Yo, so here’s a new and improved draft for the movie. Again, just a draft . . . nothing is final until the ladyfriend says so.

Also, Sharone sent me this. It’s amazing:

While Jenna was here, she befriended some of the deaf people around Bangui and we sort of stumbled into making a short video of the situation for the deaf in CAR. I put up something up on it a while ago, but here’s the grande oeuvre (or a draft of it, anyway).

It still needs some work, but it’s almost there. When it’s finished we’ll put it up on the official blog, but here’s the latest version . . . Let us know what you think!

Oh — and some have already mentioned problems seeing the captions: I’m working on making them larger, but it’s a long process.

Further, if you’re seeing the player controls over the movie, simple keeping your mouse off of the movie will make the controls disappear.

So, bad news: the peace process here has ended. All of the parties have walked out b/c the president chose to extend amnesty only to his own forces and not to others involved in the peace process. From what I’ve been hearing from people outside of Bangui, the response has been immediate: violence is breaking out in the north of country.

People in Bangui aren’t concerned yet, but . . . This country is only as big as France. Ironically, this is one of the situations in which you hope that the civil infrastructure is bad enough that the rebels can’t reach the capital (there are three or four anti-gov’t forces) . . . but that’s how the last coup happened, so we’ll see.

Hopefully I’ll see you all at the end of August 🙂

[Honestly, I wouldn’t worry: although the situation is serious, it’s really a resumption of what was going on before and not an escalation beyond that]

This is just a little clip about one of the more unexpected things going on at the office. A bit of an intro: there are very limited restrooms here, so men tend to go wherever they feel so inclined. There is a designated spot, but what I found mindblowing (besides peeing in plain view of all ones colleagues) was that the area is also right next to someone’s office.

I don’t mean to be rude and judgmental (because what are people supposed to do? Hold it until they get home?) . . . but I really was surprised that peeing on someone’s office space is okay (but not in front of it).

We were looking at the length of days here (being only 4 degrees from the equator, there is virtually no variation at all in the length of the day) and found that the longest day here is 12 hours and 20 minutes long. The shortest? 11 hours and 53 minutes.

Anyway, I promised I’d talk about my work. Basically, my role is multifaceted. It is:

1. To take what is happening here, from a humanitarian and development perspective and report it to the rest of the world (which is really the rest of world that’s interested in donating money at a governmental and organizational level to help CAR’s humanitarian situation and their development).

So to that end, the Blog has to maintain a tone of urgency and clarity over what the issues are and what can be done to ameliorate them (to whatever extent is possible). But it’s also a fine line because the UNDP (who I work for) has to maintain good relations with the government and with all the NGOs that are working here. So, you need to tread lightly when criticizing anything, bearing in mind that you or someone you work with might very well find themself across the table from someone who was responsible for X, Y or Z problem.

2. To redesign and improve the hdptcar.net website (increase its ranking on google, get more traffic in general, et cetera). When you searched for Central African Republic in June (before I arrived), hdptcar.net website came up on the bottom of the fifth page. This is pretty unbelievable considering that it’s a blog about CAR that is updated several times a week. Since I’ve been here, we’ve been able to move it to the top of page 3 (with a little help from Qiana). Traffic has remained the same . . . so if anyone has any ideas, that’d be great.

As for the design, they wanted to move it over to a different platform. Right now it’s a blog, and they wanted to move it to a content management system called Joomla. I tried to convince them that it was both overkill and unnecessary to do that. It worked and I just finished and launched an upgrade and redesign to the site last night. Huzzah!

3. Improve the Ministry of Planning’s website (http://minplan-rca.org/) — people from SIRIUS will sympathize with this greatly — the edict from the minister is “make it move.” Awesome.

I’m beginning this task this week. It’s not looking like it’s going to be particularly easy.

==
So, in effect, my position is a writer, designer, project manager, and developer. I work in a boiler room at the Ministry of Planning with one other American (who happens to be from Columbia as well), a Swiss fellow, and a German who is my boss. Everyone is SUPER motivated (i.e., works all the time). That said, they are very smart and detail oriented with a “lets just get it out the door” attitude.

It’s a great environment to work in . . . and, honestly, it’s in stark contrast to the overall working climate in CAR which seems to be very slow. This is referred to colloquially as “capacity.” The capacity here is quite low: many people don’t have a lot of experience using computers, networks, email, et cetera. So we, as resident experts, end up also doing a lot of basic IT support (e.g., setting up printers, installing drivers, getting rid of viruses), even though it’s not really what the group is here to do.

I have more to say about it, but I’ll spare you . . . this post is already too long.

Oh, and tomorrow, I’ll have a surprise video for you. It’s childish, but honestly, it’s unlike anything I have ever seen at any workplace in my life.

As an aside: we just moved our office over to the ministry of planning which happens to be a half a block from where I live.

I also found out that the woman whose apartment I’m staying in isn’t coming back until the 21st of August. That means that I’ve been living here, rent-free, for the entire time that I’ve been here — and entirely by myself or with Jenna . . . which is nice because that means that the $3200 it cost to get here will be defrayed slightly by what I’m getting paid.

Anyway, I’ve realized that the entire time that I’ve been here, I’ve completely avoided talking about my job. The reasons for this are two-fold: one because it takes me a long time to sort out my feelings about these things, and the other is because three days after I arrived, my coworkers here found my blog (internet dorks all).

Suffice it to say, that makes for an environment in which it’s difficult to talk about what I’m doing (for fear that I might offend people I spend all of my time with). That said, I’d say the experience so far has been very positive in many ways and I’ll definitely post more about it later.

So, last weekend, after stopping at the crocodile lake, we arrived at the village of Boali and it’s attendant waterfall. The view and the place were absolutely beautiful. Honestly, it’s definitely the nicest thing I’ve seen here: very peaceful, the people were nice, and there was also no one there even though it’s a dyed in the wool tourist attraction. Well, that’s not entirely true: there were two other Chinese tourists . . . but even still, basically no one.

Boali is basically the source for all the power in CAR as well. There are two hydroelectric powerstations there: Boali 1 and Boali 2. Boali 1 only has one hydroelectric turbine out of 3 that works and Boali 2 has no turbines that have ever worked (i.e., it has never, ever, generated any power at any point ever). Nevertheless, Boali 1 (which is visible in the later part of the video) is a very pretty building, even if it basically serves no purpose.

3/4 of the way to Boali is this little park called Crocodile Lake. The name is pretty much self-explanatory: it’s a lake full of crocodiles. The whole thing is really bizarre, starting with driving about 10 km off of the main road, through a series of these super small villages along a narrow dirt road in the middle of the bush to get to the park. Kids came running out of their clay brick huts to wave (or stare).

After about 15 minutes of driving, you arrive at the entrance (which is this totally overgrown driveway that, unless this old man hadn’t come out to meet us, would have led us to believe the place wasn’t there).

He charges you the entrance fee to the park ($2.50/person) and forces you to buy live chickens on a string ($5/chicken). We only opted for one (but ended up getting another one on the spur of the moment because of some arcane crocodile “fairness” doctrine that said that it was unfair that one crocodile should eat while the other feasted on delicious chicken). Anyway, the video that follows isn’t really material you should watch around a meal (or if you feel bad about watching animals get hurt).

On the walk down, the guy slapped the chicken into his hand to make it squawk . . . for some reason I found this as upsetting or more than watching the chicken get eaten by the crocodile.

As for the soundtrack . . . it just seemed like a good fit.

In contrast to what often happens when you talk to random people on the street (which is that everything typically ends up coming down to a need for your money), the deaf kids that Jenna met this week were different. Many of them have trouble finding work, but some have managed to find a niche selling these large funeral flower arrangements by the side of the main road into town. She spent hours talking to them when she first met them, we visited their school yesterday and she went back to the school again today to talk to the administration.

A little background before the video: there’s a project UNICEF is doing called “Our Stories” which is an attempt to get all kinds of stories from people all over the world on video and then put them up on the internet. Why? For posterity’s sake, I guess. For those of you that are familiar with Story Corps (which airs on NPR once a week), it’s done in conjunction with them and is similar in its mission.

Anyway, my idea was that a fun way of doing this would be to ask people to tell a joke or a story that they thought was funny or would make their friends laugh. Jenna, running with the idea, asked one of the kids to tell a funny story. This is what he came up with:

[this is my weak translation — not Jenna’s]

Jenna and I visited a school for the deaf this morning. It was very interesting and the kids there were very very nice. Of course, the teachers hadn’t been paid in four years and there were only two of them for many, many students. But other than that, they seemed to have a very good community.

I took about 40 minutes of video which I’m going to edit into about 4 to 6 minutes of material, so . . . hopefully that’ll be done tonight or tomorrow.

In another interesting note: people don’t go out when it rains here. This morning it was raining like nothing you’ve ever heard or seen (it doesn’t look like much on video, otherwise I’d post it) and when I finally got to work, it was completely empty. “Why?” you ask? Because many people in CAR don’t come to work when it rains. I’ve been told it’s because people don’t have the proper equipment (jackets, galoshes, umbrellas) to appropriately cover up so that when they arrive at work they’re not soaking wet. Thus, they simply don’t come.