many months ago (and with us learning in the meantime the meaning of the word 'demain' when used by an Africanised Lebanese...), they have over the past two days worked hard and tried to restore it, but 'the trees have grown too high' between our house and their central antenna. Right. I have Internet at work, but A.'s only option is to use one of the Internet cafés in town, which is extremely cumbersome. I feel very sorry for her, because it would make such a big difference for her to be able to go online from home.

Luckily her social life has been livening up considerably this year. She has befriended some 7 or 8 very nice young women, ranging in age from 25 to 35, who meet quite often, with or without their kids. Most of their partners know each other at least professionally as well (it's a small place here). Three of the women are African ladies with European partners, plus one Philippina, one Russian-Sudanese, and A. herself. Think again by the way when you hear seemingly innocent terms like 'ladies lunches' etcetera. Two days ago, during what must have been one of their livelier get-togethers, two of the African ladies (says A. ....) had for one reason or the other bared their upper bodies and were comparing boobs in front of the rest of the frantic lot! At 35, A. is the eldest of them all, but she also has the youngest husband, yours truly at 39, hah!

Clearly I still have enough time on my hands, with a new posting every day. Frustrating that I can't put the stuff online right away (and possibly have some of your feedback). I have been writing at home since I fell ill two weeks ago, and my only time out of the house have been those ill-fated and not very career enhancing two hours in the office last Friday and 45 minutes at a birthday drink last Saturday..

I think I am beginning to feel a little more energetic. This morning doctor PYL came to check on me and he was friendly but adamant: no, he didn't think I should go to that particular meeting at work tomorrow to be updated on current affairs, not even for an hour. As much as this reassures my inner Calvinist, this virtual house arrest is becoming uncomfortable. So I made a second attempt later on in the morning to bring up the subject with A., saying I only wanted to go and sneak into the office tonight, just to have a quick look at some private stuff, pay some bills online, publish this backlog of blog entries online, but she got even quite cross with me, which is rare and therefore not to be messed with...

A few hours later I found out they were right and I was wrong, again. The children's school is at some 200 meters away from our house, which is one of the good things about our life here. I walked down to pick up M. and T., my first such walk in two weeks. When I came back I was very tired, felt the need to lie down (slept 5 hours straight) and had experienced again problems with my equilibrium. I am also losing weight quite visibly, but for the time being I don't mind that at all. All in all, however, this malaria thing is clearly not over yet...

On a happier note, we received good news about M. s performance in class: there has recently been a clear change in his learning attitude (Sh...?) and he has started to work faster, paying better attention, in short, all that is so important to the French (I probably told you before that I find the French school system's philosophy lacking in attention for creativity, social interaction and personal development of the child. I still think M., who is not lacking in intelligence, is often bored in class.)) On the other hand T. 's attention span remains limited: it seems though that she's working with gusto on her own philosophy of social interaction (intensive and in particular at inconvenient moments) and play...

Pfff, whatever. In spite of the difficulties A. and I have recently been living through, we have three very happy, beautiful and thriving children running around here, and that counts for a hell of a lot...

The meaning of life ... (oh yes, no more, no less)

2005-11-23T19:18:00.000+03:00

(Do skip this one if you're not in the mood for pseudo-philosophical, personal blather.)

I am still at home, recuperating from the malaria that started on 12 November. I have now accepted that my body has been seriously suffering from the malaria and that I need a lot of rest. My inner Calvinist has been put to rest too, so I don't do any work, although I am thinking of popping in the next couple of days for an hour or so. Last week there have been days that I slept almost 20 hours, so clearly there's a physical need for rest that goes beyond my usual laziness.

With so much time on my hands now, I have had lots of time to think, and these thoughts have not been invariably happy. The doctor has made it very clear to me that this was not your usual malaria, but the nasty one that breaks through the brain barrier and kills a significant percentage (about one in ten) of people affected by it, especially children. We started the treatment just in time, a few hours later and I could have been in a coma. George Ng. was not so lucky, but then again his illness was infinitely more complicated (Aids, malaria and meningitis at the same time).

Not surprisingly, with also M.'s surgery still very fresh in our minds, morale is not great these days, especially A. has been scared senseless. At the same time, a cerebral malaria can happen anywhere in a malaria zone, so in most of Africa and Asia. I may have picked it up during our rainy week in Kribi-Cameroon.

I sure can't complain about my guardian angel. He did his job well for a third time, after earlier interventions in Turkey (some 10 years go, when I dove from a 7-meter high bridge into a river and came out alive 'only' with a neck injury) and a highway car incident in Belgium in 2001 that I could do absolutely nothing about but that normally should have killed me. The first two instances at least served a purpose: I have stopped diving head-first into any water any where, and I have lost all impulse to speed (even though I wasn't speeding at the time).

But what lesson to draw from this malaria attack and its aftermath? Leaving Africa is hardly an option: this is what I do as a career, as a living, and, almost paradoxically after the medical hardship we have lived through recently, I am doing it with increasing determination and motivation. We're trying to bring the country up to a level where the level of health care that I received is more accessible to more people, although I have few illusions in that respect.

There are a few lessons though on a more personal level that I am reflecting on for the umpteenth time. Everything's possible, and my life is clearly not hazard-free. My father and my father's father didn't get very old. I am 39, going on forty, statistically speaking over the hill. Can I say at this very moment that I have done what's right, for A. and the children, and the rest of the world? Most importantly: have I been a good father, and a good husband? Furthermore: have I been a good son, brother, friend, in-law, colleague, employer, citizen? What about the balance work-family life? Have I sufficiently exploited any talents I may have?

This is all thoroughly personal stuff, almost embarrassingly personal. Some of you will be quite ready to give me some clear and rather unflattering answers to a number of these questions. Anyway, this is what I meant at the beginning of the year in a letter to friends and family when I said that I felt a need for 'spiritual deepening'. Not an exercise of the incense burning and mantra singing kind, but some thorough thinking about the things that truly matter in life.

I have, as countless others, on and off throughout my adolescent and adult life been interested in these questions.(*) It's only now, after having lived through a number of things (almost ten years of marriage, losing my father, being a father of three, professional experiences, expatriation, etc.) and after having been exploring for about a year now what seems to be a promising tool (**), that I feel ready to go and reflect on these questions more in-depth, find some answers perhaps, and, who knows, start living by them some day.

(*) I don t think however that my studies in Philosophy had much to do with it: they were perhaps more motivated by the pleasure of intellectual muscle flexing, hence my interest for ancient philosophy and philosophy of language - I liked it because it was intellectually extremely challenging and just intrinsically very beautiful, but living the theory was never an issue for me. My interest in ethics is only now truly developing.

(**) I am talking about (Tibetan) Buddhism. To avoid the smell of esotericism that forces itself upon the reader when novices like myself mention the word I prefer for the moment to refer to it as a powerful intellectual tool to understand and give more sense to a number of things in life. What I have read so far makes a remarkable lot of sense and is intellectually fulfilling. My only, not so minor, hang-up with it is its belief in reincarnation, which I can't come to terms with and which logically should undermine the whole sense of the concept of karma. Strangely enough the logical gap I am thus creating does not bother me yet. Maybe I'll take this on some other time.

P.S. This blog is by now getting way more philosophical than I intended it to be. I wonder if I make any sense at all, or whether I should return to anecdotal stuff only, such as disgusting and/or scary tropical diseases that hit us, or juicy village gossip such as the UN Representative with 11 children back in Senegal who is now fathering a child with the 45-year old Minister of Trade of our country of posting? I will try to do a bit of all. It's just that we've had lots of things to digest recently which have been making my recent blog entries un peu lourds. And anyway, what can I do. You don't like it, you don't read it.

M. in love

2005-11-22T19:13:00.000+03:00

I had a great little conversation with M., our eldest, tonight when I put him to bed: he is in love. I am mighty proud that it is something he will discuss with me and A., even though it is a big secret (thanks for putting it online, Dad....). Her name is Sharlene, also a child of a mixed marriage (mother Cameroonian, father Belgian), and he is in love with her 'because of her pretty hair'. But I think I know what he likes in her too: she's quiet, sweet, and very well-behaved, and I've noticed before that that is almost invariably the type of girl that attracts him (I am pretty sure that things will be a little different with T. and R. ...) . She has been sleeping over for pyjama-parties a couple of times, and T. also gets along with her very well.

I remember M.'s little girl-friend Aldora, an Indian girl, at the English school in Brussels. They got along so extremely well. She was just such an incredibly nice little girl, pleasant, well behaved and all, that the tribal elder in me was ready to start talking camels and cattle and to arrange the marriage... I know that when the time comes and they bring home boyfriends and girlfriends for real I will have a hard time keeping my judgments to myself and to let them make their own choices and errors...

Yesterday, M.'s been handing out invitation cards at school for his 7th birthday party next week. He had to spy on her ('espioneren' in his ever more French-tainted Dutch) to get her one-on-one for a moment away from the prying eyes of his buddies and those of her girl friends to give her her personal invitation.

So sweet all this, just priceless....

Cerebral malaria

2005-11-21T19:06:00.000+03:00

As I said, the day George Ng. died, 12 November, I fell ill with a nasty case of malaria myself.

At first I didn't think much of the excruciating headache (and all the other joint aches) that went with the high fever (up to 41,3 C, never below 39 C). By Sunday I was however biting my pillow and holding back the tears, so maddening had the pain become. The doctor, PYL, who is a project manager in my section and whom we call by his initials, told me that the headache was not just a usual symptom, but that I had crossed the line to a cerebral malaria. The pain I felt were the red blood cells popping out the parasites in large numbers. We re now killing them with generous doses of Coartem, and it seems to work, the fever has gone, but I am still weak..

It was also the first time I had the typical malaria cold shiver experience: airco off, at least 30 C in the bedroom, two sets of pyjamas, 5 sheets and blankets on top of me and my teeth were clattering!

What worries me a little is that I can't walk straight at the moment, PYL says the malaria may have affected my sense of equilibrium. I sure hope this is temporary??

By merely tapping my chest (he couldn t make me cough because my head would have tumbled off, a red hot cauldron of pain) he also diagnosed a beginning .... pneumonia, in this country where the temperature never come below 24....... I've stopped asking questions. So I am taking more antibiotics, on top of the ones that had already been given over the past two months. What can I do, herbal medicine does not seem a viable option in this germ-infested country.....

Last Friday I thought I was well enough to go over to the office and check my e-mails. The results were not great: I was assured by all that I looked like a living corpse, and had to go home after less than two hours, exhausted. The few e-mails I wrote were in the most atrocious French that I had managed since my arrival here a year ago according to a trusted friend and colleague. Moreover, one e-mail, a reply to Headquarters, was apparently so bad-tempered and bordering on the abusive (usually they are only bad-tempered...) that it had to be overruled by my boss, as he most obligingly told me a few days later when he paid me a visit at home. The lesson is clear: I am now under strict instructions by doctor, boss and wife alike to do absolutely nothing and let my body and brains recuperate until further order.

Anyway, that's also the end of this family's little experiment with no preventative drugs (which are not harmless either) but treat as you go, as many people do here. This malaria attack was vicious, and with a lesser doctor than good old PYL , where would I have been.... (that French Embassy shit-for-brains comes to mind again...) We'll all go back on Savarin.

A tribute to George Ng.

2005-11-16T21:00:00.000+03:00

Here's yet another story about how people die here.

Last Saturday 12 November a beloved 46-year old local colleague of ours, George Ng., a technical assistant paid by us through a project but in the service of the government and the people of his native country, succumbed, after a week-long struggle, to the number-one cause of death here: AIDS.

(I had wanted to write about it earlier, but right on the day the day George died, I fell quite badly ill myself with a worse than expected case of malaria. Now that I am up on my feet again myself - though not much more than that, if I am to believe the doctor, I can say a bit more about it. Plenty of time all of a sudden too, since I am under official - and A.'s -instructions not to do a snippet of work until further order so as to recover fully from my bout of malaria.)

About George Ng. now: George was the coordinator of a project meant to support the National Authorising Officer (NAO), that is the Minister appointed by the government to coordinate all aid contacts with us and to sign on behalf of it regarding the aid we provide. If I wanted to be sarcastic I could say something about the fact that the NAO needs an extra support project to lead him through our labyrinthine procedures, but let s be kind and say that the support project is to help the NAO and his services with the financial volumes involved (remember: > 100 MEUR per five years) and the technical specificity of our projects that necessitate the extra help, which is true too. Moreover we re building local capacity and blablabla

After the May 2005 elections, ministerial posts had of course to be changed in an obscure musical chairs game of sincere willingness to reform and the good old jobs-for-the-boys routine. Anyway, the relatively competent and certainly very cooperative NAO we had went out, and in came a new one that has only been trouble for us ever since, blocking projects for trivial reasons etc. (sorry, can t elaborate on that now here, maybe the day he (or I) gets fired...). He also started to exert tremendous pressure, indeed harassment, on George - we suspected with the intention to replace him with one of his own pals, as Georges job is relatively well paid. And thus, within a matter of months , we saw George changing from a calm and reliable force into a nervous wreck.

The stress must then have unleashed the Aids virus in his blood, which in its turn may have triggered a cerebral malaria and a meningitis. Or at least these were the three illnesses he was diagnosed with in the week following his collapse on Sunday 6 November, just back from a government business flight from Cameroon. He s been clinging onto life for another week but died in coma on Saturday 12 November.

A tragedy in itself, certainly personally and at the family level: George was a devout Christian and a devoted husband and father, apparently so much so that he married two women (local legislation permits up to four), so one can imagine the legal mess that is going to ensue. A double family doomed to poverty, in spite of the fact that we, his colleagues, will make, have already made, a financial gesture. But also - and to me: most of all - what a bitter waste of talent in a country where high quality human resources are so scarce.

Our own doctor in the Delegation, PYL, who is a project manager in my section, was absolutely wonderful, and has been supervising his treatment until the last moment. But the doctors of the Community Hospital: shocking. It appeared that they knew all along that George Ng. was HIV positive, and yet the social stigma of Aids is apparently so great that even the doctors withheld this information for a long time from our PYL. This delayed the administration of antiretroviral drugs for almost a week and has certainly contributed to Ng.'s untimely death.

Mind you, we're presently building a 3 million euro centre for ambulatory HIV/Aids treatment on the grounds of this very same hospital. When even the local doctors give in to to social stigmatisation of Aids, one can imagine the magnitude of the work we have ahead of us. Or rather the work they have ahead of them.

Karaoke

2005-11-06T16:26:00.000+03:00

Lest you should think our life here consists only of medical urgencies and profound reflections on life, death, and the state of the nation, I should let you know that we do make sure to regularly let our hair down here.

As I am writing this, my voice is still raw and my head still hurting after a raucous night in a popular restaurant (one of the three worthy of the name). We came back at 2.30 this morning. I thought we had left all this behind us long ago, but fortunately not. The name of the game was karaoke. It was tremendous fun, even though the repertoire was overwhelmingly French, silly songs from the fifties onwards, with Johnny Halliday seemingly the hottest thing on offer. I did some singing myself too: Lou Bega, Frank Sinatra, and Born to be alive with a friend. After initial objections A. did not seem too embarrassed ;)

Over the last few months our social life has been getting ever better. A. and I now have a fun crowd of friends, many with small children, partly anglophone in a shared need to escape our francophone surroundings every now and then. We needed some time to settle down, but are now into giving regular dinner parties etc., which is easier here because we have this marvellous advantage of enough domestic help to make it doable. Life out here is like in a village. It can be a bit suffocating sometimes, but it suits us well for the moment and we are enjoying it.

Moral dilemmas

2005-11-04T18:28:00.000+03:00

Last Thursday something awful happened which laid bare the moral dilemmas of working under the Vienna Convention (diplomatic rights and obligations). It also reminded me of a similar dilemma about non-intervention I was confronted with personally a few weeks ago.

I should start by telling you that the charming young française who recently frustrated my budding management efforts is no longer the section's latest acquisition. The position of most junior member has now been taken by another young expert, a 26-year old French economist, a bit of a cowboy and as enthousiastic and wild as a young puppy dog, he's all over the place.

On Thursday we sent Puppy Dog on a one-day mission, his first here, into the bush together with representatives of two other donors, government representatives, and an army escort to inspect a project set up to reincorporate ex-combatants (from the numerous past civil conflicts here) into society again. Massive efforts to which my employer makes large financial contributions at a centralized level, whereas the project itself, in this and other ccountries in the region, is managed by another large donor.

As the convoy returned from the project late afternoon they tried to catch up on time lost during the day in order to be back in the capital before dark (security). Roads in this country are most of the time riddled with potholes and/or not asphalted at all. This particular road has however been renovated recently, so they were travelling at great speed, like 130 km/h. Very dangerous, as high grass and shrubs grow right at the sides of the road due to poor road maintenance.* Often people on the road, including small children, step back into roadside bush until cars have passed and then come out again, frequently to be hit by the next car that they hadn't heard coming. However, that was not what happened in this particular instance. As the convoy was racing back to the capital, with an army car up front, they followed a left curve in the road, cutting it for marginal time gains and thus driving at high speed on the left hand side of the road in a curve with no visibility on oncoming traffic. Sure enough, an oncoming rickety old pick-up truck with 6-7 people standing in the back suddenly emerged on that same left lane. The lead car of the convoy swung back to the right hand lane. So did the second car in the convoy, with Puppy Dog and the government's representative in it. Nevertheless the oncoming pick-up truck also had to make a rash manoeuvre to avoid a head-on collision. It is not clear whether the people in the truck panicked and jumped offf the truck at the sight of the second car coming on, or whether they were simply thrown off because of the wild swings the driver had to make not to hit the convoy. I presume the latter. The result seems to have been ghastly as 6-7 people hit the asphalt at a speed of about 80 km/h. The convoy stopped about half a mile further down the road. Government and army people took a long while to deliberate, then finally, after much urging by the people they were accompanying, decided to send back one army car to see what had happened. They came back to report on several severely wounded, included somebody's skull split open, and a little girl with one or several limbs torn off. (Believe me, this is as sickening for me to write as it is for you to read.)

Our new colleague turns out to be a amateur firefighter with a training in first aid. As the clock was ticking precious minutes away, he insisted several times and with increasing frustration that he be allowed to go back and assist the wounded. This was flatly refused by the government representative, who cited security reasons and the fact that the mission was already running late as it was.... These same security reasons didn't stop him, urged on by the foreign mission, from sending the complete armed ascort to go and pick up the wounded - thus leaving the misssion unprotected anyway - and drive them in the back of their pick-up trucks to a nearby countryside medical post. The foreign mission hasn't actually seen the wounded, but to tell by the nature of the injuries reported by the army (which the government guy almost immediately tried to talk down as mere 'scratches'), there is little doubt in my mind that some people involved in the accident are almost certainly not going to survive their ordeal. Medical facilities here, and especially those in the provinces, are terrible, see my story about M.'s surgery. Driving somebody with a fractured skull to hospital in the back of a pick-up truck will certainly not do him any good. And then the little girl, and the others with equally terrifying injuries, jesus.

Obviously Puppy Dog came back to the office seriously upset that evening , so I sat him down and we talked about it. Of course I can understand his deep frustration. I had to praise the self-restraint he had shown by respecting the fact that formally he was under the host government's orders at the time of the accident and by not following his basic instincts and running half a mile back to help. I am not even sure it would have made much of a difference given the terrible medical care the injured would receive afterwards, or at least that was what I told him.

But ... somehow it doesn't feel right. I must admit that I am not even sure how I would have reacted myself and whether his decision not to ignore the government's man's orders to stay put was really the right thing to do. Honestly, I don't know, and I guess that counts against me, professionally.

It reminded me of another incident, a few weeks ago, that had nothing to do with traffic but everything with the principle of non-intervention. I intervened in my quality as a diplomat, with the reticent approval of my superior, at a police station on behalf of our nanny's half-brother (more on African family relations some other time), a small time magouilleur as far as I can tell with hindsight, involved in a dispute over unpaid bills dating back a few years ago. While in custody, he had been threatened with imminent execution that day by a notorious local thug (an army man, and therefore untouchable), aided and abetted by the police station guards who had just let him walk into the prison. He had been sent/hired by the party to which the nanny's brother owed money in order to speed up the paying of the bills. I went there just to make the point that his case was 'followed' by us and that I merely wanted to ascertain that he was, and would remain, in good health. After some negotiations, including a long, polite but tense phone conversation with the commander of thye police station, I managed to see him, after the guardians had initially denied he was even there. He was OK, not terribly comfortable of course but he seemed, unlesss I am mistaken, somewhat less impressed with the situation than our nanny and her sister.

Apparently my intervention helped, as he has been treated correctly afterwards, although he is still in custody without formal charges etcetera as far as I know. With the wisdom of hindsight however, I probably reacted too impulsively and with insufficient knowledge about the case, rushing to action when I saw the terror on our nanny's face when she told me about the death threat. We just can't get involved in every individual case, and this one was a rather doubtful one at that. But should I have waited for a complete file to be compiled while a death threat was issued by somebody quite capable of following up on it? I guess from a human point of view my intervention will be judged by some (and certainly the nanny, who was deeply grateful for it) as the right thing to do, but this one is almost certain to count against me professionally. So be it.

So, some lessons learnt:
1. A human life isn't worth much here, as I had already started to realise before. Completely innocent people's lives have quite possibly been ended or else ruined. I am almost sure that the government and army will not do anything for them, although messages will be passed on our part in this respect.
2. Working in the framework of international agreements and conventions, like the Vienna convention can give rise to terrible moral dilemmas. I'm sure there are thousands of examples out there, much more painful than the ones cited here. For instance, on a completely different, vastly vastly more awful level, Romeo Dallaire's experiences as a UN general during the Rwandan genocide come to mind. It's all part of the game, and of the career path that I have chosen. But it's difficult and will require all the sound judgment that I can muster.

* It makes you think of our efforts to renovate roads in the capital and elsewhere in this country. Most people here walk for lack of means, and asphalted roads make for comfortable walking. Driving behaviour is terrible here, and the rehabilitation will almost certainly lead to more victims as any new stretch of asphalt leads people to drive recklessly fast. The price of progress, I guess...

Back from a break

2005-11-01T16:55:00.000+03:00

Not surprisingly, the last couple of weeks had worn us out to the extent that we thought we needed a long break. We returned yesterday early morning, three days earlier than planned.

We spent a long rainy week (rainy season in Central Africa!) in Kribi at the seaside in Cameroon last week. As always when you book when you want to get away from it all, you think any place will be better than where you are, and one tends to overestimate the duration one needs. That's a mistake. Just getting away from our country of posting was good, but without sunshine even Kribi had not much going for it, apart from great food (tons of fresh shrimp, ahh) and lots of time for and with the children. What saved this holiday was the fact that a colleague who has a similar positiopn to mine for the same employer in a neighbouring country was staying in the same hotel that week. I had only seen him once before, but we and our families turned out to get along very well and to have lots of things in common in terms of age, family size and aspirations, outlook on life, work and life experiences etcetera. A. and I also discovered that for all the hardships of our posting, there are definitely places that are much worse (like theirs).

A. and I have come back refreshed. We got the stress related to our medical adventures with M. out of our systems. Also nice is the more intensive bonding with the children which I experience during leave. Especially R., our youngest, is growing up fast, becoming ever more mischievous. He's incredibly good natured: at 19 months he didn't cry even once all week. In fact he almost never cries. He is happy, laughing, very sociable, and playing the joker all the time. Strong-willed like the other two. Amazing. He and T. are thriving here in Africa. So is M., but somewhat less so as he is not enjoying his French school too much.

I came back intellectually reinvigorated as well, ready to start (and having actually started) reading again on my latest field of ever increasing interest - the Buddhist outlook on life - which I hadn't studied much since we left for our Summer break in July. Also ready to take on a number of issues at work. I am a bit puzzled at how one week of utter lethargy at the seaside can have such an energizing effect. OK I was tired but not that tired, was I, and just a week isn't all that long?

Trouble brewing?

2005-10-16T19:30:00.000+04:00

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

2005-10-15T01:04:00.000+04:00

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

2005-10-14T20:35:00.000+04:00

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

2005-10-11T23:50:00.000+04:00

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.

2005-10-11T20:56:00.000+04:00

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

2005-10-09T23:02:00.000+04:00

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