one week in south africa, one week in sierra leone, one week in the gambia. [poor gambia always gets me at my frazzled end.] i leave for the airport in ten minutes. ¡chao!
Archive for April, 2008
dead teachers and pubic policy
This morning I was proofreading some documents for a field survey, and at one point in a training document it says “Now, we will do a demonstration interview. [---] will play the role of enumerator and [----] will be the dead teacher.” What?!
No interviewing of dead teachers in this particular survey. Next week I’ll be pretesting my paranormal baseline, in which we interview dead librarians, so that’s closer.
This reminds of a paper I co-authored once in which my colleague accidentally wrote about the implications of our findings for pubic policy. I’m not sure what those implications would be, besides washing your hands after going to the bathroom or encouraging male circumcision to reduce the risk of HIV transmission.
For now, I’ll stick with head teachers and public policy.
magic man to magic: “i felt like the ‘magic’ was getting between me and my fans
As I walk along the Gambian beaches, I am often approached by young men wanting to be my friend. Usually on those walks, finding new friends isn’t one of my goals. Everyone has the same conversation starteds: What’s your name? Where are you from? Some time ago, I wrote about adopting a stage name: Magic Man from Brigadoon.
Unfortunately, Magic Man created more questions than it answered, so I’ve shifted to Magic. From Brigadoon. Yes, that’s somewhere in Europe.
* The line in the title is from rapper P Diddy.
cab fight! cab fight!
I’m in the Gambia, and on Wednesday morning I needed to get from my hotel to my office early in the morning. None of the hotel-based cabs were around, so I walked out to the highway and got in a van. (“Vans” here are the same as matatus in Kenya and guaguas in the Dominican Republic, minivans that cram a bunch of people in and drive on a set route: basically an unsafe, unreliable bus.) After a while I saw a taxi stand and got down.I walked up to the first taxi driver and asked for a price to my office; he quoted a reasonable price, so I moved to get in passenger seat of the taxi. Suddenly a man jumps in front of me, blocking the door, shouting about how I can’t ride with this taxi driver because the driver owes this guy money for two weeks of work.
My initial response is that this particular dispute is not my concern, so I go around the protestor and get in the back seat of the taxi. The driver gets in, and then the protestor leaps into the front seat of the taxi, puts his hand over the key in the ignition, and begins shouting and arguing with the driver in a language I don’t understand.
I decided to wait ten seconds for the situation to resolve. I counted slowly to ten in my head, got out of the taxi, went to another taxi 30 feet away, and got to work.
the most dangerous country in the world!
A friend asked me if Sierra Leone is the most dangerous country in the world. Forbes magazine puts out a list of the world’s most dangerous destinations. And the winners (?) for 2007 were
- Somalia
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
- Democratic Republic of Congo
- Cote d’Ivoire
- Pakistan
- Burundi
- Sri Lanka
- Haiti
- Chad
- Lebanon
- Liberia
Not even in the top 12! Sierra Leone was very dangerous when it was in the midst of civil war, but that ended in 2002. Now, I certainly feel safer in Freetown than in Nairobi (perhaps simply due to the fact that I haven’t yet been mugged in Freetown).
Following the footsteps of Sudhir Venkatesh, I managed to infiltrate one of Freetown’s most insidious street gangs a few days ago. Luckily, I escaped with my life and this photo.
junks make the man
The vast majority of people I’ve seen in Africa (in every country I’ve been to except perhaps South Africa) wear either African traditional dress or – less expensive – used American clothes.
I just listened to an interesting description of the process by which the clothes make it to Africa in Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy: people donate to the Salvation Army, they pick out what they can sell in their shops and sell the rest to US merchant, who sorts some to send abroad (the best) and the rest to go into mattress stuffing (and like products). A big African merchant buys a gigantic bundle of clothes, which he sells to the vendors I see in the African markets. (Rivoli argues convincingly that this is the only point at which textiles face a genuinely free market.)
Different countries have different words for it: in Tanzania the used clothes are called mitumba (in Swahili), in Sierra Leone they are called junks (in Krio).
Below is a photo of one of my favorites, from the ferry stand in Freetown. [I spoke with the gentleman: he's never seen Napolean Dynamite, and I doubt he's ever voted for Pedro.]
riding a wave of nostalgia to freetown and back
Sierra Leone’s international airport is not in Freetown. By land, it would take many hours to make the trip. Some months ago, there were four options for travel from the airport to Freetown:
1. UN Helicopter (for people with UN passports)
2. Commercial helicopter
3. Hovercraft
4. Ferry
However, in recent months the hovercraft caught fire and has been grounded since (no one was hurt, but luggage was lost). The commercial helicopter has been grounded (I’m not sure why, but I can guess). I don’t have a UN passport, so I take the ferry. (One can also take a tiny speedboat, but I haven’t figured out the logistics yet.)
The last couple of ferry rides, the first-class cabin (costs US$1.50) has been playing a slew of awesome 80s music videos, so awesome that I couldn’t help but sit and watch (rather than wander the deck):
• La Isla Bonita, by Madonna
• Sexual Healing, by Marvin Gaye (they just played the beginning of this non-sensual video – despite the title – and then skipped ahead)
• We Are the World, by everyone in American pop music in the 80s. A bunch of other people in the cabin – all Sierra Leoneans – knew the lyrics to this one and were mildly swaying and mouthing the words. (You know I was, and people were loving the fact that I was loving We Are the World.)
• The Greatest Love of All, by Whitney Houston
• Sacrifice, by Elton John
• Everything (I Do), by Bryan Adams
• and then nothing less than a UB40 concert video
My 80s craving has been satisfied for at least two hours.
i’m sorry, there’s a problem with your visa…
…I don’t have a pen. A week ago, I arrived at the Freetown airport in Sierra Leone and waited for the man at the desk to stamp and sign my visa, but he didn’t have a pen. So I gave him my pen, which he held onto.
This afternoon, I arrived at the Gambia International Airport and waited while the woman at the desk looked, and looked, and then started waving my passport at a colleague in a nearby booth. Oh, you need a pen? Use mine, please. I took it back afterward, but I wonder if perhaps we need a new NGO, making sure passport control agencies are fully stocked in pens. Anyone looking for a niche?
book review: The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, by Pietra Rivoli
I took a few minutes this afternoon in the Freetown airport to pen some thoughts on this audiobook that I recently listened to. (Note: you need either a short title or a short sub-title; you can’t have a long title AND a long sub-title. No good.) My thoughts:
a brief history of EVERYTHING about your t-shirt, from birth in a Texan cotton field to re-birth in a Tanzanian second-hand clothing market
Allow me to provide a more descriptive title for this volume: What I did last summer + a history of cotton growing in America + a history of cotton mills around the world + a brief history of Shanghai + a brief history of child labor + a brief history of labor activism + a brief history of workplace safety regulations + a not-at-all-brief history of US textile protectionism + a characterization of the international market for used clothes. Interesting? Often.
In the course of all these histories – occasionally interspersed with a reminder that we are following Rivoli’s t-shirt around the world – we jump from England to Japan to Texas to West Africa; we leap back and forth (and back and forth) from century to century. By the middle of the book, I had gotten dizzy and wished it had been a long magazine article.
But in fact, the second half is the most interesting. Rivoli gives a detailed history of textile protectionism in the United States, giving a peek into the dizzying, constantly morphing tariff and quota systems as well as the huge bureaucracy the system supports. And finally, she gives an illuminating description of what happens to the t-shirts after they get donated to the Salvation Army and how they make it to market stalls in East Africa.
Rivoli is an economist and so recognizes that her inherent leaning is toward free trade, but she argues for the value of both sides of the textile battle, both the free traders and the student demonstrators.
The first half of the book feels too long (even though it isn’t that long), and Rivoli’s strength is in illuminating description rather than careful analysis. But if you get bored, just skip ahead to the next chapter: There’s plenty to choose from!
[I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by Eliza Foss, published by Recorded Books. The reading is fine, but Foss's voice is too syrupy sweet and storybookish for 8 CDs (think the voice-over narration from Desperate Housewives).]
upcountry
Yesterday, driving just a couple of hours from Freetown, I was surprised at just how quickly Sierra Leone gets really rural.
Today I’m driving from Freetown to Kailahun: yes, the exact opposite end of the country. So I’ll be offline a few days.
