First off, thanks for all the nice emails and comments!

That said . . . so, office life here is pretty cushy.

We work on the 4th floor (2ieme etage) of a six floor office building in what was formerly the Japanese embassy and is now the UNDP’s office. It’s air conditioned and has an elevator (that doesn’t appear to work), running water, a generator for when the power (frequently) goes out, an outdoor cafeteria (that, so far, puts the canteen in the McGraw-Hill building to shame) and a barbed-wire adorned wall surrounding the perimeter.

Here’s the view from my window:

It’s at the corner of two dusty, mostly paved roads and next to one of many arches that bridge the main roads here. Each arch is painted with an inspirational phrase (pics of this later) in French and something that I can’t understand in Sango (the national language).

The local UNDP office here is mostly staffed by Central Africans. This folds into a larger “capacity building” project which is basically meant to give locals as many jobs in the UNDP as possible. The idea is to that after learning in these jobs, they’ll have enough skills so that they can administer their own country without the help of the UNDP. Obviously, this is a long-term plan . . .

Of course, working at the UN insulates you to some degree from what was really going on: there was no power (from the grid) yesterday, all day. As such, we were using the generator basically all day. So, when I got home last night, there was no power there either (alas, no generator at home). Because there was no power, there was no running water in the UNDP building either . . . It was the same story at home too. boo-hoo.

The difficulties around power stem from the fact that all of CAR is powered by two hydroelectric dams. There are 5 turbines between them, 3 of which absolutely do not work — and I don’t believe that they ever did. And then the other two turbines only work part of the time. Obviously, this all puts an enormous strain on the grid — and as you can imagine, it makes running any kind of operation at all basically impossible without paying for a generator and fuel . . . And fuel isn’t particularly cheap here either . . . so this is just one of the most obvious limitations of trying to get things done in CAR.

Anyway, when we got to work today, the whole building was flooded because someone had left a faucet on on the 6th floor. So when the power came back this morning, the faucet that had been left in the on position started gushing water. And gush it did: it ended up creating a small river from the 6th floor all the way down the stairs to the ground level and out the front door. So, today, they had to turn off the power to the whole building while they fixed the electrical circuits and squeegied out all of the water. That took about 5 hours . . . So I read.

That said, things are pretty easy for us (as in those who work at the UN) compared to your average Central African citizen (who lives on slightly less than a dollar a day). To give that number some perspective, if I had to pay for everything that I used today, my day would have cost somewhere around $30 (electricity, phone, water, A/C, gas, food, et cetera).

…next up is centre-ville. get ready for a lot of red dirt.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Red Hot CAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.