Pony Up

Just got back from my first weekend in the interior of Lesotho. It was definitely one of the best tourist weekends I’ve had in a long time.

Early on Saturday, our team of eight joined up with three Basotho friends and traveled to Malealea, a trekking and camping area South of the capital.

On Saturday afternoon, I spent the better part of the day learning to ride a horse. I’d ridden horses before with limited success (on separate occasions: losing control of a galloping horse; renting a broken down nag that refused to trot; having to ride a camel instead). This time was better, though. The lodge rented me a very fast and responsive horse, Excise (like the tax), who I took on a four-hour trek through the highlands.

The scenery was stunning – blue skies, rolling pastures and deep river valleys. Our path wound its way up and down hills and through fields where sheep and cows were grazing. The only sounds other than ours were the chorus of cowbells from the herds we passed. Halfway through, we stopped at a beautiful waterfall hidden in a valley for photos and cool-down. Perhaps predictably, there were two boys playing “traditional” instruments for the enjoyment (and tipping) of passers-by. Of course, I wasn’t able to resist trying my hand at the old bucket-drum-thingy. I never got any tips... odd.



Some of my traveling companions knew much more than me about horsey matters and taught me how to control my animal. By the end of the trek, I felt like I could keep my horse in line – whether that meant going fast or slow. I’m not like John Wayne yet, but I made some progress. Towards the end of the trek, one of my Basotho companions and I had a race on a long, flat stretch. Going at full gallop is great, and it made me want to take lessons and learn to ride properly.



The best part of the day, though, was the night. To save fuel costs, the lodge shuts its power off after 10 pm, and the compound is plunged into darkness except for the occasional guard with a flashlight. Without a new moon, and without any village lights to pollute the night sky, the stars were clearer than I’ve ever seen them before. I saw the band of the Milky Way arc across the whole sky – impossible to capture with a camera but incredible to see.

On Sunday, I went horse-trekking again, this time to visit Khoi-San rock art. The Khoi-San are a large family of ethnic groups, including modern-day Kalahari bushmen and the original inhabitants of Lesotho. The original Khoi-San inhabitants were eliminated by the ancestors of modern Basotho during the Bantu expansion a long time ago. Nonetheless, some of the rock art they created is still preserved in a series of protected caves near Malealea. The drawings were small but very sophisticated-looking (in fact, I wondered at first if the locals hadn’t made them to attract tourists). Here is me with a little vintage artwork.



So that was it in a nutshell – great first weekend in Lesotho. I needed the rest; this week has been quite hectic with work… but more on that later.

Double Click

One of my favorite things about traveling is learning local languages. Sometimes I make a real effort to learn and take classes abroad (e.g., Wolof, Spanish), and other times I just try to pick things up informally (e.g., Russian and Brazilian – neither of which I can actually speak).

The mother tongue of Basotho people is Sesotho (Sotho), a Bantu language distantly related to Swahili. All Bantu languages share close similarities – a simple tense structure, lack of grammatical cases, phonetic pronunciation, common vocabulary and unusual treatment of gender. Of the major Western languages, English has one gender, French and Spanish have two genders, and others – Latin, Greek, Russian, German – have three. In Bantu languages like Swahili and Sotho, there are not “male” and “female” classes of words like in Spanish, but rather many (often more than 12) categories that refer to different sorts of things (e.g., people, abstract concepts, natural things, foreign words). Although it’s different from what most Westerners are used to, it’s very logical once you start using it. But it does take time to learn, on top of the small number of “clicking” sounds in Sesotho.

In preparation for coming here, I bought myself an audio CD for Christmas: “Talk Now! Learn Sesotho” by euroTalk. At a whopping $25, I was expecting to at least sort of learn the language. But I didn’t; the euroTalk CD is probably the single most disappointing language guide I’ve ever used. Do not buy from that series unless you absolutely have to! Thanks to euroTalk, my vocabulary now consists of colors, Sesotho names for Western food, numbers, and highly formal greetings… and my grammar is non-existent.

Nonetheless, I had a (fleeting) moment of success last night when I was able to order a glass of red wine in Sotho! The waiter actually understood what I was saying, since “one glass of red wine, please” combines the otherwise useless euroTalk vocabulary of colors (red), food (wine), numbers (one) and formal phrases (please). To be honest, it was a hollow victory – I actually wanted a glass of white wine but forgot the word for white, “tsweu.” Still, it was progress.

Not that speaking Sotho is necessary for the work we’re doing in Maseru. The partners I am working with here are either expats or highly educated Basotho who speak English perfectly. From what I gather, though, things get trickier once you get into the villages. Better have those clicks ready after all.

Lesotho Time

Happy New Year!

Tanzlines is back from its winter hibernation. This time, I’ll be blogging about my adventures in Lesotho, a little country surrounded entirely by South Africa.

I’m here as part of an exciting development project. Along with some other students from Harvard Law School, I’m working on a land-related development project supported by the governments of the US and Lesotho. The student participation in the project is the first-ever international collaboration between the Millennium Challenge Corporation (an agency of the US gov’t that focuses on poverty reduction – http://www.mcc.gov), Harvard Law School and the Harvard Law & International Development Society (a student group I'm involved in at Harvard that works on development issues – http://hlsorgs.com/lids).

The work itself is looking promising. Our team is helping to support a large ‘land regularization’ effort jointly led by the governments of the US and Lesotho. Land regularization is the name of a particular development strategy that seeks to give the occupants of land (often poor farmers or city-dwellers) certificates or titles to the land they live on. In many sub-Saharan countries, weak or inefficient administrations, plus traditional land customs, mean that the people who live on a plot of land don’t have any written proof that it’s theirs. Often, the occupiers purchased it fairly, were given it by a chief, or inherited it from their ancestors. But in a modern economy, lacking a piece of paper to prove ownership means that it can be difficult to get a bank loan, sell the property, or protect yourself from others who claim the land is theirs. The idea of regularization is that you can legitimize family occupancy and increase land security for the poor. It’s also designed to stimulate the economy, both because people with titles can more easily sell their land, and because titles allow people to borrow money from banks.

Regularization programs have had some real success around the globe (especially in Peru, where the architect of regularization and titling programs, Hernando de Soto, lives and works). But reg. efforts also lead to a lot of problems (more on that later) and a large number of academics and development workers object to the way such programs are carried out. Although I’ve done some work in land-related issues before, I still haven’t fully formed my views on titling-and-regularization programs. Hopefully the next few weeks will teach me a lot!

Although I’m only here for a little while, I should have enough time to slip in a few adventures before I go. Lesotho is famous for its rocky highlands, pony trekking, giant waterfalls, mountain camping, and interesting cultural traditions. And it looks like some pony trekking might be in the works for this weekend.

Will write more soon!

On top of it

I interrupt the hiatus in Tanzlines posts with some exciting news: after many years, my Wolof textbook has finally been published!

As many of you know, I studied abroad in Senegal for five months in 2003. It was a very challenging experience for me, perhaps because it was my first time living in a developing country. I got sick a few times. I lost lots of weight (including my beloved sophomore-year muscles). I got tired of the merguez sandwiches at the University Gaston-Berger cafeteria. And for large stretches of time, I was frustrated by life in the North of Senegal.

Although it was hard in many ways, it was also one of the most enriching experiences I've ever had - culturally, intellectually and socially.

For the most part, the intellectual stimulation did not come from the classroom. Because our beloved UGB was frequently on strike, I spent a lot of time conducting independent research on the Muriddiyah, a large and prosperous Muslim organization unique to Senegal. The Murids belong to a strain of Sufi Islam created by a charismatic Senegalese mystic over a century ago. They are extremely powerful in Senegalese society; Murids control many top government positions and most of the country's largest companies. To better understand why, I spent many weekends and festivals in Touba, the Murids' holy city.

Murids are predominantly Wolof and their faith is often closely intertwined with Wolof culture and language. To successfully work my way in to the community's most important men, I dedicated a large chunk of time to learning the Wolof language. Fortunately, I had the benefit of studying at UGB under Professor Pape Laye Dial, one of Senegal's leading Wolof scholars and a talented instructor. Within a few months, my Wolof was in fighting shape - good enough to meet with many senior businessmen and clerics, including Serigne Saliou Mbacke, the spiritual leader of the Murid brotherhood.

Before I left, Pape Laye asked for my support in translating "Gan Gi," an instructional pamphlet that he had written to teach Wolof to French speakers. "Gan Gi" was a useful guide, but I felt that English-speaking Western readers would need something more comprehensive to learn Wolof well. I checked extensively for Wolof guides online written in English, not only online, but in specialty bookstores. The answer was always the same: there weren't any Wolof textbooks in English.

I decided to fill that gap. Using Pape Laye's instructional method (specially tailored to teaching Wolof's unusual tense and pronoun structures), I started drafting a Wolof guide for English speakers. I focused on including helpful examples, correct linguistic terminology and dialogs designed specifically for Western readers. The end result, after several months of writing in 2005, was a comprehensive 196-page language guide. But 2005 was a busy year, and I left for England before I ever got the book published.

After many years, the project is finally complete: "Maa ngiy ci kawam!" has now been published and is available for purchase online. (The title, by the way, means "I'm on top of it!") I'm pleased to say that I've already received several requests from leading US universities requesting copies for their bookstore - so it looks like it will be a success!

There were many people who have helped make this project a success. Big thanks go to Pape Laye Dial (who is responsible for both my learning the language and the impetus behind the book), to the many people who edited early versions of the manuscript (you know who you are!), to Lee Cassanelli and the folks at the African Studies Center at Penn who encouraged my work as an undergraduate, to Tanya Pai who helped work out the publishing options, and to my talented brother, Calum Green who designed the cover, typeface and inside layout. Here it is:



I realize that most of you are probably not in the market for a Wolof textbook, but please share this link with others who might be interested. Although there are free online guides and Wolof books for francophones, "Maa ngiy ci kawam!" is the only commercial-quality English language guide of its kind. I hope it will fill the gap in instructional materials that our group of study-abroad students faced seven years ago.

You can buy the book at Lulu, my publisher: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/maa-ngiy-ci-kawam/13030168

If you are an educational institution looking to purchase larger quantities, please send me a message directly.

Also please note that I am not making any profit from this initiative; all proceeds will be paid to Pape Laye Dial to support his Wolof teaching, and to 501(c)(3) organizations supporting educational work in Senegal.

Thanks for your support... ba beneen yoon!

Checkout

Well, folks, my time in Nairobi has come to an end. I'm writing this one from Dulles Airport on my way back to Cambridge! (It seems a little anti-climactic, I know, to write a final blog post after leaving Kenya. But my power was out all day Friday, so I had no choice.)

The past eight weeks have flown by quickly. I think this is partly because of the excitement of being in a new place, and partly because I've been traveling so much within the region. The past four weeks have especially been a blur: a hike up Mount Kenya, trips to Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania, and meetings all over the place.

In the end, living in Nairobi has come as a pleasant surprise: I like it there now. Initially, I didn't. The traffic, pollution, fear of crime, and utter lack of charm all added up to a crappy first impression. But since then, the city grew on me. The food has been a major plus (Japanese! Ethiopian! French!), as have the benefits of Swahili-only-when-you-feel-like-it. Meeting other people has probably been the best part, though. This city is full of great, warm people doing fascinating and important work in areas I find interesting - politics, international development, reporting, impact investing and social enterprise. The people I spend time with outside of work are uniformly passionate about what they do, which I find refreshing and inspiring at the same time. And I've made some good friends.

My work has also been pretty positive overall. My team at the IFC gave me a lot of responsibility and some very interesting projects to work on. I'm glad to have played an early role in shaping the East African Community's common market strategy, a political and economic goal that I really believe in. It's been especially interesting traveling to the EAC capitals to meet with officials there. The development challenges and preoccupations of the five member states couldn't be more different, from creepily efficient Rwanda to backwards-and-we-know-it Burundi. On top of the work itself, I've really had fun with my coworkers - they're smart, welcoming and talented people. They've taught me a lot about avoiding, flattering, convincing and otherwise dealing with difficult public officials and antagonistic clients - I hope I've picked up some of that from them. The team even threw me a very nice sendoff lunch at my favorite place on Thursday, which I thought was a nice gesture.

Although I'm sad to have left, I have two great things to look forward to right away. Tomorrow, I'm going to the wedding of two good friends in Cambridge, then I'm visiting the beautiful Stephanie in San Francisco. The expectation of things to come was almost enough to dull the pain of tonight's 30-something hour journey back to Massachusetts (although it does not remedy the sad fact that I watched Prince of Persia to stave off in-flight boredom.)

So this will be the last Tanzlines post for a while. In terms of exciting African adventures ahead, the next one will probably be next January in southern Africa. Hang tight until then!

Kneeling Before Ngai

On Monday evening, I arrived back from a four-day hiking trip to Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa*. A group of friends and I decided to summit Lenana, the third highest peak on the mountain (4,985 meters) and the highest peak accessible to non-technical climbers. Our guide was Will Wamaru, an excellent and experienced guide who recently opened launched his own travel company.

Mount Kenya is a sacred mountain for many Kenyans. Several ethnic groups from the Central Highlands - the Meru, the Maasai and the Gikuyu - believe that the mountain is the home of Ngai, the supreme god and creator of the world. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first President, wrote a book, Facing Mount Kenya, which details the Gikuyu relationship with the mountain and Central Highlands culture.

This was an auspicious weekend to climb the mountain. Earlier this month, Kenyans population voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new national Constitution. Although we hadn't planned it that way, Friday (the day we began our ascent) was the day when the President, Vice-President and Prime Minister of Kenya formally "promulgated" the document and put into effect the Second Republic. Partly because current President Kibaki is Gikuyu, and partly out of Kenyan national pride, a small team of local climbers carried a copy of the Constitution to Lenana peak immediately after the signing. Because of the number of tourists on the mountain and the time we left, we stood to be among the first forty foreigners to see the special copy on top of Mount Kenya.

Of course, there's a catch: the whole climbing thing.

The obvious thing to write here is that the hike was wonderful: a pleasantly rugged trek, with a smiling, pink-cheeked Al marveling at the views from the summit and reveling in the achievement of getting to the top. But I won't lie: it was physically exhausting and, for at least a day, miserable.

The first day was fine. It was just a four-hour climb through light rain on a gravelly road, covering roughly 600 vertical meters. The first lodge we stayed at was similarly decent: a bit wet, but the food was great and the bunkbed dorm was fairly comfortable. I realized that we could have been in tents.

The second day was much tougher: a nine-hour climb through mostly decent weather, covering 900 vertical meters. We had to cross a number of ridges and some very swampy terrain, so there were a lot of ups and downs. Still, it was about 100 meters an hour in terms of vertical climb, which didn't sound awful to me.

I was doing very well until lunch when I got hit with altitude sickness all of a sudden. It's difficult to predict its symptoms for each person, but almost everyone in our group got it in one form or another. For me, it started as an intense headache, which I assumed was similar to a migraine. My temples throbbed, my head hurt and I felt a bit dizzy. As we got above 4,000 meters (2.5 miles), my breathing became very labored and I started coughing a lot. The rest of the group were facing similar things, so our pace slowed quite a bit.

The big advantage to the second day was seeing major shifts in climate and vegetation. Even at higher altitude, there's lots of interesting fauna as well: rock and tree Hyraxes (a sort of fat capybara-like thing related to an elephant); colobus monkeys; big grey monkeys that like to steal; lone buffaloes; crested eagles and buzzards.



The lodge at the second night was not a pleasant experience. I didn't have much of an appetite, although I did eat after taking half of a friend's Diamox, an altitude-sickness medicine. When I tried to sleep, I couldn't do it at first. I also had strange chills even though I could feel that my skin was hot. Weird! But in the end (probably thanks to the Diamox), I managed to fall asleep around 11 pm.



Before long, it was 2 am - time to get up for summit day. Our guide's biggest mistake was probably telling us that the final ascent would be easier than the previous day...

It was not. Whereas Day 2 involved a climb of 100 meters per hour (with an average altitude of 3,700), the summit climb involved a climb of 200 vertical meters per hour (at an average of 4,600 meters above sea level). This does not sound like much, but if you take into account safety stops, it turns into about 4 meters (vertical) per minute when you're actually climbing. At a high altitude, when hiking on ice or scree, this is pretty fast. By around 4 am, our conversation had stopped completely. We were like a team of foreign zombies trudging up the mountainside in the darkness. Or something.

After four hours we reached Lenana peak. It was pretty cool: a frozen Kenyan flag, some plaques of people that died, and a brand new glass-metal-clay shrine to the Second Republic, copy of the Constitution inside. We were probably among the first couple of dozen people ever to have seen it there.



Equally (ok, more) enjoyable, was a prank I played on John, one of the guys in our group. Some of you will already be familiar with the viral drinking phenomenon of "Bros Icing Bros." As those of you who are/were/know a 17-19 year old girl are aware, Smirnoff Ice is a sugary, lightly alcoholic, bottled drink (or alcopop) consumed almost exclusively by members of that demographic group.

But thanks to the recent Icing phenomenon, however, it has become normal for guys to foist a bottle of Smirnoff Ice on an unsuspecting friend/bro, who must then get down on one knee and drink the entire bottle in one go. There are variations on the rules - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icing_(drinking_game) - but that's the gist. I managed to present John with a nearly-frozen Ice right in front of the Constitution, surely the first of its kind in the annals of Icing history.



After such Smirnoff summit shenanigans were over, we had to descend down a treacherous ice ridge to get off the peak. Later in the day, Will mentioned that a young American woman on one of his trips had died after slipping down the ice. I'm glad he mentioned that after, or I would have felt pretty nervous about the ice. And the Ice, for that matter.

The ice ridge took about an hour to get down, after which point we had another 3-hour descent to breakfast. Part of this involved an awesome scree slope that you could sprint down since it was so soft and gravelly - a great way to knock off 300 vertical meters of thin air in a half hour. This is me resting (in the orange) before the scree part:



After breakfast, a quick nap, and lunch, we had to hike for a further 8 hours through what was described as the "vertical bog." This essentially involved a trek through a muddy creek for many hours, about 3 of which we walked in the dark. The reward for the muddy trudging was our final camp, which was at a breathable 3,000-ish meters and had a very cozy bunk bed setup. I've never slept so well in my life.



Even one day after getting back, I am already starting to re-write the more grueling parts of the experience in my head. Only my right shoulder, quads and calves remind me that, while a good time with great people, it wasn't a bed of high-altitude roses.

Overall, it was a good experience, though: the food, the excellent company, the Smirnoff-related antics and the timing of our trip were all big pluses to the weekend. Nonetheless, I don't think that I'll plan on climbing any 4,000+ meter peaks in the near future.

But don't quote me on that.

* Accordingly to Wikipedia, the second-highest peak on each continent is more challenging than the tallest peak. As a result, the "Seven Summits" (the tallest peaks on each continent) have been completed by a number of experts, but the "Seven Second Summits" have not. Mount Kenya's technical summit (not the one I climbed) is one of the Seven Second Summits and is considerably harder than Kilimanjaro's Uhuru Peak, which is generally doable for tourists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Second_Summits

Photographs courtesy of Jane Del Ser and Charlene Chen.

Minipax

I am in Kigali right now for a few meetings.

The Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, is a love-him-or-hate-him sort of guy. His proponents point to his ending the Rwandan genocide, rebuilding a shattered country and catapulting its economy ahead. His detractors often accuse him of running a police state, rigging elections and silently crushing political opposition. There is at least a grain of truth to those accusations*.

When I arrived late last night, I was trying to find the address for this morning's meeting. I asked my contact where to go. "Minijust," she said in English, using the semi-official nickname for the Ministry of Justice building.

Same thing happened for this afternoon's meeting at the Ministry of Commerce (Minicom). It's located in the joint Minicom-Minafet building (Minafet being the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The joint Minicom-Minafet building is also home to Mineac (the Ministry of East African Community Affairs). These contracted ministry names sounded familiar but I couldn't put my finger on where I'd heard them before.

In French, it is more common to have "syllable" acronyms (e.g., Societe de Transport Rwandaise becomes Sotrara) than in English, which uses "first letter" acryonyms (e.g., Rwanda Development Board becomes RDB). Even though this is a French-speaking country, I knew that something about the ministries names was odd.

It only just occurred to me where I heard this type of labeling before: George Orwell's 1984. The totalitarian Oceanian government in that novel did exactly the same thing with its evil ministries. Minipax was responsible for war; Miniluv for torturing people and running the secret police; Miniplenty for economic planning; and Minitrue for nationalist propaganda.

I don't know if Kagame realized this when he took over, but naming your ministries Oceania-style isn't a good idea for a regime accused of being a police state.

* For great professional coverage of this debate, read my roommate's recent article in the Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/18b3a66e-a183-11df-9656-00144feabdc0.html