Archives de catégorie : Travel

Leaving Abidjan again

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This morning, for the umpteenth time in the past 12 months I boarded a flight to leave Ivory Coast. In a week interacting with friends and acquaintances in Abidjan, I realised many haven’t worked out that I no longer live in the city, leaving as I did at the end of 2012, which of course isn’t so long ago. There was a mega-concert by the Belgian artist, Stromae, on Saturday night, a TedX Abidjan event this afternoon (which by accounts on social media seems to have been quite special), and then this next week there will be the annual meetings of the African Development Bank. In short, it looks like exciting times, while I’m missing out on the lot.

Today, it was interesting in this mood to be continuing my reading of Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer biography, and in particular the part where he left a Germany on the verge of World War 2, for the safety of an arranging lectureship in the USA. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he realised it had been the wrong move, and that his destiny (life mission) lay back in Germany, despite the very real risks to his life (which proved to be real).

For the pastor Bonhoeffer, at a moment of world historical importance, this was the voice of God calling him back to his mission. I wouldn’t see my situation quite so dramatically, but it’s interesting to compare that feeling of being in the wrong place, and being out of line with a mission. Bonhoeffer’s short second trip to the US was useful in helping to clarify his thinking on his personal mission, and also the global church. And, for me, being away from Abidjan, is part of a process of growing, while seeking to still stay engaged. I think the tricky bit is that latter half – of growing and becoming stronger while not disengaging/losing touch of the movement.

Aid workers

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There’s a lot of critical stuff that is written about the international aid worker scene, a group of people I guess I have joined lately. Some of that is justified. But to focus on their merits, they are often an interesting bunch of people inhabiting a very odd globalized world. The norm is that your partner comes from a completely different country, and they live in a third country as well. This month I spent time with a Brit working in Sierra Leone who calls home a place she rents not far from Mexico city. While in Dakar a couple of weeks back I spent a very pleasant evening with a Quebecois working in Senegal who lives in Buenos Aires.

They are more familiar with the good places to eat in Kathmandu or Kinshasa than in the capital city of their country at birth, and they generally can link themselves to any other aid worker in any other part of the world through a mutual intermediary: ‘Oh you worked in Haiti? You must know X, who I worked with in Goma’ etc. In some ways, they often resemble their poorer, younger cousin, the ‘backpacker’, but with the years they are keener to look out for safer, family friendly places, and often need to put down roots somewhere, whether it’s buying a place in Latin America, or a coastal cottage in Vietnam, while they continue to make a living in the latest L3 humanitarian emergency.

Dakar scenes

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Downtown Dakar on a Sunday evening waiting for the doctor to arrive for my medical clearance to depart. Yes, we need to be declared medically fit to travel BACK to Ebola-land. The doctor is late so I step out for a stroll in the evening light.

Standing outside the clinic I hear the sound of the ocean to my left and drumming to my right. I try to get closer to the latter. From a few new luxury apartments around the clinic the homes quickly become tightly packed and make-shift. There are lots of people outside – I’d find it odd to see anything else, though of course such a situation would be unusual in northern Europe. There are goats with impressive horns tied up to drainpipes, and children play marbles in the sand. I think about the time when the most impressive thing in the world was a marble the size of a table tennis ball (a ‘biggy’). I see a man on a street corner that I realise I would have taken for a drug dealer in Paris but here is almost certainly just waiting for a friend.

I walk past families out for a stroll, young people chatting. I cross narrow streets, and arrive at a cul-de-sac where about 30 women are seated in a circle on plastic chairs. In the middle are three male drummers tapping out a rapid beat. As the inspiration comes, the young women, dressed in shiny batik and full of laughter, get up and dance, raising their feet as high as possible in rapid jumps. Off to the right, the men sit in a circle and enjoy the evening, looking distinguished. A little girl who must be about three or four years’ old stands by my feet carrying two small wooden seats. She keeps trying to say something to me as I tower over her, but I can’t hear what she’s saying above the drumming. I smile back and respond but neither of us know what the other is saying. I stand at a distance though not too far off – not wanting to intrude, but wanting to show my appreciation and openness by not standing too far off. I resist any urge to take photos.

Back at the clinic I check and the doctor is still not there. So I turn left and cross the road to the seashore. Wooden canoes are parked in the middle of the road and along the pavement. This is the fish market in the centre of a wide bay. The catch hasn’t long come in, and men sort it in the boats while onlookers observe. Between the boats and the sea, women sit next to organised piles of fish – everyone has a different type and a different size.

At the clinic the doctor arrives nearly two hours late. My dinner date is cancelled. An American friend who moved here two months back tells me about his apartment. His wife first described it as being in the centre of a rubbish tip – next door a plumbing shop has a fine collection of broken toilets, while rubbish is burned nearby wafting up fumes. But from other perspectives, Dakar is described as a clean and secure city. Depends what you’re used to.

A bi-polar life

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Back in Freetown after another intense week with the family in Abidjan. I don’t think I’ll ever be used to this slightly schizophrenic life separated by a two hour flight. As soon as I get to Abidjan it’s all about my wife and baby. In Freetown, life largely revolves around work.

In the latter I have good internet, hot water, a spacious apartment. I survive on sardines, I exercise regularly, I don’t spend much, and I have a car. The opposite is true in Abidjan where we squeeze into a small studio, eat well, and the city is choc full of friends.

It’s actually difficult to imagine these world’s coming together, and it’ll be a radically new experience later in the year when they do, as Ebola fades.

Feeling human

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I sometimes try to put my finger on the essentials that make West Africa so different from Dubai or perhaps Western Europe. One recent idea I’ve been dwelling on is that in West Africa you feel like you exist, whereas elsewhere you might as well just be a ghost. Let me explain. In West Africa, when you (and we could dig deeper into what I mean by ‘you’) walk the streets or drive in your car, people are looking at you. Eye contact is taking place. People you pass in the street might say something to you, men and women will look you directly in the eye. Old people will say hello, children will wave and try and engage in conversation. Random people will approach you. Humanity and society just feels like it’s more real.

You could easily reply – that’s because you’re a foreigner with weird skin colour. And there may be an element of that. But when my wife gets in a bus in Abidjan, there is much more a sense that this is a gathering of humans. Exchanges will take place – greetings, and then commentary, and then discussion, and then shared jokes.

Hidden talents

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One of the world’s most under-rated talents, particularly in this game, is the ability to sleep anywhere. I’m typing this from the lobby of a hotel, which given what the receptionist is wearing may well be a brothel. It’s where we spent the night up country – me to a full night’s sleep, my colleague barely getting 40 winks. It’s true that there’s no toilet seats, or air-con, and a 4 inch gap between the door and floor letting in all manner of insects, but the fan did the trick for me, and I was out for the count until dawn (or just before – we went out to the airport in a rainstorm at 6am to meet a cargo plane).

I’ve never read or heard anyone praising the ability to be ‘bed tolerant’, but it’s a skill I often count myself lucky to have. In the summer in the Central African Republic, we took a memorable 4 day road trip up country, staying in very basic Catholic missions where all we got at night was a patch of concrete floor and a sheet. I slept well.

I remember touring the US by Greyhound bus for a month in September 2000 with a friend, who couldn’t sleep on the buses. We often spent the nights on buses to save money on hotels, particularly towards the end of the trip. The last two nights we travelled first from Washington to New York (north-east) via Richmond (south) (to extend the bus time) and then on the last night we took a trip to Washington and back from New York, and I got a good four hours sleep each way.

A wider point, both in Sierra Leone and CAR, is that it’s good to be able to live without too much. If you need your cappuccinos and trips to the theatre, you’re seriously limiting where you can live in the world. If you can survive on sardines and bread, and sleep with at best a fan, then your options are wide open. Steve Jobs (whose biography I just finished) used to get his cook to make ten meals on an evening, and then declare every single one ‘inedible’. I’ll eat almost anything. The descriptor ‘easily pleased’ often seems to have a negative edge meaning ‘can’t appreciate the finer things in life’. That may well be true, but it makes life straight-forward, even if it leaves friends confused that you really don’t mind where you eat out. The downside is, perhaps I settle for far less than I could have.

Starting anew

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There is something creative about moving job, country and city. It’s like the start of a new year multiplied by a factor of twenty. Out comes the notepad for resolutions. During this month of goodbyes, you have so many opportunities to reflect on what was good, what was special, what was worth doing, and also where you should have done things differently. In short, it’s a time for resolutions, reflections, and sometimes regrets. My arrival in Dubai is in the not so distant past, so I still have a sense of how I felt on arrival, what I’d aimed to do, and how things worked out.

Moving around so much really helps you to auto-correct and be self-reflective. I certainly have quite a few ideas for my new life in Freetown; two years down the track it’s almost déjà vu, and when history repeats, we can seek to apply lessons learned. Perhaps it’s even a life reborn.

Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life, by Artur Domosławski

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If there’s one book that pushed me towards Africa, it’s probably the mix of reportage and musings in Ryszard Kapuściński’s ‘Shadow of the Sun‘. It came out just as I started buying books and after reading the review in The Sunday Times, I bought it in hardback, reading in the car on the way to the annual family holiday in Switzerland. I haven’t read it since, though I should return to it. I read everything else he published in English, including ‘The Soccer War’ several times, which I rank as one of my favourite books.

Even back then I remember wondering why the dust jackets spoke of his friendship with Allende, Lumumba and Che, and yet I never came across those stories inside. I always thought that incredible stories of meeting these men must be in some other books of his that I hadn’t yet found. It turns out that for two out of the three, they almost certainly never met.

As this biography reveals and as we all now know, RK was rather fond of the odd embellishment, enhancing the details, not correcting mistakes that made him seem bigger than he was, and casting himself as the hero of every tale. As Domosławski’s work makes clear (which I finished this morning), RK was a man hiding secrets – that he had done some minor work for the Polish intelligence services and that he had been a card carrying member of the Polish ruling party (socialist).

While RK’s reputation is not what it was, I still have a deep respect for his writing, and an ambition to follow some of his style – telling tales from the bottom up, seeking an anti-imperialist perspective, and the literary writing.

Two other things struck me in the book:

i) He was consumed by the need to write. It would eat him up, increasingly so as he got older. Even in his younger days, he would get stressed when not spending time writing, becoming angry at parties that he needed to be back home writing. The book controversially talks about his numerous affairs – often these would be broken up after a few months because he would feel they were taking him away from his writing.
ii) When you hear about Poland in the 50s and 60s, it’s remarkable what a different age it seems. People were debating ideas, fighting for causes, looking for pure principles. Do we even have idealists nowadays? People who believe in ideas and put them at the centre of their lives? Ryzard himself said a similar thing at the end – he lamented how he found the poor in Latin America no longer ambitious for reform and liberation, but simply for their own slice of Coca-cola consumerism.

RK was no model husband or father. His long-suffering wife was always there behind the scenes, but many didn’t even know she existed, and he seems to have thought little about abandoning her for long travels to far-off lands. His relations with his sole daughter make for difficult reading. Why do remarkable men frequently turn out to be terrible fathers and husbands? Is it one or the other?

The X61 (Nottingham-Leicester-Oxford)

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Here’s an email saved in the archive from August 2005 that was sent to my best friends Anna, Jason and Sam. I was on the verge of leaving a good job for a year back at university…

Every school day for seven years I walked along a small section of the X61 bus route with my friends. And so the well-laid timetable of the bus proved a useful guide to the following seven years. First stop in moving from my small sleepy market town was Nottingham for my first taste of university. Then Leicester for my first proper job. Finally I move to the third city served by the bus; its southern terminus, Oxford.

From October I’ll be among the first students starting a new M.Sc. in African studies, and I can’t wait. For me 12 months is about right at Anglia. I’ve learnt a bit about how television news works and I have to say it’s been the most enjoyable job I’ve ever done. But, I’ve come to realise that two of the goals important to me, being a good overseas journalist, and being a good husband / father, are likely to be incompatible. And so, I’m keen to waste no time in doing the former before beginning the latter.

That having been said, going to Oxford is really about experiencing something new and intellectually challenging. St. Antony’s college will give me some great contacts, a good knowledge base in African affairs, and an important boost to my credibility-lacking bid to work in Africa. While I’m single, un-mortgaged and youngish it’s an offer I can hardly refuse. And although it’s always easier to do something that you pay for, rather than that pays you, I’d rather tell my children about a year in Oxford than a second year in Norwich.

In Congo there are some bridges which consist of only a metal structure and four planks. The idea is to drive from one set of planks to the other, and then take the flooring from behind to put in front. There’s a certain insecurity from having no way back and no clear way forward.

Love

J

Musings in Ibn Battuta mall

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On Saturday evening, I dropped a hire car off at Ibn Battuta mall, and was surprised by a strong feeling of nostalgia. In my first few months in Dubai, when I arrived ahead of my family, I rented a studio in Discovery Gardens, and several times a week walked the length of Ibn Battuta mall (that is from Andalusia to China) on the way home. On Saturday I was reminded of my feelings in those times, feelings that have since been lost. I was excited by the adventure of a new job, a new city and new possibilities. My bank account was fuller than it’s ever been, and the next few years looked great and comfortable. In some ways, I was also hypnotized by the glamour of Dubai – I would have a nice car, new clothes, a lovely apartment and settle down to a period of stability, treating my family to a whole array of new experiences. Sometimes I can be very shallow.

That all feels like another era, though it was at most 1.5 years ago. My time in Dubai has genuinely been enjoyable, I’ve lived in two wonderful homes, and I had a few adventures. But things didn’t quite worked out as expected. It took six months for my wife and girls to arrive, and several months of stress after that for them to get their residential papers. The summer was spent chasing education opportunities/uncertainty, which finally left both girls studying elsewhere (and on different continents to ourselves and each other). Barely had my wife arrived and the house filled with furniture, when it became apparent that my entire division would be shut down, and we’d have to move on. Dubai rents took up a large amount of my income, as did air travel. And on the personal side, I’ve been disappointed that dreams of writing music and fiction, having children and improving photography and video work have come to little. Arabic has been largely a failure despite costing numerous hours. Much is personified by my little used iMac.

Still, it’s been a good period. We’ve settled into church quicker than expected and the last six months has seen some wonderful opportunities to serve there. We’ve made good friends, some of the best in years, and my wife’s English has gone from zero to decent. The girls have made progress in their studies, I’ve been able to pay back a good chunk of my mortgage, and running the marathon was a high. At work, it’s been both enjoyable, and my writing/editing skills have improved considerably (despite what regular readers of this blog may think).

The next job posting will be an adventure (they always are). But hopefully we can settle down in some form as well – more personal productivity on my side, more stability and less travel on the family side. And a baby wouldn’t be a bad idea either.