Blackouts, scandal and sexy US diplomats: An adventure through the interwebs!

Tuesday was my second day at work. I came in at 8, excited to sit at my desk, work on some spreadsheets (oh my!), go to some meetings, and still be ready for a hike at any moment. However, around 9 am, I noticed my macbook said ‘Not Charging.’ I got up and switched the plug to a new outlet. Still not. Huh.

After a while, I realized we were in a power blackout. (I sit by a big window so we usually don’t use overhead lights.) Supposedly, the office was supposed to have generators so that we could work through the day, but these weren’t working. So people finished their meetings, and eventually trickled home as laptop batteries ran dry. Some of my co-workers asked me if we had power blackouts in the US. At this point, I naively failed to realize these were scheduled, rationed blackouts. I stammered something about storms and tree branches hitting power lines. I got some confused looks.

That night, I went to a local outdoor pub for rice and beans with my coworker C. and his brother G. Both are from a rural town in Tanzania, but G. went to graduate school at a large US university that rhymes with Barvard, and currently hosts Fogarty fellows at his NGO here in Tanzania.

As we sat in almost complete darkness, I asked them what the deal was with the power outages. Ah, G. said, good question. The story he went on to explained was a complicated tale.

Traditionally, Tanzania’s electricity relies on hydroelectric power. In the past ten years, two factors have come together to generate a large gap between supply and demand: El Nino and global weather changes have lowered available supply, while at the same time the growing economy and urbanization has led to a surge in demand. These two things add up to rationing, or rolling blackouts.

These elements of the story are natural. Now enter 1. Ostensible desire to help and 2. Human fallibility. G. explained that four years ago, the government contracted with a US company to buy, install and generate power using large turbines to be placed in Dar. However, after years of protracted dealings, no turbines emerged, the US company shifted their assets around, no power was generated, and eventually the Tanzanian prime minister resigned over the scandal. Though stable, Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world. The rolling blackouts have had an immense effect on depressing productivity and the entire economy.

G. then entered into a lengthy (and informative) discussion of the imbalance of power between a developing country like Tanzania and world powers with a financial interest. Of course, GL, BM and I, as card-carrying yuppies interested in moving abroad to do ‘development work,’ have all read the basic curriculum of Sachs, Easterly and Collins. We know a little bit about a few things. But as I listened to G. talk, I started to wonder just how sheltered our perspective still was.

G. mentioned scandals and seemingly conspiracy level situations as if they should be basic knowledge, but these were not things I’ve encountered in the New York Times or New Yorker. When I got home, I decided to see what the internet could tell me. What follows is my while goose-chase around the web.

I started by googling ‘tanzania energy scandal.’ After reading various articles (mostly from Africa focused online publications, no nyt or wapo, of course), I found the name of the US company: Richmond Development Co, from the mighty state of Texas. I changed my google search for ‘tanzania energy richmond llc”

Here’s short version of what emerges: In 2006, Tanesco, the Tanzanian government energy group, entered into a contract with RDEVCO, for RDEVCO to design, install and run power turbines in Dar es Salaam. Interestingly, Tanesco would not own the turbines, but would instead pay to then ‘use’ power produced by RDEVCO on Tanzanian soil. That is stupid and has kickbacks written all over it, but fine, whatever.

RDEVCO then contracted with another US group, Vulcan, to purchase the actual turbine. Then, RDEVCO contracted with a Tanzanian holding company, and signed over the rights of the Tanesco contract as well as the turbine purchase agreement to Dowans, the new Tanzanian company. Yes, this is all very confusing, and now RDEVCO and Dowans are currently fighting over who actually did own the turbine when it arrived in Dar. But here’s the kicker, somehow in all of this, the International Chamber of Commerce, in Paris, France, has ruled that Tanesco is the one in breach of contract with Dowans, and last fall has ordered Tanesco to pay $120 million for breach of contract. Let’s keep in mind that during this time, regular Tanzanians have been living with constant and devastating blackouts.

One might wonder, who is this mysterious Richmond Development Co.? To the internet! RDEVCO’s dark blue template style website informs me that “Energy Infrastructure Development helps economies and communities struggling to meet their rising demands for electricity. By designing, overseeing, and securing financing for large scale energy projects, RDEVCO meets this need and helps aspiring people find success and build a brighter tomorrow.” How nice. The leadership page also tells me that they have a Mr. Nick Lampson, a US Congressman, on the team. In fact, the second person listed.

Now, it’s understandable that if, for the last four years, 40 million Africans have been cheated out of having affordable electricity delivered to their homes through some shady business contracts, it wouldn’t be news I’d hear about. I mean, who cares. But, doesn’t the involvement of a US Congressman make it at least worthy of an inside page NYT blurb? Apparently not. Mr. Lampson’s Wikipedia page has no mention of anything related to Richmond or Tanzania or blackouts.

So what’s going on with the turbines now? Why did I go home yesterday instead of working to eradicate HIV through Excel spreadsheets from my air-conditioned Dar es Salaam NGO office? Well, this gets weird too. The latest news results for Tanesco show that they are in the process of signing a contract for a new US company to operate the turbines in Dar. This company is called Symbion Power, and it’s CEO, Paul Hinks, came to Dar yesterday to sign the papers.

The first weird thing is that many of the small news sites quote an ‘exclusive interview Mr. Hinks gave to the Guardian last week.’ Now, I’m assuming this means the British Guardian, so I tried to find the original article. However, guardian.co.uk turns up no recent results for either Symbion or Hinks. I even googled around for other possible papers named ‘The Gaurdian,” but not surprisingly the local newspaper in Idaho did not interview Mr. Hinks in Dar, or anywhere else.

What I did find in the British Guardian though, was a curious little stub article from 2002 that implicates Mr. Hinks, at that time a managing director of a UK energy firm, in possibly illegal kickback payments to a Ugandan official in relation to a dam construction contract. As a result, the dam project was stalled, and I’m assuming, some Ugandan people didn’t get the electricity they were promised.

Huh, weird. Now, who is Symbion Power and this elusive Mr. Hinks? The website of this US registered company tells me that “Symbion Power was built on a foundation of partnership and cooperation. Even our name – a derivative of the word Symbiosis – reflects the cooperative relationship we maintain with key suppliers, local partners and subcontractors.”

…Really? Do these companies hire middle school cheer-camp directors in the off-season to write their PR? Perhaps the most urgently needed NGO is one that teaches African leaders how to smell bullshit.

Anyways, I’m much more reassured when I get to the leadership page, because lo and behold, they also have a trusty US public servant on the team: Mr. Joseph Wilson, the former H.W. appointed ambassador to Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe. (I once read in some article that when you become president, you have to find jobs for all the people you kind of want to please but really don’t know what to do with, so you stick them as ambassadors to obscure countries.)

So, we will see if Symbion, Mr. Hinks, and Mr. Wilson will save the day and the blackouts improve this summer. I have a hunch that they won’t.

Oh, Symbion also has a British LORD on the team. This beautiful man:

Now here’s a caveat, I’m not an investigative journalist. I tried to find multiple sources but I didn’t really validate or fact check anything here. This is why blogs, like women, are both beautiful and dangerous. But this is what I found to satiate my own curiousity, and furthermore, this example is an interesting entry into a debate that GL and I have had in the past, about whether in the end, NGOs or for-profit business will save the world.

G., my Tanzanian friend, repeatedly told me that what US companies are not allowed to do in the US, they come and do it here. And now that the scandal has been perpetrated, is there a court in the world that will rule in favor of the people who actually need the power? Apparently not. Of course, this doesn’t acquit the corrupt Tanzanian leaders who got the country into the mess by signing contracts that obviously didn’t benefit their countrymen for the sake of some personal kickbacks. But still, is it then valid to say that even relatively stable developing countries like Tanzania do not have the political infrastructure to benefit from the undeniable perks of well-regulated capitalism? I don’t know.

In other news, I’m getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and might well have malaria. Stay tuned.

Who do you worship!?

GL, the illustrious executive editor and publisher of this virtual publication, once told me that if I wanted to write down my daily occurrences, only my mother would be interested in reading them. However, since today was my first day of work in Tanzania, it might be worth mentioning. In my short life, I’ve been a waitress, an SAT tutor, a shopgirl, a lab rat, a nurse’s assistant, a financial consultant, a food blogger, a public health research assistant, and a medical student, but I’ve never been a field intern for an international medical NGO. Therefore, I had almost no idea what to expect on my first day.

Before coming, I had corresponded briefly with several of the local office staff about my position this summer and what I would be working on. I had done some other work with male circumcision for HIV prevention, so I knew the science behind it, but very little of the actual field implementation. I also just couldn’t guess what the day to day work flow would look like.

I arrived in Dar es Salaam on Saturday night, and spent most of Sunday at the hotel sleeping and getting unpacked. This morning (Monday), I woke up at six, but really had no idea when I was supposed to arrive at the office. I had been told via email that a driver from the hotel would take me to the office. After wasting some time unsure of what to do with myself, I sat down to breakfast in the dining room sometime around 7:30. A little while later, one of the receptionists found me to tell me that my ‘car was ready.’ I thought this meant a driver would be ready to take me when I wanted to go, so I thanked him and continued to eat breakfast. A little while later, I saw the same receptionist wander back to the dining room to smile nervously at me. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll just finish and we can go.’

After I ate, I went back up to my room, packed my bag, and wandered downstairs. When I stepped outside the hotel, I saw to my horror that a Toyota Landcruiser with my NGO’s label stamped on the side was idling in front of the door, and inside sat a very impatient looking man. It dawned on me that someone from the office had come here to pick me up, and had been waiting the whole time while I lackadaisically spread jam on toast.

I ran to open the door and breathlessly apologize for the mix-up. S., the supremely irked driver, informed me that he had been waiting over half an hour, and that there were a limited number of cars to go around! I apologized repeatedly while trying to awkwardly hoist myself into the rather elevated car, and in the process bumped my head against the doorframe. While apologies continued to stream out of my mouth, I thought, ‘Oh shit, did my headband just crack?’

I closed the door and saw the two pieces of forlorn plastic that had fallen from my head onto the floor of the car. S. had already started pulling the car forward. My mind raced as I tried to think of some way to salvage this situation without asking him to stop the car. Did I have any spare clips? No. Did I have some way I could wear my hair down? No. Did I want to show up for my first day looking like a raving lunatic? Um…

Finally, when we had reached the end of the block, I blurted out, ‘I’m SO sorry, but do you mind if I run back upstairs to get a headband? Mine just broke…’ S. braked, and looked at me like I had just asked him for a blueberry lollipop because I had left mine at home. He narrowed his eyes and said, ‘You have another one upstairs?’ I quickly nodded and darted out the Landcruiser before he could say no, yelling that it would only take a minute.

After we were back on the road, S. turned out to be very nice. We drove the dramatic distance of half a mile to a white gated compounded on the side of a major road. Pulling into the parking lot, I saw a lot of Tanzanian men in business casual congregating around the front door of the building. Everyone was busy greeting each other good morning and shaking hands. S. pulled us to the front door, asked me to sign a car usage form, and waited for me to hop out. Wait, I thought, weren’t you supposed to take me in? What now? I nervously stepped out of the car and looked around for someone to save me. And then like a miracle, the country program director, and American, stepped out from behind the vehicle and asked me if I was Linda. Yes! If I ever was.

H., the country director, took me upstairs and rapidly introduced me to several men who’s names I promptly forgot. I noticed that despite the dirt roads outside, 1) this was a normal office, complete with copy machines, communal fridge and water cooler and 2) everyone else was wearing business casual. I, on the other hand (and to be fair, against GL’s explicit advice), was wearing hiking sandals, North Face capris, and a Columbia hiking shirt. I suppose the native Tanzanians here will just forever think that Asian American medical students are all a very poorly dressed lot, or else hopelessly over-zealous outdoorsy types.

It was somehow decided that my first day would be best spent attending a training session for a new community outreach team helping us with the circumcision campaign. This sounded like a reasonable idea to get me oriented, so I enthusiastically agreed. And so, I followed three of my new colleagues a short drive away to a hotel conference room, where I proceeded to sit through an entire day’s training…entirely in Swahili.

Luckily, my three Tanzanian colleagues were extremely nice, and gave me background materials to read in English, and also translated bits for me along the way. It was interesting to see how the audience interacted with the presenters, and hear the questions they had about the campaign. (This is an outside media group contracted to do community outreach ahead of the campaign dates in order to address local concerns and create demand, more on this later.) I also wrote down individual Swahili words that stuck out (tohara means circumcision).

Halfway through the day, I saw a slide that looked like a biblical quote in Swahili. Curious, I leaned over to C., one of the community outreach officers, and asked him what it meant. He explained it was the pact between God and Abraham. I nodded, but really I had no idea what this meant.

‘You are Christian?’ C. whispered to me.

I smiled apologetically and shook my head no.

‘Oh,’ he nodded understandingly, ‘In China you have your own…?’

Again, I shook my head no.

‘You have…nothing?’ he asked. ‘Who do you worship?!’

I dumbly shook my head and flexed my lower lip from a smile to a nervous pout. But he wasn’t done.

‘Who do you pray to? ... No one? …It’s just you?’

I nervously glanced around at the presentation that was still going on around us. I timidly shrugged my shoulders and turned back to my empty notepad. Of course before coming here, I had read about Tanzanian culture, the breakdown of different ethnic and religious groups in the country. Somehow, the percentages of Christians and Muslims and indigenous faith-ers all seemed very abstract in my mind. I never expected to encounter this kind of reaction to my own beliefs, which I found very irrelevant to my coming here.

Luckily, a few minutes later C. nudged me to help him add me on Facebook, and this relieved some of my fears of being a complete social outcast for the next two months.

Despite a rocky start, it would be unfair to end this post without saying that I ended up having a fun day and enjoying my co-workers a lot. I felt the palpable disorientation of being plunged into a culture I know very little about, and a language I don’t understand at all. Still, I’m looking forward to having a great summer, especially when we leave Dar next week for the rural Iringa, where we will actually be conducting the circumcision campaign, and where my awkward hiking shoes will have their day to shine. Stay tuned.

Arrived, and it's a bit like home

After 24 hours of travel, I've finally arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Although the city is much more chaotic and poor than I expected to find, much it feels familiar, like China 10 years ago. Stopping at a light, a half-dozen hawkers approach the car windows selling everything from apples to bike tires. Tiny shacks along the street sell everything else. The pavement stops outside the main thoroughfare, and dirt roads lined with garbage course into cramped neighborhoods of tin roofed houses.

Everyone I meet is extremely courteous, and tell me over and over that I am welcome in Tanzania. My small hotel is interesting - girls working there come up to me and say, 'Hi, what is your name? Oh! You are the 'Linda Jin' ?'

Unfortunately, there is no water at the hotel. I'm assured this will be fixed soon. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: The next morning, I spent several hours downstairs using internet in the hotel lobby. Unfortunately, when the water shut off the previous night, I had been in the middle of showering. This meant that, while I was downstairs, and the water turned back on, my room got entirely flooded by the time I ventured back up. Luckily this resulted in me getting upgraded to a better room. Win some, lose some.

The Most Dangerous Road in the World

On May 16th, an armed gang of men stormed an isolated dairy in northern Guatemala.  After the workers on the farm were unable to tell the gang where the owner was, they were tied up, hacked with machetes, and beheaded.  27 farm laborers were slaughtered; only one worker who feigned death lived to report what happened.

While authorities do not yet know who committed this atrocity, they suspect the violent drug trafficking gang of Los Zetas.  Local police believe that the owner of the farm had ties to or was involved in a rival drug trafficking network that had made a move on the Zetas’ operations.  

Unfortunately, this horrific event is not an isolated incident.  Over the past decade, Central America has become the most murderous region in the world with shockingly high homicide rates throughout the isthmus.  To provide some context, the murder rate in Seattle is 4 while San Pedro Sula (where I lived) has a rate of 92.

This terrible state is a direct result of the wildly lucrative drug (and specifically cocaine) trade.  The UN estimates in this tremendous study that the cocaine market alone in the US is worth $38 billion.  By comparison, Amazon had sales of $34 billion last year.  And because the drug industry has higher barriers to entry than online retailing (refer to new competitor entry leading to a massacre), I imagine that it enjoys healthier profit margins.  One of my friends in Honduras told me that you can buy a line of coke in Honduras for $5 as compared to $50 or $60 in the US.  And Honduras isn’t even a producer of cocaine, it just unhappily happens to lie on the main highway from producer to consumer.  

Up until the 1990’s, the largest flows of cocaine traveled from main producers of Bolivia and Colombia across the Caribbean and into the US via Miami and other southern ports of entry.  But no longer.  As the US Coast Guard beefed up patrols, the drug trade moved from water to land.  Unfortunately, the small, cash-strapped governments of Central America have been unable to cope.  They cannot afford to sink the same amount of resources into combating the trade that the US could.  In fact, according to wikileaks, the Nicaraguan government was using the profits from the drug trade to subsidize its own operations.  As the gangs that transport the drugs become more entrenched, the region becomes ever more dangerous and more under the sway of corruption.

All of this begs the question, what can, or should the US do?  Recent articles in Foreign Affairs and The Economist both argue for behind the scenes leadership and increases in targeted funding to the region.  However, knowing so much better than both of these institutions, I would contend that that is not the answer.  

In my mind, the gangs and those that work for them are merely rational, profit seeking actors, just like everyone else.  If I were a poor Honduran that had little education, no legitimate job prospects, but a chance to make it big selling drugs, who knows what I might do.  Keeping in mind that the industry (again thinking of only cocaine sales in the US) is worth $38 billion, less minor production costs, we can expect that, as a whole, the gangs would be willing to invest up to that amount in “logistics”, weapons, and influence to turn a profit.  In this light, the $80 million a year promised by Obama on a recent trip to Central America is hardly anything.

I think that instead of incremental increases in funding for the war on drugs, taller walls on the US-Mexico border, and more border patrol agents, the US needs to consider a drastically new approach and move the drug trade out of the hands of the gangs.  I’m open to new ideas but legalizing the use and sale of illicit drugs seems like the most promising.  This is of course a highly controversial idea and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure of its merits (I need to research more), but I know that the current approach, unless we are willing to spend $40 billion a year, will not work.  If drugs were legal, the US could regulate the production, the quality, and the sale (to some extent).  It could also better monitor users AND capitalize on significant sin taxes, just as with cigarettes and the lottery.  And for those that argue that legalized drugs in the US would be a catastrophe, how could it possibly be any worse than the daily horrors that happen in Central America?

 

Bubble Charts, hooray

I read an interesting article from Brookings on the change in where the poorest people in the world are living, and how this affects what the development world should focus on. This got me thinking, but I wanted more detail beyond the 2x2 box of low/middle income and stable/fragile states. But aha, here it is: Poverty in numbers, the changing state of poverty from 2005 to 2015.

This second paper is a long, detailed document, but from an initial scan, they do a great job of presenting easy to understand and visually compelling graphics. I'm especially a fan of these bubble graphs, using which the reader can immediately visually understand the relative magnitude of poverty in different regions and countries, instead of having to think about how numbers relate to each other.

This screen grab is rather hard to discern, so if you view the original document the image is on page 8. What's interesting is that China gets considerably smaller (although it would have made better sense to keep it in the same position in the 2015 graph), and in fact almost all of East Asia drops off. 2015 is dominated by South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and some SSA countries even grow in size (DRC). It's also interesting to see how Latin America, while rife with its own set of problems, represents a small slice of the pie population-wise.

TZ in the house (almost)

I guess since GL already put Tanzania into the header, I better go ahead and post.

I'm a first year medical student with some experience in consulting. I'll be heading to Iringa, Tanzania in 15 days to help out with the national government's male circumcision (MC) campaign (the most effective service for HIV prevention, more on this later) and help start a research project looking at how best to scale up MC services. Where GL brought you the latest from the field on potatoes, and BM brings you the latest on maize, I will hopefully be bringing you the latest on...penises.

But let's get to know each other a little better before discussing male genitalia. Like GL and BM, I'm interested in development and how my career, especially as a future MD, can fit into this world. This summer in Iringa will be my first experience working overseas, and I'm hoping it will answer my question of how much field work I want to include in my future.

I'm also excited just to be out in the world. I'm currently in the process of booking a safari trip through the Serengeti, Ngorongoro crater, and Tanrangire. (If you're going to be in East Africa the first week of August and want to join a safari with two intrepid Seattle natives/want to help me lower my costs, please let me know).

I'm spending most of my last days in the US scrolling through flickr pages of Tanzania. I'm also starting Peter Matthiessen's The Tree Where Man Was Born, which is so far a beautiful book about overlanding in East Africa. The book was originally published in 1972, and the map of Ethiopia includes a full northern coastline, with no Eritrea (which won independence from Ethiopia through a bitter war ending in 1993). It's strange to remember how quickly the world changes.

Since I'm still in St. Louis, here's a photo from my most recent trip, albeit to Prague.

Transition Post

News flash: I’m back from Honduras and have been for about a month now.  I haven’t posted anything in a while and was considering letting the blog rest in peace... but I’m deciding not too.  

 

However, I do want to make some changes.  Since I’m now in the boring ol’ US (AKA the greatest country in the world), I’ll be posting less travel related topics and focusing more on issues in international development and current events.  But don’t despair.  I’m actively seeking interesting travel commentary from two others that will be in Mozambique and Tanzania (respectively, of course and respectfully, we hope) to keep things fresh.  From time to time, I might be able to pull in other peeps that are currently based in the developed world.

So, hope this news finds you well and is received well.  Carry on and hopefully I’ll be back soon.