One year later ... Un an après

Voilà un an déjà que je partais pour l'Afrique!

J'avais noté quelques impressions à l'époque, dans l'espoir de revenir dessus et en faire plusieurs articles ici. Mais ça n'a pas l'air de se faire, alors je préfère les mentionner rapidement plutôt que ça passe aux oubliettes:

- les natels: il y en a partout, même aux endroits les plus reculés et où les gens habitent dans des taudis (à mes yeux occidentaux), les gens ont des natels, et même plusieurs (car les appels sur un même réseau sont moins chers, donc c'est plus économe d'avoir plusieurs cartes SIM, sinon plusieurs natels). De plus, là bas en Afrique ils sont en avance sur nous, parce qu'il n'y a pas de surtaxe pour le roaming (si j'ai bien compris). Ce qui m'a épâté le plus c'est le côté visionnaire du gars qui a vu l'opportunité en Afrique, alors qu'ils n'ont pas eu de ligne fixe ou de faxe. Ils ont sauté à pieds joints par dessus, directement au 21ème siècle. Et c'est tellement logique - comment mettre une ligne fixe si quelqu'un n'a pas d'adresse fixe? (s'il n'y a même pas de noms de rue!).

- les femmes qui sortent de leurs cases habillé de façon impeccable et tout propre, alors qu'elles sont entourées de poussière brun-orange.

- connaissez-vous l'histoire de l'enfant qui ramener les étoiles de mer dans l'océan? Parfois on a l'impression qu'en Afrique les étoiles de mer ressortent de l'eau...

- on a eu des discussions intéressantes sur le développement, l'aide, et la collaboration avec les africains. La question clef, et c'est difficile à y répondre, compte tenu de la tension entre les réalités et les sensibilités, c'est: faut-il transformer les africains en européens pour pouvoir travailler avec?

- pendant la visite, je lisais le livre "Vivre comme un simple radical" de Shane Claiborne, qui traite justement d'une vie 'révolutionnaire' à côté des pauvres et démunis. Vrai remise en question, mais mise en pratique difficile quand on a une famille.

- je crois avoir compris (pour moi, en tout cas) "l'attrait" de l'Afrique - la chose qui fait retourner (et parfois) rester ceux qui ont une fois visité. Je crois que c'est l'énorme potentielle de ce continent, son énergie, sa débrouillardise, et tout l'exotisme et l'énormité de tout ce qui reste à découvrir. J'ai aussi remarqué que maintenant que j'y suis allé une fois, ça m'a l'air d'être beaucoup moins loin (même si, concrètement, ça reste hyper loin!)

- la dernière chose c'est le contraste entre les 'deux Afriques' - l'Afrique des pauvres, et l'Afrique des (rélativement) riches. Après avoir traversé des endroits très démunis, c'était choquant de se retrouver à Nairobi avec des voitures 'neuves', et entrer dans une grande surface énorme comme un hypermarché français, ou dans un 'mall' à l'américaine. C'était aussi choquant (j'avoue) de voir que ce n'était pas que des blancs riches, mais aussi des noirs. Disons que ce serait moins choquant de voir des noirs riches s'il n'y avaient pas droit à côté des très pauvres. Le plus grand bidon ville de l'Afrique est à Nairobi (voir le film The Constant Gardener). On voit des 'hommes-âne' qui tirent des chariots/remorques énormes. Puis les lotissements de riche, entouré de fil barbelé (quand ce n'est pas fil razoir), avec un gardien à l'entrée, Kalashnikov à l'appuie. Deux sortes de ghetto différent. Ce qui choquent finalement c'est la proximité d'autant de pauvreté avec la richesse rélative. On se dit "Mais comment les riches peuvent-ils vivre avec ce décalage?" Mais finalement, ce décalage, nous l'avons tous, c'est juste que pour nous ici en occident, les pauvres sont plus loin, mais ils sont là quand même. L'injustice est bien réel, et nous sommes autant participant à cette injustice qu'un quelconque 'riche' en Afrique.

This time last year, I was on my way to the airport for my trip to Africa.

On the way back, I jotted down some of my thoughts, in the hope of turning them in to a few posts here. But it's not looking very likely at the rate I'm going, so I think it's best to run through them rapidly now rather than losing them altogether:

- mobiles phones: everywhere, even in the far flung middles of nowhere, where the people live in run-down shacks, they have mobiles, and sometimes several (calls are cheaper with the same provider, so if you have a SIM for each, it works out cheaper). And over there, they're more advanced than here, because they have international roaming with no extra cost (if I've understood correctly). What amazes me is the progressive thinking of whatever guy originally had the idea - who saw the opportunity, and didn't get hung up on the fact that they didn't even have land lines, or faxes. Nope, they just jumped over the whole of that and straight into the 21st century. It's completely logical, once someone else has thought of it: how can you possibly have a land line if you don't even have an address?

- women coming out of run-down shacks, dressed immaculately despite the fact that they're surrounded by orange-brown dust.

- do you know that story about the little boy (or girl) throwing beached starfish back into the sea? In Africa, sometimes one gets the impression that the starfish crawl back out again...

- we had several interesting discussions about development, aid, and working together with Africans. An interesting, but knotty, question, is: do you have to transform Africans into Europeans in order to be able to work together effectively?

- during the trip, I was reading "The Irresistible Revolution" by Shane Claiborne, which is precisely about living simply and near to the poor. A very challenging read, but difficult to put into practice when you've got family and kids.

- I think I've worked out (for me at least), the attraction and fascination of Africa - the thing which makes people return there (and sometimes stay) once they've visited. I think that it's the enormous potential of the continent, it's energy, it's ingenuity, all the exoticism and the enormity of all that remains to be discovered. I also noticed that now I've been there, it doesn't seem so far anymore (even though, practically speaking, it is a heck of a long way!)

- the last thing is the contrast between the 'two Africas' - the poor Africa and (relatively) rich Africa. After driving through very poor parts of Tanzania, it was a bit of a shock to arrive in Nairobi and see 'new' cars, and visit a supermarket which was big enough to rival any French hypermarché, and also an American-style 'mall'. It was also shocking (to me) to see that it wasn't just the stereotypical rich whites and poor black. I guess rich blacks would be less shocking if there weren't the poor ones right there next to them. The biggest shanty town in Africa is in Nairobi (watch The Constant Gardener). You see 'donkey-men' pulling truck-worthy trailers with their bare hands. Then the rich-peoples compounds, circled by barbed-wire (when it isn't razor wire), with a guard at the entrance, complete with Kalashnikov. Another sort of ghetto. What's shocking is the proximity of so much poverty with such (relative) riches. You wonder "how do the rich cope with such a disparity?" But in the end, the disparity is there for all of us, it's just that here in the West, the poor are further away. But they're still there, the injustice is still real, and we participate in it just as much as any 'rich' Africans.

My Computer

On part en vacances quelques temps, alors service réduit ici, à part un petit truc pré-enregistré.

We're off on holiday, so not much will be happening here for a while - except for one pre-recorded post.

Disney 2

District 9

L'autre soir on a regardé District 9 ensemble. J'avais mis du temps à choisir un film, et j'étais bien content de mon choix, même si j'aurais préféré avec moins de morceaux de corps déchiqueté..

We watched District 9 a few days ago. I'd taken a long time to choose a film, and I was pretty pleased with my choice, though personally I wouldn't have minded if there were less flying body parts.

phone home

Les deux photos étaient prises presqu'en même temps, mais pas tout à fait. "Passe-moi Rebecca, je veux lui raconter".

These two photos could almost have been taken at the same time: "Pass me Rebecca, I want to tell her".

Disney 1

Walk ... Promenade

Princesses

De retour d'EuroDisney, Kalia s'est empressé de me montrer son achat là-bas. Du coup Rebecca a voulu se déguiser aussi...

As soon as she got back from Disneyland, Kalia hurried to show off her princesses outfit. Rebecca obviously had to dig out hers too...

Gold rush ... Ruée vers l'or

On reçoit régulièrement des pubs qui annoncent "achat or au meilleur prix", mais j'étais quand même étonné de voir ce magasin au centre ville.

We get adverts stuffed in our letterbox several times a week saying "we buy your gold at record prices", but even so, I was really surprised to see this shop in the town centre.

Ratatouillie

L'autre jour pendant que Rebecca faisait la peinture, je me suis amusé à essayer de faire la ratatouille comme dans le film. J'ai pas encore goûté, mais Madame a dit que c'était très bon!

The other day, while Rebecca was painting, I thought I'd have a try at making ratatouille the same as in the film. Haven't tried it yet myself, but Madame said it's very nice.

Bereavement ... Premier deuil

Hier les filles ont trouvé un bébé oiseau sur le balcon. Il était tout nu, et ne trouvant pas le nid, avec Mamma elles ont voulu s'en occuper.

Personnellement, je prévoyais le pire. Même sans être expert, il me semblait que s'occuper d'un oiseau tout frais comme ça doit pas être à la portée de tout le monde.

Il n'a pas survécu, et ce matin, Kalia a dû se rendre à l'évidence que c'était fini. C'est un drame pour elle, et par extension pour nous... Surtout qu'elle avait "prié Jésus pour qu'il guérisse".

J'ai fabriqué un petit cercueil avec une boîte d'allumettes, elle ne pouvait pas envisager de l'enterrer parce que "il sera triste", alors on a visité la cimetière pour la convaincre que même les gens sont enterrés, le soir on l'a enterré dans le jardin - elle n'a pas pu regarder - elle beaucoup beaucoup pleuré.

Un jour d'apprentissage - de la vie, de la mort, des aléas de la prière, des limites de l'anthropomorphisme.

Super sensible, notre grande: "Mais Daddy, qu'est-ce que je vais faire de Jésus? Je ne le vois pas, et il ne dit rien."

Yesterday, while I was out the girls found a nestling on the balcony. Very young - completely featherless. Mamma couldn't find the nest so they decided to 'look after' it.

When I got back I was admittedly a bit skeptical about the chances of it surviving. I'm not ornithologist, but it seemed to me that keeping a tiny thing like that alive was probably not as simple as it seems.

And he didn't make it. This morning Kalia had to come to terms with the fact that it was over. It was a "very big thing" for her - and thus for us too. Especially as she "prayed to Jesus that he'd get better".

I made a little coffin out of a matchbox, but she couldn't cope with the idea of burying it because "he'll be sad", so we went for a walk to the cemetery, to convince her that even people get buried. Then we came home, and buried it in the garden (though she couldn't bear to watch). I read her the passage about sparrows and hairs on your head.

That's a lot of stuff to handle in one day. Life, death, burial, birds not being quite like humans. And prayer. She's a very sensitive girl our Kalia: "But Daddy, what am I going to do about Jesus? I can't see him, he doesn't talk..."

It made me think a bit about how many prayers we don't even bother praying because we "know" they won't work...

Cuttings

One of my birthday presents was a new shoulder bag, to replace the one that I've been taking to work for the last 11 years.

In the process of transferring my few worldly possessions, I came across a bundle of 'cuttings' that I'd ripped out of Guardian Weekly's over the years. For my sake more than yours, I thought I'd record them for posterity here (though the format may not be less perishable...)

Some of them are little snippets, some of the entire articles, and some are references to books which looked interesting (at the time, at least).

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa - Dambisa Moyo
The Gods that Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future - Larry Elliott & Dan Atkinson
The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less - India Knight
The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Russia and the West - Edward Lucas
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power - Tariq Ali
Bad Samaritans: Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Thread to Global Prosperity - Ha-Joon Chang
The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation - Philip Shenon
Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty And The Compromise Of Law - Philippe Sands
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes - Daniel Everett
A Most Wanted Man - John le Carré
The Age of Assassins: The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin - Yuri Felshtinsky & Vladimir Pribylovsky
---
'If you are wondering how a total of $8.2bn could be paid in bonuses over two years the the great minds whose company went bankrupt, what can I tell you? This may be close to the heart of the problem. Through history, great fortunes have been made by people directly taking risks on their own account. Today, great fortunes are made by employees, doing nothing other than their jobs: jobs which, in the case of bankers, involve taking on risks, usually with other people's borrowed money. To make more money, and earn more bonuses (usually 60% of an investment banker's pay), it's simple: you just take on more risk. The upside is the upside, and the downside - well, it increasingly seems that for the bankers themselves, certainly in the case of Lehman New York, there isn't one. This undermines the whole principle of "moral hazard", which was the idea behind letting Lehman go under in the first place - the need for companies to face the consequences of their decisions. This principle collapses if the individuals involved don't face any consequences.'

(from the same article)
'Having fully indulged their greed on the way up, and created the risks, the bankers are now fully indulging their fear on the way down, and allowing the system to seize up. But it wasn't just the banks. We did this to ourselves, because we were greedy and stupid. It's not just bankers who have been indulging in greed, short-termism and fantasy economics. In addition to its stretched mortgage borrowing, Britain has half of all European credit-card debt. We grew obsessed with the price of our hoses, felt richer than we should, borrowed money we didn't have, and now that the downturn has happened - as it was bound to do - we want someone else to blame. Bankers are to blame, but we're to blame too. That's just as well, because we're the ones who are going to have to pay.'
----
'William Morris commented: "I have never been in any rich man's house which would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all that it held."'
---
'On 9 October 1967, Che Guevara faced a shaking sergeant Mario Teran, ordered to murder him by the Bolivian president and CIA, and declared: "Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man." This final act of heroic defiance marked the defeat of multiple attempts to spread the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America.

'But 40 years later, the long-retired executioner, now a reviled old man, had his sight restored by Cuban doctors, an operation paid for by revolutionary Venezuela in the radicalised Bolivia of Evo Morales....'
---
'He (Greenspan) suggested his trust in the responsibility of banks had been misplaced: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief."'
---
'Strange things have happened during this crisis, not the least of which is that the IMF was last week praising in developed countries all the things it normally excoriates in developing nations. The one-size-fits-all model of development is just one of the many sacred cows to have been slain over the last 14 months'
---
'A famous economist, Hyman Minsky, foretold that unregulated finance capitalism inevitably ends in a meltdown and slump. The world is facing a Minsky moment.'
---
'For 30 years, greedy, callow, ignorant financiers, supported by no less callow politicians from all parties, have proclaimed the wonders of financial innovation. The price tag for their behaviour is an economic calamity. We should never have bought such snake oil. The consolation in these dark times is that we never will again.' (My comment scrawled alongside: ' Don't you believe it!')
---
'The full scale of the persecution of Christians in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul became apparent last week when the UN refugee agency said about 13,000 had been hounded from their homes this month, more than half of the city's Christians.'
---
From Notes & Queries, in answer to "What is the difference between a cult and a religion?": 'A cult abuses its members, a religion abuses non-members.'
---
'What Washington's finest do abroad, they would not dare try at home: in the US, the head of the Federal Reserve has called for more public spending. The Washington consensus, as the IMF's policies of high rates, low public spending and open markets is sometimes termed, has been widely discredited. This prescription was doled out in Asia in the 90s - and the side-effects were so bad that states have rushed to pay back their loans and so cut the strings binding them to Washington.'
---
'... the greatest form of luxury would be the relief of not living with so much.'
---
Well-read get ahead
Reading to young children stimulates their development and gives them a head start when they reach school, researchers who have reviewed studies on the effects of reading found. Professor Barry Zuckerman, of the department of paediatrics at Boston University school of medicine, said that children who were read to from an earlier age had better language development and tended to have better language scores later in life. Getting children to grip pages with their thumb and forefinger improved their motor skills.

Swiss Vapeur Parc

Hier, en voyant sa maman partir en train, Rebecca n'était pas ravie, et si elle a oublié et s'est éclaté pendant la journée, c'était à nouveau le drame pour s'endormir le soir. Alors la blague d'aujourd'hui c'était "montre à maman combien t'es triste".

Yesterday, Rebecca wasn't best pleased on seeing her Mum disappear into a train. And even though she forgot about it and had a whale of a time during the day, when it came to bedtime she was very upset again. So today's in joke was "show Mummy how sad you are".

Même avec la glace elle y arrive.

Even with a Smarties Ice Cream she can put it on.

"Mais nooon, je ne suis pas triste, je suis happy moi !"

"Non, I'm not sad, I'm happy!".

Et pour les curieux, voilà comment ça marche à l'intérieur.

For the technically-minded, here's how they work on the inside.