Because there was no way for me to post our daily log of our adventures in Africa during this past month, I was not able to share these days and nights with you. So I will be posting the day’s events one day at a time for the next month. That way, you can share the feeling of the unfolding progress and context of our African trip. For a recap of the successes and progress we made, go to http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/resources/newsletter.shtm and check out the entry for February 26, 2006, “Shall We Dance?“.
In the meantime, here is day one of the Natural Solutions Foundation’s first trip to Africa.
January 20, 2006
Bert and I took off a US airline, but clearly at the bargain basement level, based on what we experienced and what a stewardess told us: “We are “too cheap” to purchase paper containers instead of lower tech (and lower toxicity) Styrofoam” So, on the plastic and Styrofoam containers we ate plastic food (but did not drink the styrofoam-surrounded beverages” and shared the flight with West Africans and their children who, up to about 2 years of age were carried on the backs of their mothers and grand mothers held in place with cleverly wrapped rectangles of fabric over their chests. I have yet to figure out how those children did not fall off given that the rectangle was not tied, just tucked. The larger the child and the older the woman, the more the woman had to bend forward to walk. Since the access to and from the plane was stirs and steep ramps, this seemed to me to be extremely difficult.
At no time did I see a man attend to a child although fathers and grand fathers were traveling with the attentive women.
Once we arrived in West Africa the next phase of our journey began: no one was there to meet us and we did not know the name of the hotel that had been booked for us. We walked expectantly to the meet and greet area expecting our extremely efficient contact person to be there. We were not correct. Although there was a quiet, orderly mob of men and women is western and Middle Eastern garb (including some lovely Moslem women in magnificent silk robes and head scarves with embroidery and beading (which were beautiful, spotless and, to my thought, unbearably hot in that equatorial furnace), there was no one to greet us.
Eventually a police man asked if he could assist us and lent us his cell phone to call our contact person’s cell phone. That we reached her was the good news. That he then demanded a “tip” of $20 “to buy units for my cell phone” (which would buy a zillion units) was the bad news. We settled on $10 and he was disgruntled but quieted.
When our friend arrived (since the hotel had forgotten to pick us up), we wheeled our luggage carts to the car (which was forced into the pay lot so they could collect the parking fee although our friend’s husband had not parked, just waited) and about 8 men attached themselves to the luggage carts by touching them while we wheeled them over rutted, unpaved areas, across 12″ drops and stones. The did nothing in particular, just touched the carts. At the car, each of them demanded what we now knew was the usual: $20 as a “tip”. Bert had already tipped 2 of them $5 to make them go away. It was a learning experience: now we let our friend take care of the problem since she knows the culture: we do not.
Then we got into the car and got to the hotel, a simple, clean and pleasant hotel (which was, thank God, air-conditioned) with a bathroom large enough for a sizable party. That’s the good news: the bad news is that even in a hotel of this caliber, it is important not to let the water reach your lips, even when you shower.
Filtration? We prepared very well for it except for the fact that in the chaos of packing (when every schedule we created for ourselves was foreshortened by unforeseen events and requirements and, at the end, we had about 2.5 hours to pack for a month long trip), we forgot our electrostatic water purifiers, our Vitamin C, Olive Leaf Extract, Oil of Oregano, Homeopathic Travel Kit and other natural essentials. Thanks to Bob Mawson, one of our Board members, however, who was thoughtful enough to give us a filtration pump for water which did get into the suit case, we can double filter our water: the filtreation pump from Bob and our own travel filter. Between the two of them we figure we’ve got at least a chance.
Not to worry, though, we could find American Vitamin C 1 g tabs at about 3 times the price they cost in the US. Of course, after bying them we opened them to find that they were totally rotten.
Many foods and goods are available in restaurants and home inUS brands (e.g., Heinz ketchup and mustard, Knott’s Berry Farms jam, etc) but we did not see anything labled “organic”. Part of the reason is that preservation is a tremendous problem here and EU, Chinese and US goods are technologically superior in preservation techniques (of course, that includes not only packaging and sterility, but preservatives and all the other weaknesses of the conventional food supply, including GM constituents.
Our friend asked if we would like to come to her home for a home cooked meal. We were very glad to do so for several reasons including the pleasure of being invited to someone’s home and the pleasure of knowing that the food and water would be safe, not a “sure thing” otherwise. (She boils and filters the water, grows her own cattle, fruit and vegetables, etc, using organic techniques.
When she arrived to pick us up we showed her the book which we had prepared, the pens and the key chains as gifts for people. She was very pleasantly impressed and felt that they were perfect for the task.
Her home, children and husband were lovely. Naoim, her 7 year old girl duaghter came up to us as we ate and asked if we would like her to share her packet of biscuits (i.e., cookies) with us. We accepted with pleasure. It was a sweet and gentle moment.
Our afternoon meeting vaporized in a way that we learned was best described by the universally useful (and helpless) phrase, “It’s Africa!” What that means is that the Western notion of a schedule has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. None. Nada. Zip. Airplanes leave hours early with no warning. Firm appointment are about as firm as a jello ring mold in the equatorial sun. “It’s [absolutely] Africa!”
Following our dinner (which we ate alone since our hosts had already dined and this gave them a chance to relax and watch some African football (i.e., soccer), we hot-footed it off to the shopping center (the largest in the country) to buy our forgotten Vitamin C. When we emerged from the shopping center, there was a lady leaning on our car making a phone call. I thought that she was just using the car as a leaning post. When we approached the car, however, our friend and she embraced warmly. It turned out that the lady had been waiting since just after we arrive(well over an hour) for us since the afternoon meeting with her that had been scheduled did not happen because her furniture or her new apartment had not been delivered for a very long time. This is Africa.
So she waited by our car for over an hour to have the meeting with us anyway.
When we greeted her she had just learned that a young man in his 20s who worked in her office and with whom she was close friends, had been killed on his motor bike that day. Motor accidents are tremendously common. All of the roads, with one or two exceptions, are deeply rutted, unpaved and dangerously uneven. Traffic is horrific during commute times and difficult the rest of the time. Traffic accidents are extremely common.
It is dry here now and I can only imagine what these red packed, rock filled dirt roads are like during the rainy season.
People fill the roads and rapid movement with a car on them is perilous. Part of the reason that they are in the street is that down most streets, on both sides, are small kiosks selling everything from food to clothing, shoes to hats to cell phone units to drugs (often counterfeit) and herbal remedies to anything else you might need if you do not have a car and it is hard to get anywhere. They fill any available space where people might otherwise walk so they use the streets instead.
These are often sheds in front of shanties. While we were in the shopping mall, a friend of our hostess cashed a traveler’s check for us. He cheated us badly, it turns out: he cashed our Euro travelers check as if they were $ ones. Thus, a 50 E check was treated like a $50 check. This was clearly not unintentional. We did not mention it to our friend since this fellow was warmly greeted and addressed by her and we did not want to embarrass either one of them. Face is a big deal and causing someone to loose it is disastrous for a relationship.
After we hooked up with the lady who wanted the late meeting when we came back to our hotel and Bert, who, like me, had been up for over 5 days with only the sleep on the airplane and an hour on the floor of the living room a few nights ago (aside from the times we fell asleep at meals or on the computers) collapsed into bed. I continued to the meeting and we explained to the lady (a nutritionist and the number two person in the government on nutrition, fortification and supplementation) what Codex has in mind for the world and she instantly saw what it would mean. She was appropriately and gratifyingly horrified and immediately saw that we must meet with her boss and with others. She is now making those arrangements for us. I believe she is completely on our team because of her professional expertise and her good heart. Of course she knew that Codex existed but was not aware of what it really means to her people. She often interjected responses like, “But that is crazy!”
To top off the success of the evening, when I got back to the room I discovered that my cell phone works here, at least for calls to the US as local numbers. Go figure that one out: no country code, no addtional numbers, just regular US calls.
It did not work at the airport or we would not have discovered the “tipping” system with the cop.
Our friend did not come to the airport initially herself since her 2 year old son, Joshua, had a fever and she took him to the hospital since the fear was that he had contracted malaria which is endemic here. He had been put on chlorquine prophylacticly some days ago. His symptoms sounded to me like they could be due to liver impairment from the drug but the physician did not check his liver enzymes.
Post meeting: bed and more of it. Thank God for the air conditioner. Did I mention that I really, really hate the heat?
More meetings tomorrow.