As a result of last night’s heavy snow fall, about 90% of the staff no showed in the office today. I was about 40 minutes late getting into the office mainly because I was stuck in my own drive way for an hour. I had to shovel my way through the communal back alley shared by the other houses around mine.
Anticipating for more snow fall later in the evening, I even brought the shovel along with me to work, so I could shove my way out of things in case I got stuck again. The decision proved rewarding as I shoved out a spot on the side of the road to park my car near the office.
The Kiwi I work with in my department is a dummy. In terms of doing his job, he’s not bad at it if you are a fan of the "Used-Car Salesman Technique." I have never seen anybody lying through their teeth with a straight face like this guy does while all of us surrounding him know that he BS’s a lot.
In addition to that, he was just ripping the other coworker of ours for not making it in today because of the snow. He just went on and on about her absence. I was pretty disgusted with him for the lack of decency and also the way he shows his sympathy for his fellow team member.
Make no bones about it, I am definitely biased about this guy. Just not a fan of this sheepfucker (sorry, I meant him). Before I met him at this job, I wanted to go to New Zealand. Not so much now.
Of the whole time, he never ripped once into our direct supervisor for not making it in today. I guess he was just picking his battles and our other coworker was just an easier target. I can only imagine what he’d say about me had I not make it in today.
He continued to rip into her about being a no show after he’s learned that she lives in the hilly part of the Lower Mainland and that a heavy snow dump like this makes it real difficult to do anything other than staying at home. Meanwhile, he lives walking distance from the office and still walks home for lunch everyday. You can’t be serious, Kiwi.
I also hold a double standard against him as well because for a guy that’s traveled extensively around the world over the last 6 years (yes, he has only been back to NZ once the last six years), I was expecting him to be more empathetic and understanding. Boy, was I wrong. He doesn’t cut anybody any slack, but gives himself plenty. Rightfully so that I should hold my double standard against him! After all, it’s only appropriate and fittingly.
Now I am ripping into him for ripping our team members. What a wanker. I’m gonna snap!
Monday, December 22, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Shoe Me
I read this article and immediately thought of my boy, Bill Maher, and his comments on 9/11 less than a week after the attack.
"ABC decided not to renew Maher's contract for Politically Incorrect in 2002 after he made a controversial on-air remark on September 17, 2001,in which he agreed with guest conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards. He then went on to say, "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."
The show was subsequently cancelled on June 16, 2002." - wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher You can also find this clip on youtube.
Peace on Earth, good shoes toward men
RICK SALUTIN
From Friday's Globe and Mail December 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
Journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe thrower of Baghdad, has given us all a Christmas present - like the gift of the Musli - in the form of a new way to react to rage and conflict, one that's symbolic and non-violent. It evokes respect, even from its target, rather than further rage and violence.
I don't think his act was unprofessional, as claimed by Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, or a Globe and Mail editorial - since I don't see journalism as a profession, not the way medicine or shoemaking is. It lacks a unique body of knowledge and depends on a skill everyone has language - plus the exercise of normal virtues such as common sense, skepticism, observation and integrity.
The humour, restraint and non-violence - or, at most, symbolic violence - Muntader al-Zaidi showed are a welcome antidote to the common stereotypes about some inherent Muslim impulse to violence. Violence is a human trait. It's certainly just as Christian - wars of religion, Crusades, world wars, the Holocaust - and Jewish, if you consider the historical books of the Old Testament or the 41-year occupation of Palestinian land.
Our own violent, martial era of disastrous invasions and occupations is a good time to be reminded of the merits of non-violent action. It had its triumphs, in India under Gandhi and in the civil-rights battles of America. Non-violence as a political tactic usually goes with symbols such as sit-ins or the march to the sea. There are places today, including the Mideast, where it should be tried. There is, for instance, a non-violent current in Palestinian politics that might be effective, if it got a (pardon) foothold.
Symbolic acts are therapeutic for people who feel, like many Iraqis and Palestinians, humiliated. You not only lose your homes and lives, you lose your sense of dignity. A restrained, controlled act helps restore that sense. You could see it in the creativity of people raising shoes on poles in recent demos demanding U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, or pelting military convoys with shoes - rather than blowing them up with IEDs, which assault terrified young soldiers instead of the decision-makers. The latter are rarely exposed, except at press conferences, where the indignity can descend on them, if they have to dodge around like targets in a dunk tank.
Such acts can even be helpful for the targets. "This is a gift from the Iraqis ... you dog!" yelled the shoe thrower. But he gave George Bush a chance to look quick on his feet and more astute than he ever did after 9/11. Remember his doltish "analysis": It's because they hate us for our freedoms. Here he called it an "interesting way for a person to express himself" - as if it gave him something to reflect on, for once. So it was a gift.
As for journalists, the brave Irish reporter Patrick Cockburn said the toss would "gladden the heart of any journalist forced to attend these tedious, useless and almost invariably obsequious" sessions with visiting Western leaders. Journalists are citizens, too, with civic obligations. Meeting leaders isn't their "privilege," as The Globe editorial claimed; it's their duty and right. But if you merely ask tough questions, you won't get called on again, likely won't be invited next time, and may lose your job.
The shoe thrower hasn't been seen since his arrest, although he was heard from: screaming while being beaten by security afterward, then apologizing yesterday for his "big ugly act," according to a government official. He used to sign off his reports from "occupied Iraq," which sounds more sincere, as well as being both objective and impassioned. And his tosses seem a model of self-restraint and goodwill when compared to two bombings during a visit on Wednesday by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: at least nine dead in Baghdad and a 13-year-old north of there. Gimme a shoe thrower any day.
"ABC decided not to renew Maher's contract for Politically Incorrect in 2002 after he made a controversial on-air remark on September 17, 2001,in which he agreed with guest conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards. He then went on to say, "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."
The show was subsequently cancelled on June 16, 2002." - wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher You can also find this clip on youtube.
Peace on Earth, good shoes toward men
RICK SALUTIN
From Friday's Globe and Mail December 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
Journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe thrower of Baghdad, has given us all a Christmas present - like the gift of the Musli - in the form of a new way to react to rage and conflict, one that's symbolic and non-violent. It evokes respect, even from its target, rather than further rage and violence.
I don't think his act was unprofessional, as claimed by Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, or a Globe and Mail editorial - since I don't see journalism as a profession, not the way medicine or shoemaking is. It lacks a unique body of knowledge and depends on a skill everyone has language - plus the exercise of normal virtues such as common sense, skepticism, observation and integrity.
The humour, restraint and non-violence - or, at most, symbolic violence - Muntader al-Zaidi showed are a welcome antidote to the common stereotypes about some inherent Muslim impulse to violence. Violence is a human trait. It's certainly just as Christian - wars of religion, Crusades, world wars, the Holocaust - and Jewish, if you consider the historical books of the Old Testament or the 41-year occupation of Palestinian land.
Our own violent, martial era of disastrous invasions and occupations is a good time to be reminded of the merits of non-violent action. It had its triumphs, in India under Gandhi and in the civil-rights battles of America. Non-violence as a political tactic usually goes with symbols such as sit-ins or the march to the sea. There are places today, including the Mideast, where it should be tried. There is, for instance, a non-violent current in Palestinian politics that might be effective, if it got a (pardon) foothold.
Symbolic acts are therapeutic for people who feel, like many Iraqis and Palestinians, humiliated. You not only lose your homes and lives, you lose your sense of dignity. A restrained, controlled act helps restore that sense. You could see it in the creativity of people raising shoes on poles in recent demos demanding U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, or pelting military convoys with shoes - rather than blowing them up with IEDs, which assault terrified young soldiers instead of the decision-makers. The latter are rarely exposed, except at press conferences, where the indignity can descend on them, if they have to dodge around like targets in a dunk tank.
Such acts can even be helpful for the targets. "This is a gift from the Iraqis ... you dog!" yelled the shoe thrower. But he gave George Bush a chance to look quick on his feet and more astute than he ever did after 9/11. Remember his doltish "analysis": It's because they hate us for our freedoms. Here he called it an "interesting way for a person to express himself" - as if it gave him something to reflect on, for once. So it was a gift.
As for journalists, the brave Irish reporter Patrick Cockburn said the toss would "gladden the heart of any journalist forced to attend these tedious, useless and almost invariably obsequious" sessions with visiting Western leaders. Journalists are citizens, too, with civic obligations. Meeting leaders isn't their "privilege," as The Globe editorial claimed; it's their duty and right. But if you merely ask tough questions, you won't get called on again, likely won't be invited next time, and may lose your job.
The shoe thrower hasn't been seen since his arrest, although he was heard from: screaming while being beaten by security afterward, then apologizing yesterday for his "big ugly act," according to a government official. He used to sign off his reports from "occupied Iraq," which sounds more sincere, as well as being both objective and impassioned. And his tosses seem a model of self-restraint and goodwill when compared to two bombings during a visit on Wednesday by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: at least nine dead in Baghdad and a 13-year-old north of there. Gimme a shoe thrower any day.
Things you may have missed
reading this only makes me more interested in Africa. It's intriguing.
Out of Africa
As award-winning Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen bids farewell to a place she's come to love, she reflects on how it has changed, and how it changed her
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081211.wnolenafrica1212/BNStory/International/?pageRequested=all
STEPHANIE NOLEN
The Globe and Mail
December 12, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
Hunched behind a low stone wall outside the Taj Mahal Palace and Hotel in Mumbai last week, I took my eyes off the burning building for a minute to do a quick head count: There were at least 300 other journalists in the plaza with me; CNN was live at one end of the plaza, the BBC at the other, and a dozen photographers I know from war zones around the world were crouched in between.
My days of being alone on the big story appeared to be over.
In five years as this newspaper's Africa correspondent, I found myself in such a crush of reporters just three times — at the 10th anniversary of Rwanda's genocide, the controversial 2005 elections in Zimbabwe and the ousting of South African president Thabo Mbeki as head of the African National Congress a year ago. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, I was alone. Even on really big stories — like the start of the latest war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which 350,000 people have fled their homes — there was exactly one other foreign correspondent with me at the front line.
Last week's attacks provided lots of justification for The Globe and Mail's decision to open a new bureau in India, and my own desire to report there. But for me, it was also a powerful reminder of the amazing scope and scale of the stories I was leaving behind in Africa, and what it was like to cover them, knowing I was struggling against a limited Western attention span, with its defensive and weary expectation of yet more bad news — and trying not to succumb to that sensation myself. I had never set foot in South Africa before the day in July, 2003, when I landed in Johannesburg to open the new bureau. In years of reporting from the continent, somehow I had never made it there.
But I had an old and dear friend in Jo'burg, Ngaire Blankenberg, who is the daughter of South Africans forced into exile by apartheid. Ngaire was born in Canada and we became friends in university. She moved to South Africa after the transition to democracy in 1994, and she told me in our crackly long-distance phone calls about the changes happening here, the sense of opportunity and possibility. She made me want to live here.
Johannesburg was also a logical place to station a bureau that would focus on Africa's AIDS pandemic, which at that point was one of the most important yet least-covered stories in the world: South Africa had the highest rate of HIV infection anywhere, with five million people living with the virus. Plus, the phones and electricity were reliable and the airline connections were good.
The night my partner, Meril, and I landed, Ngaire and her two young children picked us up at the airport, wedged us and our heap of luggage into her Hyundai and whisked us toward the bright lights of the city I soon learned to call Jozi.
That first night, she took us to a party for a television show she was producing. We walked through the door of a bar into the Rainbow Nation that I thought existed only in tourism commercials.
The sound system throbbed with kwaito, the homegrown blend of hiphop and blues. There was a long buffet table that mixed the traditional foods of all of this country's different cultures — sour samp (a mash of crushed corn kernels) and beans, spicy Cape Malay curries, stewed pumpkin and spinach in peanut sauce.
A great polyglot mix of people, all of them stylish, were swaying on the dance floor and calling out to friends in a mishmash of languages.
That night, I fell for Jo'burg.
There were certainly challenges that came with living here: having to be on constant watch for hijackers and bag snatchers and home invaders; hearing people (of all colours) casually say astoundingly racist things.
But Jozi thrummed to the energy of people from across South Africa and the rest of the continent, people who came here to launch a fashion line or make a film or make their fortune. They worked hard and played even harder, and I met young black business tycoons, newspaper editors and filmmakers whose lives would have been unimaginable to their own parents a decade before.
And the politics were addictive. Everyone here talks politics all the time — eventually I learned enough isiZulu to know that the janitors at the mall and the ladies in the nail salon were debating the latest events in parliament; every dinner party buzzed about which ex-communist cabinet minister was making a million in mining.
There is a particular drama to South African politics, where loyalties forged in shared Robben Island prison cells or guerrilla training camps in Angola matter as much or more as any modern political relationship. I studied the newspapers, even the cartoons, like a college textbook. The debates were arcane, bewildering and seductive.
I watched Ngaire's kids, Sula and Taib, sing in Afrikaans and isiZulu at their school concerts; I watched them learn to be race-conscious, but also gloriously indifferent, and I felt the hope of this place.
I watched South Africa spread its influence up through the continent — in the form of pressure for good governance, peacekeeping forces in former conflict zones and shopping malls carrying the best Jozi brands. It seemed like a fine idea: This place had much to offer.
Plus the sun shone every single day. What was not to love?
Five years slipped by. Then one day this past May, I found myself in the township of Ramaphosa, just a 20-minute drive from my house, looking at a charred, smouldering heap of ash where a mob of South Africans had beaten a man to the ground and then burned him alive hours before, because he was a foreigner.
I followed a couple of other Mozambican men through the narrow dirt streets of the township to the ruins of their tin-scrap house, where they frantically gathered up the few possessions that remained and made ready to flee for their lives.
I could hardly to bear to be inside the shack, where a framed kindergarten-graduation photo of a chubby child grinning in a shiny blue gown was the only thing left on the wall.
I stepped out into the alley, rounded a corner — and came face to face with a mob of about 20 men carrying huge clubs and spears, smashing their weapons into tin walls and screaming out their claim on power. I turned and fled the other way, ran to my car, drove a few blocks, shut the car off again and sat with my hands trembling, feeling horrified, heartsick — and betrayed.
This was the kind of story I covered in other countries — Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe. Not here. Jo'burg was the place I came home to, the place that kept me hopeful. How could this be happening?
It was a childish response. I bit back my hurt feelings, got out of the car and interviewed people. Over the next few days, I travelled through a dozen more township neighbourhoods, trying to understand the wave of xenophobic violence that erupted first here and then across the nation, leaving 62 dead and displacing at least 40,000 others.
They were almost all refugees and immigrants who, like me, came to this country for the promise it holds. Many came from the same countries that once sheltered and supported the people who fought to set South Africa free.
In my articles, I tried to explain the sense of marginalization, desperation and resentment that drove the killers, who saw themselves shut out of the new prosperity in South Africa. The words came slowly.
A few days later, I went to a fundraiser for a local charity. The last thing I felt like doing was going to a party, but we had promised to attend. Trying to lift my spirits, I put on a sparkly, beaded black satin outfit by Stone Cherry, the best of South Africa's many fantastic fashion houses. When we got to the hall, everyone was subdued. The lights went down and the audience, black and white and every shade in between, stood and sang the words to Nkosi Sikelel i'Africa — God Bless Africa, the national anthem.
A director of the charity took the stage to begin some introductory words, but she stopped short and simply called her teenage daughter forward to take the microphone.
"Jesus, come down, we need you now — we need you at this time to help us," the young woman sang in a huge, rich voice. "We need you now." I looked around, and like me, most people in the audience had silent tears running down their cheeks.
No respite in Kenya
There was no shortage of reasons to despair. A few months earlier, I had been in Kenya — lovely, peaceful, stable Kenya, another country that usually offered respite. But this time Kenya was the story: Frustration at a rigged election ignited decades-old anger over land rights and political marginalization.
Soon, 1,300 people were dead, most of them killed with machetes or bows and arrows, and 350,000 were homeless, including a woman I interviewed who was in early labour and sheltering in a horse stall in an old fair ground. Again, I had that sense of being in a familiar, well-loved place I could no longer recognize.
Other countries I returned to, however, were horribly familiar. I went back to Swaziland, a country that, as I reported in 2004, had won the grim distinction of having the world's highest rate of HIV infection, 39 per cent of adults. Millions of dollars and frenzied international effort have gone in there.
But I saw little progress, just young men and women dying and children living alone in straw huts trying to feed their toddler siblings or giving up trying at all. Still no drugs in the rural clinics, still no change in the domineering, exploitive sexual habits of too many Swazi men that have driven the decimation of the country.
I went back to Congo, where in 2004 I made the most disturbing trip of my life, to report on the epidemic of public gang rape that has accompanied the unending civil war. Back then, I travelled by motorbike through the east and stopped in villages and small towns. Women who heard why I was there snuck out after dark to tell me their stories — raped with branches, raped with bottles, raped with guns, raped with bayonets, again and again — until I ran out of any paper on which to write another note.
I went back a few weeks ago, after four years in which Congo has had comparatively more attention and the United Nations has been pressured to protect Congolese women. I found it just the same.
Then there was Zimbabwe: Only weeks after arriving in Africa to open the bureau, I went there to chronicle its collapse, which then seemed at its height — I wrote about food shortages and clinics with no drugs and staff who had not been paid in months. I wrote that change surely would come to Zimbabwe soon, because things could scarcely get worse. I went back year after year and it was always worse; still more people were starving, or dying of simple but untreated illnesses.
When I began to plan the last trips I would take in Africa, the World Food Program was urging me to go to Ethiopia, where 12 million people are now critically short of food. There is a risk of a famine on the scale of the infamous starvation of 1984, the LiveAid famine, when a million people died. But I couldn't bear it. I couldn't go to Ethiopia for a fourth time and write about incipient famine — not again.
I started to pack up my files, and found a dusty, sun-faded copy of the first article that I wrote from South Africa, 51/2 years ago. It told the story of Zackie Achmat, a veteran of the fight against apartheid turned gay-rights activist, who was dying of AIDS.
I knew gay men in Canada who had been living with HIV for as long as Zackie had been infected, but they had access to life-saving antiretroviral medication. South Africans couldn't get those drugs: To the horror of Zackie and thousands like him who had fought in the ANC, President Thabo Mbeki had emerged as an AIDS denialist who insisted the drugs were toxic.
He appointed as his health minister an odious and combative doctor, an old, close friend of his named Manto Tshabala-Msimang, who openly consorted with quacks peddling herbal cures, and who counselled the millions of citizens sick with AIDS to eat lemons and beets and garlic to get well.
In any case, the drugs cost about $12,000 a year, beyond the reach of most people, and of South Africa's national budget.
Zackie, with help from friends, could afford to buy the drugs privately. But instead, he staged the world's first drug strike: At the funeral of a friend who died of AIDS in 1998, he vowed that he would not take the pills until every South African with HIV could have them. By that point, 800 people were dying of AIDS there every single day.
Zackie is a prickly personality, a former sex worker given to quoting Trotsky at length, but he drew people to him, especially poor South Africans with AIDS, mostly rural women. They formed the Treatment Action Campaign and before very long it had become the most powerful social force there since the end of white rule. TAC took on the drug companies, demanding that the outrageous profit margins they made on antiretrovirals be reduced in poor countries, and — although it made many of them sick at heart — they took on their own ANC government.
The first time I interviewed Zackie, he was charming and helpful, but chalky and sweaty; he moved with a sort of trepidation, as if he had ground glass in his shoes. He had not long to live. But a few months after I moved to Jo'burg, he won: Drug companies slashed prices of AIDS medications for Africa. The government announced that it would provide treatment free in public hospitals. And Zackie took his first handful of antiretroviral pills.
I remember writing the last words in that first article, the electric, unexpected happy ending — and I remember the conversation I had the next day with my friend Sisonke Msimang, an AIDS activist, about the government's backtrack announcement. She said, "This country always comes right in the end."
Success stories
When I leafed through the rest of the clippings in my small sunny office, I was reminded that much has come right here, not just in South Africa, but across the continent. Many of the stories I have told in The Globe are successes.
In Zambia, a thieving president was chased from office and tried for corruption; a capable successor was elected in his place. In Angola, voters went to the polls in record numbers and peacefully elected a new government this year; the last time the country had tried to vote, in 1996, civil war left Angola in ruins.
In South Sudan, where I travelled with a rebel army through villages where people owned not even a bucket or a single set of clothes, a peace deal was signed and that rebel army became a government that struggled gamely, with some success, to tackle that poverty.
A few years ago I interviewed drug-addled, 14-year-old Liberian soldiers who spoke with numb insouciance about gang rape. But Liberia made peace and elected the continent's first female head of state, the dynamic, brilliant Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who threw herself into rebuilding and healing her nation.
I realized that in my bleaker moments, I was doing what I often chided others for — seeing Africa as an unchanging disaster and not realizing that between this coup or that rebel insurgency, change was happening — sometimes almost imperceptibly slowly, but definitely, defiantly happening.
I started this job well aware of the preponderance of negative coverage of Africa in the Western media. When I arrived in Jo'burg, I had to face the suspicion of African journalists who were sure I was there to serve up more bad news based on a limited understanding of the place. So I was determined to tell the good news, as often as I could, even if famines and mass rape did demand my frequent attention.
In Mali, Fifi Tembely, with a small group of local women and a will of steel, persuaded her Dogon people to end female genital mutilation. "Tourists can still come and see the places where our ancestors are buried — that won't change — but the life of women, that's got to change," she told me firmly. "We want women's life to change, for them to be healthy, for them to educate their kids and take care of their families."
Many countries, with the help of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, gave out bed nets and better drugs and cut their deaths from the age-old and crippling scourge of malaria in half.
Rwanda, despite the ugly legacy of genocide, decided to reinvent itself as an information technology hub — it set out to wire the entire nation to a broadband network (the first country in the world to do it) and moved aggressively to get a "$100 laptop" in the hands of every school child.
A small group of committed politicians and police officers in Nigeria were working on innovative ways to try to stop rife government corruption.
Lucy Lanyero, who endured torture at the hands of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army after she was abducted at the age of 9 and then ostracism when she escaped and came home, had organized — with no money at all — to take care of former rebel girls like herself in a circle she called Empowering Hands.
"We're trying to restore relationships that have been lost," she told me in her tiny rented room in Gulu. The two little children she bore when forced into sex in the bush were playing nearby as we talked. "We wanted to show the community that we can contribute something. We wanted to say, 'We can go to school or do something.'" Many of the poorest nations, from Chad to Madagascar, have used a series of low-cost innovations such as vaccinations and Vitamin A drops to reduce child mortality dramatically; Alfred Malunga, a health worker in Malawi with a Grade 10 education and a $36-a-month salary, proudly showed me his village ledger, which listed pages of healthy and flourishing children.
In Zimbabwe, I had clandestine conversations with opposition activists who had survived beatings and jail and fire-bombings of their houses, and who went on, nonetheless, quietly trying to fight Robert Mugabe and bring change to their country. At the end of every one of those meetings, they smiled and wished me well and told me, "We always have hope. You have to have hope."
Doing the impossible
The biggest change of all came in AIDS, the story that I was sent to Africa to tell. When I moved to Johannesburg, fewer than 100,000 people on the entire continent of Africa had access to antiretroviral drugs — today about 2.4 million are on them. That's still only about 30 per cent of those who are so sick they need the drugs to stay alive.
But when I started this job, no one but a handful of crazy activists and supportive doctors and nurses believed it would be possible to do treatment there at all.
Treatment, the experts said, needs labs and electron microscopes and cold chains and sophisticated patient-tracking systems. The unspoken corollary was that Africans with AIDS who didn't have those things — that is, pretty much all Africans with AIDS — would therefore have to die.
People such as Zackie Achmat and the amazing Médecins sans frontières proved that was nonsense. They pushed and pushed until African governments began to believe that maybe they could do treatment. The Western world engaged too — U.S. President George W. Bush created an emergency plan for AIDS that gave unprecedented money and technical assistance to a dozen hard-hit countries.
The Global Fund, brand-new and struggling when I moved here, pushed out billions in AIDS funding. Canadians gave millions of dollars in small donations to Stephen Lewis's foundation for Africa and gave of their time and skills to volunteer in clinics and orphanages in Tanzania and Lesotho.
And African health-care workers and activists did the work. Zambia, where one in four adults has the virus, is treating 170,000 people. Malawi — tiny, poverty-racked Malawi, where the major national public hospital had precisely one doctor the first time I went there to write about AIDS — has 117,000 people on the drugs, back to work and raising their children. Malawi is still desperately short of skilled people, but it has pioneered many of the breakthroughs, showing that nurses and even well-trained volunteers at the local, rural level can do much of what we once thought had to happen in city hospitals.
Then there's South Africa: Today, five years after Zackie Achmat ended his drug strike, South Africa has the largest AIDS treatment program in the world, with 550,000 people on medication. The rate of AIDS deaths declined here last year — by barely 1 per cent, but after a decade in which it grew by 20 per cent a year, this is profoundly good news.
Dr. Beetroot, as the former health minister is scornfully known, was deposed after Mr. Mbeki's ouster and replaced by a supremely capable ANC veteran named Barbara Hogan. On her third day she took pains to travel to a major AIDS-vaccine conference in Cape Town and to say the magic words: "We know HIV causes AIDS." She said the government would make fighting the virus its top priority.
Meanwhile, the last time I saw Zackie, he was caught up in planning a seaside wedding to his boyfriend, an HIV-negative AIDS activist named Dalli Weyers with "the bluest eyes I've ever seen." TAC has gone from chief critic to chief partner in the government's anti-AIDS effort, and Zackie and Dalli are living in newlywed bliss.
Last week, I went with my friend Thokozani Mthiyane to his monthly clinic appointment. No more overcrowded hospital waiting rooms with gaunt and desperate people in endless lines: We drove into bustling downtown Jo'burg and walked into a clinic called Zimphiphilo — "get healthy" in isiZulu — its waiting room painted tangerine and with chic steel sofas in polka-dot fabric clustered around a plasma-screen TV. Thokozani's doctor is a brisk young woman named Thuli Ngwenya who believes the clinic must provide efficient service that does not inconvenience working people, like my pal, who just happen to have HIV. Thokozani gets his drugs and his viral-load tests and whatever else he might need for about $40 a month, subsidized by the U.S. government.
For Dr. Ngwenya, in her snappy red sundress, AIDS is an issue that South Africa needs to figure out how to manage — and then make as insignificant as possible for people who have mutual funds to manage, classes to teach, or, like Thokozani, poems to write and canvases to paint. It was all so normal, so calm and well-managed, that it took my breath away.
Dual reality
At the same time, I'm also aware that the scale of AIDS as the shaping force for much of southern and eastern Africa has not changed. There are still tens of millions of people without treatment. The lack of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and technicians — many of whom have died of AIDS or have been poached by Western countries — remains a critical, nearly insurmountable obstacle to expanding treatment programs further.
Most troubling of all, the number of people who are newly infected with HIV each year continues to outstrip the number who get access to the medication, in every single African country.
There were few good ideas about how to prevent infections when I started. There are even fewer now. Once-promising vaccine and microbicide candidates have failed. Condom use has barely risen. And little progress has been made in the crucial thing to stop the spread of AIDS — ending the deeply entrenched practice of having multiple concurrent sexual partners. It has its roots in migration, both traditional (to manage herds of cattle) and modern (of men to the mines) and it is the perfect conduit for HIV, which thrives on being exposed to multiple hosts in a short time.
Yet there has been a slight but perceptible easing of the panic. There is the space, these days, to think about other things. And there is a lesson in that for me — not to underestimate the potential for the miraculous to occur. I would never have believed five years ago that there would be a clinic like Thokozani's in Jo'burg, or that the sick Zimbabwean teachers and Mozambican miners I met would be up off their thin bed mats and shiny with health.
I take other things away from Africa, such as patience — there's nothing like the Nigerian Ministry of Information to teach you patience. I also found a greater capacity for rage, although my partner Meril gently points out that mine was already considerable. It drove me nearly mad to spend weeks in the depopulated villages of Swaziland or barren clinics of Malawi and then fly home to Canada on a rare visit and find that no one knew or cared that the people I had just spent time with were going to die, for no reason other than that they were African.
Many died. But others got well. Ibrahim Umoru, a Nigerian AIDS activist whose bean-pole legs were covered in scabs and scars when I met him four years ago, e-mailed me pictures of his brand-new baby this week. I leave Africa knowing how little I know about what's possible.
My old friend Ngaire was offered a great job in Toronto and moved back to Canada a few months ago. Now, our crackly, long-distance phone calls go the other way. Dreading her first Northern Hemisphere winter in 15 years and pining for the blooming jacarandas, she tells me all the things she misses about Jo'burg, such as people going out of their way for a mother with young children. No one ever scoops a stranger's toddler up into their lap on a bus in Toronto. There's that thing about South Africa, she says — a place so screwed up in so many ways, and yet it produces people who become moral touchstones for the world. When was the last time Canada did that?
A few weeks ago, Meril and I held a farewell party beneath the palm trees in our yard; after more than five years, we now have stylish, multi-chromatic friends of our own. One, Jabu Mashinini, facilitates racial-reconciliation workshops in South Africa's prisons and the still-lily-white big banks. He asked me how I was feeling about leaving. I told him about leafing through the stacks of articles as I was packing boxes — about the relief over some things, especially the lessening despair about AIDS, while in other places, I had told stories of such darkness.
He nodded. "It's important to remember that both these things exist at once," he said. "We have to remember that they are both there, together."
Stephanie Nolen takes up her new post, based in New Delhi, this month.
Out of Africa
As award-winning Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen bids farewell to a place she's come to love, she reflects on how it has changed, and how it changed her
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081211.wnolenafrica1212/BNStory/International/?pageRequested=all
STEPHANIE NOLEN
The Globe and Mail
December 12, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
Hunched behind a low stone wall outside the Taj Mahal Palace and Hotel in Mumbai last week, I took my eyes off the burning building for a minute to do a quick head count: There were at least 300 other journalists in the plaza with me; CNN was live at one end of the plaza, the BBC at the other, and a dozen photographers I know from war zones around the world were crouched in between.
My days of being alone on the big story appeared to be over.
In five years as this newspaper's Africa correspondent, I found myself in such a crush of reporters just three times — at the 10th anniversary of Rwanda's genocide, the controversial 2005 elections in Zimbabwe and the ousting of South African president Thabo Mbeki as head of the African National Congress a year ago. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, I was alone. Even on really big stories — like the start of the latest war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which 350,000 people have fled their homes — there was exactly one other foreign correspondent with me at the front line.
Last week's attacks provided lots of justification for The Globe and Mail's decision to open a new bureau in India, and my own desire to report there. But for me, it was also a powerful reminder of the amazing scope and scale of the stories I was leaving behind in Africa, and what it was like to cover them, knowing I was struggling against a limited Western attention span, with its defensive and weary expectation of yet more bad news — and trying not to succumb to that sensation myself. I had never set foot in South Africa before the day in July, 2003, when I landed in Johannesburg to open the new bureau. In years of reporting from the continent, somehow I had never made it there.
But I had an old and dear friend in Jo'burg, Ngaire Blankenberg, who is the daughter of South Africans forced into exile by apartheid. Ngaire was born in Canada and we became friends in university. She moved to South Africa after the transition to democracy in 1994, and she told me in our crackly long-distance phone calls about the changes happening here, the sense of opportunity and possibility. She made me want to live here.
Johannesburg was also a logical place to station a bureau that would focus on Africa's AIDS pandemic, which at that point was one of the most important yet least-covered stories in the world: South Africa had the highest rate of HIV infection anywhere, with five million people living with the virus. Plus, the phones and electricity were reliable and the airline connections were good.
The night my partner, Meril, and I landed, Ngaire and her two young children picked us up at the airport, wedged us and our heap of luggage into her Hyundai and whisked us toward the bright lights of the city I soon learned to call Jozi.
That first night, she took us to a party for a television show she was producing. We walked through the door of a bar into the Rainbow Nation that I thought existed only in tourism commercials.
The sound system throbbed with kwaito, the homegrown blend of hiphop and blues. There was a long buffet table that mixed the traditional foods of all of this country's different cultures — sour samp (a mash of crushed corn kernels) and beans, spicy Cape Malay curries, stewed pumpkin and spinach in peanut sauce.
A great polyglot mix of people, all of them stylish, were swaying on the dance floor and calling out to friends in a mishmash of languages.
That night, I fell for Jo'burg.
There were certainly challenges that came with living here: having to be on constant watch for hijackers and bag snatchers and home invaders; hearing people (of all colours) casually say astoundingly racist things.
But Jozi thrummed to the energy of people from across South Africa and the rest of the continent, people who came here to launch a fashion line or make a film or make their fortune. They worked hard and played even harder, and I met young black business tycoons, newspaper editors and filmmakers whose lives would have been unimaginable to their own parents a decade before.
And the politics were addictive. Everyone here talks politics all the time — eventually I learned enough isiZulu to know that the janitors at the mall and the ladies in the nail salon were debating the latest events in parliament; every dinner party buzzed about which ex-communist cabinet minister was making a million in mining.
There is a particular drama to South African politics, where loyalties forged in shared Robben Island prison cells or guerrilla training camps in Angola matter as much or more as any modern political relationship. I studied the newspapers, even the cartoons, like a college textbook. The debates were arcane, bewildering and seductive.
I watched Ngaire's kids, Sula and Taib, sing in Afrikaans and isiZulu at their school concerts; I watched them learn to be race-conscious, but also gloriously indifferent, and I felt the hope of this place.
I watched South Africa spread its influence up through the continent — in the form of pressure for good governance, peacekeeping forces in former conflict zones and shopping malls carrying the best Jozi brands. It seemed like a fine idea: This place had much to offer.
Plus the sun shone every single day. What was not to love?
Five years slipped by. Then one day this past May, I found myself in the township of Ramaphosa, just a 20-minute drive from my house, looking at a charred, smouldering heap of ash where a mob of South Africans had beaten a man to the ground and then burned him alive hours before, because he was a foreigner.
I followed a couple of other Mozambican men through the narrow dirt streets of the township to the ruins of their tin-scrap house, where they frantically gathered up the few possessions that remained and made ready to flee for their lives.
I could hardly to bear to be inside the shack, where a framed kindergarten-graduation photo of a chubby child grinning in a shiny blue gown was the only thing left on the wall.
I stepped out into the alley, rounded a corner — and came face to face with a mob of about 20 men carrying huge clubs and spears, smashing their weapons into tin walls and screaming out their claim on power. I turned and fled the other way, ran to my car, drove a few blocks, shut the car off again and sat with my hands trembling, feeling horrified, heartsick — and betrayed.
This was the kind of story I covered in other countries — Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe. Not here. Jo'burg was the place I came home to, the place that kept me hopeful. How could this be happening?
It was a childish response. I bit back my hurt feelings, got out of the car and interviewed people. Over the next few days, I travelled through a dozen more township neighbourhoods, trying to understand the wave of xenophobic violence that erupted first here and then across the nation, leaving 62 dead and displacing at least 40,000 others.
They were almost all refugees and immigrants who, like me, came to this country for the promise it holds. Many came from the same countries that once sheltered and supported the people who fought to set South Africa free.
In my articles, I tried to explain the sense of marginalization, desperation and resentment that drove the killers, who saw themselves shut out of the new prosperity in South Africa. The words came slowly.
A few days later, I went to a fundraiser for a local charity. The last thing I felt like doing was going to a party, but we had promised to attend. Trying to lift my spirits, I put on a sparkly, beaded black satin outfit by Stone Cherry, the best of South Africa's many fantastic fashion houses. When we got to the hall, everyone was subdued. The lights went down and the audience, black and white and every shade in between, stood and sang the words to Nkosi Sikelel i'Africa — God Bless Africa, the national anthem.
A director of the charity took the stage to begin some introductory words, but she stopped short and simply called her teenage daughter forward to take the microphone.
"Jesus, come down, we need you now — we need you at this time to help us," the young woman sang in a huge, rich voice. "We need you now." I looked around, and like me, most people in the audience had silent tears running down their cheeks.
No respite in Kenya
There was no shortage of reasons to despair. A few months earlier, I had been in Kenya — lovely, peaceful, stable Kenya, another country that usually offered respite. But this time Kenya was the story: Frustration at a rigged election ignited decades-old anger over land rights and political marginalization.
Soon, 1,300 people were dead, most of them killed with machetes or bows and arrows, and 350,000 were homeless, including a woman I interviewed who was in early labour and sheltering in a horse stall in an old fair ground. Again, I had that sense of being in a familiar, well-loved place I could no longer recognize.
Other countries I returned to, however, were horribly familiar. I went back to Swaziland, a country that, as I reported in 2004, had won the grim distinction of having the world's highest rate of HIV infection, 39 per cent of adults. Millions of dollars and frenzied international effort have gone in there.
But I saw little progress, just young men and women dying and children living alone in straw huts trying to feed their toddler siblings or giving up trying at all. Still no drugs in the rural clinics, still no change in the domineering, exploitive sexual habits of too many Swazi men that have driven the decimation of the country.
I went back to Congo, where in 2004 I made the most disturbing trip of my life, to report on the epidemic of public gang rape that has accompanied the unending civil war. Back then, I travelled by motorbike through the east and stopped in villages and small towns. Women who heard why I was there snuck out after dark to tell me their stories — raped with branches, raped with bottles, raped with guns, raped with bayonets, again and again — until I ran out of any paper on which to write another note.
I went back a few weeks ago, after four years in which Congo has had comparatively more attention and the United Nations has been pressured to protect Congolese women. I found it just the same.
Then there was Zimbabwe: Only weeks after arriving in Africa to open the bureau, I went there to chronicle its collapse, which then seemed at its height — I wrote about food shortages and clinics with no drugs and staff who had not been paid in months. I wrote that change surely would come to Zimbabwe soon, because things could scarcely get worse. I went back year after year and it was always worse; still more people were starving, or dying of simple but untreated illnesses.
When I began to plan the last trips I would take in Africa, the World Food Program was urging me to go to Ethiopia, where 12 million people are now critically short of food. There is a risk of a famine on the scale of the infamous starvation of 1984, the LiveAid famine, when a million people died. But I couldn't bear it. I couldn't go to Ethiopia for a fourth time and write about incipient famine — not again.
I started to pack up my files, and found a dusty, sun-faded copy of the first article that I wrote from South Africa, 51/2 years ago. It told the story of Zackie Achmat, a veteran of the fight against apartheid turned gay-rights activist, who was dying of AIDS.
I knew gay men in Canada who had been living with HIV for as long as Zackie had been infected, but they had access to life-saving antiretroviral medication. South Africans couldn't get those drugs: To the horror of Zackie and thousands like him who had fought in the ANC, President Thabo Mbeki had emerged as an AIDS denialist who insisted the drugs were toxic.
He appointed as his health minister an odious and combative doctor, an old, close friend of his named Manto Tshabala-Msimang, who openly consorted with quacks peddling herbal cures, and who counselled the millions of citizens sick with AIDS to eat lemons and beets and garlic to get well.
In any case, the drugs cost about $12,000 a year, beyond the reach of most people, and of South Africa's national budget.
Zackie, with help from friends, could afford to buy the drugs privately. But instead, he staged the world's first drug strike: At the funeral of a friend who died of AIDS in 1998, he vowed that he would not take the pills until every South African with HIV could have them. By that point, 800 people were dying of AIDS there every single day.
Zackie is a prickly personality, a former sex worker given to quoting Trotsky at length, but he drew people to him, especially poor South Africans with AIDS, mostly rural women. They formed the Treatment Action Campaign and before very long it had become the most powerful social force there since the end of white rule. TAC took on the drug companies, demanding that the outrageous profit margins they made on antiretrovirals be reduced in poor countries, and — although it made many of them sick at heart — they took on their own ANC government.
The first time I interviewed Zackie, he was charming and helpful, but chalky and sweaty; he moved with a sort of trepidation, as if he had ground glass in his shoes. He had not long to live. But a few months after I moved to Jo'burg, he won: Drug companies slashed prices of AIDS medications for Africa. The government announced that it would provide treatment free in public hospitals. And Zackie took his first handful of antiretroviral pills.
I remember writing the last words in that first article, the electric, unexpected happy ending — and I remember the conversation I had the next day with my friend Sisonke Msimang, an AIDS activist, about the government's backtrack announcement. She said, "This country always comes right in the end."
Success stories
When I leafed through the rest of the clippings in my small sunny office, I was reminded that much has come right here, not just in South Africa, but across the continent. Many of the stories I have told in The Globe are successes.
In Zambia, a thieving president was chased from office and tried for corruption; a capable successor was elected in his place. In Angola, voters went to the polls in record numbers and peacefully elected a new government this year; the last time the country had tried to vote, in 1996, civil war left Angola in ruins.
In South Sudan, where I travelled with a rebel army through villages where people owned not even a bucket or a single set of clothes, a peace deal was signed and that rebel army became a government that struggled gamely, with some success, to tackle that poverty.
A few years ago I interviewed drug-addled, 14-year-old Liberian soldiers who spoke with numb insouciance about gang rape. But Liberia made peace and elected the continent's first female head of state, the dynamic, brilliant Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who threw herself into rebuilding and healing her nation.
I realized that in my bleaker moments, I was doing what I often chided others for — seeing Africa as an unchanging disaster and not realizing that between this coup or that rebel insurgency, change was happening — sometimes almost imperceptibly slowly, but definitely, defiantly happening.
I started this job well aware of the preponderance of negative coverage of Africa in the Western media. When I arrived in Jo'burg, I had to face the suspicion of African journalists who were sure I was there to serve up more bad news based on a limited understanding of the place. So I was determined to tell the good news, as often as I could, even if famines and mass rape did demand my frequent attention.
In Mali, Fifi Tembely, with a small group of local women and a will of steel, persuaded her Dogon people to end female genital mutilation. "Tourists can still come and see the places where our ancestors are buried — that won't change — but the life of women, that's got to change," she told me firmly. "We want women's life to change, for them to be healthy, for them to educate their kids and take care of their families."
Many countries, with the help of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, gave out bed nets and better drugs and cut their deaths from the age-old and crippling scourge of malaria in half.
Rwanda, despite the ugly legacy of genocide, decided to reinvent itself as an information technology hub — it set out to wire the entire nation to a broadband network (the first country in the world to do it) and moved aggressively to get a "$100 laptop" in the hands of every school child.
A small group of committed politicians and police officers in Nigeria were working on innovative ways to try to stop rife government corruption.
Lucy Lanyero, who endured torture at the hands of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army after she was abducted at the age of 9 and then ostracism when she escaped and came home, had organized — with no money at all — to take care of former rebel girls like herself in a circle she called Empowering Hands.
"We're trying to restore relationships that have been lost," she told me in her tiny rented room in Gulu. The two little children she bore when forced into sex in the bush were playing nearby as we talked. "We wanted to show the community that we can contribute something. We wanted to say, 'We can go to school or do something.'" Many of the poorest nations, from Chad to Madagascar, have used a series of low-cost innovations such as vaccinations and Vitamin A drops to reduce child mortality dramatically; Alfred Malunga, a health worker in Malawi with a Grade 10 education and a $36-a-month salary, proudly showed me his village ledger, which listed pages of healthy and flourishing children.
In Zimbabwe, I had clandestine conversations with opposition activists who had survived beatings and jail and fire-bombings of their houses, and who went on, nonetheless, quietly trying to fight Robert Mugabe and bring change to their country. At the end of every one of those meetings, they smiled and wished me well and told me, "We always have hope. You have to have hope."
Doing the impossible
The biggest change of all came in AIDS, the story that I was sent to Africa to tell. When I moved to Johannesburg, fewer than 100,000 people on the entire continent of Africa had access to antiretroviral drugs — today about 2.4 million are on them. That's still only about 30 per cent of those who are so sick they need the drugs to stay alive.
But when I started this job, no one but a handful of crazy activists and supportive doctors and nurses believed it would be possible to do treatment there at all.
Treatment, the experts said, needs labs and electron microscopes and cold chains and sophisticated patient-tracking systems. The unspoken corollary was that Africans with AIDS who didn't have those things — that is, pretty much all Africans with AIDS — would therefore have to die.
People such as Zackie Achmat and the amazing Médecins sans frontières proved that was nonsense. They pushed and pushed until African governments began to believe that maybe they could do treatment. The Western world engaged too — U.S. President George W. Bush created an emergency plan for AIDS that gave unprecedented money and technical assistance to a dozen hard-hit countries.
The Global Fund, brand-new and struggling when I moved here, pushed out billions in AIDS funding. Canadians gave millions of dollars in small donations to Stephen Lewis's foundation for Africa and gave of their time and skills to volunteer in clinics and orphanages in Tanzania and Lesotho.
And African health-care workers and activists did the work. Zambia, where one in four adults has the virus, is treating 170,000 people. Malawi — tiny, poverty-racked Malawi, where the major national public hospital had precisely one doctor the first time I went there to write about AIDS — has 117,000 people on the drugs, back to work and raising their children. Malawi is still desperately short of skilled people, but it has pioneered many of the breakthroughs, showing that nurses and even well-trained volunteers at the local, rural level can do much of what we once thought had to happen in city hospitals.
Then there's South Africa: Today, five years after Zackie Achmat ended his drug strike, South Africa has the largest AIDS treatment program in the world, with 550,000 people on medication. The rate of AIDS deaths declined here last year — by barely 1 per cent, but after a decade in which it grew by 20 per cent a year, this is profoundly good news.
Dr. Beetroot, as the former health minister is scornfully known, was deposed after Mr. Mbeki's ouster and replaced by a supremely capable ANC veteran named Barbara Hogan. On her third day she took pains to travel to a major AIDS-vaccine conference in Cape Town and to say the magic words: "We know HIV causes AIDS." She said the government would make fighting the virus its top priority.
Meanwhile, the last time I saw Zackie, he was caught up in planning a seaside wedding to his boyfriend, an HIV-negative AIDS activist named Dalli Weyers with "the bluest eyes I've ever seen." TAC has gone from chief critic to chief partner in the government's anti-AIDS effort, and Zackie and Dalli are living in newlywed bliss.
Last week, I went with my friend Thokozani Mthiyane to his monthly clinic appointment. No more overcrowded hospital waiting rooms with gaunt and desperate people in endless lines: We drove into bustling downtown Jo'burg and walked into a clinic called Zimphiphilo — "get healthy" in isiZulu — its waiting room painted tangerine and with chic steel sofas in polka-dot fabric clustered around a plasma-screen TV. Thokozani's doctor is a brisk young woman named Thuli Ngwenya who believes the clinic must provide efficient service that does not inconvenience working people, like my pal, who just happen to have HIV. Thokozani gets his drugs and his viral-load tests and whatever else he might need for about $40 a month, subsidized by the U.S. government.
For Dr. Ngwenya, in her snappy red sundress, AIDS is an issue that South Africa needs to figure out how to manage — and then make as insignificant as possible for people who have mutual funds to manage, classes to teach, or, like Thokozani, poems to write and canvases to paint. It was all so normal, so calm and well-managed, that it took my breath away.
Dual reality
At the same time, I'm also aware that the scale of AIDS as the shaping force for much of southern and eastern Africa has not changed. There are still tens of millions of people without treatment. The lack of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and technicians — many of whom have died of AIDS or have been poached by Western countries — remains a critical, nearly insurmountable obstacle to expanding treatment programs further.
Most troubling of all, the number of people who are newly infected with HIV each year continues to outstrip the number who get access to the medication, in every single African country.
There were few good ideas about how to prevent infections when I started. There are even fewer now. Once-promising vaccine and microbicide candidates have failed. Condom use has barely risen. And little progress has been made in the crucial thing to stop the spread of AIDS — ending the deeply entrenched practice of having multiple concurrent sexual partners. It has its roots in migration, both traditional (to manage herds of cattle) and modern (of men to the mines) and it is the perfect conduit for HIV, which thrives on being exposed to multiple hosts in a short time.
Yet there has been a slight but perceptible easing of the panic. There is the space, these days, to think about other things. And there is a lesson in that for me — not to underestimate the potential for the miraculous to occur. I would never have believed five years ago that there would be a clinic like Thokozani's in Jo'burg, or that the sick Zimbabwean teachers and Mozambican miners I met would be up off their thin bed mats and shiny with health.
I take other things away from Africa, such as patience — there's nothing like the Nigerian Ministry of Information to teach you patience. I also found a greater capacity for rage, although my partner Meril gently points out that mine was already considerable. It drove me nearly mad to spend weeks in the depopulated villages of Swaziland or barren clinics of Malawi and then fly home to Canada on a rare visit and find that no one knew or cared that the people I had just spent time with were going to die, for no reason other than that they were African.
Many died. But others got well. Ibrahim Umoru, a Nigerian AIDS activist whose bean-pole legs were covered in scabs and scars when I met him four years ago, e-mailed me pictures of his brand-new baby this week. I leave Africa knowing how little I know about what's possible.
My old friend Ngaire was offered a great job in Toronto and moved back to Canada a few months ago. Now, our crackly, long-distance phone calls go the other way. Dreading her first Northern Hemisphere winter in 15 years and pining for the blooming jacarandas, she tells me all the things she misses about Jo'burg, such as people going out of their way for a mother with young children. No one ever scoops a stranger's toddler up into their lap on a bus in Toronto. There's that thing about South Africa, she says — a place so screwed up in so many ways, and yet it produces people who become moral touchstones for the world. When was the last time Canada did that?
A few weeks ago, Meril and I held a farewell party beneath the palm trees in our yard; after more than five years, we now have stylish, multi-chromatic friends of our own. One, Jabu Mashinini, facilitates racial-reconciliation workshops in South Africa's prisons and the still-lily-white big banks. He asked me how I was feeling about leaving. I told him about leafing through the stacks of articles as I was packing boxes — about the relief over some things, especially the lessening despair about AIDS, while in other places, I had told stories of such darkness.
He nodded. "It's important to remember that both these things exist at once," he said. "We have to remember that they are both there, together."
Stephanie Nolen takes up her new post, based in New Delhi, this month.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
You don't know China
an essay from the globe and mail.
Life after Deng China's door has now been open for 30 years, but the world's perceptions remain skewed
TOM GRIMMER
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
December 13, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
As I was casting about for some way to sum up the 30 years in China since the start of the open-door policy, George H..W. Bush saved me the trouble. In a recent interview with the China Daily, an official newspaper, he said: "I think it's not even questionable that people have more freedom than they used to have. Now some people [in the United States] don't understand that. They still regard the Chinese as a bunch of communists."
This is the sort of thing an old guy who doesn't care just blurts out. But it's also true; Western perceptions of China are quite skewed. Moreover, it appeared in a Chinese newspaper. Okay, the China Daily is an English-language paper of small circulation, but the fact that the quote made it into print shows how far China has come since Mr. Bush first set foot here. It was certainly a communist country then. What is it now?
Thirty-four years ago, Mr. Bush came to head up the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, an outcome of Richard Nixon's opening to China and a precursor to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations. It would be four more years before things really began to change.
The event marking that watershed moment arguably as big a moment as the Communist revolution of 1949 was the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It concluded in December of 1978, 30 years ago this month. Few grasped that the cardboard speeches of that plenum would change not only China but the world.
(By then, Mao Zedong had been dead for more than two years. A power struggle had raged. In the end, Deng Xiaoping prevailed; the tectonic plates of Chinese politics had shifted. The open-door policy was born.
Other things happened that month. The United States and China announced the resumption of diplomatic relations; Boeing sold its first airplanes to the People's Republic; Coke said it was going into China.
Thirty years on, we know what Mr. Deng set in motion. By now, we can almost recite the gee-whiz statistics: the world's third-largest economy, 40 million new Internet users every year, 600 million cellphones, $2-trillion (U.S.) in foreign-exchange holdings and — my own favourite — the planet's biggest consumer of cement. This country has seen the greatest poverty-alleviation effort in history. Yes, yes, we've heard it all. But somehow, knowing this does not quite do this place justice.
I arrived in China seven years after Mr. Deng's triumph, in the fall of 1985. I was employed by a Chinese "work unit." My local colleagues lived in cold-water flats they didn't own, rode ancient bicycles and looked forward to the annual train ride to see their parents in another province. Getting a passport was next to impossible, and you needed permission to read certain papers containing foreign news. Now they own their apartments, many have cars, and they go online to book their holidays abroad. Most surprising, they don't seem to find this transition, in less than a generation, the least bit jarring.
China's rise exhibits many interesting phenomena. One is the often skewed view of China beyond its borders, which is equal parts awe, greed and fear.
Awe, because it's so vast and so old and so storied; China has an enduring mystique (which its tourism promoters hope never fades). The greed comes from thinking that there's something in the China miracle for us: Can we sell them resources, can we produce more cheaply there, can we tap that supposedly bottomless consumer market? And finally fear: What if they not only want to buy our oil and minerals, but also the companies that produce them?
The self-contradictory attitude towards China is now at a peak because of the financial crisis. The Economist asked a few weeks ago: "Can China save the world?" It was an economic basket-case 30 years ago, but we're now counting on China's engine to keep the global economy ticking over. Its recently announced four-trillion-yuan ($720-billion) stimulus package has everyone hoping.
Despite the saturation coverage that China gets, what I hear from most first-time visitors is "I had no idea." That normally refers to China's pockets of affluence, its stunning infrastructure and just what a simply cool place it can be. For whatever reason, after 30 years of China's open door, people don't fully get it unless they've been here.
Part of the problem is the nature and tone of the coverage China gets in the international media. The other day, CNN carried an item on Chinese golf schools. Halfway through, up popped those hoary old images of communism so beloved by the cliché machine: a grainy Movietone News-style clip of Mao Zedong, inspecting something or other. The voiceover said ominously that the bourgeois indulgence of golf was once banned in China, and that recently there have been renewed calls for limiting course construction. Well, that's probably true; they banned everything fun, we all know that. Buit in the clip, Mao wasn't anywhere near a golf course, and the reasons for wanting to limiting them these days are quite prosaic: Golf eats up farm land and uses too much water. That's it.
China has an image problem, and that old communist tag doesn't help. Of course, the Chinese Communist Party runs the place, but it could just as easily be called the Chinese Pragmatist Party these days. Old-school congresses with waves of clapping delegates are still de rigueur, as are the stars and hammers and sickles. It all makes for great photo ops — and perpetrates the myth that today's China bears any resemblance to our Cold War-forged notions of communism.
Of course, China has many deep-seated problems, too. For starters: a paucity of human rights, a growing gap between rich and poor, the environment, Internet censorship, a crumbling social-safety net that isn't being repaired quickly enough. Pretty much anyone you talk to in China these days will frankly acknowledge all these points; that's the difference between now and when I arrived in 1985.
China is a place of contradictions and contrasts; it was a contradiction, after all, that set this chain of events in motion. What used to be called "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," that hybrid of communism and capitalism, is what sparked this place to life. Its architect, Deng Xiaoping, was a contradictory character himself. His vision created the freer China of today, but he was a disciplinarian — and the Tiananmen debacle happened on his watch.
Politics and economics are the two areas where there's the greatest disconnect between foreign hopes and Chinese reality. For 15 years, various commentators have been saying China is ripe for political change. It hasn't happened. In any event, China is not going to be a liberal democracy in our lifetimes and whatever system does evolve here will probably never suit Western tastes. Get over it.
As for economics: Just what is China's system, and why has it managed to create such vast wealth in such a short time? The combination of authoritarian politics, state capitalism and a frenetic private sector has been a potent wealth-creator. China is at the same time highly entrepreneurial (the private sector accounts for up to 60 per cent of GDP now, depending on whose numbers you use) but also very state-directed. There are far fewer state-owned enterprises in China today than a decade ago, but they are leaner than their predecessors, have healthy balance sheets and, importantly, are profitable. Many have been partially privatized through stock-market listings, but the central-planning hand remains strong.
This makes people outside China uncomfortable. They picture backrooms full of cadres scheming about world domination. What they should be picturing is boardrooms full of suits, scheming about their companies dominating the ones down the road. These are big, strong companies, some of which want to play on the world stage. If you want to play with them, you have to come to terms with the government factor, because it isn't going away. It's been amusing to watch the waves of paranoia that have rippled out every time China Investment Corp., the sovereign wealth fund, has raised an eyebrow about an acquisition. This is a passive equity investor just looking for a place to park cash; it's not Dr. Evil. (So far, CIC has taken a bath on the likes of Morgan Stanley and Blackstone stock; they are not seers.)
So here we are, 30 years into Mr. Deng's complex and often fraught experiment. Look at it this way: China has now been longer in the Deng mode than it was in the Mao mode. Is this communism? Yes, but let's call it Communism 2.0. That separates it from those days when Mao banned golf — and leaves open the tantalizing prospect of the upgrades to come.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081212.wcoessay1213/BNStory/specialComment/home
Life after Deng China's door has now been open for 30 years, but the world's perceptions remain skewed
TOM GRIMMER
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
December 13, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
As I was casting about for some way to sum up the 30 years in China since the start of the open-door policy, George H..W. Bush saved me the trouble. In a recent interview with the China Daily, an official newspaper, he said: "I think it's not even questionable that people have more freedom than they used to have. Now some people [in the United States] don't understand that. They still regard the Chinese as a bunch of communists."
This is the sort of thing an old guy who doesn't care just blurts out. But it's also true; Western perceptions of China are quite skewed. Moreover, it appeared in a Chinese newspaper. Okay, the China Daily is an English-language paper of small circulation, but the fact that the quote made it into print shows how far China has come since Mr. Bush first set foot here. It was certainly a communist country then. What is it now?
Thirty-four years ago, Mr. Bush came to head up the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, an outcome of Richard Nixon's opening to China and a precursor to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations. It would be four more years before things really began to change.
The event marking that watershed moment arguably as big a moment as the Communist revolution of 1949 was the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It concluded in December of 1978, 30 years ago this month. Few grasped that the cardboard speeches of that plenum would change not only China but the world.
(By then, Mao Zedong had been dead for more than two years. A power struggle had raged. In the end, Deng Xiaoping prevailed; the tectonic plates of Chinese politics had shifted. The open-door policy was born.
Other things happened that month. The United States and China announced the resumption of diplomatic relations; Boeing sold its first airplanes to the People's Republic; Coke said it was going into China.
Thirty years on, we know what Mr. Deng set in motion. By now, we can almost recite the gee-whiz statistics: the world's third-largest economy, 40 million new Internet users every year, 600 million cellphones, $2-trillion (U.S.) in foreign-exchange holdings and — my own favourite — the planet's biggest consumer of cement. This country has seen the greatest poverty-alleviation effort in history. Yes, yes, we've heard it all. But somehow, knowing this does not quite do this place justice.
I arrived in China seven years after Mr. Deng's triumph, in the fall of 1985. I was employed by a Chinese "work unit." My local colleagues lived in cold-water flats they didn't own, rode ancient bicycles and looked forward to the annual train ride to see their parents in another province. Getting a passport was next to impossible, and you needed permission to read certain papers containing foreign news. Now they own their apartments, many have cars, and they go online to book their holidays abroad. Most surprising, they don't seem to find this transition, in less than a generation, the least bit jarring.
China's rise exhibits many interesting phenomena. One is the often skewed view of China beyond its borders, which is equal parts awe, greed and fear.
Awe, because it's so vast and so old and so storied; China has an enduring mystique (which its tourism promoters hope never fades). The greed comes from thinking that there's something in the China miracle for us: Can we sell them resources, can we produce more cheaply there, can we tap that supposedly bottomless consumer market? And finally fear: What if they not only want to buy our oil and minerals, but also the companies that produce them?
The self-contradictory attitude towards China is now at a peak because of the financial crisis. The Economist asked a few weeks ago: "Can China save the world?" It was an economic basket-case 30 years ago, but we're now counting on China's engine to keep the global economy ticking over. Its recently announced four-trillion-yuan ($720-billion) stimulus package has everyone hoping.
Despite the saturation coverage that China gets, what I hear from most first-time visitors is "I had no idea." That normally refers to China's pockets of affluence, its stunning infrastructure and just what a simply cool place it can be. For whatever reason, after 30 years of China's open door, people don't fully get it unless they've been here.
Part of the problem is the nature and tone of the coverage China gets in the international media. The other day, CNN carried an item on Chinese golf schools. Halfway through, up popped those hoary old images of communism so beloved by the cliché machine: a grainy Movietone News-style clip of Mao Zedong, inspecting something or other. The voiceover said ominously that the bourgeois indulgence of golf was once banned in China, and that recently there have been renewed calls for limiting course construction. Well, that's probably true; they banned everything fun, we all know that. Buit in the clip, Mao wasn't anywhere near a golf course, and the reasons for wanting to limiting them these days are quite prosaic: Golf eats up farm land and uses too much water. That's it.
China has an image problem, and that old communist tag doesn't help. Of course, the Chinese Communist Party runs the place, but it could just as easily be called the Chinese Pragmatist Party these days. Old-school congresses with waves of clapping delegates are still de rigueur, as are the stars and hammers and sickles. It all makes for great photo ops — and perpetrates the myth that today's China bears any resemblance to our Cold War-forged notions of communism.
Of course, China has many deep-seated problems, too. For starters: a paucity of human rights, a growing gap between rich and poor, the environment, Internet censorship, a crumbling social-safety net that isn't being repaired quickly enough. Pretty much anyone you talk to in China these days will frankly acknowledge all these points; that's the difference between now and when I arrived in 1985.
China is a place of contradictions and contrasts; it was a contradiction, after all, that set this chain of events in motion. What used to be called "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," that hybrid of communism and capitalism, is what sparked this place to life. Its architect, Deng Xiaoping, was a contradictory character himself. His vision created the freer China of today, but he was a disciplinarian — and the Tiananmen debacle happened on his watch.
Politics and economics are the two areas where there's the greatest disconnect between foreign hopes and Chinese reality. For 15 years, various commentators have been saying China is ripe for political change. It hasn't happened. In any event, China is not going to be a liberal democracy in our lifetimes and whatever system does evolve here will probably never suit Western tastes. Get over it.
As for economics: Just what is China's system, and why has it managed to create such vast wealth in such a short time? The combination of authoritarian politics, state capitalism and a frenetic private sector has been a potent wealth-creator. China is at the same time highly entrepreneurial (the private sector accounts for up to 60 per cent of GDP now, depending on whose numbers you use) but also very state-directed. There are far fewer state-owned enterprises in China today than a decade ago, but they are leaner than their predecessors, have healthy balance sheets and, importantly, are profitable. Many have been partially privatized through stock-market listings, but the central-planning hand remains strong.
This makes people outside China uncomfortable. They picture backrooms full of cadres scheming about world domination. What they should be picturing is boardrooms full of suits, scheming about their companies dominating the ones down the road. These are big, strong companies, some of which want to play on the world stage. If you want to play with them, you have to come to terms with the government factor, because it isn't going away. It's been amusing to watch the waves of paranoia that have rippled out every time China Investment Corp., the sovereign wealth fund, has raised an eyebrow about an acquisition. This is a passive equity investor just looking for a place to park cash; it's not Dr. Evil. (So far, CIC has taken a bath on the likes of Morgan Stanley and Blackstone stock; they are not seers.)
So here we are, 30 years into Mr. Deng's complex and often fraught experiment. Look at it this way: China has now been longer in the Deng mode than it was in the Mao mode. Is this communism? Yes, but let's call it Communism 2.0. That separates it from those days when Mao banned golf — and leaves open the tantalizing prospect of the upgrades to come.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081212.wcoessay1213/BNStory/specialComment/home
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Help Child Soldiers dot com
I watched the video and thought it was funny in the sense that it's true. I have always thought "neutrality" is a cop-out because by one is taking a side by not taking sides.
And if you weren't confused 45 seconds into the clip, then you are not paying attention.
found this randomly on the globe:
"In the summer of '07, John St. launched a hair-raising and awareness raising campaign for War Child Canada by fictionalizing "Camp Okutta." Summer-time fun for the campers included grenade tossing and rifle toting. When posters went up in downtown Toronto, some passersby thought Camp Okutta was for real. Outrage ensued.
So understand that the next iteration of the campaign, with a short form of this video airing nationally, IS ALSO NOT REAL. What it is, is hair-raising and awareness raising. Award-winning, too, I bet. And if you want to help out, check out the website (www.helpchildsoldiers.com), download some posters, and spread them about."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081211.WBwellsblog20081211182029/WBStory/WBwellsblog/
And if you weren't confused 45 seconds into the clip, then you are not paying attention.
found this randomly on the globe:
"In the summer of '07, John St. launched a hair-raising and awareness raising campaign for War Child Canada by fictionalizing "Camp Okutta." Summer-time fun for the campers included grenade tossing and rifle toting. When posters went up in downtown Toronto, some passersby thought Camp Okutta was for real. Outrage ensued.
So understand that the next iteration of the campaign, with a short form of this video airing nationally, IS ALSO NOT REAL. What it is, is hair-raising and awareness raising. Award-winning, too, I bet. And if you want to help out, check out the website (www.helpchildsoldiers.com), download some posters, and spread them about."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081211.WBwellsblog20081211182029/WBStory/WBwellsblog/
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Week 1 of Work
So I have been back to Canada for almost 3 months now. I have had a few brief stints with a couple of jobs during this time. I worked as a traffic surveyor for a week around Vancouver collecting traffic data. Then I accepted an offer as a retail customer service person with a Canadian automotive franchise for a month.
I decided that it was just a waste of time there since I had no time to look for the job I wanted when working full time. I was looking for work online after I got home from work.
I took that job with the logic that I could work there and look for something else better simultaneously; therefore I can have a source of income for the duration. But it was just such a crappy situation I got myself in so I decided to end it for good.
It took about another month before I secured the current job I am with now. It’s only been 1 week in and I am questioning myself if I made another mistake. I am currently training to become a wholesale travel agent for the Asia department.
I am learning a lot about the booking and reservation system and spending all my time on these programs all day at my cubicle. It’s a pretty steep learning curve, but I wasn’t expecting a walk in the park anyway.
I am not enjoying myself as much I thought I would mainly because of the company’s culture is quite strange. There are probably about 35 to 45 employees at the office on a daily basis. I work with 2 English, 4 Kiwi’s, 2 Aussies, 7 Chinese, 3 Philippinos, 1 Vietnamese, and 2 Taiwanese (including myself). The rest are all home-grown Canadians.
After a whole day training in the boardroom over a Skype conference call with a Toronto trainer, one of the Aussies invited me to go out for a drink after work with the other staff. I hesitated a bit before taking him on that offer because I had to be at a Xmas dinner for the volunteer work I have been doing over the past month.
So off I went with them for an hour and I am glad that they invited me out for a drink at a pub down the road from the office. I found out that over 70% of the staff at the office have been with the company have been there for less than 2 years and about 40% of that 70% have only been with the company for less than 8 months to a year. According to one of the staff at the table who’s been there for the longest (all of the whooping 3 years!), the company has got a pretty high turnover rate. (that’s a first bad sign right there!)
In addition, just before this company hired me, they laid off quite a few employees and fired the manager in charge of the location because of a personality clash with the VP in the head office in Toronto. Most of the more senior members and department leaders at the company were all shocked because the manager on location was a superb leader.
So they hired me and another Kiwi basically because they realized that they laid off a few too many (and a few left on their own terms) and needed to regain grounds fast.
Other than that, I didn’t feel alive at work all week. The only time I actually enjoyed myself was hanging out with the Kiwi’s and the Aussies after work on Friday. I felt like I could actually be myself. It also helped that the fact a couple of them are doing what I did in Australia………..their working holiday time in Canada. We got on pretty well.
The English guy I report to directly is a pretty nice guy, but I could just tell he rather not be at work at all. His body language says it all especially when he walks down the corridor in between the cubicles. I have never seen an able man in his mid 30’s to walk that slowly with such a mentally exhausted look on his face first thing in the morning everyday for the entire day. I can only rationalize it by “must be the English in him.” (oh did I mention he’s only been with this company for 9 months?)
Week 2 should be better?
I decided that it was just a waste of time there since I had no time to look for the job I wanted when working full time. I was looking for work online after I got home from work.
I took that job with the logic that I could work there and look for something else better simultaneously; therefore I can have a source of income for the duration. But it was just such a crappy situation I got myself in so I decided to end it for good.
It took about another month before I secured the current job I am with now. It’s only been 1 week in and I am questioning myself if I made another mistake. I am currently training to become a wholesale travel agent for the Asia department.
I am learning a lot about the booking and reservation system and spending all my time on these programs all day at my cubicle. It’s a pretty steep learning curve, but I wasn’t expecting a walk in the park anyway.
I am not enjoying myself as much I thought I would mainly because of the company’s culture is quite strange. There are probably about 35 to 45 employees at the office on a daily basis. I work with 2 English, 4 Kiwi’s, 2 Aussies, 7 Chinese, 3 Philippinos, 1 Vietnamese, and 2 Taiwanese (including myself). The rest are all home-grown Canadians.
After a whole day training in the boardroom over a Skype conference call with a Toronto trainer, one of the Aussies invited me to go out for a drink after work with the other staff. I hesitated a bit before taking him on that offer because I had to be at a Xmas dinner for the volunteer work I have been doing over the past month.
So off I went with them for an hour and I am glad that they invited me out for a drink at a pub down the road from the office. I found out that over 70% of the staff at the office have been with the company have been there for less than 2 years and about 40% of that 70% have only been with the company for less than 8 months to a year. According to one of the staff at the table who’s been there for the longest (all of the whooping 3 years!), the company has got a pretty high turnover rate. (that’s a first bad sign right there!)
In addition, just before this company hired me, they laid off quite a few employees and fired the manager in charge of the location because of a personality clash with the VP in the head office in Toronto. Most of the more senior members and department leaders at the company were all shocked because the manager on location was a superb leader.
So they hired me and another Kiwi basically because they realized that they laid off a few too many (and a few left on their own terms) and needed to regain grounds fast.
Other than that, I didn’t feel alive at work all week. The only time I actually enjoyed myself was hanging out with the Kiwi’s and the Aussies after work on Friday. I felt like I could actually be myself. It also helped that the fact a couple of them are doing what I did in Australia………..their working holiday time in Canada. We got on pretty well.
The English guy I report to directly is a pretty nice guy, but I could just tell he rather not be at work at all. His body language says it all especially when he walks down the corridor in between the cubicles. I have never seen an able man in his mid 30’s to walk that slowly with such a mentally exhausted look on his face first thing in the morning everyday for the entire day. I can only rationalize it by “must be the English in him.” (oh did I mention he’s only been with this company for 9 months?)
Week 2 should be better?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
