Well, kinda: here’s my first post. It’s on the power crisis (this is technically one small aspect of the job that I’m supposed to be doing):

http://hdptcar.net/blog/2008/07/09/central-african-republic-plunged-into-darkness-after-power-system-collapses/

You’d think we were all heading to the airport by the sound of it. We’re not.

Well, kinda: here’s my first post. It’s on the power crisis (this is technically one small aspect of the job that I’m supposed to be doing):

Central African Republic plunged into darkness after power system collapses/

You’d think we were all heading to the airport by the sound of it. We’re not.

Of course, the video above is the worst possible shot of the Oubangui river, but it does capture a certain feel that’s here: there is a lot of beautiful nature here — it’s really quite a green city. Greener, certainly, than New York. But then there’s also this undercurrent of detritus . . . a worn out, this-place’s-time-has-passed, the-best-isn’t-yet-to-come kind of look.

Bangui looks out, across the river, onto the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It’s interesting to see because, over on their side of the river, there are no trees really. Pretty much every single one has been cut down for fuel and all that’s left is underbrush.

Conversely, in Bangui, they’ve worked to limit the use of trees for fuel (at least within the city limits), which has left much of the trees intact. Since 87% of residents in CAR still get most of their energy from wood, this is pretty remarkable (remember that video view from my office? There’s a veritable forest on that there hill).

Anyway, we’ve been trying to find the gym so that Jenna can go exercise when she feels so inclined. Sadly, rumor has it that everything there, in terms of machines, is damn near dangerous to work with. Moreover, to get there, you need to go past the presidential palace where people are known to stopped by the police and harassed: hardly worth it for a trip to the gym.

I won’t do another post on the power for a while, but suffice it say, getting power AND internet has been quite a chore for the past few days. Because the power is totally unreliable now, and everyone’s generators have now been running for several days, the NGOs are beginning to run out of fuel for them or they’re simply breaking down.

There are two fuel barges scheduled to arrive in Bangui later this week (we’ll see if that happens). However, they were both scheduled to arrive long before the breakdown of power station and their delivery likely won’t last the next three weeks. It’s not clear whether or not more is scheduled to arrive, but the rumor is that Total (the fuel provider) is doing what it can to get supplies here.

In the mean time, NGOs are having to act as make-shift supply lines, carrying all the fuel that they intend to use out into the field with them — being unable to count on any supplies being available outside of the capital.

So, for now, we’ve been driving around Bangui, trying to find power and internet wherever it may be. And we wait for the whole house of cards to come crashing down in the near future.

I just moved from my boss’ house to the apartment of a friend of a classmate of mine (apparently, everyone in my class knows someone who lives somewhere). She’s got a very nice apartment in a part of town that doesn’t get its electricity cut ever (or nearly ever). This is a big deal, I suppose, because everyone else I work with (with the exception of one person) has to deal with these unpredictable power cuts, often lasting for days.

Anyway, Jenna arrived last Wednesday night at around 11:30pm and we’ve been hanging out and exploring the town since then. There has been a conference of the Catholic Bishops in town and it’s a major deal for the city of Bangui. Lucky for us, the largest Catholic church in town is half a block away. I would show you pictures, but I just found out that it is illegal to take pictures in Bangui. Let me repeat that, IT IS ILLEGAL TO TAKE PICTURES IN BANGUI. What?!

Not that I’ll let that stop me, but the new rule is that I can’t take pictures any place where there are men or women in uniform.

That said, at this conference of Bishops, it was a very interesting scene: in the enormous front lawn of the church were the Bishops. They were sitting on risers with a cloth awning that had been constructed specifically for the occasion. There was very loud music playing from underneath a tent next to the risers — it sounded like a kwassa kwassa with a full choir or something: very very festive and loud. There were thousands of people crowded around the risers and the tent, both sitting in chairs and standing, and there was a rhythmic movement of the whole group. Moreover, virtually everyone was wearing paper hats with the name of a saint or something (pardon my ignorance).

Then, on the outskirts of the enormous, 3000-4000 person crowd were the gendarmerie and the military. There were guys with rocket propelled grenades, rifles, machine guns, and then these groups of two or three guys riding around in the back of pick-up trucks manning what looked to be anti-aircraft guns: these enormous cannons (and sometimes batteries of four guns), ominously not pointed skyward.

It lets you know something about the safety situation here: it seems that one might worry less about the private citizen and more about the military and political conflict. As a co-worker was saying to me: the people around here don’t have very much power, but they see that the people who do have power are the people with guns and a uniform — what would you do?

Moment of zen:

So, you know, it’s all fun and games for me to lament the lack of power and water, but in a city of over half a million people, losing power can quickly become a serious disaster.

For me, it’s not such a big deal: I’ve got financial flexibility, I’m mobile, I speak English, I work for a good organization, et cetera. But for the actual Central African full time residents, this kind of situation is far more dire — and in ways that may not fully be grasped.

First off, without power, the city has trouble running the water pumps that feed the city. Without water pumps, sanitation of any kind becomes an issue very quickly. In a city of over 500,000, residents will start taking water wherever it is that they can get it. Ditches, polluted streams, drainage canals, the river, et cetera. This, without a doubt, means the beginnings of epidemics such as cholera.

Bangui — at night. With generators doing most of the work . . . (turn off the sound):

Also, without power the city has trouble running its hospitals. Gas, needed for generators, isn’t exactly cheap: it costs $600 a day to run a typical business sized generator here. That’s in a place where the government’s budget is around $30,000,000/yr (that’s thirty million). Without any hospital care to treat the disease and illness that inevitably arises from a lack of water comes large scale epidemics.

Now imagine that there isn’t power throughout the city and the only way to get power is to buy gasoline to power your generator. What do you think happens to the price of gas? Since the only way to have power or move anything here requires the use gasoline, the price of everything will skyrocket: food, water, medicine, beer. Everything.

With epidemics and inflation comes almost certain political upheaval, especially because the issues with power have long been known to be entirely preventable: the gov’t has been offered help to deal with this issue (as I’ve been told), and has chosen not to take it for various reasons – disorganization and pride being the likely culprits.

That said, now the gov’t is willing to accept the help that it should have taken at least a year ago when it was offered. The current rumor is that the power won’t be regular for at least six months — which, knowing CAR, probably means much longer than that. And what do I mean by “regular”? Well, regular is having reliable, continuous power in most of the city for longer than 3 to 6 hour spells every 48 hours.

Some might say, well, at least you have some power. That’s true, but this isn’t about being grateful that something works in a poor country. This is about a poorly managed situation leading to an even poorer result that was entirely avoidable. And the “entirely avoidable” part must be emphasized.

This, of course, is a worst case scenario being played out on paper. We’ll see what really happens. For now, like I said earlier, they say the power will be on/off for the next six months . . . I’m only here for two.

You’d think that living in New York for seven years would give you, at the very least, the stones to be able to deal with a whinny cab driver.

Last night, I was going home from work at about 8pm (as is per the usual here). I walked outside the UNDP compound and one of the private security guards that work the gate came out behind me — ostensibly to help me hail a taxi.

Some background here: there are two types of taxis here in Bangui and both of them look exactly the same. The first type is your regular taxi: hail, stop, get in, destination, pay fee (XAF1000 during the day and XAF1500 at night). (the exchange is XAF 410 = $1). So about $3.50 for a cab at night to anywhere in the city.

The other type of taxi is what my co-worker calls a “bus-taxi.” For those of you who only had one friend who had a drivers license but many friends who wanted to go to Big Boy to smoke cigarettes, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how this works. Usually there are between four and six people jammed into something slightly larger than a Beetle. The cabbie will only drive straight down whatever road he’s on and when your stop comes near, you tell him to stop, he stops (if you’re in the middle seat, everyone piles out) and you pay XAF150. It’s the best deal in town. These cabs are blunt instruments, but they get the job done if you live on one of the major routes.

Let me preface this by saying that I do not live on one of the major routes. I live between the Democratic Republic of Congo’s consulate and the Danish Medicins Sans Frontieres office. It’s on a dirt road near the somewhat recently looted stadium (which is next to the other stadium that was recently built by the Chinese for CAR — a nice gesture, I thought). So, I always have to take the less common taxis that are the ones that we’re all more familiar with.

Back to the story; so the security guard hails a taxi for me and tells him where I’m going (which is weird because I definitely speak enough French and have enough life experience to do both, but, whatever). After their conversation ends, the driver hands him a coin and we drive off.

I ask the driver, “XAF 1500, right?”
“Right,” he says.
I say, “Are you sure?”
“Yes. XAF 1500. no problem.”

Literally, no more than five minutes later, we arrive at my house. The guards are sitting out front, talking to the other guards on the street. Everything is fine. I hand the guy XAF 1500 and he turns to me and says, “No, it’s XAF 2000.”
I say, “What?”
He, with incredulity, ups the volume, “it’s XAF2000.”
“Why?!”
“The security guard, I gave him XAF500. That means the price is XAF 2000.”
“But we agreed on XAF1500”
“That’s true, XAF1500 in addition to the XAF500 you must pay me,” acting as though this was perfectly clear from the beginning (please review our earlier conversation if you’re confused)

By now the security guards are interested and walk over. This isn’t necessarily a good thing because these guys wield their authority like bulls in china shops. Anyway, the guard is listening to what I have to say, and he starts yelling at the cabbie in Sangho, the language that everyone here speaks (which is weird because while everyone here speaks Sangho, only some people speak French, and yet French is the official language — yet another totally strange thing about this place).

They yell at each other for about a minute or two, and then I interject that it’s insane that I should have to pay him extra both because he said the price was XAF1500 to begin with and because it was hardly my fault that he gave the UN guard XAF500.

Finally, after a few more minutes of shouting, grumbling, more shouting and assorted whines from the cab driver, I just get out and start walking towards the house.

And this is where I completely don’t understand myself at all.

For some reason, I turned around, walked back to the driver (who had now done a 180 in the middle of the road), and gave him the XAF 500. The driver wasn’t happy about it. I wasn’t happy about it. And I don’t think the security guard who had yelled at the guy for three minutes on my behalf was, was happy about it either — he was totally puzzled, if not completely pissed off. And why shouldn’t he be? What I did makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Which makes me wonder: was it just the principle?

Abe just told me a story about how, when he was living in Beijing several years ago, he got into a fight with a cab driver over $.85. Things got so heated that the driver took out a tire iron and started threatening Abe and his friends with it — the conflict culminating when one of the members of Abe’s party got his shirt torn off. But I think they never paid. And rightfully so.

wtf.

I just remembered this very strange exchange I had on my way to Bangui.

Just a little background, in order to get to Bangui, you either need to fly Air France (French, $3200) or fly Afriqiyah (Libyan, $1000 – $1500). There are other airlines, but they’re not recommended (Air Chad and Air Cameroon) — and I imagien that’s for good reason.

So, if you fly Afriqiyah, you need to go through Libya on your way to C.A.R. I was looking forward to this because I don’t know many people who have been to Libya and, although it sounds stupid, it seemed like it might be nice to see their airport, even if that’s all I would have the ability to see.

Libya’s Airport. YAWN.

One question: sign language support for the sermon? Wow.

So, I bought a Sprite ($2!), sat in the “cafe” and waited for about two hours. Unfortunately, the video doesn’t have high enough resolution to show what I could see from where I was sitting at the time: a beautiful portrait of Mohammar Qaddafi, under whom was written in English “the Libyan people are not slaves to wage labor” (or something to that effect). It was an interesting first intellectual glimpse of a place about which I know little.

Eventually, we were directed to our gate, where there was a security screening, if you want to call it that. Some passengers walked around the metal detector, laughing with the “security guard” dressed in a golf shirt and faded dark blue slacks, then taking their seats in the gate’s waiting area. Others walked through, setting off the metal detector with virtually no reaction from the guard, other than to smile and wave them past.

Then it was my turn. I put my bag through the baggage scanner, handed the guard my ticket and passport on the other side of the metal detector and then started through the metal detector with the rest of my body. Of course, I set both off. He laughed, looked at the man watching the x-ray of the bag and he said:

fshhsdhf “battery” asdffds “american” asdfsaf “bomb”

To which the other guy laughed, looked at me, and then looked at the x-ray operator and said:

adsjghuer “battery” adsfffd “terrorist” jfgfiuinm “American” fdshdskas

And then looked at me with a big smile on his face and said, in Arabic:

“Role reversal”

Or at least that’s what it seemed like to me, because all three of us started laughing. And then he asked me to open my bag and show him the batteries. I did. We all smiled and had a good laugh, and then I was on my way.

All I can say is, you can’t make that joke in an American airport.

While eating dinner at Chez Fatou (this Senegalese woman’s dining room, basically), the power cut out (again). The restaurant is kind of on the outskirts of a slightly more run-down area of the city — but it’s really not all that bad. The owner is very nice and the food is delicious (spicy chicken + spicy onion cream sauce + rice= crazy delicious).

This is a video of eating in the dark at Chez Fatou with my classmate Matt (it turns out that the only other intern at the UNDP in CAR is this guy who I go to school with at SIPA). Weird.