LEMURS!

Anananarivo: HECTIC!

I got into Madagascar yesterday afternoon after a couple of restful days in Johannesburg, hilighted by a powerful visit to the Apartheid Museum there.

In the eighteen hours I've been in Madagascar, on the street I've been offered - in order of usefulness - a bottle of water, cell phone airtime, a baugette and other foods, clothing, French-language newspapers, calculators, raw meat, bamboo, live animals, and a 40-pound full-scale replica model sailing ship.

Tana is a bustling town, and you need to share the streets and narrow sidewalks with cars, rickshaws, and the armies of street vendors walking around. It's, to borrow a word from RSA, quite hectic.

Madagascar also seems a bit difficult to navigate. I speak almost no French, and - although there's some English spoken here - have done a lot of pointing and gesturing, and getting around is also tough - there are virtually no street signs and all rental cars come with drivers - it's impossible to drive your own vehicle, though I'm not sure why.

I have plans to spend the rest of the day exploring the capital here, then tomorrow I'll head south to spend a few days visiting some national parks and searching for lemurs.

Photos from Namibia

Swakopmund: Been There, Dune That

I’ve been in Namibia for three days now and have started to compile a list of the positives and negatives about the country.

Pros: amazing desert landscapes and scenery; interesting mix of African and German influence; lots of adventure sports options.

Cons: long distances; the sand gets everywhere.

Namibia is vast. Once I got out of the Windhoek capital area on the 450+ km drive to beach, there were barely any people or cars on the road, and nothing but mountains and barren landscapes dotted with small industrial mining towns. (Uranium is mined in the towns I passed on my drive; the diamond mining areas in the south have restricted access.) With 1.8M people (about 600K more than Swaziland, and more than 15x Swaz’ size) and the huge, barely inhabitable Namib desert, it’s the least dense country in Africa in terms of population.

So far I’ve spent most of my time playing in the sand dunes around the beach town of Swakopmund. On Thursday I went quad-biking (motorized mini 4x4ing), and yesterday I tried sand-boarding (like snowboarding, but impossible). I took a couple of face plants and have spent the last 18 hours finding sand in all corners (shoes, hair, ears, pockets, nostrils, etc.).

Swakopmund is a tourist town, and there’s a strong German feel here in the architecture, restaurants and braushouses, and language. You’re more likely to here German being spoken than English, Afrikaans, or any of the 50+ tribal languages within the country.

This country’s too big to see in a week, and I’ve decided to head south and push further into the desert than to drive to the game parks in the north. I’ll head out from Swakopmund later today for Sossusvlei in the Namib Desert, and look forward to some hikes in the dunes tomorrow and Monday.

Itinerary

Wednesday morning I leave Swaziland. I have three and a half weeks to travel through southern Africa before heading back to New York. I'm looking forward to the trip.

15 Oct: Namibia
21 Oct: Jo'burg
23 Oct: Madagascar
29 Oct: Mauritius
5 Nov: Reunion
9 Nov: Zurich
10 Nov: New York

If you're in the region, drop me a line.

Wrapping Things Up

I’m down to my last couple of days in Swaziland, and have been spending some time wrapping up work, saying goodbye to colleagues and friends, and preparing for a few of weeks of travel which lie ahead. It’s been a great four months, and September – in which I neglected to write much on this blog – was especially enjoyable. It was then that I started to really appreciate the work for the project which I’ve helped move forward (not as much as I had hoped, but enough to see a marked difference), the community of both Swazis and expats that I’ve feel into, and the relaxed life here in the Swaz. (September, incidentally, is a good month for the working man in Swaziland, as we only had one full 5-day workweek due to a number of holidays.) Yesterday was a milestone for The Business Place, as renovations started on the building where TBP will be housed later this year. To mark the occasion, last Friday we held a braai – or BBQ – at the building and a bunch of colleagues from TechnoServe and TBP’s partners came out to help celebrate. Our contractor was there as well, and he brought a sledgehammer for us to take a couple of ceremonial swings on some of the walls that we’re knocking down. (We barely made a dent, as it’s an old building with concrete reinforced walls.) It took a lot to get to the point where we were able to start the construction process, and I’m glad that it happened before my time here is up.

A bunch of TechnoServe colleagues came out to the braai, which was in Big Bend, about 120 kilometers outside of Mbabane. It felt good to include them – I have learned a lot about the work of the horticulture, feed and livestock, handcrafts, business plan competition, and youth entrepreneurship teams in the office, and have collaborated with a few of them. But Sabelo – the Executive Director that we hired last month (a well-connected SME champion and Swazi patriot) to take over the project – and I haven’t had a product to show. Bringing everyone together at the site and giving a short of the building took steps towards that.

I still have a number of loose ends to wrap up before leaving on Wednesday, and am sure that I will have some thinking to do after that. From my experience with my last couple of jobs – with Bike & Build and at Accent – it takes some time after I’ve been away from my work to realize and appreciate what I’ve learned and accomplished. I hope to add some of my thoughts here in a few weeks.

40-40-29

With all of the banners and streamers that have been placed around Mbabane the past week, it’s been hard not to think two things. First: something big is happening. And second: this is a country that knows how to celebrate.

Yesterday was the big 40-40 event here, the double celebration of Swaziland’s 40th year of independence (actual date, September 6, 1968), and King Mswati III’s 40th birthday (actual date, sometime last April). To commemorate the occasion, there was a big party in the main stadium, complete with entertainment, marching and military displays, and heads of states and other dignitaries from a number of (mainly southern African) nations. The party also fell on my 29th birthday.

Nick, Shubha, and I went out to the stadium at around 9am yesterday and found some space in one of the bleachers. The ceremony took a long time, as the dignitaries’ arrivals stretched for over an hour. Heads of state from Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the SA Zulu Nation all arrived and were announced to the crowd, which was close to 100,000. The largest cheers – besides for Mswati – went to the Vice President of Taiwan to Zimbabwe’s Mugabe.

Swaziland is one of the few countries to recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty, and reaps a lot of benefits in terms of aid and investment from throwing its weight around on Taiwan’s behalf in the UN and other multilateral bodies. The Taiwanese have a big presence here, and it’s clear that the crowd was responding to them. It’s less clear to me why Mugabe got such a big hand, as most of what I’ve heard from locals about him isn’t at all positive.

The 40-40 celebrations have been controversial here as a large, vocal group has seen it as a big indulgence. I haven’t seen a price tag put on the event in the papers here, but a lot of money has been thrown into it – and not always wisely.

Each of the visiting dignitaries rolled into the stadium in a brand-new USD$100,000+ BMW. The government bought 20 new cars, and – after the news of the expense made its way into the paper – a minister announced that they had always intended to sell the cars immediately after the 40-40. Five of the BMWs have since been taken off the sale block, and will likely end up in the garages of the royal family, ministers, or other connected people. There have been other grandiose expenditures, including a shopping trip in Dubai for 8 of Mswati’s wives. (This article in the NYT recounts Mswati’s extravagance in the face of the nation’s poverty, and captures a lot of the complicated sentiment here about the King and his spending.)

Nick, Shubha, and I lasted through the introductions, a lengthy marching band session, and a few speeches, before ducking out at around 1pm. After the event, I felt the itch to get out of Mbabane and drove down to Maputo for the night. I caught some live music, met some bribe-loving Maputo police officers (once for taking an “illegal” U-turn, and the second time for Driving While White), and toured around the city before heading back to the Swaz.