Stephanie Nolen, 02/06/08 at 5:44 PM EDT
There was something about Mamadou. I met a lot of lovely children while reporting on street kids trafficked from rural West Africa into begging networks in Dakar. It's the sort of story that requires a correspondent to have her journalistic calluses firmly in place when she sets out in the morning. I saw kids getting whacked on the head with a thick braided rope by their teacher when they made a mistake in their Koranic memorization, I saw kids nearly get run over by indifferent rich Senegalese irritated by the begging bowls at the window of their SUVs, I saw kids huddled on the concrete floor of a dorm room under a filthy blanket, shivering in the midday heat from what was likely malaria. All of it was infuriating.
On the day I met Mamadou, I had set out to interview kids begging in the street – hoping that, when I saw them away from the hovering presence of their teachers/controllers, I'd hear a more honest version of their lives in the daara, the religious schools. I went with Seydou Nourou Mbodji, who recently published a moving book called A mes frères des rues, told in the first person voice of one of the street boys. He was going to translate from Wolof to French for me.
The first kid we met, outside a posh bakery, was so sick that we abandoned work for an hour to take him to a dispensary. We couldn't pay for many drugs, though, because Seydou was afraid the child would either take them all at once, seeking the comfort of a high (of sorts), or else be beaten up for them.
Next we walked down to a gas station and there we found Mamadou, scruffy and forlorn. Seydou began to chat to him in Wolof, at which point Mamadou apologized in beautiful French and explained he hadn't been in Senegal long enough to learn the local language. He happily put aside his begging bowl to talk to us; he insisted on getting us a piece of old cardboard box to sit on in his patch of parking lot; he sternly told other children who swarmed around not to bother us. His story came pouring out – how he'd tried to make it into regular high school, couldn't afford the books to study and failed the entrance exams, came to Dakar hoping a religious school would offer him at least some sort of alternative. What he really wanted, he informed me wistfully, was to be a journalist – I might have suspected I was being conned, but he told me all about a career fair at his old school, and how he'd weighed up many options before picking journalism, which he thought would be important in a corrupt and mis-run place like his home country, Guinea-Conakry. And he was full of intelligent questions about the trade.
After an hour or so with him, Seydou and I should have moved on, but we were both enthralled by this kid. Seydou excused himself to make a phone call – and he came back, after a long conversation on his cellphone, to hand Mamadou a piece of paper with an address. He had called a woman he knows from his work with street kids, Anta Mbow, who runs a shelter in Dakar, Empire Des Enfants. There she teaches the kids life and job skills and sometimes helps send them home to their families. He had put aside his usual professional objectivity to plead with Ms. Mbow to squeeze in this one particular kid. He primed Mamadou on how to get to the shelter, told him he could learn to be a journalist, or go back home to his family if he wanted. Mamadou was wary but clearly thrilled; he was worried, though, if he showed up there as dirty as he was, they would turn him away. Seydou reassured him; I gave him the equivalent of 25 cents for soap.
Seydou and I left feeling just a little bit hopeful, although as we walked away, a tiny, filthy 7-year-old pulled on my shirt, saying, "Please, I'd like to go home too." I turned to Seydou, agonized, and he gently led me on, reminding me that the problem is huge, and reporting on it was really the only way I had to try to address it. A couple of days later, before I left Senegal, Seydou and I checked in with Ms. Mbow: Mamadou had shown up (clean) for his first meeting, and he was enrolled in their program. Somehow, seeing Mamadou off the street helped lessen the sting when I thought of all those other children.
But then, a couple of weeks later, I asked Seydou to check in on Mamadou again – and when he got back to me, I was reminded that it's never this easy. Mamadou moved to l'Empire, but he had a difficult time adjusting. He fought all the time with other kids. So Ms. Mbow tracked down a way to reach his parents, and his mother said she wanted him to come home (like so many other parents, she had had no idea that her son had wound up a street beggar rather than a religious pupil.) Ms. Mbow made the arrangements – but when the time came, Mamadou balked: he wouldn't go. Seydou says he was too embarrassed to return home to the village, implicitly acknowledging that he failed in his big chance at city life. He told Ms. Mbow he was going back to the street instead.
Today, Seydou told me he his working on getting Mamadou into another shelter – but first he has to find him. He's been looking at the bank machines and intersections of upmarket Dakar, the places a kid like Mamadou goes to beg for enough to survive.
Stephanie Nolen, 21/05/08 at 9:53 AM EDT
Near Dakar last week, I met a remarkable group of women working to try to convince their sons not to make the perilous trip to Europe as illegal immigrants. The first thing that was unusual about them was that they were all wearing the same dress – about 70 of them, all together, crammed into a teeny office, in the street out front, in the neighbouring houses.
It turned out that the members of the Collectif des femmes pour la lutte contre l'immigration clandestine au Sénégal had been recognized that morning by Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade for their work, and had put on their official dress for the occasion at State House.
(Across Africa, organizations – from Roman Catholic parishes in Congolese villages to Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party – have cotton printed with their logo and slogan, and then make it into outfits for supporters. I've interviewed women wearing Mr. Mugabe on their skirts, and "Happy 25th Anniversary St. Basil's Church", and "Long Live the ANC!" and the AIDS ribbon twined around the words "Together we can stop HIV! Wear a condom every time!")
But once I got past the odd sensation of talking to a room full of women wearing what appeared to be the curtains, it was a sad and inspiring conversation. They had all lost at least one child, when he attempted to cross the Atlantic in a small wooden canoe, in search of work in Spain or Italy, and they were working to try to create jobs at home so their boys will stay home. They were motivated in no small measure by guilt, because they, like other Senegalese mothers, had urged their children to make the trip on which he died.
Yayi Diouf, the founder of the group, told me that was a survival tactic in a society where nearly all marriages are polygamous – women rely on the earnings of their older sons, especially when they fall out of favour with their husband, usurped by younger wives.
"In this society, it's males that are important – a house with 1,000 women and one son, it's a house with one son," she said.
I pointed out that women might be disregarded or unvalued in her community, but it was the women who had banded together into this organization that had done so much to raise awareness about the dangers of migration and were doing their best to generate economic growth in the community.
She gave me a look that mixed scorn and pity, apparently amazed at how little I understood.
"Men, they've got lots of wives, and lots of children," she said. "It's not their problem."
Stephanie Nolen, 02/05/08 at 8:53 AM EDT
Freetown, May 2
Let me preface this by saying two things.
First, I love Freetown. I really, really love it. A few years back, I schemed madly to find a way to convince The Globe and Mail to put its new Africa bureau here. In the end, I gave up, for reasons that will become clear below.
But this remains my favourite city on the continent, this choked, teeming, boisterous sprawl over the jungly hills.
I love the soda-pop cadences of Krio, the national language.
I love the ingenuity of people struggling to survive in what the United Nations says is the world's least-developed country - give a young man a thousand leones (about 25 cents) and he will find a place to charge your cell phone, or physically stake out a rare and precious parking space until you get a car into it, or arrange to get your clothes washed in one of the streams that snake down the hillsides into the sea.
I love the warmth of friends who greet me with the highest compliment, "You're so fat! Ooh, you're fat! Fat!" (That took a little getting used to.)
Second, this country has the most beautiful beaches that I've seen anywhere in the world, an order of magnitude more lovely than I had ever even dreamed a beach could be. From the deserted white sands of Freetown's rather pedestrianly-named Beach No. 3, I once launched into cyan seawater and found myself in the middle of a school of tiny fish flashing silver in the sunlight. It was like swimming inside a disco ball.
So you will understand when I say, in broad principle, that I think everyone should visit.
But I also feel it's only fair to relate the following small travel story, so that when you book your next March Break in Sierra Leone, you know what to expect.
I am meant, as I write this, to be in Monrovia, the capital of next-door Liberia. But I've been here for four days now because when my connecting flight touched down on Monday, and I disembarked to transfer to the flight to Monrovia, the airport staff burst into laughter.
There were no flights to Monrovia. Hadn't been for days - maybe weeks. They thought the ticket I had purchased that very morning in Dakar for a flight, scheduled at 5 pm, to Monrovia, was one of the funniest things they had ever seen.
Eventually my good friend Benjamin Franklin (and the basic kindness of the aforementioned airport staff) helped me get around the fact that I had no visa for Sierra Leone, and I set off for town.
Since then, I have spent an inordinate amount of time talking to employees of various airlines with which you may not be familiar, such as Slok Air. Slok is meant to have a flight to Monrovia a couple of times a week, but a rowdy pilot apparently cracked the windscreen of their plane and so they are grounded. Elysian Airlines is inexplicably not running, its staff a bit vague about why that is.
I tried to go overland, but no one could agree on whether Freetown to Liberia takes one day, or three. And a British military officer I know, stationed here to help train the country's new armed forces, muttered darkly about how things "are still a bit hairy" around the border.
And so finally I abandoned all hope of reaching Monrovia and tried to get back to Dakar, where I have reporting for other stories waiting. Lagos-based Bellview Airlines, the people who got me into this mess in the first place, sold me a ticket (yes, I had to pay, even though they marooned me here) for a flight that was variously reported as leaving at 1, 2, 4 or 5 p.m. today.
Now until quite recently you could reach Lungi International Airport by helicopter from the city. But apparently Sierra Leone's recently removed Minister of Transport was somewhat undiscerning in his willingness to register aircraft (dozens of them) with the national call letters, aircraft now operating in drug- and gun-running businesses in other parts of the world - that's the story in Freetown these days, anyway. So the country has been suspended by international air transport authorities, and there is no helicopter. So if you want to get to Lungi, it's overland or nothing.
I set out from my holiday on Freetown's Signal Hill in the early morning, in order to spend hours snaking through the go-slow, with the car mostly gridlocked and turned off, on one of the capitals half-dozen main arteries - roads barely wide enough for one lane of traffic, let alone two plus innumerable handcarts, hawkers and women with jerrry cans of water on their heads.
We reached the ferry dock - about 5 kilometres from the hotel - just before the 11 a.m. ferry. The boat has recently had a smart coat of orange paint courtesy of one of the fiercely competing cellphone companies, but has nevertheless clearly seen better decades. I sat up top, in the shade but open to the breeze - until an itinerant Muslim preacher in an emerald green embroidered polyester ensemble set up his bullhorn next to me, at which point I retreated downstairs to "first class" (cost: $2) for the hour-long crossing.
(An aside: the cabin has a resident DJ, who uses a cheap Chinese-made DVD player to spin full-volume tunes with videos on a wall-mounted TV. First there was some fantastic local music, and then a moving retrospective of the great works of Whitney Houston -- "The Greatest Love of All" seemed to send the whole packed cabin into wistful melancholy. Then the DJ played – three times – "We are the World." There were Cyndi Lauper, Kenny Rogers, Huey Lewis, Michael Jackson, belting it out for the starving children. And I noticed something in the video that I never had before – the singers perform in front of a huge banner reading "USA for Africa." The irony seemed a little dark, as a hundred Sierra Leoneans quietly hummed along: the U.S. never intervened in Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war, even though its battleships were often stationed within sight of the Atlantic coast. More than 70,000 people died. But I digress.)
When the ferry docked on the other side of the lagoon, I got into another rickety taxi for the half-hour drive to the airport - where there was no sign of check-in staff. Would-be passengers had lined up their luggage in an orderly queue while they flaked out against the walls in the stifling heat. One fellow in a uniform told me the flight to Dakar was canceled. Another told me it left in two hours. A third told me it would fly in the evening. I found a piece of wall to lean on myself.
Two hours later, a voice on the intercom announced check-in - at which point the orderly queue of luggage became a Lord of the Flies-style scramble for the doorway. Two more hours of shuffling along, and an alarmingly thorough body search later, I was in the departure lounge - where there is a truly wonderful if deeply improbable French restaurant. Another hour, and a Bellview plane landed. Another hour, and I was aboard it.
Then we sat on the tarmac for two hours. If you've ever sat simmering on a grounded Air Canada flight while the staff studiously avoids telling you anything about what's going on, let me tell you, an Air Canada employee has got nothing on a Nigerian airline employee for sullen, tooth-stucking obstinacy. On the other hand, a planeload of Canadians will sit and mutter quiet, bitter recrimination to their seatmates - but when half the passengers are Nigerian businesspeople with deals to do, they resort, before very long, to full-volume, windmilling-arm, near-violent physical confrontation with the cabin attendants, which tends to be somewhat more effective in getting the information flowing.
Paperwork, we were told in end. Didn't have it, now they did, we are leaving.
And 13 hours after I left the hotel, about 20 km away, the flight is taking off for Dakar.
The moral of this story? Come to Sierra Leone - it's a magical place. But bring some good books, and some Benjamins, in your hand luggage.
Stephanie Nolen, 30/04/08 at 2:30 PM EDT
Freetown, April 30
- DVD player
- Hand towels
- Dress sox
- Desk lamp
- Bootleg latest season of Lost on DVD
- Nail clippers
- Calculator
- Set of six drinking glasses
- Collected video speeches of Osama Bin Laden – two disc set
- Padlock
- Tire iron
- Palm-leaf fan
- Car floor mats
- Living room upholstery
- Sunglasses
- Coat hangers
- Virgin Mary wall clock
- Cold Coke
- Warm Coke
- Greatest Gospel Hits – three volume set
- Mobile phone charger
- Cellphone air time
- "Top Quality Imported European Perfume"
- Slightly used sparkly t-shirts
- Fried plantains
- Today's newspapers
- Home barbing set
- Last World Cup on DVD
- Soap
Stephanie Nolen, 20/04/08 at 1:45 PM EDT
Johannesburg, April 20
Reporting on Zimbabwe these past three weeks has meant an almost unbroken litany of grim news. But for a foreign journalist, there is one tiny source of levity amidst the heartbreak, and that is the Zimbabwean flare for names.
In the course of a single day, not long ago, I interviewed a nurse named Marvelous, a waiter named Patient, a lawyer named Jealous, a farmer named Precious, a black-market fuel trader named Remarkable, a strapping opposition campaigner named Sweetness and a soldier named Tedious.
In this election, ZANU-PF fielded candidates with the first names Antimalaria, Township and Orders.
The director of Zimbabwe's spy agency, the dreaded Central Intelligence Organization, is somewhat improbably named Happyton Bonyongwe. Zimbabwe has a famous soccer player named Have-a-Look Dube. I've met people called Sleepy, Wonderful, Tolerant, Courage, Moreblessing, Charity and Envy. There is a leading democracy campaigner named Lovemore Madhuku. There is a reporter for the state-run Herald newspaper whose byline is Hatred Zenenga.
Which leads one to ask, of course, what kind of parents name their child Hatred. A couple of excellent Zimbabwean journalist pals (named Shakeman and Darlington) explained to me that the names, which can sound peculiar in English, are translations of names that make sense in chiShona. Have-a-Look, for example, is Tarisai in chiShona, which means 'to ask God to watch over one's family'. Moreblessing is a less mellifluous translation of a chiShona word that welcomes another child as an additional blessing.
Other names, like Antimalaria, may have been given in a rural area when there was a vogue for English names but less fluency with what they actually meant. A child might be named Hatred if born at the time of a family feud, or born to a woman whose husband has taken another wife and who is trying (with a certain lack of subtlety) to send a message.
At the end of the interview with the nurse named Marvelous, I asked if her name is a lot to live up to – what does she do on the days she's feeling only Mediocre? She laughed, and said she doesn't really think about her name, "it's just a name, like Mary."
And the soldier named Tedious? He goes by Ted.
Stephanie Nolen, 17/04/08 at 10:17 AM EDT
Johannesburg, April 17
Nineteen days after Zimbabwe's national elections, the government has yet to release the results of the presidential vote. And the excuse that they're not quite done with the counting has worn a little thin.
Because, of course, one byproduct of living in the world's highest inflation (the Zim dollar hit $75 million to the U.S. dollar yesterday) is that you learn to count really, really quickly.
"Nobody counts faster than Zimbabweans," a well-known Harare black market currency dealer observed yesterday. "We are the world's fastest counters."
He gestured at the stack of bills in front of a customer.
"How long did it take you to count that $15 billion?" he asked.
"Uh, about four minutes," the customer replied.
"You see? But they expect us to believe they can't count those five million election votes yet?"
Stephanie Nolen, 02/04/08 at 3:59 AM EDT
Harare, April 2
Covering the crisis in Zimbabwe is complicated in many ways -- the phone network connects only one in every 10 dialed calls. The electricity keeps cutting out, and I'm on a perpetual hunt to find places to charge the gear. To keep gas in the car, one has to be on a constant look out for a filling station that has a sudden influx of supply. You can spot those because they post young men to wave frantically in the middle of the street out front.
And then there's money. The current black market exchange rate -- not that I would ever, ever, change money on the black market, which would be illegal and immoral and very bad behaviour -- is $40-million Zimbabwe dollars to one U.S. dollar. (The government offers 30,000 Zim dollars to a greenback buck). This means that I tote around a wad of $10 million notes stacked as high as two bricks in my handbag, just to cover basic expenses. (Anything important, of course, one would have to pay for in foreign currency, which would also be illegal, immoral, see above.)
Dealing with this chaotic currency environment -- with 150,000 per cent inflation, where the price of your entrée may go up twice in the course of dinner -- involves an exhausting amount of mental math. I paid $30-million for parking yesterday. I paid $475-million for lunch on Sunday. I do a lot, a lot, of counting out bills.
A couple of days ago, I asked a Zimbabwean pal about the price of a monthly dose of anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV. Zimbabwe has one of the highest infection rates in the world, about a quarter of the population, but virtually nobody here can get treatment any more because of the economic collapse.
"They cost $66-million the last time I checked, in February," he said. "That was a lot of money, back then."
Stephanie Nolen, 30/03/08 at 8:02 AM EDT
HARARE, March 28
Now about that letter of accreditation … my application to cover this vote was rejected, as were those of 200 other foreign correspondents and news agencies based in Johannesburg.
It didn't come as a huge surprise: Zimbabwean journalist friends of mine (who are black) had told me about a meeting they had last week with Dr. George Charamba, the official in charge of the foreign press, in which he apparently told them that no white reporters, no reporters who've covered the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, no reporters who have sneaked into the country before, and no Kenyans, would be allowed in to cover the vote. It was a refreshingly blunt list, and it ruled me out on three out of four counts. (The restriction on Kenyans apparently had to do with fears that activists from the Kenyan opposition, who fomented the violence that led to the power-sharing deal after that country's disputed election in December, would try to infiltrate in the guise of journalists.)
After three days in which I did nothing but dial, and redial, and redial the Ministry of Information, I finally reached a young woman who told me that my application was "declined." That, at least, was an answer. I considered sneaking into the country again, but having done it many times before, and with the government reportedly on high alert for "illegal" reporters, I decided not to take the risk, and resigned myself to reporting on the election from the Globe bureau in neighbouring South Africa.
And then, Canada's ambassador to Zimbabwe, Roxanne Dubé, sent me an all-caps e-mail on Thursday afternoon with the stunning news that she and her staff had persuaded the Ministry of Information to reconsider, and had won 11th-hour permission for me and a CBC crew to come into the country.
A couple of hours later I was on the plane.
And this morning, I presented myself as instructed to the Ministry of Information and then the accreditation centre, where, all told, I parted with $1,800 of the Globe's dollars, which the government is demanding – in cold, hard greenbacks – for the right to cover this vote.
After my first day of reporting, that works out to about $81 an interview.
Stephanie Nolen, 28/03/08 at 11:11 AM EDT
HARARE, March 28
I landed in Harare late last night, and fumbled my way off the plane – the once-bustling international airport was cloaked in gloom; only dull emergency lights glowed in the corridors. The dwindling electrical supply doesn't reach the airport anymore, apparently.
I stood in line for a visa, and presented my letter of accreditation to a stern-faced police officer. He began to instruct me about the process of registering with the Ministry of Information, but I politely interrupted to explain that I knew the drill – this is the third time I've covered a presidential election in Zimbabwe. "And I guess I'll see you again the next time Mr. Mugabe runs for president," I said slyly, risking a joke. At that, the grim face split into a grin. "Of course," he said. "And the time after that."
Mr. Mugabe, of course, is 84, and has ruled this country since independence in 1980.
I had booked a rental car back in Johannesburg – the fuel shortage has thrown Zimbabwe's transport system into such crisis that friends in Harare had warned that a pre-paid car and fuel tank might be the only way to get around. But the arrivals hall was also pitch dark, and I was giving up and contemplating a long walk to town when I found the rental agent out in the parking lot, under the stars. He handed over the keys to a wildly overpriced car the size of a ballet slipper, with just enough room in its trunk for my handbag. It lacks, I soon discovered, power steering – and for a car the size of a tea cup, it takes a mighty wrench to turn it left or right.
Never mind. Had visa, had car, had theoretical hotel booking, all good. I set off into the city not long before midnight: not another car or a person in the road, not a single streetlight working. Impenetrable gloom. I flicked on the radio and flipped through the channels – nothing, nothing. And then the husky voice of Oliver Mtukudzi, Zimbabwe's greatest musician, filled the car, singing his anthem for a free homeland, Zimbabwe. I swerved around a pot hole bigger than the teacup-car, and wondered what Oliver thinks now.
