Boulder and LA

As a follow up to my last post on a problem I had gone to Hargeisa to "solve", I would like to report that, though progress has been made, the problem has not been solved.  I'm going to blame my absence over the last few weeks on all of the time it is taking to not-solve this problem.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I had the chance to go back to the US for my good friend Noah and Hana's wedding.  Hana was my backup doula (and I her's) when I lived in New York.  I met her at the doula training and Noah a few weeks later when they had me over for the first of many amazing dinner's at their apartment.  They were also notable for almost always inviting Eskimo along, and he only disgraced himself there occasionally.  Anyway, I have several very good friends getting married this year and I won't be able to go to most of the weddings, so I was really happy to be able to go to theirs because of the way timing worked out.

The trip started with a five hour flight to Dubai and then a 17-hour flight--the fifth longest flight in the world--over the North Pole to Los Angeles, city of angels and soft hotel beds by the beach to sleep in for hours and hours to recover from that flight.

Before I slept off my jet lag, I had to see a little bit of LA and where better to start than Santa Monica pier?  Also, that's what was was just steps from my hotel, so it was the most convenient.

I rode the ferris wheel, alone.  Except, did you know they won't let you ride ferris wheels alone?  Apparently it gets unbalanced.  So if you are alone, you have to wait for a) someone else alone or b) somebody the ticket taker can sucker into making them feel guilty enough to ride with you and not their friends.  Which is how I ended up with a really sweet kid who was a freshman in high school in a town a few hours outside of LA and there with his family for the evening.  Awwww.  We had a lovely chat.

After wandering Santa Monica for awhile the next day, I spent the rest of the weekend doing wedding related stuff, such as a rehearsal dinner that included playing on the equipment at Muscle Beach.

The wedding itself was lovely, at state park in the hills over the ocean.  It was supposed to be outside but it downpoured the entire day--rare for LA, apparently.  Fortunately there was a tent.

I must have been really jet lagged by then because I only managed to take two pictures and both of them were unbelievably bad.  Neither captures what a beautiful and happy occasion it was.  No, not at all.

And then I flew to Boulder, via Salt Lake City, which is gorgeous to fly into.

And then Boulder, with Jess and Tessa (and Tessa's husband, Tom) for some pretty laid back fun--The Hunger Games movie, some really good food, some hiking and some more really good food.  Oh and riding a giant frog on a carousel.

Mostly it was just really nice to spend some time with really good friends.  I love my job and the excitement and the travel and all the amazing new friends I've made along the way, but there isn't really anything like spending time with really good, old friends.  I feel really lucky not only to have such good friends but also to have friends so accepting of me disappearing off to another continent and then reappearing and demanding they hang out with me for the short time I am back.  And I miss them when I'm gone...hoping a few might come visit soon (you know who you are...)!

Problem Solving in Hargeisa

More travel--I’m in Hargeisa for a few days right now.  So far I’m well on track to break last year’s record of 62 takes offs/landings.  I’m at 24 now, with the promises of lots more travel on the horizon.

I’m in Hargeisa for two reasons, one because somebody from headquarters is here who wanted to go to Hargeisa and two, because we’re having a little issue with one of our donors here.  I won’t name this donor but I’ll say this:  they are a UN donor and they work exclusively with providing food. 

Last fall, we approached two donors, one (Donor A, also a UN agency) of whom provides food and money for treating children with severe malnutrition and one (Donor B) whom provides food and money for treating children with moderate malnutrition (obviously, right?  Since, you know, one donor couldn’t do both?  Very efficient.)  Anyway, we proposed a total of 54 sites in eastern Somaliland, with costs split 50/50 between these two donors.  Both agreed and things moved forward relatively smoothly for the donor that treats severe malnutrition.  The other donor…not so much.  Issue after issue after issue. One of the big issues is that parts of eastern Somaliland are disputed between Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia.  It might sound a bit funny, but realistically no one really knows at any given time where the border between this two countries is.  While Donor A thought all of our sites were in Somaliland, Donor B thought 20 of them were in Puntland and wanted us to cut them. 

Finally we got to a point, during my last visit to Hargeisa in February, where Donor B agreed to fund these 20 disputed sites and supply them from its Puntland office.  It looked like everything was ready to be officially signed, when all of a sudden, Donor B called and said, oops, it turns out our Puntland office already gave this sites away to a local NGO and we didn’t know!  Sorry!  Good luck!  And I said, oh no you don’t—that leaves us without 50% of our funding for 20 sites that you had promised us, as well as the fact that we are already working in these sites and haven’t seen any sign of an organization providing these programs for moderately malnourished children.  So I told Donor B that they needed to be sure that these organizations were providing what they said, and that as long as they were we were happy to remove those sites from our proposal—provided that Donor B would talk Donor A into providing 100% of the funding for the 20 sites we were removing.  So we started working on this.  And then things got interesting—at a MoH planning meeting, the government of Somaliland realized what Donor B had done, namely that it had more or less decided that an entire regional of Somaliland actually belonged to another country.  The MoH demanded that these sites be given back to my organization, as we provide all the nutrition programming in that part of Somaliland.  

  

Aaaaaand now I’m on a plane to Hargeisa to try to deal with that.  The solution remains yet unclear, other than that we will not, I repeat, WILL NOT, be getting in between Donor B and the MoH in this political game.  At this point, I am just going to advocate for getting these programs started in the remaining 34 sites while the MoH and Donor B duke it out.   Because something everybody seems to have missed during these games is that while we are playing them, sick kids aren’t getting care, and isn’t that why we are all here in the first place?

On a lighter note, I had brunch yesterday with somebody who works with another (different) UN agency that is working to get Somalia’s police force into some semblance of order.  His big task recently has been attempting to find and get to Mogadishu enough manual typewriters for Mogadishu’s police stations.  Laptops have constant problems that can’t be resolved with the resources available, and both laptops and electric typewriters require electricity, which there isn’t any of usually.  So, manual typewriters were the best option by far, except that they are hard to track down and, it turns out, expensive.  He finally found a manufacturer, Olivetti, in India and a supplier of them in Nairobi, at $400 each.  More expensive than a cheap laptop, until you factor in the cost of a generator…They’re off to Mogadishu on a Jubba Airlines flight later this week and the Mogadishu police should be clacking away in no time.

Mogadishu

When I took this job working with the Somalia program, I knew that I would spend a fair amount of time in Somaliland.  I also knew that there was the possibility that I would spend some time in Mogadishu.  For me that was kind of exciting.  It became an even more interesting prospect when I began to spend huge amounts of my time writing proposals for new funding for my organization in Mogadishu and managing a couple of small water and sanitation projects.  I was writing with apparent authority about a place I had never set foot, which has its obvious challenges.

One of the big projects we have in Mogadishu is a hospital.  We'd be working on this hospital with a Turkish NGO.  The Turkish have a major humanitarian presence in Mogadishu right now.  Depending on who you ask, it's Turkey's bid to become a major player on the global humanitarian scene, and so far they have been able to mobilize and gain acceptance much faster than "traditional" actors like my organization.  The downside is that they are not terribly interested in coordinating with the UN and other NGOs and that many of them lack experience in implementing complex humanitarian projects.  My organization got involved with the Turkish NGO because we thought that a pair of a traditional (us) and non-traditional (them) actors might mean the best of both worlds--good access, quick implementation, but also coordination, experience and monitoring and evaluation.  We're the first NGO to try to conduct a partnership like this, and a lot of people are watching.

The opening of the hospital was scheduled for mid-March.  It was scheduled to coincide with the first long-haul international flight in Mogadishu International in several decades, operated by none other than Turkish Airlines (apparently these flights are now fully booked through December).  When we landed at the airport on Tuesday morning, the jet had recently landed and was sitting in the tarmac with a red carpet rolled out to the terminal.  The plane was packed full of journalists and dignitaries, a number of whom were scheduled to come to the hospital for its opening, including the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey.

The hospital opening had been scheduled for the next morning, but because of security issues was at the last minute changed to Tuesday afternoon, so the opening ended up being the first time I saw the hospital.

Behold, the hospital:

The opening was entirely in Turkish and Somali.  I was the only non-either one of those present.

I toured the hospital.  It was nice to see the reality of something I had just written more than 30 pages about.  I have a lot of pictures of the inside of the hospital, but I'll only share my favorite:  a neonatal incubator.  There's three in the hospital, and I'm fairly certain they are the only three operational ones in Somalia.  I have plans for these little machines.

Leaving the opening was an interesting scene (photos taken within about 15 seconds of each other between the gate and my armored SUV).

For obvious reasons, we had quite a lot of security in Mogadishu as well as limited movements.  Here's the armed escort that goes everywhere you go (as soon from the backseat of the car):

Here's my bullet proof vest:

Here's one of my bodyguards:

If you read news articles about Mogadishu, they all pretty much give the impression of a destroyed city, devoid of any meaningful activities of daily life (except for this one from the New York Times, courtesy of my mother).  In reality, it's a fairly vibrant city; life is very much going on, albeit in a physically destructed environment and with a fair amount of ongoing insecurity.

Now for the photo tour....here's the National Cathedral today:

This is what it used to look like:

Here's where the infamous Black Hawk helicopter went down (look carefully for the rotors):

Here's the K4 roundabout, a busy (and strategic) central roundabout, where things regularly go down.  It's name for being 4 kilometers from the city center.

Here's one of the many, many internally displaced person camps that dot Mogadishu, squeezed into empty spaces.  They're filled with people fleeing famine and conflict around Mogadishu and, depending where Al-Shabaab is at any point, there's flow in and out of the city.  Recently, the transitional federal government (TFG) began an offensive in what's known as the Afgooye Cooridor to the east of Mogadishu, sending a new wave of people into these informal camps in Mogadishu.  There's also informal shelters put up in little patches around the city.

This was Al-Shabaab's last stand in Mogadishu, a hotel (former hotel?)

Here's the beach, it's actually very beautiful.  Maybe in 20 years Mogadishu will be giving Mombasa a run for the tourist dollars.

This is the formerly posh beachside neighborhood, filled with the remains of villas once occupied by Italian expats and wealthy Somalis.

This is Villa Somalia, the Somalia parliament.  It, too, has seen better days.

Here's the Somalia Maritime and Fishery Institute.  It doesn't appear operational right now, but some of maybe the only good news coming out of Somalia right now is that all of the pirate activity along the coast has allowed previously depleted fish populations to revive.  There are now some attempts to get fishermen active again, but there's concern by some that giving these fishermen better boats will just lead to pirates with nicer boats.  There's still a lot of money in piracy.

Here's just some random pictures from around town:

Yeah and there were some meetings and other stuff.  And then we rolled out back to Nairobi (that's Mogadishu from the air).

Easter on Mount Meru

Once again, I've been negligent about keeping up with this blog--there's been a lot going on.  I have a couple of entries to catch up on, but I'll start with the most recent. 

Easter is a big holiday and Kenya and we had Friday and Monday off from work.  My two roommates, Caitlin and Caroline, and I wanted to go somewhere interesting and we ended up deciding to go hike Mt. Meru, Tanzania's second highest mountain and Africa's tenth highest mountain.  By "we decided" I mean that I was in the US and said I was good with anything, email me when you decide what you guys want to do and I'll buy a plane ticket."  Fortunately I live with excellent decision makers.

The adventure started with trying to buy a plane ticket on the same flight Caroline was going on.  The website refused to take my credit card multiple times, so I selected the "pay at office" option.  This necessitated a dreaded trip downtown to their office, battling Nairobi's hideous traffic, only to be told that the office's credit card machine had broken five months ago and still wasn't fixed.  But could I go online and try to rebook, maybe the credit card problem had been resolved?  No, it hadn't, and in the meantime the price had gone up $50.  So I sent an email to the address I had been explicitly told to email if I was still having problems and...it bounced back.  Precisionair fail.  So I booked a Fly540 flight instead, leaving from Wilson Airport, the smaller airport in Nairobi.  Which doesn't have a departure lounge, you go to your airline's individual hangar.  Unfortunately, I didn't know this and my taxi driver dropped me off at the entrance to the airport, about half a mile away from the Fly540 hanger.  Lesson learned.

We all eventually made it to the Kilimanjaro Airport and on to Arusha where we spent the night before being picked up Friday morning to head to the base of Mt. Meru to begin our hike.   Because there are a number of buffalo on the lower slopes of Mount Meru, you have to do this part with a ranger (with a gun).  There was a "ranger shortage" so we ended up with a group of 8 other people for this part, and democratically chose to take a longer, gentler 6 hour hike instead of a steeper 3 hour hike.  It was lovely, first grassland, then big trees, then interesting mountain shrubs. 

It ended up taking about 5 hours of steady upward hiking to reach the Mirikamba Huts (elevation 2,514 meters) just in time for a cup of tea, dinner and an early bedtime.  The clouds briefly parted for a rather nerve-racking glimpse of what lay ahead for us to climb.

Also, we were maybe not the most prepared hikers ever.  Hiking boots??? Who needs hiking boots?  A pair of hot pink Nike running shoes should do the trick nicely.

 

The next morning, we set off on part two of the hike, which we were told included 1,000 steps and would take about four hours.  After extensive counting, I would like to report that there are actually 2,677 steps, which is quite a difference.  But we powered up those steps and reached the second stopping point, Saddle Huts (elevation 3,570 meters) in 2.5 hours, at about 11:30 am.

At this point, most people spend the rest of the day relaxing, go to bed early, and get up at 1 am to begin the (very challenging, 6-hour) hike up to the summit for sunrise, when the weather tends to be clear.  However 1) we are kind of crazy 2) we were hiking at solid pace, faster than the estimated times and 3) we were hiking in the rainy season and it was quite cloudy at points.  Thus, the guide suggested that we take a quick break at Saddle Huts then hike up to the summit and back that afternoon instead since it was not looking like it would rain that afternoon but was raining almost every night.  So off we went.

It was a solid hike, first a steep climb to Rhino Point (3,800 meters) then along a sloping outer ridge of ash that forms the outer wall of the crater and sheer cliffs of rock that form the inner wall of the crater to Cobra Point (elevation 4,350 meters).

We reached the summit, Socialist Peak (elevation 4,566 meters) in a record breaking (or at least pretty awesome) 4 hours, after a final steep climb across rocks.  It was wickedly cold and totally surrounded by clouds--it felt like we were on a rock island in a sea of clouds, and more silent than maybe anywhere I have ever been.

And then, just when we were about to begin the climb down, the clouds began to clear and we had the most amazing views of the ash cone below to the east (Mt. Meru is an active volcano and last erupted in 1910) and the lush countryside at the base of the mountain to the west.

On the way down, we went in out of clouds, but were above the cloud line for much of the hike, giving us some really beautiful sunset clouds views as well as a sudden and brief glimpse of a snow-covered Mount Kilimanjaro, 70 miles to the east.

We made it to back to Saddle Huts about 8 pm, hiking the last hour or so in the dark (headlamps= greatest invention EVER).  After about 10 hours of hiking, we ate and collapsed into our sleeping bags.

The hike down the mountain the next day was beautiful as well, with rapidly changing landscapes.

A giraffe (twiga in Swahili) sighting about a mile from the end of the hike bought us some precious enthusiasm to get us back to the trailhead.

On the way back into town, the clouds cleared long enough for us to see what we had just climbed in its entirety.  We were pretty impressed with ourselves.

We made it back to Arusha in time for some much needed hot showers and an amazing dinner for us three absolutely famished hikers at the Bayleaf Hotel (think lobster ravioli, brie stuffed figs, and chocolate puddle cake), and an early bedtime.  After a few hours wandering Arusha's markets in the morning (review:  same stuff as in Kenya but more expensive), we headed back to Nairobi. 

Landing at Wilson Airport again I had an amazing view of downtown as well as Kibera, the massive slum that dominates Nairobi's south-eastern side and was made famous in The Constant Gardner.