20 December 2002

Sticks and Stones

I am in an African frame of mind this morning, a cold mist outside my window and a long drive to come just after dawn. I had the best time talking to my friend from the Agency for International Development at the bar last night. He is a senior manager at the agency, just back from a posting in Kenya to run an office at the Headquarters. We talked about the sticks and stones and people of the Horn of Africa, a place where only the dry sticks have any value.

We hung at the bar at Da Domenica after work. It is not far from my Agency and on the way home to his suburban Vienna home for him. Dom, the stocky owner was out front parking cars. He wore a Redskins cap in the misty night and shrugged when we praised his dedication to total service for his customers. In addition to the best veal chop on the East Coast he will park your car. Dom shrugged. “Hey,” he said in his soft Italian accent, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

My friend was still sick from the road, getting better, but still hacking and wheezing from the dust and the hotels of the Horn of Africa. My friend is an old African hand, started in Senegal years ago and has ridden the tiger down through the years. He recounted his latest trip, first leg to Amsterdam, then a plane change and into Kilimanjaro International, at the foot of the white-capped mystic mountain. It is there to service the climbing trade. The last time I saw the mountain was from the Kenyan side, from a sleeping car rattling along the right-of-way of the British East African Rail on the night train from Mombassa to Nairobi. The snow-capped summit gleamed in the moonlight, serene, majestic. Clickity click, clickity click.

Then on to the capital at Dar es Salaam. And a good hotel, The Golden Tulip, and long meetings in which he tried to convince the Tanzanians to clean up the corruption. There was endless discussion at the conference about projects and famine. It had been organized and sponsored by the plutocrats of the World Bank. My friend called it a self-licking ice cream cone. I told him that I thought Julius Nyere, the legendary founder of the post-colonial democracy there, was clean. He would not have approved of the skimming and cheating, I thought, an educatd man with a vision for his people that was left unfulfilled. As V.S. Naipal observed, the new bureaucrats of the post colinial age only had a banana and a newspaper in their official-looking briefcases, and an eye for the quick opportunity..

Naomi the bartender kept filling up my wineglass and bringing my friend rich dark beers. She works at her own rhythm, forward leaning, returning to her station at the end of the bar to grab a smoke and then swoop down to freshen the pinot grigio, fill up the Goldfish in the little dishes, or bring the last of the complementary hors d’oeurves on a little plate.

Then it was on to Addis Ababa and another Sheraton, by his reckoning the best hotel on the Continent. Excellent service, jobs being scarce as they are there. Ethiopia has 65 million people now, and the rains have failed. It is dry as it was in the late 1980s, when CNN made the emaciated children and their distended bellies and spindly arms an international video-bite. I guess they figure it has been done already, since I haven’t seen any images like that this year. rom Addis out to the hinterland by the ancient MI-17 helicopter. Oil seeped down below the rotor, staining the aluminum ominously, and the a fuel tank sat next to the passengers in the cargo bay. The UN won’t permit its people to fly in them.

The old Russian base is decrepit. The windows are all broken out on the long barracks blocks and the grass is growing up through the tarmac where the mighty Antonov transports flew, and which were capable of accepting the giant Tupolev-95 bombers with the counter-rotating propellers.

But that war is long over now and the helicopter took the old African hand to places he never had never seen in his career out there, and will likely never see again. Places where the women walk four hours to the hills to cut wood, and walk back down the mountain to sell the bundles for seven cents. The wood is the only commodity to harvest, and it is non-renewable. They are stripping the earth of all that is left. I saw it in Haiti, nothing left except sticks and stones and the once lush hills now like the surface of the moon. They have eaten their seed corn and the cows are dead. In the Tigre province where the Eritreans rolled across the Ethiopian border and flattened the villages the people are fading away, no longer able to move.

I smoked and my friend wheezed and Naomi filled our glasses.

My friend took a sip of dark beer and said his big boss had joined the delegation there for the inspection of the disaster in Tigre Priovince. He is a career USAID guy, not one of the politicals from the Administration. He was not from the Africa section, though. He had come up in Latin America and had never seen a place before where those able to walk were the minority, and the minority walked four kilometers to see the Americans. Left behind, silent in the huts were those who can no longer move. They lay in their huts, dying, no hope. Nothing left. They saw the women whose only economic chance was to offer their bodies to the long-haul truck drivers. Nearly all the truckers are infected with the AIDS virus, and the sex act goes for between two to five Birr, the Ethiopian currency. At an exchange rate of eight and a half Birr to the dollar, a fuck and a death sentance are exchanged for between 15 and 60 cents.

We are all bureaucrats, after all, and so there must be a program to address the problem. They have created one to help Commercial Sex Workers, as they are called, generate income from other sources than sex. But when you live in the dust and there is no rain coming this is a hard problem. Ethiopia’s population is growing at between 2.5 and 2.7% per year, and will double in 23 years despite the drought. If the plague permits, that is. But the insidious nature of AIDs lies in the fact that it only takes the vigorous, the ones who should be working.

We feed as many as seven million people a day there in the horn of Africa, and in many cases the food aid is being delivered to the places it is needed. But the demand is forecast to rise to eleven million meals a day by the early spring, when the rains will fail again. The donor nations are tapped out, and some would prefer to divert what is available to their old colonies, only fair, after all.

That is why my friend is one of those Americans that make me proud of my country. They are quiet Americans, but not like the ones that Graham Greene wrote about in Saigon. These are Americans who make a difference against the impossible.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra