Raging Squid

Extended family etiquette

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000Z

My colleague has family problems. They keep coming to visit. "Now that my wife is at home with the twins looking after her mother, I can't manage the rest of the children. My sister-in-law is very good with the kids but all the time there are things with the schools, this and that... So my wife is coming back this week to pack and they will all move to our house at home. But I still have five visitors here in Dar. You know, they just call at any time, 'Hi, I'm passing through Dar es Salaam...' they stay two weeks or two months. Then you have to also pay their taxi and transport. When I go home for the holidays? Yes, the visitors will stay in my flat. So I'll look for a smaller place, just a room for myself, maybe with a lounge. While you have a big place, people will keep coming."Our other colleagues sometimes compare notes on visiting relatives: "My aunt comes from the country with a sack of maize. When that's been eaten, she leaves." "My mother comes from Arusha so someone has to drive there and fetch her, 12 hours. Then she might stay one or two days and have enough of Dar, 'OK! I want to go home now!' and then we have to drive her back." Quoting my outlaws: 'Dos grandes alegrias nos dan los parientes: una cuando llegan, y otra cuando van.'

Vege-recept! på svenska.

2011-10-04T14:23:00.002Z

Men det finns ju massor av goda vege-rätter... Här kommer en lång lista! Anpassad till nära och kära i i-länder med större ingrediensutbud i vissa nicher.

- Feta i tomatig pastasås eller med grönt.
- Grillad halloumi för att få den där salt-knaperheten.
- Stekt tofu med lite tuggmotstånd och smak, i stir-fry, ni får säkert groddar som man vågar äta också för lite 'krunch'.
- Rostade nötter eller frön ger genast mums-faktor (hasselnötter, mandel, hampa, sesam, solros etc).
- Risotto med trendiga puy-linser.
- Jordnötssås med rostade kryddor, jag har ett recept på kryddigt/chili-igt jordnötskross från Ghana.
- Hemgjord pesto med valfria frön och örter (plus vitlök, parmesan och olivolja).
- Pajer!
- Hela det indiska köket
- varianter av europeisk 'gräddsås, ostgratin och i ugnen'-grejer med eller utan pasta eller ris.
- Mysiga ugnsgrytor med rotfrukter och ugnsrostad vitlök och örter.
- kokosgrytor och thai-mat.
- Mexikanskt med bönor, avokado, gräddfil, ost...
- Alla möjliga versioner av ägg, t.ex. frittatas (skivad kokt potatis, nåt annat gott, mycket persilja i en stekpanna och sen omelettsmet på. Vänd den upp och ner när den börjar vara färdig för att få lite färg. Kräver välsmord panna.)
- äggröra med grejer i (t.ex kinesiskt: tomater och sojasås plus ägg-röra)
- chakchouka: röd nordafrikansk tomat-vege-rostat kummin-stuvning med ägg som knäcks i mot slutstadiet och puttrar i stuvnings-gropar. Färsk koriander på.
- Allt möjligt med svamp, europeisk och asiatisk.
- Alla möjliga sallader, jag är ganska lat att laga sallad, men man kan sätta i frukter eller avokado eller ÄRTSKOTT som våra släktingar i Sverige odlar, mums!
- Nudelsoppor - om man får tag på japansk miso-bas så kan man slänga i fast vad som helst annat, eller inget, det blir gott i alla fall. Klassiska tillägg är skivad spring onion, tofu, svamp, gröna bönor, tunna morotsskivor.
- Patéer att sätta på bröd: hummus, baba ganoush, mosade vita bönor med olivolja, citron, lite vitlök och finhackad koriander. Avocado på rostbröd med en nypa salt och lite olja eller citron är ju en express-delikatess.
- Om man har potatismos över, så kan man laga potato cakes: stek upp lite spenat eller courgette eller lök (löken gärna länge så den blir söt och kladdig), lite ostbitar kanske, gräslök/kapris/persilja/koriander. Kläm in fyllningen i potatismos-bollar, platta till och stek i smör tills de är gyllene och knapriga. Servera med gräddfils-sås t.ex, ahhhh. Det ska inte vara alltför asketiskt.

Rätterna på listan här kan man laga med diverse goda grönsaker: courgette (kokas bara några minuter, mindre exemplar är godare), squash, rödbetor, oyster-svamp och purjo har jag i kylen för tillfället. Paprika, courgette, diverse gröna bönor, och spenat/andra löv passar bra i nästan vad som helst. Om man har tillgång finns alla möjliga spännande grejer - kronärtskocka (mycket arbete att äta), palsternacka, söt majs, fan vet. Man behöver bara investera lite för varje 'cuisine' så man har curry paste, fisksås, 'kaffir lime leaf' och lemongrass för thai mat, kummin, koriander, ingefära, kanel och nejlika för nordafrikanskt, dillfrö och curryblad för sri lanka, exotiska grejer för japanskt.

Jag tror inte det där med protein är så hemskt noga, vi behöver egentligen inte särskilt mycket om dagen om vi nu inte jobbar med att gräva diken. Ost, svamp, nötter/frön och tofu täcker mycket. Och man får mycket från fullkorns-spannmål o.dyl, och från sojamjölk. Kanske man borde slänga i en handfull linser i maten när det inte stör. Jag är ingen stor lins- och -bön-entusiast (eller äggplanta - verkar som om den bara är god när den simmar i olja).

Book review på svenska: 'Eating Animals' (eller: varför jag blev vegetarian)

2011-10-04T14:15:00.003Z

Jag läste en bok som fick mig att bli vegetarian såhär på gamla dar: 'Eating Animals' av Jonathan Safran Foer. Vad handlar det om?

Jonathan Safran Foer är en bra författare, hans roman 'Everything is Illuminated' var helt superb. Så han gör det lätt att läsa sin faktabok/matbiografi. 'Eating Animals' är saklig och anspråkslös, enda problemet är en aning senimentalitet och melodrama när han skriver om sin mormor. Hans fakta och forskning är solida. Poängen är: genast när han berättade åt folk att han skrev om att äta djur (och inget mer), antog de att han förespråkade vegetarianism. Ergo, är 'alla' medvetna om att ju mer man vet om att äta djur, desto mindre lust har man att göra det. Så vanliga mänskor antar att man kan inte både vara medveten om realiteterna i kött/fjäderfä/fiskindustrin och samtidigt med gott samvete konsumera från dem. Så folk väljer att inte få reda på hur det är istället för att låta bli att äta oetisk mat...

Sen beskriver Jonathan hur det funkar i den amerikanska 'mat'industrin och det är just så illa som folk är medvetna om. Själv har jag helt i förbifarten sett ett par tre dokumentärer och läst några romaner och essäer om industriellt 'jordbruk' och 'Eating Animals' gav mera detaljer. Problemet är inte bara att 'mat'industrin är så grotesk men att den också medvetet försöker ta kål på de få etiska bönder (i USA) som fortfarande föder upp t.ex. kalkoner som kan föröka sig själva (industrikalkonerna är så fel-formade att de inte kommer åt!). Underligt nog visade det sig att nötindustrin (slaktkor) är den minst jävliga djur-industrin, det hade jag inte trott.

Med fisken så är problemet 'bycatch', alltså att väldiga trålare 'fiskar' (drar enorma påsformade nät genom havet eller lämnar tiotals km långa linor) efter bara en art, t.ex. tonfisk eller räkor. Men de fångar in alla möjliga andra arter också, t.ex sjöhästar, sköldpaddor och fåglar, plus en massa annan fisk... allting dras upp på däck och dör och sen kastas allt annat, utom den art man är ute efter, överbord. Inte levande. Jonathans liknelse är nåt i stil med 'if you're eating a plate of sushi, imagine another plate five foot in diameter with all the other sea animals that died in order to catch that tuna'.

För mig är det är närmast slöseriet som irriterar mig - ett så jävla klumpigt sätt att få ihop protein till salu! Så sabla o-ekonomiskt. Med tanke på hur många människor som kunde få jobb om man fiskade lite mer precist, hur många som kunde äta av den där by-catchen som säkert innehåller massor med annan god fisk (bara fel art) om man bara sorterade en liten aning, och förstås att det är så kortsiktigt. 'Hej vi drar upp allt havsliv här' och ingen tanke på att de inte kommer att ha mycket halvsliv kvar om fem år. Assholes.

Odlad fisk är också problematisk men inte lika mycket.

Nå, så jag bestämde mig för att låta bli... Fast de tanzanianska boskapsuppfödningsmetoderna inte är lika utpräglat grymma som de amerikanska så tror jag inte att de är särskilt idylliska heller. Och det är kanske mer på grund av att folk inte har råd med en fyravånings fönsterlös grisfabrik med tillhörande skit-lagun, inte för att de har mer respekt för djuren. Transporten och slakten här är åtminstone säkert rätt jävligt, för att inte tala om hygienen sen. Kycklingen: jenkkinas 'fecal soup'-bassänger där de uppsprättade hönsen badas för att suga upp vatten/avfalls-sörja och få extra vikt innan de säljs kan mycket väl vara helt vanligt i TZ. Och här kollar säkert ingen heller hur mycket hormoner eller kemikalier som djuren har fått i sig. Fisken här är kanske mer OK om det är tanzanianska fiskare som själva har dragit upp dem i sina nät mano a mano, men hur vet man? Jag kan helt tänka mig att kustens fem trålare dumpar väldiga berg med död fisk i Kivukoni men åtminstone gissar jag att allt sorteras och tas tillvara här.

Så att... får se hur länge jag orkar hålla den här linjen, men man borde inte försöka bli alltför fanatisk eller absolutist, då blir ju bara fallet mer lockande. Kanske om mina chagga-kolleger tipsar om var man kan få get som inte ätit konstfoder (de säger att de känner på lukten och bara äter get som fått gräs. Vad man lär sig i livet!) Hittills gick det bra att äta potatis, sås och grönsaker på konferensens grillfest och att lämna flygets fiskportion (visserligen hade jag just ätit på cafe på flygplatsen), fast särskilt smakliga måltider var det ju inte. Lyckligtvis lagar jag själv bättre. Lunch på jobbet har funkat OK med mat hemifrån, ett par gånger har det blivit chips mayai på grannrestaurangen. Stekta kokbananer på mishkakistället, lyckligtvis var jag inte heller särskilt hungrig då. Begränsade alternativ på restauranger.

Nästa blogg: matidéer!

?Tienes revistas con hombres desnudos?

2011-08-07T08:30:00.004Z

Here's a surprise: I found a really nice glossy magazine. It's got everything you want for diversion and stimulation: pop culture, real-life dilemmas, celebrity interviews, and buff bare flesh in the fashion shoots. But where most women's magazines' fashion and beauty features seem to promote anorexia, bad feeling and spending £495 on shoes, this one shows more or less naked men featuring a mix of come-hither pouts and 'yeah this is me, what of it?' looks. Guilt-free eye candy. We're talking gay magazine 'Attitude'.
The contrast to mags by women (?) for women is startling. Picking up a women's magazine is an exercise in self-loathing for a woman. Well, for me at least. It takes a bit of steeling myself and preparing a sarcastic anti-capitalist point of view as a precaution just in case I'd suffer a sudden lapse of judgement and take it seriously. As an example we can take the March 2011 edition of Elle, found in the upstairs toilet: in 386 pages the only life-affirming feature was the interview with Keira Knightley in which she is revealed as being sensible, human and striving to improve herself. The rest is basically Barbie-proportion legs and the shoes to complement them. You are not just invited, but pretty much forced to compare yourself and it takes a serious effort to dismiss the onslaught of legs from your own life. The message is: 'you can't make yours longer but you can make them thinner, bitch, the Argentinians have the right attitude. Suffer and pay!' The counter-attack is arguments like: she's fifteen years old, I may not have the same legs but instead I've been enjoying a rich and exciting life since I was younger than her. She can't eat a toasted oat-bread sandwich with goat's cheese, as I'm planning to do for lunch. She can't surprise an opponent in capoeira with a well-timed attack of a flying tesoura, but I can. Her shoulders are pathetic. It's been airbrushed and photoshopped by professional sanitizers. etc etc.
Now: is this a fun way to spend time? mentally fending off unspoken attacks on your self-esteem by the fashion industry? I say hell, no.So why the fuck do women pay MONEY for this bitch-fest? Wouldn't women's magazines be more enjoyable if they contained, say, pictures of half-naked men instead of half-naked teenage girls? I definitely had fun reading Attitude. Not only because it contains interviews with Ciaran Griffiths (aka Mickey from Shameless - the guy who manages to bring the mouth of Wallace from Wallace & Gromit from plasticine into life) and Dolly Parton, but because every fashion and interview portrait was nice to look at. It's good-looking men! they are objectifying themselves! Some of them look like they have the glint in the eye, the straight interviewees pose with good cheer, one of the gratuitous swimwear hunks looks slightly sullen, maybe he got drafted in from the modelling agency without fully appreciating the homosexual gaze... but whatever they are up to, it has nothing to do with my life. It's beside the point that I don't want a pumped-up Tom of Finland man, this is about the reader herself and the magazine: I don't need to be a pumped-up Tom of Finland man. I'm under no pressure whatsoever to build my abs and biceps or get a half-sleeve tattoo or worry about hair loss. The point is that the photos in Attitude invite a woman to look and enjoy, whereas the pictures in Elle invite you to mentally confine yourself in medieval torture instruments. I'd rather have the gay men's hyper-sexualisation than the women's hyper-anxiety. Plus I learned that Ciaran Griffiths is about to launch a skit show, that's valuable knowledge. I recommend Attitude!
PS the quote in the title is from my friend Anu, who was looking for a porn magazine for women in Argentina for an art project (krhm) and ended up asking 'do you have magazines with naked men?' She was given a gay porn mag, and complained that none of them have hairs. For information, one of the swimwear boys in Attitude does feature hair.

Magic words: 'Can I see your identification please?'

2011-07-27T13:17:00.004Z

Now I've had a proper round of that classic Tanzanian institution, traffic cop harrassment. The first time the harrasser was probably not a cop at all, Abdul's guess is he was a security guard at the New Africa Hotel looking for extra income, and after he resorted to patting his shotgun and saying 'This is my identification' with exaggerated self-importance, I knew I'd won and drove off. I consider that time a warm-up exercise.
The second time on the Morogoro highway was half-hearted on their part: "Hello mzungu!!" with a cheerful grin by a traffic cop wearing sunglasses with bright pink frames. When I saw those glasses I knew I'd won. This game is all about the mental upper hand. He and his green-uniform colleague said "You overtook at this double zebra!" Indeed, I had just managed to pass a block of four slow-crawling goods vehicles. So, I leaned out the window and we all looked back, contemplating the lines on the road. The slow-crawlers passed by. "No, back there it was not double" I said. The line was solid on my side, broken for the other lane. "She's right" said the green motorbike cop. "Ok, go!" Then I had to pass all the four container trucks again.
This third time there was no pretense that I had actually committed a traffic violation. I was picking up my friend J from the airport and it was evening. He was telling me horror stories from Nairobi. Illustrative example: "This is very gentlemanly driving compared to Nairobi".
Coming round the corner from Pugu Rd into Bibi Titi Mohammed Rd a green motorbike cop stepped into our path after some traffic lights and lifted a hand, gazing vaguely over the car's roof, and disappeared behind us somewhere. I couldn't see where he'd gone, figured this was some general traffic-organising measure, and drove on to the next lights. Then another motorbike cop, this one fat and carrying a large well-worn gun of some description, was knocking on the window. I was right in front of the traffic lights with the first gear in, squeezing the clutch, ready to move. This was the conversation:
- (cop, in Swahili throughout): You went through a red light back there. You need to pay a fine of 250,000 TSH or spend two weeks in jail.
- I'm sorry, I don't understand you.
- This is serious. You're facing a fine of 250,000TSH.
- What's your name please?
- We need to go to the police station and you'll pay a fine.
- I don't know if you are a police. Can I see your identification please?
- Open this door, we'll go to the station.
- I'm sorry, I don't speak Kiswahili. Can I see your identification please?
- You'll be in jail for two weeks, we'll confiscate your car!
- Can I see your identification please?

...you think this is tedious to read, imagine how I was feeling, wind-up monkey line rabbiting on and on in real time with a puzzled and concerned citizen's smile... But I had the psychological upper hand. The guy never asked to see my driver's license or waved a fine book or anything. He didn't even try to pull the classic 'ten thousand without a receipt' line. Not to mention the fact that those traffic lights were off. He had no case, it was pure bluff.
J was sinking down in his seat, very quiet, not that I looked at him. My leg was starting to tremble from pressing down the clutch and I was hoping to hell it didn't show. We were blocking the traffic and cars were driving round the fat ass of the cop who was leaning down to talk to me through the half-open window.
- (cop, in English) You- red lights. Police station! Fine: two hundred and fifty thousand shillings! You: two weeks in jail!
- Can I see your identification please?
- OK, give me 200 dollars.
- Can I see your identification please?
His friend came round to check what was wrong. "She wants a receipt." This situation had run its course. The lights changed to green, I said "Thank you!", lifted the clutch, pressed the gas and moved off smoothly, as my driving instructor Derek would have said. Now it seemed like the road was blocked by all manner of imaginary tractors and goats and road works and short-sighted lorry learners and yes, red lights at which I was heavily disinclined to stop.
- 'You just ran from the police' stated my friend; the judiciary being one of the most highly trusted institutions in Finland, that kind of thing is a bit hard to shake even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the contrary. Then again, Finns trust banks even more so maybe every Finn should experience this kind of reality check, it would only be healthy.
- Yep. Can you check if they're following us please?
- You just assumed that he wouldn't shoot us.
- Yep. I've had practice.
- This wouldn't happen in Nairobi.

Ogling and ogled

2011-07-22T10:17:00.003Z

Mateo's parents and brother were here for two weeks, and they were dragged to various sights as is customary with visitors. The best one was the Maasai market at Melela. We got a guide through Chilunga Cultural Tourism in Morogoro, which was lucky because the Samuel had relatives whom we met immediately on getting out of the car: his mother and three brothers-from-other-mothers. After that it was a matter of us gawping at the Maasais, them gawping at us wazungu, and Mateo's mum shooting pictures in the process.

I learned that if you want good pictures, it's no good being shy.

The camera pointing down for a minute
I think this means I'll continue to shoot mediocre pictures. I'm too fidgety about things like personal space and 'the gaze' etc and feeling like if I get something I value I must compensate the person who gives it to me... quite a Nordic zero-sum game approach perhaps? I helped by chatting to people and hence distracting them while J zoomed and snapped, standing still and close and intent on the camera.
We milled around the market at a slow pace, checking out the red Indonesian sarongs that Maasai men wear, and the stiff synthetic blue wraps for the women.

We learned to spot woven flat rope for cows, dye powders for hair, and saw plenty of resplendent hairstyles and ornamentation on the young warriors. By face they could have been any young grinning dude with bad skin on the street, but add layers of earrings, braiding, weave, drapes, weaponry, light jingling metal medallions, beadwork arm and shin guards and the white plastic sandals... one of them approached slowly on a motorbike and I felt like I was in the presence of Hollywood-grade glamour even though he was just heading to the shop to buy some matches.
Eventually we bought some roast goat to eat from the spits by the firepits. The meat is stretched out on sharpened sticks and leaned over the fire, then chopped up on an unspeakable chopping-block with a knife cleaned with spit. There was so much fat that we were feeling it in our throats for hours afterwards, and the smoke sat in our clothes for days. Nonetheless we ate with good appetite. We introduced the innovation of combining beer-drinking and goat-eating (in addition to the innovation of women eating with men), standing around the chopping board, and donated meat generously to various greybeards who drifted in our general direction to stand and look vaguely into the air.

The women were in a different zone although they were right next to the open spaces: inside huts made from sparse branches, cooking goat offal into a hideous grey-green soup.
Sartorial culture exchange

Wriggling

2011-05-12T12:49:00.001Z

Africa is chucking cliche-enforcing reptiles at me in earnest today. First the washing machine this morning. I opened the hatch... and spotted a tiny little gecko tail dancing and writhing hopelessly on the ground below it. Then I saw the dead body of the tail's owner: a little gecko, smaller than my thumb, who'd been inopportune enough to be chilling out right on the hinge of the washing machine door. When I'd opened, I'd crushed its head. There was a tiny smear of blood and a pathetic little gecko paw still stuck to the side. These geckos have a pretty unpleasant colouring to begin with - it looked as if it was already long-dead, this unhealthy translucent pallor. So I was there making ugh!' sounds, clutching my armfuls of laundry, looking for a stick to get the corpse away from the washing machine. I didn't want to end up with a clean dead gecko in my clean clothes. I flicked it away with a stick under further 'uaah!' noises. But I wasn't woman enough to flick it further away, into the bushes. When I came back to do the whites the ants were busy at work on the weirdly human-shaped body.
And now, as I was on the balcony thinking about a satisfying round of feminist banter I'd pulled off in Kiswahili in the car on Tuesday (example: 'You say that women will obey their husbands because they are afraid that their husband will beat them. So that means that the stronger will rule. Tell me: who's stronger, a cow or a human? And who rules?' ahhh, this is so satisfying I've got to continue: 'A Swahili man? Why would I want a Swahili husband if he believes that the bible is different for men and women, and he believes in babu's miracle cure, in having a mistress and in witchcraft and that men should rule women??')
so, I pulled open the sliding door to go downstairs, and it got stuck in a soft squidgy kind of way- and suddenly I saw frantic wriggling on the other side... something else wriggly trapped by me! Was it one of these long skinks that sometimes visit our shower? Shit, I'm really the killer of cute small animals today. I was getting distressed at the thought of prying another body out of the furniture, plus it wasn't even dead, what if I'd have to administer the mercy blow. Then the wriggler lifted its head and I saw that it was a snake, small and brown. Now I had a legitimate problem, thank God. I shouted over the balcony for Thomas. 'I have a problem. There's a snake here! It's stuck in the door. Can you come with a panga or something?' Luckily I hadn't locked the downstairs door. Thomas took a pointy stick, left his shoes outside, and came in, up the staircase and started whacking at the snake. By now it had managed to turn around and was heading out to the balcony, squeezing between the panes of the sliding glass door. I closed the bedroom door and stood on a chair like a massive girl. The snake escaped to the balcony and I had to instruct Thomas in how to open the sliding door, perched on the chair, snake making good its escape under the sandals and bag that are 'drying' on the balcony floor... finally he got through, whacked at the general direction of the snake, and managed to make it dead. I have no idea what kind of a snake it was. Grey-brown, small angular head. Thomas assured me that this is a fierce dangerous one that kills.
If dead reptiles come in threes, can I please count the non-inclusion of the Basic Finns party in our next government as the third for today?

National auditing sensations

2011-05-04T09:09:00.005Z

It's time again for the staggering annual revelation of what exactly is happening with Tanzania's public funds: the Controller-Auditor General (CAG), Mr. Ludovick Utouh has published his reports into the financial year July 2009- June 2010. The four reports were submitted to the President, tabled in the National Assembly and published online on the the National Audit Office's website. Apologies for a long text below. The findings are so spectacular that it's hard to choose what to highlight.

You become dizzy when counting the zeroes on the public sums that have been misappropriated. Generally, neither central nor local government are following their own rules on accounting standards, procurement etc. It is fascinating to see that one of the CAG's main recommendations is that the government should implement his recommendations from previous years: essentially, nothing is done to address the detailed and shocking malpractices revealed in these reports. Here we see that transparency (having a public CAG report) is only one aspect of accountability: enforcement is the aspect that is sorely lacking! The CAG even writes clearly what people on the street are saying: "this government is not serious" (page 22 of the Central Govt report).

There are a few people taking action: it is encouraging to see that three investigative Parliamentary Standing Committees (all chaired by opposition MPs) are doing some work in uncovering malpractice. The donors are aware of these problems and are making efforts to institute better public finance management. CSOs investigate and try to hold various local government authorities to account - an uphill battle. These are all small initiatives against an enormous tide of institutionalised malpractice.

The CAG reports are on: local government, central government, Public Authorities (utilities etc), and a performance audit on selected areas (TANROADS, maternal health, the Customs and Excise Department, the Medical Stores Department - exec summary from page 17).

Some key findings are:
Local government: (the executive summary starts on page 14)

- There are 134 Local Government Authorities or Councils in Tanzania. Mwanga, Kishapu, Rombo and Kilwa District Councils all received an 'adverse opinion', or negative verdict, from the CAG. If you work in any of these areas, it's worth finding out more on page 48.

- Generally, the District councils have a weak grasp of the financial management systems and databases they need to use, as well as not following up on funds allocations down to Ward and Village levels.

- Altogether 132 councils failed to spend one third of their District Development grants: 175 billion TSH or ca 87 million Euro. Some of that was probably unspent because the projects weren't ready, but some will be 'lost on the way'.

- Councils had made payments for TSH 2.8 billion or ca 1.4 million Euro without keeping supporting vouchers (receipts), and TSH5.5 billion or 2.7 million Euro without proper vouchers - so it is not known how this money was spent.

- TSH 583 million, 289.000 Euro, was paid to non-existent employees (retired, dead or not at work.)

- TSH 2.7 billion (1.3 million Euro) of collected revenue (local taxes etc) was not paid to the Councils - and 948 revenue receipt books were missing so the auditors could not tell how much may have been collected.

The recommendations hint at a picture where LGAs are not quite capable of managing the funds they receive as part of the Decentralisation by Devolution policy - the councils now have responsibility for development, but they don't necessarily have the management tools. It appears that another problem is that funds disbursements from the central government are unclear and delayed - and, of course, plain lack of oversight in the systems.

Central government: the executive summary starts on page 17.

- This covers Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) including Embassies and donor funds.

- Overall, 283 billion TSH or 189 million Euro was spent without proper supporting documents.

- Salaries worth TSH1.8 billion (913,000 Euro) paid to non-existent staff

- TSH48 billion, 23 million Euro, was paid to the Bank of Tanzania as a stimulus package to industry in response to the financial crisis - however, the list of beneficiaries of the funds is not available.

- The external debt is increasing (by 50% from the previous year) without being properly included in the national accounts.

- One staggering revelation is that Integrated Financial Management System data entry operators can easily change data in the databases (and create purchase orders without authorisation) and that recovery/backup systems are weak or non-existent.

- The tax collection was short by 391 billion TSH (194 million Euro).

- 'Unresolved issues' of 220 billion TSH (110 million Euro) from the previous report remain 'unresolved'.

- Tax exemptions also cost the government money: among others, donor projects and NGOs are tax exempt.

The report on Public Authorities gives some gems on malpractice on public utility companies (conflict of interest, MPs sitting on Boards of Directors, non-payments to the Treasury, enormous government guarantees for privatised bodies etc). This is of interest to any of you whose work relates to water, electricity etc. The Executive Summary begins on page 18.

The question is: Why are Tanzanians not taking to the streets? The only indications that anyone is being held to account are reports of a shakeup last month in the ruling party CCM where they considered removing the party membership of some of the most astonishingly corrupt public figures of recent years. Also, the CCM Central Committee was changed. But neither of these developments was linked to the CAG revelations. The media has written about a few details from the CAG reports but there does not seem to be any sense of outrage. Are the Tanzanians too complacent or are those in power too complicit?

There will probably be more analysis coming from our colleagues in the Policy Forum's Budget Working Group over the next few months: stay tuned for more shock revelations.

"D'ya need a TAMPAX?!" and other idiots encountered en route

2011-04-21T13:18:00.006Z

I've just been travelling - the old-fashioned way, with a backpack on public transport. Aside from the startling sight of the youth hostel run over by children, it was pretty similar to travelling at age 17. (Literally: the TAZARA train is exactly the same as the ones we took in the mid-90s in China on the People's Railways or whatever. Thankfully without the loudspeakers spewing out rousing music.) Except this time I had the lines ready when meeting idiots and a zero-tolerance policy for drunken assholes. Thank God for the reverse brainwashing (brain-encrustation?) provided by Paul Theroux in his travel books: 'that doesn't need cross-cultural understanding. He's simply an idiot'. Here are some choice lines:
- "No, no, no you asshole, you have to tie it further up the branch! I can't believe you being so young, and so stoopid! Goddamn I'll come up there and tie it myself. I wasn't aware you had a vagina?? D'you need a TAMPAX??' this by the winner of the Zam Trip Asshole contest, a Californian refugee from common sense and decency, meeting his bewildered estranged sons for the first time in 15 years. Yes.
- "You know, me I like white women. I'm a pastor!" (swaying in the train compartment door.) The next day this dude was embarrassed. He showed us white women his girlfriend's voter card. She's 19 years old. A chance to heckle: "So, you like schoolgirls as well?" Plus, what the hell was he doing with his girlfriend's voter card?? Does he have her locked up in a a cupboard somewhere?
White guys about to die soon, have a bit of this
- "You eat nsima??? Seriously, you eat nsima?? I'd like to see you eating nsima!" this by the waiter, barely overcoming his hilarity. "Yeah well you're clearing away my plate, here's a great chance for you to do a forensic study of how I've eaten nsima."

On the other hand, the vast majority of the Zambian people I talked to were great. Schoolteachers, traders, fitness instructors, entrepreneurs, grassroots party organisers, tourists domestic and international. Usually very sensible but sometimes you got quality lines: "Do you have a brother? I'd like Brenda here to marry a white guy." One friend adding "Yeah, I could also marry a white guy. One who's about three months away from dying."
Hello hello! remember yesterday you said you're a pastor!?
Taxi driver's view on how they mobilise grassroots support for the party in Southern Province: "They just hold meetings with chibuku and eating goat?? That's no way to campaign!"

'Sorry something came up'

2011-04-21T13:07:00.001Z

My meeting just got cancelled. The meet-ee had to rush out of our
office before we got started. "Sorry something just came up. I have to
go and get married", he said balancing on the sidewalk kerb scanning the
street for a taxi. He waved a sickly green A5 cardboard form. "This
registration form is only valid for seven days, and next week I can't, I
have a doctor's appointment."
Imagine that! Phoning your beloved: "Shit! Meet me at the registrar's
office in 20, they close early today!!" Not much point fretting over the
napkins matching the flower arrangements there. How refreshing!

Enjoy old news!

2011-03-15T09:23:00.005Z

There's so much happening in the world these weeks that everyone seems to be rehashing the news in blogs. Didn't seem like I needed to join in the clamour. But then you can't really blog without referring to current events, so I haven't blogged about anything. Or can you? I think I'll show off my jääräpäinen (pig-headed) side and blog about long-gone events instead.
Other people may get feed off current events from the BBC, and that's also the source of my past events excitement: 'Witness' radio podcasts. Get them here!
I downlad them, transfer them to my mobile on Bluetooth, and play them back in the car on loudspeaker when I commute. This is my latest solution to the disappearance of the BBC on Tanzanian FM. For a while I was listening to 'Tuntematon Sotilas', the seminal Finnish war novel (Unknown Soldier), on an audiobook on CDs. By now, CD 7, it's just getting too depressing. The author Väinö Linna is killing off the characters, realistically, en masse in an aggression war against the Russians. He must have planned this because he's populated the start of the novel with enough characters to take a 50-60% loss. This quantity-over-quality approach means that each character only gets allotted a surname, a tribe and one characterisic; maybe two. Those who have an ethnic accent don't get any other character trait except maybe 'humorous'. I got to where Lehto (orphaned, grim, sadistic) has just shot himself in a ditch and Riitaoja (weak, cowardly, reduced to a childlike bunch of nerves) think she can hear him shouting and runs to find his lost unit in the rain of bullets and gets one, mercifully, in the back of the head. You expect the five or so characters with more than one characteristic to survive, but who knows.
The commuting alternative to Tuntematon Sotilas was cycling. This is mostly a pleasure, expected to be interrupted by a few hits of adrenalin, but since I found Mkadini Road and JICA rehabilitated the footpath next to Selander Bridge, the 'pleasure' side wins overwhelmingly. But now the weather has turned to liver-shaking thunderstorms (well, at night at least) so the bike option is less feasible.
So: weather and base-setting inertia make the car win over the bike some of the time.
What to distract myself with? R&B radio??? My own thoughts? (better). But best: BBC 'Witness' podcasts.
The one I listened to yesterday was about the setting up of the Apartheid system in South Africa in 1957. The BBC reporter uses his back-of-the-nose posh accent ('fear' sounds like it has only one syllable, Nordics will recognise 'fää') to grill the Prime Minister in a way that sounds very contrary to the British establishment's and Thatcher's blockade-busting future. "How do you reconcile with Christian principles making black people second-class citizens in their own country, taking their land and moving them into cheap labour reserves?" he asks. The prime minister is from a pre-spin era. He says it like it is. The lack of hypocrisy is refreshing, but shocking, very much an iced water bucket on head-effect. "The purpose of Apartheid is to protect the white South African. If we did not segregate the races, the three million while South Africans would soon disappear. The black man, left without the guardianship of the white, would soon revert to a state of barbarism. That would be very contrary to Chrsitian principles". Seriously people, you have to hear it yourselves.
That's what it was, Apartheid, naked, unapologetically oppressive, with a single purpose. You'd have to fight that directly. If you were South African (or a person with empathy) you couldn't shrug your shoulders after hearing that. You'd have to go ANC.
Today's advocacy relies a lot on uncovering lies and hypocrisy and hoping that revealing the true state of affairs will make 'someone' stop the bad shit; it's known as "the Dracula effect". But it doesn't seem to work very well. Maybe spin, greenwash and lies aren't so necessary for the bad guys after all. Eva Joly, the French anti-corruption crusader, realised that there's no interest in pursuing the common good even when bad shit was revealed, so she left the judiciary adn went into politics. The Yes Men didn't cause any outraged action in the audiences when they staged ironic shows to allude to corporate crimes. If people are on the side of bad shit, they know it and uncovering the truth won't necessarily make them change their position.
With such a jaded outlook on life you can imagine how happy I was to hear that South Sudan has broken free (that Al-Bashir had the background to turn Gaddafi and go for the worst shit solution), that the North African people are calling their emperors naked, and that...well, after that's when they shut the BBC in Tanzania, so I haven't really been able to hear news much. At least not good news.

Ubungo mk 2: the Transport Minster undercover

2011-01-23T10:59:00.004Z

Ahahh, vindication for my blog post about Ubungo bus station from the highest level: Transport Minister Omari Nundu wants the touts out of Ubungo bus station. I like the fact that the Transport Minister - newly appointed?- can walk around Ubungo and get hassled like the rest of us, just by wearing jeans and a sweater rather than a suit and 7 bodyguards. He told the Guardian newspaper he bought bus tickets to Dodoma from different hustlers and had some complaints about process. Apparently the bus companies pay the touts a TSH2,000 commission for each ticket, and touts work for different companies.
The article and interview seem to have many holes - for example, if all bus companies pay the same commission and touts work for any company, why would the touts refuse to sell you a ticket for the company you want, and instead lie and give you a ticket for another company? If it works like Nundu says it does, the touts would just in effect be roving ticket vendors, and the commission would be the premium the passenger pays for the convenience of buying by the bus instead of having to go via the ticket office.
A company could start paying TSH2,500 commission instead, get more passengers, and spark a commission inflation. No, there's something else going on in the Ubungo micro-economy.
Nundu uses the 2,000 shilling commission as an excuse to dismiss the long-distance bus companies' (Tanzania Bus Owners' Association TABOA) requests to raise their fares to keep pace with rising costs: “It is the presence of touts which increases the operational costs of the business and nothing else. If the owners manage to do away with the touts there would be no need to increase the fares." Yeah, sure, and the rising cost of fuel has nothing to do with it?
Nice operation at the station sir, but come on.
Photo by Selemani Mpochi

Coping with Ubungo bus station

2010-12-11T09:01:00.004Z

This time acquiring my long-distance coach ticket to Handeni at Ubungo Bus Station was slightly less adrenalin-pumping than last time. Getting on the bus to Arusha, now that was an experience that made me want to write a long irate section for the travel books to help other travellers avoid the blood pressure risks.
We'd been told that Dar Express is THE bus company to take for Arusha. Buses leaving every half hour until 10 AM. Arriving at Ubungo after 7 AM, the taxi driver betrayed us straight away. As soon as a taxi approaches the line of ticket offices, ticket hustlers swoop down on the windows like some horror movie zombie attack and start shouting 'where to, sister!!!' Our taxi driver told them. All was lost. At this stage it's important to keep your thoughts focused as you pay the taxi driver and collect your luggage and get out of the car, because each window of the taxi will be blocked by a few hustlers (mapapasi) screaming 'Arusha Dar Express this way this way sister!!!!' They'll crowd in on you, they'll walk in front of you so you stumble on them, after a while they'll start grabbing your hands or clothes. At this point I thought that they were just mapapasi who wanted to guide us to the Dar Express ticket office so they could get some commission. Normally I've walked up to the ticket office I wanted and told them 'this guy didn't help me at all!' to avoid the guy walking in front of me getting commission for getting in my way. But here we didn't know where the Dar Express office was and there was no sign of it. Wandering up and down the ticket office gallery, the guys said 'Dar Express office in here!!!' and we actually stumbled into the office, which had a sign saying 'Hai Express'. They wanted to write us tickets. "Yes this is Dar Express". "Well it's Hai Express, it's the same company." I knew that sometimes the name on the bus ticket didn't mean the name on the bus, maybe there's some sort of code-sharing going on, or I've just been conned in the past. "Look, this is luxury bus. very good bus." We all looked at the photo on the wall of the five-seats-in-a-row red vinyl-clad interior. "Dar Express is full. The government has hired all the buses to take people to vote." This was a mind-boggling statement and I didn't know where to begin inquiring - the government transports busloads of voters?? By hiring private sector buses? Procurement standards? Constituency boundaries? Coerced ballots? Voter registration issues? At this point I was actually starting to consider Hai Express but luckily M had his head screwed on and started to laugh at the nonsense of the story and we forced our way past the 4-5 spectators and hustlers blocking our exit and charged down the gallery. Another, younger guy blocked our path. 'Dar Express this way sister!' I told him to get out of my way and stop lying. 'No no, this dada works at Dar Express, she'll sell you a ticket." He grabbed the elbow of a stout woman with the same bad liar's expression as all the rest of them and pivoted her into my path. She had a ripe brown hole in one of her front teeth and I considered her options for getting it fixed while she tried to cheat us. She grabbed my elbow. 'Yes, tickets?' she said. 'Which company do you work for?'I asked and grabbed her elbow in return but she clearly considered the invasion of personal space to be a non-issue.'Hai Express' she said. Behind us, the original Hai Express people were complaining softly, our wellbeing close to their hearts. 'They will cheat you!!' they were saying in English. I swirled around: 'How? how exactly will they cheat us?' I asked. The guy looked abashed and wouldn't give away trade secrets.'They will cheat you' he repeated. 'And you won't?' I said.
All around, people were shouting at us 'Dar Express! office number 31!' I walked into the closest ticket office, number 33, where three desks were occupied by lounging employees of three separate bus companies. They looked neutrally at our entourage of frantic mapapasi. 'Good morning. How is business. How is work. Thank you very much.' I started. 'Could you please tell me the office number of Dar Express?' They glanced at the mapapasi glaring at them and considered some sort of territorial division of labour or gangster protection schemes or turf wars or whatever the hell goes on in the organisational structure of Ubungo Bus Station, and said 'number 45'. I thanked them and we surged back out into the gallery and noted that the offices only went up to number 40. If there were more, they were on the other side of the road that leads out of the bus station. That road was just blocked by a Dar Express bus idling as it waited to turn out onto the Morogoro Road.
I was still thinking like a Finn, wanting to clarify whether Dar Express was in fact full or not and wanting to buy a ticket. We went around the darkened windows of the bus and hammered on the driver's door. 'Where is your office??' He just waved for us to go around to the front door on the other side, slightly irritated. So we hammered on that door. Miraculously, it opened and conductor looked out on the scene of two wazungu with bags and seventeen baying mapapasi scenting blood and unwilling to let the quarry get away. 'Do you have space??' we asked and she nodded and it felt like she pulled us to safety from a river boiling with piranhas. She showed us seats in the last row, stowed our bags and said 'those guys were really bothering you, eh?' The bus had clean seats, four in a row not five, and air conditioning... and a sound system playing Botswanan music videos but never mind...
From the window we could see the calm and orderly row of 'posh bus' ticket offices on the far side of the bus station access road. Dar Express was there at number 45.
Travellers in Tanzania, this I have learned about Ubungo and wish to share for the increased peace of mind and health of the cardiovascular system of my fellows:
- get the taxi or lift to drop you inside the station where you're outside the hustler territory.
- don't tell people where you're going. They may claim to help you but there are several species of service providers in there, all with varying and obscure agendas.
- buy your ticket from the people at the bus. That way you can also inspect the bus itself.
- what do you mean, buy in advance? Ubungo is about 10 km outside of the town centre on the exceedingly busy Morogoro Road and it will take you an hour or two to get out there to buy your bleeding ticket. Then another hour to get back into town. Having said that, Dar Express does have a city booking office on Libya Street.
- If anyone other than the guy standing outside the bus says 'that bus is full', don't feel compelled to trust their veracity.

I did this for my trip to Mbeya last week- arriving 45 minutes in advance, buying a ticket off the guys outside the bus, getting a seat number - and it worked fine. Going to Handeni last Sunday I didn't see any trace of the Hadjeez bus company so I had to ask. But I asked people chucking passengers into minibuses, who looked like they had to stay where they were and couldn't follow me around. They also tried 'Hadjeez is full' but I just said 'I just want to talk to the Hadjeez people, where is their office?' and they told me. The Hadjeez people also had the self-satisfied faces of small-time crooks but other people were buying Handeni tickets from them so I figured this was OK. Turned out that Hadjeez only has about three buses so we had to wait until one arrived from Handeni half an hour late, until the arriving passengers had fought their way through the departing passengers who were mobbing the bus, for another unspecified amount of time idling by the bay, and finally when they drove the full bus into the garage at the back of Ubungo for some maintenance work with a heavy spanner or mallet or something banging on the base of the bus... but after that we travelled to Handeni and arrived only 2.5 hours late.

Shortcut to heaven

2010-11-30T16:29:00.003Z

101 posts! Yey!
Yesterday I took a 12-hour bus ride to get to Mbeya. I had seven sweet minutes of hoping that nobody would take the seat next to me, but then a gang of people got on and started brandishing a long slice of tickets. Luckily at least it was the narrowest one of them who sat next to me - and the youngest - a dude who seemed to be herding four elderly relatives. He talked on the phone: 'We're going to Zambia now, we'll sleep at Tunduma. So we'll be out of range for communications. I'll call you again when I'm back from Zambia.' It sounded so adventurous. "I'll call you when I'm back from Zambia"! How long would it take? Days? Months? Years? What was a bunch of elderly relatives going to do in Zambia? I couldn't even imagine. Business? New life? Pilgrimage?
Took a while to find out. We shared some cashew nuts at Chalinze. It was only at Mikumi national park that we chatted a bit, refreshed by a Coke after the first six hours. He told me 'yesterday there were four big giraffes lying on the road. Just lying there! The bus has to go real slow and nudge past them! And elephants!' He'd travelled this road from Mbeya the day before??? 14 hours to Dar, pick up relatives, off to Zambia the same way? What madness was this! "My father died." They were going to the funeral in Zambia.
Is this typical -- the uncles and aunts probably never thought of going to Zambia for decades, just imagine the fare. Then a relative dies, and then suddenly it becomes possible - imperative - to travel!
Because they were 5 people, their logistics arrangements kept us all in the back of the bus stimulated. At every stop they shouted for the phone voucher sales guy. They were trying to track down the place to get the passport, someone to stay at in Mbeya, and Kevin. I vaguely listened to the hunt for Kevin until a few hours later it was established that 'Kevin moved to Singida. We have to talk to Vicky.' Then the getting off the bus. 'What?? Where we are now? At Uyole!!' you could almost hear the dismay of the other person, hearing that they hadn't moved in the last 30 minutes. The Mbeya locals around us in the bus shouted 'Sai!!' 'No no not Uyole. we're at Sai! Sai!" Chuckling, they got off at Soweto.
- Today in the meeting it emerged that the stuff I was interested in wasn't even on the agenda and I'd have to wait for AOBs. A fellow participant noted my disinterest. he consoled me at lunch. "You may think that this is all a waste of time for you, but you should know that this work of yours is a great help to us in Tanzania. In Kyela, your people the Danish built a water pump! The mamas don't have to walk seven miles to the well! Really. Your sufferings are like the sufferings of Jesus, who sits on God's right hand side. Your name will be known in Heaven. When God sees your name, he'll call you right past the que. Even if there's someone else with your name, they'll say 'is this her? No! Bring her from the back of the que!!"
Slight meeting ennui or crucifixion? I know which suffering I'd take any day.

The coma playlist

2010-11-07T12:44:00.000Z

I just finished Oliver Sacks' 'Musicophilia'. Oliver, that thoroughly civlised person, writes freakshow pop psychology with a rock-solid neurological grounding and boundless respect for his subjects. He manages to sound optimistic and reassuring even when he describes cases of hopeless dementia or amnesia or other disorders that fragment the person. In many of his books you only get the description and discussion of weird things that happen when something goes wrong in the brain, but in 'Musicophilia' Oliver's message almost sounds religious. The cumulative effect of the chapters is a point similar to that of the loving Lutheran church: 'don't worry. Somebody's there for you.' In Sacks' case that 'someone' or something is music. No matter how mangled your brain is, chances are that some parts of it will be able to recognise and interpret music.
Turns out that the capacity to understand music is supported by many different parts of the brain, from the raw emotional lizard-brain to the good postcodes of the sophisticated frontal lobes. The evolutional purpose of relating to music is unclear but it's in there, leaning on many legs in different brain structures, stable and persistent. This means that although your memory or your motor coordination or your ability to speak may be shot to hell, listening to music can mobilise other parts of your brain and so to speak jump the gap of what you're lacking so you can function. Sacks's chapters describe demented old people who perk up and sing along to old songs, people with jerky motor problems who find themselves able to dance, and autistic or otherwise non-communicative people who can talk to others by chanting or singing. He talks about how music gathers up a splintered personality. My impression is that music is such a holistic experience that one missing piece – a catastrophe for performing most functions – is a minor inconvenience in the big music picture. It's a marching band of the brain rather than a string quartet, so if your second trombonist is missing it's no big deal.
String quartet, eh? Yep, my only complaint about 'Musicophilia' was that it's so high culture. Who are all these people that Sacks describes, who have grown up following the score of operas at home and who compose for symphony orchestras as a hobby? The majority of his music cases involve people who are intimately conversant with classical music. What about us who listen to four-minute vernacular compositions over a regular drumbeat? Do the same musical miracles apply even if we don't appreciate the architectural structures of Bach vs the melodic frippery of Tshaikovsky?
Nonetheless! Until I spend several days listening my way through these depths of classical music that Sacks describes, I can at least set up my own coma playlist. I think we should all make one! This is for our loved ones to programme an MP3 player with when we're reduced to meat plugged into tubes, blipping intermittently post-motor accident. Or for our great grandchildren to programme into our brain chips when we're in our old folks' pods.
For movement and physiotherapy, give me capoeira music. Some charismatic ladainhas with well-tuned berimbaus, full bateria, and a strong voice that understands to stay in key. A thumping roda recording that builds and shakes, ideally recorded live with people whooping at spectacles in the game. Some deep twisted woinging funk would also work here. Those people who made the Shaft soundtrack with Isaac Hayes, all dreads and sunglasses and carrot-sized joints, fingertips fluttering on the bass strings. Curtis Mayfield or the Last Poets or George Clinton or the Sweet Sweetback soundtrack... you could probably just get a few blaxploitation collections and weed out the predictable tracks. But if I only need to learn how to walk, I could do that editing myself.
Generally, for my coma soundtrack I need stimulating music. The main criterion is that the bass player should have work. Most white-boy 4-person bands with three-chord progressions within the same key and whingy vocals, famous for two seasons until their trouser waist size exceeded 28 inches, are out. You might accidentally tip me over the edge. Careful. Also avoid Buddha Bar and Thievery Corporation – good music, bad memories. Having said that, Radiohead is on, and the late Beatles is also on – where they started twisting their structures around a bit, Hey Jude and She Said and suchlike.
Fela is on, especially Coffin for the Head of State and Beasts of No Nation. But please don't put more than two Fela tracks in a row. Each song is at least 20 minutes long and not all of them are equally beautifully put together.
Then we have the desert rock'n'roll, starting with Tinariwen's 'Amassakoul'. Related, North African-Parisian fusion with Orchestre National de Barbes and Gnawa Diffusion.
West African-Cuban fusion music, Orchestre Baobab and those dapper 60s swingers... I imagine them jamming wearing sharp suits and hats in Dakar, holding transatlantic jam sessions.
You can give me ska and dub and cheeky ragga. Rinneradio and Ultra Bra. Gypsy punk like Goran Bregovich or an Emir Kusturica movie – in Black Cat White Cat the band even comes to rescue grandpa from the hospital, wouldn't that be majestic. Some happy mambos by Perez Prado. M.I.A going over the top with the effects. But again, not too much of one thing. I'll have to regularly cleanse the aural palate. I don't normally listen to music nonstop so although the coma might be deathly boring and the earphones might be the only thing I have, it might still be advisable to alternate with an audio book now and then. Maybe the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
- Then, we need a dementia playlist to bring me back to myself – some of the albums I've listened to the most when young and strong and happy. I'll enjoy Carlinhos Brown's album 'Alfagamabetizado', Johnny Cash's fourth American album with some of the country-est tracks removed but plenty of mournful old-man barytone, everything by those rockin' folk secessionists Hedningarna, Leonard Cohen, 'Precious Things' by Tori Amos, 'Kashmir' by Led Zeppelin, Tellu Paulasto and witch chanting, Radiohead's second and third albums, Eryka Badu's album with that sleeve art she drew herself, 'Walk On By' by Aretha Franklin, Air's 'Moon Safari', Massive Attack, Manu Chao, Bellowhead's 'Burlesque', Debut and the second one by Bjork, Kafka with their 25-minute prog rock landscapes, the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, Dire Straits' 'Brothers in Arms', and when I've regressed to the period of being 14 – Queen's and Abba's 'Greatest Hits'. Allsang and Kauneimmat Joululaulut and Apa for the second childhood or to get me to sing along.
Stick that on and see how the curves on the screen respond.

The President's witchdoctor vs the Witchcraft Act (2002)

2010-09-28T11:35:00.004Z

Wow, finally for once my blog is surfing the foamy edge of current affairs: president Jakaya Kikwete's personal witchdoctor, Sheikh Yahaya Hussein, has been accused of witchcraft by an enterprising citizen under the Witchcraft Act that I wrote about yesterday.
Mr Paul John Mhoyza, described in the Citizen as a former tutor at the Dar es Salaam Teachers' College, has petitioned the High Court of Tanzania to arrest and charge Sheikh Yahaya, described as a 'prominent astrologer', under the Witchcraft Act. Sheikh Yahaya, witchdoctor to incumbent president Jakaya Kikwete and his party CCM (the Revolution Party) has threatened anyone who opposed president Kikwete with "sudden death" in January this year. Kikwete is running for re-election in the 30-31 October general elections. Yahaya has also claimed that dark forces by JK's opponents caused the president to collapse at a rally, and that Yahaya is protecting him with "black magic".
Yahaya is the subject of speculation in this discussion thread named 'Sheikh Yahaya, head witchdoctor of CCM?'. According to the concerned citizens on the noticeboard, Yahaya's influence over the ruling party CCM may explain some of the party's apparently incoherent policy agenda. "They are more afraid of him than of God" says Jile79, originator of the thread.
So that's something about the 'eminent astrologer', but what about the diligent Paul Mhoyza? Is he a force for progress and enlightenment? He has tried to use the letter of the law before, apparently trying to get JK's name off the list of presidential candidates based on breaches against the constitution. (Quixotic but admirable.) However, in his statement as to why Yahaya should be arrested, Mhoyza talks about how the effects of black magic are "not humanly predictable" and expresses concern that even judges presiding over cases involving JK's opponents could be struck by Yahaya's black magic. So it appears that he's genuinely worried about the effects of black magic on opposition candidates in this multi-party democracy.
Wow! I love to see a bit of citizen activism, especially when it's in this kind of absurd area. Will Mhoyza's petition be acted upon by the High Court? Will he take the matter forward himself as a private prosecutor? Will he suddenly meet some bizarre and unexpected misfortune? Stay tuned!!
And thanks to Sarah for alerting me to the link!

The United Republic of Tanzania: Witchcraft Act (revised 2002)

2010-09-27T09:57:00.004Z

Does your country have a Witchcraft Act? No? Then how do you punish 'witchcraft and certain acts connected therewith' within a clear legal framework, huh? Take heed from the United Republic of Tanzania. These guys have legislation for dealing with "sorcery, enchantment, bewitching, the use of instrument of witchcraft, the purported exercise of any occult power and the purported possession of any occult knowledge".
Again, I ask myself: what the hell is going on here??
To be fair, the Act doesn't actually say that it will punish witchcraft. The offense is to represent yourself as someone who has the power of witchcraft, or to threaten someone with or give advice on witchcraft or 'instruments of witchcraft'. In this sense, the law doesn't need to get into the thorny issue of whether supernatural illegal events have actually taken place; it is enough that someone claims that they have.
It is also an offense to accuse someone of witchcraft (outside of the context of a legal witchcraft case) 'with the intent to cause injury or misfortune'.
The punishments are interesting. To practice witchcraft or accuse someone of witchcraft 'with the intent to cause death, disease, injury, or misfortune' is a prison sentence of no less than seven years, no fine alternative.
If you commit a witchcraft/accusation offense but without intending to cause death, misfortune etc - the punishment is either a fine of TSH100,000 (ca 50 euro) or prison of no less than five years.
WHOOBA! Fifty euro or five years?

Is this law enforceable? I guess if you raid any self-respecting mganga (witchdoctor) you will find plenty 'instruments of witchcraft'. As for someone purporting to be a sorcerer, it would be harder to prove what someone said (in the dead of night, during a new moon, under the baobab tree...?). Sounds like a risky situation. In a court case, one party will automatically be found guilty - either of practicing witchcraft or of accusing someone unlawfully of witchcraft.
And what if you inadverently practice witchcraft? I've heard that if you say "You'll see!" you are casting a curse. As in, "if you keep feeding that baby river water he's going to get sick and die, you'll see!" There, you've just killed a baby. Off to trial, 7 years.

There's hope, though, that the judiciary system won't need to bother its head much with this one. Seems like the lawmakers have updated the first five pages of the 1956 Act in 2002, but they forgot page 6. There, it says that the punishment for disobeying an order lawfully made under this section (i.e. not turning up in court, not following the ASBO, not reporting to the District Commissioner weekly, or so on), is a fine of TSH 150. That's 70 euro cents.
Or two months in prison.

According to BBC World Service research earlier this year, 90% of Tanzanians believe in witchcraft. My colleague says: "Even the ministers." Maybe the lawmakers deliberately left the 150 TSH fine in there so that they wouldn't have to go through the costly and cumbersome process of prosecuting 36 million people.

Useful work

2010-09-10T14:55:00.004Z

Just spent a week in Iringa, Tanzania, on an advocacy training course for district-level NGOs networks. Reeling in the piercing high-altitude light and squinting at the dust and blossoming jacarandas, I plunged into four days of Kiswahili immersion.
The topic was trade-related advocacy. And it turned out that all the participants were also running businesses, in addition to their unpaid NGO work. Raising chickens or pigs ("Pigs! They take work. Always getting sick."), growing coffee, refrigerating and distributing fish, running a stationery store, selling onions... I felt sort of useless, selling only information, knowing about trade only from reading.
This time I had fewer occasions to use my active Swahili than I had in May, on the equivalent workshop in Mbeya region. In Iringa I found that anything I wanted to say, one of the participants already said. These guys (including the women) had already persuaded the Tunduru authorities to lower their capricious 5% rice levy to 3%; stopped the Mbinga district councillor from imposing an arbitrary requirement to conduct overpriced fumigation (from their friend) as a prerequisite of gaining a business license; and managed to get a village council to distribute land to poor and deaf people. They were confident and outspoken.
Yeah, this advo business isn't that grave-serious
I didn't quite manage to run my session on international trade in Kiswahili, but at least partly. I drew a value chain on the flipchart, went through some basics of comparative advantage, listed Tanzania's trade partners and treaties with special mention of the EPA. It was gratifying to see the main facilitator referring back to my drawings in his later sessions. I think that although value chain and trade balance are concepts that these kinds of people would be familiar with, it's good to get it out clearly (and especially in drawings). I felt like I was finally doing useful work: here was knowledge I've acquired, being passed on to people for whom it complements their own knowledge. Neat.
We've found that 'experience-sharing' is an effective method for capacity building, and here we got plenty of that. The participants who had made changes happen in their areas talked about how they did it, what happened, how they reacted. Sadly my threshold for understanding doesn't come up to 'anecdotes' level and that's where all the best stuff is told... maybe at the next course. But here's an example that was shown with leg demonstration:
Facilitator: 'So, in advocacy work we end up making enemies some times. That official who you noticed was writing the farmers one receipt and making another for the books... how did he react when you revealed him?"
Activist: "He said he would break my legs!"
Facilitator: "And how did you respond to that?"
Activist: "I said look, somebody else already broke my leg, and here's the scar!!"
Iringa and Ruvuma participants answer questions

Raging Squid stats

2010-09-10T12:42:00.001Z

This new 'stats' tab in Blogger reveals fascinating information. One hit came from someone doing a search for 'eating blackheads'. YOU SICK FUCK!

Nyheter i riktiga livet: bransletrucken som valte

2010-09-10T11:27:00.004Z

Eid idag! Bra for mig, jag kom hem fran Iringa igar kl 9 pa kvallen och var ganska slut... jag tror det ar mest fran att sitta med huvudet vridet at hoger i bussen i 10 h, man far lite huvudvark osv. Och av att inte dricka vatten. Vi hade bara en tio-minuters matpaus och tre kisspauser varav en var oplanerad.
Den hande nar vi plotsligt saktade in mitt i bushen vid en brant sluttning till hoger, akrar till vanster lagre ner, i en ko med 6-7 bussar framfor oss. Nagra av oss hoppade ut och kissade och kollade sen vad som orsakade stoppet. 'En olycka' sa nan. Inga fordon rorde sig sa jag gick ocksa mot stoppet, nagra hundra meter i middagssolen: en bransle-containertruck (sant dar cylinderformat slap) hade pa nat satt valt at sidan och precis diagonalt over hela vagen. Hjulen i vadret at andra hallet, den lackande behallaren och cockpiten mot oss, diket mot sluttningen fullt av orange bransle, en back av bransle rann at andra hallet ner mot akrarna. Dar var nu redan 7 bussar stannade, var och en inneholl 50 passagerare, ungefar halften av oss var ute och ihmetteli, en riktig karneval. Man markte hur sma manniskor ar i jamforelse med en san har truck: fast vi alla 300 hade forsokt, hade vi inte kunnat flytta pa den eller rata upp den igen. 'Chaufforen skadades, han har redan forts till Morogoro till sjukhus'. Truckens 'bror', en till bransletruck fran samma bolag, stod ocksa i kon. Jag tankte vagt att sablar, sana har exploderar ju ofta, vart rinner bensinen... men jag visste ocksa att de inte antands helt lika latt som i filmerna sa jag iddes inte oroa mig sa mycket for explosionsrisken. I Uganda nagra manader sen skadades typ hela byn nar en san exploderat... Men har var nastan ingen framme och samlade bransle, bara en bybo med en kanister, lite diskret. De hade ju redan flera hundra liter i diket.
En containertruck kunde ses pa andra sidan trucken, och pa var sida vaxte kon hela tiden. Det ar massvis med trafik pa de har vagarna! Fast fran Iringa till Dar... 3-4 bolag kor den strackan direkt, med en buss i timmen, 4-5 avgangar varje morgon. Upp till 20 bussar at ett hall. Sen har vi alla bussar som kor Mbeya-Dar, samma vagar, och Zambia-Dar, och Songea-Dar, och efter Chalinze blir det Morogoro-Dar, Arusha-Dar, Dodoma-Dar, Singida-Dar osv osv osv. Och samma at andra hallet fran Ubungo. Det har var utanfor Mikumi. I var ko fanns bussar fran Sumry, Hood, Abood (tva bussar), var Upendo, tva kinesiska bussar, och mer pa kommande. Busschaufforerna holl konferens. Folk gick omkring och paivitteli. Ingen tycktes ta initiativ. Skulle vi bli tvungna att aka tillbaka? Sova i bussen? Promenera till den narmaste byn? Lifta tre i taget med smabilar? Be om hjalp fran Morogoro? Mobilnatet funkade inte. Kunde vi arrangera ett utbyte av passagerare - bussarna kunde tommas, passagerarna ga runt, satta sig pa bussarna pa andra sidan, och vanda om? vilket organiserande...Skulle vi bli tvungna att vanta pa att Tanroads eller transportbolaget kom med en kran och flyttade undan trucken? Eftermiddagen fore Id? Hah!
Smabilar kom och kilade forbi cockpiten: det var lite utrymme mellan den och sluttningen. Det har hande pa ett horn eller en kurva som stack utat. For dem som kom fran andra hallet var det nerforsbacke, 1.7 m utrymme mellan trucken och sluttningen, sen hamnade de i det bensinkladdiga diket fullt av bensin-lera och gamla sondriga olflaskor (hur? varfor?). En av bussarna fran andra sidan korde fram. Varvade upp. Tog sats. Korde fram, korde upp, lutade mot cockpiten, 20 cm utrymme, kom igenom, hela 25 m buss mellan sluttning truck, dike, lyckades svanga upp ur diket och lamnade tjocka oljiga hjulspar pa asfalten. Hurra! Alla blev energiska: det har kunde ga! En buss till korde igenom fran andra sidan. Sedan, i sinom tid, containertrucken... containern lutade orovackande mot trucken, jag tankte att fan nu krashar den har ocksa och stanger av vagen helt konsekvent. Men t.o.m den kom igenom.
Problemet for oss pa nerforsbacken var kurvan, och den hala bensinleran i diket. Nu borjade folk arbeta. Nagra man borjade grava upp sluttningen i hornet: rensade bort torra buskar, bande med kappar, bar sand fran sluttningen (med en avsliten del av cockpitens vind-kupa), och kastade i diket. Jag papekade att 'har ligger ju kappar (antagligen nans samlade ved), vi kan satta den i diket sa hjulen far faste... och har ar stenar...' sader lite vagt. En mzee hade sett samma sak, han sade med hog rost, ni ungdomar! Ta de dar stenarna och satt i diket. Ungdomarna lydde. En annan mzee ropade at en dam som vattnade sin aker, 'mama, hamta nagra hackor at oss!' (kuokka) och damen satte av till byn. Han paivitteli 'vi behover ju bara nagra hackor, forr i tiden hade varje buss en hacka med sig!' och tre skolflickor vid vagkanten borjade gapflabba, tydligen lat han som en av deras larare. De borjade repetera: 'forr i varlden hade alla en hacka!' hahahaha. Sen blev det varsta talkoot, na inte med alla men ett tiotal man som gravde utrymme fran sluttningen med hackorna, bar kappar och buskar och sand till diket, kastade i sten. En buss fran vart hall, Sumry, testade och korde upp. Placerade sig framfor trucken... blev fast i diket. "Ar det dar en Scania? " "na, nat kinesiskt skit". Blockerade passagen. Lyckligtvis gravde inte hjulen ner sig i alla fall. Jag bar ocksa en sten till leran och placerade bakom bakhjulen... Man i sina finklader/resklader, skjorta och lackskor gravde, bar kvistar och gras och sand och stoppade i diket under bussen, ungdomar bar sten... Bussen rullade tillbaka bakat, kvistarna knakade och brots, sen gasade den pa och vi tacktes alla med flygande damm fran avgasroret, sen rushade den igenom, lutade mot cockpiten, gavde upp diket till en grot, kom igenom. Yeah!! Vi kunde sova hemma!
Varje buss som korde igenom var i alla fall ett spant tillfalle: de lutade illa mot den fallna trucken och svajade igenom. Smabilar kom och passerade och korde helt frackt over underlaget i diket som busspassagerarna hade byggt, na, de hade ju inte sett hur situationen utvecklades. Var buss var den fjarde som skulle passera. Jag gick runt trucken fran aker-sidan, steg over bensin-rannilar, och borjade konversera med en bybo som lutade sig pa en stav och kollade spektaklet. Han pratade engelska med mig sa jag fick andvanda fraser som han sakert inte lart sig i skolan, som 'that is my bus. I hope it can pass!' och 'this oil is terrible for your fields'. Han berattade att stallet hette Msimba, 15 km fran Mikumi.
Forstas var var buss den forsta som blev fast: man horde den hoga bollywood-musiken som chaufforen spelade, men kanske han hade behovt nat med mer bas, for den sista tredjedelen av bussen klamdes fast vid cockpitens ovre hogra horn. Fan! Men chaufforen skrapade helt enkelt igenom, och fick en 1.5-m lang Bangladeshisk skrama..."det ar bara malfargen!" sa nan optimist. All var glada over att ha lost ett allvarligt problem, stamningen var uppstamd. Vi 30 Upendo-passagerare/publik joggade efter bussen och trangdes for att komma ombord och korde vidare, forbi den 2-kom langa kon pa andra sidan. Vi var ungefar 2h forsenade fast det tog oss nog inte 2h vid blockaget... kanske trafikstockningen in till Dar var speciellt ihopklamd eftersom alla ville till stan till Id? I alla fall tog resan 10 h till Ubungo. 600 km.
Hur gick det manne for resten av trafiken den dagen. Undrar hur lange var dikesstoppning holl. Undrar hur mycket som var kvar av truckens tak och nos efter att hela dagens trafik klamt sig forbi. Hoppas nan aterlamnade hackorna till byn. Undrar om an rojer upp diket igen for nasta regnperiod. Hoppas bensinen inte fororenar gronsakerna som vaxer nedanfor.
Na, i alla fall kandes det positivt att vara med, och det var gladjande att se hur folk tog sig an jobbet att ta oss alla vidare. Fast det hade varit lite snabbare att aka bil hade jag gatt miste om en upplevelse.
Glada passagerare nar vi klarat oss
Det fanns t.o.m en tupp i en korg i bussen som klarade resan bra... pa vagen till Iringa var det tva lador kycklingar pa bagageracket. Afrika-tillfallen.

U2, us too

2010-08-21T10:25:00.002Z

U2 held a mega-concert in Helsinki last night. I wasn't there, but went for dinner with a friend and her partner and to check out their new flat afterwards. The dinner followed an intensive and rewarding week of work, not enough sleep, a professional celebration, cava and getting a ride on the back of a bike. In the slack and satiated post-professional, post-prandial atmosphere, we stumbled out of the restaurant and headed up the hill.
Suddenly we realised that the music echoing around us was U2, the sound carrying from the Olympia Stadion several km distant. It was a surround-sound underwater noise, echoing off the walls lining the street and coming at us softly from all sides. As they unlocked the gate we could hear Bono whistling the theme to 'With or Without You'. We decided to stay in the courtyard between their house and the neighbours, all highrises, where the surrounding walls caught and amplified the song. We could only catch the vocal and treble frequencies so the lyrics were almost audible. The wind brought more music as if someone had turned up the volume. It was a spot-on soundtrack to the vague satisfaction left from a good week and the anticipation of heading to bed, but not leaving the city just yet: an urban bonus present.

Book review: 'Blink'

2010-08-21T09:06:00.003Z

This book is all about the wisdom in snap judgements and the back of the book blurb congratulates the reader on following their impulse to buy the book. Facetious bastards.
This is vacuous, floaty stuff. I followed my snap judgement NOT to buy 'Blink' about 37 times when I saw it on the bestseller shelves of airports around all continents over the last year. Finally, in a fit of time-killing at Julius Nyerere International, I picked it up and followed my usual book vetting procedure of ignoring the back cover and looking over a few pages. The part I opened described a man who specialised in decoding facial expressions - his institution had a code number for all facial muscle movements. I put the book back down but found myself wanting to find out more about the facial expression decoding. So I bought it from the tall stack ("No. 1 International bestseller") of 'Blink' copies at Akademen.
3 chapters in I can already discourage you from making the same mistake as I did: follow your intuition, don't buy it. It teases the reader with intriguing anecdotes, but then it doesn't follow up and analyse or deconstruct them in any detail. 'Speed dating can show you whom you're attracted to! But that attraction may not follow the criteria you thought you wanted in a good partner!' End of anecdote. Why not? What happens inside your head when you revise your opinion of what you like in a man? Does the snap judgement work for long-lasting love happiness, or should you revert back to the boring 'has steady job' criteria for the long term? Can you tell me, Mr Malcolm Gladwell? No? You're too busy bathing in champagne and getting rubbed with truffle oil by hired Hollywood starlets, with my 11 euros and those of a million other suckers? Bitch.
If you want pop psychology (and let's be honest, we all want pop psychology), my well-considered recommendation is Oliver Sacks. I also bought his 'Musicophilia', (like 'Blink',having browsed it at Julius N and paid money for it at Akademen), because they didn't have English versions of An Anthropologist on Mars. Sacks doesn't just deconstruct the weird behaviour in humans, he even gives us the neurophysiology of it, and draws fascinating societal conclusions. Put your money on Oliver Sacks.

Book review: Beware of Narcissists

2010-08-12T18:44:00.006Z

There are people out there who can make our lives hell.
A narcissist is someone who thinks that the rest of the world is the same as he or she, that their world is the only one in existence, and hence assumes that everyone and everything will do their bidding. These people are characterised by a lack of empathy, wanting to be the centre of attention at all times, abusing and exploiting others, being manipulative and insisting on winning. They crave attention and admiration and often 'keep court'- but defectors from the circle of admirers get punished. Rules for normal people don't work on narcissists. It's a type of personality disorder that lawyer Markku Salo has come into contact with around 300 times under disquieting circumstances - in family law court hearings.
I just read Salo's book 'Varo Narsistia!' or 'Beware of the Narcissist!'. I thought I'll spread his main points about how to cope if you end up under the thumb of a narcissist, or an 'impossible person'.
The narcissists that lawyer Salo has been in contact with have mostly been husbands and fathers (of his clients). Some women narcissists and some work bullying cases involving narcissists have also landed on his desk, but the bulk of them were men who were abusing their families.
These men typically start off charming and seductive, the perfect man, and only become abusive once their partner is firmly bound to them - committed to a mortgage or married or pregnant. Then they start undermining their partner's confidence, bullying, demanding submission, creating rules that are absolute for everyone else but not for themselves, threatening violence or even murder. Some conduct mental torture like not letting the partner sleep. Sometimes they get physically or sexually violent, against the partner or the children. The partner and/or children have to escape. After that you have to turn to the legal system to get protection: divorce, child custody, restraining order etc.
So it's important to be prepared to fight a narcissist. Salo writes that narcissists easily involve the authorities (police, court, social services), because they assume that the authorities will see the world from their own perspective. According to Salo narcissists can be very charismatic, have no compunction about lying, and are good at bringing social workers round to their version of the story.
Hence:

Collect evidence. If you're getting hit, go to a doctor so there's a paper trail of the injuries. Try to get other people to witness the narcissist's behaviour. Otherwise it's one word against the other in court and the court can only make a judgement based on the evidence they are presented with. Narcissists, on the other hand, can be well prepared, with documents, video, research, lies.

The narcissist might demand visiting rights or custody of the children in court only in order to torture their ex. If they see the custody hearing as a personal battle, they will do everything to prolong and win it, regardless of whether or not they actually want to spend more time with their children. They can also be willing to lose, materially, if it means depriving their opponent of something (e.g. dividing the property after divorce).

If you leave a narcissist when pregnant, do what you can so that he doesn't end up being the official father of the child. If the narcissist wants to, he may set in motion an enormous court battle about the child just to spite you. The only way to avoid this is to be married to some other man while your child is born. In that way the new husband becomes the 'technical father'. It doesn't have to be a long or serious marriage and the technical father doesn't have to take on full parenting responsibilities if you agree on such an arrangement.

If your narcissist ex kidnaps your child within Finland and makes a formal address change for the child, there's not much you can do to get the child back (unless the child itself decides to move out). Social services can't act if the child is residing at its registered address.

Social services are likely to be too overstretched to conduct a thorough enough background check to notice a narcissist in the home. Don't trust them to notice that your partner is a psycho. If they do notice, they are likely to formulate their report in a polite and vague manner so they don't offend anyone (and so the narcissist doesn't charge them with libel) - which isn't of much use as evidence in court.

If you're getting divorced from a narcissist, start the process of naming a liquidator at the outset of the proceedings. You'll need an impartial person to assess and divide your property, because the narcissist is likely to try to give you a raw deal (less than 50%), hide property and lie about what he owns.

- This is terrible stuff. The main point Salo is making is that the law is written for reasonable, responsible citizens, and it doesn't have the tools to deal with people whose emotional development got stuck at the early infant stage. The system doesn't necessarily help the victim because it relies on a volatile mix of factual evidence and the impressions the judge gets of people.
Women, keep your job. We need an independent source of income.
People who've had the misfortune to get a narcissist in their life can have their self-confidence completely crushed. The same goes for sense of proportion, clear thinking, initiative - undermined gradually over a period of time. Imagine trying to fight a custody battle with a manipulative, ruthless and determined psycho under those circumstances.
Narcissists are capable of driving people to suicide, even killing them. Threats are not empty. Salo has seen two murders, two suicides and one escape abroad among his clients. Others just have to cope with lifelong harrassment.
The female narcissists weren't butch enough to beat up their men, but they tended to nag and complain a lot, 'difficult women'. They often had affairs and one left her husband for another man and left him to look after the eight children.
- As a reader who's not worried about narcisssts at the moment, this was still a good, informative read. In a way it's unsatisfying: it doesn't tell us how to avoid narcissists - who tend to prey on nice, helpful people, especially women worried about the biological clock, and on religious people who are less likely to question authority. The point is that you don't necessarily notice before it's too late. Or you notice, but your wish to have a normal life with a good job, husband and kids makes your conscious mind sidestep the warning signs.
I think it's good to realise that there's this category of people who just don't function according to our social rules, and who can't be expected to do so either. They can try to kill you or drive you insane. You can't change them, so it's best to walk away.
While reading I started to wonder. Have I had to deal with narcissists? Maybe one or two. Is my partner a potential narcissist? Am I a narcissist??? You wouldn't know if you were one, since the narcissist's basic assumption is that everything in the world is as they see it.
- Salo's book is well-written, spare, informative. It's not chatty: no paragraph is wasted. He resists the temptation to go sensationalist and describe the various abuses. Everything is clear but gives the minimum of detail. It also gives technical tips for victims. The tone is reflective and sometimes personal. He's happy to tell us what he thinks personally, where his observations differ from the literature, and when he thinks researchers and social workers and bachelor judges are idiots. Or, not idiots, he is very restrained, he would perhaps call them 'in an inappropriate position'. He's clearly very saddened that there's not enough investigation and clarification in difficult family law cases. His advice is to stay the hell away from courts if you can possibly avoid it, because there's no way to know what the verdict will be.
--
'Narcissist' in English is a considerably more ungainly word for an 'impossible person' than what Markku Salo uses in Finnish: 'narsisti'. 'Narcist' would sound a lot snappier. Why the extra syllables?

Samba stumbling

2010-08-04T06:31:00.004Z

Brazil: my holiday was a city-residential stay in Sao Salvador at first, house-sitting for a friend of Mateo's... a military police officer would you believe it (but employed in the military academy as school admin staff). Her house was built near the bottom of a narrow valley, by a steep set of stairs leading up to the other two homes on the slope. The houses across from hers in the valley looked home-made despite resting on tall stilts of reinforced concrete so I assume that was the look of her place too. We couldn't go outside and look since there were burglar bars, and you would've fallen through the courgette vines into the stream at the bottom.
There was capoeira angola, buses, drizzle, spaghetti junctions, interspersed with tourist stuff in the old town Pelourinho. It seemed like many of the stately buildings were public museums, but they looked so imposing - big hallway, reception desk, snoozing guard, big staircase, no sign of exhibits - that I didn't dare go in and experiment with asking about entrance fees in Portuguese. I did check the museum of popular music and marvelled at the horizontal double-vaqueta berimbau.
One of the highlights was stumbling into a samba club/party, just a big well-lit room with doors to the street with pastel-green walls, three musicians hidden in a corner, totally packed with people more or less dancing samba. The best dancers made a circle of their own, taking turns in the middle, cheering and whooping so we couldn't see anything of that. After a while of bobbing up and down we also started to move our feet around in a mockery of samba. Mateo went to get beers at one point and within ten seconds there were two guys wanting to learn more about my life and personality.
One couple by the wall was great: young good-looking people where the woman was quite tall and stout and stood in front of her shorter, skinny boyfriend so all you could see of him were his hands on her waist, some of his dreads sticking up, and a dreamy expression behind her shoulder.

Sartorial Salvador

2010-07-29T07:22:00.003Z

I expected the Brazilians to be friendly, multi-ethnic, good-looking,
fun-loving and not considering cold beer to really be an alcoholic
drink, but I wasn't expecting them to dress so badly. This was my third
trip to Brazil, the second to Salvador. I remember that the first time
I'd hoped to go shopping for some cool clothes by hip local designers,
imagining Palermo in Buenos Aires. Instead it turns out that Salvador is
a big target market for C&A.
Staying in a residential neighbourhood in Salvador, the other people on
the bus stop and on the city streets wore remarkably bad clothes:
basketball tops, Bermuda shorts and flipflops for men. Tight, cheap,
ill-fitting tops for the women, synthetic materials, loud prints, sloppy
finishing. Shorts. Wedgy sandals or mules - wedge platform sandals were
frequently worn on the cobblestones of old the town, Pelourinho. And
everything tight, regardless of body shape, which I guess is liberation
of a kind. Definitely no signs of Argentine-style anorexia and other
body neuroses. Among the teenage nymphs and voluptuous vixens were e.g.
a lady with fat thighs in yellow cycling shorts, topography of the lumps
all there for the public to contemplate. I was frequently the only woman
in sight wearing loose trousers or a cotton t-shirt with space between
the fabric and the skin. Positively Muslim.
Mateo mentioned the theory that since Brazilians are so diverse in terms
of body, they go for conformity in dress. Well, it wasn't so much
conformity as looking like everything was bought in the same
mass-produced price bracket. Or maybe it's just a casual attitude to
clothes: hey, I'm wearing earrings, doesn't matter if they are nice
earrings or not. Hey, I'm wearing trousers, what more do you want?

On Football 2: In Search of the Underdog

2010-07-07T11:50:00.005Z

Another football fact that makes it sit uneasily with my personality: you have to back the winner. We're at a stage where everyone who doesn't have the aspect of a tall, handsome, symmetrical, short-haired chunk of Teutonic perfection is out. We're left looking at guys who've eaten plenty of animal protein and potatoes every day of their childhoods, had their hair ruffled then combed by doting wholesome parents, went to high-quality government schools and who recycle their garbage out of reflex. Where's the fun in supporting sports if there's no room for the scraggy-but-cheeky 'played football after my shift as a cartoneiro'ex-urchins? Even the ugly, short or aged players are out. There's no story left in the semi-finals.

Some games I've watched (and How I Got There):

Mexico-South Africa 1-1.
At Hugo's Bar, with Zebs and Bruno. Didn't expect to enjoy it and indeed they dynamics were a bit like trying to saw through a length of hemp rope with no tools except your teeth and the edge of a table. I cheered for Mexico out of outlaw loyalty but felt warm and happy inside when Bafana Bafana scored the first goal of the tournament and did that victory dance.
England-Algeria. My first return to Q-bar since the year 2001, the atmosphere and nature of transactions hadn't changed. Impressed by Aila's vuvuzela skills.
Mexico-Uruguay. Came cycling from work at high speed trying to make it to J&J's house and TV in time for the 5 pm kickoff, panicking about the fact that I hadn't bought beers although I'd promised to, but not wanting to miss the teary-eyed patriotism at the start. Bike veering towards the shops, then back towards the destination. Decided to ditch good guest behaviour. Luckily J&J had made a little detour to the kiosk and bought some delightfully cold Kilimanjaros, making up in host conduct what I was lacking as guest. Female J was up and down off the sofa tidying and offering drinks and to be honest the France-South Africa game on the other channel was considerably more dynamic. Mexico got eliminated and the craggy face of Cuauhtemoc Blanco (although his name implies some of the exciting ambivalencies of contemporary Mexican ethnicity) didn't much endear them to me. Oscar Perez the goalie was cool though, plus bonus points for hailing from a Chiapas club.
USA-Ghana. Finally a nice anti-colonial story. However, I spent the bulk of the game fairly inebriated and wandering around the moonlit beach admiring the visuals, and only came to watch the game, surrounded by Americans, when the half hour of extra time started. At that point I kept nodding off every two minutes. When the game ended and the Ghanaians had won, we were three people who went 'Whoo!'. Everyone else appeared to be in a stupor of dejection and the host had fallen asleep in his chair.
Spain-Portugal. Although more inclined to support Spain, I watched this at the house of a Portuguee and didn't want to twist the knife for him.
Brazil-Holland. I didn't actually watch this one but was on Skype to my man in Mato Grosso, Brazil, while it was going on. He said they'd done a sweepstakes in his house and only the non-Brazilians had bet for Holland. You could win 30 reais. He'd bet Holland 2-1 and wasn't expecting to collect. After a while I heard screaming from the background in Brazil and thought maybe some traffic accident happened outside their house. He said, shaken, 'umm they just told me it's 2-1 to Holland and there's five minutes left...' 'You'd better go!!' I said.
Ghana-Uruguay. Now this was action, tension, drama, spectacle! Perhaps because of the combination of drinks and Italian espresso that we'd had before watching the fuzzy big screen at my outdoor local, Lukas Bar. Enough of a critical mass of spectators there to get some palpable joy when Ghana scored. Sad that it ended with such a let-down, Ghana (and by association, all Africa) only losing because of some Uruguay cheating and a penalty. Seeing the majestic Gyer cry at the end made me think this game isn't so great.
Argentina-Germany. Anu and I had decided to watch this one over some Indian food at the Badminton Club in town. It was a gorgeous golden day. I left late and heard about the first goal on the BBC Kiswahili service. We got there and saw that they were still sweeping the floor and nothing moved on the makeshift outdoor screen. Naturally: the courtyard was full of gorgeous golden afternoon light. We did some daredevil old town one-way system driving to Florida Bar, a sympathetic and dark little cave with a TV in the corner and five other ladies lounging about. We tried talking about life, love and tailoring while turning around to squint at the TV, then made a run for it at half time. Headed to posh cafe Epi d'Or and again heard about the second German goal on the BBC Kiswahili Service. I sent sympathetic thoughts to my Argentinian friends, one of whom has a little daughter who has lived less than a month and already experienced her country's failure to thrash the world in football.
Paraguay-Spain. Possibly the first time I've seen live Paraguayans since high school. Anu and I returned in style to our reserved front-row sofa at Epi d'Or and saw the whole lacklustre thing with crinks in our necks, sipping glasses of thick juice and Anu shouting 'Torpatkaa!!!' at the Paraguayans.
Uruguay-Germany. Suddenly we went from Southern Cone-saturation to Lutheran overdose. Who'd have thought I would end up spending so much time looking at these Uruguayans, mainly the homicidal glare of that Forlan (and hearing the Brit commentator mispronounce his name)? The dude looks like an illustration of the army psychologist in 'Alice's Restaurant': “I wanna kill.... Kill! Kill!” OK fine, sorry, a man can't help his face. Despite disliking Uruguay for fucking over Ghana, I found myself cheering for them at the Alliance Francaise yesterday and I had to conclude that it was basically because their players have longer hair than the Germans.

On Football 1

2010-07-07T11:35:00.002Z

Ah, this bloody zero-sum game. I don't like it. One side ecstatic, one side crying. How can you be happy for some when it means that the other are equally miserable? Especially when you don't have anything personally against the unhappy side, and even more when the outcome hinges on some minor turn of chance. I think football would be more enjoyable all around if you got appreciation for style and flair, like in capoeira. Nobody wins but you can pick your favourite. Eh?? Eh??

Criminals, run for your life (to the cops)

2010-07-05T08:46:00.000Z

Now then. The Citizen newspaper is worried about the lawlessness in Tanzania. Disregard for traffic rules, littering, smoking in public... and lynch mobs assaulting police stations in order to drag out suspects and administer quick justice.
Mobs (about 4 reported this year) are actually setting fire to police stations, beating up cops, and springing suspects from jails. Not to help the innocent to freedom but to kill them for supposed crimes. The example in Sunday's article is about people who were arrested for a suspected kidnapping of a schoolgirl. The mob thought that she had been abducted and used as a human sacrifice by miners making good luck spells. Outrage!!!! Except actually she was just AWOL on a jaunt in town.
This is so contrary to our Robin Hood narrative of the cheeky small person vs the evil cop machine that I'm having to do triple-takes. The citizens are rising up against authority... to assert their right to burn witches. The cops are having to protect the people they arrest against mobs who have presumably worked themselves into a righteous frenzy.
Don't you think Daily Mail readers and our other reactionary European brethren would secretly love to do that? Rush a copshop and torch a few pedofiles? Which do you want, an authoritarian state or vigilante justice? In Tanzania you can't have both. So far, the vigilantes have the upper hand. Immediate death by mob for theft or traffic accidents are commonly reported.
The Citizen uses the non-existent kidnapping story to promote good governance, end of bribes and rule of law that people can actually trust. But it seems that the road from present to proposal is loooong.

What to tell the traffic police

2010-06-23T09:37:00.002Z

Useful knowledge from yesterday's dinner conversation: what to say when
the traffic police try to get you to pay a 'fine, no receipt':
If stopped for legitimate reasons (e.g. driving while intensely
hungover, swigging a bottle of cider, wearing flipflops, without
carrying your license):
"Absolutely. Just send it to my office. I'll pay it on Monday."
Result: no fine.
If stopped for spurious reasons:
"I can't do that. God sees us."
Result: no fine.

I once got pulled over twice in the same day. The first time, to be
frank, it was me pulling over to let my friend out of the car, and I
happened to pull into the middle of a police razzia. One cop knocked on
my window and weakly pointed to the passenger saying 'no seatbelt', this
while said passenger was busy saying her goodbyes and climbing out the car.
Later that evening another traffic cop cadged a lift with me. I let him
in of course, and tried to be a good conscientious driver while driving
him the 750 m to Maktaba. However, he didn't put his seatbelt on. The
car is of a high-tech annoying version that has irritating beeps for
different minor events like opening a car door, but
the 'no seatbelt' beep is really more of a howl. I was trying to be
polite. 'Could you please put your seatbelt on?' The cop grunted vaguely
and continued staring in a straight line, making no gesture to the
seatbelt. 'The car really wants you to put the seatbelt on.' No
response. The car's little howl doubled in frequency and started
resembling something out of a 90s techno club. 'Bwana, this seatbelt is
a pretty important thing!' Finally Mr Cop started twisting his stoutness
in the seat and fumbling in the corner, and I realised that he probably
didn't know how the seatbelt worked.
I tried to indicate the buckle to click it into while maintaining a
smooth 'no problems here' commentary, while maintaining my non-fineable
driving standards, while fuming and trying to think up some punchline to
distill the absurdity of the situation.
Maybe I should have just asked him to fine himself.

Development agencies get cute with football

2010-06-11T10:26:00.003Z

Ouf, I recognise a good advocacy hook when I see one, but some of these are getting beyond far-fetched and reaching 'cute'. Here are my favourites:
INTRAC applies football management tips to organisational development.
World Development Movement lets you compare teams based on the ethical performance of their countries. Choose a clean team to support.
Finally, football combines with moral righteousness!

Sorry guys but TZ fucks up again on a national scale

2010-06-10T09:58:00.002Z

I am, like Paul Theroux in Singapore, trying not to carp. It's all too easy to write goat anecdotes, chicken anecdotes, bugs anecdotes from Africa in a spirit of cheap stereotype-reinforcing domestic sensationalism. But when Tanzania shoots itself and its reputation in the foot so spectacularly (see e.g. my border bridge with no customs posts blog entry)they only deserve to be exposed to the world.
Hence: the opening of the Brazil-Tanzania friendly game!
You know that uneasy scene at the start of meetings when the person at the laptop looks for their powerpoint presentation on their memory stick, the projector is on and nobody has pressed fn-F5, the mundane process is visible to all, and the entire room waits quietly and watches every twitch of the mouse on screen.
Yeah, that's embarrassing enough when you're only in front of colleagues, but they can deal with the minor show of unprofessionalism. Even invited guests can be expected to be a bit flexible. But to do that in front of a 60,000 spectator stadium two minutes before kick-off on the only Brazil-Tanzania football game in history?
Yes people: the digital stadium scoreboard became our office wall, when the exposed-although-hidden techie's desperate search up and down drop-down menus dominated the stadium landscape for about ten minutes.
Maybe the screen's operating system was set to Chinese. Whatever it was the screen-jockey was looking for, he didn't find it. Link to a camera? No. Score display? No. He did, however, locate a feisty advertising clip for the government's new policy sensation 'Kilimo Kwanza' (Agriculture First), featuring a gyrating woman in traditional dress (NB: not farming) and a booming drum track. Perhaps relieved, the techie victim ran it on loop, failing to notice that the teams had lined up and that they'd introduced the players and started playing the Brazilian national anthem.
The national anthem sound guy - clearly somewhere far away from the screen display guy - tried cranking up the Brazil anthem volume to compete with the Kilimo Kwanza thunder, but with little success. The video ran three times at full volume while the Brazilian national anthem was on. By that time someone must have sprinted to the screen bunker, overpowered the screen guy and ripped the computer cable from the wall, because the Tanzanian national anthem started off undisturbed.
However, it became evident that 'Mungu Ibariki Afrika' was played from a CD, since it started skipping after the first phrase and had to be re-started.
After the game began, we were treated to the sight of someone playing with Word Art to modify the text 'Tanzania's National Stadium' over a computer image of the stadium.
I'm not surprised that the headlines about this are along the lines of 'Shame at national stadium', but those stories mostly covered the skipping TZ anthem and the streaker who ran up and hugged Kaka (who hugged back). Someone has probably issued a stern precaution against linking Kilimo Kwanza to insulting the Brazilian guests.

Samba vs Taifa

2010-06-10T09:33:00.003Z

I went to watch live football for the first time in my life on Monday: the illustrious Brazilian national team vs Tanzania's Taifa Stars in a friendly pre-World Cup game here in Dar es Salaam. Yeah!
We all know by now that Brazil won 5-1.
The Brazilians were clearly in control of everything they did. Every time they touched the ball it was for a purpose, they passed precisely to each other. Their goals looked easy - in fact, the last goal looked like it slipped in almost by accident.
In contrast, the Tanzanians moved the ball well across the field but when they got into the vicinity of the goal, they seemed to panic. They repeatedly tried to score from way too far away, in hasty-looking long shots in the general direction of the goal. The Brazilian keeper could swoop down and catch each attempt with ease. They kept on doing this, as my Bangladeshi colleagues would say, 'again and again' - why!
Anyway, after the Brazilians' fourth goal, the mood in the stadium was gloomy and the grumbling started to sound seismic. My friend on the left said 'couldn't they just let the Tanzanians score once' - and then they did! Well, the Tanzanians scored a goal, but the euphoria had already waned.
Here's the analysis of Andrea, an Italian who seemed to know something about the sport: "If you look at the game itself and not the goals, it was not bad at all. Tanzania are playing a very old-school African style, very light, very quick. It worked well back then, but now the West Africans are moving away from it."
My more immediate experiences were of the fans. I don't think anybody expected Tanzania to win. But we started off cheerful and the Taifa Stars' every approach to the Brazil goal drew a roar of encouragement. When Brazil scored their first goal, the mood dampened a bit, as if we'd been given a sour reality check. The Tanzanians cheered their team even in a 'good try!'-spirit, nearly going crazy with euphoria during the first few attempts to score.
They also applauded the Brazilians' goals, perhaps in recognition of greatness. But after half time some frustration began to show. Disappointment ruled in the end. I felt a bit bad. I think people felt 'well, we saw Brazil play, and our national team were not bad, but...'
Still, Tanzania has a great capacity to grin in adversity. The fans around me were getting more and more creative with their commentary and loud instructions to the players as the game wore on. If the Taifa Stars aren't doing it, better create your own entertainment.

If you seduce a mermaid

2010-06-07T19:01:00.004Z

what then? What the hell would you do with her? You like her, she likes you, but there's a very definite limit to how far that romance can go.
That's the dilemma of Rosanna Arquette's ditzy character in Le Grand Bleu, which I recently had the pleasure to re-watch after a gap of something like fifteen years. That movie made a deep and lasting impression on teenage me, and watching it again was intense: all the aching feelings of being 14 and an abstract yearning for love and beauty. In the movie the girl is saying good night to her crush outside her hotel, and wants to invite him up, but can't work out how: the recurring dilemma of 14-year-old Linda. Although 31-year-old Linda could give Rosanna Arquette a good few tactical tips for getting him in there before her plane ticket expires, it was unexpected and bitter-sweet to revisit that particular pain. Sarah was watching as well (in fact, we persuaded our host to change his edifying movie night selection to The Big Blue), and I'm sure she had a very similar relation to the film.
The second- and third-best things about the film are the visuals and the music. If you only focus on those you can have a clean high-class movie experience. Jean-Michel Jarre's machine music is good: multi-layered, intricate, well-wrought. And watery, as befits the theme. Plus since the movie is from the 80s he probably built it all himself on some arcane piece of home-made equipment. And the cinematography is proud to be following beautiful things and gives the Mediterranean, the sunlight, the actors some deeply respectful treatment. It looks sublime.
Do I have to mention the dolphins... yes, I probably do. The problem with watching this as a culturally conscious grownup is the gratuitous use of dolphin shots. Far too often it looks like Sea World Florida. I hung my head, I was embarrassed on Luc Besson's behalf. Ugh, the dolphins. And the other catastrophe was Rosanna Arquette, especially at the beginning with the 'hilarious camp tourist on Peruvian train'. I can totally see why her name comes up in the '14 worst casting choices' discussion on Amazon.
And the 'humour'. Our host had been remarkably gracious after we turned his movie evening into a wallow in teenage girl romance, but he couldn't resist commenting on the "my mamma will kill me if she catches me eating spaghetti in a restaurant" sequence: 'Ah, the world-famous French humour, ha ha.'
Now that I've pointed out the brutal downsides of the film, please let me get back to the pleasant ache of it, OK?

Nothing in the film looks as exquisite as Jean-Marc Barr playing Jacques. I had entirely forgotten how hot that man is. If you would've asked me to recall things from the film a week ago I would have said that Italian diver, the Mediterranean, that Rosanna Arquette being told 'no more ouzo', dolphins, that guy with the short hair, Greek village. I would not have remembered how beautiful he was.

OK, now for the actual discussion.

I think Jean-Marc was probably cast mainly for his looks - here's a man able to look sexy even when wearing arctic-grade diving goggles. But the casting team struck gold because of his ability to look vulnerable and impish, and then the trump: looking both triumphant and worried at the same time.
That look comes after the sequence where he breaks everybody's record and free-dives to 115 meters. He comes up grinning, but from the middle of the crowd of well-wishers he looks only towards his old bully, rival and friend Enzo at the porthole, and looks worried: he knows that Enzo will have to try to re-take the record and that it will probably kill him. We get this love-hate relationship, two friends competing, recognising the other as the only worthy opponent. (but it is a competition to the DEATH!) Note what a coup it is for Jean Reno to be able to pull that character Enzo off with dignity. It would have been a fine film about the two men torn between ambition in the depths and friendship in the sun.

So why did Luc Besson try to insert Rosanna Arquette and the comedy elements into this film, which would have been so much more elegant without them? He made it look a bit like romantic comedy. Oh, Joanna tricks her boss into sending her to Siciliy to investigate an insurance scam. Oh, Joanna's roommate is unbearable and doesn't appreciate Joanna pining. Haha.
Regardless of the temporary insanity behind casting Rosanna Arquette, the romcom element works: I think it serves a good purpose. Luc, intentionally or not, is teaching the watching girl-children a valuable lesson: romantic comedy isn't how life goes.
Rosanna, or her character, Joanna, has a crush on Jacques. Jacques sort of likes Joanna. But they live in different movies. Joanna is from a Hollywood romantic comedy where all you need for lasting love is a few hilarious disasters, a few kisses, a sex scene and saying 'I love you!'. However, really, Jacques is a merman. He's a changeling who's literally in the wrong element. It's never quite clear why he's even vaguely interested in Joanna. Probably he's male enough to think some sex is fun. But where Joanna sees true love because he kisses her in the elevator (a bit reluctantly, may I add), Jacques looks at her after the shag as if he's not sure who the hell she is and what she's doing in his bed. He has other priorities: getting back into the sea. He frolics with dolphins (yes, those unfortunate dolpins), which I understand is like being close to 300 kilos of pure power and grace. Joanna with her frizzy hair and inert luggage isn't anywhere near the ballpark, let alone the same ballgame. She jumps in the sea and tells Jacques that she wants his babies and a car and a dog, but Jacques gets distracted by swimming and diving and doesn't even pretend to listen. And he can hold his breath for five minutes. Joanna doesn't have a chance. Sorry sister.
- There are men like that in reality: guys who haven't been brainwashed by the romcom version of life and who don't really give a shit that a woman tells him she loves him. Men who are focused enough to make sex a minor part of life, subsumed under some greater purpose. It's important to have some sort of preparation to deal with them. Sometimes their greater purpose is something creative and positive, but it can also be something as dark as Jacques'100-m under the sea - drugs or other obsessions. What do you do? You tell them 'there's nothing there! It's cold, and dark, and there's nobody. But I'm here, I exist!' And they still don't give a shit. You say 'I love you!'. Not his priority. You start to cry and say 'I'm pregnant!' He looks back and hands you the rope to tug to release the rig.
Oh, it's shit. Oh, he doesn't give a fuck about you as a person. Oh, Disney misled us. Oh, woe is me!
But then you tug the rope, watch him rush into the deep, you walk off and maybe start a project of your own.

Quantity vs quality

2010-06-01T06:52:00.001Z

I was surprised to hear impassioned denunciations of family planning at an 'economic alternatives' forum here last month. The line was: 'the wazungus want to stop us having children!'
(Wazungus being white foreigners, although I'm interested in where the line is drawn for black Westerners.)
Sigh, another good idea thwarted.

TEDxDar on language racism

2010-05-22T09:31:00.005Z

The Dar event with the sleekest graphic design so far even prevailed against a temporary torrential downpour. For a minute it looked like the hi-tech American ideas hype, 8 months in the planning here in Dar, was going to be overcome by simple precipitation. But the waterproof canvas managed to keep the water off the soundystem and video streaming.
This is supposed to be 'ideas worth sharing'. So far we've had a mix. American Pete Mhunzi started talking about his love for the Kiswahili language, first awakened in 1970 when he started taking classes at his Californian university. But mzee Mhunzi was making a bit of a mixed-up argument about the unequal uses of Kiswahili and English. He seemed to assume that English is an unstoppable monolith that's going to take over Kiswahili if we don't watch out. I'm not at all so sure. Kiswahili is well protected by the state, has a vibrant use in 'high language' as well as street and rural use, has its poetry, that is epic ancient poetry as well as slam, and the language academy churns out phrases that are actually used. Yes 'marketing' (usoko) may be a new and alien phrase in Kiswahili culture but it was invented for an alien concept in 'English' culture too. We have a full development vocabulary in Kiswahili that's just as instrumentalist and abstract as development jargon in English.
And finally: Mzee Mhunzi complains about code mixing, English-Kiswahili. Code mixing is using different languages in the same statement, and he was saying that the 'higher' language prevails in terms for government, technology, culture and romance.
But Mzee Mhunzi seems to have overlooked the fact that most traditional terms for government, technology and culture have already come into the Kiswahili language as a result of code mixing - with Arabic. We have high-culture words like hakimu - judge, jamhuri - republic, sheria - law, hesabu - to count - all from Arabic. Even basic words like kalamu - pen, and the word for civilization itself - ustaarabu - are Arabic.
For Mzee Mhunzi, how long does it take before loan words become 'naturalised' and no longer alien?
And perhaps there is even romance vocabulary in Kiswahili with Arabic roots - although the only example I know is pretty bad, being talaka - divorce.

Postscript: i chatted to Mzee Mhunzi after the sessions and he recognised that he had intended to talk about the Arabic influence, but had missed it out because he memorised his entire talk and the mnemonics slipped.

Tanzania disqualifies as a nation

2010-05-17T11:47:00.003Z

Last week presidents Jakaya Kikwete and Armando Guebuza inaugurated the long-awaited Unity Bridge that spans 720 meters over the river Ruvuma between Tanzania and Mozambique. The two countries are finally connected!
Except they are not. During the project of spending 34 billion Tanzanian shillings ($24 million)nobody thought to build customs posts or roads to the bridge. It's 165 km from the bridge to the nearest paved road in Mozambique, and 56 km to the paved roads in Tanzania. The nearest towns are Mocimboa da Praia (275 km) and Lindi (240 km).
These people built a bridge linked to nothing. It can't have been built so suddenly that it took the Ministry of Planning by surprise. It can't have been so low-profile that nobody noticed that it was happening. According to the Controller and Auditor General (report on financial year 2008/2009) the bridge it "useless".
Finance minister Mustafa Mkulo says "It was unfortunate that there wasn't adequate coordination when the project was being implemented".
I'm laughing because there's no redeeming reaction to this - this deserves no pity, no excuses, no explanations, and after this, no respect. It's a fuckup of the absolutely highest level, and it deserves my hoarse hearty ridicule.

Batspotting

2010-05-13T08:22:00.003Z

Turns out that the nocturnal chirping, squealing and murmuring in the trees near our gate is bats. What? i thought they'd be too busy airborne, swerving and ducking and echo-locating for bugs - how do they find the leisure to give up on military-efficiency clicking for food to frolic here in a tree, chattering like a coffee party? They are loud and consistent; they can be heard at any time of the night.
Our night-guard Barnabas has an explanation: 'This is their season. They are in the tree, eating leaves.' Leaves? Season? Mating season? Fruit bats? I haven't seen much fruit on that particular tree. Leaf-eating bats? An arboreal bat social, like shaved be-winged koalas on caffeine and e? A bat coming-out ball, bat manhood initiation? Are they like some of those species that get so overwhelmed by mating season that they neglect to eat?
The other day I met some more determined bats: a whole river of them, swooping across somebody's back yard, across the street where I stood, past the tall building site and off to the south. I stood there for a minute or so and they just kept coming, dense as a throng of primary school kids in a corridor. An air bridge of bats. I felt a bit like I was in a horror movie.
That brings to mind the Bangladeshi bats, big as seagulls, solitary and dignified, flapping way above the high-rises of Dhaka at early dusk to destinations unknown. They looked like they didn't need any support from another bat, thanks, butch enough. They travelled while it was still pretty light and they could be seen clearly, clearly by any passing hawk or kite, but this didn't seem to be enough evolutionary pressure to change their timing. They are the polar bears of bathood, big and singular.
Maybe I can become a bat-watcher instead of a birdwatcher. Would be nice to know what I'm looking at. Plus I wouldn't have to hang around for hours with binoculars, just look around at dusk and then go 'naah, too dark' and have a beer.

Yasmin vs Nigel

2010-05-09T18:07:00.003Z

I love the fact that Frank and Sheila's twins in 'Shameless' are named Nigel and Delia. In the next season Frank refers to them as 'poor little Gordon and Delia' and has to be corrected about the names of his children. Hahahaa
Anyway, I'm having a slight cookbook debacle myself. Soon after arriving here and floundering around the imported bookshop, I picked up- just touched!- a heavy, matte, bright-coloured hardcover book called 'The Settler's Cookbook' and ended up buying it even though it was expensive and was the autobiography of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in whom I had no prior interest. I reasoned: 'this is an autobiography of an East African Ishmaili, with recipes, so I can cook these straight away'. It was true: all the ingredients for e.g. Yasmin's mum's coconut dal were easy to obtain and the curry is delicious. It even has a recipe for millet flatbread, so gave me something other than porridge and debasing scones to do with my bag of millet. Yasmin's life was also fairly interesting - she starts with a girlhood in Kampala surrounded by hawk-eyed 'community' neighbours, where all the Black Ugandans mentioned are servants until she starts university, and where she gets practically excommunicated for kissing a black boy on stage in a controversial performance of 'Romeo and Juliet'. Then she moves to the UK to study, and gets 1970s white racism straight in the neck. Yasmin's recipes are good, though, and I can always get the stuff that she refers to as 'you can get this in specialist Indian shops'. It goes well with my 'eat Tanzanian' policy. In between the syrupy sweets and mutton recipes is enough interesting vegetarian stuff to stop my lentils going off.
Last week I was, again, reeling around the same bookshop in a slightly fuddled post-work upset-stomach frame of mind. After selecting a few good crisp masculine novels to balance out previous reads 'The joys and sorrows of work' and 'The Little Stranger', I made the same mistake again and touched the hefty 'The Kitchen Diaries' by Nigel Slater. I recalled weighing the same volume in my hands in the UK years ago - that time I reasoned that it was unconscionably expensive, and bought his nifty and economical paperback 'Good fast food' instead. This time I didn't even dare make an objective assessment of how many Kitchen Diary recipes I'd be able to cook here, I just hauled it to the counter and paid the hard currency equivalent.
Tonight I'm a powercut refugee in a cafe. My idea was to entertain myself with Nigel and a coffee until the electricity returned. I'd check if Nigel had any good recipes for what I have in the fridge, and then go home and cook the butternut squash.
Turns out that Nigel does have many mouth-watering and useful recipes that I can make here, if I get into cooking with chicken, stock, meat, Parmesan and fried potato. He seems to follow the simple cooking principle 'throw butter at the problem'. I wonder how fat Nigel's wife is after eating all this goat's cheese and porcini for a year.
Yep; but I can become a Nigel cook with a bit of effort and by expanding the stock of basics in my kitchen. Most of it doesn't quite fit 'eat Tanzanian' but hell, with this range of ingredients something would have to be imported in any country in the world. But even the pumpkin soup and tomato curry need thick yogurt and home-made vegetable stock. What the hell. At the moment I'm substituting chocolate for sex, so thick hearty recipes feel absolutely right.
Seeing more darkness outside the window, I decided to skip the whole cookbook malarkey and order a wrap at this cafe instead of going home to an uncertain future: cooking in the dark and the heat, surrounded by mosquitoes that may have survived the chemical warfare I laid down on them before leaving?
I bet Nigel Slater never had a desperately wriggling millipede in his kitchen sink either. But Yasmin Alibhai-Brown probably did.

Book review: indulgence and soap opera by A.S. Byatt

2010-04-24T13:25:00.005Z

When I started reading 'The Children's Book' by A.S. Byatt I almost lost patience with it in the first 50 pages. It seemed whimsical and indulgent, like A.S just wanted to gambol with her exciting happy artsy characters for a while.

A.S. is an author who expends a lot of effort on describing the visual. In this case she set the story at the V&A in the 1860s and at the homes of rich but philanthropic Fabians with lots of adorable children, creative acquaintances and radical ideas. This gives her generous occasion to describe objects - exhibits at the V&A, ceramics, tailoring, meals. Where was the narrative tension? Plot? Structure? It all seemed to be about hats, champagne, and pots with turquoise glaze shot with indigo, supported by coiled ceramic lizards.
Well, the narrative picks up soon enough and leads the reader along to dead siblings, torturous secrets, homosexuality, anarchism, coal mining, teenage crushes, nudism and plenty of extramarital sex. By setting up a character gallery where the central family has seven children and where about five auxiliary families are drawn in, there's a whole soap opera's worth of people to write about. Most of them have improbable and recherché-sounding names like Prosper Cain, Violet Wellwood, Seraphita Fludd, and these names keep being repeated in full throughout the 500 pages. Not only are there about 35 main characters but the action stretches over 30 years, so we end up with a lavish tangle of narrative. It's pretty delicious.
So, there's an overwhelming amount of character and plot, but what about structure? Weak! In the acknowledgments A.S. thanks her typist, which makes sense: the novel reads as if A.S. has written it in longhand (possibly with a feather quill), one scene at a time, as the fancy takes her. Once the ink dries and the pages pile up, they stay there and don't get restructured as the book develops. OK, that's probably not quite true. But the shape of the novel is all over the place. I got the feeling that the author had gotten interested in, for example, the development of European porcelain, and so she sends a bunch of characters to the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Here they look at an overwhelming amount of ceramics, lovingly described. Off we go on a massive field trip. We get these literary excursions mid-story both for art and for politics. Some characters get involved with German anarchists and Suffragettes, a classic device for charting social change ("this character, whom you are attached to, becomes part of a movement that you now learn about"). But we also get interruptions in the soap opera while A.S. gives us brief, de-personalised vignettes of contemporary political events. These irritated me for being too obscure and name-dropping for the lay-woman (i.e. myself with zero prior knowledge about late-Victorian British political thought) but not analytical enough to state what was going on, in reaction to what, and with what consequences. I thought it was interesting to read about early work on ideas that we are still grappling with: income distribution, women as earners, class relationships. But A.S. accomplishes this through her characters who give a vivid picture of the preoccupations of left-leaning idealists of the time, and I don't think it needed excerpts from the prime minister's wife's correspondence.
So in this way the structure of the novel bulges where A.S. has found something fun to describe, and traipses along with characters on their more or less coherent narratives.

I think she wastes a lot of material. Any handful of 'The Children's Book' characters and events would have been enough for a rich and nuanced novel in itself.

I think she wastes a lot of material. Any handful of 'The Children's Book' characters and events would have been enough for a rich and nuanced novel in itself. Indeed, A.S. Byatt herself has written a 'trilogy in four parts' about a literary prodigy turned single mother. Here, much more imagination, research and character development gets crammed into one book. Most notably, she wastes the First World War, which takes up about the same amount of narrative as Florence and Griselda's coming-out ball or the progressive arts summer camp.
I think a novel is a piece of art and includes, by necessity, artifice and artificial constructs: themes, moral, structure, pattern. This novel is more along the lines of 'let's introduce these fun characters and see what they do for 30 years'. The only structure is the timeline of real events, but it's not really a commentary on those events, more a description of them. Even the dark ending with WW1 doesn't seem deliberate - it's just what happened at the time. The back cover cobbles together something about "in the darkness ahead, [the children] will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them". I think that's inventing a theme- parents nurturing then destroying children- that isn't actually there in the text. At least it's not a strong theme, but because half the relationships in the book are between children and parents, we get some destructive relationships along with the constructive.
Well, aside from the unsatisfying lack of structure, this was absorbing, interesting and enjoyable to read. It's as absorbing and sensationalist as a soap opera, and you might want to read it twice to catch more of that exhausting detail that you probably missed the first time around.

Book review: trying to be a good man in an evil game

2010-03-27T10:06:00.006Z

I just finished 'Livläkarens Besök' (The Visit of the Royal Physician) by Per Olov Enquist. This was strong stuff, and intricate, working on many levels. Per Olov Enquist writes exploratory books that start off with real historical events, letters, documents, interviews and then gradually weave in fiction to fill the documentary gaps in the story.
'The Visit of the Royal Physician' is about the court of the Danish King Christian VII in about 1770 onwards, and the various people who try to use his weakness to further their own agenda. The young prince Christian is beaten and his personality brutalised from childhood so that he'll make an easily manipulated ruler. He grows up unstable, confused, weak, twitching. A few compassionate tutors try to protect the prince against the 'wolves' at the court.
The novel is about power, both political power and power between individuals at the personal level. The Royal Physician of the title, Johann Struensee, is a modest man of principles, commitment to improving life, and Enlightenment ideas. He finds himself in a position to seize power - the notional but absolute power of the feeble-minded King Christian. He has a chance to abolish the serfdom of the Danish peasants, rein in the excessive spending on aristocrats' perks, the overinflated army, the folly of a naval engagement with Algeria; to abolish hypocritical and prurient Purist laws that punish women, children, poor people and other sinners; and to institute some redistribution mechanisms. In the story Struensee tries to do good for society through politics, while keeping himself clean and moral. There are many stories about how such an undertaking is impossible, about statecraft being such an evil business that it can't be conducted without becoming one with the filth. But this story doesn't take that route - it's not another 'he tried but he had to play the game and the game took him, oh dear' story. What is it instead, hm, maybe it's close enough to its historiographical origins that its story and conclusions are more like real life - unsatisfying and messy.
Let me stress, it's a compelling, beautifully executed novel both in terms of structure and language and you should read it. Cheap on Amazon. I bought it because I felt like reading a costume drama, sorry historical novel. But I was also fed up with seeing these whimsical ethno-comedies (that seem to be the new chick lit) all over the three Dar bookshops, and I wanted to read something crisp, tight and serious. Luckily the guy with a bookshelf in Stone Town had this Per Olov Enquist. It's not 'fun' to read but it is gripping and engaging and emotional, there are many interesting characters (including the little Queen who is presumably supposed to be the naked babe on the cover of the English version) (yes there is sex) and there are enough unexpected plot ups and downs to keep you interested, in my case, almost despite myself. There's such a strong charge of pathos to the state of the lost King that it's almost car-crash literature, it almost feels obscene to be finding out about this suffering and exploitation, but there you go. It works.

I still find myself thinking 'for fuck's sake, I thought we got rid of that with the Enlightenment'.

Incidentally, getting into politics, this book makes frustrating reading for those among you who hold Enlightenment ideals. I realised many years back that I kept making the comment, 'for fuck's sake, I thought we got rid of that with the Enlightenment'. And I was thinking late 1700s enlightenment. It's one of the most bitter tragedies of contemporary life that we've still got stoning to death for rape victims, 'intelligent design' enthusiasts, and this latest farce with the Americans disagreeing over who has the responsibility to keep a country's population fit enough to work, or whether the poor should just be left to die. How long can it take to get common good and common sense to take the upper hand, if it's been going for 300 years already? Must it really be this kind of never-ending struggle?

Back to literature talk. I have to thank IB World Literature for introducing me to Mr. Enquist - we read 'Musikanternas Uttåg' (The March of the Musicians, 1978) in that Swedish class and it's left a strong imprint in me, a physical memory of the vertiginous experience of reading it.
Since then I've tried to read other books by him. 'Lewis Resa' seemed to be about religion - the early days of this very purist Protestantism that's still practiced by pockets (of misguided fools, krhm) in Scandinavia. I didn't get far with that. 'Boken om Blanche och Marie' was about Marie Curie and her lab - and her assistant Blanche, whose four limbs had to be amputated because of radiation poisoning - that just got too sickening and macabre. 'Kapten Nemos Bibliotek' is still in my bookshelf. Luckily Mr Enquist is a prolific writer and if there's more like The March of the Musicians and The Visit of the Royal Physician, it's worth me testing more of them.

good quotes

2010-03-22T19:36:00.002Z

Jess Cartner-Morley: 'Now that we sleep in boxer shorts and slogan t-shirts, the pyjamas in the thinking woman's evening wear of choice'.
Tori Amos: 'So you can make me come, it doesn't make you Jesus'.
And here, a Hispanic's fantastic double-entendre about tall shoes: 'I do find women with high hills some how erotic (sometimes), however when the hill are out of a context I find them completely absurd and makes me think that the woman’s intelligence correlates negatively with the size of the hills.' This last one made me laugh and I hope I can be forgiven for publishing it.

I touch your feet, old one!

2010-03-19T07:57:00.004Z

I'm trying to find out more about Tanzania at the mo, so went to the CIA for some basic info.
Turns out that there are only about 1.1 million old Tanzanians in existence - 'old' meaning aged over 65 years. Out of a population of 41 million! That's 2.9%.
Of course it's possible that they just haven't mentioned old people in the census. But I'm not so sure. Being old here commands lots of respect. You probably wouldn't just ignore granny. The rarity of old people explains why having 'mvi' (grey hair) and being called Mzee (old man) is a big deal here. The greeting for someone in the next age bracket up is Shikamoo ('I touch your feet')and in return they give their blessing, 'Marahaba'.
So there are not many people around to tell you how they used to do it before all this newfangled nonsense... and a lot of the newfangled stuff like government accountability, mechanised agriculture, and bleaching cream is really nonsense, so those 1.1 million people might have something useful to say.
OK, I generally don't enjoy 'all better before' rants because it's bullshit - one word: antibiotics! - so I won't go down that route. We could also go into some thinking here about the quick erosion of intergenerational knowledge and about how it affects your lifestyle if you don't expect to live beyond 50. Another time.
I did a quick reality check with my colleague BKB.
Me: "Do you think the numbers can be correct?"
BKB: "Yes... yes, it could be right."
Me: "And when you lived in Birmingham, did it look to you like there were lots of old people around?"
BKB: "Yes! Yes, it did! And lots of old ladies walking on the streets who didn't want you to help. And in the charity shops: lots of old women, selling."
- In contrast, there are at least 2.5 million HIV-positive people in Tanzania. 6.2% prevalence rate. (Or '1.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS', not sure how to interpret those two different numbers).

Feminine frippery

2010-03-14T10:48:00.005Z

-Whoah, a rook just flew off with my discarded ice cream cup. Now it's perched on the back of a chair and sipping melted chocolate ice cream remains. Smart birds!
Anyway, I was going to rant about neo-feminine blogs. What's going on?? I refer to the phenomenon whereby every time I click 'next blog' here on Blogger, I get some American housewife blogging about her adorable 'crafts' projects. These blogs seem to have a few things in common:

about the creation of non-essential objects
usually something that needs expensive inputs - coloured felt, beads, Alice n Wonderland figurines
often put together with appalling lack of craftmanship (glue guns!)
not to mention lack of taste
pastels.

Is there a disproportionate proliferation of blogging hobbyists on this site or has Google picked up on the fact that I once voluntarily clicked on the 'make these adorable felt dolls' blog recommended by V, and is feeding me more of the same?
Has anyone else had to suffer like this?
Today, it was 'Blue Barn Bulletin' and 'oohing and aahing' over a 'darling pincushion'. Aha?? Lower down the author tells us that her team won third place in the Bible quiz. OH MY GOD SHE HOME-SCHOOLS HER CHILDREN. That ought to be illegal. It's the sign of a person whose belief in her own world is so fragile that she'll take extreme measures to stop it being challenged by official knowledge.
Before that, Google offered me 'Etiquette with Miss Jeanie' where Miss Jeanie had celebrated the release of Tim Burton's 'Aliss in Wonderland' by setting the table for 'tea for two' with an Alice theme. She posted pictures of all the delightful details such as the 'Alice' teacups with the 'O Mouse' quote written around the rim, the table decorated with Alice in W-land porcelain figurines, a cake stand, blue gingham napkins, lime-green fluff under the plates for some reason, and place cards for Alice and her husband, who would get the place of the Mad Hatter. Did she have all this stuff at home or did she go to the mall to buy it, specifically, for one teatime? Her scones looked a bit wonky and burnt and she had egg mayonnaise sandwiches on the top tier of the cake stand; I'm not sure if English posh folks would quite find it pukka. And will she greet her husband wearing a blue gingham Alice band plus dress? Will she have a top hat ready for him when he gets in the door? How much patience does he have with the games?
The Alice blog came soon after another one where the author posted pictures of various superfluous objects acquired for the house, such as 'cup cake stands'. My mind boggles. And my erstwhile Dhaka blogger contact who showed how she's decorated the bathroom with blue tiles, fish motifs and shells.
I shudder, but I don't really want to take the piss out of these bloggers. There's something touching and scary about them. Obviously, it's people who have creative energy to spare and who are doing something about it: making something with their hands, making their space prettier. What's my problem with this? I approve highly of handicrafts... I admire my mother and grandma for weaving and knitting and crocheting and embroidering and my dad for woodwork... I think it would be pretty groovy to make things myself. Maybe because these bloggers aren't making things to be used, just to be looked at. Because they are buying half-ready stuff from shops and adding the finishing touches, not...buying yarn and weaving it into wall hangings like mum... or, more honourably, cutting up clothes and other fabrics that are past their useful life and weaving colourful, sturdy rag rugs like Mummu. It shows skill, imagination, taste, initative, control over the materials.
My other problem is the assumption I'm making that these American bloggers are stay-at-home 'homemakers' and hence I'm assuming also that they rely on their husbands for spending money, have no ambitions beyond matching the table cloth to the serviettes and make butter icing for cupcakes. Consumers, not producers?
Assumptions assumptions. I have enormous respect for growing your own vegetables, cooking delicious food from basic ingredients, sewing and weaving for the home, raising good citizens, repairing your own house - useful stuff, home stuff, traditional gender roles stuff. But when you talk about these 'home' jobs you can easily slide over into housewife thinking... assuming that home work is all about renouncing ambitions to have an influence outside the home, and that it's somehow better suited to homely females.
It comes uncomfortably close to the revival of tulle underskirts, beehive hairdos, red lipstick and cupcakes, and their current-day practitioners' assertion that this helps them affirm their femininity in a liberating way. 1950s revival: the clothes look amazing on women with full figures. For me all of the above symbolise the big American housewifery experiment of the 1950s, whose main function was to keep women away from competing with men for jobs and to create demand for electronic consumer goods. Can you wear a hat and corset and still keep your noughties' killer instinct alive?
The snub-nosed high heels and powder line is a real backlash against 1970s-style feminism; which in turn rejected all the stuff that was previously classified as 'feminine' - no to marriage and housework and child-bearing. Now marriage, housework and childbearing are in vogue again (at least among my friends, which is of course the gold standard for good living). But I think we're starting to find a better balance, where people value cooking well, and some people go for growing their own food, making their own stuff. Most importantly, we are sharing the housework and earning between the men and women. This is not to be taken for granted. But let's keep it at this useful compromise and not start going over board. I don't long to see men stencilling seashell motives on the wallpaper.

PS There's some sort of function here on Blogger that makes a link to the DVD on Ebay wherever I've mentioned the full title of Charles Dodgson's early psychedelic work featuring the little aristo-English moppet and the rabbit hole. Hrrrgh. I'm not prepared to start wrestling the collaboration between two of the net's biggest machines, so I'm circumventing it a little instead by not writing that full title.

A woman's friend is a woman!

2010-03-08T13:27:00.004Z

Happy International Women's Day!
I attended the launch of the Tanzania Women's Cross-Party Platform on Saturday - what colour! I arrived expecting dry speeches and wearing pearls but this was sartorially off-message. The dress of the day was the 2010 Women's Day kitenge. I bought one in haste and wrapped it on sari-style.
My dry speech expectation was equally wrong. The 500 participants arrived in a procession led by a military brass band in full uniformed oompah glory, singing women's solidarity songs and cheering and ululating. All this because they'd set up a group to link the women's wings of the various political parties? Whoo! Imagine if Tanzania ever won the world cup. We'd be bulldozed with party.

The speeches from the TWCP were also humorous and rousing with call-response slogans such as 'Rafiki wa mwanamke ni mwanamke!' i.e. the friend of a woman is [another] woman. The First Lady, mama Salma Kikwete, spoke. The Finnish contingent from cross-party development organisation DEMO wore tailored mini-dresses in orange Women's Day kitenge. There was a dance troupe and rapping community theatre on women's rights! I was having a whale of a time! The Tanzania Women's Cross-Party Platform was launched by Mrs Kikwete to double oompah glory! OH YEAH!
Tonight I'm heading to the Finnish women's International Women's Day dinner... promising to be a lot less exuberant... so WHAT AM I GOING TO WEAR?

(Now it's a year since I left the UK and moved to Bangladesh. A more private anniversary!)

I-like-big-BUTTS...

2010-03-07T13:48:00.004Z

"Words of advice for young people" is the psychedelic track
where William S. Burroughs has been recorded giving words of advice for
young people, and someone has mixed it into a delightful and hypnotic
chant. My favourite bit, and the only part I can remember properly,
is "if you ever do business with a religious sonofabitch, make sure to
get it in writing".
I've also been given good advice in person. The most memorable pieces
are: Have as much sex as you can; If you're scared do it anyway; and
Don't be afraid to spend money to be happy.
The first two were from someone barely 6-7 years older than me - at the
time she was about my age now I think - but divorced and struggling to
get laid, and the last was from Professor Geof Wood at Bath University.
I'm certainly spending money to be happy now - mainly on
plane tickets to and from Brazil. But the cost is small in comparison
to the happiness that results from spending it, and the nadir of misery
that would result from not spending it. Thanks Geof for pre-empting any pointless overconsumption-guilt.
Near my office here in Dar, on United Nations Road, there's a wall
outside a school that's decorated with murals depicting words of advice
for young people. I was delighted to see them and took photos of the
most telling ones. A lot seem to focus on the message 'Don't fuck
schoolgirls'.
Another bunch of them have the messages 'Stay with your partner'
and 'Focus on your studies instead of daydreaming' but they are telling
of a much more interesting phenomenon: the fetishisation of the big
ass. The thing that distracts the guys in the pictures from their
partner and their schoolbooks is the thought of a butt the size of two
pigs in a sack. I've also seen that image adorn a sign for a beauty
salon. To paraphrase Hugh, fuck you in the ear, Western anorexia
culture!

The paintings are not wrong. There are some amazingly callipygian
figures here, on women who have the good fortune of subcutaneous fat
stacking up on the top of the buttocks, rather than flopping outwards
on the hips and towards the thighs as tends to happen on us pitiful
caucasians. So you get astonishingly sexy women in all sizes. No
difficult choices to make between eating chips and compromising your
sexual market value! Looks like here the big ass is the semiotic
equivalent of the 'hello boys' bra posters.

Anecdote of the day: St Ives

2010-03-06T13:19:00.002Z

My colleague BKB on the phone: "Ok...Ok... but the bathroom will be
ready?...Ok...Tomorrow? We have to clean it during the
day...Ok...Right".
Me: "You're moving in tomorrow right?"
BKB: "Yes. But they still have to tile the bathroom.My old contract
expired a week ago but the landlady has let us stay an extra week."
Me: "Listen, if you get a real crisis you can stay at mine. I have a
spare room. We can probably fit the children, there's some space in
the living room."
BKB: "Hah, you know my family...."
Beardy Colleague: "Seven people right? You, your wife, five children."
BKB: "My wife, me, five children, my wife's sister, the housegirl, and
my wife's younger sister - she helps us look after the twins."
One salary for ten people in his case - one salary, spouse allowance
(insh'allah) and subsidised housing for two persons in my case.

More armadillo than insect

2010-02-17T20:25:00.003Z

I bought a jar of Nutella earlier today. I was thinking, 'over at the Lebanese cafe they charge 5500 shillings for one Nutella pancake; I can buy the whole jar for the same price and eat several'. In the event the sickly sweet stuff clogged up my mouth and throat and the nut flavour was a bit too much and I enjoyed the tart plum compote filling more.
My life these past weeks has been very staid, very boring, mainly me and books and the laptop and home, home, home. First it was because of the 39 degree fever and frankly I couldn't leave the house, I couldn't even walk up stairs, I couldn't make myself food and when I managed, i couldn't get myself to eat, that got a bit problematic. But now I'm better and just 'taking it easy' it's getting boring.
So here I was, thinking life is pretty fucking bourgeois when an iron-plated cockroach daddy fell from the lamp fixture onto the dining table, thankfully to the other side from the pancakes but I still put the lid on the Nutella double-quick. It seemed to have jumped from the hole in the ceiling where the lamp wire comes through. It was big, fat and somehow spiky, more armadillo than insect... I had been thinking it was probably rats making that noise on the ceiling, scuttling about. But now I think it must be teeming with these roach/tanks up there. Ah, Tanzania, I knew there had to be downsides.

Book review: Life on the Golden Horn: Mary Wortley Montague

2010-02-12T14:45:00.004Z

I picked up this Penguin 'Great Journeys' edition out of solidarity with the female traveller, expecting limp Victorian-era cliches about Turkey. Not so! Mary was pretty gung-ho: a British aristocrat in the early 1700s, married to Mr Wortley who was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. They travelled overland during the high drama Baroque era, just after the Turks and Austrians had concluded a titanic war. Powdered wigs, smallpox, Janissaries, no certainty whatsoever of getting back home alive. I've enjoyed reading about this period in Neal Stevenson's Baroque Cycle and Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
And I enjoyed it again here! Mary is no high-camp swooner of a lady. She goes out there and observes and makes (very rich and well-connected)friends and sends back sharp, amusing and astonishing letters to her friends (including Samuel Pepys) in London. She is positive and admires the cleanliness of Holland and the figures of the ladies of Vienna. She describes a women's pistol-shooting competition in Austria and their physics-defying clothes.
But the best stuff is when they arrive in Constantinople (six months after leaving). Mary shakes off her five carriages of women and starts to enjoy the freedom of the Turkish women: walking in effect incognito in a veil, some Muslim three-piece fabric system that hides the face.
Mary's assertion that the burqa makes it easy for women to have affairs has been discussed in he last blog entry, but is worth repeating. She says that women can go anywhere, including to see her lover. And the lover may not know anything about who she is, because there's no way for him to see her outside of the rendez-vous - so he can't gossip. Mary concludes that the Turkish ladies are the freest in the world.
She also describes inoculation against smallpox. Ha! And I'm pretty damn sure that my biology textbooks, and probably medical textbooks too, talk about milkmaids in Germany in 1810 when they get into smallpox inoculation. Here Mary W describes the process in Turkey in 1718. A group of people will decide to take some time off to have the smallpox, and get some of 'the best kind of smallpox' stabbed into them by old ladies who specialise in the operation. You can choose which arms and legs she'll make the small cut in. Then they fall ill with a mild version of the disease, don't get many scars, and get well with immunity. We should write to The Lancet!
Mrs Wortley Montague is clear-sighted and a fair observer, and makes many very contemporary statements like, on slavery:"But you'll object men buy women with an eye to evil. In my opinion they are bought and sold as publicly and more infamously in all our Christian great cities." She compares Turkey to England and seems to conclude that Turkey is better.
Read it and enjoy it... and if you're feeling generous, buy another one from the Penguin Great Journeys series and send it to me. Now I want to read them all.

Sexual freedom in a burqa

2010-01-29T08:03:00.001Z

The BBC World Service tells me that the French government has banned face-covering veils for Muslim women in public places. Freedom through coercion? What's going on here? I have pretty ambivalent feelings about the whole thing.

I can totally relate to wanting to see the face of the person you're conducting official business with. I think the whole-face walking tents are dehumanising and best got rid of. Burqas seem to me to be an attempt to make women invisible, the reasoning being that women should stay in the house and if they for some pressing reason have to leave the house, the house (well - tent) comes with them. The background assumption is that nothing important ever happens in the house. If the president started making defence strategy over coffee in the kitchen with the (other) ladies, I'm sure hardcore Muslim men could quickly be persuaded that the segregation of the sexes is outmoded and counter-productive.

Another thing that's going on here is the 'my property in my house' attitude of men to women that's also embroiled in the whole burqa business. A woman has no other function than cooking, sex, children, cleaning (also known as reproductive work)... all the functions of a washing machine...she will do this for ME and nobody else, in MY house. Regarding the sexual dimension of keeping women covered, it implies an fundamental mistrust (extrapolating from one's own thinking?) of all other men who will obviously rape any visible female bla bla bla, been here before, see previous blogs.

I have fewer problems with other headscarves/ sacks as long as they leave the face free. Clothing is a sign of identity and if your Muslim identity is so strong that you don't want to show your hair, then I have no problem with that. Provided that's what you want. Fundamental point.

But grh, with this French legislation there's the thorny fact that they're trying to force women to accept freedom. Plus there may be all sorts of other more or less twisted cultural reasons behind it.

But surely the real underlying reason why burqas are regressive is that they've a sign of exclusion, dehumanisation, marginalisation, oppression and – fundamentally - lack of choice. We Yurpeans assume that the woman wants to participate in society as a full individual with choice and agency, and that if she hides in a black tent she is also giving away our obligation to take her seriously. We deal with individuals who need to have a face to talk to. For a covered woman, either her patriarchy doesn't want her to be taken seriously. Or maybe these women get learned helplessness, give up on trying to interact or affect anything. Or maybe this is just my stereotype and women from ultra-conservative Muslim cultures are out there all the time in their burqas, attending demonstrations, arguing with government officials, speaking in Parliament, negotiating disarmament treaties. Yes? No?

Hm, moot point for the argument at hand but please disabuse me if you have better information than I do.

People want to choose their clothes (among other things) and white women choose all sorts of other counter-feminist sartorial signals: let's say high heels, saying 'you can fuck me and you'll like it', perhaps implying that fuckability is the best thing that this woman has to offer life. Plus so bad for the back! You can't run for the bus! Your feet freeze in winter! Ban them! It's for your own good. Anyway.

So: presumably enlightened societies that are based on liberty, brotherhood and equality want to give also conservative Muslim women the right and opportunity to participate as full citizens in public life. Should they so choose. If they don't want to exercise those rights – well, voter apathy is at pretty impressive levels so they'd not be alone. But forcing women to change their clothes seems a bit beside the point if the reason the clothing is considered offensive is because it is a sign of suppressed agency.

Where is the legislation to force conservative Muslim men to give conservative Muslim women liberties and influence?

Deal with that exclusion, marginalisation and oppression, good people. (Obviously I don't know how but there are books full of tried and tested tricks from the empowerment literature.) Deal with the cause not the symptom.

Maybe the French can use this argument: the burqa makes it very easy and risk-free for women to have affairs. Hahaaa!! I just read this in a travelogue from 1719 by Mary Worteley Montague, who travelled to Constantinople to accompany her ambassador husband. (it's an awesome book as well.) Lady Mary observes that women go everywhere in their black shrouds, so it's impossible to tell who's a lady, who's a servant, in fact who is who. The women take lovers who never know their lady friends' names or identities because they have never seen them outside of the sessions of lurve. Love it!

Still happens in Saudi Arabia, I have it on insider's information.

chocolate nostalgia

2010-01-08T19:11:00.005Z

Never mind the urinating positions, never mind the scale of the city, never mind the ortography: when it comes to feeling foreign, there's nothing like nostalgia to disorient you in a strange country. Each country has its own extremely specific nostalgia (with sub-group sub-nostalgias too, by all means) and this is something that a foreigner can never be part of. You'd have to be very deliberately fake, and not mind being aware of how fake you are, before you can start partaking in nostalgia for something like (to use an English example) French fancies, Cadbury's Dairy Milk or horse brasses. Sub-optimal (not to mention sickening, sugar-laden or ugly) things are cherished by millions simply because of nostalgia. If you don't share the nostalgia you end up doing as I did, and arousing the outrage of my British fellow-bloggers by pointing out that they have bad cake. Folks: crumbly dry sponge is not good cake. But never mind. My former housemate Sahara had enough self-irony to introduce me to French Fancies in the spirit of kitsch: hideous little cubes of dry, crumbly sponge covered in a shell of pastel-coloured sugar icing. Teeth break through the casing of sugar; sugar taste fills the mouth, then the icing sticks to your tongue and gets covered in cake with the texture of an ancient disintegrating foam mattress. Two problematic substances that you then have to pry off your tongue with minimal contact with the rest of the mouth, and swallow as quickly as possible before any more of it violates your senses. This explains Christmas. Why else would anyone voluntarily eat things like turkey breast, Brussels sprouts (anglosaxon), rehydrated cod (Scandi)and turnip bake (Finnish)? Who ever craves Christmas food in summer, for example? We don't want it for taste. Purely for nostalgia.
Outside the world of feasting and confectionery the same goes for TV. The programmes we watch as kids are inevitably etched in our nostalgia nodes, with zero quality control. When people who share a nationality start talking about programmes they watched as kids - that's when you really feel foreign. There's no entry to that world for you. A xenophobic government whose strategic aims are taken from Orwell's 1984 could do well to isolate the people culturally by not importing or exporting any children's media. It would seem innocuous. But when you'd be ready to mobilise the citizenry against the X Menace fifteen years later, you could so easily convince your good burghers that the rest are not One Of Us and hence, Against Us. "They know nothing about Blue Peter!" GASP!!
The transnational approach to blanket-bombing chocolate - Mars, Twix etc- have got this entirely wrong. Their brands are bland enough, but not embedded or specific enough, to be used as a weapon of nostalgic mass mobilisation. Twix unites the peoples of the world (albeit in a lukewarm, ambivalent embrace) but not enough to power anybody's passions. Its highest value would be in crowd control.
I could list my own nostalgia triggers here but I'm afraid they'd be used for military purposes. Suffice to say that Finland seems to have imported quite a lot of East Block felt animation into Pikku Kakkonen and so I suspect we'd find strange resonances with Hungarian and East German comrades of our generation. Did the 80s Finns sense the hollowness of neo-liberal capital as a long-term force?
There are, of course, good points to being outside national nostalgia. Dodging the draft is one. Leeway to rant is another. I had ten good years of toothsome foreigner's ranting against Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Such an easy target: the nation's favourite soap, sorry chocolate, bar, popularity powered purely by nostalgia. Then Mateo pointed out that our Finnish equivalent, Fazerin Sininen, is also not all that shit hot from an objective chocolate perspective.
I was forced to concede that he's right.Fazer Bleu is by all means better than Dairy Milk (but so are Dove bars) but it's not the cat's satin pyjamas. Maybe the cat's favourite boxer shorts and slogan t-shirt.
So now I've made a few taste-tests for nostalgia, using Finnish chocolate. I've tried to separate actual confectionery quality from nostalgia. What are the results so far?
- Kismet: Not as good as nostalgia.
- Suffeli: not as good as nostalgia. But this works in reverse. When you eat one on a river cruise in Bangladesh, you get both chocolate novelty, gift excitement, AND patriotic nostalgia. Even when the chocolate coating melts off the wafer it tastes good.
- Fazer's Red: not as good as nostalgia. But at least Fazer is a multinational that... is based in Finland, as opposed to having been being bought in a hostile takeover...
- Fazerina: as good as nostalgia. The orange-oil truffle is a recipe that has since become trendy and been replicated by hundreds of other chocolate makers.
- Geisha: almost as good as nostalgia. The little sharp flakes still work.
- Patkis: better than nostalgia. A perfect two-bite-size bar with a perky mint tint.
- Chewits: not as good as nostalgia, i can just imagine the corrosive lingering aftertaste.
- Panda's Christmas box of chocolates: as bad as nostalgia, this one was always the cheap shit box to receive from people who don't really like you. Or from Mummu.
- Aladdin Christmas box: I wish I could find one of these to test. (By Swedish confectioners Marabou, now owned by Kraft Foods - who are trying to buy Cadbury's as I type.)
- Dubbelnougat: as good as nostalgia, or even better as a grown woman because of the frisson of guilt that comes with eating something so similar to two layers of butter.
- Royal (with nuts): strongly associated with Famo, this one is very confusing. Wrapper, smell and shape positively flood me with nostalgia. Taste: not as good.

-But maybe this is an entirely pointless exercise since chocolate nostalgia quite obviously has nothing to do with taste or quality. And since chocolate as a product has much more to do with corporate takeovers and industry consolidation.
Nonetheless, aside from nostalgia Green & Black's milk chocolate with whole almonds still sweeps the floor with all these Finnish brands I mention above. Considering the fact that Green & Black's was bought by Cadbury's in 2005, I seem to have scored a spectacular chocolate-ranting own goal.

Give and take

2009-12-16T19:38:00.003Z

I have given:
- Most of the useful but not strictly necessary stuff in my Dhaka flat... from tahini (mum was happy) to capoeira trainers (they fitted Jess perfectly) to shalvar kamis (some to Christina who's doing research in Gaibandha; some to a lady who lives next to the railway tracks).
I have received:
- Housing, a wide bed with fluffy pillows, calm, dinner and packing resources - from Cat and Chris in their admirably kitted out new house. Space and warmth from Ida, peace of mind from work, love from Mateo.
My stuff is in flux and I'm in flux myself but if it continues in a positive way like this, I'm liking it.

Rage against the dogs

2009-11-20T18:29:00.002Z

As for the scarf (called ulna) I have very strong opinions about it. It's a totally pointless cumbersome garment and I'm convinced that it's a conspiracy of the patriarchy. You (woman) are supposed to drape it over your bosom and over both shoulders, to cover the chest area and deflect the destructive attentions of men. (The chest is already covered by clothes but never mind that. Evidently the lecherous mind of men isn't foiled by anything as simple as a shirt). This is 'for modesty' and the entire responsibility of doing it rests on the woman. That is, the responsibility to avoid giving men anything to look at in terms of breasts... because if there is anything to see they will invariably look?... and if they look, they will invariably have impure thoughts and, moved by this superhuman force of their impure thought, will be inevitably moved to rape? The poor boys, helpless puppets of their animal lusts. Wrap up, ladies, it's a jungle out there and nobody's going to defend you.
What is all this saying about the personality, morality and, most of all, self-control of Muslim men? If a man is so weak that he can't even stop himself ogling and violating women if they aren't draping a scarf across their boobs, then we have to conclude that these men are not in control of their actions. Others who are not in control of themselves tend to get sequestered in asylums or jails. Self-control sets us aside from the animals. So why the hell would we let these men, who can't even control their own eyeballs let alone hands, control things like moving vehicles, heavy machinery, the accounts, or the economy?
Seriously.
The argument 'it's not me but all the OTHER men who want to ogle and rape my woman' argument doesn't wash. It's the argument of someone who thinks he sees his own evils in everyone else.
Similarly the argument 'If my woman gets attention from other men she will feel flattered and leave me' is also hollow. Are you such a bad man that your lady will dump you for the first lout who gives her a sonorous wolf-whistle?
Assholes.
Personally I detest the pressure to wear an ulna, not because it falls off when I bend down to pick things up or because I have to faff with it when I go to the toilet, but because I have to even think about it. I have to check that it's in place, adjust it if it goes too high or too low (showing the area of my shirt under which there are gasp breasts!) and hence, I'm worrying about whether I'm exposing anything 'immodestly' to the hundreds of guys on the street who have nothing better to look at. I've become a victim of somebody else's lack of self-control and normal adult behaviour and even if ulna worrying only takes me ten seconds then that's ten seconds that are really somebody else's responsibility.
It's true that if you get raped here, there's nearly zero recourse to justice. Plus your social standing is shot to hell, all the more so if you're unmarried and hence lose your value added, namely the guarantee that your husband will feed only his own DNA. So it makes sense to avoid all rape risks.
But hell, Western rape justice is also in the pits. Our judicial system may work on a different plane of efficiency than the Bangladeshi one, but rape convictions are still despicably low and your life is also shot to hell if this happens to you. Here, I have to say that our men are better brought-up than the Bangladeshi ones. Even if some get mad jealous if their lady wears provocative things, and even though comments and groping occur, generally men can deal with a bit of attractiveness and still relate to the woman as a fellow human being. (another interesting discussion is whether social pressure to cover up is more or less aggravating than social pressure to look sexy.)
And the 'run and hide' victim mentality of Bangladeshi women won't do anything to tame the dogs. Sorry guys, here poverty is no excuse.

I may be smiling but it's not because of the clothes.

Weird shit story no. 3: soap and the hereditary unclean

2009-11-20T17:25:00.006Z

We came to visit a Dalit (Hindu casteless people) NGO, Parittran, outside Khulna (in fact, right next to that stretch of bad road I wrote about). These guys were the only angry ones I met during the visits. They had a burn in their eyes, a grudge, a seething knowledge of all the injustice they suffer. Dalit traditionally do all the dirty jobs, like tanning leather, sewage diving, garbage disposal, and less nasty things like being barbers and cobblers and weaving gorgeous baskets.
I can see how this is an ancient (Hindu religious) way to make sure that someone gets the disgusting jobs done: make it the hereditary trudge of a specific class of people, and make sure that the rest of society has good reason to keep it that way. Casteless people's contact can 'spiritually pollute' higher-caste people by getting in physical contact with them. Your toilet cleaning is solved for 500 years ahead and you never have to squabble about whose turn it is. Spiritual pollution, baby! tough luck.
But here's the weird shit - in Bangladesh even the Muslims ostracise the Dalit. Dalit aren't allowed to drink tea from the same cups as others, hence not allowed in the tea stalls or restaurants... not allowed to sit in the same schoolrooms, and here's the really bad part, not allowed in the cyclone shelters. With the rest of the Bangladeshi citizens, while there's a cyclone out of hell raging outside, drowning cattle and disabled family members, unleashing storm tidal surges, ripping roofs off etc. These NGOs guys' eyes were burning.
The Muslims don't give a shit about having their caste purity compromised - caste being a Hindu idea. But they do want someone to clean their toilets without saying 'hey, why the hell am I cleaning this toilet and not the person who shits in it?' So this class of outcasts continues to serve its purpose, i.e. doing the dirty jobs, stripped of the Hindu mumbo jumbo excuses. You'd think that you can still respect someone who works with the hides of dead animals and drink tea with them, after they've showered. But maybe part of the machine is to demoralise this class of people so they don't even think of moving to more agreeable professions. Because it would cost too much to compel someone to do this with wages rather than with psychological bullying?
My theory.
Parittran, the Dalit NGO is next door to the Union Parishad headquarters, or local administration. The front court and roof of the building were covered with dinnertable-sized platforms with makeshift rooves - shaped like those American pioneer ox wagons, made from plastic sheeting and reed mats. This was a shack city for 400 families whose farmland and houses are under water. The river breached the embankments 6 months ago - not even a dramatic media event or a special disaster, it just overflowed and drenched the land, and the water isn't draining out because the riverbed is silted up to a level that's higher than the farmland. So. About half the displaced people are Muslims, the other half Dalit/Hindu. The Union Parishad let them set up camp in its grounds and only kept two offices open for themselves. The muslims moved in to the other office rooms; the Dalit weren't allowed to share and now live in an area the size of a small town square, between the main road, the rice field, and the UP building. One dinner table per family, waiting for the government to dredge the river channel.

So, thinking about this... in pre-antibiotics, pre-soap times it makes perfect sense to avoid someone who has spent the day elbow-deep in typhoid sludge 'like the plague', literally. And I guess the continued exclusion of dalit shows that Bangladesh is still in practical term pre-antibiotics and pre-soap for the majority of the population (I think the stats are something like 80% living on less than $2/day). (Interestingly, some ethnic minorities are also considered dalit not because of their spiritual Hindu position but because they eat unusual/unclean things like foxes, rats and cockroaches.) But why be so nasty about it?
How do we enlightened bla bla bla white people deal with our toxic sludge? How do we get pest-controllers and slaughtermen and nuclear power plant operatives and cleaners and binmen... partly by paying them well. And partly by setting up changing rooms and hot showers in the workplace. I used to have a boyfriend who came home from his job as a vet at the slaughterhouse and still smell of pigs. His many excellent qualities made that a minor detail. These jobs still contaminate you to some extent but if you met a guy in the pub and found out that he works as a binman it wouldn't necessarily stop you buying the next round.
Ah, this is poverty: the stupid little indignities, the minor easily solved problems, wrecking your entire life. No soap.

Cuanto es cuento?

2009-11-20T16:23:00.005Z

It's been a peculiar ten days in Khulna (south-west Bangladesh) where I've been doing Field Research with a team of colleagues. The topic was 'what do these local NGOs think about/intend to do about climate change?' so you'd expect some pretty sober accounts. But while trying to work out what the hell was happening, a whole zoo of weird tales cropped up, psychedelic dream-snakes among the grey obvious elephants of standard NGO spiels. The experience was energising, exciting, fascinating, bewildering, and often the stories were so absurd that I had to laugh. But, to quote Mateo (who is doing his own fieldwork in Brazil) - cuanto es cuento? Cuanto realidad? that is, how much is story? How much is reality? The integrity of the report is on shaky shifting ground here. I'm starting to sympathise with the anthropologists.
And now, at home, I'm still wide staring awake with all this craziness like an overexcited child... no question of resting or putting my feet up. This might lead to a crash soon but for now I think I could make some sense by writing things for your titillation and amusement, and also because I like to throw unexpected leftfield missiles into the artificial order we create for our life narratives.
Another reason the stories make so little sense is that my Bangladeshi conversation partners know the background where I don't; and that they often mess up the distinctions in English between 'for', 'of', 'at' etc; and that they don't always start at point A and proceed from there. (more on that later).
So, weirdness!
1, the Bad Road:
Linda: Why is this stretch of road so badly maintained when the rest between Khulna and Satkhira is fine?
Answer: "A motorcycle can charge 4 taka a kilometer but a bus can only charge one taka. So the motorcycle people pay the Highways Authority not to repair it. [so that they can charge people for lifts across the bad stretch of road]. This was some time ago so now they are bribing less and the Highways Authority is slowly repairing it.
Linda: "So if you don't bribe the authorities, they will build you a road?"
Answer: "This is Bangladesh."

1, the Bad Road, version 2:
Khulna University professor: "When you travel from Khulna to Satkhira you will see that one part of the road is rotten, about 2-3 kilometers. The rest is a beautiful road. This is because the MPs on both sides of that road are fighting, so one has blocked the river to spite the other one. Now both sides of the road are water-logged and the people are suffering. So the NGOs will go there and say 'ooh! the poor people are suffering from water-logging! Let us show them how to grow fish in cages' and all this other absurdity, as if you only pick up one fish when you want dinner, all this floating gardens and other crazy things." [note that this didn't actually explain why the road is bad.]

2. Women and tabla:
Linda: "That little boy was excellent at tabla! He's so small, only eight years, and making all those amazing rhythms! But I've never seen a woman play tabla. Why is that?"
Female colleague: "I used to play tabla when I was small, but then my teacher told me I had to cut my nails to do it. So I cried and said no! and my little brother played instead. And also it's a problem for girls. You have to move your arm like this [a swing from the elbow]. And your scarf doesn't stay in place."
-Giving up an instrument because it's not ladylike?? The scarf moves? -My next blog is about the scarf, no fear... and the Dalits as well...OK, this is long enough, some of the weirdness should get their own blog entries.

These are my colleagues and a HUGE TREE

Chinese takeaway with extra helpings of eyeshadow

2009-11-03T10:36:00.001Z

Soooooo last night my two film-making Quebecois neighbours invited me over for Chinese takeout dinner and to meet the subjects of their documentary: the godmother of Dhaka's hijras and her favourite disciple. Hijras are transvestites who have a special place in South Asian society... as far as I've understood, they are some sort of beggars/witches/gypsies/fairy godmothers, as in Sleeping Beauty. They dance at weddings and to celebrate newborn babies and that's good luck. But if you don't give them baksheesh and they curse you (or flash you!) it's mega-bad luck. So they are a kind of walking talking mincing cackling emotional blackmail.
Imagine having such a specific cultural niche - in a repressed, surface-hetero, conservative Muslim culture you have this gap where men can dress as women, get covered in bling and lipstick, and harass people for money. Oh and they aren't always just transvestites; all sorts of people with transgender tendencies or ambiguous genitalia can end up as hijras.
So the Boss-mama of all hijras takes on young ones and takes care of them; in return they give her a share of what they earn dancing in the market. Protection racket? Madaming? The term is 'patron-client relationship'. Boss-mama is also a civil society activist: she started her own NGO for hijras and sex workers and goes to conferences and gets USAID funding.
I came in for dinner and instantly felt under-accessorised. Boss-mama is tall and wide - not really fat but solid, cylindrical, with stubby hands and a lovely refined face. Quite a smooth broad oval face with a sweep of eyebrows and a short leonine nose. She was wearing an understated dark blue sari and a gracious smile and kind eyes and many earrings. She smoked cigarettes: "I have had many lovers but this one is forever". Her young slip of a trophy husband was lounging next to her, pretty uninterested; apparently everybody knows that he's only in it for the money.
The young protegee is extraordinary. Short and solid and pretty. Frizzy hair tied in munches on the top of her head with flamboyant red ribbons - looks like the hair is at that pesky stage of growing where you can't do anything good with it, I can sympathise. But the main thing is that she hams it up constantly, with a kind of street-fighter daring. She looks like she's trying it on all the time, and knows it, and won't mind if it doesn't work, because at least she's given it a shot and hey it's entertainment. Head held high, back straight, belly out, feet deliberately planted, padding around looking like she's up to no good. Lipstick, three-tone eyeshadow, four plastic necklaces, short dress over trousers which is the standard clothing for women here.
But a Bangladeshi woman (unless she has <i>no breeding</i>) wouldn't ever loll around on cushions letting the dress hitch up above her (baggy trouser-clad) crotch... she wouldn't stroll around like she owns the place... wouldn't sit with her legs open... wouldn't suggest that you give her your scarf and threaten to take a brandy bottle with her. I LOVED seeing someone who looks like a Bangladeshi woman behave so subversively. It was happifying and refreshing and made me want to laugh. The Protegee would slouch and loll, but move her head and hands with a dancer's grace. She constantly get up and wander about like an American TV-era attention-deficit victim and pick things up and poke people and interrupt to make jokes or wide Hollywood smiles or to flirt with the Quebecois cameraman.
Our Quebecois hosts had found a transvestite movie at the mall and it was running on the TV: Princesa, Brazilian film from ca 2000. The dialogue was in Italian but every now and then the hijras would comment. 'Her breasts!!??' '-Hormones from Europe'. 'She is sexual girl, yes?' -'Yes... with those boots...' (thigh-high red latex boots were in evidence). They hooted when the tall blond-wigged trans used her big handbag to give a muscular beating to homophobic Italians who were shouting abuse. One Quebecoise commented, of the madam in the film, 'She is like their guru!' and Boss-mama had to say 'my girls are not sexual girls'. Maybe it was a bit much to show a transvestite movie to transvestites as if they have nothing else going on in life, but I must admit I was curious about their reactions. Well, Protegee was bored most of the time and looking around for mischief.
So there we go, exotic dinner parties in exotic places!

Modest Disney

2009-10-31T15:40:00.003Z

A rickshaw gives you a great vantage point to check out life around the streets: park, commuters in buses (scratched and dented to a degree where they look like they've been driven through a narrow tunnel and the chassis squeezed to fit), sidewalk-dwellers wrapping up against the glare of the streetlamps to sleep, looking disconcertingly like corpses, and the open shops. I was returning from the Bangladesh-Zimbabwe cricket match this evening and was feeling happy to have seen something new and strange with great people, relatively drunk. My rickshaw driver was clowning around a bit, leaning to the sides and talking to himself. I was checking out the shops. Corner shop, corner shop, bananas on strings, crisp packets, bottles of water, evening diners, snack shacks, crutches?
Crutches, toilet-chairs, pharmacy, the Orthopaedic Hospital aha!, stacks of crutches, neck braces, pharmacy, snacks, snacks, diner, pharmacy, the children's hospital, snacks, toy shop, pharmacy, five shops with men's shoes, the amusement park.
Ah, what a heartbreaking thought, to stop to buy a soft toy tiger and some bananas to visit a child in hospital.
And the amusement part right next door. So if your child is only a bit sick, you can take them 50 meters along the road for a few rides to cheer them up. But also - the kids who are too sick to go out, would they stand in the windows and look at the rides and want to be there and be sad that they can't?
You could drive yourself crazy with this kind of thinking.
At the time I was pretty happy about life and just happy that there is a children's hospital and that private, enterprising people set up the kinds of shops that you need, where you need them.
And I was pleased to see the paintings on the amusement park walls: Disney characters. Mickey Mouse with a Bangladeshi flag; Minnie in a sari, the dupatta pulled up between her ears.

Book review: A Case of Exploding Mangoes

2009-10-30T07:55:00.001Z

Aside from the fact that I think the plural of mango should be spelled mangos, this was an excellent and very enjoyable book. I bought the cheery yellow hardback with the vague educational motive of reading up on South Asia, and that wholesome thought put me off reading it for six months. Turns out that that was just delayed gratification.
A case of Exploding Mangoes is an exercise in the genre postcolonial neo-magic-realism. Come on, you know the stuff. Captain Corelli's Mandolin. The God of Small Things. The Book of Chameleons (review coming up next!) These things are typically pretty anglo-centric, but juicy and rich and refreshing.... um, perhaps like an iced mango-ginger smoothie with English mint. And these types of books deal with serious questions and real history/traumatic events. But packaged in whimsy, exotic settings and twisty language. My kind of education.
So, author Mohammed Hanif hasn't invented his own genre here but never mind. The novel is about the assassination/freak accident death of former military dictator of Pakistan, general Zia ul Haq. The narrator is airforce underofficer Ali Shigri, a sympathetic and feisty albeit army-brainwashed chap, but General Zia features as the central character about half the chapters. This is a pretty merciless caricature in the style of Il Duce in de Bernieres' "Captain Corelli" ("is that the cat that shat in my helmet!!! where is my pistol!!!") and very similar to Josef Stalin in Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle", constantly calling on their sypmasters to increase the alert level. You start to feel a vaguely nauseous pity for the character, partly because of the proximity to a real scumbag and party from his treatment from the author.
The General Zia episodes are layered with stories about CIA/Afghanistan/cold war, how to thrive in the army, appreciation of your friend's eyelashes, various psychoactive drugs, torture, communism, G-forces, and Arab princes. Did I mention that it's also funny? And political? And still really relevant, even though it's set in the late 1980s. For example it features the story of the Texan with a Wonderbra fundraising in Lufkin, Texas, to fund the jihad against communism in Afghanistan.
Yeah, this is a good one people. Buy it and read it and support Mr Hanif, former airforce pilot!

Three pieces of good news

2009-10-28T05:38:00.001Z

1. One feisty woman agreed to be in love (with a guy who was supposed to be 'just for Christmas')
2. Another force for creativity and beauty is pregnant (her funky husband is the dad)
3. The funding proposal I wrestled with for interminable months a year ago has been approved by the European Commission! (€200K plus!)
FOUR pieces of good news
4. Mateo's research is going strong and he's zooming around central Brazil talking soya
FIVE pieces
5. My own research project at work is gathering momentum
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!

Brasilia, city of insects: Familiar

2009-10-02T15:51:00.004Z

In contrast to the Grand (quality) ethos of the Brasilia city centre, the residential areas are more about Equal Opportunity (quantity). Housing is organised in 'Supercuadras', Super-blocks, with 3-floor blocks of flats organised around a short street with shops, and a school/church/park. You keep arriving on the same plan and feeling like someone is messing with your head in a not too subtle way: they changed all the kulisser (set) but not the layout. We are staying in a friend's flat in the South Wing (of the 'airplane' city layout) and going to visit a cine-cafe in the North wing yesterday was even worse - because we drove for half an hour and then - it was the same! Feels like being trapped in a cheap animation where they recycle the backdrop constantly.
There are plenty of trees where cicadas make noise. But not your soft reassuring pulsing that you hear in Africa. Some of these sound like a sawing inside your brain...like mike feedback... like psychosomatic tinnitus... like a dentist' drill form the ninth circle. If I was a lady cicada I would not find that sexy.
This place! Centrally planned meets American car culture. I've never been anywhere this weird.

Brasilia, city of insects: Grand

2009-10-02T15:16:00.005Z

Brasilia, UNESCO world heritage site, the ultimate manufactured capital, home of spectacular architecture by Oscar Niemeyer, makes a pedestrian feel like an ant. The city plan from 1960 is a bold statement of a clean, sleek future of citizen-centred centrally-planned governance and equality - where everyone drives cars. In the city centre you can see the monumental buildings of state from kilometers away, across expansive green spaces and sweeping minimalist plazas. Then you try to walk to look at them more closely and realise that this means trudging across those plazas and greens without shade or respite, and more importantly, you have to cross about 7 six-lane highways where cars sweep past non-stop, with not a single pedestrian crossing (never mind footbridge or underpass) in existence. The whole place is literally top-down: you can imagine the architect drawing the plans: "Green in the middle - here! Then the roads can go on the sides. Next, ministries flank the roads to the north and south. Everything leads to the Congress, a tower there, and the judiciary at the end! Clean!" They forgot about the micro/human scale. Maybe pedestrian crossings and bus stops seemed like old-fashioned, twee clutter.

So the city centre is a very confusing mix of buildings with beautiful lines that elevate the soul, a sense of pre-emptive exhaustion at the thought of walking anywhere, and people dashing desperately across the highways while a few lanes are free of immediate death-danger. The natives keep going on about the beauty of the famous 'plano piloto', the airplane-shaped city outline. But those guys all have cars. Brasilia is like Birmingham in that they've invited the ring road into the city centre.
So there I am, tourist, taking the bus to the end of the Esplanada (it would otherwise mean walking 2 km across dry lawns and climbing down into car underpasses to run across the north-south roads) to check out those beautiful airy state buildings. It's 30 degrees warm. The curves of the support of the Supreme Court roof are indeed both stroke-able and noble and the building appears to float a bit above the ground. Then it's a 400 m diagonal across the plaza to look at the Palacio do Planalto (under refurbishment for the 50th anniversary next year). More ant time. Then three of us line up to wait for a break in the traffic to cross to the Congress with its famous 'upside bowl-downside bowl' symbols of the upper and lower houses. (Giant contact lenses.) So it's me, a diminutive and grubby lady talking to invisible people, and a hale tall politics vixen all scurrying to safety in perfect egalitarian danger. By this time I'm feeling the sun and the pond surrounding the Congress towers looks indecorously tempting, but Brazil has enough diplomatic incidents on their hands at the moment so I desist from jumping in.
So, more of this trudging across inhumane scales follows... turns out that there is zero space for the civil servants to have a lunch sandwich or a beer - the ministries are surrounded by car parks. Gardeners look enviably cool wading in the pools around the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and tending the papyrus groves. Everywhere the formal/grand meets small incursions of informal/human. Scraggly paths run in convenient diagonals across the big squares of green. The neat corners of the Congress roof meet the road smoothly - but someone has blocked them with temporary-looking barriers. Photocopied notices on the mausoleum at the Praca dos Tres Poderes. Humans may fight back but in this case it's a losing battle. Even though we have common sense, business opportunity and networking theory on our side, there's no way to make a bar at the ministries because it's a UNESCO heritage site and nothing from the original plan can be modified.
I've heard rumours of cold beer caffs and coffee bars in the commercial sector (North) but that's another whole termite life away and by now even the thought of crossing the central green to the other side of the Esplanade feels overwhelming. So I take the bus back to the bus station where there's a mall next door, get indoors to the anodyne commercial no-view no-place, buy a small bottle of water and eat a McDonald's ice-cream sundae. Apparently shopping malls fit the 'grand' scale of Brasilia.

recycle? Just get someone to do it for you.

2009-09-16T17:00:00.000Z

I bought five bananas last week. I eat one or two each morning with muesli. By day 3 the bunch was starting to look manky and I knew that ugly things would happen if I left the remaining two bananas out on the shelf. But it would also be bad if I put them in the fridge. So I sliced them and put them in a neat little tupperware box in the freezer. Always slice your bananas before freezing, unless you have very specific plans for your fruit.
Then yesterday I went to the cash point after lunch when it stopped raining and stopped by the supermarket on the way back to the office to break a 500 note. I bought a container of Aarong (Brac trading arm) 'sour curd' ie natural yogurt, and when I got home I put my bag in a corner and forgot about it until the morning. By that point it was too late and the fresh tangy smell of yogurt had a fetid tone to it. I flushed the yogurt down the guest toilet and ate muesli with papaya and milk.
In this climate you really have to shop for food on a daily basis, but a fridge helps.
But it doesn't help forever. Shopkeepers don't like to sell less than 100 g of chili, for example. That's 2-3 handfuls and lasts me a good month. After a few weeks in the fridge, the seeds go black and the whole chili experience seems a bit debased. I bought a net bag of onions - one kilo. Even in the fridge they found the will to grow and are putting out shoots. Of course I could just chuck them and invest another 30 p on onions. Which I will. The house cleaning ladies already find all sorts of recyclable and reusable goodies in my bin, carefully separated into different clean bags: paper bags for compostables, plastic or cloth bags for paper, plastic and (rare) glass. The latter have a market value. The paper bags are so that the kitchen waste can go straight to the teams of garbage sifters with their pitchforks and children, stirring through the skips of rotting vegetable waste with crows for company (crows in the daytime; at night it must be like the Seventh Circle.). I try to make it easy for the plastic and paper merchants and their subcontractors, the small rag-picker children, although the kids seem to work the streets more and I think some more upscale outfit has the monopoly on us posh highrise buildings. The stair-sweeper ladies themselves pick out any edible things I leave (again, separate from the rest) if it looks useful to them. I wonder if they took my clapped-out bras too or if that's not something they'd use.
I leave the bin outside the door in the morning and when I come home it's waiting for me, clean and washed.
So really, I should know when I'm not going to eat more onions or if I'm going to leave the bread to go stale, so that I can pass it on while it's still reasonably nice to consume... When I gave myself shigella by not cooking the spinach properly after washing it in tap water, I worried that someone else would eat my pasta sauce leftovers and get the same strain of antibiotics-resistant bugs. I can afford the cephalosporine but to someone in a bad state already it could be really serious. Even if they drink tap water straight and already have a few other parasites, the shigella might have grown and multiplied joyously in the tupperware and caused extra mayhem.
Now I'm travelling tomorrow so the ladies will get onions, garlic, chili, newspapers, cardboard, shopping bags (card) and an elbow-height pile of those Aarong yogurt containers. I'd be interested to find out if Brac, the biggest NGO in the world, has organised some sort of informal marketing channels for reclaiming its yogurt pots. I wouldn't be surprised, they're pretty sturdy, not disposable, even though the lids never fit an alternative pot.
I managed to use the frozen bananas though. I zapped them with leftover ice cream from ages ago (since there was no yogurt), frozen cranberries (present from mum when SHE went on holiday and was clearing out HER freezer- I am her garbage lady), a bit of papaya and some milk to get the consistency blitz-able. It was a milkshake! I put the remainder in the freezer while I packed and it became ice cream! And i had just some good ingredients left for a light dinner.
Now my remaining challenge is to consume three eggs, three tomatoes, two carrots and a handful of chili for breakfast tomorrow.

Mukava kokemus

2009-09-14T04:05:00.004Z

Sukupuolten valisten suhteiden laatu on Bangladeshissa laajalti pohjalukemissa. Maa ei ole vanhoillis-islamilainen eika karsi vakivaltaisesta konflikteista, mutta suhteellisen vakaaseen tilanteeseen verrattuna naisten asema on selvasti alakynnessa. Naisten moraalista kayttaytymista seka haita ennen etta niiden jalkeen valvovat kymmenet naapurit, sukulaiset ja tuttavat laajan juoru-verkoston kautta. Naisia naitetaan nuorina avioliittoihin, vanhempien on maksettava kalliit myotajaiset, miniana muutetaan miehen vanhempien luokse ja vakivalta naisia kohtaan on yleista. Erityisen barbaarimaisia ovat happohyokkaykset - eivat hampaisiin, vaan naisten kasvoihin. Pienteollisuudessa kaytettya rikkihappoa voi ostaa kaupasta mustasukkainen tai torjutuksi tullut mies. Vammat ovat kammottavat eika hapolla poltettu nainen sen enempaa osallistu yhteiskuntaan. Taman kaytannon laaja levikki saa minut suoraan sanoen kyseenalaistamaan bangladeshilaisten inhimillisyytta.
No. Suurin osa heista ovat ihan tavallisia ihmisia jotka yrittavat vain edeta elemassa; kai tahan pitaa uskoa. Ja tapasin viime viikolla oikein piristavan esimerkin edistyksellisesta naiselamasta.
Vetamallamme SMILING-projektin kurssilla oli useita naispuolisia osallistujia, muun muassa hankevastaava Ratna. Nuorehko (no, suunnilleen 25-vuotias)nainen ymmarsi helposti loogisen viitekehyksen (!! Logframe-kasite taitaa olla joka kielella monimutkainen) eri osiot ja jututti teetauoilla muita. Lounaalla juttelimme sita ja tata miehistamme ja tyosta: "I like my husband very much. But he is very short and black!" Han kutsui minut ja Kamal-kollegani kotiinsa iltapalalle.
Virkea ja hymyileva "lyhyt ja musta" isanta, viiksekas (ja ihan ruskea!) mies, toivotti meidat tervetulleiksi vaaleanpunaisiin pukeutunut kolmevuotias sylissa Ratnan haaraavan viela kattamuksen ja pienemman tyttaren parissa. Keskustelimme englannin kielesta, Kushtiasta ja itsestamme. Hetekan ylapuolella tilaa oli luovutettu vanhemman tyttaren studioksi ja liitu-teosten annettu vallata turkoosi seina.
Ratna ja M--- ovat olleet seitseman vuotta naimisissa, jota ennen pari seurusteli myos pitkaan. Ratna on bengalin kielen maisteri, miehensa englannin kielen opettaja. Hindu-perheseen kuuluu Ratnan vanhemmat ja kaksi tytarta; kaikki asuvat Kushtian keskustassa. Aika kuluu toita tehdessa, perheen kesken seurustellen ja telkkarin ja netin parissa. Avioliiton alkuvuosina Ratnalla todettiin hyvalaatuisia kohtukasvaimia - onneksi han paasi Laosissa kansalaisjarjestossa tyoskentelevan veljen avulla Thaimaaseen leikkaukseen.
Oli hienoa tavata nuori pariskunta jotka elavat sopusuhtaista, onnellista elamaa ilman turhautumista, huonoa onnea tai pelkoa. Tuntui silta etta heilla vastonikaymiset oli voitettu, paamaarat saavutettu ja nyt pystyi rauhassa nauttimaan elamasta. Se jos jokin on 'kehitysta'!

Pearls before Finns

2009-09-01T03:01:00.005Z

My boss and I went to a meeting in Gulshan yesterday. The world-famous Dhaka traffic impeded progress somewhat, but at least we avoided the most common problem - momentum turning into running in place - because boss kept directing the driver up and down cunning alleyway shortcuts. So it took a long time as always but we were moving.
Still and all it was traumatic enough that my boss decided to go for retail therapy after the meeting: to buy some pearls as presents. She asked me: 'You don't like pearls?' I said 'They are pretty, but where I'm from they are associated with cultural conservatism.'
She could relate to that and no need to mention skirt suits, hairspray or Laura Bush.

Carbon Godzilla

2009-08-27T09:33:00.006Z

This year my lovelife will be trans-continental: Bangladesh to Britain, follwed shortly by Bangladesh to Brazil. I have 30 days of annual leave. My immediate family also lives on a different continent. Hence, my emotional and physical wellbeing rests heavily, heavily on the possibility of taking long-distance airplane journeys at regular intervals.
According to the carbon footprint calculator at Climate Care.org (now part of JP Morgan, with an 'offset!' button millimeters away from the 'calculate! button) a return flight from Dhaka to Sao Paulo, such as mine booked for 17.9-1.10, emits 5 tons of carbon.
That's probably,literally, a shedload of carbon...if compressed into diamond form, and a small slag heap of anthracite, and a few FSU-country dormitory town blocks' worth of smog. Five tons! Ten fat cows' weight in carbon. If I could suck it out of the air and compress it, I could carve it into sculptures of sleeping horses in reference to Dylan Thomas'Under Milk Wood.
And that's just one flight. Altogether my private trips for this financial year add up to 16.45 tonnes of carbon emissions. Average for persons in industrialised countries is 15 tons a year. And that includes all the bastards commuting to work by car and heating their houses in winter and drinking Slushies (not that slushies rlease greenhouse gases per se, but it seems like a linked observation. The refrigeration?). I haven't even calculated my energy consumption or land transport.
Living in Bangladesh this is especially embarassing, since I don't need to imagine what effect a sea level rise would have on the place- I'm already standing knee-deep in it. Some of my colleagues had to raise their beds onto stacks of bricks when it rained hard in late July because the water came rushing in through the door. And all of us are still in an income bracket where we can afford a change of shirts and a stove for making hot tea. Many others don't. People are still living on the dam embankments in southern Bangladesh after the storm Aila swept through in May and broke the polders that kept the sea water out - helpfully constructed with Dutch support in 1975, their upkeep neglected by all subsequent Bangladeshi governments. Those guys probably don't have kerosene stoves. So you'd think that this proximity to freak weather suffering would make me see sense in terms of commercial aviation.
Well, yes but - my alternatives are to risk irreparable loss of contact with the perfect man; or living as housewife/non-Portuguese speaking research assistant in rural Brazil on half a Mexican student grant. The effect might be the same.
Now, fortunately we have reinvented the pre-reformation Catholic practice of selling absolution. You can buy your conscience clean. I don't like it: I once felt cold shivers over a tip in Cosmopolitan: "Have a nice hot bath! And don't worry about the carbon emissions; you can offset it later". But I'm going to use it.
The Clean Develoment Mechanism still has some way to go in terms of demonstrating good effects in return for money thrown. Even my friend Johannes who works in the carbon markets couldn't recommend a good project I can support that would prevent forests being cut down (or prevent Finns flying to Brazil for sex). Even though Climate Care has its cosy HQ on my former street, Magdalen Road in Oxford, I thought the link between their fuel-efficient stoves in Africa and my Bangladeshi countrymen who have to swim back to their huts during low tide to try to find the cooking pots is a bit tenuous.
On the other hand, Practical Action - an organisation that has probably pioneered and disseminated the hand-worked brick crusher I wished for in a previous blog - are here in Bangladesh too. These guys are based on the idea of spreading technology so people don't have to hurt so much whle they work by hand, goddamit - but without the tendencies for gadget-glamour and heady tinkering that have made industrialised-country technology such a fetish. You know the lesson 'a tractor is no solution without spare parts'. Practical Action support easy mechanical solutions that don't need an online support network with updates from California installed daily to work. I really like this approach. More laziness! 'By God, woman, stop grinding the maize with that fucking rock, you'll wear your disks down'. But no hi-tech dazzle. These are the type of people who run workshops on building your own hand-pedalled wheelchair.
Anyway. Practical Action here have a project where they teach people how to build floating gardens. It's not only their idea, this is an old system, but it's neat. Pile compost on top of a raft made from water hyacinth; grow onions. This is especially delightful because water hyacinth is an alien invasion of a plant. It has spread joyfully over waterways everywhere, but it only has natural eaters at home in South America. It eats up nutrients and sunlight and clogs water pipes and boat propellers accompanied by a chorus of curses in hundreds of languages. It's a sweet revenge to force it to do something useful, like float while you grow vegetables on it.
I emailed Practical Action to offer them my year's penance money as calculated by Climate Care: about £150.
Then some poor bastards can watch their carrot patch float while they huddle in the rain on their sagging roof and try to get their school books to dry.

By popular demand: potato cake recipe

2009-08-26T05:39:00.005Z

This is a no-brainer recipe that tweaks the pleasure of mashed potato with tasty bits, so that you can pass it off as something worth giving guest
Potato cakes according to yesterday's ingredients:
1 -2 kg floury potatos
3 onions

Bits:
Cheese (when in Dhaka, use paneer or 'Dhaka cheese') in small cubes
2-3 chilis, sliced
Chives, chopped

Boil or steam the spuds. Meanwhile, peel and chop the onions - quarter and slice them. Start caramelising the onions (=fry in a bit of oil over a low flame for a long-ish time, you're aiming for translucent and sweet).
When the potatos are cooked, peel them Finn-style with a fork and knife, stirring the onions every now and then. Guests who arrive early can be roped in to help with this task, just give them wine and they probably won't complain.
Slice or chp the chilis and fry them with the onions.
Dice the cheese - pretty finely, I made dice-sized cubes last night and they were a bit too big.
Chop the potatos roughly and put them in a big bowl. Mash them up with your hands (or a masher if you have a hi-tech kitted-out kitchen). This is sticky work, so if you're on the phone to grandpa while mashing, your shoulder WILL ache because you can't transfer the phone to the other ear.
Add the other ingredients to the bowl and mix everything up more or less;
Take ping pong ball-sized handfuls of the mash mix and shape them into patties. The flatter you can get them, the more tasty crispy fried surface you'll get on them. Or bigger (golfball) by all means, it doesn't really matter.
Add more oil to the frying pan (1-2 tablespoons depending on the slipperiness of your equipment), making sure you're not going to burn any leftover onion bits. Heat the oil up to medium and fry a batch of potato cakes at a time, on both sides. You're aiming for a golden surface. They don't really need to cook, all the ingredients are already edible and tasty, so this is purely for fried-carb indulgence. The cheese may melt and bubble; just scoop it back into the fold of its mother cake.

At this point it's customary to panic about dips or salads to cut the comfort-food munchiness and bring the eaters to sharp reality a bit. If your 2 kg of tomatoes for the salsa have all gone bad, you may have to improvise with the yogurt. If you can't mix finely-chopped ripe tomatoes, toasted ground cumin and coriander, chopped garlic, chili and fresh coriander, and if you don't have a cucumber for tzatziki, you may have to just mix garlic, coriander and chives into yogurt and conclude that this is also good.

9. Serve. The above quantity is not-really-enough for 8 guests, especially not for those who haven't had dinner.

Alternative things to stick in the potato cakes: capers, chopped olives, chopped boiled egg perhaps, fried canned tuna (I wouldn't recommend it but I have seen it done in which case you can call the result 'fishcakes'), shredded spinach, other types of cheese e.g. feta, chopped pickles, sun-dried tomatoes maybe? Bits of salami? Go crazy.

Earthquake?

2009-08-12T05:31:00.004Z

I woke up at 4.48 last night because my bed was shaking from side to side. It shook for a little while, then abated. After a few moments it shook again. By this point I'd decided that I was feeling an earthquake and needed to consider my options. I knew the location of my trousers, glasses and passport. What shoes would be most suitable? Should I take the mobile with the British sim card - if Bangladeshi mobile masts crashed down, maybe O2's global reach would still work? Would I need to wade through burst water mains swimming with live electricity cables?
That's if I even made it out of the house. Dhaka is fertile soil for 5-storey concrete highrises, built by hand and most likely not to Japanese quake-proof standards. Just yesterday one of my strangely eloquent colleagues surveyed the rooftops (We were taking a bit of air after lunch on the office roof) and said "Just one earthquake and all this will be gone". Bangladesh is prone to earthquakes - and obviously seismologists recommend an "urgent updating of the Bangladesh National Building Code".
My house has burglar bars on all the windows and balconies; I live on the fourth floor; I lock my front door from the inside (and leave the key in), there is one covered stairwell serving 20 flats. I would probably get a head start down the stairs before my neighbours who are not used to moving their bodies and who have children to rescue. Maybe I could scoop up a kid or two, if panic didn't get the better of me. Would the walls of the stairwell stay standing? Would the guards have the wits about them to open the gates?
And if I made it out into the street - surrounded by collapsing 5-storey concrete colossi, snapping electric cables and burst gas pipes - well, it seems like a better idea than staying inside 30 meters of unstable concrete.
After a moment at 4.48 last night the bed shook again, but less this time. I concluded that the earthquake was somewhere else and this was an aftershock. It kept shaking, with longer intervals and less force. I fell back asleep.
I'd better consult Islamic Relief's handy booklet 'Get Prepared for Effective Flood & Earthquake Response". Their premise seems to be that the worst danger is from falling furniture and collapsing walls. They advise us to crouch under a sturdy table and not to run. But - in a highrise building? Another preparation point is 'consider building codes before housing construction'. Yeah right. And outside, you're supposed to "move to a safe area away from trees, billboards and buildings". That'll be the intersection, then.
Sigh. Some justice for the people in the countryside: easier earthquake survival than for us hip snobby city-dwellers.
So what actually happened last night? I have to consult the newspaper. Andaman quake leads to tsunami alert for hrs. So it was an earthquake off the Andaman Islands, 7.6... Apparently people in other cities in Bangladesh also woke up, didn't hesitate, and ran out of their 5th floor apartments to "take shelter on roads" to "escape casualty".
The paper says the earthquake happened at 2.55 AM, so maybe I didn't see the time correctly on my phone.
The article suddently starts to report on a different earthquake off Japan, which makes for confusing reading.

Since we're on the subject

2009-08-10T08:46:00.005Z

NO you scummy-minded renegades, I mean reviewing books.
From now on I'll start recommending Arthur Phillips to anyone who asks for a good book.
His novel The Egyptologist is superb. It contains a detective story and an archaeological dig and a love correspondence, set in the 1920s. But all those stories are narrated by people who are veering between lying through their teeth and extravagant fabulation. The pace is such that you spend one or two pages reading in good faith before thinking 'hang on, what the hell' and from there on it's all-absorbing. Who killed Paul? What's wrong with the sparkly Margaret? Did Mr Ferrell deserve his fate in an Australian nursing home? How come Ralph's paperwork is missing?
The deranged egyptologist character is funny as hell. In fact, most of the characters are caricatures, but they still have loads of personality and their emotions matter. The whole thing is teetering on the brink of darkness and you hope it won't tip over.
Well, sorry to be a bit coy about the detail here but I want everyone to read this book and it's better if I don't reveal details that you may have the pleasure of discovering. It's funny. It's brilliant. It's exotic. It's got scandal, slums, erotic poetry, gangsters, gangrene, Pharaohs, twin Chinese acrobats relaxing with self-administered fellatio, the quaint customs of Balliol COllege - Oxford, and Tibetan lapdogs. Go! www.abebooks.co.uk
(An interesting making-of detail is that the author (in Australia) didn't know jack about ancient Egypt and got most of his information through email correspondence with a public information officer at the British Museum.)
I discovered Arthur Phillips by reading a review of his latest novel 'The Song Is You' in the Daily Star - the Star had lifted the entire review from the San Francisco Chronicle, evidently trusting that distance and incompatible intellectual property law will save them from any copyright repercussions. Anyway, 'The Song is You' is not released yet in the UK so I bought two of Arthur's previous books on AbeBooks: 'Angelica' and 'The Egyptologist'. I'm starting on 'Angelica' now.

Girl shock porn: an analysis of some examples of the genre

2009-08-10T08:40:00.002Z

I've been given piles of books by friends, and, succumbing to human nature, I read the trashiest one first. 'Wetlands' by Charlotte Roche has a hot-pink cover featuring half an avocado. The title and cover punch obvious messages into your brain: titllation, girlishness, vulvas.
Actually it was more about titillation, neo-girlishness and anuses, but close enough. The author uses a flimsy frame plot with some attention-seeking emotional urgency ("the longer I am here in hospital with my anus operation, the higher the chances are that my parents will visit me at the same time and get back together!") to string together 20-30 vignettes about transgressive teenage girl behaviour like eating blackheads, making your own tampons, having a voluntary sterilisation at age 18, getting your pubes shaved by strangers, using the family shower head for DIY enemas, and not washing your face for months on end. Some of these vignettes are pretty retch-inducing. Lots of them involve conquest and shagging and are medium-grade sexy. I guess they can be read as a call to revolt against the tyranny of hygiene and the pressure to be nice. Since cleanliness, godliness etc are standards that apply far more harshly to women than to men I guess you could stretch the argument that Wetlands contains a message for empowering women.
But I think the author just wanted to have a bit of fun and play with the concept of a young girl getting into various ways of being disgusting. 'What if she did this - how bad would that be?' The book should include a retch-monitor, where the readers can evaluate their disgust with a handy five-star system, for example printed on each page after a nasty flashback scene. You could ask people to fill in a live retch-monitoring form online while reading. The findings might be unusual. I, for example, reacted most negatively to the bit about eating the pus from ingrown leg-hairs.
Jesus, OK sorry if anyone is reading this, enough. Wetlands is pretty entertaining, although nasty. I am actually making a point here. It reminded me of two similar novels, written by (grown-up) women about (young) women behaving badly. Although they focus more on shock than horror, '100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed' and 'The Ages of Lulu' have a similar message: 'See how bad we girls can be' (buy now!).
The Ages of Lulu by Almudena Grandes is a proper novel, it's interesting, it's got structure, character development, unexpected turns and excellent porn. Plus it was written in the 1970s (if I remember correctly) and gave the conservative Spaniards a real shock. It features transvestites at a time before the Rocky Horror Show, sex parties before Ann Summers, tenage crushes before Lolita (well, Lolita was published in 1955, but this was before Lolita the movie at least) - and in a place, Madrid under Franco, where you had to be pretty determined and dedicated to spice up your sex life. So, good on Ms Grandes for transgressive writing in adversity, even if she didn't do all her own field research.
100 Strokes of the Brush is all coy, with the anonymous author 'Melissa P' claiming in the 'author's profile' to have 'always wanted to write a novel'. (Maybe Melissa P is actually a chubby male – it wouldn’t surprise me – but this is the back story the reader is fed.) OK, s/he wrote one, and she chose the good bestselling subject 'See how bad we girls can be'. 100 Strokes is about a 16-year-old Italian girl who agrees to all sorts of morally exploitative sex for no apparent reason. You don't get much of a sense of why Melissa keeps saying yes to such obviously bad ideas as letting her crush call his friend with a phone update of how he's going to deflower her; being the plaything of a bunch of older guys, and agreeing to being the sexual muse of a balding fat married man she picks up online. I guess the point is she never actually says no. Come to think of it she doesn't even say yes. Or, she never actually thinks about the situation or herself or what she wants; she doesn't consider there to be a decision to be made so the opportunity to say yes or no just passes by unnoticed. There's no discussion of how all this stuff makes her react either. Some platitudes of the type 'I just wanted to be able to feel something'.
OK, so Melissa the narrator is not really a character, then. More an Inflatable Barbara plot device, something for the sex scenes to happen to. This is fine and good in porn writing, where you just want to get from one sex scene to the next with minimum hassle. (Witness Anais Nin who never bothers with plot. But she still manages to paint pretty vivid characters.) But in a novel - and remember that this explicitly claims to be a novel in the introduction - this sucks. Melissa's exploits are also really distressing because she doesn't seem to be enjoying herself at all and comes home and cries. (And brushes her hair. And does it all again in the next chapter.) How is that fun?
So '100 Strokes' has all the trappings of porn except for exciting sex. Even the Marquis de Sade does the 'exploited maiden' plotline better. Not only is there no good sex in 100 Strokes, there is zero message beyond "Parents: lock up your daughters if they're wearing fuck-me boots. Your daughters are out at sex parties and not even getting paid! Oh, and don't get divorced."
So if this isn't right-wing propaganda packaged in the prurience, the favourite medium of conservatives, what was the point of the book? It seems like there was only one: the author wanted to write a novel. Well, that all went a bit wrong then.

The most annoying thing about both Wetlands and 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is that neither book can imagine a real-life happy ending for the scenarios they set up. The authors spend 150 pages going on about girls who go against the nice girl image, parents, "traditional mores" (and common-sense mores too) bladi bla. But they are stumped when they need to imagine where a girl would go afterwards. They crash and burn when trying to imagine a narrative way out for the non-conforming girl, and end up choosing the most trite, washed-out ending of all: the Rescue of Prince Charming. Yep: both of them find redemption with a Good Boy who takes them 'away from all this' with a kind kiss on the forehead. YES: a kiss on the forehead! The heroines sob in gratitude.
So these folks, the writers, spend a lot of time and effort crafting stories about girl behaviour that breaks the boundaries and goes wild! But then they undermine themselves in the last pages with the signal 'Never mind: it's actually just a fairy story!'
Why?? Why?? How can it possibly be so difficult to link rebellion to reality? People do this all the time in real life, in interesting ways. All the authors needed to do is give some indication that their main characters have learned to use initiative for more than sex and personal unhygiene. But they’re lazy: the narrators/heroines end up being rescued by princes in the last pages. Away from all this bad behaviour. Don’t worry, we’ll get you some nice clean white cotton underwear. Geesh.
- Maybe I’m expecting too much from the writers. I’m assessing these books as if they’re contemporary fiction. Maybe they should just be lumped in the category ‘boring porn’, we'll hear no more abou them, and congratulations to the writers for managing to get them onto the mainstream charts.

Binary office mate

2009-08-06T06:23:00.001Z

After the new Awami League government came into power in January this year, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina soon announced an ambitious knowledge-management strategy for the country: 'Digital Bangladesh'. With 4 hours of powercuts a day (when all desktops run out of spare battery after 15 minutes), Digital Bangladesh is considered a pretty sour joke by most of my colleagues. But there's one colleague who should embrace the concept: my office-mate 'N'. This gentleman has achieved the country's strategic aims, because he already functions like a computer.
I've often found it difficult to talk to N, because he sometimes doesn't answer questions, and when he does, his answers often don't seem to bear much relation to what was asked. He's a nice, friendly man with a pleasant, unthreatening demeanour and a CV the length of the Ganges and I often need to find out stuff from him - the background and reputation of a prospective cooperation partner organisation; main findings from events; how the villagers he visited cope with natural disasters and climate change. Responses tend to be very unsatisfying and I often find out later that he actually knows exactly the information I was after at the time; he just didn't tell me. I really don't think he's holding back information - he's a guy with no ego problems, whose workplace posistion is based on the strength of his competence, not facility for intrigue. But I think I need to filter my queries in a different way.
I've come to the tentative conclusion that this guy's mind is a database. You can place a query and get the data from it, but it won't interpret it, make any links between this data and other data, update it, summarise it, draw conclusions from it, or separate useless from useful information.
The other feature of his mind is to work through keywords: his response is to keywords in the query, rather than superfluous rubbish like syntax, inflection, or body language. He then downloads all his knowledge related to the keywords (within the context of the project we're involved in, thankfully not going back to 1982) and presents the data in a real-time verbal output. To the questioner this manifests itself in an unstoppable monologue often containing phrases like "there are four reasons for rising riverwater levels. The first is siltation. The second is seawater encroachment from rising sea levels. The third is increased runoff from melting headwater glaciers. The fourth is"...actually I've forgotten the fourth, but I pride myself on remembering the first three anyway, because my query that time had nothing to do with rising river levels. Actually I had been trying to explain the difference between the concepts of 'waterlogged' and 'inundated' in English. I thought they were confusing the two terms in a piece of writing for the World Bank, and could benefit from clarifying which one they meant.
I had drawn diagrams to illustrate the difference between 'waterlogged' and 'inundated', but clearly my colleague N is still some way off image recognition. I clearly need to work on formulating my queries.

2009-07-29T03:49:00.001Z

Anecdote of the day, from my colleague who travelled to Gujarat for three months:
"In Gujarat they have this habit: they drink tea not from a cup, but from a shallow dish. When you come to someone's house they offer you tea to drink in this way. So I was curious, I asked 'don't you have a cup...?' And they have a very nice answer. They said, when you go to a shop, they sell you tea in a cup. So the cup is for selling tea to a customer. We are giving you tea because you are our guest, so we want to show you that this is not a shop, so we don't use a cup."

zone-out synaesthesia

2009-07-28T09:16:00.004Z

Please tell me if this happens to anyone else:
on the edge of nodding off to sleep (usually in environments where sleep is inappropriate, e.g. meetings, lecture, desk)I have a vision of a place where I've been before. The vision is a visual image, very clear, usually of an urban environment. The image is at eye level (i.e. as I saw it before) and carries a little flavour of the atmosphere at the time, but mainly it's a cold objective view. These are not necessarily sites where anything special happened - in fact they're usually pretty banal, and it's startling to revisit them in such an immediate way all of a sudden. The vision is often of a road or cross-roads and the roads and buildings are clearer than people or greenery. Today I saw, from the southwestern corner vantage point, the square with many inroads in Biarritz where the French were having a neighbourhood party when Mateo and I looked for the capoeira workshop venue in May last year. What's going on??
I suspect that I'm seeing places where I've needed to pay attention to the geography: finding my way around a new place for example. My borderline cityscapes are places where I've needed to decide where to go next - where to turn or which road to take or looking out for landmarks. This is my theory - I started paying attention to these visions at some point, intending to document the phenomenon. It happens when I havahdun (Finnish for coming around to your senses quickly)and I manage to stay aware of the vision, think 'what the hell??' and have the wherewithal to make a mental note of what I was seeing. So I can report that previous visions have taken me to:

the path between my junior highschool Helsinge Skola and the temporary needlework class which was housed in a red wooden outbuilding; passing primrose (nyponros) bushes on my right and heading for the bus stop near the ring road overpass ('turn right at the gravel road').
The view up and down a long straight sloping road, when coming out of a sidestreet with the uphill on my left- Granada? Buenos Aires? ('now I'm at the main road leading up to that landmark which means that I know where I came out of the alley')

... that's all I can recall right now but weird, eh?
Needless to say I blame jet lag for sitting here by the laptop and skimming over the surface of sleep, touching it periodically like a butterfly-kiss from a flying flat stone.

Dhaka smells good

2009-07-27T13:01:00.003Z

I've only been out of Bangladesh for two weeks, but this return felt different from before: it smells good. I arrived around 4-5 pm and after I (and several whole clans on family visits using their British passports in the Foreigners queue) cleared immigration and came out, Dhaka had an after-the-rain look saturated with colour and moisture and life. I like it.
To clarify, my positive impression is not very objective. Dhaka today smells like Hong Kong in July, and it's pushing all my sensory memory buttons of excitement and promise.
Then there were two unfortunate Dhaka cliches ready to greet me: 1.5 hours in traffic and a power cut at home. But I was too fuzzy-headed to mind and the car journey was a continuation of the plane - sleeplessness and reading the various sections of the Observer in great and pointless detail.
At home all is well, except for a puddle of rainwater by my bedroom window (mopping that up was a suitably meditative, low-tech powercut-activity) and now I only need to cope with a flat to myself and the traces of Mateo here. The toothpaste tube he'd cut open! The towel he hung up to dry, and whoah - his mobile, camera charger and new memory card in the top desk drawer.
My next problem is what to eat: garlic omelet - or newly imported crumpets with Mateo's home-made blueberry aniseed jam? Yes.

Money and laundering

2009-06-03T10:42:00.004Z

Here are the ways to get clean clothes in Dhaka:

Send clothes to the laundry with the dudes-who-clean. Comes back after 5-6 days, boiled, beaten and finally, mangled. You can use the shirts for roof tiles. Highly impressive, albeit a bit harsh on the clothes. You then have to remember to cut the little note tags off the clothes before wearing them in public. Not cheap - costs about £10-15 a week.

Handwashing. For underwear and sensitive garments. A couple of lumps of 'jet' handwashing powder (the box features a picturesque 50s housewife), water and a mass of underwear - and scrub. The water turns grey - is this just my sweat and secretions, or are the clothes caked with dust as well, or is this just the colour of Dhanmondi tap water? Price: effort...and exacerbated heat rash from the lazy rinsing.

Washing machine!!! One was installed in the flat yesterday. It seems to work although it walked nearly a meter during the spin cycle. Heaving it back in place is as much effort as handwashing underwear, but it takes a shorter time. Now let's watch the electricity bill skyrocket.

The mighty Buff

2009-05-12T09:30:00.004Z

Water buffaloes! They make cows look scrappy and badly put together. Granite flanks, Barbara Hepworth curves! I asked my colleague which animal is more expensive, a cow or a water buffalo. He said "The water buffalo. Because they are mighty." That's riiiiight!

Take heed for after the apocalypse

2009-05-12T09:06:00.007Z

Spending last week on a field trip involved a lot of sitting in the car and watching the rice harvest in Chapai Nawabgonj. As we sped through villages and towns, scattering anything smaller than the landcruiser onto the road verges and terrifying righteous pedal-power travellers, it gave a good overview of the different harvest phases.
It was sort of fun to look into the lush green fields beyond the 'tempo' buses careering into potholes and ditches and past the cyclists carrying bunches of firewood and 50 kg of rice and balancing on the last 5 cm strip of asphalt, and piecing together the sequence of rice events. It seems to be:

men advance around the field with sickles, cutting the bunches of rice and leaving them on the ground;
people of all types gather up the bunches and tie them into sheaves;
these are carried (on the head) to the house or yard;
the farmers have hired a threshing machine: a cylindrical drum covered in short metal hoops that make the rice fly off the straw when you turn each sheaf over the hoops and foot-pump the mechanism.
The rice is spread out on a convenient surface - school yeard, basketball court, roadside - to dry and people walk through every now and then, shuffling through to turn the grains evenly.
The rice is transported in sacks (on home-made tractors, bikes or trucks)to market where it's weighed and sold at rock-bottom prices because the market is saturated.

So if we face a situation where we have to reconstruct civilisation after the total meltdown of modernity, you'll be pleased that you've read this blog and so know how to harvest rice. You just have to hope that your companions in survival have read another blog about germinating, sowing, transplanting and irrigating rice. Enjoy!

goat and pumpkin

2009-04-16T12:31:00.003Z

At work today we talked about rural poverty. In certain districts of Bangladesh, absentee landlords own all the land. Although it's fertile as Eden, the people who work there (growing food) don't own any of it, and earn a living from their labour on other peoples' (probably my neighbours') fields. (They may well have had land before, but had to mortgage it to the landlords or moneylenders during crises like flood, drought or too many daughters). This means that after the September rice harvest, when there is no agricultural work to be done, these folks have nothing to live off and nothing to eat. The 'lean season' is called monga and is a high-profile development problem that DfID wants to solve.
So far so depressing. My colleagues were talking about livelihoods diversification strategies. Some of these involve growing alternative crops: if they ripen during September-November when everyone's starving, even if you can't eat them yourself (because they belong to the landlord), you can earn some money from hearvesting them. (And buy food from the market; life is twisted). Sweet potato, strawberries, root gardening involving pumpkins, cassava and neem tree were suggested. Or you can rear goats, ducks or chickens (given to you by an NGO). These don't need much land (which you don't have) but you can eat the milk or eggs or whatever, and lend the chicks or kids to your neighbours and get eggs back as interest, or similar. (Until the goat is washed away in the next flood, or it survives the flood and you have to sell it to the moneylenders so that you can get rice for your family to eat).
Goats around here are cute; they have long floppy ears that do something to counterbalance the satanic horizontal pupils. And ducks are cute. Low centre of gravity. I must admit that I was distracted from empathising with the full horror of being a trapped, desperate, howlingly angry monga-region cash cropper by the thought of these farm animals; and even more so, by the thought of them combined together with alternative food crops in a fragrant, succulent goat and pumpkin tagine.

alone

2009-04-10T14:27:00.001Z

Now I realise why the Lonely Planet guidebooks are called that. Because with a Lonely planet, you never have any need to talk to another person.

A really good day

2009-04-08T04:47:00.002Z

Yesterday.
I woke up with mellow morning sunshine through the hotelroom curtains. Good breakfast coffee. Some telecommunications and work things out of the way.
Then: 1.5 hours of yoga on a rooftop! Don't imagine anything fancy, now... A bog-standard third world urban rooftop with bare concrete beams, water pipes to step over, yellow nylon washing lines, a few potted plants and improvised brick walls. In front: the outside wall of the taller building next door. Behind, the neighbours' washing. Sunny and fresh, activity on the road below, birds swooping, motorbikes zooming.
I'd paid for a session with instructor D, trained in yoga and ayurvedic massage in Kerala, serious credentials were rolled out by his colleagues in the spa reception. He turned out to be a short young dude, sympathetic and professional. We sat on dusty green mats, I was wearing my baggiest trousers and t-shirt, I expressed a preference for asanas (postures) over inner peace, and indeed we got the spiritualism out of the way with three oms.
Then: weird body contortions! Stretching! Bodily discipline! Balance! Lactic acid! Funny animal names! We started with standing up postures, me wobbling shamefully, but taking a lot of pleasure in standing on one leg, holding up my other heel on a level with my head, focusing on getting my knees straight and feeling some sun, breeze, some city noises around me. One part of the mind empty and focusing on stillness, another looking at the Italian tourists having a drink in a hotel garden below.
It was also gratifying to be able to do the fish asana, the cobra, the boa, the locust (!!! Half locust... On your stomach, one hand grabs one foot and hoists it up-up above the back, the other foot, knee bent, supports the leg in the air), even the headstand worked on the second try. And I like this 'now relax and take a few breaths' business in between asanas. I think Instructor D pushed the envelope a bit to see what kinds of postures I'd be able to do, being more flexible and gung-ho about movements (as in the capoeira attitude 'try this!' 'OK!') than your average gweilo. No pain at the time, though today my back muscles are peevish: 'You didn't warn us about that!'
So that was sunny, outdoorsy, challenging but not hard, satisfying exercise... I trooped downstairs to where Z was having a body scrub and pedicure, and signed up for the 'body scrub'.
This involved a masseuse giving me a mild massage - perfect after the unfamiliar yoga movements- with big sloppy handfuls of fragrant grit! Aaaaa it was drool-inducingly pleasant -- starting from the feet up to the neck. No painful massage-digs into muscle knots, no icky post-massage feel of 'how do i get this oil off'. The sheet I was lying on looked like modern art afterwards with a negative of my body in clean sheet, stencilled in coffee-and-rice grit.(Then: hot shower.) Zoe's toenails were also a cheery pink.
Friends, this place is not in the Lonely Planet, but go: Serenity Spa, opposite Hotel Florid, Z Street, Thamel Kathmandu.
The overwhelming good feeling lasted all day. We walked to Swayambunath temple through a bit of real Nepal after that. The endorphins got a bit of a top-up from climbing the stairs up to the temple.

Joke about work

2009-04-01T07:16:00.003Z

"I will try to translate a joke for you, so that you can understand our organisation better. Here. There was a man who died and was condemned to hell. But he was a borderline case, he wasn't a very bad sinner, so he had a lighter sentence: he was allowed to choose the section of Hell where he would be punished for all eternity. So he was being guided around Hell by a demon, seeing all the burning, the skinning alive, etc. But then he was shown one section where people were just standing around, not screaming, not in agonising pain - they were just standing up to - up to just above their knees - in, well, excrement. And they were all drinking coffee! So the man thought, hey, this is not so bad! So he chose that section. OK, the demon pushed him into the lake of shh- and he got his footing.
But then suddenly a bell rang and everyone put their coffee mugs away and turned - upside down - and started standing on their hands in the shit. And you can relate, if you're standing on your hands in shit that goes to just above the knee, well...
So the man said What's all this!! And the demon answered, That was just the coffee break!
So I interpreted this: was the proposal writing we had done so far at work - was it just the coffee break?

Inflamed beyond the limits of self-control

2009-03-26T18:45:00.002Z

Today Z and I were invited to a meal with ladies who work, but also lunch.
We’d been told that it’s informal – so we came wearing comfortable clothes, on the racy side for Bangladesh but relatively cool (e.g. just-below-calf length silk skirt, grey t-shirt, contemporary red perspex earrings and red wrap for me). Of course the other guests were in starched fine saris, full arsenal of gold jewellery, impeccable makeup and hair. The lunch was a very civilised ‘salon’ type affair. Our hostess had invited her relatives, colleagues from the university, and family friends and political allies. We talked to at least two women who are professors of sociology at Dhaka University (the hotbed of politics, notably the war of independence started with a university massacre); teachers of English at Brac University; a boutique owner; two knitwear factory owners and a Chief of Staff for the U.S. Navy who invited us to California to visit. And a physiotherapist from Oxford. We talked about their child/work balance, their lives in New Zealand, Norway and Nebraska; the latest designs in the sweatshop; their school’s exchange programme with Durham; the boondocks that is Sherman, Texas; my mum’s physiotherapy; women’s lack of rights under Hindu religious law; the political war between student factions…
-I’m starting to feel that as long as the elites are in charge of the development sector it can never really have a serious effect on the lives of 'marginalised populations' i.e. normal people. I think I’ll start another internship on the side of this philanthropising, ideally learning to run a café so I can revert to my family’s (Virkkunen side) roots: small business owners.
After the lunch towards sundown we took a walk around Dhanmondi ‘lake’ (a puddle) and then explored our way to Aarong, the Brac handicraft shop. The men were unusually rude, perhaps because of being drunk on Independence Day celebrations, or perhaps the sight of my ankles inflamed them beyond the limits of their self-control.

Dhaka week 1: Fifty men with spoons

2009-03-13T16:41:00.003Z

This is a sprawling congested third world metropolis, running on overpopulation and dirt-cheap labour. The skyscrapers and highrise blocks are hand-built by skinny worn-down people stamping clay, whacking brick molds, stacking bricks, burning bricks, carrying bricks on their heads... At building sites there are anthills of people shovelling cement, hauling baskets of sand, buckets of concrete, swinging sledgehammers, lifting reinforcement iron rods one at a time. Breaking bricks with hammers, each one lovingly at a time! An artisan method for gleaming city living.
It's one of those world-twists you come across some times... When I see a skyscraper I associate its building process with larger-than-life machines, superhuman awesome steel monsters. Hundreds of kilos of concrete poured, giant steel beams swinging from 200-meter cranes, pile drivers, men scurrying around only to operate the machinery. Thus rise the gleaming spires of technology, finance, progress. (Well 'progress' in the modernist sense, before it became a hopelessly quaint dead-end of a word.) Here the same results are reached by sinewy women hauling heavy stuff in baskets. It makes a LOT of sense for a country that has people in abundance (and foreign exchange in the opposite of abundance.)
But it reminds me of an anecdote James told me about previous Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa.
Mkapa was inspecting a roadworks. An angry man said 'That mechanical digger has taken the jobs of ten men digging with spades!!' Mkapa answered: 'Or the jobs of fifty men digging with spoons!'
Love that anecdote. There's got to be ways of making the Bangladeshi building industry less of a misery for those who work there. I mean, there's no need for people to spend long days carrying gravel in buckets IN THIS DAY AND AGE. On the other hand a mechanical system that relies on power to move hundreds of steel parts in exact sequence is laughable in a city where there are ten powercuts every day and every spare part has to be imported from Japan and paid for in hard currency. But in between there must be simple mechanical tools to make life easier... hand-operated machines of some sort. Brick-crushing mills for God's sake. Who wants to be the first to open an intermediate technology building company in South Asia?

Dhaka week 1: traffic

2009-03-12T09:07:00.002Z

Everyone I told about moving to Dhaka invariably said "traffic" with varying expressions of doom, exasperation, resignation... I had images of being trapped because of lack of walking culture and the city streets being packed with jam for most daylight (and night-time) hours. But it's not so!
I'm pleased to say I was wrong about the walking – there are indeed sidewalks, and the reason people don't walk is that there's a constant conveyorbelt of bicycle rickshas (official spelling rickshaw but that looks too colonial-British to me) gliding past on the edge of the road. It's like those gliding sidewalks in airports, only raised 1.3 m off the ground and pedalled by wiry men with a haunted look in their eye. You need only glance into the road and one will stop and you can swing up into the seat (canopy cheerily painted) and start praying for your life. The rickshas occupy the same niche in the traffic food chain as bikes in the UK: an unofficial strip of road on the edge, overtaking each other recklessly, lining up when waiting, filtering through traffic jams. The drivers use the same over-shoulder glance before moving off. But the bikes are enormous, heavy-duty single-gear anachronisms, taking an enormous effort to get started (you see the ricksha-wallas pulling up on the handlebars and lifting the pedals with the topside of their feet to get going) and the drivers are reluctant to break, because of having to start up again after. So they prefer to curve sideways away from exactly the front of the oncoming car, more towards a diagonal collision course. The intersections looked like pure anarchy at first, but at rush hour there are people directing the traffic. Otherwise it is pure anarchy. Well, Like anywhere else road-users are reluctant to kill each other, so the cars usually shoulder through more through force of attitude, presence and personality than through actual force. Like in the rest of life.
Z's nerves were wrecked by our first ricksha ride. I felt vaguely superior for being able to think 'this driver has clearly been in the job long enough to survive so far so he must know what he's doing' and 'there's plenty of time for us to get past here' but actually I was on the left (sheltered) side and she had all the buses and motor-tuktuks (known as CNGs) coming straight at her

Scots Missionaries anecdote

2009-01-27T18:10:00.002Z

Anecdote of the day:

Megan on ‘The White Man’s Burden’ by William Easterly:

“The white man has a lot to answer for… The Scots missionaries more than any of them! You go to any underdeveloped country and ask anyone ‘what’s your name?’ – it’s something like McKenzie. McKenzie, Macloud, MacDonald, they’ve all been there!“
Jan: “Everything that she says is true.”
“That’s why the world is full of them! Jamaica, the Windward Islands. They left their wives behind! Look at Trevor McDonald.”
Jan: “And New Zealand, full of Scottish missionaries. Even that Dr Livingstone, exploring the Zambezi River, he had whole harems. He died in the arms of a multitude concubines.”
Megan: “They all wanted to throttle him, for his waywardness!”
Jan: ”Oh I feel awful now, like Dr Livingstone is going to take revenge.”
Linda: “Dr Livingstone doesn't have that kind of clout."

An NGO project is like...

2009-01-19T22:36:00.001Z

Quoting Kumi Naidoo who quoted someone else:
"An NGO project is much like Columbus' discovery of America. When you start you don't really know where you're going, when you arrive you're not really sure where you are, when you return you pass it off as a tremendous success, and you do it all with somebody else's money."

Gunpoint

2009-01-12T21:37:00.004Z

Saturday anecdote.
Context: Caracol in North Pakistan with doctor mum, coming to lend a brotherly hand to the earthquake reconstruction - probably aged around 15 at the time.
"After that we went travelling in the mountains and it was really gorgeous... and people were so different. In one village they'd be really really nice and come out and give us food and stuff, and in others the driver was like 'cover your heads!!! In this village everyone carries weapons!!" And we did actually get held up at gunpoint."
What did the guy want?
"Weirdly enough, he wanted to help. We'd got stuck in the mud and the driver had one idea of how to get us out. And this guy had a different idea. So he pulled his gun on the driver and was like 'no, we do it my way'."
So no culture of discussion.
"Yeah, that didn't work either."
What did the driver do? Did he get shot?
"No he was like come on, put the gun down."

Anecdote of the day

2009-01-09T16:05:00.001Z

“My grandfather’s main ambition in life was to outlive Winston Churchill. He was that pissed off with him for putting down the miners’ strike in the 1920s. So he was well into his 80s when Churchill finally died; he was real happy!
So what was your grandpa’s involvement with the miners’ strike?
“He was a miner! He used to say that his only holiday from the mines was the first world war and even there he got shot! He got shot through the thigh, the fleshy bit at the top. He used to say “Two inches higher, Brian, and you wouldn’t be here!”

minus five

2009-01-06T21:52:00.003Z

It's so cold in the kitchen that I've selected the ugliest unwanted-present hat from last year, because it has a fleece lining, to wear as kitchen hat. It's so cold in the kitchen that I made espresso yesterday just to have an excuse to heat something up; and I warmed my hands near the hotplate while the coffee was getting up to speed.
Then I realised I was not in the mood for espresso but hey! here's a little dessert recipe for just such moments:
Arabic stereotype mishmash

2 dl strong espresso
some chopped dates
half a teaspoon of cardamon (crushed)

Mix, let stand, serve with thick yogurt as a dessert, ideally with something other than coffee to drink. Maybe something more could be added... a sprig of mint? Touch of chili?
I had it on muesli this morning.

where has Linda been?

2009-01-04T23:25:00.005Z

3 weeks in Mexico over the Christmas holidays.
Surreal experiences: cactus forest, small children in a procession with brass band and live donkey, sunrise over the Pacific seen from a hammock, free New Year's concert with the spectacularly inept singers of Los Tigres del Norte, navigational hilarity looking for the origin in the one-way grid street system of Tehuacan
Food: chilaquiles for breakfast, caldo de piedra, guava juice, tostadas, crab ceviche, christmas seafood extravaganza, soup with avocado, crackling, chili and cheese of your choice; seven types of mole; banana crisps, bacalau, omelette with chapulines (grasshoppers!), quesadillas with courgette flower, death-defying hielo de fresca in the market, saag aloo, Oaxacan wound-up cheese nystan, green vegetable soup.
None of: diarrhoea, highway robbery, mariachis.
Sunburn: light to moderate.
Extended family: lovely.
Most random christmas present: Happy Tree friends memory stick
Sights seen: mineral museum of Tehuacan, maize museum, contemporary Oaxacan ceramics, Teotihuacan pyramids, hilltop springs of Hierve la Agua, Puerto Escondido coach terminal, the San Agustin Etla sustainable paper factory, the botanical gardens in Oaxaca, the long straight street Insurgentes, Zocalo decked out in 7 types of festive extravagance, contemporary art museum at UNAM.
Best bits: Christmas present trading game, Gimenez Cacho celebrations, the light, Roca Blanca, being given basketry and espresso cups, mezcal discussions, the virrvarr of Tlacolula market, investments in the arts, conversations, Mateo.

Swedish paperbacks

2008-11-24T20:37:00.002Z

Spending 130 Swedish kronor at a paperback shop at the central station in Stockholm turned out to be a delicious and enlightening experience.

Daughters of Egalia by Gerd Brantenberg: a dystopia of gender chauvinism. Men are forced to wear tight, impractical clothes; are excluded from important jobs; can't enjoy sex; are nonetheless considered sexual objects; are never taken seriously. It's funny how enraged you get when you imagine these horrors and humiliations inflicted on the valiant valuable men. But of course it's the reality for women.

Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg: an elegant tale of loneliness and intellect interacting with sensuality and morals. A stylistic masterpiece, effortlessly crafted. We follow the lonely doctor - "I realised that I am one of very few people who distinguish desires of the long term from desires of the moment, and I realised this is rare, rarer perhaps than lasting happiness" (I paraphrase), his insomnia in the summer nights, his interest in freeing beauty from loathing.

English Picnic

2008-10-06T16:28:00.001Z

Yesterday we decided to take a detour off the M23 and walk in the forest to enjoy the delights of British woodland and this timeless outdoors lunching tradition. I was travelling with Americans – a Quebecois and a Mexican - but we were determied to show respect by imitation and enjoy our host country. We had a canvas shopping bag filled with cheese, chorizo, baguette, rye crackers, orange juice, bananas, Jaffa cakes, dried apricots and vine-ripened organic tomatoes in compostable non-plastic non-GM packaging. And about four cubic meters of Mateo’s possessions, but that wasn’t for the picnic specifically.
We managed to slink away from the Gatwick spaghetti junctions, got directions from an equestrian on a country lane, parked the rented removals van on the verge and set off into the medium-grade October rain – the only civilians on foot wearing scruffy clothing - sheep-rustlers with ethical shopping habits.
Despite the Venus-grade cloud cover and intermittent precipitation the woods were indeed beautiful – tall straight trees, the brook ‘the Mole’ burrowing a valley for itself, hobbits padding around planning afternoon tea, mushrooms sprouting with an almost audible ‘poing’ noise, exciting velvety moss and outlandish lichen formations on tree trunks, yellow leaf carpet. We got a bit muddy walking around and sat down on a triangle of wet fallen tree trunks, pulled up our hoods, shook our hands out of the warmth of our jacket sleeves and ate bread products with feta and chorizo, getting mud on the bag, passing the umbrella from hand to hand when the rain picked up, taking sips of airplane-grade miniature Ballantine’s, trying to recall which fingers had touched potentially lethal mushrooms, and whether the hallucinations would be worth experiencing before expiring this worldly life from mushroom poisoning. It was cold, wet and not exactly fun.
In this respect, the British picnic has a lot in common with the British seaside.

What Linda did in Brazil

2008-07-22T21:54:00.004Z

We stayed in Negao's house in Itapua outside Salvador: three rooms piled on each other, with an eccentric spiral staircase in the middle, window frames warped, anemic fluorescent lights, half-finished or a bit rickety, with the sound of the waves constantly crashing in the background. Cold showers, a terrace perfect for practicing on, boys twanging berimbau at eccentric times, rescuing the hammock out of the rain. Everything rusted. We cooked together. Breakfast had wonderful strong coffee and ready-buttered rolls.
Some highlights:

Getting wrestled by the giant green waves near Negao's house. Morna spent every morning on the beach but our last day there was the perfect combination of sunshine, Atlantic, good company, picnic with the last remains of food, and burning my ass.
The kids at the Crianzas do Abaete capoeira project. Especially, watching 10-year-old girls Semeji and Abeila do all 8 of Mestre Bimba's Sequences in one effortless flow.
Improvised samba party after the children's batizado. We'd just gone for lunch with some of the teachers and other capoeiristas and had some ice-cold beers... then someone had a tambourine and started singing samba, then the professional sambista/caff owner brought out his drum, then we all played with Morna's bellydancing scarves, then more singing and ass-shaking, the beer bottles lining up on the tables, rain falling and people stopping to check where the noise was coming from, someone brought out the base drum and started shaking the neighbourhood, the cafe owner's small son skipped around with a small snare drum, then the men played with the scarves and shook their asses, then the good cheer and music and dancing (bad samba dancing from me) just continued until we got a bit hungry again and went to get acaraje.
After a week of standing up, fast and hard regional-style training and intimidating testosterone masters (albeit charming), Mestre Daiola's last training session full of humour and floor work. And Daiola's roda on Friday night, with normal human-level Brazilian capoeiristas, good inclusive spirit, and the presence of quadriplegic (diving into shallow water) Contra-Mestre Couringa in his wheelchair.
Street food! Acaraje, coxinhas, sorveje (ice cream!), juices with fruits like jenipapo, acerola and maracuja (passionfruit!), pasteis, acai na tigela, beiju with chocolate and banana, and soups like sururu and octopus.
Ice-cold beer in small glasses-culture.
Well-functioning public transport system.
Deep culture - wall murals from eminent artists and highway graffiti from eminent artists, people owning and using the dance schools and capoeira centres and art galleries in Pelourinho.
Beach tourist bliss on Morro de Sao Paulo; Ben teaching me an au reversao; capoeira teacher Vaqueiro on his horse, sitting and mooching and drawing, moonlight swim, daytime training, fruit juices with 2 parts cachaca at night.
Successfully explaining to the military police what had happened to my cash withdrawal (in a mixture of splintered Portuguese and mime). Then getting a Jesus lecture from said police. Arguing about the Prodigal Son.
Conversations at the dinner table, on the sofas, on the viewpoint edge at the nightclub, in the minibus, on the balcony, en route to Itapua.

Although I'd dreaded the thought of spending all my time in a group, one of the best bits turned out to get to know my lovely capoeirista comrades better. Louise being very English about things being nice. Vish with the cheeky sideways grin. Axola and the sound effects. Morna laughing on the beach. The supernatural (because rare) smiles and discussions with regal Nadhya. Stuart sober - a delight. Wanga's teenage self-consciousness breaking up for moments. And that was just the first week before the arrival of Circus Ben and Agi's accident-prone charm and Charlie's stabilising influence.

I tried to walk around the block but politics stopped me

2008-07-01T21:38:00.006Z

Walking around Nicosia Old Town I keep getting lost (a hobby of mine) and eventually found, but here's the freaky thing: I keep thinking I recognise familiar features - which are actually on the other side of the UN Green Line. I think I've seen this corner, on the left should be the street where I had a tavuk sis and ayran. No. That street is on the other side of concrete walls, barbed wire nests, steel gates and the Turkish army. It is not here. That is to say, it may be 200 meters away, but to get there implies a half-hour walk, reorienting the language, and a passport check.
OK, so partly that shows how illusory my sense of direction really is - if I keep imagining that I know where I am, maybe that's what I do in places like Grosvenor Square and Moscow as well? Maybe the only reason I ever find my way to where I want to go is either a) it's not such a big place and you keep walking, you get there eventually or b) the city loves me and curves around to meet me. (Option c) judicious use of A-Z.)
But here... the old city is built of a honey-creamy sandstone, not unlike Oxford, with old run-down town houses with curvy balconies, not unlike the unclean wet dreams of semi-respectable british property developers. On the TC side last time, I was voyeuring into the living rooms of large Turkish settler families who were watching TV all together and taking down the bedding for the night with their windows open to the heat. Shock revelation! GC Nicosians do the same. Today I walked on the GC side from the football pitch in the ancient Venetian city wall moat (on the TC side: basketball court) via family houses and a square with a large outdoor bar (TC side: bigger square, Latin restaurant) and the large mosque (in active use by South Asian guest workers). On the TC side it's a cathedral. Well, converted into a mosque, but still obviously a Gothic cathedral. The Turkish Cypriots don't give a shit about religion anyway:" I went maybe twice to mosque... I was small, my grandpa wanted me to come. That place was like a social club for him. He just sat with the other old men on the bench and gossiped. Yeah, while the prayer was going on."
Walking home on the GC side, admiring the low-water flower arrangements (cactuses, palms, hibiscus, beautiful things in large tubs outside houses), thinking I had been there before although actually I hadn't, I found the experience very restful. Nicosians seems addicted to cars so there were no other pedestrians. Cars may have passed, but in terms of real humans I felt I had the streets to myself - warm old city streets, with a mild breeze, old architecture, exciting details, bright stars, cats, cactus. Where else can you admire the old quarter at night, carrying a laptop and hard currency and not be in the slightest worried about your safety? (Winchester?) I arrived at ruins and was looking around thinking how exciting it could be to play in the broken-open town houses and climb stairs behind fallen walls and hold illicit meetings in dark rooms - and then I spotted the Cypriot and Greek flags and a quiet dark sentinel booth and a handsome soldier wistfully watching the open-air bar in an alley nearby.
Of course: the dead zone.
They haven't built a new wall but they've razed the buildings in a few blocks in a line across the city; nobody lives there, on one side of the street there are normal golden sandstone houses, on the other, blown-up walls still in rubble. The cross-streets are blocked with tall grey steel gates.
I tried to walk around the central market on the TC side last time I was here. It was closed and I could see heaps of watermelons and oranges but couldn't get in. I hate re-tracing my steps so thought hell, at least I can walk around the block,
Wrong. One long wall of the market must have been the dead Zone. Each side street I tried to turn down was blocked with a concrete breeze-block wall or a steel gate, you could imagine the Turkish army rolling out on gigantic trucks at any moment to reinstate Ottoman supremacy, Ataturk or no Ataturk.
The very accessibility of those gates was peculiar. They turned streets into dead-end alleys. You could easily have set up the heavy machinery for your carpentry business there at the end of the alley, or let bits of junk pile up there. But they were all kept meticulously clear, as if something really could come rolling out at any time, trucks or a political solution perhaps, and the streets would instantly need to reconnect again to their Southern cut-off halves.
Maybe my sense of direction and of familiarity isn't so delusional after all; maybe my brain has managed to reconstruct a mental Nicosia map that ignores the artificial slash across.

"when I am prime minister"

2008-07-01T20:54:00.005Z

I used to keep a blog that was a whole lot more open. But now I run into what my former Italian friend expressed when someone took a photo of him scandalously drunk, with 3-mm gangster stubble, looking like the most reprehensible underworld scum and waving a beer and eulogising about InterMilan: "Get rid of that photo!! When I am prime minister..."
Yep, When I am Minister of Foreign Affairs and some young punk political aide to the conservatives digs up my online archives, looking for dirt and sniggering into his pinstripe wool suit, he'll find this blog and realise that even if I had tried hard to insult the people, they did it for themselves. My (well-educated, liberal, well-travelled) friends on both sides are equally eloquent in disparaging themselves. In this way, Turkish Cypriot O last night (see how hedgy I even am about naming people. They might make it to prime minister before me.) talked about the Cyprus problem. "You know what I call this place? But I have the copyright on this. Mogadishu."
Tonight, Greek Cypriots S and A... they are certainly of presidential calibre... talked about former president Papadopoulos ("The man who cried on TV") sponsoring the pre-election opinion polls but not managing to get very sophisticated propaganda, buying his daugther a 1000 square meter house ("That's only the house, not the grounds." Me: "What, does she have 200 children?") and about why there is no desalination plant ("2 years ago they said, 'we don't need a desalination plant, look, it's raining!"). It hasn't rained all this year and Cyprus is technically speaking a desert. Greece keeps a steady shuttle traffic of water tankers to top up the reservoirs. Turkey is slightly less well organised for supplying the north.
I, not resisting the temptation to gouge a little bit with A and S, raised the question of why the hell there is no public transport system. I felt slightly justified in this, since my taxi driver on Sunday had talked about it himself. ("60 euros for a taxi to Limassol, 100 to Pafos. Today everyone is coming home from the beach, we will have a 1.5 hour traffic jam. That's 45 minutes to Nicosia and 45 minutes inside.") I raised the point that, coming from a clan of small business, I could easily set up a shuttle bus system for visitors from the airport and make a fortune. A and S told me about the taxi drivers' interest group in government. "They are the mafia!" Playing my part as the innocent outsider (you get so much interesting information when you're not scared to ask stupid questions) I referred to modern times and enlightened self-interest. "We are in the EU now, and the cornerstone of the EU is free trade. If I can't open my bus business I'll complain to the competition authorities!" They looked thoughtful for a moment, as if thinking about the best way to break the news to me gently. A started the story of a scandal at the competition commission: cameras had been discovered even in the toilets. Well, this didn't really discredit the work of the competition commission to me... So to keep it simpler, she then pointed out: "Sicily is also in the EU. Eh!"

hot evening

2008-06-30T21:26:00.004Z

I should have brought my diary... Cyprus is starting to shape up socially, just as I'm here on my last management coordination visit. I could have chosen to spend the weekend on a golden beach on the remote Karpaz peninsula, possibly with nice people too. (In the end London won my favours: Asim's canvas at the Aicon gallery, Lizzie's daughter's party and champagne-tickled conversation in the sun). But I managed to squeeze in some time on the beach next to the airport when I landed yesterday. Sure, charter jets came howling in every half hour so you could look up from swimming and see their underbellies, and I'd forgotten to take a kanga or towel and there was a 1.5 hour traffic jam to get to Nicosia, but I got as much sun lounging as I wanted during my hour there. A whole weekend would probably have been too much.
And now I know enough about Nicosia to have a favourite cafe (got bought a beer by two Greeks who wanted to flirt; instead they got an argument about politics) and to have people's numbers for going out in the evenings. O from my Master's today for a stupendous meze on the TC side seaside; S tomorrow for a cocktail.

aspiring to the culturally appropriate

2008-04-13T20:54:00.002Z

Greetings from the unrecognised Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. Travelling always makes for a pretty surreal feeling – which is well and good. I think air travel makes places seem too conveniently near and without time differences, jet lag, disorientation etc you can lose a sense of perspective: namely, how far places really are from each other. So between here and… my bed in Oxford? God that’s far – there was getting up at 4.30, airport coach, sunrise, the space-station terminal, sitting around for hours, feeling totally alienated by the relentless ‘luxury brands’ shops, and then being in the Sierra with Ernst Hemingway and the Republican guerrilleros for the duration of the flight (reading 'For WHom the Bell Tolls'), followed by a long taxi ride and passport checkpoint. So by the time I got here it seemed perfectly natural to read Turkish everywhere and readjust to walking around on streets where you don’t see other women and dress for 25 degrees’ warmth.
Oh yes! I got to the hotel room, brushed my teeth and went straight back out. I wanted to see the coast on my free afternoon, and the closest place is the pretty town Kyrenia or Girne in Turkish. I had had enough of taxis so went for a dolmus (pronounced dolmush), which in Turkey is a minibus. Here a dolmus turns out to be a slightly mind-bending stretched Mercedes – an extra set of doors in the middle… I’ll have to get a picture. I went into the minibus office and greeted the men with mustasches in Turkish (they asked if I’m from Turkmenistan) and they nodded and smiled and offered me a cigarette and asked me to sit down. After about ten minutes of nothing much happening, I figured either they were a) waiting for the driver, or b) the dolmus only leaves every half hour, or c) they have to wait for enough passengers to fill the bus. Lucky I’ve travelled before and can think about these options, I remember getting really flustered about the same scenario once in China. It turned out to be C. They needed 6 persons before they could drive, and unhappily I happened to be the first in the que.
But I went to the café next door and ordered a lahmacun and watched the street… Young boys came up and chatted with the minibus gents, men walked up and down, boys on bikes and eating ice cream and racing each other sauntered past. Women appeared for 15 seconds at a time before disappearing into cars or back inside. I was happy to be wearing loose long trousers and have taken my Ethiopian shawl around my shoulders; it’s bad enough being the only female in public without needing to deal with the side-effects of wearing a sleeveless top. The minibus dudes kept me updated on the passenger progress and finally, light going pastel in the sky and swallows chasing bugs ecstatically over the rooftops, we got 5 more passengers and set off!
The stretched-Merc ride to Kyrenia itself was only ten minutes after all that.
Kyrenia looks charming and the sea smells musky and fresh and promising and there are ancient sea-walls and forts and things. Again, no unsupervised women around, but hey, someone has to show an example. Lots of people were taking a Sunday evening paseo on the beautiful sea wall and I got to practice my ‘I am not a prostitute’ eyes-focused-in-the-middle-distance look to avoid eye contact with all the groups of young men. I enjoyed a grilled fish and excellent salad and realised that everyone I’d spoken to all day was probably from the Turkish mainland. You get some very Muslim signs here, like the segregation of women and the call to prayer from mosques (which I love listening to). On the other hand, the Greek Cypriots are a lot more religious, and interestingly enough the Turkish beer Efes is a whole planet better than the Greek Cypriot ‘Keo’. (perhaps the Efes is imported and Keo locally brewed…) So much to learn! Life is great.

Christmas refugee

2007-12-26T12:14:00.000Z

By chance, the only cafe that's open in my home town today is also the only place where I can get internet access, so Wayne's doubles up as mökkihöperöys (cabin fever) antidote, espresso pusher and communication channel. I'm here enjoying an ethnic family Christmas.

Staying at grandpa's one-bed flat isn't so bad as long as you activate maximum rambling anecdote- and bad pun filters (frequently the two are combined in unholy and terrifying ways).

The Virkkunen clan is fine - we had a super-idyllic Christmas Eve with everyone looking lovely (especially our glam aunt who caused widespread speculation about cosmetic surgery) and small flaxen-haired children gambolling around, tons of good food and good cheer and someone had even persuaded grandma to allow bottles of beer into the house.

The cousins' children are growing and displaying personality and making adorable comments that'll some back to haunt them for evermore as they grow up and we insist on embarassing them with every time we see them.

E.g. Otto: "He [the cat] is too small, he hasn't learned to talk yet". Our cousin the Breathtaking Yuppie has bought a third beemer. He entertained us all with tales of business negotiations with the Chinese. Our grandma steps up to her matriarch role and puts up with cooking 17 different christmas dishes including a 10-kg ham with Christian forbearance, but shows her contempt for the whole circus through the presents: I got instant coffee and a hand towel, Oskar got toothpaste and economy chocolate.

Ida and I have taken every excuse to sing Swedish seasonal songs in harmony. The daylight hasn't filtered down much. God jul etc etc folks!

Linda's bread social

2007-12-19T13:29:00.000Z

Since I‘ve only made it to shops (clothes, books)about three times since summer, I figured it’s ridiculous to think that I could start pro-shopping now, for consumer-Christmas. This dog’s forgotten those tricks. Last time I went into a clothes store was when the mail order people at [surprisingly pricy label for what it is] sent me back my cheque saying they’d run out of trousers, so I visited their meatworld shop instead and blew £100 on two pairs. That was only because I suddenly realised that I couldn’t cross my legs at a meeting because the external consultant I was sitting next to would spot my tattered trouser cuffs. (cuffs? Lahkeet anyway.) I do have the inclination to buy clothes, let’s not get all holier-than-thou, but there’s nothing in the affordable shops that I want until this hideously misguided 80s revival blows over. I can just see the marketing people falling over themselves, laughing incredulously, going ‘they’re STILL buying the red leggings!!!’

So anyway, my loved people are getting baked goods, edible mail-order organic stuff, second-hand books and stuff handmade by my friends with artisanal companies. Ideally, The Good T-shirt Company t-shirts if i can track down Imelda. Suzie and Ben got rum-soaked chocolate cakes that were more chocolate than cake. Indeed, Ben suggested that next time, I should just make a slab of chocolate coating (melt 150 g chocolate, 50 g butter, ½ dl cream) and glue thin sheets of cake on with apricot jam. Inside-out cake.

I had intended to bake bread on the same day as the cakes, but that was the day the landlord was removing the putrefying rat caracss from our kitchen ceiling so kitchen usage intensity had to remain low for both aesthetic and epidemiological reasons.

Instead, I baked yesterday. With guests! I can recommend this actually as a social pastime, especially if your kitchen is a bit bigger than ours. Al arrived first, got press-ganged into bread detail, and chopped apricots and mixed the dough while I fussed around melting margarine and mashing carrots. Soon we were both elbow-deep in bowls of warm sticky friendly dough (we were making a double batch, all bowls were needed), very therapeutic and satisfying. Cat and Housemate Chris arrived just as we’d set the dough to the side to prove and I’d washed up. Soon it was time to knead and make the loaves and everybody wanted to braid their own loaf – we made plaits, not slabs – I say forget drinking and watching movies for entertainment, this was brilliant fun. Then you get the bonus of cutting into a warm fragrant loaf (the smell driving you crazy for 20 minutes beforehand) and eating bread (butter, cheese, radishes, salami) silent and intent like the animals we know we really are.

Carrot bread recipe

2007-12-19T13:27:00.000Z

Carrot bread

(using metric measurements – 1 deciliter, dl, is 1/10 liter. A cup is about 2.5 dl.)

5 dl hand-warm water

50 g yeast or 2 sachets dried yeast

1 dl golden syrup

1 tbsp salt

A bit of Orange peel or zest

500 g carrot puree or mash

100 g chopped dried apricots

3 dl porridge oats

4 dl melted margarine

1 kg bread flour

Start by dissolving the yeast in the warm water (dry yeast gets mixed with the flour, use warmer water). Add the other ingredients, alternating dry and liquid ingredients, mixing to a soft dough. Knead and leave to prove for ½ hour. Knead the dough and bake into two loaves. Leaving these to rise for a bit helps but is not strictly speaking necessary. Bake at 200 degrees for about 45 minutes (mine took a bit shorter).

+/- 300 years

2007-11-03T12:33:00.000Z

Here's a throwaway line from a novel (set in the late 1600s): "the winter had been harsh. One third of Finns died and the survivors flocked to the coasts" -- then it went on to talk about privateers in the English channel but that line was enough for a HOLD on!! moment.

ONE THIRD of the population died. My ancestors were among the two thirds whose genetics survived. I was reading this lounging on the sofa and put the massive 900-page book down on my chest and thought down to my DNA curled up in every cell: congratulations, guys. Amazing work. We made it. I started trying to imagine my ancestor - female? Working on a farm somewhere? Or in a hovel in the forest? Young or old? How did she survive the winter of 1696-97? Was she just lucky, or did she have to sacrifice family and steal food from others and scrabble for corpses and eat dead rotten frozen things? Did she come away from the famine scarred and stunted and with a twisted relationship to food for the rest of her life?

But then I thought, hang on, that's only one person. How many ancestors of mine were alive in 1696? 300 years - 10 generations - 1024 persons. 1024 persons' genetic inheritance survived the famine among the 2/3 of Finns (and some Swedes), and kept surviving for the next 300 years, and contributed bits of DNA to me.

Who were these people? I don't think I'd be especially close to them or feel any unusual affinity with them. 1/1024th of my genetics from each - that doesn't leave a lot of scope for looking or behaving similar, it wouldn't be like meeting a long-lost cousin or grandparent where you could look out for yourself in them. One of the ancestors of 1696 (at a minimum) would have had brown eyes like me, but beyond that they would have been all shapes, all sizes, different ages, all personalities. Thinking about it like that made me realise what a silly and artificial idea 'the family tree' is, with the sense of 'X begat Y' when actually X had 4 grandparents and added to X's wife's 4 grandparents that already gets messy on the parchment where you're writing the family tree out in calligraphy, and Y had three siblings and a half-brother and now you're run out of parchment space even though you turned it to landscape instead of portrait.

Actually we're looking at something like a family fishing-net, thousands of strands knotted and interlinked and pulled across and branching out and spreading in every direction. The DNA gets mixed and churned like water molecules in the sewage-to-rain cycle.

So now that this DNA of my 1024 ancestors has made it this far, we still can't say we're high and dry. They made it some distance, but they need to keep going. There's never an end to survival and evolution. You can never win, only lose (by having all your genetics die out) - how bloody exhausting is that - what a burden if you start taking it seriously. Serious, like all those formerly starving grave Renaissance Finns who know what it is to survive a winter where everyone around you dies...recombined, blended-and-liquidised DNA snippets in each one of my cells, with no purpose in me except to keep procreating.

OK folks, all in good time.

Meanwhile, it's a funny experiment to think who my 1023 contemporaries are - the ones who will be my co-ancestors for our little progeny in 300 years' time. They could be absolutely anyone. 1023 individuals more or less in my generation...I might meet a few of them - the parents of my child's partner and maybe the grandparents of my grandchild's partner. But I'd hope for a worldwide spread. Since we don't live in villages where everybody marries people they know and whom everybody else knows, that leaves 1016 who are likely to remain total strangers to me and each other until some of our descendants encounter after 290 years and like the look of each other. Or get paired up in the breeding programme or whatever.

capoeu-foria

2007-09-17T16:11:00.000Z

Just thought I'd publish this bit of writing, of which I am quite fond. This got the Abolicao Trust thousands of euros in funding! Those crazy Dutch...Feel free to zone out for the project details at the end. But of course who knows, you might read this, get inspired, and invent some crazy-creative event to fundraise. For me, the heartfelt stuff is about capoeira, and I think everyone should have ac hance to learn. Anyway:

Capoeira started as a Brazilian vernacular art of the oppressed: a way of unarmed fighting developed (according to oral history) by plantation slaves and disguised as dance. Capoeira embodies a culture of protest, struggle for emancipation, subversion in the face of crushing domination, and appropriating and evolving your own heritage.

Capoeira today is kicking and feinting within a rich setting of music, rhythm, grace and flow. It can range from a dazzling whirl of acrobatics and hair-raising moments of near-missed spinning kicks in the regional style, to a slow game of tricks, traps, bluff and ritual in the angola style. Angola is only one of the many terms and songs that refer to the African heritage of black Brazilians. Besides being a musical and physical activity, capoeira provides a community of its own. It has an immense lexicon of movements, etiquette, music, songs (with lyrics about everyday life, freedom, plantation work, politics, love and mischief), history, internal politics and rivalries, and religion and spirituality.

This passage by a student from the group ‘Abolicao’ with Contra-Mestre Luis Negao in Oxford, UK, shows some of the exhilaration of a capoeira game:
“We strive to be possessed by rhythm and momentum and grace, while foot-fighting and near-missing each others’ heads. The best capoeira games are where you’re already stoked up on chanting and rhythm and you come into the ring rocking to the pulse. You face someone you like, with a positive attitude and low ego, you look each other in the eye, shake hands, grin, get the signal from the berimbau player, and swirl in close with the first feint, kick or cartwheel. You stick close to each other, but separate to regroup or break the momentum; give each other space to show off, but also keep on your toes watching for the next attack. Your muscle memory has kicked in and performs the standard movements, giving some liminal bottom-left section of the brain space to watch for openings, plot traps, break habits and concentrate on flourishes. The word-brain is totally sidelined, there’s no anxiety, no self-consciousness, no awareness of the circle of people chanting you on or of the blisters or the dirt on your t-shirt. It’s eloquent communication without a word.” (Student Fio de Ouro)

For centuries, capoeira belonged only to the underclass, to the black people, poverty and oppression. Having been stigmatized for so long by the association with poverty and marginalisation, capoeira was only legalized and institutionalised in Rio de Janeiro in 1923, and now enjoys the position of Brazilian national sport. Since the early 1990s capoeira has been spread worldwide by travelling capoeira teachers from Brazil, initially in the large cosmopolitan cities in Europe and North America, but it is increasingly reaching provincial towns and middle-income countries.

However, capoeira’s return ‘home’ to Africa is still in its infancy. Although groups are established in Luanda, Nairobi and Cape Town, the students tend to belong to middle-class elites with the disposable income to pay the teacher. One of the attempts to bring capoeira back to ordinary, non-privileged African people is the efforts of the Oxford-based capoeira group Grupo Abolicao (abolition – of slavery) training under Luis Negao do Patrocinio, known as Contra-Mestre Negao. In 2005 Grupo Abolicao set up a children’s capoeira project in Abaete, Salvador Bahia, Brazil and since 2003 our group members have been participating with capoeira training at the children’s capoeira group in our second project in South Afirca, part of the umbrella NGO the Keiskamma Trust. In 2005 Contramestre Luis Negao founded the THEAbolicao Trust, a registered charity entirely funded by Abolicao Oxford capoeira members, who work hard ot support the two projects.

The group in Hamburg, Eastern Cape, is part of the Keiskamma Trust’s Early Childhood Development Project. The group evolved from several months of volunteering stints from Oxford students Tom and Bailarina, with periodic visits from Luis Negao to provide higher-level teaching, the link to Brazil, inspiration and grading. Here, young South African students Msindisi Mva or ‘Tigre’ and Lwazi Tupeni or ‘Falcao’ have taken over teaching regular classes, and are with dedication and energy evolving their own capoeira. Grupo Abolicao invited Tigre and Falcao to Brazil in 2006 to visit the Projecto Crianzas do Abaete, and see the roots of capoeira. We hope to strengthen and repeat these links in 2007.

Grupo Abolicao Oxford Capoeira has been running the project Crianzas Raizes do Abaete project since 2005 - and supporting a capoeira school for children in Negao’s home neighbourhood Abaete in Salvador, Bahia. Abaete is a low-income area where the capoeira school provides a focal point for approximately 70 children and their families.