Adrift in a Sea of Rolling Hills
My time in the Pays des Mille Collines
Archive for Observations
December 1, 2008 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Observations
Yesterday, I hung out by the pool of the Novotel Hotel as I do most Sundays. A friend of mine came and we played tennis on their red clay courts. We almost had a ball boy too. We told him he could be our ball boy, then he asked me if I wanted a new grip. I told him I didn’t, but somehow, lost in translation, he then left. So we picked up our own balls. After we finished, we returned to our friends at the poolside and ordered another round of beers. It was all very colonial.
Next week we’re going to play again. This time with the ballboy and the lines judge (Apparently, you get the package deal for $2, so why not?).
November 25, 2008 at 8:39 pm · Filed under Observations
Here is a recent conversation involving our chef, Hilam, and our director, Nir, who is trying to learn Kinyarwanda:
Nir: What’s the word for breakfast?
Hilam: Chai.
Nir: But that’s the word for tea.
Hilam: Right.
Nir: So it means breakfast too?
Hilam: No, it means tea. The word for breakfast is tea. Breakfast is tea.
Nir: Oh, right.
I guess breakfast is a foreign word for people not lucky enough to feast on eggs, bacon, and/or cereal every morning.
November 22, 2008 at 2:47 pm · Filed under Observations
Hunting water is awfully tiring. Yesterday I spent much of the first half of the day watching two Indians and their three Rwandese workers survey several patches of nearby fields in search of water. In this age of technology and electronic gadget wonderland, what these tests consisted of was two cables attached to a briefcase, where two men, one with each end of a cable, walked ten meters, hammered a stake attached to the cable end into the ground, and then the head Indian pressed a green button on his briefcase, typed the number it spat out into his calculatior, and then used a pen to write down this new number on a pad of paper. They then walked ten more meters and repeated, for like two more hours. All the while, just yards away, I played games and skyped with my friends on my iphone. If I can connect to the internet on my phone in the middle of nowhere, someone needs to give me a good reason why they’re still doing geological surveys with pen and paper.
Anyways, what we were doing (other than feeling like you were watching a first season episode of “Lost” where they have to keep pressing the same button every 60 seconds) is searching for a place to drill a borehole. As it stands now, it would be charitable to refer to our water supply as “unstable.” In fact, much of the time they don’t pump water to us and we have to fill our tanks from trucked in tankers. When they do manage to pump, it is at an absurd cost.
Indeed, one of the greatest and most pressing challenges facing Africa is access to water. While few outside of the fancy rich have any access to running water, more and more Africans are connected to water by daily, sometimes many kilometer, hikes to a community well/ spring/ water supply. While we in the West consume and waste water like it grew on trees, African consumption is rarely more than a jerry can’s worth. Apart from better access to water in the home, one thing that an improved and connected water supply could mean is irrigation and improved agrarian productivity.
So in the spirt of James Bond and “Quantum of Solace”, where Bond’s newest villain declares that water is “the world’s most precious resource,” here is a link to a great New York Times piece on how “Blue is the new Green” and what we can do to lead the world to solve these challenges instead of recklessly proliferating them. Because, after all, water is life.
November 22, 2008 at 2:08 pm · Filed under Observations
After much delay and great difficulty, our village is finally connected to the internet, by way of CPE WiMax antenna mounted on one of our houses. Just as cellphone technology leapfrogged landlines in Africa, wireless networking is doing the same for internet. So we mount an antenna on top of our house and connect to a signal 8 kilometers away, which is itself connected by microwave link over 50 kilometers to a giant satellite in Kigali which receives its internet connection by satellite from outer space. Pretty soon, landline fiber cables should catch up with the reach of wireless networks, but in the meantime, all this means is that internet in Africa is ridiculously expensive (and slow).
While the average household broadband internet connection in the US is 150 megabytes (for about $30) and the Japanese can now connect at home at speeds up to 1000 megabytes for just $56 a month, here in Africa, we’re paying $600 a month for about a third of one megabyte (split up between up to 80 computers). So we have about 384 kilobits (if all goes according to plan with our internet provider, which it usually doesn’t) for let’s say 38 computers (an underestimate). That leaves us with about 10 kilobits per computer, compare that with the 56 kilobits you used to get back in the day with your dial-up modem and you get a sense for how crazy slow things can be here.
So while the rest of the world zips along in the hyper-productivity of cyberspace, Africa is left lagging behind, footing an absurdly huge bill for a service that won’t even let you connect properly to Gmail, YouTube, or (gasp!) Facebook. How deprived we are.
But there is hope. Two submarine cables, carrying our fiber connection to the world, will “land” in East Africa within the next two years, connecting us to the global fiber network, replacing a system where bandwidth is delivered by too few satellites at extortionary costs. Internally, Rwanda is setting a torrid pace at laying their own fiber network of cables, to take advantage of this new marine promise. So if everything goes according to plan, Africa (at least parts of it) may just come out of the digital dark age soon enough. Now, I wish the same could be said for water…
Update: Here’s a link to an intersting article about the two submarine cables. Rwandan authorities say these cables will bring the cost of 1 megabyte from $3000 to $25.
October 16, 2008 at 12:09 am · Filed under News, Observations
While bankers in New York learn that what goes up must come down, it’s easy to feel somewhat inoculated here in Africa from the global financial unraveling. Indeed, without a major stock index on the entire continent (Apologies to Johannesburg, but you’ll need a market capitalization of at least $1 trillion to play in the minor leagues. Double that and we can talk about the Big Leagues.), doom and gloom don’t seem to be running wild here like other places around the globe (Zimbabwe’s 531 billion percent inflation excepted - though that seems to have little to do with sub-prime mortgages.) While there’s still plenty of regular doom and gloom abound, no one should be jumping from tall buildings any time soon (at least not in Kigali, where tall buildings are something of a rarity).
According to The Economist, arguably the world’s most important newspaper, Africa’s prospects are actually looking pretty good. It seems China’s still buying, Africa’s over-regulated banks were never allowed to invest irresponsibly abroad anyways, and the aid money and direct investment keeps flowing from governments (Japan, China, Malaysia, India, and the US, Europe, and Gulf States) eager to court Africa’s vast resources. Watch TV here and you see commercials for tax-free cities in Dubai and burgeoning stock markets in Poland - it’s bizarre.
Reports The Economist, even adjusting for the global slowdown, the IMF still expects something around 6% GDP growth for the continent. It was less than 1% at the beginning of the last decade. Prices for commodities will certainly fall, but even tempered demand will still be high. The US wants 25% of its oil to come from Africa by the next decade and China is an unscrupulus driller.
So maybe Africa is’nt such a bad place to be.
I asked one of my Rwandese co-workers why she cared about the US election. She said she just cares about the economy and someone fixing it. I told her the good news, that Africa is doing pretty well. So we (myself included) don’t have to worry, I told her. She reminded me that we work for an American organization. America goes down, we don’t have jobs. Not so un-inter-connected after all.
Oh, right.
October 14, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under Observations
The opening of Nakumatt’s (a Kenyan chain) first store in Rwanda in Kigali’s small but sleek central shopping center/ mall has been all the rage this past month. It’s not just that it’s huge (some people say it’s two floors because it has a small second level in the way back, I say 1 and a quarter), or that it sells everything (it’s like a miniture Wal-Mart), but that it’s absurdly open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I don’t know what life is like in Nairobi, but Kigali isn’t exactly a 24 hour a day kind of city. In fact, you find that “sleepy” is one of the most common words used to describe it.
Nakumatt’s supplies are all imported (even in a landlocked country, the fancy kind of imported) and mainly caters to the ex-pats and prosperous. Maybe the size of a normal sized supermarket (you know, the ones without the starbucks and the dry cleaner), it enters a market dominated by a small market also specializing in imports, but smaller than a large 7-11. Suffice to say, it’s light years ahead of the competition - and, honestly, Rwanda itself.
But by jettisoning a market that closes at a reasonable hour and early on Sundays, Rwanda is leaving their despised Francophone (good luck finding a French supermarket open on a Sunday, much less 24 hours) colonial roots for a firm desire to chase the promise of prosperity of American capitalism. Rwanda wants to speak English, not French (which is why our school will teach in English, by government decree); they want a buzzing capitalist center, not sleepy, sober cities; they want IT and long hours, not agriculture.
So bring on Nakumatt with it’s multiple floors, flat screen TVs, frozen foods, treadmills, imported fruit loops, dismal produce selection (doesn’t matter where you go, produce just shouldn’t be bought at supermarkets), multiple checkout stands, and fancy bar code scanners (beep..beep..beep..now that’s the sound of progress, American style!). If you want to speak like America and work like them, why not shop like them too?
October 11, 2008 at 3:17 pm · Filed under Observations
Rwanda is a land of hills and it’s difficult to grasp just how much that is true until you arrive here. There is literally no flat land here, one hill rolls into another ad infinitum. There are no straight roads either – they wind around the curved slopes of these hills – and going from point A to B is almost never as direct as it seems it should be.
Along these roads your find the people of this country and the activity of Rwanda. Up and down they walk, sometimes with great bundles on their heads or in tow – be it firewood, water, fruit, or construction supplies - they port it all by foot for miles. In a country where even a bike is a luxury, it is astonishing to see the things they carry.
September 20, 2008 at 6:03 pm · Filed under Observations
Want to get anywhere in Rwanda? The moto will take you.
These little machines that sometimes resemble no more than a motorized bicycle cover every corner of this country. Throughout the country, the motos are the transport system from the most remote houses to the nearest bus stop to anywhere else you might go.
In Kigali, it’s less than a dollar to get most everywhere in the city.
Cheap point-to-point public transportation. Not a bad idea if it weren’t for the absurdly high accident rate. It seems everyone has far too many moto accident stories and death is not uncommon.
But they sure are fun.
September 19, 2008 at 5:45 pm · Filed under Observations
I was traveling in the countryside yesterday 20 to 30 minutes down a dirt road into the country. City life far behind. If it weren’t for all the people living here, we might say “into the natural landscape.”
As we’re bumping along, one of my fellow passengers chucks out the milk carton he just finished. In my most bemused California, Berkeley student way, I asked, “Why’d you do that? You just toss the garbage on the side of the road like that?”
“It’s okay,” they responded. “It’s not a problem.”
“But it’s trash. Why not just hold on to it and we’ll throw it away later?”
“Rwanda is very clean. Very clean for Africa. It’s okay.” There was a clear consensus in the car.
“But this makes it less clean, doesn’t it?”
“No, no. It’s okay. Rwanda is very clean…”
…Honestly, Rwanda is very clean. You don’t see trash and abandoned waste anywhere. Which is why I don’t get it. For how normal they made it seem to chuck your trash out your window, Rwanda should be much dirtier.
Shouldn’t it?
