World Watching And Politics

On The Road In Malawi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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May 20, 2002
Up 5 am and out 6:30. Most of the day is spent traveling to Zambia. A bridge is out on the road south so we have to double back to Mezuza and take another route. Stopped off at Mezuza again for a couple of hours in a frustrating attempt to get e-mail.

Back on the Road
I turn around to say something to Bob two seats behind me and see Rod lying in the aisle asleep-recurring Malaria he thinks. He stays there for two days and then gets up but he is a rag. His head hurts and he is weak. Bob starts reading about Malaria. There are many kinds with symptoms all the way from feeling like you have the flu to feeling a piercing cold that makes you tremble and shake. During these times you want a heavy thing to mash you down and keep you still…you wish you could die.

Rod warns us to use mosquito repellant but Bob has his doubts about it’s effectiveness. In the tent at night we use a towel to kill off any mosquitos we find before we go to sleep but invariably during the night they mysteriously materialize-buzzing in your ear…keeping you awake until you finally get up and thrash around with your towel again.

The Malaria carrying mosquitos were especially bad around wet marshy areas like Dar es Salaam and Lake Malawi. Sunday is our day to take our Larium but it makes us have vivid dreams at night. One night I dreamt that some people had cut my chest open and was slicing up my heart and eating it!

To pass the time on the long haul today I read Edward Said’s memoirs “Out Of Place.” As I read I gaze out of the truck from time to time wondering…what to wonder…what to think…Edward was born a Christian in Palestine, had ancestors from Lebanon, grew up in Cairo but isolated from the muslim community, went to English schools which he hated, was educated in the United States and now teaches at Columbia University in New York and has become a spokesman for middle east affairs. “Out of Place” is a good title; I have felt that way myself.

Las Vegas Bottle Store…pass one woman chopping wood out behind a mud hut and two men sitting in front…”makes me mad!” Melissa from New Zealand says…children literally scream out their greetings…villages are perfectly neat no litter or pieces of paper or the proverbial third world plastic. As in Moroccan casbahs you would think absolutely no one lived there at all because they use and reuse everything over and over until there is nothing left to become garbage.

Cleaning The Lenses
I am feeling comfortable and at home in Africa. The lives and cultures of the people in these countries at least seem to have integrity…congruity. The way they live makes sense in relation to their history, geography economics and culture-not to be compared to any other place. Rather than judge, a friend says she tries to engage “others” with a “reverent curiosity” to describe how she travels. We are intentional-we borrow her idea and make it our own-we call it “reverent inquiry.” We want to respect the dignity of those we are coming to visit.

I want to be transparent in sharing my struggle with my own ethnocentric/class biases I have learned from living in my culture…insofar as I can become aware of them. Where are you from, he says…America, I say…which America, he says? And there it is again. I could cover it all over with political correctness but I want to explore-I want to peel the layers off the lenses-I want to write with integrity. Traveling is a seriously important business. Rod says 90% of Americans don’t have a passport which means that many Americans have never, in a substantive way, experienced any other valid way to live in the world. Isolated. Insulated. For how long? We cannot be a “superpower” and not be inter-dependent with the rest of the world; the world is going to force us to look and listen to it. It has begun with 9/11. And we thought the Cold War was bad!

I made the mistake of remarking to Rod that we liked the fact that our drivers were Africans and none of the other trucks had African drivers. He reminded me that he was African, which he is, and that even some of the British and Australian drivers have been at it for 15-20 years and know Africa well. There I did it again-I used the term African when I really meant black African. Assumptions can work both ways however. I have a friend whose husband happens to be black and when he visited Africa he had to explain that he and his brother were Americans born and raised in New York.

I ask Rod if the local people can tell that James and George, who are Kenyans, are not from this area. Yes, he says, because of their size and they are very dark. And people here don’t speak Swahili so they have to use the common language-English. Rod says that Malawians and Zambians are more friendly than people in the north and south of Africa because they are not around western tourists enough to become inflamed with desire for the material things we have that they don’t have. In the north and south the feeling is that “You’ve gotten yours, now it’s my turn to get mine-no matter how.”

Tanzanian News

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Picked up a Sunday Observer-local Tanzanian paper in English; lead article: “Reading culture badly lacking” lamented the lack of interest in reading and warning that Tanzania could become isolated and left behind as the world was “changing so fast.” The advent of TVs, the Internet and use of CD-Roms, according to the article, has contributed to the decline of reading.

Subsidiary article extolled President Mkapa’s gesture to include opposition parties in a discussion of issues concerning the country. Big front page news!

A third front page article by correspondent Saum Zidadu reported on a conference on “Reporting Africa” held in Gaborone, Botswana. Ms. Connie Rapoo Garebatho, in her paper “Gender and Human Rights” said that “Negative coverage has created negative images of the African continent which has had a negative effect on the continent’s economic, political and social development, especially hurting women, and makes Africa look hopeless in the eyes of the rest of the world.”

Conference presenters said that most media houses in the developed world report negatively about Africa as not only a poor continent that it is, but also as a continent that has no hope economically, socially or politically. Most of the time Africa only makes headlines, the conferees said, when people are dying of hunger, engaged in civil wars and natural disasters…

Finally, an inside column on literature by Bernard Mapalala titled “Nelson Mandela’s Ageing Principles” gave an unflattering review of the official biography of Mandela written by Anthony Sampson that came out in 1999. Apparently many African leaders did not feel supported by Mandela after his release from prison. Well…?

Terrorism in Kenya

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The U.S. embassy in Nairobi was bombed a few years ago. The U.S. was going to rebuild across town, a merchant said, but now the location is being moved again.

Across the street from a local cooperative selling arts and crafts is a vacant lot. A woman in a purple gallabaya is using pans to scare birds off the lot. On the other side of the lot is a mosque. The merchant told us they think that the Muslims paid off the government to let them set fire to about a hundred Christian businesses and cooperatives that used to be in the vacant lot-six of them Maasai cooperatives.

Discovering African Issues

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One evening we had coffee in the Hilton coffee shop and just hung around watching the people come and go. There was an international UN conference on urban planning so there were people from all over Africa and the parade of women’s evening wear was wonderful to see. One striking woman who said she was from Rwanda had gone to school in Canada. She said the conference was dealing with many issues but primarily with the rights of the poor in shanty towns whose homes get bulldozed down in the middle of the night by the government or the police.

In fact, the local English newspaper, the East African Standard, recently featured an article about 200 armed policemen who destroyed shanties at the Kamuigi slums in Nairobi without warning at 6am. The article said the tenants accused police of being used by officials of the Kamuigi House Company Ltd to evict them. There was a dispute in court between officials and shareholders of the company but the police did not wait for the court to rule or the government to intervene. The land in dispute, the article said, was bought by 168 members at a cost of 125,000 shillings (100 shillings are worth more than a dollar) from an Asian who had since relocated.

Edfu

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Israelis Bombed 9/11?
While waiting for the others to come out of the temple at Edfu, and when it became apparent that Bob wasn’t going to buy anything, Bob was invited into a seller’s shop for tea. The seller, who seemed more educated than usual here, wanted to talk about things…did Americans think, he asked, if the massacre of 59 tourists at Luxor was masterminded by the Israelis? No, Bob said, no one in America that he knew thought that. “We think it was the Israelis,” he responded confidently.

The same rumor was going around the Arabic world after 9/11 that the Israelis had done it. Seems to be incomprehensible to some middle eastern people we have met that Osama or any Muslim could be responsible for such mass killing.

Search For Truth In Egypt

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Cafes and Food
You can have what Bob calls “mystery meat,” which in Egypt is called kebab-lamb or chicken sliced from a vertical spit-very good in pita bread. Kofta is ground meat peppered with spices, skewered and grilled. You can find delicious spit roasted chicken. Tagen is a stew cooked in a deep clay pot with onions, tomatoes and rice or cracked wheat. Stuffed cabbage leaves are called mahshi karumb. Fried fish is great. Kushari is tiny noodles, tomato juice, lemon and onions looking somewhat like a soup.

We were welcomed into one empty cafe and graciously given the best seat upstairs near a window where we could look out on the street while eating kushari, a “traditional Egyptian dish” as the proprietor called it. He gives us an idea that if we could get away from the sellers that the Egyptian people would be wonderfully hospitable and gracious. We were touched.

In certain cafes men sit, play backgammon and smoke sheesha pipes.

Luxor
No knobs on anything in the hotel. Had to lift the toilet lid to figure out how to flush and while leaning over the toilet tank the fan blades from the fan above fell off and konked me on the head before bounding into the tub. Lonely Planet uses Budget, Mid Range and Top End for classifying hotels and this was a MidRange which I think is a pretty good gauge of the local economy. Takes money they don’t have to clean and repair.

Ongoing Search for Truth
When I was in college, ironically, a book by the great theologian Martin Buber called “I and Thou” gave me my first understanding about bridging the gap between the “I” and the different “thou.”

More recently cross cultural writers have been writing about the concept of “the stranger” describing our fear of the “different” as a genetically built-in survival response mechanism that is a healthy one when used to keep ourselves safe, but if we are not aware of our subtle responses on this level and let it operate when it is inappropriate then we can be very damaging to each other. Ahdaf Soueif writes in English and the theme of her autobiographical novel “In The Eye Of The Sun” is the notion of foreignness. Her latest novel “The Map of Love” was shortlisted for UK’s Booker prize.

Thinking about all this reminds me of an experience I had years ago when managing a student foreign exchange program. I gave a party for all the exchange students in my home and wanted to include some older students to provide perspective so I went to a local private University and was referred to three foreign students who happened to be from Saudi Arabia. While inter-viewing them I was told by one that our culture and our values were “ugly” to the Muslim “as if you took a lid off a garbage can and looked in!” The way he said it made me shiver. I didn’t invite two of them to the party even after they complained that American were not friendly and that as students here for the last two years they had never been invited into anyone’s home. If not to the party, I should have invited them to my home. The third did come to the party, cooked a fantastic chicken dinner for the students and is my friend in Salem still.

A Felluca Ride Up The Nile

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In Aswan, a felluca, an ancient sailboat of the Nile, is a common means of transport up and down the Nile River. It has a broad canvas sail and the boat itself has a shallow deck upon which are thick cotton covered pads to sit on and watch the dark waters of the Nile slide by in the hot dry desert wind during the day and to sleep on at night. Two gracious Nubian men in flowing jalabayas sailed the boat-one at each end-and cooked for us in a tiny area on a small propane stove.

The first afternoon, the wind became too strong and tangled the sails. Was amazing to see one small, lithe Nubian scoot up the mast to untangle the sail.

Before leaving Aswan, we sailed to nearby Kitchener Island where about 12 Nubian young girls-secondary school students studying to be teachers- surrounded us laughing and talking and asking questions-practicing their English. I love your sweet soft faces I said…oh thank you very much they said laughing. Then “I love you,” one said, probably coming from a lack of vocabulary to be able to say anything else.

A couple years ago I saw a contemporary rendition of the opera “Aida” in which a Nubian princess was captured by the Egyptian army. The music was composed by Elton John and the historical revision sympathetically illustrated the plight of the Nubians. After their lands were submerged under water when the High Dam was built, most Nubians today occupy the lowest paying jobs.

We sailed the Nile with six other people for an incredibly beautiful and langorous two day trip to Edfu. We were joined by a young couple from Milan Italy, another young couple from Paris and two friends-one from the Czeck Republic and the other from Slovakia. The two from Czech and Slovakia had just spent a year and a half in Israel as nannies and were relieved to be out of the country…not because of the danger from the Palestinians but because they didn’t care for the Israelis.

English has truly become the international language. Everyone on the felluca was fluent-the French girl saying that her generation was quite happy with English but that her parents and older sister still resented it.

The first evening over dinner we traded information and honest understandings about the foreign policies of our respective countries. The French girl described her insights into the story of “Chocolat” and the French guy talked about the 35 hour work week and how it has not created more jobs-just means that more work is now done in less time.

The Italian and French couples had a lot in common and were planning to meet again the night we got off the felluca-and I imagine they will remain friends-a wonderful thing that could not have happened a generation ago-the upside of globalism and a common language.

Cultivating Hate In Children

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On the same day that Arafat finally condemned the terrorism against Israel, his wife, who lives in Paris, granted an interview with an Arabic-language magazine, Al Majalla, wherein she endorsed suicide attacks as legitimate resistance against Israeli occupation.

My eye caught the following feature article that Mary Kelly, former editor of Egypt Today magazine and who lived in Cairo for 8 years, reported to the Herald Tribune: “…children, still in their school uniforms, were seen laughing and changing as they half-marched, half skipped along the sunny road in Cairo, toting knapsacks and book bags.”

The account continued: “One might have thought it was an ater-school field trip if it were not for the boys in the center displaying a Palestinian flag…In the evenings, Egyptian family members swapped stories of their children participating in such demonstrations. Over dinner at home with one family in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, Fatma, 10, told me how an older boy at school rallied her classmates on the playground during recess. Their rhyme was addressed to Ala Mubarak, son of President Hosni Mubarak, “We sang ‘Ala, Ala, tell your father the Americans will not help you!”

Unicef has called for an end to the Israeli-palestinian violence for the sake of the children…against a backdrop of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in the Arab world, children are getting powerful messages about who their enemies are. In Egypt, TV is showing virtually nonstop news coverage of the crisis and nationalistic, pro-Palestinian programming. Old footage of Palestinian children being shot and throwing stones at Israeli soldiers roll in slow motion with melodramatic music playing in the background (we saw it on the TV in the hotel)…A political solution…won’t erase these mental images…and America gave the green light, the adults say over and over again.

A UNICEF rep in the West Bank said on CNN that ‘it will be a question of one, two, even three generations.'”

US News From Egypt

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News in the International Press
Subjects we have been reading about lately have often covered the European Union, deregulation of the labor market, global economic trends, immigration problems, agricultural pollicy and the issues stemming from the World Trade Organization agreements, market liberalization, the by products of globalization, economic indices and their interpretations, the subtle balances between countries which are being upset by the Mideast dispute, the International Court and the French elections.

Many articles are critical of the States. A piece entitled “The Sole Superpower” stated “Today, there is only one superpower. It may listen to the opinions of its allies but it’s views and decisions are rarely influenced by them…The sole super-power certainly has responsibilities. As for the Europeans, it seems that they will continue, helplessly to bite their lips.”

An op-ed piece questioned the “Bush administration who has appointed a record number of corporate executives to high-level positions, who often regulate or do business with their former employers. Further, that may of the business execs first entered the private sector after previous careers in the Reagan and Bush administrations….Dick Cheney being the quintessential example of what is called crony capitalists or men who live by their connections.” Isn’t this what caused the Asian financial crisis…and why Japan is trying not to fall apart…and we are suprised by ENRON?

Another Washington Post article described the battle between the State Department and the Pentagon regarding how to proceed with the Mid-East dispute and war with Iraq.

Diplomacy Egyptian Style

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As westerners we are not used to the constant demands for “baksheesh” (tipping) that make you want to blow your stack…and then they want you to be happy about it! Salaries and wages are so low that baksheesh becomes an essential means of supplementing incomes-so for a cleaner in a one or two-star hotel who might earn only about $35 a month tipping becomes the mainstay of the income.

Minimal Diplomacy
Waiter on the train as we were returning to Cairo, asks Bob “Are you happy?” “That much,” says Bob with a show of hands about two feet apart…There just is minimal diplomacy as we know it unless you are insulated in a four or five star hotel. But the older eccentric Brit eating with us in our hotel restaurant has been coming here every year for six years…and was here during the massacre in Luxor. You just have to realize they are trying to survive, he says, and that the people are living in a benign dictatorship that colors the cultural fabric.

At the airport, as we were walking up to the doors we thought we were home free. But as soon as the door opened there were two uniformed and armed police facing us. One yelled “what are you doing here!” With our bags it was obvious that we were tourists so the question was confusing. At that point, Bob retorted angrily that we were just trying to get into the airport! They let us go.

Cultural Attitudes and Mores
Is your husband looking for new wife, says the tour operator…want to trade your wife for a camel he says then to the young Irish guy visiting with his shy new Japanese wife on their honeymoon…your husband is a lucky man…if he finds new woman you just kill him and put him in the Nile.

In the souk (market) I said “see you later Alligator,” to a seller. “Here it’s not ‘After While Crocodile,’he replied. “it’s ‘In the Nile Crocodile’.” We laughed! Water is sprinkled on the streets to keep the dust down…making mud…as I walked down the street.

What are you looking for…nothing, I don’t need anything…I am just looking to appreciate…if I buy that it will just sit in my house…are you Egyptian he asked. No, I said, American…he said you think just like an Egyptian…what do you need. Nothing, I have husband and children and a house…what are you looking for…nothing…I have nothing, he said, what color do you want? Blue I said…how big do you need it…infinite size, I said not realizing what kind of game I was playing with him. Then…I have something you have never seen, he said…come look…

Young man wants to buy my shoes…with those shoes I could get dressed up and go to the disco and find a woman…!

After the souk, dodging 6 lanes of honking cars not traveling in any one lane, we cross the street for orange juice while a truck full of soldiers passed by waving and blowing kisses…also men sitting idle…not seeming to mind I was with a man…your husband is a very lucky man…to Bob again are you looking for new wife?

Later in Aswan I heard from a vendor…would you like a banana…just 30 minutes….

On the train on the way back to Cairo from Luxor…here is a flower (looked like a dandelion but smelled like a gardenia) realizing the server had to have gotten off the train at the last stop to get it…can be very charming but no clue about western sensibilities or boundaries…and I suspect they don’t care to know.

I read that even Egyptian women, who would not otherwise, wear the higab (Islamic scarf) outside the home to protect themselves from the same harassment. It is not really intimidating but just a nuisance, like a mosquito buzzing in your ear, Lonely Planet says. You can swat it away and keep it at a distance, but it’s always out there trying to get in your ear. The problem is, according to one Egyptian man, that for every 10 women approached, one will say yes. The Dutch woman on the train behind me said that her brother who travels a lot, has come across a lot of Egyptian men who hook up with Western women.