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.

So finally, after much ado (and many false starts), Jenna, Phoebe (a co-worker of mine) and I will be going to Boali this weekend (this is the waterfalls, dam and hydroelectric station). We’ll be making the 70km trek from Bangui in a cab: apparently the road is quite good and there are only two road-block/toll stations on the route — so there’s little need for a more “official” mode of transport.

We’ll also be taking a “trusted driver” — he gives everyone in my office lifts around town, making him more reliable than a random off of the street (as I learned very early on, cabs around here have a funny habit of changing the price between when you leave a place and when you arrive at your destination).

One of the highlights of the trip (that is if Phoebe and I can convince Jenna to do it), is a crocodile pond. The entry fee to the pond is a chicken that kids sell by the side of the road: you feed it (alive) to the crocs while you’re there. Alternatively, you can feel good about yourself and not feed the chicken to the crocodiles and just give the operators the chicken, but the chicken will likely get eaten by someone or something anyway.

Anyhoo, the total price works out to about $80 for the whole trip. Not bad considering we basically have a car and driver for the whole day.

On a more somber note, just about 80km past Boali, the Minister of Forestry was shot to death in his car by bandits. It’s a reminder of the fact that this place, no matter how accustomed you get to it, is never really all that safe — although I really don’t think we have all that much to worry about.

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Speaking of which, I was almost pick pocketed last night on my way home from work. It was, honestly, the most low-budget, after-school-special attempt at a robbery that I’ve ever seen. First, I got out of my cab on a somewhat busy street (busy for cars, but because it was late, there weren’t a lot of people); for those of you that have been following along, it’s the street that has all the stolen library books for sale on it (in fact, right at that point in the street).

Once out of the cab, I waited for traffic to clear so that I could cross the little intersection. I crossed the street and I notice two guys were walking behind me on the “sidewalk”, both moving pretty quickly. One of the guys sped up, cut in front of me quickly and bent over to “tie his shoe”, while the other is maintained a very close clip behind me.

Now, here’s what I was supposed to do (if I wanted to give them my wallet): I should have stopped, said “excuse me” and then the guy behind me would have “bumped” into me and lifted my wallet.

What happened was that, when I saw the guy in front of stoop to “tie his shoe” I turned around, saw the guy behind me stooped over driving towards my wallet, and I just moved out of the way . . . and to my surprise, they both cursed softly, turned around and walked in the other direction . . . To better illustrate, I’ve written a dialog that is relatively analogous to what happened and shows both how obvious and nonthreatening the situation was:

“We want to rob you.”
“What? No.”
“Shit. Fine. Ugh, let’s go.”
“Ok. Bye.”

So, both Jenna and I got sick this weekend. Basically the long and short of it is that we bought peanuts by the side of the road (peanuts being one of the few things that CAR actually has in quantity) and ate WAY too many of them. I didn’t realize this, but you can actually have too many peanuts. Apparently everyone else knew this but me.

Anyway, they sell boiled peanuts in the shell and liquor bottles (used) full of peanuts by the side of the road pretty much everywhere around here. I just thought I was doing my part to support the local economy. Knowing what I know now, I will never support the local economy ever again.

That said, we did end up going to this place called the “Rock Club” this weekend. It’s basically a pool/health club that looks out over the Oubangui river, into the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s a really beautiful view (if you don’t count the smell of the Oubangui river and the fact that the pool was mobbed with about 10,000 unsupervised kids). One of the more unexpected things we saw while we were there, was a huge crowd of Lebanese men smoking hookah and playing dominoes or something.

I’ve been told that there’s a fairly large contingent of business owning Lebanese people here. It’s not really clear why this community has sprouted up, but they’ve apparently taken to the place. In fact, it seems like most of the businesses in town are run by expats of one kind or another: the aptly named “Chinese Restaurant” is run by a Chinese family, the Grand Cafe is run by a Lebanese family, the “Relais de Chasse” is run by a Frenchmen, Chez Fatou (a Senegalese restaurant) is run by a Senegalese woman out of her house, the grocery stores are all run by expats.

One wouldn’t be totally wrong to feel like some of the more prominent aspects of daily life for an expat in CAR weren’t very Central African at all.

So, finally, after several days of work, I was able to put up a post on the semi-famous wildlife reserve here, the Dzanga-Sangha. I guess I got it up there last Friday, but I’m still proud of it.

I would love nothing more than to go and visit, but at $600 for two days, it’s a little out of my price range. Moreover, there’s really no way to replenish the funds that you bring with you because:

1. No business takes credit cards in the Central African Republic. Not one single place.

2. There is not a single ATM in the capital. An ATM was set up about a year ago, but it was never activated.

You really do have to wonder how one could ever do business here when there is literally no other way to bring money into the country than on your person. I’m sure this is related to the fact that CAR has completely land-locked, has unreliable power and all of the data infrastructure is managed via satellite: this makes high-speed business communications out of the country expensive and unreliable (given the method and the power situation).

Of course, this probably sounds funny to people who traveled before 1990 (the era of travelers checks and cash, and the occasional credit card), but it is kind of surprising how much the world has passed this country by. I have to remind myself that if I get robbed or whatever, that’s basically it: no more money until I get paid (when that will happen also seems unclear).

==

In other news, some of the NGOs around here are saying that because of the ongoing power cuts, armed gangs are beginning to maraud in the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Bangui. Nothing terribly organized, but I’m beginning to get slightly nervous because, given what we know about how things tend to get done here (very slowly), it seems likely that things will get worse before they get better.

The robberies are also getting more bold: in one case, a gang of armed men showed up at the gate of an unnamed NGO, the guards opened the gate, and the gang proceeded to take everything from the NGOs office at gunpoint. Although I doubt that they would have the audacity to do that to the UN, it does give you second thoughts about where you’ll go in the city.

==

Jenna and I are going to try again to go to Boali . . . this time we’re going to try and get a cab to drive us there: 70km in 2 hours.

This is my walk to work:

The Economist has a good article on the Central African Republic . . . or had, I should say. It’s several months old, but it pretty much captures it all: Beyond a failed state.

About a quarter of the country’s 4m people have been affected by the violence. The United Nations says some 300,000 have fled their homes. A New York-based lobby group, Human Rights Watch, puts much of the blame on Mr Bozizé’s forces, who, it says, have committed hundreds of murders and burned thousands of homes in a counter-insurgency campaign that started in 2005.

[…]

The country remains mired in poverty and neglect. Unions began a series of strikes at the beginning of the year to demand the payment of over seven months of unpaid salaries for civil servants and teachers; the government says it has no money. Foreign aid-workers say that, though international aid to Africa as a whole has soared, the CAR has got even less than before. Some well-wishers hope that the presence of the incoming EU force may help stabilise the country and enable its economy to start growing again.

At least the government is trying to talk to its opponents. “Rebels or Zaraguinas, they’re just bandits,” says Dieudonné-Stanislas M’Bangot, a presidential adviser. “But we have to negotiate with them, as we don’t have the means to fight them. Do you have any better ideas?”

One of the things that I didn’t really notice right away is how often everyone gets sick here. And people get sick with things that aren’t run-of-the-mill (by western standards) at all. Since I’ve gotten here (three weeks ago), my co-worker’s son got sick with malaria, the security guard at my old house got sick with typhoid, two acquaintances were diagnosed with malaria two days ago, one acquaintance just got over it and one of my coworkers has tonsillitis that so bad that he can’t swallow and is now sitting across from me, spitting in a bucket.

What’s even more impressive is that wounds don’t really heal here either. I got a cut on my arm five days ago — a little scratch from moving my arm too quickly against the corner of something; in other words, a cut that would normally be insignificant and heal in a couple of days. Well, it’s been five days and the scratch appears bigger to me than it was when I initially got the cut. And it’s telling me to do things — awful things.

You do have to wonder, though: in a place where you absolutely do not want to go to the hospitals (I recently heard a story about a man who went to the hospital last week with a broken arm and ended up dying after their treatment), what recourse do you have when you get sick here?

I mean, this is a place where, when you get sick, you just get fired from your job. Then, as you can probably imagine, it really hits the fan. And I’ve already been asked several times by the people who worked at my old place and the by the people who work at the new one for help with the costs of medical care. Apparently this isn’t an uncommon phenomenon.

Finally, in another weird note, and I haven’t experienced this personally, but apparently people die all the time around here. I realize that this sounds naive, but I’ve been told that it’s not uncommon to see a perfectly healthy person one day and then for them to be stone dead the next, as in:

“Where’s Bodoien today? I thought he was going to meet us for X.”
“He died.”
“oh.”

It’s not that I have no experience with death, and it’s not that it’s a casual thing here. It’s more that it either appears to happen with a greater frequency here — or it, in fact, does. And I’d be willing to bet it’s the latter considering that this place has a life expectancy of about 44.

Sorry — this weekend was a disaster in terms of being able to do updates. There was a combination of no power and thus no internet or power and no internet. In any case, this weekend was very slow. We ended up going over to the Alliance Francaise to get Jenna signed up for a short language course. It was ridiculously bureaucratic, involving standing in several lines and filling out paperwork: it was almost as if they don’t want to you sign up.

Anyway, we tried to get her into the least advanced course because she speaks no French at all. Despite our promises that she, indeed, spoke no French, the man who helped us insisted that she take a test. She did, and when he came back to grade it, started laughing at her answers and corrected her as is she ought to have known better. Then Jenna starts looking at me and says: he knows I don’t speak French right? (as if I hadn’t translated properly)

After that we stopped over at the UN Residence for a going away party (the head of UNDP and OCHA — one guy — is leaving at the end of this week). I was impressed: everyone really let loose.

Other than that, we went to hang out at someone’s house on Sunday. Their view of the city is really quite spectacular — even if the city itself isn’t so spectacular — so, behold: Bangui vs the power failure!

So, in my new place, there’s a woman who comes and cooks and cleans the apartment three days a week. Nice, right? Sure.

But, the whole thing just ends up feeling weird for a variety of reasons, chief among them not being accustomed to having someone pick up after you, it ends up being more of an annoyance than anything else . . . you begin to wonder, what can Flore (the femme de menage) be doing all day? The apartment isn’t THAT dirty. My clothes are only washed once every two weeks. She’s only making a meal for two. Why is she charging four cell phones at once?

But this all goes back to my expectations when I came here: I brought utensils and a camping bowl. I brought headlamps and flashlights (which, to be fair, I definitely use). I brought hiking boots. I brought a sleeping sack (different from a bag in that this is really just a sheet). I didn’t know whether I’d be camping out or sleeping in a bed. Or if I’d have running water or a rain barrel.

Now, I realize that I have basically every convenience I had in Brooklyn (minus food delivery and internet — although if I asked my neighbor, I might be able to get on his satellite connection). This is very weird to me. And what makes it so weird (beyond that we’re in one of the poorest countries in world and my standard of living here is incredibly high) is that this is pretty standard for many, if not most of the westerners staying here.

I think I expected that things would a little bit more raw, I guess. In a way, I’m disappointed: I thought that the situation would be harder on me, by necessity. I didn’t expect to be carted around in SUVs and cabs. I thought I’d be walking to work in the heat every day. I didn’t expect to be sitting in an ACd office all day. I didn’t expect to have access to such delicious baked goods (seriously, the bread and pastries here are pretty impeccable).

Of course, I say this, but I also have to remember that one of the important things to remember about being in a place like this is that things can rapidly get very bad — people are beginning to stockpile fuel in beer bottles and sell it by the side of the road, for example. So, I guess I should be careful for what I wish for.

But, for now, I have to say that this place is pretty beautiful, relatively relaxed, made up of mostly peaceful people who are very poor.

This weekend we’re going to try and go up to Boali, 25km north of Bangui. It’s where all of the hydroelectric power for CAR is generated, so I’ll try and take some pictures (or video). Alternatively, we might go up river to this place where a mother hippo abandoned her baby hippos — and now they spend all day swimming around the river. That sounds fun enough . . .