Inconspicuous Intended Outcomes

So it’s my last post.* I won’t go into the obvious stuff like the culture shock (airport bathrooms in D.C. with auto water, soap, and towel…needless to say running water!), or even how blessed I feel to be from this great country of ours. And I’m not even going to talk about poverty.

That’s because poverty is not what this fellowship was about. It never was intended to be, but I didn’t know that at the beginning. Thinking back to Bangladesh, I can recall sitting in one of the few modern cafés of Dhaka, racking my brain over tea after tea, trying to figure out what I was going to produce from this fellowship. What tangible thing was going to be the outcome? Along the way I would explain to expats what I was doing, and of course, one of their first questions would be, “So what do you have to do? Is this for a degree? Do you have to write a report?” When I told them, no, I only had to blog, they didn’t get it. Their next question was, “No, I mean, don’t you have turn something in?”

Even though I knew I didn’t have to create anything, I still, for some reason, felt I did.

And so, I sat in Dhaka, thinking that if I was going to do something, it needed to be comparative and a consistent theme, and so it needed to start here, country number one. Would it be a book? A photo journal? What would be the angle? Mega slums? Social enterprise? Big aid? The fellowship proposal I had written seemed like a guideline enough when I composed it, but now that I was actually carrying it out on the ground, it became more of a tenuous concept than a clear roadmap. Time was running out – I had to leave Bangladesh soon.

I was consumed with self-doubt. I really couldn’t think of anything – I was interested in all the areas of poverty and all the areas of development. Since I knew I wouldn’t be able to cover it comprehensively, I couldn’t tie it together. Here I was, I felt, with this golden opportunity that so many people would kill to have, and it looked like, if I didn’t act soon, I was just going to wing it.

And that’s pretty much what I did.

I tried to set things up along the way in terms of volunteering or some sort of network in each country of which I could be a part, but these plans really had no consistent theme except it was all stuff I was just really interested in. Often, such as in South Africa, I would just hitchhike around a country doing outdoors activities or, like in Zimbabwe, I’d just walk up to the border and see if I could get across to talk to people and see what was going on with the farmer situation.

This is when I started to think. Smashed between sweating Malawians in the back of a minibus that never seemed to move. Speeding through rice fields in southern China on a mountain bike under clear blue skies. Spending New Year’s Eve alone in northern Mozambique, knowing really no one in the city. Though not all of these were the most pleasant experiences, they are some of my fondest memories.

It was during times like these that I really started to understand myself and how I see the world, as cliché as it sounds. My thoughts rather exploded – I had scraps of paper with ideas to explore and write about a later date when I was not traveling. Even now, back home and not completely back in the mix, my corkboard has become a holding pen for notes bearing one random thought or another.

All throughout college, and my life in fact, I’d been producing, pushing, trying to get to the next level. College entrance. Scholarship applications. Getting internships. Admission to societies. Meeting after meeting. Rinse and repeat.

But I never really stopped to think about what it all meant, or how I fit into the bigger picture. Of course, much of this was self imposed, but I’d wager to say that many people, especially those at top-20 colleges, have had similar experiences at some point. A lot of this, I think, has to do with the way the system is set up: to value lines on a resume much more than creative thought.

When I got back Stateside, I was able to catch up with the other Keegan Fellow from my year, Kathryn Moreadith. It was shocking how similar our reflections were. Talking over Skype, the essence of our conversation was as if we were both saying, at the same time, “Can you believe what just happened?! It never was supposed to be about the project!” The creeping feeling of failure that I felt, even after I was back, was something she could understand. But now, having had time to reflect, that feeling of failure is gone. I realize I’ve succeeded in ways valuable beyond measure.

*I will technically post a few more of my thoughts from the trip on my main fellowship site. In fact, I’ve already published one about Chinese social enterprise, a piece I was working on while abroad but never published. Go here to see this first piece.

In-Flight Entertainment

Exhausted, 10 pounds lighter, and wearing a tan that almost had people mistaking me for a Liberian, I sat between two massive engines laboring for the Boeing 767 that was carrying me across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States.

As I sat there, almost two days after I had left the village, I was still running through everything that had happened in the last two weeks.

There were certain events that simply showed the amazing obstacles these people confront too often: for example, watching (and shortly after joining) Game pick up rice that spilled on the ground, grain by grain in the dirt, or when I went with Esther to see her home, slogging 20 minutes through thick mud and water over my knees. She goes through this every night, except she carries Ma-Mary on her back and pots on her head.

And the end was typical enough – they were sad to see me go, I was sad to go, I promised to come back. Some of them gave me gifts, which was really uncomfortable considering how much they had already given me.

But beyond this one of the real takeaways of the two weeks was seeing how people handle poverty across the spectrum.

~

During my trip, I’ve come to poverty largely in terms of opportunity. Under this definition, a villager with a small house, little money, but a technical degree and many friends in government agencies or formal companies would probably be less impoverished than a villager with lots of money, a big farm, but no schooling or outside contacts.

So, how do you get opportunity?

If we’re talking about the impoverished, you either WAIT for opportunity to come to you, or you SEARCH for it. Examples could be working extra jobs for tuition and being accepted to college (searching) or waiting for the country/economy to structurally improve and bring your standard of living with it (waiting). My arrival to the village was, in a sense, a convenient proxy for an opportunity.

Then, the question becomes: what do you do with it once you get it?

You either CREATE more opportunities for yourself and/or others, or you CONSUME it. For example, do you just milk the NGO that’s come to your village for all it’s worth, or do you try to capitalize on the program offered and/or the Western connections?

On the plane ride home from Monrovia, I sketched a diagram out, which I later altered a bit with the help of my cousin, a sociology professor. First off, I’ll admit it’s not the most simple and sexy diagram. I’m not a theorist. More technically speaking, a couple notes:

1) The pyramid is not indicative of ranking but rather of quantity (like the food pyramid). The middle “?” indicates that not all “Searchers” will be “Creators” and vice-versa.

2) The wave indicates that a person’s status as a “Searcher” or “Waiter” is not static, and is influenced by various things throughout their life like cumulative capital (financial, social, human, etc.) and dependencies (career, family, etc.). Perhaps I’m more of a searcher now, but check back when I’m married and have kids and see how willing I am to take big chances.

OPPORTUNITY DISCOVERY AND ACTION BY THE POOR

The reason I started thinking of it in these terms is because this is exactly what I saw in the village. On one hand, Togbah was comfortable to use me like a pocketbook throughout my entire stay. Conversely, Amos never asked me for money or for me to buy anything for him. He’s not content to wait and wants to create businesses that will have impacts far beyond himself. He’s already started saving, but I’ve offered to partially fund one of his businesses, which we’re discussing now.

James and Goma fall somewhere in between. They really valued me as a friend, I believe, and wanted to convert this friendship into support for themselves and for their children’s college. They’re a bit harder to characterize because I saw varying tendencies.

So what’s the point?

I think this has a lot of indications for development organizations/businesses and where they intervene. One school of thought is that if you have a limited number of aid dollars, to get the largest social return per dollar, spend the money on high potential villagers (creative searchers) and let them be examples to the others.

However, perhaps these people will be creative on their own, and maybe the people you really need focus on are people like James and Goma, who risk becoming a complacent waiter/consumer.

And this doesn’t mean that waiting consumers can be ignored – certain Bottom of the Pyramid approaches and business ideas, such as launching a product, really needs to pay attention to these consumers and what they want.

It’s not a perfect model, but thinking back to people like Josue in Mozambique, Sihphiwe in Soweto, and Anis in Bangladesh, it creates an interesting lens through which I can see how people handle poverty.

DIY Infrastructure

In my small hometown, in terms of infrastructure and specifically roads, city officials often consider things like whether to repave a road, install a roundabout in place of a stoplight, or alter speed limits. Rural Liberians in Bong County were faced with a similar dilemma on a slightly larger scale: their government, out of lack of will or capacity, had failed to provide a road connecting their villages to the city. I talked with Amos Mulbah, one of the villagers (not the Amos previously mentioned) who explained the problem was that pregnant women had to endure many pains over the footpaths that made villages accessible only by foot or motorcycle. Yea, I think a road connecting my home to modern civilization is probably pretty important, too.

Villagers are taking matters into their own hands. When I first heard them talk about this, I envisioned them uprooting stumps or something of the like to make it more passable. Instead, they are essentially hacking through the forest to build their own road from scratch. Follow the road far enough from Kpellemue as I did one Friday, and you will run into about 25 people, five or so of whom have axes and are chopping away at trees, while the rest are destumping, clearing, and smoothing the road. A group of women come out to provide food for the workers.

They’d been at it since January 2010, and when I talked to them in November they estimated they would be able to finish the last two miles by last month, February 2011. They let me take a few swings of the axe, and it became pretty obvious why it was going to take them over a year (I didn’t get an estimate on the distance).

The effort was started in Gbanga, the county capital, and most villagers worked as much as they could until the road reached their village, meaning there were many more working early on. There was no formal structure in place, and I even had trouble identifying who was in charge – it was as if everyone rolled up their collective sleeves and said, “Well, we’re not going to wait any longer”. Every Friday, people would take off time from their farm or job to work on the public road, and even a few like Amos Dolo (the aforementioned entrepreneur) have continued to help after the road passed their villages.

Similarly, at Amos Dolo’s school, he showed me another problem. The national government mandated a cap of 35 students per class, but failed to provide the funding necessary for additional buildings. Whoops. Though school officials have voiced their concerns to government, the PTA decided they were going to do something about it themselves. Subsequently, they have been going out to find “contracts” – essentially agreements with people who need brushing done, need fields harvested, or have other labor-intensive jobs in need of completion.

He showed me the extension, which only needs funding for the zinc roof before completion. In the meantime, they’re using a one room church and have divided it into thirds with tarps and stand-up dividers. Technically they’re separate rooms, but when I tried giving a short lesson, it was a bit distracting, to say the least.

They expect their government to provide the infrastructure and social services – that they were vocal about. But given these examples of collective initiative, it seems they understand the nation has just emerged from years of war and recovery will be slow. In the meantime, they can help too.

While I won’t compare apples with oranges – Liberia and the US are in two completely different development situations – it is tempting to envy this combination of urgency and will. Writing this from back in the US, where years of spending beyond our means and gridlock on issues such as healthcare and social security have produced one of the most pressing situations in recent history, it sure seems we have the former but not the latter.

Amos' Vision

Walking the main path through Boi Town and Kpellemue during the early morning hours and dusk hours is like going to a small town grocery store just after 5 p.m. It’s hard for me to get very far before running into someone. One day I stopped to talk with middle-aged man caring a bundle of sticks on his head. He let me try it out. The load must have weighed over 50 pounds, as I could barely make it up the hill. Somewhat amused, he took it off my hands and continued on his hour-long trek.

On several occasions I also ran into Joseph, a young man about my age walking village to village to sell medicines in order to save money for college. On average he estimates that he walks about five hours a day.

Then there’s Jacob. A friend of mine who’s often around the farm, I asked him to charge my phone. The village is off the grid, so he had to go in town. The transport to get there and back, at 40 Liberian dollars, was almost the same cost of actually the phone. Assuming you walk, that’s a half day of work you’ve missed.

I met many shopkeepers in the village, such as Niepoo, who kept me satiated with the delicious, peanut buttery Liberian snack, kanyah. Others sold small consumable items like matches and cigarettes. But I only met one entrepreneur (or maybe more accurately, one entrepreneurial family). This was Amos, who I’ve previously mentioned briefly.

Amos is an elementary teacher at a nearby school that I took a half day to visit, and almost every afternoon you can find him on his porch, in his dusty Florida Marlins hat and running shorts, working on tomorrow’s lesson plan. He’s one of the few people in the village with a concrete home and one of even fewer who have completed high school. His responses to questions can be slightly curt, but at the same time he’s a bit of a jokester. In his spare time he works on his rubber and rice farms, and recently has been vaccinating children in the village for polio on behalf of the World Health Organization. His wife, Framadah, runs the only “restaurant” in town, and is a local to Kpellemue (Amos is from out of town). Amos explained that she didn’t get very far in school – he tried to teach her the ABC’s and she only got to K – but she’s quite the shrewd businesswoman.

Amos is even more enterprising. After I got to know him a bit better, he told me about some of his past failures with fish farming, but also how he has other plans. Particularly nagging him is an idea to bring electricity to the village. He wants to save enough money to buy a small generator to charge cell phones, which are growing in number in Kpellemue and surrounding villages (no nearby villages have electricity either). He would use Framadah’s restaurant as an anchor point. He envisions the restaurant extending service to dinner time, when the generator could be used to power a TV and VCR to screen football matches and movies. During the screenings for which he would charge admission, he could charge phones and serve meals, coffee and tea.

He’s thinking bigger, too. His next idea after that is to start a rubber purchasing/consolidation depot. Currently, most villagers individually take their rubber into town and sell it to the traders in the market, getting middleman prices. His plan is to buy up any rubber in the village at the going rate that traders are offering and take it in aggregate, to save on transport costs, directly to Firestone, the multinational company. The villagers would benefit because they wouldn’t have the added transport costs, and his transport costs would be covered by the higher margins at Firestone.

He went on and on like this in priority order – next it was poultry farming, then pineapple. As with anything entrepreneurial and especially agricultural, there’s an enormous amount of risk. Exhibit A is his fish farm, which crashed when the region was hit by a drought. But still, I can see the opportunity: I bought a pineapple in the village for the equivalent of 35 cents, while I saw the same pineapple in the city a week later for around $2.50.

And it seems like he’s not the only one of the family. His brother-in-law Anthony is planning to start a pharmacy, giving the aforementioned Joseph a run for his money. I can only hope that Amos and others like him hang around and hang onto these visions. He’s one of few who are really leading by example.

Where’s the Corn?: Thoughts on Idea Spread in Liberia and Beyond

Staying on the topic of rice, as I swished through the rice fields day after day, I started to wonder: Where is all the corn? In Southern Africa, corn is everywhere – everyone eats it as a thick porridge, and as a result grinding mills are ubiquitous. Maize is present in Liberia, but it’s much less available than rice is in Southern Africa. It’s not the case that corn can’t grow in Liberia (see chart...no data available for Liberia). It seems, rather that Liberians haven’t developed a culture of consuming it as a meal. Something happened – and I’m not sure what – but the idea of rice as the country’s staple food above corn spread long ago and has cemented itself.

What’s interesting to me here is how ideas and customs spread or don’t spread, and what this means for a diversified, and thus more stable, economy (and more diversified diets in this case!). Something as culturally distinct from traditional African customs as spaghetti – which I loved to eat at the many roadside stands – has taken off in West Africa and specifically Liberia. In contrast, corn is still relegated mostly to a grilled, midday snack.

So why didn’t corn establish itself originally in Liberia and why has it still not?

On one of my days off from harvesting, I was chatting with Cooper, a teacher at a nearby school. We talked about idea spread in Liberia. Cooper thinks that part of the corn absence might have to do with the fact that no one has taken up corn on the processing side. Currently, there are few grinding mills for corn, and almost as few people know about them. He told me a story of an entrepreneur who had brought a pineapple processing business for juice near to his home, which created a huge jump in pineapple production. People need to see that you’ve built a factory, and they want someone before them to test the waters.

He continued, “We only know two ways to cook cassava [another staple food] – boil it and pound it.” No one had hit upon the idea of grinding the root and then frying to serve as a topping on foods like they had in Ghana (they do grind it, but don’t fry it). Certainly, you can’t treat Africans as one homogenous group, but many ideas can be and have been transplanted from other neighboring countries.

It’s conversations like these, and observing how certain products spread like wildfire throughout a country but stop immediately at the border – like boat shoes in Cote d’Ivoire – that underscore the huge opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. These open market gaps can be filled. Consider poultry in northern Mozambique, which I worked on in Mozambique with TechnoServe: people are getting into all aspects of the industry – growing, processing, trading – largely because it’s simply an available, profitable option. Along the same lines, NGOs have found “look see” demo plots to be one of the most effective ways to convince farmers to adopt new agricultural practices. In Africa, more than in the West, seeing is believing.

Without digging around for different studies online, just being in Africa I get a sense that there is an almost “if you build it they will come” size of an opportunity. Of course, there are many complications that need to be carefully navigated, such as politics and quality control. If you could do that, and determine WHY certain products hadn’t reached a consumer segment, I’d bet there are many untapped pools of producers to ready to work and customers waiting to be served.

Models for Governance in the Rice Fields of Liberia

The primary work I came to do at the village – and by “work” I mean that I owned the dead-weight title for the duration of my stay – was rice harvesting. It was harvest time and so much labor was needed.

From a high-level perspective, the way it works is that for every day you work on someone else’s farm, they owe you a day on your farm. So you end up with about 15 or so people, whose farms you’ve already worked on previous days, assembling at your farm on one planned day to knock out most or all the field. It’s much more efficient than going on your own because you have a couple young men collecting the cut rice from behind the line of attack (see last picture), and I can attest there’s strength in numbers. (In this first picture I'm getting ready to haul the rice back to the farm kitchen in typical style - on top of your head with cutlass under your arm.)

The first day was a grand failure, as everyone showed up to Togbah’s farm, but soon after left when they realized Togbah had not prepared the ties (vines) to bind the cut rice. In following days, as I joined the team and went to other fields, I never saw anyone’s field unprepared and thus realized the blatant lack of preparation by Togbah.

But eventually it was our turn again, and Game and Esther, as is custom, prepared a big midday meal for everyone, which the workers devour in quantities I’ve never before seen. The meal is much needed because it’s tough work. Ten solid hours under the blistering sun, hunched over the rice, day after day, is difficult when you don’t have any climate-controlled refuge to return to or any Western amenities. The irony is that to cut the rice almost everyone uses the same paring knife bearing the brand name “Enjoy Living” on the handle.

As we cut, we would do rhythmic chants to propel the work along. It was usually one person leading, and then everyone chanting a complimentary phrase, with me somewhere in the background trying to sound like I was saying the right thing. Seeing as how Liberia was founded by freed American slaves, I couldn’t help but consider the unsettling possibility that I was singing along with them songs that were once sang on my country’s southern soil.

But what is most intriguing about the harvest itself is the developed leadership structure and well-defined schedule of fines for those who don’t follow the rice harvesting rules. I talked with the friendly Superintendant James Flomo about this. His position is supported by a Secretary and Solider, and as the leader, he is in charge of organizing the group and recording fines. A line leader with a whistle indicates when the group should move to a new section of the field.

The fines are rather strict – 5 Liberian dollars for talking during a song, 20 dollars for leaving rice behind you, 10 dollars for leaving the area without telling anyone. All the money goes in a pot, primarily used to help the family pay for the food and purchase palm wine that is consumed throughout the day. I took a few swigs but being the nice guy that I am, I saved the rest for them.

In a country where corruption and leadership is so poor that the president dissolved her entire cabinet save one minister, next to neighboring leaders who alter election results to their liking, this village governance is impressive to me. Why can’t policy makers take a hint from the leadership and discipline from their constituents in the village? To be certain, there is much less power at stake in the village, but my experience in the rice fields makes it seem that the raw capacity is there.

Why Do Resources ≠ Riches on the African Farm? Pt. II

So why have Africa's resources not been turned to riches?

There are many compounding factors, and I won’t go into them all here, but near the core is lack of stable property rights, which in turn translates to people finding little gain from investment, and in the end few companies find an incentive to be there to buy the raw materials of people like James.

Without enforced property rights, two key things can happen, which have interrelated effects:

1. A strong-armed government, such as Angola or Zimbabwe, can capture export rents and fail to spend it on the public, alienating business and not supporting public infrastructure and social goods. Botswana’s equitable partnership with De Beers, the diamond company, is one reason for the country’s success.
2. The mindset of people like James becomes consume now, save later. As higher demand chases a constrained amount of goods, inflation ensues, and the central bank raises interest rates to combat it. This high cost of capital, a key symptom of weak property rights I’ll hit upon next, compounded by corruption, lack of infrastructure, and other factors, isn’t the most inviting scenario for investors, foreign or domestic.

When at a USAID conference in Mozambique, I remember the Standard Bank official tell the delegates, point blank, something to the extent of, “There’s no way we can give your farmers lower rates than 16% or reduce the 40-60% equity requirement. It’s just not possible.” At the root of what he was talking about was property rights: in Mozambique, the government owns all property, so private individuals have no equity in their property with which to take out loans.

As a result of these factors, the cost of capital in Sub-Saharan Africa is enormous. The average commercial lending rate for all SSA countries with data available is 17% (CIA Factbook, 2010), and you can imagine that countries without data likely have higher rates.

Business investment is sorely needed, for both agricultural innovation (higher yields for farmers) and to serve as an outlet to which farmers can sell. When I was in the village for those few weeks, I almost ran out of money from people trying to sell me things – pineapple, pumpkin, fish. I was like the United States of village trade – heavy on the imports.

It’s also no coincidence that while doing my work with TechnoServe in Ghana, I heard villagers singing the same song, telling me they loved having a “ready buyer” in Guinness Brewery, even though the price was slightly lower.

The villagers need agricultural business to start up, and it’s starting to happen in Liberia. Attracting large commercial investors can be a powerful way to grow an economy and help people like James, but if property rights and cultural traditions aren’t respected when business comes, as this NY Times article points out, it can lead to foreign companies and dictators running away with the loot. In a few posts I’ll talk about people in the village who are looking to serve the business need from the ground up on a much smaller scale.

Why Do Resources ≠ Riches on the African Farm? Pt. I

I split time between working with Togbah, and James and Goma (pictured with our dinner), a wonderful couple who graciously opened their home to me (they had a couple homes, and I stayed in their Boi Town home). By the time I visited James’ primary home in Jaimue, I had already learned how to make and sell charcoal, source homemade alcohol, and watch as Togbah instantly closed my cut with the juice of some random blade of grass he found in the brush. Our meals come from the rice of the fields, and the bitter ball in the garden. I bathed either in a small stream under the expansive stars or just went outside and stripped down when the thunderous rains poured at night. It’s amazing to me how much the land has to offer. Unfortunately it also offers dirty drinking water, which led to a short speed bump in me getting giardia and a complimentary sleepless night/painful day.

I want to digress briefly and explain the generosity of Goma, who in addition to offering her home, ran errands into town for me and routinely brought me dinner, even despite the 45 minute roundtrip walk (not fun after a hard day’s work in the field, I can attest). She first met James during the civil war while they were hiding out in the bush from 1990 – 2003. For 14 years they were on the run, moving occasionally, pounding rice in the swamp so as not to be heard.

Goma and her young son had been abandoned by her husband, and James stepped in. Their two children, Naywa (pictured) and Matu, grew up on the run. In the community, James has been somewhat of a leader, doing things like building a public bridge across a river to many farm plots, and also spearheading construction of a public palm oil “factory”.

Which brings me back to the resources of the land. One staple of West African diet and agriculture I haven’t mentioned is palm oil. ­The first day I visited James and Goma in Jaimue, a village about a 20 minute walk away from Boi Town, we went hunting for fresh fruit bunches of palm kernel.

When I was in Ghana with TechnoServe, I was looking at palm oil from the NGO’s side, doing an oil palm market analysis. Now I’m sweating in the bush with the farmer they are trying to connect with. Full circle, indeed.

It started by James finding a “wreath” in the woods, which was essentially natural ladder. He rigged this 25-foot ladder with a sickle-like hook on the top, and pointed it up in the oil palm tree over one of the branches. Once up among the branches, he’d knock the fresh fruit bunch down, and I would gather it up. Tree after tree we did this, and I’m not ashamed to say that I never volunteered to climb.

From there, back at the farm house, I chopped the bunches apart and manually processed them with Goma to create a sweet oil, a sample of which I was able to take back home. The meal of plain rice and oil is probably the Liberian equivalent of spaghetti and sauce in the States. A guy’s go-to.

I’ve often explained to people the potential for African agriculture. After working on the farm for just a few weeks, that only becomes clearer. It is true that Africa has a more difficult agricultural environment than places like Latin America and infrastructure such as roads is lacking. But it’s also true that there are opportunities in terms of increasing yields and increasing the amount of land that those yields are on. Right now 60% of the world’s uncultivated land is in Africa, and average yields stand at only 1/3 of those of South Asia, according to the World Bank. There’s room to improve, and in the next post I’ll attempt to explain where past failures have come from in as simplified and entertaining manner as possible.

Solving the Conundrum of Poorly Planted Fields

"A visitor is a guest for two days. On the third day give him or her a hoe."

-Swahili proverb

For a long time I’d been trying to solve what I termed to myself the “Conundrum of Poorly Planted Fields.” When in Mozambique working with CLUSA, I wondered why nearly all soybean fields had been planted by farmers just scattering the seed, leading to poorer yields. Economically speaking, the poorer you are, the more willing you’ll be to trade time for money. Thus, wouldn’t these farmers, who have much more time than money, make every effort to plant correctly to maximize yields? Seeing the poorly planted fields, the only logical answer was, they’re lazy. But I didn’t believe them to be lazy. Hence the conundrum.

The simple answer is that there’s a certain point where the amount/difficulty of work outweighs the additional financial benefit. Though I thought this to possibly be the case, I never really believed it until I did the work on the farm myself. I suppose I was holding them to a higher standard than myself. This became evident when I got to try my hand at their work:

• Checking and setting traps: on a couple of mornings we went around checking both water and ground traps for any catches. This required us to trek through the woods and wade through the swamps to find Togbah’s hidden traps. A few crabs were all we came up with during the two weeks, which we ate shells and all.

• Weeding the bitter ball crop: this was absolutely back-breaking labor. What I initially thought would take me a half day ended up requiring two days. I had the help of a few of village kids, about whom I inquired why they were not in school. No real reason. (Bitter ball is a tiny eggplant with a self-explanatory taste.)

• Building a rice kitchen: when families harvest, they have to store it to eat it later – most people don’t commercialize, since the quantities usually aren’t that enormous and trying to fetch a good price when the markets are flooded is pointless. So, a stilted structure made entirely from wood, vines, and palms is constructed to protect the rice from rain. This required Togbah and me to collect and form together a wood structure entirely with without nails. Huge market opportunity for nails here, I’m thinking.

• Brushing: to brush means, essentially, to clear brush. On the face of it, chopping away at grass is no problem, until you realize that there are thorny vines and sawgrass that rip away at your hands (or my hands…theirs were hard as rocks). By the end of it, gripping a cutlass with hands covered in razor thin cuts was less than enjoyable.

But by far, the most intensive – primarily since we didn’t finish the rice kitchen – was making the charcoal. During the building process, the rain started to pour, and the rest of family retreated inside. What took us an entire day to build, the charcoal pit – a pile of wood, dirt, grass, and palm – was lit to slowly burn over the course of two days.

Once the burning started, our work wasn’t over. You have to closely monitor it all times so that it “doesn’t spoil”, in Togbah’s words. This meant that he, Game, and I had to sleep in the kitchen – an all-thatch structure about 7 feet x 5 feet – to check the coal every few hours and watch for “rogues” (Liberian English) trying to steal the rice, which I’ll talk about later. The bugs living in the thatch bed combined with the rain dripping through the ceiling cracks didn’t make for a pleasant sleep.

It wasn’t until that night, in the middle of my dinner of dry rice, that I found out it was Liberia’s Thanksgiving Day. The contrast to the American Thanksgiving experience and even the urban Liberian’s Thanksgiving experience is striking. As I settled into bed, we could actually hear blasting African pop music from the nearby city. Togbah said to me, “And you see how they are enjoying?”…”Do you think, if I was having money, I would be sleeping like this?”

Ironically, on a day that should be for acknowledging what you have, the poor are reminded of what they are without. It doesn’t seem, for most of them, it’s for lack of effort.

Development Choking Points

Let me first clarify the initial post “Living Their Life” and preface subsequent posts. In reference to the villagers, by saying I was “living their life”, I was being quite presumptuous – certainly for journalistic reasons and not to mislead. A dominating characteristic of their experience, one which I would NEVER be able to comprehend regardless of the time spent immersed, is a feeling of perpetuity. For most villagers, things will never change; there is no escape in sight. For me, I know in X number of weeks I escape to a better place. This is one reason why I’ve come to accept that I will never fully understand poverty – I can only get close. Having said that, in two weeks in a village, you can pick up a lot, and that’s what I hope to share with you.

So getting on with it.

I want to continue where I left off, with what happened next with Togbah. The next morning circa 7:00 am, after a night of powerful rain that shook the house, we went to the farm to tap the palm wine. The wine was extracted from the base of the overturned palm and handed to me in a never-washed cup complete with dirt, bark, and all manner of insects floating in it (pics 1 and 2). I went back for seconds, but not because I liked it. From there we went to a bar in the next village for “7 cent gin” (the name I gave it), and then purchased a bottle of fiery home brew moonshine to split back at the farm. When I went for my lunch, which was just oranges, he questioned why I wasn’t soaking it in alcohol. So my lunch was a gin-soaked orange, and by around 11 am I was a bit tipsy.

It didn’t take long to confirm that yes, I had somehow been paired up with the village drunk, for lack of a better descriptor. Many people claimed there was something wrong with his head – a claim I initially thought to be an exaggeration or slight, but became increasingly convinced that that might actually be the case.

This alcohol problem, combined with his personal mindset, did two things. First, he killed any opportunity for himself in terms of work and impressing me, someone who could probably really help him. He spent more time drinking and talking than working which, at least to me, doesn't seem like the best course of action when it’s harvest time and you have free labor on hand. Second, he killed opportunity for his family and those around him. Which leads me to Esther.

Esther is 18 years old. She’s in 5^th grade and has three classmates. This isn’t unusual for Liberians, especially rural Liberians, who have had schools disrupted for years. She’s the daughter of Gamay, but not of Togbah, so he tells me often (“she not born to me”, he says). As such, he really doesn’t care at all for her.

Still, she’s studious and hardworking. To fund her education, every Saturday she heads to market to sell cassava leaf. I noticed that she was always carrying around this tattered World Book – the “T” section from sometime during the Clinton administration. Since it was the only book she had, and I understood there was another she wanted, I offered to buy her the new one once she could find out the price.

This was a problem with Togbah. He warned me, “And you don’t give her money [for the book]. Don’t ever try. Don’t ever try, I tell you…Whatever I tell you to do, do; whatever I tell you don’t do, don’t do.” Admittedly, I should have checked with him first. Yet, this was a consistent pattern throughout my stay: any money I wanted to spend had to go through him, and he always had to benefit first. He essentially wanted to use me as his personal pocketbook. Needless to say, this created an interesting dynamic throughout my stay.

The problem with this is not primarily that he is difficult to help get out of poverty, but that he serves as a choking point for impacting others – his entire family. In thinking about how to impact a community, people like Togbah create very difficult situations. In Bangladesh, I met many female entrepreneurs whose husbands had been supportive of their home business. Would Gamay ever be able to start a business? Would I ever be able to mail something like books to Esther? It’s not impossible, but when need is great and resources are scarce, you go for the low-hanging fruit.

(I did, by the way, buy her the book before I left, and proposed to Gamay that if she made it to college I would fund it. To my knowledge, Togbah still doesn’t know.)

Overview of the Villages

Before I go any further in documenting my time in the rural hinterlands of Liberia, I thought it would be helpful to give a quick tour of the villages, Boi Town (pronounced "Boy") and Kpellemue (pronounced "Belly-moo"), which are nearest to Gbanga city in Bong County. I did this walkthrough at the end of my stay, and planned it so that it was midday when people would be working and I wouldn't be ransacked by each and every villager eager to say hi.

From village to village it's about a 15 minute walk, but I've condensed it (and added music) for your sanity. Along the way I point out a few key people and places, some of which I'll refer to in subsequent posts. You'll also notice me repeating the same several phrases - I had the greetings down pretty well, as well as commonly used items for me like "cutlass" and "country axe", but beyond that I pathetically defected to English. Needless to say it led to some interesting, if frustrating, conversations.

Living Their Life: Entering 2 Weeks of Immersion and Uncertainty

I was probably scared, early on in my trip. Since I set off I’d wanted to live in a village, but I've balked. I’ve lived in South African slums for several days, had a few nights’ stay in Bangladeshi villages, and trampled around countless times for hours on end through ghettos and rural communities in the world’s poorest countries. But I wasn’t living their life. I was observing, interviewing, walking around, going to social events – and my Western preoccupations were never really checked at the door. I was always planning, producing, multi-tasking.

Finally in Liberia everything came together: a harvesting season (where labor is needed and I could be used), an English speaking country, and a connection to a villager. So, a friend of a friend of a friend said sure, his father would put me to work. Not knowing any of these people, as usual, I just took their word and snagged a free ride one Saturday morning, heading several hours over crumbling roads into the war-ravaged interior of the country.

Arriving in the small town of Gbarnga, I met my friend of a friend, Johnny, at his Carter Center office. An impressive individual, Johnny served as my contact in case anything went wrong. He introduced me to Cooper, the son of the old man I’d be working for. I hopped in the back of truck with Cooper and his friend, and we drove through a light rain shower off to the village. I was nervous. Two weeks, alone in the bush, as an outsider to a bunch of people with whom I have nothing in common. What would we talk about? How awkward would it be living with the old man? What if I got sick? (I brought no medicines, no water purification, nothing) And perhaps my biggest concern: what if I was just bored all the time?

When we arrived, some half hour later (not far, but far enough to see no trace of modern civilization), we were in solid bush. The village was Boi Town. I hopped out of the back, and met Togbah, a short, scruffy old man with graying hair, a strained face, and condemning eyes that were initially hidden behind a big grin and welcoming attitude (pictured in orange shirt). He insisted I call him his Papa (pronounced “Pap – A”), as he was known in the village as the Papa. My things were dropped off at his house, which was quite impressive, and then we walked to his farmhouse, five minutes away. His daughters were pounding rice and his wife was busy at the fire. From his farmhouse we made stops at every home and person, introducing me. Finally we came to the village “restaurant” that serves breakfast and lunch, run by the wife, Framadah, of Togbah’s younger brother Amos.

“Do you want to bath?”, asked Amos. “What?” I asked, bewildered. In hindsight, it was really dumb for me to assume I’d bath at the house, since the village has no running water. Next thing I knew, I found myself stripping down by a murky puddle next to an old guy I’d met 30 minutes prior so that we could cup water from the puddle and splash ourselves clean. So much for small talk.

That night dinner was delivered to me and Togbah at his house. Everyone else claimed they had eaten, so his wife Gamay (pronounced “Ga – may”), his 18-year-old daughter Esther, Ma-Mary the 2-year-old toddler, and others including James (in red hat) and Goma (pronounced “Go – ma”, pictured in orange shirt helping to find a creative way to hang my mosquito net) who were somehow related to Togbah, sat around watching Togbah and I eat this large portion of rice, greens, and fish. It was very awkward – almost like the white man and alpha male got all the food and everyone got what was left over. Had they really eaten?, I wondered. After dinner we sat around, in the dark, passing a bottle of hard liquor between Togbah, James and me while everyone watched. Two sips later I was already feeling the buzz. Looking back, that first bottle was a warning sign of things to come from Togbah.

Punk'd: Liberia Style

What works for development? One of the main problems with development is that in many cases, we simply don’t know. Failed approaches get tried over and over again by different organizations or even the same ones – in Ghana, an organization with which I worked was planning a community grain storage scheme in the same manner that had previously failed. When I got assigned to the task, I started asking questions, doing interviews, and digging deep for data – at least in the handful of organizations with which I worked, there wasn’t any organized manner for looking at past results (partly due to digitization only since the late ‘90s). And there certainly isn’t any database between organizations to document past experiences. So, most of the records are either buried deep in the archives, found in some long chain of emails, or recalled only from the memories of development workers who may or may not still be with the organization.

Compounding this problem is that even when you do find the records, it’s almost always a self-evaluation. What a breeze Vanderbilt would’ve been had I been able to grade myself! I was actually brought on with TechnoServe in Mozambique to gauge the impact of its poultry project. I tried to be objective as possible, but when the organization that you’re evaluating is paying your bills and giving you all the contacts, there will be some bias. And there’s pressure to paint a positive picture, because that improves your chances of getting a gig at another project, as it did for me in Ghana. Most NGOs are guilty of this.

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is trying to change this. Based out of Yale, the NGO and its sister organization J-PAL at MIT are conducting randomized controlled experiments to test and improve the effectiveness of poverty alleviation interventions. So, they will generally go to an NGO that has or will have a program soon starting, take a baseline survey of random villages both included and excluded from the intervention, and after the intervention administer the same survey to the same villages.

IPA interested me because of its unique role as an NGO that supplies the implementing NGOs with the information they need (though IPA has recently started doing implementation itself). To get to know the organization better, I volunteered just for a week and a half helping design a very small part of a survey that was to determine whether peace education was worthwhile (peace education is big in post-war Liberia). The UN and Liberian government had implemented a huge program to train communities in conflict resolution.

For my part, the setup was that after the team had finished administering the survey to the entire village and right before they were to leave, several enumerators were to get into a staged fight in the presence of the village chief. How would the chief respond? Had the training improved his “conflict resolution”? I was tasked with designing the skit and training the enumerators to act it out. Not the budding Shakespeare everyone believes me to be, I asked for the help of some locals in writing it. Training them was hilarious – when they practiced it out in the church (above), several unknowing pedestrians came by to try to mediate the fake fight. Liberians (and I tend to believe Africans in general) are amazing performers, at least when it comes to getting in fights – I think because they often do get in real fights themselves.

It really got fun when we went to local villages to practice on unsuspecting village leaders. We first asked permission to act it out, but this didn’t work since they knew what was coming. I did a quick 180 and in the next village we did a fake mini survey as a pretext for being there. I excused myself to go to the bathroom so that I – as the survey team leader – could not be assumed by the chief to take action when the fight broke out. I took a video, which was previously posted but had to be taken down in response to IPA's human subjects liabilities. The chief comes out saying, “We don’t fight here! I will fine you!”, and the village chair soon after runs out too. From there we go to the palava hut, and evenutually reveal the skit as a fake. There’s a moment of disbelief and then everyone just starts laughing hysterically. Invariably this was the response of the villagers. Everyone was a good sport, and the chiefs were especially interested to know how they performed.

(Ivory Coast Update: On Thursday the election results were announced with opposition candidate Ouattara winning in a 54% to 45% margin. On Thursday night, incumbent president Gbagbo's ally in the Constitutional Council called the results announced by the Independent Electoral Commission null and void. Gbagbo has instituted a curfew, closed borders, and threatened to kick out the UN envoy. Gbagbo's henchmen are patrolling the streets of Abidjan, and on Thursday night they opened fire at point blank range, killing 8, at the opposition party headquarters in Youpougon, the exact compound I spent time interviewing opposition supporters. Riots have broken out across the country. As I write this, both candidates are being sworn in as president, and the country is on the brink of civil war. International community supports Ouattara, and the African Union is holding an emergency summit to decide a course of action. The news is coming out by the hour. For a good article and stunning pictures, go here.)

Effects of War

Civil wars are not created equal. When you hear about different African countries recovering from civil wars, the degree of healing varies. Liberia makes Cote d’Ivoire look like a Sunday warm-up. Nearly everyone you talk to here has been affected by the war, usually directly and severely. Joseph (on the left), who I had lunch with one day, had just two weeks ago returned from a refugee camp in Ghana after being there for seven years. In his room, I saw his few personal items still half unpacked. He recalled back to 2003 when, with the war closing in on him and his family, they spent their last $200 to pay for a motor canoe to flee the country. After a less than fun week of vomiting, eating and drinking almost nothing, and relieving oneself in front of everyone (50 people packed onto a small canoe), they landed in Ghana. Seven years of living in a refugee camp and he was forced to come back when the school at which he was working in Ghana was cutting staff and he couldn’t get a ticket to the U.S. It’s hard not to run into someone who doesn’t have a similar story.

His brother Emmanuel (to the right of me in the picture) was currently in university getting his B.A. He is 30 years old. On average most people I met were years behind their grade level, due to the schools shutting down in most areas during the war – 12 year-olds in 1^st grade, 20 year-olds in 5^th grade, etc. I had the chance to visit the University of Liberia for the day, arguably the country’s best university. The teaching was, in my opinion, pretty subpar, though the professors may not have been at fault. It seemed like they were reading a lot of definitions for the students to copy down, something they should have covered in their preparation. But then I found out that books were too expensive for the majority of students to purchase. One of the interesting things I saw was that they were covering indifferent curves in their economics classes; granted it was something I learned in my first year at Vanderbilt while they were just getting to it as juniors, but they were covering it nonetheless. Now that schools are back open, the classes are heaving. The classes I saw were spilling out into the pathways, and students searched for anywhere to sit, while those less lucky had to stand for the lectures. Large populations of students are pressed into a limited number of schools – roughly 70% of schools were damaged or destroyed during the war, and 35%, of the whole population has never attended school, according to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. Until education improves, it’s unlikely that many of the top jobs in these big MNC’s like BHP Billiton will be able to go to Liberians.

Liberia: The Other Lone Star State

After an epic two-day overland trip involving motorcycles through the bush, creaking minibuses aboard which I garnered the name “Obama”, sleeping in a village at the border, and over 20 police checkpoints (and 4 forced bribes on the Cote d’Ivoire side), I found myself in Monrovia. If the capital city sounds vaguely presidential, it’s because Liberia is one of only two African countries with American ties (the other being Ethiopia).

Liberia had been on my hit list for a while because of its US connections, but more due to its being a reconstruction economy. Ranked 162 of 169 countries on the UN’s Human Development Index, Liberia is a country starting from scratch. Two brutal civil wars in 1989 and 1999 (to be detailed in a following post), which basically spanned from 1989 until 2004, left over 200,000 dead and the country’s infrastructure in shambles (the Guinness brewery, which I toured, was left alone, unsurprisingly!). When I told a US Foreign Service Officer that I was interested in development and wanted to meet USAID officials, he asked what part of development, and explained, “Liberia is rebuilding literally everything. Everything is in development.”

He was right. But it’s not just thephysical guts of the country, but the human capital. Over 1 million people fled from a country that only has 3 million to begin with, and as of 2005 half of those remained to be repatriated. Many are educated Liberians. On a flight, I happened to sit next to one, who had left before the war and only been back three times to see his grandparents. He said something interesting about Red Light, an area in Monrovia with which I was familiar, and which was notorious for muggings. It’s one of the trashiest places in the city – the side of the road seems like a soggy landfill. Being in Africa for nearly a year, I dismissed this as just another African street, but he explained in 1980, when he left, it was never like this. Liberia, he said, was like “the United States of Africa”. It was one of the shining stars of Africa, years ahead of now prominent countries like Ghana.

So Liberia has gone from African standout to devastated failure. What to do? The country made history in 2005 by electing the first, and still only, female president in Africa – and a sharp one at that. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (pic above, credit: myhero.com) is a Harvard-trained economist and former director at the UN and Citibank, among other institutions. She has a stellar resume and Western connections and support rarely privileged to African leaders. The US Ambassador to Liberia, in a fascinating NY Times article I suggest you read, explained, ”We see her as one of us.” Much more than other African politicians, she takes a fiery, no-nonsense approach. Fed up with corruption that was proving difficult to stem, just two weeks ago she dissolved her entire cabinet except one minister.

Mama Ellen, as she’s affectionately called, is known for being a tireless worker, even at age 72. I had the opportunity to have dinner with one of the directors of Liberia’s Philanthropy Secretariat. The unique unit resides in the Office of the President and is tasked with helping attract and channel philanthropy money from private donors (like Gates Foundation, not USAID) to on-the-ground projects. The employee I talked to explained that there is almost never a night when he leaves and Sirleaf’s office light is off, and he works late hours.

Her hard work seems to be paying off, at least internationally. She has attracted big MNCs like ArcelorMittal and BHP Biliton, two of the world’s largest steel companies, and has renewed contracts with Firestone, there for the country’s rubber trees. Her biggest accomplishment has been convincing the World Bank and IMF to cancel the country’s $4.6 billion debt (the country’s GDP is $876 million). Most Liberians I talked to felt she was doing a pretty good job and some even spoke overwhelming positive about her – they couldn’t come up with much negative, except for her work on the domestic front, which they say has taken a backseat to her focus on international relations.

What is most clear, though, is that these people have hope. They believe things are getting, and will continue to get, better. This was quite the opposite of what I saw in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise when you’ve hit rock bottom.

(Note: 3rd picture is cassava leaf and rice, which I ate a lot of.)

Amidst the Mob at Alassane Ouattara’s Election Kickoff Rally

Apologies for the two-week hiatus. I was away in rural Liberia for an amazing experience that will be documented shortly. But before that I need to wrap up my experience in Cote d’Ivoire. During my stay in Yopougon neighborhood and interviews in the same area, I befriended some of the leaders of the local headquarters of the Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party, who asked if I wanted to meet the presidential candidate Alassane Ouattara. Unfortunately one opportunity was missed when I went north, but I was invited to the kickoff rally on the first official day of campaigning.

When I arrived with Cisse to the muddy, open area the size of two football fields, the crowd was already buzzing with energy. A crowd of youths ran through the streets chanting “Ado is the way!” (Alassane Dramane Ouattara takes the nickname “Ado”). We were able to maneuver our way into the VIP/journalist area quite easily with our connection and my skin color (Indeed, I never saw another non-black the entire day), and found some standing room within about 30 feet of the stage.

There were people on top of people. As far as the eye could see, there were people – on top and inside of buses, hanging on to old billboards, finding space on distant unfinished construction projects. I was wearing many people’s sweat. We arrived around 2:00 p.m. and Ouattara didn’t appear until after 6:00, during which time the crowd became increasingly crazy with anticipation like a little kid waiting for Christmas. As each of the prominent party members came on stage, I could feel people closing in on me. The fence behind me separating the masses from the VIP/journalist area bulged and looked like it could give way at any minute. People were forcing themselves over the fence, despite the efforts of security. (The amazing thing is that by all accounts, no one was drinking, which is interesting in that 1) this was raw enthusiasm and 2) I’d be afraid what might happen if there had been alcohol involved.)

My experience at election rallies is very limited, but the atmosphere, when Ouattara finally arrived, was pure electricity. Not a citizen of the country, even I had chills running down my back. You could sense this was a country ready to move on, enthused about what’s next. Some journalists insisted that I get up close to the presidential candidate for pictures, like they wanted me to show the world that Cote d’Ivoire is ready for change. Ami, one of the party staff I knew, texted me and told me to come sit in a section neighboring Ouattara’s platform. With all the commotion, I wasn’t to get any personal time with him, but when he did make his way for the main stage, I had the opportunity to shake his hand and wish him the best. Having played his part on stage, Ado retreated and left the stage to a band for an all-night concert. Cisse and I, likewise, moved to the outskirts of the rally area, before heading to a nearby bar for drinks to reflect.

All this comes back to my unanswered question: Does democracy promote growth in ethnically diverse countries? Research has shown good governance to have a positive, significant effect on growth. But as far as I can tell with a cursory view of the literature, whether “good governance” is a proxy for democracy is still open for debate. In some cases, some research found that political institutions such as dictatorships or democracies were not important, but rather political stability was.

(Note: The elections went off peacefully, with a voter turnout of 83%, one of the highest ever recorded for a multiparty election in Africa. Incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo received 38% of the votes and Alassane Ouattara received 32%. The runoff is slated for November 28.)

Fed Up, Yet Hungry at the Same Time

"I think that today, it is the population, the citizens, who will impose peace to [the] politicians [and elections]…People will kill each other never again."
--Acouba Outtarra, Bouke city school teacher

Anticipation. If I had to describe the atmosphere of the country right now in one word, that would be it. Ivoirians are nervous about the potential for violence, but excitement to exercise their right to vote outweighs any hesitation. A very watchful international community, including the large UN and French contingencies on the ground, is keen on seeing this election happen peacefully.

The excitement is pervasive. Everywhere you could hear people talking about the election, and go by almost any school and you’d see snaking mob lines of people waiting for their identity and voting cards, which the election commission is furiously trying to get distributed in time (I say "furiously" half laughingly, because of the African context). I went with Cisse, my translator, to talk to some of the waiting citizens (see pics 1 and 2). One woman had waited in line for four days, each day being turned away. This was par for the course. And people arrive early. Cisse’s sister was sent at 4:00 a.m. to wait, and was replaced by Cisse’s 70+ year-old mother, Salimata Bakayoko, when Cisse’s sister had to go to school. For four days Salimata waited in the heat, finally getting the cards. I am expecting a very high voter turnout.

At the root of the country’s excitement to vote is that they are simply fed up with instability. It’s impossible for a country to plan when the administration in power doesn’t know if there will or will not be a presidential election in one year's time, and the effects are compounded when this happens every year, for five years. And it shows in the country's infrastructure and business activity. No foreign business, or local business for that matter, is willing to make any investments until the elections happen, and happen peacefully.

This became very clear when I took a trip to Yamoussoukro, the official capital. There I stayed with Regis, a

really cool Ivoirian working in a bank. He made me feel right at home at his place, organized group dinners with his Ivoirian friends (who could also speak English!), and connected me to Kinda to serve as my translator. Kinda had been an English teacher at a local university, and introduced me to the director, a very traveled, educated, and impressive guy. He explained that he went ahead and began funding the school himself because no investor was willing to put in their chips until the election. As for Kinda, we quickly became good friends, and I could certainly write an entire post just about him. Abandoned at birth and adopted by American nuns, he has been in and out of jail five times for being an outspoken supporter of foreigners’ right. Two years ago he walked for eight months from Cote d’Ivoire to Mali to raise awareness for a proposed UN commission to support foreigners’ rights. Immensely fascinating guy. As a side note, I even had time to see the basilica, which is the largest Christian place of worship in the world (bigger than the Sistine Chapel).

From Yakro, as they call it, I hired Kinda and went to Bouke, the stronghold city of the rebels in their once northern-controlled area and one of the most affected from the wars (last pic: weeds and brush now growing in the abandoned structure of one of the city's most prominent hotels). Most people advised me not to go, which is exactly what drew me to the area. Plus, I generally think hospitality wins out over hostility. During my time there I heard incredible stories about schools closing for years and people scrapping by during the war, and now how excited they are to vote.

But the most interesting thing about Bouke might have been the large security presence, which is most evident at the city’s entrance. Arriving into the city, I was confronted with the biggest security checkpoint I’d ever seen. Fifty or so armed soldiers patrolled the area. Kinda and I were told to get out of the gbaka and funnel through a large hut, almost like we were at a border to another country. There we met an officer. He demanded a "toll" for us to get through, much higher than ordinary

Ivoirians because of my status. "Why?" I heard Kinda ask in French. He responded, "Here you don’t talk much. You give or you don’t pass." When we were leaving the city, an officer, wearing a ragged, badge-less but official uniform, begged me for some money. These soldiers are mostly former rebel soldiers who failed to make the cut (e.g. they were illiterate) to be absorbed into the national forces. The government’s employment project for them didn’t pan out as planned, and so many are forced to take tolls at the city gates to survive, or in some cases, beg.

From Bouke, we headed back to Yakro in a horrendous gbaka ride (a story in its own right) just before I jetted off to Abidjan for an amazing opportunity to be part of the election activities.

(Note: I have been behind in posting because of my travel, and am no longer in Cote d'Ivoire. The election takes place tomorrow, and of course I am excited to see the outcome.)